Love in the Time of Will Spiritual Development, Discipleship, and the Future of Thelema

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

I’ve spent enough time being on the offensive against what I consider to be the termites in the framework of modern Thelema. It’s time to shift gears and begin to lay down a mature vision of Thelema that is both individually and corporately sustainable. Of course, it won’t happen in a single essay, but let’s ease into it.¹If this feels tonally out of place in the chronology of my essays, it is because I began writing this in November 2024, when I started softening my stance on Substack and working toward a more irenic tone in my essays. I didn’t finish it until now, but I’d already moved on to pieces anticipated in this essay. For many, this will be uncomfortable because they rebel against language, they buckle under the pressure of their religious upbringing,²I’ve had some claim that they had no religious upbringing and therefore no religious influence (or trauma) to overcome; yet there are no Western individuals without Jewish-Christian-Islamic religious influences. You can see it in their writings and YouTube videos easily enough because it’s baked into all our institutions and culture past the 1200s. It is inevitable, even when invisible. The idea of deconstruction and decolonization of religious indoctrination takes far more than mere denial. It could almost be likened to a re-indoctrination process—but don’t misunderstand or misinterpret what I’m saying here in trying to play gotcha games. Deconstruction is a difficult process, and merely “leaving my childhood church for greener pastures” isn’t enough. and their minds seize under the complaints of familiarity with the functions and forms of the previous aeon.

While the Law of Thelema has revolutionized much of our existing perspective concerning religion and spirituality, what we call the Aeon of Horus remains merely the present aeon in a dialectic succession of aeons,³See Realigning the Aeons, Part I. each aeon providing the fulfillment of the previous aeon, resolving certain pathologies of critical mass, and introducing all-new concerns of humanity to be resolved by the next aeon beyond us in eschatological time. This aeon isn’t offering a final perfection to humanity any more than the previous aeon did in the formula exemplified through the various magi of that aeon. It has, however, brought the next step for humanity to address the same existential concerns, but from a new and elevated understanding.

The question before us is: now what? I mean, if ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,’ how shall we then live?

For so long we have spent our time with outmoded Victorian fraternities and cosplaying Wizards & Wonders led by grifters and ‘YouTube academics’ with more eyeliner than eloquence. The focus on Crowley’s personal predilections rather than the revelation of the Law and its applications in life, both on a personal level and corporate level, has left our culture bereft of the revolution of the Law. We spout off about magick and qabalah and degrees in not-so-secret societies as if any of that offers anything to the lives we live daily, provides meaning in our journey through life, or even adds depth to our spiritual development.

Oh. See? I did it. I stepped over into dangerous territory there.

Spiritual Development

When we talk about spiritual development, it’s a hard conversation to have within Thelemic communities. The saturation of Thelema over the last 60 years in the radicalization of individualism has created a doctrine that the individual is somehow the key to spiritual advancement, forgetting that the individual is only meaningful in a relational sense. There is no such thing as a solitary individual. Even the Book of the Law provides this relationship quite clearly. However, many gurus within Thelema have distorted the concepts of self-actualization and individuation, rendering them self-centeredrather than self-referential.

Indeed, Crowley extolled the sanctity of the individual over the collective,⁴One of the most oft-quoted sentences of Crowley’s in defense of the radicalization of individualism is from Magick Without Tears, where is writes, “The family, the clan, the state count for nothing; the Individual is the Autarch” [Crowley, Aleister. 1994. “Morals of AL.” In Magick Without Tears. New Falcon Publications, 303]. Of course, in the same letter, he’s just made a mess of aeonic theory, he goes on to praise Hitler, and suggests Hitler had private writing that was near plagiarism of the Book of the Law. For all our reliance on Crowley to support our theology, he certainly shoots us in the foot enough to make it difficult.

yet Crowley had a naive and underdeveloped understanding of group dynamics and individual psychology. Not that he was entirely wrong, of course. The individual is important and, quite frankly, is the primary focus of spiritual development in Thelema. However, spiritual development, like individual development, occurs across and is shaped by multiple domains, including behavioral (or biological, depending on the framing), psychological, cultural, and systemic domains.

All growth happens within a relational framework. This is especially true of spiritual growth. While there are exceptions to every circumstance—and certainly historical examples of individuals who were capable of extraordinary personal change through a life of solitude or extended periods of retreat from the world—the utter hubris of people today thinking each of them is a special snowflake of that caliber is what derails spiritual development and runs people back to grifters who promise them “ladders to God” via empty fraternities and outdated occult practices. Those who teach “magick” are those most often teaching a Calvinist approach to Thelema. It’s self-defeating. It’s rubbish.

Much of modern Thelema is threatened by the spiritual infancy of Thelemites who have continued to spend their time as (what Crowley called) “drifting occultists”.⁵Aleister Crowley, personal correspondence to W. T. Smith, April 1, 1943.

To overcome this deficiency, spiritual development has to be re-grounded. To that end, I see four central requirements:

1. The general community of Thelema must be decoupled from the primacy of secret societies and fraternal degree systems, outmoded magical models, and badly formed ontological and/or [so-called] gnostic assumptions of the universe.⁶This is not to suggest that individual fraternities such as O.T.O. and similar organizations are “bad” or unimportant to the members thereof, but they are not representative of a distinctively “Thelemic” community or culture any more than the Freemasons are representative of American or European community or culture.
2. The general approach of Thelema must be decoupled from occultism. Crowley never saw it that way and would be kicking the shit out of his followers today for continuing to relate Thelema to such quackery.⁷In fact, Crowley went out of his way to explicitly decouple his own ideas of “magick” from “occultism.” Not that it’s helped any of his modern followers to do the same. Thelema is a full-fledged worldview,⁸I have some issues with this term, “worldview,” but I’ll come back to it an other time. philosophy, and religion (take your pick, or all three).
3. The recentering of the individual (“a star”) within the community (“the company of heaven”), not to be subsumed by the community, but to be seen, to be accepted, and to grow within the context of community, is essential.⁹Believe it or not, the Unitarian Universalists have done a generally fabulous job at this across the board. The ability for people of diverse beliefs to come together under a single roof and hold fellowship continues to inspire me today. I see community as symbolized by Love and the individual by Will which makes “love under will” so much more poignant to me, especially understanding how community supports the individual at a psychological level when we start discussing concerns like poverty, mental health, addiction, and other areas of individual life we know are affected by community supports.
4. The active process of spiritual development is not “magick” in the contemporary meaning of rites and rituals, pseudo-Harry Potter-esque tarot reading, and crystal-shoving nonsense. Magick has to return to Crowley’s meaning as “the Science of understanding oneself and one’s conditions [and] the Art of applying that understanding in action.”¹⁰Crowley, Aleister, Mary Desti, and Leila Waddell. 1997. Magick: Liber ABA. Edited by Hymenaeus Beta. Weiser Books, 131. I am aware most people will quote his definition of magick as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will” [Crowley, Liber ABA, 126], and that’s all good and well, but I think when we are talking about the nuts and bolts of application to life, we need to show a more practical aspect of magick. I believe this starts with discipleship.

Discipleship

Oh. See? I did it again.

I stepped right into that wordplay that makes people uncomfortable. I don’t give a shit. I want to show you something here. We like to play with our Latin, especially when it comes to that ridiculous Powers of the Sphinx [which is never in the correct order anyway, but I’ll talk about that some other time]: to know (scire), to dare (audere), to will (velle), to keep silent (tacere). But nowhere in there is to learn. And that seems pretty important if you’re going to assert that you know something in order to set out with daring to willfully do something.¹¹And for those who want to blather that ‘to know’ something means that you had ‘to learn’ it? Uh. Have you spent any time on Reddit or Facebook lately? I assure you that lots of people “know” things and yet haven’t “learned” a damn thing from all that knowledge.

Disciple comes from the verb root, discere, “to learn.” (There is an alternative thought suggesting it might come from a verb root, discipere, “to grasp, comprehend,” which I like too).¹²Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, s.v. “disciple,” accessed October 6, 2024, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disciple. Either way, the point here is that a disciple seeks to learn or to grasp or comprehend the importance of something (a teaching, or what we would call a doctrine) within a particular school of thought. But we’ve taken it to an ugly place due to centuries of religious trauma—especially in America. It’s time to reclaim it.

Granted, you may be, if you so wish, a disciple of Crowley: a Crowleyan disciple much like a Freudian disciple or an Einsteinian disciple—I just made that up; I don’t know anyone that would admit to that—or a Christian (a Christ disciple). I’m not a Crowleyan disciple. I am a Thelemic disciple. I am a disciple of the Law of Thelema. I am certainly not ashamed of that either. Where Thelema and Crowley diverge, I choose Thelema over Crowley. Every time.

However, discipleship in a time of Thelema means something different than in a time of Christianity—though I do think many Christians are rethinking their 1970s/1980s image of discipleship as well these days.

What does Thelemic discipleship look like? Well, first, it’s going to be different for each individual, but it may have some general markers that look similar for everyone.

1. The recognition that spiritual maturity is a journey.

We don’t wake up one day and suddenly find ourselves at the end of the road, or “enlightened,” or (stupidly) “crossing the Abyss.” It is an understanding that there is no “end of the road” at all. This whole idea of “finding our True Will” isn’t some strange mystical, magical process that takes a lifetime (or 93 days) of sleep deprivation or facing off with the so-called Four Kings of Hell. That’s all rubbish. Oh, and metaphor. Likewise, even this “True Will” isn’t the end of the road. It’s just another marker along the way. The question still remains once you’ve figured it out: now what?

You may have woke the fuck up, but you still have to grow the fuck up.

2. The recognition of the narrative of Thelema and our part in it.

So much of the grift of Thelemic gurus today is about how to make you feel like a special little snowflake rather than helping you to find, well, you. I want you to stop right now and go re-read that introduction to Part II of Liber ABA. I’ll wait. (Or you can read it in the footnotes.¹³“This book is for ALL: for every man, woman, and child. My former work has been misunderstood, and its scope limited, by my use of technical terms. It has attracted only too many dilettanti and eccentrics, weaklings seeking in “Magic” an escape from reality. I myself was first consciously drawn to the subject in this way. And it has repelled only too many scientific and practical minds, such as I most designed to influence. But MAGICK is for ALL. I have written this book to help the Banker, the Pugilist, the Biologist, the Poet, the Navvy, the Grocer, the Factory Girl, the Mathematician, the Stenographer, the Golfer, the Wife, the Consul—and all the rest—to fulfil themselves perfectly, each in his or her own proper function.” [Crowley, Liber ABA, 125.]) I am going to come back to this idea later in the year, this narrative of Thelema, because I think it’s important, vital even. It’s part of a storytelling that we have completely missed in our efforts to be mysterious and spooky and “occult,” while entirely sidestepping the focus of Thelema itself: change.

3. The journey of discovery is relational.

No individual exists in a vacuum. No individual heals from trauma in a vacuum. No individual grows, learns, or develops in a vacuum. Growth and maturity happen not when we attempt to balance power among ourselves, rivaling each other for social currency, but only within a community of power when each supports the other, contending for a common wealth of success for the community that supports the needs of each individual.

You will find some, a few isolated oddities, who will try to sell you on a weird far-right, Übermensch, “you can’t hear me roar all by myself in this lonely field,” neo-Nietzschean fanfic version of Thelema. They are the ones on the mountaintop in thin air thinking “rarified” means “special” instead of “gasping for breath and about to die,” not knowing that spiritual life doesn’t happen on the mountaintops, at the peaks, frozen in death at 23k.¹⁴There is a vast difference between having a “peak experience” and the experience of “spiritual living.”

4. The journey has a map.

It’s your map that is unique to you, but everyone has a map nonetheless. Crowley wrote, “Let him, before beginning his [Great] Work, endeavour to map out his own being”.¹⁵Crowley, Liber ABA, 145. He goes on to mention addressing imbalances found in one’s being, but I find it interesting his suggested process does not “lead to the supreme attainment [but will] define the separate being of the [individual] from the rest of the Universe, and discover his relation to that Universe” [Liber תישארב Viæ Memoriæ sub figurâ CMXIII]. Granted, this is an advanced practice of the A∴A∴, but the point here is not to suggest preparation for “crossing the abyss,” but merely working to “know thyself” more completely. Remember: it’s a journey, and we’re talking about the map of the Self. How are you going to understand yourself and the conditions of your life, much less apply that understanding in action, without that map?¹⁶What’s even more bizarre is how many of these “high-level adepts” of fraternal and magical Orders have written books talking about their “HGA experiences” and have yet to ever comment on this in advising others on where to start. It’s the very first piece of this journey that Crowley says is vital and it’s never mentioned by any of them. When you hear people talk about having “read everything from Crowley,” be suspicious. I have read what feels like literal boatloads of Crowley’s published and unpublished work, and even I’m surprised by what I haven’t read after 40 years and by what I learn new all the time. I’m humbled by it constantly. 

What? You thought discipleship was going to look like stroking some guru’s ego, shaving your head, and sending money to a Patreon? If you need that, there’s one over on Facebook who’s still organ-grinding for followers.

For Christianity, discipleship has always been outward-facing, about turning individuals into shallow propaganda machines, to send people out to lead others back into the Church. With the advent of Thelema, discipleship has turned inward. It is not about recruiting others into uniform belief but about refining one’s own alignment and understanding of meaningful relationships.

1. Learning.

It’s mostly learning about yourself and your place in the universe. That’s it. It’s relational. I know I keep saying that, but Thelema hammers this constantly throughout the Book of the Law that we are all connected. The symbolism of Thelema is saturated with relational meaning.

2. Discipline.¹⁷Discipline comes to us via a weird linguistic shift from the word discipulus, the Latin word for pupil. While it takes a weird historical bend through Christianity via self-flagellation and into modern vernacular as punishment, ultimately it remains related to voluntary behavior-related and motivated learning mostly through operant conditioning.

One of the few Crowley quotes with which I agree entirely is from Magick Without Tears, in which he writes, “About 90% of Thelema, at a guess, is nothing but self-discipline. One is only allowed to do anything and everything so as to have more scope for exercising that virtue.”¹⁸Crowley, “Morality (1).” In Magick Without Tears, 423.

3. Integrity

Thelema is not a hall pass for narcissism. “Do what thou wilt” is a demand, not a suggestion—and certainly not an excuse. It requires that you actually know what your Will is, and once you do, you must hold yourself accountable to it. That means no shortcuts, no pretending, no posturing. Integrity is the through-line: the ability to remain congruent with your Will even when no one is watching, and especially when everyone is.

4. Union.

Not the kind of fake utopian fusion where everyone dissolves into one big kumbaya, but real Union: the ecstatic collision between fully individuated, Will-realized beings. Thelema doesn’t promise unity through sameness. It offers Union through difference—through Love. “Love is the law, love under will” (AL 1.57) is not an afterthought. It’s the key. Thelemic discipleship ends not in isolation, but in communion with the world, the stars, the other, and the Self.

This is what discipleship means in Thelema: a life lived deliberately, not dogmatically. It’s the commitment to be in an active relationship with your Will, your world, and those you encounter on the path. It’s not about swearing fealty to dead men’s diaries or collecting initiations like Boy Scout badges. It’s about the day-in, day-out labor of becoming more fully yourself, in truth and in love, without retreating into isolation or inflating into spiritual cosplay.

So no, Thelemic discipleship isn’t a pyramid scheme of enlightenment, and it sure as hell isn’t another self-help hustle in occult drag. It’s harder than that. It demands you show up—with attention, with courage, with consistency. But it also promises that you’re not walking it alone. Not because someone else is leading you, but because the stars themselves are your kin. Thelema doesn’t ask you to follow. It dares you not to walk alone.

The Future of Thelema

I’ve spent the last several months waving red flags around about the immediate future of Thelema in a world on fire. And I still think that is important.

However, if we back up a bit and look at a larger picture, I think we’ll find that Thelema was never meant to be a crisis cult clinging to relevance in the collapse. It’s a long game—a cosmic, human, evolutionary game. Thelema thrives not in apocalypse cosplay or endless reaction to institutional rot, but in the steady cultivation of a spiritual culture across generations. The world may be on fire, but fire is not only destruction; it is also illumination. And what we do in this moment—how we practice, how we build, how we shape—how we love—becomes the relevance of Thelema a hundred or two hundred years from now.

Thelema is not going anywhere, but it will evolve. It must. It has to shed the brittle nostalgia of Victorian elitism and the lazy pantomime of rebellion for its own sake. It must deepen, become more honest, more mature, more human. The future of Thelema doesn’t belong to influencers or armchair mystics. It belongs to those willing to sit with ambiguity, to do the work without applause, and to teach not just by doctrine, but also by the integrity of their lives.

Thelema begins with one star—but the sky is full of them.

Love is the law, love under will.