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Liber XXXII · Thelema

Liber XXXII · Thelema

Is Thelema a Religion? Scripture, Rites and Scholarly Views

Is Thelema a religion? How Crowley described it, its scripture, church and holy days, why some call it a philosophy, and how scholars classify it.

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Thelema is a religion by most scholarly definitions: it has a founding prophet, a revealed scripture, gods, an ethic, a liturgy, a clergy, holy days and organised communities. Many Thelemites call it their religion, and its largest organisation runs a church. Yet a significant number of practitioners describe Thelema instead as a philosophy or a system of spiritual training, and Aleister Crowley himself presented it both as a new religion and as a scientific method, so the question is genuinely debated.

What Crowley Said: The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion§

Crowley's own statements point in two directions. On the one hand, he regarded The Book of the Law, received in Cairo in 1904, as the scripture of a new age that would replace Christianity, and he saw himself as its prophet. He spoke of the Law of Thelema as implying not only a new religion but a new cosmology, philosophy and ethics, and he worked in his later years to promote it as a creed for the world. The Gnostic Mass he wrote in 1913 was explicitly a church service, and his Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica borrowed the language of Christian institutions.

On the other hand, Crowley distrusted faith in the ordinary sense. His journal The Equinox, launched in 1909, carried the motto "The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion," and he called his approach "scientific illuminism": spiritual claims were to be tested by experiment, recorded in a diary and checked against results. His order of spiritual training, the A∴A∴, demanded practice rather than belief, and he urged students to doubt even his own teachings. As Marco Pasi and other scholars have noted, this mixture of prophetic religion and sceptical, quasi-scientific language is characteristic of Crowley and of the occultism of his time. Thelemites today can therefore cite Crowley in support of either view. His life is told in Aleister Crowley.

The Religious Features of Thelema§

Measured against the features that scholars usually look for in a religion, Thelema has most of them.

  • Scripture and revelation. The Book of the Law is regarded as dictated by a superhuman intelligence, Aiwass, and is treated as authoritative and unalterable in its text. Other inspired texts, the Holy Books of Thelema, form a wider canon. See Thelema and The Book of the Law.
  • Gods and cosmology. Nuit, Hadit and Ra-Hoor-Khuit, together with figures such as Babalon and the Beast, provide a theology and a cosmic history of aeons, explained in Thelemic Doctrine.
  • Ethics. The Law of Thelema, "Do what thou wilt," understood as the duty to discover and perform one's True Will, together with "Love is the law, love under will," gives a moral framework.
  • Ritual and sacrament. The Gnostic Mass, the daily solar adorations of Liber Resh and rites of baptism, confirmation, marriage and burial structure religious life.
  • Clergy and institutions. The Ordo Templi Orientis and its Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica ordain deacons, priests, priestesses and bishops.
  • Sacred time. The second chapter of The Book of the Law lists feasts, among them the three days of the writing of the book (8 to 10 April), the Equinox of the Gods in March, and the first night of the Prophet and his Bride. Thelemites also date years in an era beginning in 1904.

The greeting "93" and the formal letter openings and closings used among Thelemites function as shared religious language, marking members of a community with common values.

Arguments That Thelema Is Not a Religion§

Those who reject the label make several arguments. First, Thelema asks no one to accept a creed on faith. A Thelemite may treat Nuit and Hadit as literal deities, as personifications of cosmic principles, or as psychological symbols, and many practitioners are agnostic or atheist about the supernatural claims of The Book of the Law. Second, the centre of Thelema is the individual's True Will, which no church can define; religion, in this view, implies an external authority that Thelema rejects. Third, much Thelemic practice, especially yoga, meditation and ceremonial magic, is presented as a technique for producing results, closer to a discipline or a science than to worship.

Some Thelemites also associate "religion" with what Crowley called the Aeon of Osiris, the age of the dying god and of submission to authority, which they believe the Aeon of Horus has replaced. For them, calling Thelema a religion risks importing the habits of the older age. Others answer that the Gnostic Mass and the existence of clergy make such a position hard to sustain, and that many religions, from Buddhism to liberal Judaism, accommodate members who interpret their teachings non-literally.

How Scholars of Religion Classify Thelema§

Academic definitions of religion vary. Substantive definitions focus on belief in superhuman beings or a sacred order; functional definitions focus on what religion does, such as creating community, meaning and ritual. On almost any of these definitions Thelema qualifies, and scholars of religion routinely treat it as one. It appears in reference works on new religious movements and in the academic study of Western esotericism, and its history has been the subject of a substantial scholarly literature since the 1990s (see Studying New Religious Movements).

The essays collected by Henrik Bogdan and Martin P. Starr in Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism treat Crowley as the founder of a new religion and as a pivotal figure in the development of modern occultism and alternative spirituality. Sociologists have placed Thelema among the "self-religions" of modernity, which locate the sacred in the deepest self rather than in an external god, a category that also includes parts of the New Age. Hugh Urban and Manon Hedenborg White have examined Thelema's sexual theology and gender roles as part of its religious system, and historians of Satanism, Wicca and chaos magick treat it as an ancestor religion whose ideas fed later movements.

In practice, Thelemic organisations operate as religious bodies. The Ordo Templi Orientis, led after its revival by Grady McMurtry from the late 1970s, is incorporated in the United States as a non-profit religious organisation, and a federal court decision in California in 1985 recognised it as the continuation of Crowley's order in a dispute over its name and property. OTO bodies in other countries are registered in various ways depending on national law. Its ecclesiastical arm, the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, performs public worship in the form of the Gnostic Mass and conducts weddings and funerals.

Other new religions faced similar questions. Courts in the United States, for example, recognised Wicca as a religion for constitutional purposes in the 1980s, as described in Dettmer v. Landon. Thelema has attracted less litigation, partly because of its small size, but its institutions function in law as churches and religious associations.

Thelema Among Other Modern Religions§

Thelema shares its ambiguity with several movements that grew from the same occult soil. Wiccans debate whether their tradition is a religion of goddess and god or a practice of witchcraft open to people of any belief. LaVeyan Satanism describes itself as an atheistic religion that uses ritual for psychological ends. The Theosophical Society, by contrast, insisted it was not a religion at all, but a society for the study of all religions. Thelema sits between these positions: it has the institutions of a church and the rhetoric of a science.

The most widely accepted answer is therefore that Thelema is a religion that leaves its adherents free to treat it as a philosophy. For some Thelemites it is a faith with gods, a prophet and a church; for others it is a method for discovering the True Will. Both positions can be found in Crowley's writings, and both are part of the living tradition described in What Is Thelema?.

Frequently asked questions§

Did Crowley consider Thelema a religion?§

Yes, in many places he described the Law of Thelema as a new religion for the Aeon of Horus, and he wrote its central rite, the Gnostic Mass. He also presented it as a scientific method of spiritual attainment and discouraged blind belief, so his statements support both views.

Do Thelemites worship gods?§

Some do, treating Nuit, Hadit and Ra-Hoor-Khuit as real divine beings and addressing them in ritual. Others regard these figures as symbols of cosmic or psychological principles. Thelema does not require members to adopt either view.

Is the OTO a church?§

The Ordo Templi Orientis is a fraternal and initiatory order, but its Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica functions as a church, with clergy, sacraments and public worship. In the United States the OTO is registered as a religious non-profit organisation.

What are the Thelemic holy days?§

They include the Feast of the Equinox of the Gods around 20 March, the three days of the writing of The Book of the Law from 8 to 10 April, and other feasts listed in the book's second chapter. Many Thelemites also mark solstices and equinoxes.

Sources and further reading§