[The Pomegranate 13.

2 (2011) 163–183] ISSN 1528-0268 (Print)

doi: 10.1558/pome.v13i2.163 ISSN 1743-1735 (Online)

The Heart of Thelema: Morality, Amorality, and Immorality

in Aleister Crowley’s Thelemic Cult

Mogg Morgan

mandox2000@yahoo.com

Abstract

In the wisdom literature of ancient Egypt, as in modern culture, the heart

is a physical organ but also a metaphor for one’s moral centre. Aleister
Crowley is the founder of a small but signiicant magical cult that claims
to be a revival of Egyptian magical religion. Some Thelemites do not admit
moral distinctions or judgments; and are in this sense amoral. Moral issues
are raised in a core passage in Crowley’s inspired text, Liber AL (II 18-21)
which presents the essence of its “Nietzchean standpoint.” Crowley rarely
departed from this “Law of the jungle.” Crowley acknowledged and vali-
dated a magical “son”, Charles Stansield Jones (Frater Achad) as “the
one” who would unlock the true meanings of Liber AL. Jones promul-
gated a revisionist interpretation, more liberal and in tune with the phi-
losophy of Ma’at, the ancient Egyptian personiication of justice. Jones
wrote that: “by trying to help Humanity as a Whole, without distinction,
as far as in me lay, I could learn to do the Will of God, or the True Will.”
Rejected by Crowley and other important opinion formers, Jones’ ideas
continued an ex cathedra existence, gathering followers anxious to make
Thelema more relevant. Recently published correspondence between
Crowley and Jones will apparently show that toward the end of his life,
Crowley acknowledged Jones interpretation as valid and equal to his own.
In the years since Crowley’s death there has been an interesting revival of
Ma’atian philosophy in the mainstream and independent of Neo-Pagan-
ism. Pan African Political groups have found in it material for an ethical
system that avoids the tradition of Abrahamic faiths and also Mediterra-
nean ethno-centrism. There has been new research, especially on the so-
called “Negative Confession.” The philosophy of Ma’at emphasises our
social being. Its irst principle is “I have not impoverished the people.”
Thelemites are shown to have views relevant to controversy between indi-
vidualism, free will and social justice.

“Your heart is lighter than a feather”

—OGDOS Egyptian Ritual1

1. Ritual of the Oxford Golden Dawn Occult Society, a small but inluential sodal-
ity of independent ritualists, active from the early 1980s. See Richard Sutcliffe. “Left-
Hand Magick: An Historical and Philosophical Overview,” in Paganism Today, ed.
Charlotte Hardman and Graham Harvey (San Francisco: Thorsons, 1995), 109–37.

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164 The Pomegranate 13.2 (2011)

Some would say that the Thelemic cult does not really admit of moral
distinctions or judgments and is in this sense neither moral nor immoral.
However its foundation texts reveal a conlict between radical individ-
ualism, “Nietzchean ”2 and amoral, and a more compassionate view
which is libertarian but also aware of concerns of “Humanity.” 3 I plan to
show that Thelema can have a moral code of conduct of the kind usually
thought essential to an orderly and just life and often promulgated by
other religions, philosophies and humanisms.
Thelema has its own “law book”—the eponymous “Book of the Law”
which is elsewhere called “The Law of Liberty.”4 The moral”code in this
book is often epitomised by a terse irst principle “Do what thou wilt
shall be the whole of the Law.”5 This line is often accompanied by a val-
edictory “Love is the Law, Love under will,”6 and this in itself might
imply some principle of emotion and compassion for others.
In 1920 Aleister Crowley started work on an extended commentary
on the Book of the Law, a process that he returned to on and off for the
rest of his life. The Law is For All, hereafter referred to as the Commentary,
is the inal version edited posthumously and published by Crowley’s
student Israel Regardie.7 The Commentary also incorporates extensive
passages from other Crowley works, notably Liber Aleph.8
Regardie says in his introduction that the main themes are sex, drugs,
and religion.9 He could also have included ethics, as pages 175–208 of
The Commentary are devoted to this theme. The above is a comment
on Liber AL II 18–21 which for Crowley was the essence of Thelema’s
“Nietzchean standpoint”: 10
These are dead, these fellows, they feel not. We are not for the poor and
the sad: the lords of the earth are our kinfolk.

Is a God to live in a dog? No! but the highest are of us. They shall rejoice,
our chosen; who sorroweth is not of us.

2. Aleister Crowley, The Law Is For All: An Extended Commentary On the The Book of
the Law, ed. Israel Regardie, (Phoenix: Falcon Press, 185 [1954]), 75.
3. Charles Stansield Jones (Frater Achad) The Egyptian Revival or The Ever-Coming
Son in The Light of the Tarot (Chicago: Privately published, 1923) 40–41
4. Aleister Crowley, The Law of Liberty, small tract or advertisement published in
The Equinox 3, no. 1 (1919).
5. Liber AL I, 40
6. Ibid.,57
7. Crowley, The Law Is For All.
8. Aleister Crowley Liber ALEPH vel CXI The BOOK of WISDOM or FOLLY in
the Form of an Epistle of 666 THE GREAT WILD BEAST to his Son 777 being THE
EQUINOX VOLUME III NUMBER VI by THE MASTER THERION (1971)
9. Crowley The Law Is For All, 29.
10. Ibid., 75.

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 Morgan The Heart of Thelema 165

Beauty and strength, leaping laughter and delicious language, force and
ire, are of us.

We have nothing with the outcast and the unit: let them die in their
misery. For they feel not. Compassion is the vice of Kings: stamp down
the wretched and the weak; this is the law of the strong: this is our law
and the joy of the world.11

Aiwass is the preternatural entity who dictated the text of Liber AL to

Crowley. Crowley says Aiwass is his own personal Holy Guardian Angel
(HGA). Crowley’s student Israel Regardie was a psychiatrist practicing
in the Freudian, Jungian, and Reichian traditions. He interpreted the
voices of Crowley’s HGA as, in part, those of his unconsciousness mind
but also of the collective unconscious.12 Thus according to Regardie,
Crowley is the author of Liber AL, although this does not stop him both
agreeing and dissimulating from the views there expressed.
“You may disagree with Aiwass” says Crowley, “—so do all of
us—the trouble is he can say ‘but I’m not arguing: I’m telling you.’ ”13
But Crowley then writes: “Our humanitarianism, which is the syphilis
of the mind, acts on the basis of the lies that the king must die. The king
is beyond death; it is merely a pool where he dips for refreshment. We
must therefore go back to the Spartan ideas of education; and the worst
enemies of humanity are those who wish, under the pretext of compas-
sion, to continue its ills through the generations. The Christians to the
lions!”14
Liber AL II vs 18-21, quoted above, is to say the least a fairly challeng-
ing point of view. It may even be self contradictory, i.e. “compassion is
the vice of Kings”—we the enlightened are kings, therefore our vice is
compassion? 15
In Magick Without Tears, 16 a posthumous collection of eighty-four let-
ters17 written circa 1943 (ive years before his death), Crowley responds
to an anonymous female correspondent on more or less identical terms.

11. Liber AL II 18–21 quoted in Crowley, The Law Is For All, 292–3.
12. Aleister Crowley, The Law Is For All, 29
13. Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears, ed. Israel Regardie (St Paul: Llewellyn
1973) 305
14. Crowley, The Law Is For All, comment to II: 23.
15. Perhaps comparable to “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart
of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
Karl Marx, introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,
Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1976)
16. Crowley, Magick Without Tears.
17. Ibid.,The contents of my edition lists 83 topics, number 55 on “Money” omitted
in error

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Her side of the correspondence is not preserved. This literary exchange

ranges over many subjects; including Thelemic ethics for which Crowley
draws heavily on the views expressed in the Commentary.
For example, “That this imbecile and nauseating cult of weakness—
democracy some call it—is utterly false and vile.”18 Crowley is not
subtle; he might have done better had he conined himself to a critique
of the failings of democracy. Similarly with his apparent lack of compas-
sion; there are modern voices, on the right and the left, who feel that
misdirected compassion and indeed charity can disempower the very
people it wants to help—for example, the homeless. It does not follow
that compassion or democracy per se is false or vile; merely that it can
be misdirected.
Letter 48 is entitled “Morals of Liber AL.” Crowley’s correspondent
must have responded to his earlier letter 46 on the lines that it took us
back to primitive savagery. To which Crowley responds, “Well, where
are we? We’re at Guernica, Lidice, Rotterdam and hundreds of other
crimes, Stalag, and a million lesser horrors inconceivable by the most
diseased and inlamed Sadistic imagination forty years ago.”19
Again he reiterates that “The Book announces a new dichotomy in
human society; there is the master and there is the slave; the noble and
the serf; the ‘lone wolf’ and the herd. (Nietzsche may be regarded as
one of our prophets; to a much lesser extent, de Gobineau). Hitler’s
‘Herrenvolk’ is not too dissimilar an idea; but there is no volk about it;
and if there were, it would certainly not be the routine loving, uniform-
obsessed, law-abiding, refuge-seeking German; the Britain, especially
the Celt, a natural anarchist, is much nearer the mark.”20 Nietzsche’s
work Antichrist was for Crowley the last word on bourgeois morality and
hypocrisy.21
In the same letter Crowley says that as far as he is concerned, and
contrary to what the reasonable reader might think, Liber AL is the work
of “a different order of Being from ourselves.”22 The catastrophes men-
tioned above are perhaps not so signiicant in terms of a greater divine
plan, played out over millennia. Furthermore at this particular juncture,
so his argument goes, the gods of Liber AL are being descriptive rather
than proscriptive. They are prophesising the results of our hubris, the

18. Ibid., 293.

19. Ibid., 305.
20. Ibid., 303.
21. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1990). In German Der Antichrist can mean either The Anti-Christ or The Anti-
Christian.
22. Crowley, Magick Without Tears , 305.

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 Morgan The Heart of Thelema 167

result of our attempts to build a world order based on principles other

than those in Liber AL.
So what are these principles? Liber AL and Crowley are clearest on the
issue of sexual morality and indeed opposition to marriage: “There shall
be no property in human lesh.”23 Crowley is uninterested in the idea of
legal marriage as a protection of the rights of women. His opposition to
marriage often seems to promulgates a new form of sexual slavery: “If a
woman asks a man who wishes to kiss her why he wants to do so, and
he tries to explain he becomes impotent. The proper course is to choke
her into compliance which is what she wants anyhow.” 24
As to property in general, the Book lays down no law. So far as one can
see, it seems to adhere to “the good old rule, the simple plan that they
should take who have the power, and they should keep who can.”25 This
principle is not extended to democratic institutions or collectives, but it
does apply to the aristocracy. Assuming Crowley is not making one of his
rather laboured jokes, then he is often inconsistent, even contradictory.
Elsewhere he writes, “Robbery in any shape is a breach of the Law
of Thelema. It is interference with the right of another to dispose of his
property as he will; and if I did so myself, no matter with what tactical
justiication, I could hardly ask others to respect my own similar right.
(The basis of our criminal law is simple, by virtue of Thelema: to violate
the right of another is to forfeit one’s own claim to protection in the
matter involved.) 26
Behind all this lies the notion that a Thelemic community would be a
good environment because of the inner discipline of its members. Thus in
Letter 70 (Morality 1) Crowley recalls that one of his students, or at least
so it was reported, said, “Self-discipline is a form of Restriction,”27 thus
turning on its head the line from Liber AL “The Word of Sin is Restriction,”
i.e., restriction is the only sin acknowledged by Crowley’s sacred text.
Crowley’s response is to remind his correspondent that “90% of Thelema
. . . is self-discipline. One is only allowed to do anything and everything
so as to have more scope for exercising that virtue.”28
This sentiment is further emphasised in a Liber II, irst published in
The Equinox in 1919. Famously we are told that “Do what thou wilt” is
not the same as “Do what you like” but involves some kind of personal
development and work on the self to purge it of any possible anti social

23. Liber AL I: 41 quoted in Crowley, Magick Without Tears, 353.

24. Crowley, Magick Without Tears, 205.
25. Ibid., 353.
26. Ibid., 312.
27. Ibid., 423
28. Ibid., 423

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or indeed purely hedonistic tendencies:29

Any possible act is to be performed if it is a necessary factor in that Equa-
tion of your Will. Any act that is not such a factor, however harmless,
noble, virtuous or what not, is at best a waste of energy. But there are no
artiicial barriers on any type of act in general. The standard of conduct
has one single touchstone. There may be—there will be—every kind of dif-
iculty in determining whether, by that standard, any given act is ‘right’ or
‘wrong’; but there should be no confusion. No act is righteous in itself, but
only in reference to the True Will of the person who proposes to perform
it. This is the Doctrine of Relativity applied to the moral sphere.30

Crowley says Liber AL is the “road to a royal republic which is the ideal
of human society,” although I suspect his best insights are magical rather
than ethical. “Its raison d’etre, apart from social and political plans, is
the teaching and use of a secret method of achieving certain results. This
secret is a scientiic secret; it is guarded against betrayal or abuse by the
very simple automatic arrangement.”31
Crowley seems to be stumbling toward some kind of divine retribu-
tion or law of karma.32 Thus in Liber Aleph he writes, “There are very
many for whom in their present Incarnations this Great Work may be
impossible; since their appointed Work may be in Satisfaction of some
Magical Debt, or in Adjustment of some Balance, or in Fulilment of
some Defect. As is written: Suum Cuique [To each his own].”33
Liber AL alludes to some inal, utopian vision of human society, an
end, which Crowley says, more than justiies the means.34 “It is nonsense
to bring a verdict of ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ against a prisoner” [or idea]
without reference to the law under which he is living The end justiies
the means, if the Jesuits do not assert this, I do. There is obviously a limit,
where ‘the means’ in any case blasphemes ‘the end’ e.g. to murder one’s
rich aunt afirms the right of one’s poor nephew to repeat the trick [on
you].”35 In other words the means may also determine the end, a fact all
too familiar since Crowley’s day where the violence of revolution often
breeds counter revolution. Behind all this looms a notion of progress
toward something, perhaps “the world-old dream of the Brotherhood
of Man.”36

29. Aleister Crowley, “Liber II: Message of the Master Therion.” The Equinox 3
(1919).
30. Crowley, Magick Without Tears, 423
31. Ibid., letter 71, 425
32. Ibid., 312
33. Crowley Liber Aleph Vel Cxi, chapter one, “Apologia.”
34. Ibid., 219.
35. Ibid., 241
36. Crowley, LII Manifesto of the O.T.O. Clause 4.

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 Morgan The Heart of Thelema 169

One can see why Crowley doubted his abilities to interpret and make
sense of the religious text he had channelled. Like many extreme liber-
tarians, he wants personal freedom but also some communal protection
from the extreme demands of others. Crowley’s own inner voice was not
really happy with his own attempts at commentary, thinking that he was
too close to it to be truly objective. Several times in Liber AL, Crowley’s
alter ego predicts ,“There cometh one to follow thee.”37
“The One” was Charles Stansield Jones (1886–1950), later referred to
as Frater Achad. He was drawn to Crowley’s magical group the AA in
1909, making rapid—according to some, too rapid—progress through
the grades. Jones took the advanced degree of Master of the Temple and
Oath of the Abyss seemingly on his own volition, informing Crowley
of this circa 1917. Crowley connected this to an act of sexual magic ini-
tiated with a female associate of Jones in Vancouver, though consum-
mated elsewhere.38 The purpose of this act was expressly the creation of
a magical child.39 Jones’ declaration, coming as it did nine months later,
convinced Crowley to acknowledged him as his magical son or succes-
sor. He is mentioned several times in Crowley’s autobiography, The Con-
fessions.40 In 1918 Crowley wrote a series of 208 intense epistles to Jones
entitled Liber ALEPH vel CXI The BOOK of WISDOM or FOLLY.41 This
was not fully published until 1991. The relation between Crowley and
Jones was short-lived, for by 1919 Crowley no longer considered Jones
as his magical son. Kenneth Grant, a disciple during Crowley’s twilight
years, stigmatised Jones as “a strayed god.”42 But the matter did not end
there.
Jones’ authority as a prophet lies with his discovery in 1918 of the
true name and inner key to Crowley’s Liber Legis, thereafter referred to
as Liber AL and its famous numerological key, viz., 31 and 3 x 31 = 93.
This discovery was accepted by Crowley, and for many the designation
of Thelema as the 93 Current is pretty standard.43

37. Liber AL II, 76 & 155 and also III 47.

38. Martin Starr, The Unknown God: W T and the Thelemites (Bolingbrook, Ill.:
Teitan Press, 2003), 38
39. Aleister Crowley, Liber Aleph, II, i, I “I have begotten thee, o my Son, and that
strangely, as thou knowest, upon the Scarlet Woman called Hilarion, as it was mys-
teriously foretold unto me in The Book of the Law.”
40. Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: an Autohagiography, ed.
John Symonds and Kenneth Grant (London: Cape, 1969).The irst two of a projected
six volumes were irst published 1929 by Mandrake Press as The Spirit of Solitude: An
Autohagiography re Anti christened The Confessions of Aleister Crowley.
41. Crowley, Liber Aleph.
42. Kenneth Grant, The Magical Revival, (London: Mullers, 1972), 150
43. Charles Stansield Jones (Frater Achad) LIBER THIRTY–ONE Being a part of
the diary of O.I.V.V.I.O. concerning the Fool, Parzival and how he discovered the

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170 The Pomegranate 13.2 (2011)

Jones also wrote several books on occult Kabbalah. This tradition has
its beginning in the dissemination of Judaic Kabbalistic texts follow-
ing the 1492 expulsion of the Jews from Spain. These ideas were taken
up by a succession of early “Christian Kabbalists” such as John Dee.
Over time it became a distinct exegetical tradition in its own right, com-
menting, modifying, supplementing, and even rectifying older “classi-
cal” authorities, often on the basis of new revelations. Charles Stansield
Jones’ books are very much in this tradition.
Q. B. L. Or THE BRIDE’S RECEPTION,44 dated June 1922, was Jones’
irst major work in this ield. In an appendix he details a further revelation
concerning the traditional attributions of the Tarot trumps to the paths
on the Golden Dawn Tree of Life glyph. This is Jones’ famous “upside
down” version of the tree, although this phrase is hugely misleading, for
in fact the whole tree is not upside down, he merely reverses the order
of the tarot trumps on the paths. There are twenty-two trumps of the
occult Tarot numbered 0—21 beginning with The Fool and ending with
The Judgement. The entire sequence had already undergone a number
of revisions since its irst manifestation. It is usually understood as repre-
senting twenty-two stages in the initiate’s journey from irst call to inal
apotheosis. As there are also twenty-two paths in the Golden Dawn Tree
of Life, it is occult practice to allocate one trump of this sequence to each
path, starting in order from the eleventh path joining Kether (the crown)
to Chokmah (wisdom) and then downwards through the sequence to
the sphere of Earth (Malkut). It therefore can be said to represent the
entire evolution or descent from the world of Spirit to the mundane world
of Matter.
Jones “revelation” involved following the path of ascent.45 He fol-
lowed the ideas of many spiritual traditions from the existential position
of spirit discovering itself trapped in the world of the elements but then
journeying back to the source and inal apotheosis. It’s a radical change
of prospective from that of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and
indeed Crowley does apply standard occult ways of thinking. It is difi-
cult to see why Crowley, or indeed any other adept, would be so horriied
by this revelation; it seems to make a lot of sense. Indeed Kenneth Grant
was later to offer this more nuanced view of Jones’ achievement: “The

mystery of the One that is Not. Written down in the fourteenth year of this Aeon when
the Sun was in the sign of Libra, by Frater Arctaeon. Note delivered by 777 unto 666
for His high consideration this Third day of the 11th month of the year 1918 E.V.
44. Charles Stansield Jones (Frater Achad), Q. B. L. or the Bride’s Reception, Being
a Short Qabalistic Treatise on the Nature and Use of The Tree of Life. (New York: Weiser,
1969 [1922].
45. Jones, QBL, 71. Appendices to chapter 3 and 4. (“sections” in appendix) 1.

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 Morgan The Heart of Thelema 171

ultimate test involves not the criteria of scholastic or academic ability . . .

but . . . of initiation, which is assessable only by fellow initiates.”46
Thelemites make pretty fast and loose with Egyptian mythology, often
privileging the works of Victorian Theosophist Gerald Massey over more
modern academic authorities.47 “There was,” comments Caroline Tully,
“no reason for maintaining historically inaccurate beliefs about much
ancient Egyptian material culture. [which] could be seen for itself rather
than through the mediating lens of the Greeks and Romans . . . . It may
be considered surprising then that in the wake of . . . advances in Egyp-
tology which, as Lehrich explains, have subsequently been promoted
as examples of the triumph of reason over superstition and ignorance,
that in the late nineteen century the appeal of unscientiic ‘Egyptosophy’
would be as strong as ever.”48 In all fairness one should say that academ-
ics also sometimes privilege their own superstitions over those of others.
The eminent Egyptologist Jan Assmann “otherwise not inclined toward
esoteric interpretations [saw] ‘secret Hermetic wisdom’ and ‘a sort of
cabala’ in the Books of the Netherworld from the royal tombs.”49
With this in mind I want to address another aspect of Jones’s revela-
tion, that concerning the occult doctrine of Aeons. Jones has in mind a
prophesy from Chapter III, 34 of Liber AL:

But your holy place shall be untouched throughout the centuries: though
with ire and sword it be burnt down & shattered, yet an invisible house
there standeth, and shall stand until the fall of the Great Equinox; when
Hrumachis shall arise and the double-wanded one assume my throne and
place. Another prophet shall arise, and bring fresh fever from the skies;
another woman shall awake the use & worship of the Snake; another soul
of God and beast shall mingle in the globed priest; another sacriice shall
stain the tomb; another king shall reign; and blessing no longer be poured
to the Hawk-headed mystical Lord!

After our own supposed Aeon of Horus, the text foretells an Aeon of
“Hrumachis.” Hrumachis is the Greek rendering of Horakhti, “Horus
of the Horizon.” Jones, following the authority of Massey, says this is
“the great Mother . . . Maat, Lady of Truth who it is prophesied in a
veiled manner [above],” and also opening in Liber A’Ash, “Seth is his
holy covenant which he shall display in the great day of MAAT, that is,
being interpreted the Master of the Temple of the A… A… whose name

46. Kenneth Grant, Outside the Circles of Time (London: Muller, 1980), 46
47. Jones, The Egyptian Revival, 8
48. Caroline Tully, “Walk Like an Egyptian: Egypt as Authority in Aleister Crow-
ley’s Reception of The Book of the Law,” Pomegranate 12, no. 1(2010): 22
49. Erik Hornung, The Secret Lore of Egypt: Its Impact on the West, trans. David
Lorton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 184

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172 The Pomegranate 13.2 (2011)

is Truth.” In this slightly garbled form we have Jones’ irst mention of

Maat and her succession of Horus (“blessing no longer be poured to the
Hawk-headed Lord”) at some future, as yet unspeciied date or indeed
Aeon.
A year later Jones wrote The Egyptian Revival, where he further reines
the new ascending arrangement of the Tarot trumps but does not expand
on the comments on the Aeon of Maat. But he does offer a new paradigm
of the meaning of Thelema, which I shall argue below is closer in spirit
to the original Egyptian conception of Maat:

When I read the “Message of the Master Therion,” I found it clearly stated
and explained that “Do what thou wilt” does not mean “Do what you
like.” What then does it mean? That I have tried to discover, by means of
experiment, and I have found, as stated by Therion, that far from leading
to “license” it becomes the “strictest possible bond.”

One can hardly fail to realize that we have been living in an age of ‘restric-
tion’ which has led to most direful results. But the solution of the dificulty
is evidently not to be found in a mad breaking away from all authority
and order, a running wild with cries of “freedom” and “liberty” only to
ind ourselves more enslaved than before.

I considered the matter seriously and said “If do what thou wilt shall be
the whole of the Law,” it evidently applies to all mankind. In that case
my own personal will is but a little part of the will of Humanity, and in
doing it I must learn irst of all to consider other people’s wills more than
anything else.

I began to realize that the True Will of Humanity as a Whole was the same
as the Will of God for Humanity at this particular stage of their develop-
ment. Therefore by trying to help Humanity as a Whole, without distinc-
tion, as far as in me lay, I could learn to do the Will of God, or the True
Will. I found this entirely satisied my ‘personal will’ for I realized that I
was living for a greater purpose than I could personally formulate as a
plan of action by means of the little “will.” Herein then lay the secret of
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” it was a divinely sent
promise to encourage Humanity in its Hour of Darkness. . . . There could
be no turning aside, it became a Conscious and Free fulilment of Destiny,
a co-operation in the plan of the Great Architect.50

From then on and intermittently for next decade or more this issue
was part of his private meditations and magical work. It is only after
Crowley’s death that Jones’ restated his full blown revelation:
Soon after the death of Aleister Crowley in December 1947, the well-known
collector and archivist Gerald Yorke wrote to Charles Stansield Jones
asking for a copy of the latter’s Liber 31, the record of Jones’s discovery
of AL as the Key to The Book of the Law . . . This initiated a correspondence

50. Jones, The Egyptian Revival, 40–41

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 Morgan The Heart of Thelema 173

between Yorke and Jones which continued until the death of Jones in 1950.
. . In April 1948, Jones announced the incoming of the Aeon of Maat, and
from this time onwards the correspondence includes material document-
ing the unfolding of the new Aeon which Jones had detected, . . . Kenneth
Grant drew upon this correspondence in the course of his Typhonian Trilo-
gies, referring to it as “Oficial and Unoficial Correspondence Concerning
the Incoming of the Aeon of Maat.”51

Following the death in 1962 of Crowley’s successor Karl Germer, the

already fragmentary Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) began to fragment
even further until today it is represented by a number of rival organisa-
tions.52 What is sometimes known as the Caliphate OTO offers no public
explanation of the passage in Liber A’Ash, at least not one they are pre-
pared to share with any other than their own members. 53
The inluential commentator and writer Kenneth Grant was the head
of another of those OTO successors, known since 2008 as The Typho-
nian Order.54 The irst of the Typhonian Trilogies mentioned above, The
Magical Revival, was published in 1972. In the chapter entitled “Strayed
Gods,” Grant is dismissive of Jones’ discoveries, including the declara-
tion of the Aeon of Maat, seeing these as evidence of an “unbalanced
mind.” 55 In Outside the Circles of Time, published eight years later, Grant’s
view has changed to one of qualiied acceptance: “Frater Achad’s work
is now—nearly thirty years later—seen to be vindicated, at least in part.
He announced the dawn of the Aeon of the Daughter which would com-
plement and polarize the Aeon of the Son ushered in by Crowley.”56
In forthcoming collected correspondence between Stansield Jones and
Gerald Yorke, Jones claims that in 1936 Crowley conceded that his work
on the Aeon of Truth and Justice had validity, but he would concentrate
on the work of the Aeon of Horus.57
What had prompted Grant’s change of heart was the emergence; post
Crowley’s death in 1947, “of a totally new scene.” 58 For example, the
publication of Liber Pennae Praenumbra59 “by an adept who wishes to

51. Charles Stansield Jones (Frater Achad) The Incoming of the Aeon of Maat.
(London: Starire, 2012) publisher’s announcement.
52. Starr, The Unknown God, 343.
53. Aleister Crowley, Magick Liber ABA (York Beach, Me.: Weiser, 1997), 653.
54. First appearance of the change of name circa 2008 in Starire: A Journal of the
New Aeon 2, no. 3.
55. Kenneth Grant The Magical Revival, 154. The declaration of Maat seems to be
part of Jones’s earlier work QBL not The Egyptian Revival as stated by Grant.
56. Grant, Outside the Circles of Time, 47.
57. Private communication with Michael Staley, current head of the Typhonian
Order.
58. Grant, Outside the Circles of Time, 1
59. Cincinnati Journal of Ceremonial Magick 1, no. 1 (1976); Nema Maat Magick: A

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174 The Pomegranate 13.2 (2011)

remain anonymous. However, as she is an active member of the Typho-

nian OTO..., and as her work is discussed in several chapters . . . , she is
referred to . . . as Soror Andahadna.”60
A signiicant minority of Thelemites now accept the above train of
thought; hence the Ma’atian “faction” is irmly embedded in the tradi-
tion. This version of the Thelemic philosophy is arguably more relevant
to modern society. It can make common cause with new trends within
modern ethics. Egyptology also has changed and reformed, within the
same signiicant post-World War II time frame. “Since World War II it has
made considerable efforts to overcome its positivist phase and to move
in a more interpretative direction.”61 Books, such as those on Ma’at by
Maulana Karenga, show how “the reception of Egypt is entering a new
phase. Egyptology is now confronted with, or complimented by another
disciple that deals with the same sources but on the basis of a different
methodology and different questions.”62
The goddess Ma’at was one of the very earliest personiications of
justice. Strictly speaking there was “nothing in Egypt corresponding to
the Mesopotamia codes detailing written law, publicly displayed as the
symbol of impersonal justice. In Egypt the law was personally derived
from the god-king and was tailored as justice and equity to the individ-
ual appellant.”63 This situation changed after 700 BCE as a direct result
of the Persian conquest. Throughout most of Egyptian history before
this moment, “custom and Ma’at, the abstract sense of justice, guided
the king’s command.”64 The Egyptian historical record is full of accounts
of legal judgements but thus far no formal law code has emerged.65 For
this reason historians often use ancient ictional narratives such as “The
Tale of the Eloquent Peasant”66 as sources from which to reconstruct
the ancient law code. Egyptologists are unsure whether this written
legal code awaits discovery or no such code ever existed and the ancient
judges were solely motivated by a meta-theory or principle.

Guide to Self–Initiation (New York: Weiser 1995).

60. Grant, Outside the Circles of Time, 3
61 Maulana Karenga, Maat, the Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt : A Study in Classical
African Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2004), xx.
62. Ibid.
63. John Wilson, The Culture of Ancient Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1951).
64. Ross Versteeg, Law In Ancient Egypt, (Durham: Carolina Academic Press,
2002).
65. See, for example, Susan Redford, The Harem Conspiracy: the Murder of Rameses
III, (Dekalb: Northern Illinois Press, 2002).
66. Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Vol. 1. The Old and Middle King-
doms (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1973).

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 Morgan The Heart of Thelema 175

Maulana Karenga is is aware of the above but points to a long textual

tradition, culminating in the “Negative Confession” or “Declaration
of Innocence” which he believes is in effect a law code. The Egyptian
goddess Ma’at is inextricably linked with these texts. 67
Aleister Crowley in his description of the Justice/Balance Tarot card
writes, “The igure is that of a young and slender woman poised exactly
upon tiptoe. She is crowned with the ostrich plumes of Ma’at, the Egyp-
tian goddess of Justice, and on her forehead is the Uraeus serpent, Lord68
of Life and Death.” 69
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its various avatars is
part of the fabric from which is woven successive occult sodalities such
as the Crowley’s Ordo Temple Orientis and Argentinum Astrum. The
Goddess of Truth, i.e., Justice, performs a key role in the neophyte ritual
of Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. In fact this rite is in part a re-
enactment of the famous judgement scene that occurs in many Ancient
Egyptian books of the afterlife.70
Maulana Karenga’s reclaiming of the “Declaration of Innocence” is
interesting and mirrors the way many other political and ethnic groups
have looked for an ethical legacy untainted by the Judeo-Christian world-
view. Contemporary Pagans may ind they can make common cause
with someone like Karenga, who calls himself a “Seba Ma’at,” meaning
“moral teacher,” and uses the recovered ethical code of Ma’at which he
views as on a par with the Buddhist eightfold path, Ifa’s ive require-
ments for a good world, or the Judeo-Christian Decalogue.
Karenga is an author, political activist, convicted felon, and college
professor active in Black Power movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
Karenga’s doctoral thesis is entitled Maat, the Moral Ideal in Ancient
Egypt: A Study in Classical African Ethics. For him the Ma’atian person
is “above all a person-in- a- community. He or she is a worthy citizen,
loving father etc., etc.”71 His “central source of Egyptian moral princi-
ples and practice”72 appears in the 125th chapter of the famous “Egyp-

67. Karenga, Maat.

68. The uraeus or spitting cobra is actually a goddess.
69. Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth (Egyptian Tarot) (New York: Weiser 1969).
I’m not going to discuss the conlation of the mythology of the Egyptian goddesses
Mut with Ma’at. These are quite different goddesses and there is no reason to think
Crowley thought differently. There is a whole occult tradition stemming from Crow-
ley’s mention of Mut in his description of Atu or Trump O, The Fool. See for example
Michael Staley, “Supping at the Angel and Feathers,” Starire Journal 5.
70. Erik Hornung, Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife, trans. David Lorton,
(Ithaca: Cornell, 1999).
71. Karenga, Maat, the Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt , 326.
72. Ibid., 135

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176 The Pomegranate 13.2 (2011)

tian Book of the Dead,” or as Egyptologists prefer to call it, “The Book
of Coming Forth by Day.” The texts accompany a well-known vignette
of the god Osiris sitting in judgment on the soul of the deceased in the
hall of Double Ma’at, presumably so named because the judgement falls
into two parts and is detailed in two lists. The irst list comprises thirty-
six queries before the gods, and the second a further forty-two queries
before a panel of celestial judges. 73
The full code of the second list reads as follows:

I have not impoverished the divine herd (people);

I have committed no crime in place of What is Right;
I have not known (explored) nothingness;
I have not done any evil
I have not made a daily start in labours over what I did (previously);
My name has not reached the ofice of director of servants;
I have not orphaned the orphan of his goods;
I have not done the abomination of the gods;
I have not slighted a servant to his master;
I have not caused afliction;
I have not caused hunger;
I have not caused grief;
I have not killed;
I have not harmed the offering-cattle;
I have not caused pain for anyone;
I have not reduced the offerings in the temples;
I have not harmed the offering-loaves of the gods;
I have not taken the festival-loaves of the blessed dead;
I have not penetrated the penetrater of a penetrater;
I have not masturbated;
I have not reduced the measuring-vessel,
I have not reduced the measuring cord;
I have not encroached on the ields;
I have not added to the pan of the scales;
I have not tampered with the plumb bob of the scales;
I have not taken milk from the mouths of babes;
I have not concealed herds from their pastures;
I have not snared birds in the thickets (?) of the gods;
I have not caught ish in their pools;
I have not held back water in its time;
I have not dammed a dam at rapid waters;
I have not put out the ire in its moment;
I have not transgressed the days concerning meat offerings;
I have not turned back cattle from the property of a god;
I have not blocked a god in his processions;
I am pure (four times),

73. Edouard Naville “Chapter 125A,” in his standard edition of New Kingdom
Books of the Dead. This version comes from the Book of the Dead of Nu, on a papyrus
now preserved in the British Museum (EA 10477).\.

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 Morgan The Heart of Thelema 177

One obvious question is whether, given the mortuary context of this list,
is it a guide for the living or the dead. Several scholars have also noted
the overlap between some aspects of this list and priestly declarations
of purity and virtue inscribed on temple entrances during the Ptolemaic
period.

I have not eaten what is forbidden for a priest,

I have cut off no living being’s head,
I have killed no one
I have not slept with the wife of another
I have touched no sheep’s wool etc.74

It is entirely understandable that a specialized part of the legal code

was reused for the priesthood and may even have played a part in their
initiation rites. Even so, many experts such as Karenga and Lichtheim
say this cannot be the original context of the text, which is the culmina-
tion of a long development from the very earliest tomb inscriptions of
the Old Kingdom. It “relects a moral tradition rooted in the concept of
justice and judgement which involves concerns for other humans, but
also for animals.”75 Scholars agree that the 125th chapter of the Book of
the Dead encapsulates “not only a concept of ancient Egyptian religion
in general but also and especially important for the work, a concept of
the ancient Egyptian ethical ideal.”76 In other words “it gives concrete
expression to the ideal theme of Ma’at.” 77
“Typhon” is the name of an ancient Greek god used in an Egyptian
context to designate the god Seth, sometimes seen as a personiication
of evil or amorality.78 Crowley equated Aiwass, the preternatural intelli-
gence that dictated Liber AL, and indeed Hadit, the subject of the second
chapter of Liber AL with Lucifer, the Devil, Satan, Typhon, and indeed
the Egyptian god Seth;79 and this might be an obstacle to a Ma’atian
reading. However, the great Egyptologist Erik Hornung says,

The gods of Egypt can be terrifying, dangerous and unpredictable, but

74. Reinhold Merkelbach, “Ein Griechisch–agyptishce priestereid und das Toten-

buch,” in Religions in Egypt Hellenistique et romaine, quoted in Karenga, Maat, the Moral
Ideal in Ancient Egypt, 298.
75 E. Drioton, Le jugement des âmes dans l’ancienne Égypte, quoted in Karenga. Maat,
the Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt., 149.
76. Karenga, Maat, the Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt ,138. See also Reinhard Greis-
hammer, Das Jenseitsgericht in den Sargentexten (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1970)
and “Zum Sitz im Leben das “negativen Sudenbekenntnisses,” ZDMG, Sup II (1974):
19–25), quoted in Karenga Maat, the Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt.
77. Karenga, Maat, the Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt, 136.
78. Herman Te Velde, Seth: God of Confusion (Leiden: Brill, 1977), 11
79. Aleister Crowley, Magick Liber ABA (New York: Weiser 1994) 277n, 566ff, 653.

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178 The Pomegranate 13.2 (2011)

they cannot be evil. Originally this was true even of Seth, the murderer
of Osiris. Battle, constant confrontation, confusion and questioning of the
established order, in all of which Seth engages as a sort of “trickster”, are
all necessary features of the existent world and of the limited disorder that
is essential to a living order. But gods and people must together ensure
that disorder does not come to overpower justice and order and this is the
meaning of their common obligation toward Ma’at. 80

Karenga uses the code to argue against Kant’s moral theory based on a
“transcendental subject” and even John Rawls’ “ unencumbered subject
of an original position.”81 He speciically aligns himself with Michael
Sandel’s criticism of Rawls and Kant, complaining that we cannot
divorce ourselves from the very values and aspirations that deine us.82
For Karenga, the attraction of the Ma’atian code is that it is very much
about community values. Rather amazingly, Frater Achad came to a
similar conclusion many years earlier: “I considered the matter seriously
and said ‘If do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law’ it evidently
applies to all mankind. In that case my own personal will is but a little
part of the will of Humanity, and in doing it I must learn irst of all to
consider other people’s wills more than anything else.”83
It makes sense to break the code down by categories:
1. Universal or general principles
2. Particular rules derived from the above Universal principles
3. Temporary rules of priestly and religious observance
I could add a fourth category for some of the rules that initially seem
to be historical oddities, arbitrary or cultural. Who these days would list
“I have not masturbated” in a law code, especially those who respect the
Thelemic agenda of sexual freedom? It is a well-known fact that mas-
turbation, incest, hetero and homosexual sexual acts occurs in several
ancient Egyptian creation myths and this is connected with a number
of important magical secrets.84 Its interdiction here in the code is almost
certainly to avoid any priestly conlict between their actions and the
natural sexual power of the god in whose shrine they serve.
The same can be said for the rule “I have not penetrated the pene-
trater of a penetrater”—the penetrater of the penetrater might be a rather
cryptic reference to the God Horus, who in an important mythologi-

80. Erik Hornung, Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many, trans.
J.Baines, (Ithaca: Cornell, 1996).
81. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1971)
82. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1982).
83. Jones, Egyptian Revival, 40–41
84. K. Sethe, Die Altaegyptischen Pyramidentexte, (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1908), para-
graph 1652)

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 Morgan The Heart of Thelema 179

cal episode manages to avoid the homosexual advances of his brother

Seth. In fact, Horus turns the tables and penetrates Seth. It is not really a
condemnation of homosexuality, merely an interdiction not to sodomise
Horus in his own temple!85
It makes no sense to think that rules governing celibacy were anything
other than a temporary condition of priestly ofice. Egyptian priests
were expected to serve the gods only part-time and could revert to their
other professions, whether in government service or in the trades, when
they were not in the temple. Biographical texts clearly document the
part-time nature of the majority of priests. For example Nebnetcheri of
the 22nd dynasty (circa 943-720 BCE) was a priest of Amun in Karnak, a
supervisor of priests “of all the gods,” a sem priest, and a priest of Ma’at,
and also served as “Chief of all the Works on all monuments.”86
The priesthood was drawn from different classes of society and all
sexes; family background and social status being taken into considera-
tion.87 The ofice was often inherited from one’s father. Autobiographical
texts show that high-ranking priests could also be selected by the king.
The most junior or “entry level” priest was titled wab (wabet for
women) meaning “pure one.” These priests had no distinguishing dress
or hairstyle. Women in the Old Kingdom served as hem netcher to the
goddesses Hathor and Neith, although in later times their role in the
religious hierarchy appears to have declined.88
I participated in an Egyptian reframing of the Hermetic Order of
the Golden Dawn’s “Neophyte Ritual” where the candidate is made to
declare their heart to be “lighter than a feather.” In later discussion with
the other participants we agreed that this referred to an internal psy-
chological state, perhaps akin to the yogic idea of non-attachment. To
have a heart “light as a feather” or indeed balanced, is a state of psy-
chological equipoise or one pointedness. Members of this same inlu-
ential sodality also viewed the notion of celibacy from a more “yogic”
perspective—that is to say, as a magical technique designed to sublimate
the body’s sexual energy, to temporarily reserve it. This same technique,
so they believed, falls within the parameters of karezza as known within

85. Te Velde, Seth God of Confusion .

86. Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Readings. Vol.3. The
Late Period. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) quoted in Emily Teeter,
Religion and Ritual in Ancient Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011),
23.
87. Teeter, Religion and Ritual in Ancient Egypt, 28. She writes that research on social
class in Egypt is not well developed, but see B. Kelly, Petitions, Litigation and Social
Control in Roman Egypt, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
88. Teeter, Religion and Ritual in Ancient Egypt 23

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180 The Pomegranate 13.2 (2011)

the Western magical tradition.89

Apart from these particular aspects of the Declaration of Innocence,
there are some axioms that are generic and point to the meta-theory
of justice. Thus the irst axion is “I have not impoverished the people”
(“divine cattle or herd” is an old Egyptian term for human being).90 This
line is much reproduced on funerary stele and epitomises the entire list.91
“I have not impoverished the people” is a universal and surprisingly
modern principle. It is close in spirit to Rawls’ irst principle of justice:
“each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty
compatible with a similar liberty for others” .92
It can be used to address the issue of inequality and therefore also
include Rawl’s second law, the so-called difference principle,” viz., only
those inequalities are permitted that are beneicial to the least-advan-
taged members of society.93

Conclusion
The foundation texts of the Thelemic cult lend themselves to two con-
licting interpretations:. The irst is radical individualism, “Nietzchean”,
94
amoral, and I would say ultimately antisocial and often reactionary.
A second interpretation takes a more compassionate view of individ-
ual freedom, is libertarian, aware of collective concerns and the “will of
Humanity.” 95
Although the former interpretation is well represented in Thelemic
literature, it has in my opinion the least going for it in terms of relevance
and therefore durability. It appeals to the nihilistic side of some per-
sonalities but is ultimately, in my opinion, an ethical backwater. A size-
able minority of Thelemites chose the later interpretation. Henry Ibsen
is reputed to have said that “the majority is always wrong, the minority
rarely right” and in this instance I think the minority has a point.

89. Personal account but the society is documented in Richard Sutcliffe. “Left-
Hand Magick: An Historical and Philosophical Overview,” in Paganism Today, eds.
Charlotte Hardman and Graham Harvey. (San Francisco: Thorsons, 1995), 109–37).
90. Hornung, Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife.
91. Peter Der Manuelian, “The Giza Mastaba Niche and Full Frontal Figure of
Redi–nes in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,” in For His Ka: Essays Offered in Memory
of Klaus Baer, ed. David P Silverman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994),
55–78
92. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 53.
93. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 303.
94. Crowley, The Law Is For All, 75.
95. Jones, The Egyptian Revival, 40–41

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 Morgan The Heart of Thelema 181

The minority view supplements the ideas of Liber AL with, amongst

other things, a large segment of philosophical wisdom from Ancient
Egypt, principally the philosophy of Ma’at, personiication of truth and
justice. The “Negative Confession” is a text often ignored by Thelemites
of all persuasions. A brief investigation of this text reveals a continual
relevance. I have drawn attention to the interesting revival of Ma’atian
philosophy outside of contemporary Paganism. For example Pan-Afri-
can political groups have found in it material for an ethical system that
avoids the tradition of Abrahamic faiths and also Mediterranean ethno-
centrism. The philosophy of Ma’at emphasises our social being. Its irst
principle is “I have not impoverished the people.” Thus prepared, The-
lemites could have something relevant to contribute to the controversy
between individualism, free will, and wider concerns of social justice.

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