On a lighter than usual note, this entry will consist of a review and discussion of John Crow‘s “The Missing Calls to the Great Work”, an interesting and thoughtful essay in an otherwise uniformly disappointingly lacklustre and low-quality second edition of the “Journal of Thelemic Studies” magazine.

In the essay, Crow summarises some points relating to themes he covers on his blog dealing with the “Thelemic community” rather than with Thelema itself, grouped into three main areas:

1. Availability of information;
2. Attempts to categorise Thelema as a religion; and
3. Attempts to separate Aleister Crowley from Thelema.

Each of these areas will be here examined in turn. We rarely give much attention to what my be termed the “social aspects” of Thelema on this blog, instead focusing on the individual aspects of it, but it will be an interesting and entertaining diversion to make an exception.

Availability of information

Aside from the question of “secret” O.T.O. ritual information – which we will not consider here – this section deals not with the question of whether information should be available, or even with the effects of a wide availability of information, but with what Crow calls “information egalitarianism”:

Another problem of the ubiquity of the information is an assumption that just because the information is available to all, then everyone can understand it. This is undoubtedly false. In spite of this, the prevailing attitude is that if someone can read a document, then their understanding is the same as everyone else’s … Because any hierarchies of understanding have been leveled, the idea of differing levels of understanding, and more importantly, that others may understand a text better, is simply not an option for consideration … Moreover, no one can tell anyone else about the text, nor describe a deeper meaning because the text was read, and therefore all that can be known about the text is known.

This kind of attitude is indeed a plague on the “Thelemic community” and on the “occult community” in general. The problem is compounded in the case of Thelema in particular due to the common mistaken interpretation that the Comment to The Book of the Law prohibits sensible discussion of the book, and that everybody has the right to “decide what Thelema is for themselves.” More generally, the common misconception that “spiritual experience” – which is unverifiable – is a better indicator of truth than reason – which is verifiable – leads certain people straight to the belief that their fatuous and vapid opinions are “just as valid as anybody else’s”. Either way, a view held all too frequently is that everybody has some sort of “right” to be correct in their opinions, that their “interpretations” of a given book or concept should and do carry as much weight as anybody else’s. In particularly obnoxious cases, some people try to claim that their opinions only carry weight “to them”, as if calling a view a “personal opinion” somehow automatically invalidates criticism of its nonsensicality.

“Spiritual experience”, as we have described, is not verifiable, so it’s easy for anybody to set themselves up as an expert by claiming that they’ve had some form of “experience” that justifies the silly views they hold. This is really an intellectual defense mechanism; by dismissing the role of reason – which, again, can be verified – in favour of arguments from “spiritual experience” – which, again, cannot – the individual sets up a barrier which enables him to deny a priori the validity of any criticisms of his position whatsoever, giving him all the psychological motivation he needs to keep right on believing the nonsense that he believes.

Nobody likes to hear or even consider that they might be wrong. In more “mundane” subjects such as computer programming, home improvements, mathematics, and the like, ignorance and lack of competence tends to become very obvious very quickly, since failure is often painfully visible, but this “sanity check” does not exist in the same way in spiritual pursuits, since there is no verifiable yardstick against which “success” can be measured. This being the case, it becomes remarkably easy to anybody to convince themselves of the validity of what they are doing. This kind of attitude is both a complete bar to progress and a doorway to delusion. The fact that this kind of attitude is so common among people who claim to be practitioners of a subject whose very goal is the progressive removal of illusion is highly ironic.

Fortunately, whilst it is remarkably easy to delude oneself of mastery of this subject, it is several orders of magnitude more difficult to convince anybody else of that, certainly when that someone else actually does know what they are talking about. Whilst “spiritual experience” itself is not objectively verifiable, understanding of the subject matter is. What these people all too often fail to comprehend is that if they claim that their “experience” has given their opinions some sort of validity, then those opinions ought to stand up to scrutiny from others. If they do not stand up to such scrutiny, it is no defence to claim that they are automatically valid, since they have already implied that their experience does lead to understanding that can be conveyed in those opinions by the very act of claiming they are “valid”. If they claim that their opinions only have validity “to them”, then the implication is that their opinions are somehow uniquely exempt from the need to be internally consistent and grounded in some measure of reality, which is laughably false. Moreover, if their opinions carry so much weight “to them”, and that the opinions of others only possess validity “to those others”, then one is forced to wonder why they seem to spend so much time and effort acquiring books. To follow their argument to its conclusion, one would be forced to presume that the information in those books is only “valid” for the authors themselves, making the reading of them perfectly useless.

Crow continues:

Very rarely are there members of the community that are truly and deeply engaged in and knowledgeable about the Thelemic material

and that this idea of “information egalitarianism”:

ignores the very real fact that there are significant differences in levels of understanding and that much of the material is incomprehensible to most people for most of the time

This is something that should be obvious to all. There are very few people who can, for instance, design a nuclear power station, and I am happy to count myself as being outside of that select group. Similarly, there are very few people capable of winning an Olympic gold medal. Why then, when it comes to spiritual pursuits, should we assume the case to be any different? It should stand to reason that the vast majority of people will indeed not be able to make any significant headway with this subject nor with the material, and it is quite simply folly to deny this, a folly which is allowed to continue by the very unverifiability of “spiritual experience” described above. For as long as people are able to convince themselves that they are knowledgeable without having to demonstrate that, then they will be able to postpone they day when they realise that, in fact, they are not.

Thelema as a religion

This is a well-trodden question, most of the arguments on either side being too well-known and tired to rehash here. One question Crow does raise is this:

One of the most striking aspects of the arguments presented by Thelemic Religionists is not what they advanced but actually what they do not advance. Crowley described a large number of practices and beliefs that were primary to his vision of Thelema. You hear nothing about these practices.

This omission is hardly unique to Thelema. Amongst almost all the religious traditions we can distinguish between what we might term the “common followers”, and the “dedicated followers”, priests, monks and “holy men” being examples of the latter category. If widespread appeal is sought for a religion, it is simply unreasonable to expect anything but a small number of people to be able to come to grips with what we might call the “inner practices”, and this is in itself not problematic. The existence of a wider Thelemic “church” where these practices are not emphasised – or even mentioned – does not preclude the existence of one or more “inner churches” where they are, for people so inclined.

The natural question, in that case, is why should such a wider church be necessary, or even desirable? One obvious possibility – from the point of view of the “inner members” – is that widespread acceptance would make their lives easier. By encouraging widespread acceptance of the Law of Thelema it may make it easier for those who actually are capable of “doing their wills” to do just that.

A second possibility is that even a “dumbed down” version of Thelema may be better than the alternative. Crow argues that:

We also must recognize that not everyone will be able to do this, and that in fact, some are simply incapable of engaging in the theory or praxis of Thelema

This being the case, a “wider church” of Thelema need not necessarily be as rigorous in its requirements if it accepts that not many people will be capable of fulfilling them. On the grounds that “something may be better than nothing”, there may still be a place for a watered down popular version. He asks “since we know what we gain from describing Thelema a religion, we have to ask, what do we lose?” to which the obvious answer is “nothing”. Nothing in the creation of such a wider church would preclude more dedicated and capable individuals from doing things their own way.

A much more relevant question is why, if the leaders were in the business of attending to their own wills, would they even want to create such a wider church, which is far more difficult to sensibly answer. The selfish “it makes it easier for me to do my will” argument outlined above just won’t cut it here, when we consider how much work would have to go into the creation of such a successful church; by the time it was established, the leaders would be dead and their own wills would have fallen by the wayside. That being the case, we are forced to ask what kind of example any leaders of any self-professed “Thelemic organisation” could be setting.

One further argument Crow raises in this regard is that:

Thelema rejects the morals and values of normative society and acts to transgress and violate these norms

This question of “normative society” is one frequently raised by Crow, and it is one that needs clarification. The term “normative society” refers to one in which the necessity of conforming to stated norms is considered to be important. This is indeed rejected by Thelema, which states the individual will to be the sole arbiter of conduct. But the statement that Thelema “acts to transgress and violate these norms” needs to be taken carefully. Thelema does not “act to transgress and violate” any particular norms, and neither does it “act to trangress and violate” norms as a matter of principle. What it does seek to transgress is the very idea that there “should” be norms in the first place; it rejects the idea of social norms wholesale. Thelema cannot be reduced to schoolboy rebellion, and the fact that a norm is there is no reason to transgress it. Thelema does not advocate the “transgression” or norms, but the disregard of them, the dismissal of them into the trashcan of irrelevance. Naturally, the consequences of disregarding norms in practice needs to be taken into account, especially when considered norms whose transgression can be expected to result in severe reprimand, but the Thelemite is indeed not only encouraged but positively instructed to disregard any ideas that there is any validity in a moral evaluation of his conduct against any and all given norms.

And this is the real problem he raises with promoting the widespread acceptance of Thelema as a religion. One the one hand, we could describe such attempts as a way to get more and more people to “think Thelemically” so that social norms intrude progressively less rudely into one’s own life. What Crow sees in practice, on the other hand, is the converse, the introduction of norms into Thelema in order to make it more acceptable to a normative public, and this is indeed to rob Thelema of its very essence. It is interesting to consider whether it ever would be possible to avoid this, whether people could be freed from their norms in large numbers, or whether widespread acceptance inevitably involves conformance to norms if that is the very nature of human society. Certainly the “social contract” theory of people voluntarily foregoing some of their individual freedoms in order to benefit from social membership would appear to indicate the latter.

Jettisoning Crowley

Finally, Crow deals with the recurring attempts to separate Crowley from Thelema, firstly due to a distaste for Crowley’s “‘bad boy’ legacy”, his seemingly politically-incorrect ideas of gender and race, and his disdain for egalitarianism, democracy and the “general public”. Naturally, attempts to remove elements from a system based on individual will and sovereignty on the grounds of their “social unacceptability” is indeed the height of idiocy and cognitive dissonance; self-evidently so, and hence requiring of no further comment here.

A far more interesting point is raised, however. He says:

Thelema, at its root, is a system designed to put the practitioner into various states of crisis and difficulty so that the person may grow … If we reject Crowley because he is challenging to us and makes us uncomfortable, are we actually performing a disservice to ourselves?

This point puts aside the idea of the desirability of ridding Thelema of Crowley, and instead turns to the simple possibility of it. It is certainly true that if one jettisons from Thelema what is “uncomfortable” about it, then one loses the whole point, since notions of “comfort” in this context are more often imposed from the outside than from the inside, and pandering to them causes one to lose sight of the will. However, Crowley is far from being the only “uncomfortable” or “challenging” thing in the world, and although rejecting Crowley for this reason might classify as a “disservice”, it doesn’t necessarily mean that rejecting Crowley must necessarily be a “disservice” if he can be replaced by other challenging things. Crow continues:

There is absolutely no way in which someone raised within the last fifty years would not have issues with Crowley’s philosophy, and/or lifestyle. In other words, Crowley pushes many of our “buttons.”

But what if this is not the case? What if there existed somebody who was not “challenged” by Crowley? What then would they be challenged by? There are many challenges in life, and the removal of one of them does not imply the removal of all of them.

More generally, he continues:

To have a version of Thelema sans Crowley is to present a version of Thelema that is essentially not Thelema in any sense of the word … How useful or meaningful would Buddhism be without the teachings and example of the Buddha? What would be the point of Christianity without Jesus?

This raises the question of what Thelema actually is. If we can reduce Thelema to a collection of ideas (such as the idea that one should be guided by the will rather than by an imposed code of conduct, that there is a self whose preferences are veiled by the conscious mind, et cetera) then it should be clear that these ideas can survive the presence of absence of any particular personality. It is true that Christianity would be meaningless without Jesus, but if – for the sake of argument only – we could reduce Christianity to a similar set of non-supernatural ideas (such as one should love one’s neighbour as oneself, that human nature is essentially sinful and needs to be rejected for salvation, etc) then these ideas could survive the removal of Jesus, and even if what we were left with could not sensibly be called “Christianity” it would nevertheless remain unchanged in its essence.

When Crow talks about the removal of Crowley from Thelema, he either implicitly or explicitly links that with the idea of removing him because he makes us uncomfortable. If we put this idea aside, and just talk about the simple removal of Crowley from Thelema, then we can see that to equate Crowley with Thelema – if the essence of Thelema can indeed be reduced to ideas – is to simply become attached to a name. If the ideas can survive the removal of Crowley, but those ideas could not sensibly be called Thelema any more, then so what? Who cares what we call it, if the ideas are what is important?

Naturally, if we cannot reduce Thelema to ideas, and instead necessarily equate it with, for instance, following the specific individual practices that Crowley developed, then it is true that his rejection would render Thelema fundamentally unrecognisable to what it was to begin with. But in this case, the argument ceases being one about the rejection of Crowley, and transforms into one about the definition of Thelema. Which is an argument for another day.

Conclusion

It is clear from the essay that the ideas Crow considers to be fundamental to Thelema are the rejection of social norms, and the confrontation which things which are “uncomfortable”. The other common theme of the rejection of egalitarianism and the recognition of – sometimes stark – personal differences is arguably a mere corollary of the wider question of norms, since an attachment to egalitarianism is just such a thing. It is undeniably true that the practice of Thelema will require – for the vast majority of people, and quite possibly all of them – a rejection of social norms before the preferences of the will can be perceived, as the former veil the latter. Crow also recommends that we go further than that, to “examine, challenge, and when appropriate, change our beliefs, morals, and values” even when we consider them to be our own, rather than socially imposed, and this also is true, necessarily so in the case of “beliefs” and “morals” which must not only be “changed”, but discarded altogether if we are to discover our wills.

There are many other facets of Thelema which are important, of course, but this short essay neither intends nor purports to be complete. The only really significant problem with it is the same one that arises in all considerations of the “social aspects of Thelema”; if it is true that we should “examine, challenge, and when appropriate, change our beliefs, morals, and values”, and if it is true that we should be attending to our own wills, why should we be giving so much attention to what the rest of the “Thelemic community” is doing, let alone the wider public? Does this attention not demonstrate a failure to achieve the stated objectives? Crow has long bemoaned the “necessity” of dealing with “the Community”, and especially with the O.T.O., and justifying a concern for it on these grounds, as he does in a recent blog entry:

Let’s face it, the O.T.O. “house” is the biggest in the neighborhood. What goes on with it influences and dictates certain things about the others in the neighborhood. Moreover, the managers of the house use its size to dictate conditions and actions for the others around it.

However these “conditions and actions” most often appear to revolve around “restricted assets” and other “resources”, most notably the copyrights to most of Crowley’s own works. However, accepting that the appeal of Thelema is necessarily small – as the current essay argues, along with considerations of the availability of information – this would appear to be a rather unconvincing argument. Although the essay is interesting and entertaining, one cannot escape the feeling that the subjects covered are, ultimately, little more than a distraction.