Realigning the Aeons, Part I An Integral Approach to Aeonic Theory

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

The aeons are something many Thelemites take for granted without realizing just how unstable the foundation of our doctrine of the aeons really is throughout Crowley’s writings. He mentions them now and again, makes a couple of contradictory pronouncements about their historicity, and then leaves them pretty much unaddressed with any finality. But nearly all of his remarks about aeons are entirely out of touch with reality.

Disclaimers

I hate disclaimers, but here we are and here we go.

First, what follows is most definitely something we can file under a third-order issue. Outside of the “change of aeons,” which is still subject to its own debate about its importance, doctrines surrounding the aeons are of zero importance to the overall message of Thelema.

That doesn’t mean that examining the aeons lacks any worth. It just means that we can toss specific doctrines of the aeons out the window and be no worse for wear.

One might say Aeonic Theory, as I’m presenting to you here, is my own version of qaballistic masturbation. It really is that pedantic without much relevance to Thelema itself. But it amuses me to tackle some of the minutiae of Thelemic ideas, especially when hypothesizing at this level can’t really do much harm to Thelema in the big picture. Or I don’t think so, at least.

Second, what follows are several entirely novel hypotheses of my own. I have seen several copycats that are very obvious in their influence from various works that I’ve posted on social media over the last twenty years—including an utterly anemic piece published on Thelemic Union.

However, I’ve never compiled a single essay that included all the elements of Aeonic Theory as I envisioned it beyond merely explaining the “change of aeons and a progression of magical formulae.” Like many aspects of Thelema, the manner in which we approach the aeons and what meaning we take from them “depends on the context” in which we approach them.

Third, as with most things around here, this isn’t a definitive work on Aeonic Theory. It’s merely throwing some ideas around to play with among friends. And I’m trying to keep it all within the space allotted to me in this format. Some of these are abbreviated and could be an entire book unto themselves.

Aeonic Theory: A Basic Overview

Crowley’s take on the aeons was steeped in the dispensational theology of his day and padded with the kind of pseudoscience that makes (most) modern theologians wince. It’s a colorful picture, to be sure, but it doesn’t really match how either actual history or even psychospiritual growth seems to happen. If we drop the idea that every new aeon kicks down the door and torches the last one, we can see something more organic at work: each aeon unfolds out of the unresolved tensions and the calcification and disintegration of the previous era, answers a few of its lingering questions, and—because nothing’s perfect—plants fresh challenges for future generations to solve. The aeons are less like a string of disconnected fireworks shows and more like pages rolled into a single scroll, unfolding in order, each page overlapping and threaded into the next, never entirely separate.

Because of that overlap, Thelema can’t just bulldoze everything that came before. Its real strength is dialectical: it keeps the gems of past traditions while scrutinizing their blind spots. Christianity and Islam, both Osirian in flavor, still shape the lives of billions. Treating them as museum pieces misses the point. A dialectical stance invites us to respect their historical role, learn from their wisdom, and challenge their limits without pretending we can slap them together into a tidy syncretic stew.

This perspective also deflates the notion that the Aeon of Horus is supposed to be a nonstop revolution. Civil‑rights gains and expanding personal freedoms matter, but they’re surface ripples of something deeper: a growing insistence that every person’s will and conscience have intrinsic value. Turbulence happens when old social scaffolding creaks under that new weight, yet upheaval itself isn’t the goal. It’s a by‑product, a sign that interior shifts are working their way outward.

Seen from that angle, aeonic theory doubles as a map for personal growth. We begin life snug in tribal belonging, graduate (often awkwardly) into a world of rules and authorities, and—if we keep stretching—discover the responsibility and exhilaration of genuine self‑direction.¹In this particular sense, these mirror Kolberg’s preconventional, conventional, and postconventional moral development stages. Historical and individual timelines echo each other. That mirror teaches a simple lesson: don’t romanticize some distant utopia, and don’t waste energy demonizing the past. Work with what’s on your plate today. In doing so, you step into the ongoing conversation of humanity, adding your own dialectical twist to a story that started long before any of us arrived and will keep evolving long after we’re gone.

Crowley’s Three Aeons

Crowley’s conception of the aeons—Isis, Osiris, and Horus—forms one of the core frameworks for his magical and religious philosophy. Across multiple texts, Crowley attempts to elaborate on the progression of human history and development through these aeons, occasionally offering nuanced and even contradictory descriptions. Yet, he is also repetitive without diving deeply into the expository nuance of any specific aeon. His most oft-repeated construction is the “Isis » Osiris » Horus” outline that has been the philosophical circus for Thelemites ever since.

As merely one example of Crowley’s inconsistency, he proclaims in Confessions:

To recapitulate the historical basis of The Book of the Law, let me say that evolution (within human memory) shows three great steps: 1. the worship of the Mother, when the universe was conceived as simple nourishment drawn directly from her; 2. the worship of the Father, when the universe was imagined as catastrophic; 3. the worship of the Child, in which we come to perceive events as a continual growth partaking in its elements of both these methods.²Crowley, Aleister. 1989. The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography. Edited by John Symonds and Kenneth Grant. Arkana, 399.

This same paragraph in his magnum opus, Liber ABA: Magick published the same year, reads very closely but changes both the second step and some of the finer details of the individual aeons themselves:

To recapitulate the historical basis of The Book of the Law, let me say that evolution (within human memory) shows three great steps: (1) the worship of the Mother, continually breeding by her own virtue; (2) the worship of the Son, reproducing himself by virtue of voluntary death and resurrection; (3) the worship of the Crowned and Conquering Child (the Aeon announced by Aiwass and implied in His Word, Thelema).³Crowley, Aleister, Mary Desti, and Leila Waddell. 1997. Magick: Liber ABA. Edited by Hymenaeus Beta. Weiser Books, 703.

So in the first case we have Mother » Father » Child, and in the second we have Mother » Son » Child; the Isisian formula is either the universe “conceived as simple nourishment” or woman “continually breeding by her own virtue” (i.e., parthenogenesis); the Osirian formula is either catastrophic or centers the virtue of “voluntary death and resurrection”; and the Horusian forumla is “continual growth” or merely the next aeon.

Admittedly, none of these are mutually exclusive, but it shows that Crowley wasn’t checking his notes for consistency when writing about the aeons.

In both editions, he subsequently claims:

The Book of the Law is careful to indicate the nature of the formula implied by the assertion that the residing officer of the temple (the earth) is Horus, the Crowned and Conquering Child. And again, Egyptology⁴I believe we have to be careful with asserting an egyptological centrality within the Book of the Law rather than an egyptosophical influence adjacent to the Book of the Law. Briefly, egyptosophy is the mythological version of egyptology that was prevalent in the 19th century, during Crowley’s lifetime, but it goes back as far as the 17th century and beyond. It is the idea that Egypt was pretty much the center of the magical universe, if not the center of the known universe itself. This is where we get our egyptosophical framework for Thelema built right into everything. and psychology help us to understand what is implied, and what effect to expect, in the world of thought and action.⁵Crowley, Confessions, 399 (emphasis mine).

In one of the better-written introductions to the Book of the Law, Crowley writes

[The Book of the Law] explains that certain vast ‘stars’ (or aggregates of experience) may be described as Gods. One of these is in charge of the destinies of this planet for periods of 2,000 years. In the history of the world, as far as we know accurately, are three such Gods: Isis, the mother, when the Universe was conceived as simple nourishment drawn directly from her; this period is marked by matriarchal government.

Next, beginning 500 B.C., Osiris, the father, when the Universe was imagined as catastrophic, love, death, resurrection, as the method by which experience was built up; this corresponds to patriarchal systems.

Now, Horus, the child, in which we come to perceive events as a continual growth partaking in its elements of both these methods, and not to be overcome by circumstance. This present period involves the recognition of the individual as the unit of society.⁶Crowley, Aleister, and Rose Edith Crowley. 2004. The Book of the Law: Liber Al Vel Legis. Weiser Books, 15-16.

One final quote from Crowley that is relevant for us here is also from his Equinox of the Gods material:

Within the memory of man we have had the Pagan period, the worship of Nature, of Isis, of the Mother, of the Past; the Christian period, the worship of Man, of Osiris, of the Present. The first period is simple, quiet, easy, and pleasant; the material ignores the spiritual; the second is of suffering and death: the spiritual strives to ignore the material. Christianity and all cognate religions worship death, glorify suffering, deify corpses. The new Æon is the worship of the spiritual made one with the material, of Horus, of the Child, of the Future.⁷Crowley, Magick, 444.

In both of these previous quotes, Crowley speculates on human history. He’s wrong about several details here, but we’ll get to that later since these offer some enlightening details about Thelema’s place in the continuity of spiritual succession as well as Crowley’s religious prejudices.

Aeonic Theory

Aeonic Theory is a complicated yet not entirely insignificant aspect of Thelema. Crowley’s approach and application are entirely flawed, even if his premise is fairly understandable. Many, if not most, are caught up in looking at what they think are Crowley’s views of the Aeons, and they don’t examine Crowley’s view of what Aeons really are and aren’t. As we’ve seen, he didn’t have much of a concrete view of the Aeons. He made several comments here and there, usually vague, nearly always scientifically unsupported. He didn’t have any theory conclusively laid out beyond his simplistic “mother, father (or son), child” motif and Fichtean dialectic. In fact, he made very limited comments about some astrological associations but didn’t even really flesh those out all that much.

There is a current trend of Thelemic authors, I believe influenced by a [now deceased] popular author, who continue this fallacy that Fichtean dialectic is the same as Hegelian dialectic. It’s not. It appears as such on the surface, but only as such to those who haven’t dug far enough into Hegel to truly understand his method. Those looking for the standard thesis, antithesis, synthesis pattern that has been around since Aristotle will be disappointed.

I’ve claimed in the past that I believe Crowley’s aeons to be accurate, just not entirely in the manner Crowley laid out. I think he was onto something, but didn’t quite have the resources to explain it and was too highly influenced by his Plymouth Brethren upbringing to express it in anything other than the Darby-grounded dispensationalism of his day. That doesn’t make him wrong—except the pseudo-scientific bullshit in which he wrapped up some of his explanations—so much as it made him limited in vocabulary. Nothing wrong with that. We just don’t have to remain limited.

Aeonic Dialectics

One of the underlying premises of Thelema is that of spiritual (or religious, if you prefer) continuity. Sometimes we call this “spiritual evolution” if we’re trying to be all scientific-y about it.

But by this, I mean a spiritual line or lines of development from the earliest humanity that stretches through time and evolves right along with us. Some mistake this line of evolution for the myth of progress, and while there is “progress” of a sort, progress and change through evolution are not always synonymous and can be in the eye of the beholder.

It takes a balanced eye to see that for every adaptation of beneficence, we are handed a near equal portion of a challenge to go with it that downright pisses some people off. Industrialization, for instance, has objectively increased humanity’s welfare and health, yet it has nearly equally brought with it an abundance of woes that could be said to have harmed us. It is, after all, about perspective. Either way, industrialization was an adaptation in human evolution on multiple levels and scales.

However, rather than seeing this evolutionary progress as “better or worse,” the underlying premise for Thelema is that the aeons are dialectic in nature. Not Fichtean (thesis to antithesis to synthesis), not a flow between themselves (Isis to Osiris to Horus) but Hegelian dialetical within each aeon itself and throughout the flow of history as a whole: that is to say, each aeon starts with a formula (i.e., a revealed Word, e.g., AUM, TAO/INRI-IAO, ABRAHADABRA) and general spiritual nuance (abstract), something that illustrates the depth and span of the relationship of humanity with divinity, eventually stirs up an internal tension with that relationship that creates a disharmony and exposes the inadequacy of that aeonic formula (negative), which then creates a more calcified expression of that same formula and its tension (concrete) which continues until it decays and composts into the fertile soil of the subsequent formula (new abstract) for the next aeon. This process is dynamic, not static, and repeats as spiritual evolution continues to unfold through time.

I’d rather do this in a table, but I risk the “all this is AI” crowd. So here are some popped-off thoughts about the dialectic of the aeons in succession:

Aeon of Isis

• Abstract: Union with Nature; spirit and matter are perceived as undifferentiated. The divine is maternal, immanent, nurturing, and cyclical.⁸We should not mistake this for a pastoral era of innocence and naivety. Early humanity was just as brutal and savage as we are today. We just have more technological and mass-destructive means of savagery at our command. The human being is the object-in-opposition-to-God (Deus et Homo, “God-and-Man”)

• Negative: The emergence of subject-distinction (I-ness). Awareness of death, limitation, chaos. The child begins to separate from the mother. Identity begins to form against the background of totality. Nature is no longer “just” nurturing—it is indifferent, dangerous, unpredictable.

• Concrete: Mythic consciousness. Religion arises. The gods are personified. The world is enchanted, but now also interpreted. The self is born in relation to the cosmos. But the concrete here is still fundamentally collective, tribal, and myth-bound.

Transition: This mythic-synthetic consciousness, no longer purely immersive, becomes the fertile soil for the new abstract of the Aeon of Osiris.

Aeon of Osiris

• Abstract: The self stands apart. The Father replaces the Mother. Spirit is separate from the world. God is transcendent and paternal. The human being becomes the subject-in-opposition-to-God. This is the age of law, morality, suffering, and sacrifice.

• Negative: Alienation. Guilt. The Fall. The soul is crushed between command and desire. Religion becomes institutionalized, oppressive, dogmatic. The sacred is imprisoned in scripture and sacrament. The self longs for redemption but knows only separation.

• Concrete: The interior life. The birth of conscience. Individuality deepens, and tribal elements begin to break down but are not fully removed; moral and reflective interiority begins to shape society. Martyrdom becomes the highest virtue—the soul asserting itself through its own suffering. But this interiority, though rich, is still rooted in opposition (Factus est Deus Homo, ut Homo Fieret Deus, “God was made a Man so that a Man might become a God”).

Transition: The individualized conscience, formed through alienation and moral struggle, becomes the tinderbox of revolution for the new abstract of the Aeon of Horus.

Aeon of Horus

• Abstract: The individual as divine. God is not above or within. This is the moment of immense potential—sovereign, radiant, liberated—but still abstract, untested, and often naive. The human being becomes the subject-in-union-with-God (Homo est Deus, “Man is God”).

• Possible Negative: Nihilism, solipsism, shadow inflation. The worship of ego masquerading as Will. Fragmentation and the myth of pure autonomy. The Self becomes a god—but without relation, without justice, without empathy. The New Aeon risks becoming a mirror of tyranny, just individualized.

This framing makes the Aeons not just steps in a timeline but moments in a spiraling dialectical movement, each richer, more differentiated yet still integrated than the last. Thelema, then, posits the continual reconciliation of all that came before and that which succeeds, the bridge between the alienated and the unity that preserves continuity (includes) yet integrates (transcends) difference.

I once read a political reframing of the “New Aeon” as a resistant and destructive force in the aim of social progress. While not entirely the same blindness I believe Crowley had in his lifetime, I think it’s close. It’s the idea that all this smashing and stomping around in the new aeon means a tumultuous “end of life as we knew it” for hundreds and thousands of years, that somehow social chaos is a magical formula of the inauguration of the Aeon of the Child (or any aeon, for that matter). It’s a toddler mindset.

The Aeon of Horus isn’t about “destroying the old” any more than the previous “New Aeon” was about destroying the so-called Aeon of Isis. It is not at all about the “old” needing to die before the “new” can begin. I realise it’s a neat mythic narrative, but it’s just another superficial approach to examining the unfolding of humanity through time. It’s nice to think that we are suddenly in this enlightened zone of something new, that the past pathologies are all under tumultuous siege and dying away by force and fire. That’s not entirely reality as we know it. That’s not the truth of the human condition. As each new aeon appears to resolve certain pathologies of critical mass, it also introduces new pathologies (even if we’re not entirely sure what those are immediately). The whole point of the aeons seen in the perspective of a dialectic rather than a dispensation is that we can observe the actual flow of history through this series of unfoldings and the nature of the internal conflict of one aeon giving way to its resolution in the next aeon.

“Social progress,” as such, is not the goal of any aeon. It’s not even really the prime mover of an aeon. For instance, civil rights is a by-product of the cultural movement of critical mass toward individualisation. It is only by starting to recognise the inherent, metaphysical distinction of the individual that we can start to recognise the political equality of and within specific groups and, indeed, society as a whole.

Aeonic History

The ahistoric, astrological approach to the aeons leaves us with no instructional material of worth beyond a small cultic nuance with limited application. Pulling back the curtain on human civilization and individual development allows us to see that everything is connected, and the creative emergence of consciousness at all levels, all structures, and all stages removes a nuanced doctrine of the aeons and offers a full-fledged understanding of the unfolding of history and humanity’s place in it.

Dating

Most people don’t like to talk about the historicity of the aeons. We can get ourselves into a lot of trouble this way because it’s much easier to just see the aeons as mythic. But I posit the aeons have some historical basis. And when I say some, I mean a very loose connection. So you’re going to have to suspend your disbelief to follow with me here. Promise not to laugh, alright?

First, we have to throw out this whole astrological horseshit about the procession of the equinoxes, at least in a literal sense. Doctrinally, mythically, theologically, sure, if you want. But literally, in the sense of using it for our historical or religious calendar? Utter nonsense. There is no way to make it work. And I’m here to tell you that nearly everything Crowley wrote about it historically doesn’t work either. Yet nearly every Thelemic author blindly repeats him. We’ll talk about some of the specifics as we go along.

Second, I hypothesize that each aeon has an approximate (again, loose) half-life of the aeon previous to it, generally based on the critical mass of the mean consciousness as exemplified across multiple domains of human activity. So far as I can tell, Crowley never gives an actual date of the start of the Aeon of Isis but offers 500 BCE as the start of the Aeon of Osiris. If the latter ends in 1904 CE, then we can round that off at 2,400 years in length. If we double that, it puts the beginning of the Aeon of Isis around 5,800 BCE. However, it’s more likely around 4,000 BCE, give or take a bit. Anything from 3,000-4,000 BCE is generally around the mythological beginning of the world in multiple world religions. It’s also right around the critical mass fulcrum of humanity’s agro-pastoral society.

Aeon of Isis

If we consider the Aeon of Isis to be about 4,000 BCE to 500 BCE, then we’re talking about humanity’s movement from scattered fields and riverbanks into the first dense centers of power. Agriculture was no longer sparse but the standard. Trade moved along precarious routes, carrying grain, copper, and stories from one edge of the known world to another. Religion deepened: what had once been a living sense of the world’s cycles began to solidify into rites, roles, and hierarchies.

By the end of the period, city-states warred for land and honor, and dynasties rose and fell in a pattern that already felt old. Philosophy, prophecy, and reform movements stirred at the margins, recognizing that the world was slipping into something different. The sacred was no longer something lived through instinct and necessity; it was something administered, enforced, or negotiated. Beneath the monumental achievements—the ziggurats, the laws, the poems scratched into clay and parchment—there was already a tension that would break the ancient patterns. There was a gathering sense that the world was not a garden, and humanity would not be content to simply turn with the seasons anymore.

Note: There is no basis for Crowley’s (or anyone’s) claim for a matriarchal political structure in any historical society. The best we have are matrilineal groupings. And every so-called matriarchal society has a mythological patriarchal origin, i.e., the “female leadership” was given their authority, as such, by a heroic man or elder.

Aeon of Osiris

Crowley claimed the Aeon of Osiris started in 500 BCE. Other than his claim for the shift to the Aeon of Horus in 1904 CE, it’s about the only other date he ever claimed with certainty. It fits. What began wasn’t just a new religious age. It was a transformation of human life into something more complex, more divided against itself. The gods were no longer with us; they became judges, kings of the invisible. Guilt and law grew into the spine of civilization. Redemption was no longer a matter of living rightly, but of suffering rightly. Every empire, every scripture, every philosophy carried this undercurrent: humanity was broken, and could only be redeemed through sacrifice or submission, blood or conquest. The world itself became secondary—a stage for punishment, a pit to escape from. The old harmony with nature was first strained, then lost entirely.

This era produced almost everything modern humanity takes for granted: ethics, reason, the concept of the soul, and the very idea of history as a forward march. But the price was staggering. Slavery was codified and rationalized. Genocide was blessed by priesthoods. Entire civilizations were gutted to build monuments to gods who no longer spoke. By the time the nineteenth century ground its way to completion, the West had perfected machines of production and destruction that could flatten cities and bodies alike, but found itself hollow at the center.

When Crowley marked the end of the Aeon in 1904 CE, it wasn’t a just victory cry—it was a recognition that the structures meant to save humanity had turned inward, devouring the world and the spirit in the same breath.

Aeon of Horus

Since 1904 CE, the Aeon of Horus has unfolded not with clarity, but with conflict and contradiction. The old structures have cracked, and in their place, the individual stands exposed, yet freer and more accountable. Progress has been uneven, often brutal, but the central demand of the age remains clear: meaning is no longer inherited; it must be made. If there is hope, it lies in this hard-earned understanding: that the future will not be given to us, and the work of shaping it belongs to each alone, and all together.

In understanding the nature of the Aeons—this particular symbolism that expresses the progress of humanity through history in a meta-narrative of evolutionary promise—we find the unfolding nature of ourselves as well. This is not a fantasy of occult power and Adepthood, but the birthright and the raison d’être of every man and every woman. Just as our current situation of humanity is far from the end of the narrative, this New Aeon is merely the next step in a cascade of involution on a scale that is rapidly and progressively expanding through the soul of humanity. The Aeon of Horus will eventually become the next “Old Aeon.” It’s essential to keep that in mind. However, to pine away at what we might become in the distant future, rather than to recognize what we have been and focus on what we are becoming here and now, is the idiot’s chase of the phantasmal.

If I’m right about the dating of the aeons, this one will run until around 3100 CE, give or take a bit. And then “Hrumachis shall arise and the double-wanded one assume [the place of Horus]. Another prophet shall arise, and bring fresh fever from the skies; another woman shall awake the lust & worship of the Snake; another soul of God and beast shall mingle in the globed priest; another sacrifice shall stain the tomb; another king shall reign; and blessing no longer be poured To the Hawk-headed mystical Lord!” [AL 3.34e–l].

Aeonic Theory, Part II

I’ll take a look at Aeonic Psychology (aeons as symbols of individual development) and Aeonic Hermeneutics (aeons as a scaffolding of a system of interpretation) in Part II.

Love is the law, love under will.