The Crisis of Revelation Returning to the Word

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

I ran across some recent social media posts by Frater Memefication, who seems to be turning away from his decades of shitposting and misrepresenting Thelema toward sounding more like Gerald, Marco, and even me.¹His current railing on about “First Principles Thelema” sounds perversely too familiar to calls for ‘first principles’ I made in the late 1990’s as well as more recently after the release of Antti Balk’s travesty of a book, The Law of Thelema: Aleister Crowley’s Philosophy of True Will [2018], in which he couldn’t even articulate philosophical principles with any relation to text and context. It’s a bit strange to see someone who has done more damage to our larger movement suddenly start talking—however poorly, as usual—about topics of which he has little experience or familiarity, but rings deceptively similar to the grounded voices of those who take Thelema seriously in life rather than as a grift for courses to teach people how to be “real Thelemites.”²If you read between the lines, though, you can see the same grinding tones of Frater Schadenfreude’s “Elite Thelema™” oozing through it all. I’m not surprised, however, since everything he’s done has been stolen from someone else’s work and then poorly repackaged to fail until he finds a new grift.

The issue, to be clear, is that his “first principles” aren’t principles at all. He’s doing the same thing he’s been doing from the beginning, all those decades ago, spewing a bunch of words that don’t mean much and lacing them with quotes from Crowley that may or may not have any relevance at all. Yet his mewling points at something that I’ve struggled to articulate for just as long as he’s been spewing poison: that Thelema, and indeed the whole world, is in the throes of a crisis of revelation because it has been swamped with modernist and postmodernist slobbering from those who couldn’t grasp truth if it bent them over a couch after dinner.

The Crisis of Revelation³Excerpt from Preliminaries to the Canons of Thelemic Philosophy and Religion. Originally written in 2018. Updated with silent corrections and additional material in 2026.

The one thing that remains constant throughout human spirituality is the horizontal tension between what we might loosely call an overarching spirito-historical narrative (mythos) and the inherent character of an individual (ethos). To this, we add the vertical tension between the premise of life (logos) and the passion for living (pathos). Yet it is the struggle between mythos and logos that reaches a crescendo of crisis—those historical moments when logos finally breaks free into a new revelation—that illuminates humanity and shapes our mythos accordingly.

By revelation, I do not mean merely the private vision of a prophet on a mountain, or the ineffable hush of a mystic in prayer. I mean revelation in the broader and more disruptive sense: the unveiling of reality that forces the human animal to revise its story about itself. Sometimes that unveiling arrives clothed in symbol and ritual; sometimes it arrives as an equation, a microscope slide, or even merely a brutal autopsy of our favorite assumptions. Either way, it is the same basic phenomenon: the mind confronts a truth it cannot comfortably metabolize, and so the culture—slowly, violently, comically—rearranges itself around the new center of gravity.

This is where the layperson tends to get confused. We treat mythos as if it were “just stories,” a kind of ornamental antiquity, and we treat logos as if it were “just facts” (or some kind of “Divine manifestation”), a cold machine for correct answers that emanate from science or sanctuary. But mythos is never merely decorative; it is the narrative scaffolding by which communities become coherent across time. And logos is never merely clinical (or spiritual); it is the living capacity to discriminate, to test, to refine, to see more clearly than we did yesterday. When revelation occurs, it is not simply that a new fact has been discovered; instead, a new orientation becomes possible. A fresh intelligibility opens. The old mythos does not merely vanish—cultures are not computers that delete obsolete files on command—but it is pressed into the hard work of translation. The old symbols either deepen into a wiser meaning, or they calcify into superstition, or they are discarded in anger like a snake’s skin that still smells like fear. We have a precedent for this in the Book of the Law: “the rituals of the old time are black. Let the evil ones be cast away; let the good ones be purged by the prophet! [AL 2.5b–d].

In our current age, we find the struggle for truth pitting revelation against reductionism, faith against uncertainty, and transcendence against materialism. It is superstition that is the root of error on both sides of these dichotomies. The single most radical idea that has turned the crisis of progress into a cascade of intolerance and fear is that science and spirituality are incompatible—that continued revelation in science means the transformation of spirituality into common legend or, conversely, that a spiritual revelation must dictate the nature of reality over empirical science.

We must abandon the false notion that scientific progress and discovery mean the negation of spiritual principles and, likewise, that spiritual understanding is incompatible with scientific knowledge of our universe and of ourselves. The ultimate concern of each individual is not dictated by science, and yet it can be clarified—sometimes painfully—through scientific methodologies. Crowley understood this quite well and promoted such an approach even at the most basic level through his list of definitions in Part III of Liber ABA: Magick (among other writings). There is no conflict here except in the power plays between those who would demand allegiance to superstition alone.

It would be a mistake to assume this crisis of revelation is unique to our specific period of humanity’s scientific, social, and spiritual evolution. Such turmoil in the understanding of our ultimate concern—each for ourselves—has plagued our species since we were capable of pondering the ineffable. As each subsequent revelation unveiled what was unknown and unseen to humanity, a new mystery was born: a new unfolding of logos that left our species grasping for the next step in its evolution at all levels. Each moment in civilization, each step forward in technology, in culture, even in our cognitive processing as individuals of the human species—these together formed provisional answers to that sustaining riddle of who am I and why am I here? Each step of science has offered us ways to derive purpose and meaning from the elements among which we live and breathe. Each step of our spiritual unfolding has suggested that we exist to serve something higher (or deeper, depending on your outlook) than ourselves and has pointed us toward discovery.

And this is precisely why the war between “faith” and “science” is such a tragically modern superstition. Ancient people were not naïve because they used mythic language; they were human, as we are human, trying to speak about realities too large for the mouth. Their error—when it came—was not mythos itself, but the refusal to let mythos mature under the pressure of clearer seeing. Likewise, our contemporary error is not pathos itself, but the refusal to admit that the human person cannot survive on spirituality (or materiality) alone.

The world can be quantified without being comprehended. A brain can be mapped without love becoming less mysterious. A hormone can be isolated without meaning becoming a rounding error. The crisis, then, is not revelation versus reason. It is revelation versus rigidity. It is the living encounter with truth versus the dead grip of ideology. And if Thelema has any vocation at all in this historical moment, it is to insist—without apology—that the path of both the individual and the community is a lived experience, testable in the blood and bone of those who live and breathe in this very real world, and yet also oriented toward a different calling that reductionism cannot even name without stumbling over itself.

We exist in a time of space missions to the surface of Mars, scientific probes beyond the boundaries of our solar system, and the discovery of exoplanets that might just be capable of sustaining life; a time of genome sequencing, developing organs from stem cells, and even whole face transplants; a digital age of information at the speed of thought—or, in so many cases, the lack of thought—or maybe only at the speed of socially replicated opinion. The pervasiveness of technology only furthers our isolation from the truth of the revelation, not in the sense of distance, but in the sense of closeness. We are left with little space to breathe, to ruminate somewhere between mystery and solidity. We find ourselves in the midst of an overload of innovation divorced from tradition, each new direction pulling at us through novel and overwhelming exchanges between the chattering of individualist drivel and claims of “Authority,” between those who assert every man and every woman is an island and those who declare—in duplicitous words—to be the island itself.

There can be no innovation without tradition. There can be no preservation of tradition without innovation. It is only through the balance of certainty and skepticism that forward progress is made possible.

Civilization has been under the aegis of the same unfolding of history, step by step, as far back in time as we can recognize it. Despite the timeless nature of humanity’s ultimate concern, however, there is something new, something unique and emergent, that has added to the unfolding in which we currently find ourselves. The last century has witnessed an exponential expansion of technology and ingenuity across the spectrum of human endeavor, in the service of both the elevation and the brutal degradation of individuals and whole societies. This gives rise to the paradox of the common person’s trust in the advancement of science and their distrust of its abuses and destructive possibilities.

The media today is vastly different from even sixty years ago, when a near-instantaneous communication with the other side of the world was merely a dream. Now we have vivid connections in real time with everything from a baby’s birth to the drone slaughter in conflicts around the world, from the construction of homes for the poor to the terrorist destruction of towering edifices in our cities, from the reception of images from space to the powerful pictures of destruction of human life and property in fires or tsunamis. We are inundated and overwhelmed by the ecstasy and outrage that is served up without ceasing amid the competition for media ratings. We live on the fine line between personal engagement with every repetition of crisis—to the point of emotional exhaustion—and the barrage of media-crafted information that creates a sense of regressive numbness to meaning and truth.

It is within this overload of sensation that the crisis of revelation is most pronounced for Thelemites today. Having been forged—at least in its popular imagination—in the crucible of the sixties and seventies, modern Thelemites have been led by a generation to find everything from their mystical gurus and World Teachers to an ineffective rebellion against “the System.” The culture shock of maturity as Thelema emerges into its own brings with it the corresponding call to preserve its occult history as responsibly and as humanly possible, while grasping the natural identity of Thelema as a culture and also the universal Law of Liberty of every man and every woman on the planet.

The power of mass media has created a dichotomous situation: drowning out any sensory understanding of the universe around us and, conversely, powerfully shaping society through the satiety of the reprehensible. It is little surprise that the Law of Thelema is not the first discourse of corrective focus even among self-professed Thelemites. The rise of anxiety, the flood of fear and depression over current events, the notions of radicalism on all sides of the political spectrum, the restless preoccupation with a hypersensory experience of spirituality that is proximate to the novelties of scientific innovation and progress—this is all symptomatic of the loss of connection to the nurturing and sustaining message of the logos.

The Law of Thelema offers up the foundation of truth in a succinct and meaningful way. Yet we live in a time when verbal inspiration—indeed, revelation—is no longer trusted. The inundation of deception from the most basic advertisements on television to the lies of expediency from our politicians to the competing messages between orthodox and syncretic religions has clamored for attention and priority. The confusion over what is real and what is perceived has been challenged by modern and postmodern claims that nothing can be known for sure, either way. Communication undermines trustworthiness in the truth. However, if there is any value to the Tunis Comment (the so-called “Short Comment”), it holds as a bulwark for the value of truth itself.

Media saturation is the irony of our very real and present circumstances. We are surrounded by the ability to traverse the world in a moment of time without ever leaving the comfort of our armchair. What we can see of the world revealing itself to us is merely distanced by the flip of a switch or the click of a button. Amid this pervasive technical accessibility, we have the unparalleled opportunity to disseminate the Law of Thelema in ways that no other religion in the past has been immediately capable. While the news cycle is one tragedy after another, Thelemites have the incredible ability to offer something different—something revolutionary in approach to every problem whether individual or global. We have news for the world. We have news that actually is huge news, great news, true news. If it is our task to bring the Law to the world—and it is our task by mandate of the Book of the Law itself—then it is through our personal application of the Law in everyday circumstances that will most allow the world to see the liberation of the Law in action.

The implementation of the Law of Thelema to liberate humanity falters just as much out of ignorance of the Law in the world beyond select fraternities and so-called “secret societies” as it does from the deprivation of the Law through its strangulation by those that would represent the Law as just another choice in the buffet of religious notions. In addition, the technical nonsense elevated to essential doctrine by those who would attempt to manipulate the message betrays the need for political control over a message that both rises above and radically infiltrates politics. While the philosophy of Thelema is complex, to be sure, the application of Thelema is so simple—as the prophet said—that it amounts to a truism. The message of renewal and transformation that comes from the Law of Thelema leads to a life that is unique, individual, and determined to express itself.

The critical message of Thelema is the liberty of the individual to identify and grasp the flow of personal destiny. The paradox of that message is just how simple—and how difficult—that liberty can be for each individual.

Love is the law, love under will.