Unified Kingdom Theology A Challenge to the Ideological Extremes of Thelema

Let me make what shouldn’t be a controversial statement but probably is in some Thelemic spaces: theology should not pander to our prejudices, personal or organizational. However, I’m also aware that theology has been weaponized in many spheres to do precisely that: pander to some pet ideology or another.

When speaking about theological matters, I try to be very clear about my personal biases, even when I believe they are on solid ground. And if it’s not obvious by now, all opinions around here are mine and subject to change at any time through new information or reasoned arguments.

I believe there are two extremes of theological perspective within the larger Thelemic community. Both of them get my goat—and always have. I’m not sure if it’s the way I was raised or if it was a proper grounding in theology that kept me from falling for the terrible eisegesis that was rampant within occulture at the time (late 1980s/early 1990s) and continues to exist today.

At one extreme, we have the social Darwinists who haven’t escaped their pseudoscientific attempts at justifying their own extinction. They are usually pseudo-Nietzschean knuckle-draggers who blather on about being “lone wolves” and Übermensch-wannabes.

At the other extreme, we have a proto-Magisterium that is cosplaying the next Holy Roman Church from within a position of masonic irrelevancy, but traditional connections to Crowley directly offer the pretense of legitimacy.

What makes both of these camps so exhausting isn’t that they’re wrong (though, yes, they’re often wrong). It’s that they’re predictable. Each faction arrives with its preferred ideology already packed and labeled, and then proceeds to treat the Book of the Law like a rummage sale: grab the shiny verse that flatters the pre-existing worldview, ignore the rest, and call it “Thelema.”

The “lone wolf” crowd reads Thelema as a predator philosophy and then acts shocked when their spirituality produces exactly what they fed it—antisocial license dressed up as metaphysical freedom. The proto-Magisterium reads Thelema as a half-assed ecclesiology project and then wonders why their “spiritual authority” keeps requiring ever more theatrics and legal threats to remain plausible. Both end up doing the same maneuver: subordinating the revelation to something else—bad Nietzsche on one side, desperate organizational legitimacy on the other—while insisting with a straight face that they’re the ones being faithful to “the idea of Thelema.”

I’m framing the following outline as a challenge to ideological extremes rather than a complaint about personalities—and I’m sure some of us could complain about certain loud-mouthed personalities all afternoon. Talking heads come and go; the error pattern remains. The pattern is simple: radical individualism treats other stars as irrelevant background noise, and magisterial thinking treats other stars as a problem to be managed. In both cases, the “company of heaven” gets quietly reduced to a stage prop. A cosmos of stars cannot survive being handled like a prop without eventually becoming a punchline.

There is what could be seen as a pre-presupposition¹I think three fundamental presuppositions define the general hermeneutic that encapsulates a fundamental approach to both a solid Thelemic worldview and a systematic theology: that is, (a) what I call The Three Rivers, which is also a stand-alone set of three propositions that work together in forming a teaching element, or mnemonic, similar to the Buddhist concept of ‘taking refuge in the Three Jewels,’ (b) Egyptosophical Scaffolding, and (c) Spiritual Continuity or dialectic. This idea of Unified Kingdom Theology is a foundational premise for these. [from Canons of Thelemic Religion and Philosophy, unpublished] to both a solid Thelemic worldview and a systematic theology: the theology of the Unified Kingdom. And yes, I know how that sounds. But this is less “new doctrine” and more “reading the text like an adult.” The Unified Kingdom takes an integral approach to Thelema, that is, (a) affirmation of both the individual and the community, (b) acceptance of the Book of the Law in its entirety rather than focusing on prooftexting favorite verses, and (c) rejection of both the Magisterium and radical individualism as healthy worldviews.

A comparison of all three ideological or theological models:

Hyper-Individualistic (Lone Wolf) Model

1. Ego-centric.
2. Homo est Deus.
3. “center of Universe”.
4. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” [AL 1.40 as prooftext]
5. Liber Oz.

Magisterium Model

1. Ethno- [or socio-] centric.
2. the “few and secret”. [AL 1.10 as prooftext]
3. Exclusive membership in-group. [typically initiatory]
4. Hierolatry.
5. Crowleyanity.

Unified Kingdom Model

“Man is the Middle Kingdom. The Great Kingdom is Heaven, with each star as an unit,” Crowley writes in his Commentaries.²Aleister Crowley, The Law is for All, 25.

1. World- [or possibly kosmo-] centric.
2. “The unveiling of the company of heaven.” [AL 1.2]
3. “Every man and every woman is a star.” [AL 1.3]
4. [The entire] Book of the Law.
5. “Duty”³“A note on the chief rules of practical conduct to be observed by those who accept the Law of Thelema” informing Kingship. [AL 2.58-59]

Now, the obvious objection is that I’m setting up a neat triad where reality is messier. Of course it is. People are inconsistent. The same person can quote Liber Oz on Friday night and demand apostolic succession on Sunday, like a spiritual raccoon rummaging through different dumpsters depending on what smells strongest. But the messiness doesn’t erase the underlying trajectories. None of this is a matter of right versus wrong but of more or less emphasis. Which approach will build a culture with more coherence and consistency? Which approach will provide more emphasis on liberty? Which approach will offer a more holistic approach to the technology of Thelema on both the spiritual and practical playing fields?

The hyper-individualistic model sounds like liberty, but it quietly swaps “True Will” for “whatever my ego⁴As used colloquially, i.e., “inner personality structures.” can defend rhetorically.” The tell is always the same: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” gets treated like a magic spell that separates the one who invokes it from consequences, context, responsibility, or—the Gods forbid—other people. When a single verse becomes your entire metaphysic, you haven’t found a key to the Law, you’ve found a loophole in your own conscience.

The Magisterium model commits the equal and opposite error: it swaps “True Will” for “authorized Will.” It treats the Thelemic current as though it can be mediated through institutional proximity, as if initiation-by-fraternity (one possible method among many) is the ontological gate to being a star. But the Book of the Law doesn’t unveil a secret committee of the “few and secret.” It unveils the company of heaven. The stars aren’t created by membership. Membership is, at best, a tool stars sometimes use.

The Unified Kingdom model tries to preserve what both extremes lose: the actual cosmology implied by the first chapter. We begin with the company, then we name the units within it, then we receive the Law that governs their motion. That means, by definition, there is no such thing as a star whose orbit has “zero influence, conjunction, or lack of effect” on other stars—because that’s not how any real cosmos works, physical or metaphysical.

This is where “Kingship” matters—not as elitism, not as caste, not as Crowleyan social Darwinism, and definitely not as a permission slip to become a jerk with a fetish for an occult vocabulary. Kingship, in this framing, is both a state and a process: the gradual movement from being mostly an effect in your environment to increasingly becoming a cause within it—under Will, under Law, and with the kind of inner governance that doesn’t require you to dominate anyone else to feel real.

And “Duty” is the acid test here, because duty is the one thing both extremes hate beyond lip service:

• The radical individualist ignores “Duty” because it limits his romantic self-image.
• The Magisterium ignores “Duty” because it relocates authority inward—into the actual work of being a king—rather than outward into titles, offices, and paper trails.

But the Book of the Law will not let us off the hook that easily. “Therefore the kings of the earth shall be Kings for ever: the slaves shall serve” [AL 2.58]. Whatever else we do with that verse, the grammar alone refuses the cheap reading.⁵See Thelemic Hermeneutics: A Critical Evaluation of the Study of Thelemic Scripture, Part I The second clause doesn’t create a permanent underclass so much as it describes what kingship does: it serves—first the Law, then the Work, then the Kingdom itself. That’s why the king/beggar dynamic makes more sense than the master/slave cosplay that some folks imported from Nietzsche, often with Crowley’s enthusiastic help. While Crowley had his projections, the revelation of the Law is under no obligation to share them.

So the Unified Kingdom is not “collectivism,” and it’s not “rugged individualism.” It’s the conjoining of the individual and the community without dissolving either—each star sovereign, each star situated, each star bound to the others by Law rather than fused into a herd or atomized into a void.

In that light, the theological question stops being, “Which side are you on?” and becomes, “Which theological position produces a coherent view of the cosmos—one where stars can actually live as stars, and communities can exist without pretending to be just another Catholic diocese or the untamed wilderness?” The Unified Kingdom model is my answer: not a third tribe, but a refusal to treat theology as a mirror for our favorite ideological chest-pounding.

Love is the law, love under will.