The Athelite: A Definition — On Diagnosis and Restriction
by relaxos_palaiologos
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Pronaos
Athelite — Ath″e·lite (ăth″ĕ·līt), n. IPA: /ˈæθ.ə.laɪt/
[From Gr. ἀ- (a-), privative prefix, without + θέλημα (thélēma), will, from θέλειν (thélein), to will, to wish + -ίτης (-ítēs), suffix denoting one characterized by a quality or condition. Formed by analogy with, and in contradistinction to, Thelemite, one who follows Thelema.]
1. One who lacks knowledge of, or connection to, their True Will; a person in a state of spiritual dormancy, characterized by absence of authentic volition and ignorance of their own essential nature.
These are dead, these fellows; they feel not. — Liber AL vel Legis, II:18
2. One who is bound by mechanical causality and external determination; a person whose actions proceed from conditioning, convention, or compulsion rather than from the pure expression of individual purpose.
They are the slaves of because: They are not of me. — Liber AL vel Legis, II:54
Low men, not being aware of their True Wills, tend to invade the prerogatives of others with tiresome frequency. — Motta, The Commentaries of AL, on II:24
3. (Thelemic Philosophy) A person who, regardless of class, education, or social position, remains veiled from himself, incapable of the self-directed action that characterizes a King; one whose non-thinking and non-curiosity are symptoms of spiritual insensibility rather than mere intellectual deficiency.
There are people who are veiled from themselves so deeply that they resent the bared faces of us others. — Crowley, New Comment on Liber AL, II:24
4. (By extension) Any person who has not undertaken the process of spiritual awakening or initiation; the uninitiated; the profane. — Distinguished from Black Brother, which denotes one who has advanced in the Great Work but refused the final sacrifice of the ego.
By ‘the people’ is meant that canting, whining, servile breed of whipped dogs which refuses to admit its deity. — Crowley, New Comment on Liber AL, II:25
Proem
It is an omission of no small consequence that a religion which names its own with so scrupulous a care—which calls the follower of the Law a Thelemite, which styles the man awake a King, which has found words for its saints and its scriptures, its grades and its ordeals, and has assigned to each its class, its calendar, and its dignity—should have left nameless the very condition from which it proposes, before all else, to deliver mankind. The scriptures themselves know the condition intimately. They speak of those who are ‘dead’ and ‘feel not’; they name ‘the slaves of because’; they describe, in the Prophet’s own commentary, a people ‘veiled from themselves so deeply that they resent the bared faces of us others.’ The condition, that is to say, stands everywhere described and nowhere denominated—and whatever the sleeper has been called, whether slave or dog or ‘the people,’ he has been called it prophetically, in the voice of proclamation rather than the voice of analysis, so that the movement which possesses a precise name for the man who has found his Will has never yet possessed a technical term for the man who has not.
The want is here supplied. An Athelite—the privative ἀ- set before θέλημα precisely as the Greek tongue sets it before θεός to make the godless and before γνῶσις to make the unknowing—is one who lacks knowledge of, or connection to, his True Will: a person in a state of spiritual dormancy, moved by conditioning where he ought to be moved by purpose, bound to the wheel of Because where he ought to be moving in an orbit of his own. The word is no mere synonym for the scriptural slave, though the two may describe one and the same man; slave names a relation—bondage to that which is not himself—whereas Athelite names a condition: the privation of Will itself, as blindness is the privation of sight.¹
For all the care with which the term is offered, however, the objector stirs—and he stirs with scripture in hand. To fix upon a living man a name that declares him asleep, to pronounce upon the state of a soul that no eye can inspect, to erect a taxonomy of the awakened and the dormant: is this not precisely that Restriction which the Book calls the word of Sin? The objector deserves better than dismissal; he deserves his full armament, and he shall have it.
§I — The Objection at Full Strength
Scarcely is the term proposed before the Book itself appears to rise against it. ‘The word of Sin is Restriction’—so runs the forty-first verse of the first chapter, and the Prophet’s New Comment, as if to forestall any narrowing gloss, defines the term with a breadth that admits of no evasion: 'Anything soever that binds the will, hinders it, or diverts it, is Sin.'² Anything soever: not force alone, not fraud alone, but whatsoever binds, hinders, or diverts. The Old Comment, pressing the same doctrine to its metaphysical root, declares that 'interference with the will of another is the great sin, for it predicates the existence of another.'³ Upon these stones the objector builds, and he builds honestly. To pronounce a living man an Athelite is to pass judgment upon the interior state of a soul; a judgment so passed does not remain in the mind of him who passes it, but goes forth as a word, and the word, once abroad, does work in the world; the man so named must now carry the name—must answer it, or dispute it, or bear it in silence—and a man compelled to answer for his own soul before another’s tribunal has been, in the plainest sense the comment will bear, diverted. The syllogism wants nothing: diagnosis is judgment; judgment, published, hinders and diverts; whatsoever hinders and diverts is Sin. The diagnostician stands accused by the very scripture from which he takes his terms.
The objector, moreover, has not exhausted his scripture. ‘Beware therefore!’ cries the Book in the second chapter, 'Love all, lest perchance is a King concealed!'⁴—and he reads the warning as a standing injunction against the whole taxonomic enterprise. If there is no certain test—and the Book has said, one verse earlier, that there is none⁵—then every act of classification is performed blindfold; the beggar sorted among the sleepers may be a King in masquerade, and the sorter, having no instrument by which to inspect a soul, has arrogated to himself an eye that belongs to Hadit alone. Love all, the objector concludes, and classify none: the very existence of a term for the unawakened is a presumption against the concealed King, a net cast over waters the fisherman cannot see. What the Athelite-diagnostician calls a definition, this reading calls a verdict delivered by a court with no jurisdiction and no evidence.
Should the diagnostician retreat to the plea that a word is not a chain—that he has bound no limb, emptied no purse, barred no door—the subtler objector is waiting for him at the bottom of the stair. Compulsion, he observes, does not travel only through hands. To be named Athelite within a fellowship that prizes Kingship above every other dignity is to suffer consequence without a finger being lifted: the cooled friendship, the withheld confidence, the door not barred but no longer opened. A community’s regard is a medium, and judgments propagate through it as pressure propagates through water; the man at the bottom feels the weight of what was spoken at the surface. The diagnostician, on this account, does not merely describe—he ranks; and rank, within any society of men, is destiny administered by other means. Thus the objection reaches its full stature, and it must be granted its dignity: it is not the whine of the slave who resents the bared face, but an argument drawn from the Book, the Comment, and the common experience of mankind—that the namer of sleepers binds with a word what he could never bind with a rope.
§II — The Reconciliation
The answer begins where the adversary began—inside the comment he quoted—for the phrase ‘anything soever’ is broad only until it is read against the practice of him who wrote it. The Master, setting out in Duty the obligations of a Thelemite toward other men and women, gave the doctrine its operational form in a single injunction: ‘Abstain from all interferences with other wills,’ and appointed as its scriptural warrant the very verse our objector has not yet dared to open—'Beware lest any force another, King against King!'⁶ The sin is located in the forcing: not in judgment, not in speech, not in the passing of one sovereign mind upon another, but in the act by which one will is made to move at the dictation of a will not its own. The same essay presses the point into a figure: the love and war between individuals ‘are of the nature of sport, where one respects, and learns from the opponent, but never interferes with him, outside the actual game’; to seek 'to dominate or influence another is to seek to deform or destroy him.'⁷ Contest is lawful; contact is lawful; the collision of proud and sovereign wills is not merely tolerated but relished, as sport is relished. What is forbidden is the reaching of one hand into the machinery of another’s volition—domination, deformation, the treating of a star as a satellite. Bind, hinder, divert: the triad, read in the light of its author’s own gloss, describes three modes of coercion, not three degrees of discomfort.
Interference, properly understood, is therefore coercive restraint—fraud or force that prevents a star from moving in its orbit—and truthful speech coerces no one. Liber OZ, the Master’s own reduction of the Law to its plainest rights, declares that man has the right to think what he will, to speak what he will, to write what he will;⁸ a right of speech that expired the moment speech had consequence would be no right at all, since no word worth uttering is without consequence. Speech proposes; force disposes. The man who hears himself named Athelite may weigh the name, dispute it, or disdain it—his will remains at every moment his own, his orbit unbent—whereas the man bound, defrauded, or compelled has lost precisely that sovereignty which the Law exists to secure. The adversary’s strongest word thus returns to him inverted: a diagnosis ‘diverts’ a man exactly as a thermometer gives him fever.
Let the syllogism now be tested against the tribunal it forgot. Diagnosis is judgment; judgment, published, is Restriction; whatsoever restricts is Sin—so ran the argument. The Book of the Law itself pronounces: 'These are dead, these fellows; they feel not.'⁹ The Book classifies: 'They are the slaves of because: They are not of me.'¹⁰ The Prophet, commenting, diagnoses an entire moral civilization at a stroke: 'Our humanitarianism, which is the syphilis of the mind, acts on the basis of the lie that the King must die.'¹¹ Here is judgment upon souls, published to the whole world, fixed in Class A scripture and sworn commentary; if the objector’s syllogism holds, then Aiwass stands first among sinners, the Prophet second, and the Book is itself the word of Sin. The conclusion is absurd, and the absurdity instructs. Observe what these terrible diagnoses do: they name, and they pass on. No confession is demanded of the slaves of Because; no tribunal is convened; no program of reform is imposed upon the dead who feel not. The sentences are taxonomic and valedictory—they classify the sleeper and bid him farewell—and where the commentary discloses a purpose beyond classification, the purpose is emancipation: 'We are fighting to free them, to make them masters like ourselves.'¹² Diagnosis in the Book’s own mouth binds nothing, demands nothing, forecloses nothing; it is the chart of a coastline, not the blockade of a port.
There remains the verse the adversary flourished, and it must now be read past the point at which he ceased to quote it. ‘Beware therefore! Love all, lest perchance is a King concealed!’—thus far the objector; yet, the verse continues without pausing for breath: 'Say you so? Fool! If he be a King, thou canst not hurt him.'¹³ The Book, with an economy no disputant could improve, states the humanitarian objection at full strength and rebukes it within the selfsame verse: the concealed King needs no protection from a word, since no mere word can wound him; the caution ‘lest perchance’ is answered by the certainty ‘thou canst not hurt him’; the objector has been quoting scripture whose second half was written expressly against himself. The Master’s comment supplies the positive doctrine that remains when the false tenderness is cleared away: we should indeed love all, ‘for love means union; and the proper condition of union is determined by will’—one loves cholera by studying it intimately, the better to maintain the right relation with it, 'which is, not to allow it to interfere with one’s will to live.'¹⁴ Love-all and non-interference are thus reconciled by the Master Himself: love is right relation, not indiscriminate embrace, and even the ferocious ‘hell’ of the following verse is glossed by the Master as no ‘outburst of colloquial enthusiasm’ but as the word that alone ‘serves the purpose of the speaker’—Hell being, in His doctrine, the concealed Place, helan, no fear or hindrance to men of a free race but ‘the Treasure-House of the Assimilated Wisdom of the Ages’—so that to consign the sleeper to hell is to drive him toward that very treasury which his waking mind conceals from itself: violence of rhetoric in the service of awakening, never of restraint.¹⁵ As for the subtler objector at the stair, with his doctrine of compulsion-by-consequence, the Book has answered him at its beginning: 'thou hast no right but to do thy will. Do that, and no other shall say nay.'¹⁶ A man’s fellows who, hearing a diagnosis, cool in their regard, are exercising wills of their own—free association and its withdrawal being themselves rights of the sovereign individual—and what others freely do upon hearing a truth cannot be laid at the feet of him who spoke it. Press the doctrine of consequence-as-compulsion to its conclusion and it forbids the waiter’s question—must humanity fall silent, lest ‘would you like a milkshake with your order?’ be found to have violated the will of a vegan? The Book knows nothing of so timid a courtesy; it seats the proud and the royal at one table and sets them contending: 'the keen and the proud, the royal and the lofty; ye are brothers! As brothers fight ye!'¹⁷ Friction between sovereign wills is the fraternity of Kings, not its violation. The objection, granted every dignity, has dissolved in the reading of its own texts: the clasp that was taken for a rope was, in the end, merely the grip of one’s own hand.
§III — The Anti-Type: Diagnosis That Binds
The reconciliation yields, as its corollary, a criterion; for if the diagnoses of the Book are lawful precisely because they name and pass on—demanding no confession, convening no tribunal, imposing no program of reform—then the marks of unlawful diagnosis may be read from that lawfulness inverted. Three such marks present themselves. The first is compulsion: the diagnosed is not left to weigh the name but must answer it, and answer it in the diagnostician’s appointed form. The second is instrumental domination: the judgment exists not to describe the man but to move him—the diagnosis is a lever, and the hand upon the lever is not his own. The third is epistemic arrogation: the tribunal claims for itself the certainty which the Book, in the honesty of ‘there is no certain test,’ withholds from every eye but Hadit’s, and from its verdicts it permits no appeal. Where one mark appears, prudence should stir; where the three convene, diagnosis has become everything the objector of our first section feared—and history, with an assiduity no thought-experiment could match, has staged the demonstration at the scale of nations.
The Bolshevik ritual of kritika i samokritika—criticism and self-criticism—supplies the specimen in its perfected form. The historian of Stalinist culture records that the ritual ‘was performed mainly on special occasions and usually required permission or initiative from above’: it could be applied ‘when higher authorities wanted popular justification for their desire to remove a local functionary, when they were not sure about denunciations against him and wanted to test him publicly, during elections to party posts, or simply as a substitute for the Christian ritual of “penance” for the regular cleansing of the system’.¹⁸ Submission was the substance and membership the wage: ‘accepting criticism and delivering self-criticism in the proper way, were the proof of successfully internalized cultural values and of one’s status as an insider’, and the proceeding ‘could not be considered completed without a solo performance of “sincere self-criticism”’.¹⁹ The ritual’s force was such that even Communist oppositionists facing the death penalty ‘were still proving their insider status by admitting imaginary crimes and accusing themselves in the public performance of Moscow trials, while denying their guilt in last private letters to Stalin’.²⁰ The Chinese refinement of the same instrument was studied at close range by Robert Jay Lifton, who found the milieu of thought reform governed by a single dominant message—‘only those who confess can survive’²¹—and who traced the mechanism to its root: the ideological totalists, ‘by defining and manipulating the criteria of purity, and then by conducting an all-out war upon impurity’, create ‘a narrow world of guilt and shame’, perpetuated ‘by an ethos of continuous reform, a demand that one strive permanently and painfully for something which not only does not exist but is in fact alien to the human condition’; they become thereby ‘the arbiters of existential guilt, authorities without limit in dealing with others’ limitations’.²²
Set the specimen against the criterion and the three marks answer as tumblers answer a key: compulsion, in the confession that only permission from above may even convene and that no man may decline and remain a man in standing; instrumental domination, in the diagnosis deployed to remove, to test, to purge—a lever from first to last; epistemic arrogation, in a tribunal seated as arbiter of existential guilt, an authority without limit and without appeal. Observe, further, what the specimen is, for it is a religion in all but name—here are the penance, the catechism, the original sin of impurity, the perpetual examination of conscience—and a slave-religion need not be a religion in the conventional sense to enslave. The whole architecture of the confession booth stands rebuilt in it, with this difference only—that the door is locked from the outside. Athelitism, which our second chapter met as a private condition, here appears institutionalized and armed: Because enthroned as god, and the slaves of Because compelled to confess—to Because—their insufficient servitude. The distance between the two diagnostics is now exact; the Book names the sleeper and passes on; the tribunal names him and never lets him go.
§IV — Living Among the Sleeping
The criterion, having convicted the tribunal, now turns homeward and addresses the diagnostician himself; for the man who carries a true taxonomy through a world of sleepers carries also a temptation, and the temptation is to use it. Three abstinences govern him. The first is the abstinence from interference, and it is secured not by sentiment but by a mechanism the doctrine itself supplies. Motta’s observation—that 'low men, not being aware of their True Wills, tend to invade the prerogatives of others with tiresome frequency’²³—reads, in its inversion, as a verdict standing at the ready for the diagnostician’s own file: invasion of prerogatives is the signature of the man who does not know his Will. The Master’s doctrine is exact upon the mechanics:
Liberty is absolute to do thy will; but seek to do any other thing whatever, and instantly obstacles must arise. Every act that is not in definite course of that one orbit is erratic, an hindrance.²⁴
Obstacles must arise—for the waking no less than for the sleeping, since knowledge of the Will confers no immunity from error, only the means of its detection. The man who knows his Will, straying into another’s prerogative, feels the hindrance as a helmsman feels the shoal beneath his keel, and corrects his course; the Athelite, by the first sense of our definition, can do neither—ignorant of his own essential nature, he possesses no orbit against which a deviation could be read. 'Beware lest any force another, King against King!'²⁵ The warning would be superfluous were Kings incapable of the fault; it is addressed to the waking precisely because the waking can commit it—and can, unlike the sleeper, hear the warning. The moment the namer of sleepers presses, engineers, or compels the awakening he has prescribed, he has performed before witnesses the characteristic act of athelitism. The act is not yet the condition, for a King may stumble; let him persist, however, feeling no obstacle and correcting nothing, and the evidence completes itself—his own term closes over him like a well-made trap, sprung not by the stumble but by the failure ever to feel it.
The second abstinence is from evangelism, and here the Book legislates with a bluntness that leaves the missionary no covert. 'Success is thy proof: argue not; convert not; talk not over much!'²⁶ 'The Law is for all’²⁷—and the sentence declares a jurisdiction, not an invitation. The Law is no prospectus laid before the sleeper for his signature, free to be declined; it binds him as gravity binds the stone that has never heard of Newton, and none escapes lawful mandates by ignorance of them. Here, precisely, lies the ground of the abstinence: since every man stands equally under the Law, no man stands above another to administer it, and the missionary who presses assent arrogates a magistracy the Law nowhere confers—commanding, where he holds no commission; forcing, where the Book has said King against King. His zeal is moreover a confession. The man who cannot rest until his neighbor believes has made his neighbor’s assent a condition of his own peace; his persuasion is a dependency; he has enthroned—in the applause of the converted—Because, and bent the knee. The Thelemite’s whole apologetic is his orbit: a life moving visibly by its own law argues more powerfully than any argument, and the sleeper who stirs at the sight of it stirs of himself. Proof by success demands nothing of the audience; proof by conversion demands everything, and in demanding, binds first he who demands.
The third abstinence is from contempt, and it rests upon the honest epistemology of the Book itself:
Yet there are masked ones my servants: it may be that yonder beggar is a King. A King may choose his garment as he will: there is no certain test: but a beggar cannot hide his poverty.²⁸
The diagnosis of athelitism is therefore, and permanently, a provisional judgment—a reading of garments by an eye that admits it cannot read souls—and precisely because it is provisional, the contemptuous impulse is barred from riding upon it: the sneer such an impulse engenders is not merely unlovely but unscientific, an assertion of certainty where scripture has posted its warning against certainty. Humility before the masked ones is not a courtesy grafted onto the doctrine; it is the doctrine, applied to the limits of one’s own instrument. Love-all, rightly read, commands exactly this posture: the intimate study, the right relation, the unbent orbit²⁹—regard without surrender, distance without disdain. The waking man thus walks among the sleeping as a naturalist walks a coastline: charting all, coercing none, despising nothing, and remembering at every headland that the charts are his own and the coast is not. One question alone remains to him, and it is the most dangerous in the whole enterprise—whether the eye that reads the garments has ever been turned upon the man within them.
§V — The Hygiene of the Diagnostician
The Master answers with unsparing directness, and He answers from the very comment that seemed most to license contempt:
Still deeper, there is a meaning in this verse applicable to the process of personal initiation. By “the people” we may understand the many-headed and mutable mob which swarms in the slums of our own minds. Most men are almost entirely at the mercy of a mass of loud and violent emotions, without discipline or even organization. They sway with the mood of the moment.³⁰
The first Athelites any diagnostician encounters are therefore domestic: the swarming, swaying, undisciplined populace of his own psyche, enthroning Because anew with every mood. Diagnosis rightly begins at home, and only there may it lawfully end in intervention—the kingdom in which a man may press, engineer, and compel is one alone, and it is his own. A single abstinence lapses at that border, however, and it is the first, for a man cannot invade his own prerogative; the abstinence from contempt crosses the threshold with him and binds within it at redoubled force, the Book having legislated for the self-loather in a single line: 'It is a lie, this folly against self.'³¹ Contempt for one’s own kingdom is not government but siege—an obstacle raised in the very orbit the intervention proposes to clear—so that the man who loathes himself has not brought the diagnosis home but merely imported the tribunal. Let no reader mistake this examination, therefore, for the totalist’s ethos of continuous reform (n. 22): the tribunal of the slums is convened by the man himself, requires no permission from above, seats no arbiter of existential guilt, and strives not toward an alien standard of purity but toward the one standard native to him—the orbit whose discovery is its whole object. The self-loather fails that test at its last two clauses, having seated the arbiter within and raised an alien purity above his own nature; he is the totalist of a population of one, and his kingdom suffers everything the third section catalogued, at the hands of the only tyrant no border can exclude.
Depth psychology adds to this domestic labor a warning the diagnostician cannot refuse, namely that what his eye finds abroad may be freight carried from home. C. G. Jung, anatomizing the shadow, observes that its most obstinate features ‘are usually bound up with projections, which are not recognized as such, and their recognition is a moral achievement beyond the ordinary’; the subject ‘must be convinced that he throws a very long shadow before he is willing to withdraw his emotionally-toned projections from their object’.³² The mechanism, uncorrected, is epistemically fatal to any taxonomy of others: 'Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face.'³³ The naturalist, wearing fouled spectacles, charts not the coastline but the smudge. Every diagnosis of athelitism must accordingly pass a first tribunal in which the diagnostician himself is the accused: is the sleep I read in yonder man a fact of his condition, or the exported portrait of my own? Jung presses the discipline to its costly conclusion: the man ‘brave enough to withdraw all these projections’ becomes ‘an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow’, who ‘has become a serious problem to himself, as he is now unable to say that they do this or that, they are wrong, and they must be fought against’—yet this man ‘knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world’.³⁴ He lives, in Jung’s resonant phrase, in the House of the Gathering; the Thelemite will recognize the address.
The final instrument of hygiene comes, fittingly, from the arch-skeptic of diagnosis itself. Thomas Szasz reminds the diagnostician that the naming of a symptom ‘involves rendering a judgment’, one that 'entails, moreover, a covert comparison or matching of the patient’s ideas, concepts, or beliefs with those of the observer and the society in which they live’³⁵—an audit of the norm, then, is owed before every verdict: is the standard against which I read this man’s sleep the Law, or my own taste in ermine dressed as the Law? Szasz insists likewise upon 'the importance of asking the question “Whose agent is the psychiatrist?” and of giving a candid answer to it’³⁶—and the question transfers entire. Whose agent is the diagnostician of athelitism? An honest answer admitting any master but his own Will—the applause of a coterie, the comfort of superiority, a wounded vanity keeping accounts—convicts the diagnosis before it is spoken, whatever its accuracy. Three disciplines, then, compose the hygiene: the slums patrolled, the projections withdrawn, the norm and the agency audited; the lens so purged may again take the coastline into view. A diagnostician thus governed is no longer a danger to the sleeping, having first been a serious problem to himself—which is, the whole tradition suggests, the only apprenticeship the office recognizes.
Return
The threshold at which this essay opened held nothing more alarming than a dictionary entry: a headword in Webster’s sober dress, four numbered senses ascending from privation to profanity, a usage note, a modest family of derivatives. The entry stands now exactly as it stood; not a sense has been altered, not a citation moved. The reader who returns to it, however, returns otherwise than he came. The word that was made to seem a rope is found to have been, all along, what a definition can only ever be—a chart; its senses read now as soundings taken along a strand, and its usage note, once a mere courtesy of the lexicographer, discloses itself as the whole essay in miniature: the condition is diagnostic, not indelible, with the beggar who may be a King posted at the gate of the entry as he is posted at the gate of every judgment the entry will ever license. The derivatives carry their own clemency, declared before any argument had been made: the athelitism of the multitude ‘is not wickedness but sleep; they know not what they do, for they know not what they are.’ The intervening chapters have not softened that sentence; they have merely explained it.
Thelema has long possessed a name for those who take the Law as their own. It possesses now a name for the condition that name excludes—no more than a name, and no less. The term asks of its user everything the Book asks of its diagnoses: that it name and pass on, demanding no confession, convening no tribunal, coercing no awakening; whoever takes up the word takes up its disciplines with it, and the hand that would turn the chart toward a blockade will find the instrument was not built for the grip. A vacancy in the lexicon is filled; nothing else has been enlarged. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law—a dictionary adds nothing to that, and this entry does not pretend to. It marks a coastline; the coast was always there.
Love is the law, love under will.
Notes
> ¹ The entry’s full apparatus, for the reader who would pursue it. The derivational family: Ath″e·lit′ic /ˌæθ.əˈlɪt.ɪk/, a., of, pertaining to, or characteristic of an Athelite; Ath″e·lit′i·cal·ly /ˌæθ.əˈlɪt.ɪk.əl.i/, adv.; Ath″e·līˋtism /ˈæθ.əˌlaɪ.tɪz.əm/, n., the condition or state of being an Athelite—formed on the model of parasite → parasitism, whose precedent governs the pronunciation: as parasitism preserves the long diphthong of its parent rather than reducing it, so Athelitism preserves /aɪ/, the suffix -ism appended without disturbance to the stem. The usage note: the term Athelite is distinguished from the scriptural designation slave (as employed in Liber AL vel Legis) by its function as a technical term of philosophical discourse rather than prophetic proclamation. Slave emphasizes the relation of bondage; Athelite emphasizes the condition of lacking Will. Both may describe the same person, but illuminate different aspects of the spiritual state. The condition is diagnostic, not indelible: cf. AL II:58, ‘there is no certain test’—yonder beggar may be a King.
> ² Aleister Crowley, New Comment on Liber AL vel Legis I:41.
> ³ Crowley, Old Comment on Liber AL vel Legis I:41–2 (the verses commented jointly, under the single heading ‘41, 42’).
> ⁴ Liber AL vel Legis, II:59.
> ⁵ Liber AL vel Legis, II:58.
> ⁶ Aleister Crowley, Duty, §B (‘Thy duty to other individual men and women’), third injunction, quoting Liber AL vel Legis, II:24.
> ⁷ Crowley, Duty, §B.
> ⁸ Liber OZ sub figurâ LXXVII.
> ⁹ Liber AL vel Legis, II:18.
> ¹⁰ Liber AL vel Legis, II:54.
> ¹¹ Crowley, New Comment on Liber AL vel Legis, II:21.
> ¹² Crowley, New Comment on Liber AL vel Legis, II:24. It is upon this comment that Marcelo Ramos Motta glosses: ‘Low men, not being aware of their True Wills, tend to invade the prerogatives of others with tiresome frequency’ (The Commentaries of AL, on II:24). The gloss circulates in some quarters under the Master’s name; it is Motta’s, and is here restored to its author—an essay on lawful diagnosis owing its own citations the same exactness it preaches.
> ¹³ Liber AL vel Legis, II:59.
> ¹⁴ Crowley, New Comment on Liber AL vel Legis, II:59.
> ¹⁵ Crowley, New Comment on Liber AL vel Legis, II:60; the doctrine of Hell as the concealed Place is developed in Liber Aleph, cap. ‘De Libidine Secreta’ (cap. Δσ), where the Master derives ‘Hell’ from the Anglo-Saxon helan, ‘to hele or conceal’—‘the concealed Place, which, since all things are in thine own Self, is the Unconscious’—and in ‘De Inferno, Palatio Sapientiae’ (cap. Δχ), where this Hidden Wisdom ‘is not thy true Will, but only the Levers (I may say so) thereof’. Hell is therefore no room in the psyche’s conscious house but the Palace wherein the Will’s wisdom is stored: where the Freudian unconscious lies beneath the ego, the Master’s Hell lies above it, dark only for light overwhelming—the Great Work being not the draining of a swamp but the storming of a Palace. Speculatively (and we mark it so), the correspondence is to Neschamah: Wisdom is Chokmah, and Binah, the Understanding, is traditionally her hekhal, her Palace—the Treasure-House that receives, assimilates, and transmits. The reader is warned, finally, of a snare in the apparatus itself: the widely circulated gloss that ‘hell’ here means ‘the secret sanctuary within their consciousness’ is Motta’s note, not the Prophet’s comment, and locates in consciousness precisely what the Master’s etymology conceals from it.
> ¹⁶ Liber AL vel Legis, I:42–3.
> ¹⁷ Liber AL vel Legis, III:58–9.
> ¹⁸ Alexei Kojevnikov, ‘Rituals of Stalinist Culture at Work: Science and the Games of Intraparty Democracy circa 1948’, The Russian Review, 57/1 (1998), 25–52.
> ¹⁹ Kojevnikov, ‘Rituals of Stalinist Culture’, 25–52.
> ²⁰ Kojevnikov, ‘Rituals of Stalinist Culture’, 25–52. (Journal-page loci for individual passages to be mapped in Phase V; the PDF of record is hosted at the author’s departmental page, University of British Columbia.)
> ²¹ Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of ‘Brainwashing’ in China (New York: Norton, 1961), ch. 5.
> ²² Lifton, Thought Reform, ch. 22. (Page locus advisory pending Phase V print check.)
> ²³ Marcelo Ramos Motta, The Commentaries of AL, on II:24. See n. 12 on the attribution.
> ²⁴ Aleister Crowley, Liber II: The Message of the Master Therion. The passage continues: ‘Will must not be two, but one.’
> ²⁵ Liber AL vel Legis, II:24; cf. Crowley, Duty, §B: ‘Abstain from all interferences with other wills.’
> ²⁶ Liber AL vel Legis, III:42.
> ²⁷ Liber AL vel Legis, I:34.
> ²⁸ Liber AL vel Legis, II:58.
> ²⁹ Crowley, New Comment on Liber AL vel Legis, II:59; see n. 14.
> ³⁰ Crowley, New Comment on Liber AL vel Legis, II:25.
> ³¹ Liber AL vel Legis, II:22.
> ³² C. G. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, Collected Works, ix/2, trans. R. F. C. Hull, 2nd edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), ¶16. (Print page loci pending Phase V.)
> ³³ Jung, Aion, ¶17.
> ³⁴ C. G. Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East, Collected Works, xi, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), ¶140. Italics on the pronouns are Jung’s sense, rendered from his construction; Phase V shall confirm the print emphasis.
> ³⁵ Thomas S. Szasz, ‘The Myth of Mental Illness’, American Psychologist, 15/2 (1960), 113–18 (p. 114 advisory).
> ³⁶ Szasz, ‘The Myth of Mental Illness’, p. 116 advisory. Szasz’s mature formulation—that involuntary psychiatric intervention ‘is not a medical, but a moral and political, enterprise’ (The Myth of Mental Illness, rev. edn (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), p. xii (preface to the second edition))—converges from libertarian premises upon the same abstinence the Book commands; the convergence is noted as corroboration from an independent line of argument, not as doctrinal authority.
Bibliography
I. Scriptural and Doctrinal Sources
> Crowley, Aleister, The Book of the Law: Liber AL vel Legis sub figurâ CCXX (received 1904), Centennial edn (York Beach, ME: Red Wheel/Weiser, 2004); consulted against the well of record at lib.oto-usa.org.
>
> —— Duty: A Note on the Chief Rules of Practical Conduct to be Observed by Those Who Accept the Law of Thelema, in The Revival of Magick and Other Essays (Oriflamme, 2), ed. Hymenaeus Beta and Richard Kaczynski (Tempe, AZ: New Falcon Publications, 1998); consulted at lib.oto-usa.org.
>
> —— The Law is for All: The Authorized Popular Commentary of Liber AL vel Legis sub figurâ CCXX, ed. Louis Wilkinson and Hymenaeus Beta (Tempe, AZ: New Falcon Publications, 1996). [The New Comment, cited throughout by verse.]
>
> —— Liber II: The Message of the Master Therion, in The Equinox, III/1 (Detroit: Universal Publishing Company, 1919).
>
> —— Liber Aleph vel CXI: The Book of Wisdom or Folly (West Point, CA: Thelema Publishing Co., 1962); corrected edn, as The Equinox, III/6, ed. Hymenaeus Beta (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1991).
>
> —— ‘Liber Legis’, with the Comment, in The Equinox, I/7 (London, 1912). [The Old Comment, cited by verse.]
>
> —— Liber OZ sub figurâ LXXVII (London: O.T.O., 1941).
>
> Motta, Marcelo Ramos (ed.), The Commentaries of AL, Being The Equinox, Volume V, No. 1 (New York: Samuel Weiser, 1975). [Motta’s glosses, cited by verse; see nn. 12, 15, 23 on attribution.]
II. Scholarly and Scientific Literature
> Jung, C. G., Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, Collected Works, ix/2, trans. R. F. C. Hull, 2nd edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).
>
> —— Psychology and Religion: West and East, Collected Works, xi, trans. R. F. C. Hull, 2nd edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969).
>
> Kojevnikov, Alexei, ‘Rituals of Stalinist Culture at Work: Science and the Games of Intraparty Democracy circa 1948’, The Russian Review, 57/1 (1998), 25–52.
>
> Lifton, Robert Jay, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of ‘Brainwashing’ in China (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961).
>
> Szasz, Thomas S., ‘The Myth of Mental Illness’, American Psychologist, 15/2 (1960), 113–18.
>
> —— The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct, rev. edn (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).