“I was turning 40 and thinking, Oh dear, I’m probably going to have one of those midlife crisis things which always just bore the hell out of everybody. So it would probably be better if, rather than just having a midlife crisis, I just went completely screaming mad and declared myself to be a magician.”[1]
–Alan Moore
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”[2]
The prophet Aleister Crowley once claimed to begin all his writing, even letters to his butcher,[3] with this mantra. It is, in eleven words, the heart of Thelema. This affectation, of course, took, and so it’s also the first eleven words of anything written on the topic by a Thelemite. So it’s really the only place I can begin.
Since it’s a religion of wizards; there’s a lot of writing about Thelema, much of which will begin by telling you that this core tenet of Thelema is widely misunderstood to be a call for endless self-indulgence. It is an understandable anxiety, what with their prophet being perhaps best known for being an Old Guarde Edgelord. That said, I have yet to meet anyone with this misapprehension. I have, however, met a lot of people who don’t know what Thelema is in the first place. I’m not sure how much of an audience there is to be misunderstanding this vaguely obscure occult religion. But that’s fine; having one foot in the shadows is a necessary and important part of occult societies. Thelema, as a matter of principle, doesn’t evangelize, or reach out to new prospective members.
That’s not to say that the practice of regularly disavowing this “common misunderstanding” is meaningless, or an act that exclusively belies a community that is unaware of its obscurity. No, the phenomenon is perhaps best thought of as a cumulative banishing ritual—by the time you’re deep enough in esoteric nonsense to be reading the Law, you’ve already been told what it’s not.
So sure, I’ll do my part: Obviously, “do what thou wilt” doesn’t mean “yolo.” Wilt is the key here. The word “Thelema” itself is derived from the Classical Greek for “divine will,” and the work of the Thelemite is all about discovering and following one’s True Will—capital T capital W—the thing you are meant to be doing at a celestial level. Find your true spiritual calling and do whatever it takes to achieve it. There exists no moral or legal code that supersedes this mandate.
Given this, one must assume that Aleister Crowley’s True Will was to be a giant asshole.
No, really; stories to this effect abound. My favorite is how, in addition to being an occultist and poet, Crowley was an accomplished mountaineer, and in 1905 he and a small team made an attempt to summit Kangchenjunga[4]—a feat that would not be achieved for another fifty years. The group had a spat over leadership and several of the climbers attempted a retreat. There was an accident, and Crowley, alone, stayed in his tent when their cries reached the camp.…
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