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Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law!Like most of the people here, I wasn’t brought up as a thelemite. I becameinterested in Crowley, partly because of an interest in magick, but largelybecause he seemed like an interesting role model. After reading the twostandard Crowley biographies, The Great Beast and The Confessions ofAleister Crowley, it took me a couple of years of dithering at the edge of themagickal scene before I decided I was ready to join a magickal Order. I wasprimarily interested in Thelema, but neither of the main ‘Thelemic’ Orders onthe scene at that time offered any kind of formal training. Rather than givingup, I decided to look elsewhere. Like most people, I was aware that Crowleyhad adapted most of the core techniques of Thelema from the HermeticOrder of the Golden Dawn. In any event, I thought there was enough commonground between the two traditions to justify my joining a magickal orderstemming from the Hermetic/Rosicrucian tradition, a decision which by theway that I’ve never regretted. Those of you who share my acquaintance withour right hand path brothers and sisters may also have picked up a certaincondescending, patronising attitude towards Thelema. Perhaps you, like mehave wondered why this might be. The most obvious explanation, of course,is that we’re much better than them, and they’re jealous. This was certainlygood enough an excuse for Crowley, who once used it to explain why WBYeats didn’t like his poetry! Strange man. Then there’s our dodgy image.We’re typically a bit younger, dress in an eccentric and erotic way, take a fewdrugs now and again maybe, piss it up a bit, argue a lot and have a healthyappetite for sex, none of which fits in with the traditional image of how amagician should behave. But the real reason they look down on us, in myopinion, is that we DARED TO CHANGE the tradition they love. Yes, as far

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as they’re concerned, we’re not doing it just exactly the same as ChristianRosenkreutz did 600 years ago, so there’s obviously something prettyseriously wrong.

Initially I went along with this. Not the part about there being somethingseriously wrong of course, but the part about Crowley departing from theHermetic/Rosicrucian tradition on a tangent of his own. Personally, I didn’tsee anything wrong with a little change. Why not, I argued? After all, thingsdo change a little every few hundred years. It wasn’t until I began to readabout the Renaissance as part of my research into the evolution of organiza-tions that I realized that Thelema is in fact much more in line with manyHermetic and Rosicrucian principles than the Golden Dawn ever was.

The first and most obvious difference between Thelemites and the GoldenDawn traditionalists is their perspectives on authority. To a Thelemite,authority stems from the True Will, whereas to the traditionalist it’s aconsequence of rank in the Order. MacGregor Mathers, joint founder andlater sole chief of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, was what wewould doubtless now describe as a bit of a control freak. When the GoldenDawn was founded in 1888, it was he who constructed the initiation ritualsfrom the mysterious ‘cypher manuscripts’. Four years later, it was again hewho introduced a curriculum of magickal study and an ‘Inner Order’, theRuby Rose and Gold Cross, for those seriously interested in practisingceremonial magick. There is no doubt that he was the driving force behind theestablishment of the Golden Dawn, but in later years he seems to havebecome progressively more paranoid about other people wresting control ofthe Order away from him. William Wynn Westcott, the only other survivingchief of the Golden Dawn besides Mathers, was forced to resign formallyfrom the Order after one of the Order’s documents bearing his name fell intothe hands of the police. There have always been speculations that this wasdown to Mathers, who may have ‘accidentally’ left the documents in the backof a cab. Westcott was a coroner, and the authorities presumably had thesame perverted fantasies about what occultists get up to with corpses as theydo today. Mathers began to suspend people’s membership and expel them atthe drop of a hat. His physical location in Paris probably made him paranoidabout the politics of the Isis Urania temple in London, which was noweffectively beyond his control. When he suspended Annie Horniman, a verysenior member of the London Temple, there was a protracted correspond-ence between various members of the Order, and a large chunk of it is

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reproduced in Ellic Howe’s The Magicians of the Golden Dawn. Of all theopinions that were voiced not one questioned Mathers’ right to act as hepleased. When there was an attempt by F.L. Gardner to get up a petition to‘respectfully petition for the reconsideration of the decision’, many members,including Crowley’s friend and magical teacher Allan Bennett, thought thatthe idea was scurrilous and treasonable. The petition was never sent.

Eventually, though, the penny dropped. In fact it’s probably fair to say itwas Mathers who dropped it, when he accused Westcott of forging theoriginal correspondence from the ‘Secret Chiefs’ authorizing the formationof the Golden Dawn. The London Temple obviously weren’t as stupid asMathers had hoped. They quickly worked out that Mathers had cut himselfoff at the legs. His authority depended on that of the ‘Secret Chiefs’, and ifthey hadn’t authorized him, he had no authority. Soon afterwards, the GoldenDawn fragmented around the issue. Bearing this in mind - that the conceptof the absolute authority of the chiefs caused the fragmentation of the originalGolden Dawn - it is perhaps surprising that the same concept is still currentin many Rosicrucian groups. The following extract is from The Sword ofWisdom, a biography of Mathers by Ithel Colquohoun, surprisingly a Thelemiteherself and a sometime member of Kenneth Grant’s Nu Isis Lodge of theOrdo Templi Orientis (OTO). It refers to the various branches of the GoldenDawn which formed after the split.

‘I compare Regular Temples to legitimate offspring and Dissident Tem-ples [i.e. those without Mathers’ permission] to bastards. However giftedthe illegitimate may be, he is at a disadvantage when matched against hislegitimate siblings. . . In esoteric matters, it is not that a candidate must notreceive the Mana of his initiator but that he cannot do so unless it isregularly bestowed.’

In other words, real initiation and magical inspiration can only be bestowedby a ‘legitimate’ initiator. The attitude is obviously still current on the occultscene, as testified to by the protracted arguments about charters and lineagesthat would be irrelevant if people didn’t still think that Orders with an ancienthistory are somehow implicitly better than those without one.

To sum up, then, the Golden Dawn view was that the adepts existed in aperfect hierarchy of ever more enlightened beings, each being entirelydependant on his superior for any advancement. Total obedience wasexpected of all subordinates. According to the Golden Dawn’s Historic

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Lecture for Neophytes an unbroken line of initiation supposedly existed fromthe mythical founder of the Rosicrucian Order, Christian Rosenkreutz, rightup to Mathers and Westcott. Cosmologically, their capacity to work magicand to evolve as human beings depended entirely on the coincidence betweenthe hierarchy of the Order and the natural hierarchy of the cosmos.

When talking about Mathers attitude to authority, Ellic Howe traces theconcept to an 18th century German Masonic outfit known as Der StrikteObservantz. I would argue that to understand the concept properly, you haveto go back much further, to the collapse of the Western half of the RomanEmpire in the middle of the first millennium of the Christian Era. By then, theEmpire was in big trouble. Not only was it being attacked on every front, butit was having trouble keeping itself going financially. Now running an Empireis an expensive hobby. On top of all those orgies and circuses, palaces andbaths, you’ve somehow got to find money to pay the troops who stop JohnnyForeigner from dashing in and taking it all off you. The Roman administrationwas centralized, with the Emperor personally in charge of both the army andtaxation. This system worked like Imperial glue. Each province depended onthe Imperial Army for protection, and therefore wouldn’t dare withhold taxes.The army got paid by the Emperor, and he who pays the piper calls the tune.Every part of the structure was dependent on every other part, which madeit particularly durable against internal factions and external attack.

Unfortunately for the Emperor, a lot of the regional governors had theirhands in the till, taking large chunks out of the tax before it saw the insidesof the Emperor’s pockets. Even executing the odd governor here and theredidn’t seem to help. Simultaneously the army was overstretched, and couldn’tprotect the more remote, less profitable provinces. Eventually, the Emperorwas forced to allow some local governors to collect taxes for themselves. Ofcourse, this only served to weaken the Emperor’s hold on the regions

With the Empire offering no protection and few financial benefits, therewas little to stop them going it alone. When the Ostrogoths, Franks andVisigoths swept down into the Western Empire, many of the Roman officialssimply swapped sides in return for the right to retain their lands and position.This was the origin of many European ‘noble’ families.

The story didn’t end there, of course. The new Barbarian kingdoms,founded on military might alone, were no more capable of sustaining a centralmilitary and taxation system than their Roman forebears, with the result thatthey were perpetually falling to pieces. The regional princes were still

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effectively autonomous, and were likely to ally themselves with whoeveroffered them the best deal. National boundaries rarely lasted a generation.The Barbarians, of course, had a different culture to that of Rome, one whichput a much stronger emphasis on family or tribal groups which formedalliances with one another by means of oaths of loyalty. The only way to

Roman Imperial Structure

develop any kind of political stability was to make use of these features. Allthe different social ranks, from slave up to king, became hereditary, withfamilies marrying within their own class. A complex hierarchy evolved, witheach level swearing binding oaths of loyalty to their superiors with terriblepenalties for transgressors. This was much the same as the way Neophytesof the Golden Dawn were obliged to swear an oath cursing themselves todeath if they ever betrayed the Order. The Christianization of WesternEurope brought a slightly different variation of the game. It was now God whomade Kings and Emperors, in a Divine hierarchy. As the Pope was God’srepresentative on Earth, it gave him a lot of weight, which he didn’t hesitateto chuck around. As well as having a hand in the government of almost everyEuropean Kingdom, the Roman Church directly held a number of principali-

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ties all over Europe throughout the Middle Ages. The Kings and Princes alsohad plenty to gain from allying themselves to the Church. The Parish priestsassured the peasants that their station in life was a holy office ordained byGod. The most any man could hope for was to play his role well. The Churchconvinced the serfs that the political hierarchy was God’s natural order, andthat anyone trying to change it would reap a terrible reward, both in this lifeand the next. It is interesting to note that Mathers used many of the samethreats regarding the moral and spiritual dangers of ignoring his authoritywhen his leadership of the Order was challenged by the Isis-Urania Temple.This Medieval political hierarchy, which became known as the Feudalsystem, more or less held Europe together until the 16th century. Of course,it didn’t do much to stop the high-ups from ignoring their oaths of loyalty toone another and their pledges to protect those over whom they ruled. Theywere perpetually fighting wars to increase their own power and wealth, oftenfunded through extortionate taxes. At the bottom of the pyramid, though, itwas a very effective instrument for keeping the peasants in their place.

Of central importance in maintaining the feudal system was thecosmological doctrine of the Divine Hierarchy. The kings and noblemen werefar too well educated to believe the crap the Church spouted out, and stuck

The split of Roman Empire

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to it just as long as it suited them. The peasants, on the other hand, knew nobetter, and the nobility did their best to make sure it stayed that way. A casein point is the English Peasant’s Revolt of 1381. As a result of a particularlyunpleasant tax, the infamous ‘Poll Tax’, a peasant army rose up and tookLondon. Their complacent masters never took the prospect of a large-scalerevolt seriously, with the result that the army was away fighting elsewhere.When the peasants achieved their military end, they put their demands to theKing, who was then a boy of fourteen. The fault, they reasoned, must be witha greedy nobility, and once the King realized their plight, he would undoubtedlyuse his ‘Divine Might’ to restore justice. So thoroughly convinced were theyof the Christian notion of Divine Kingship that the thought of a corrupt Kingnever entered their minds. Of course the King was just a boy who wascompletely at the mercy of the more powerful Barons. In any case, heundoubtedly knew which side his bread was buttered on. The King went backon his promises to the peasants as soon as the army could be recalled, thepeasant rebels were ruthlessly hunted down and killed, and the supposedmoral transgression of the peasants was used as an excuse by the nobility toimpose an even more terrible suffering on the serfs.

The Feudal System, then, saw the origin of the cosmological modeladopted by the Golden Dawn. There was a perfect hierarchy with God at thetop, and ordinary mortals at the bottom. In the feudal system the intermediateranks were composed of the nobility, and in the Golden Dawn by the variousgrades of adepts. In both cases, you derived your position from your superiorin the organization, to whom you owed absolute loyalty. Doubtless Matherswas aware of the parallel. At the inception of the Golden Dawn he wasalready using ‘Royal is my Race’ as his magical motto. From then on hedeveloped increasing pretensions towards royalty, dressing in a kilt, callinghimself the Count of Glenstrae, and claiming to be a descendant of Rob RoyMacGregor! He spend his twilight years on the lunatic fringe of themonarchist movement in Paris, where he hobnobbed with exiled aristocratsfrom the rest of Europe.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, the wealth of the nobility began to dependprogressively less on agriculture and military conquest, and more on trade.The shift towards trade needed a more educated work force. People neededto be able to write letters and keep accounts. Simultaneously, there was amove from rural towards urban society. If you’re trading, it makes sense tohave everything in one place. The more complex society needed more

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complex laws, and better educated people to administer them. The higherpopulation density and concentration of wealth meant that medical treatmentstopped being the sole preserve of the aristocracy, with a greater demand forphysicians, and a consequent need for more education. Because wealthdepended on trade, having a more competent workforce equated to moremoney. In the feudal system, agricultural workers had been expendable, butthe new emphasis on trade turned people into a valuable commodity. The newcity-states began to realize that more liberal laws would allow them to attractthe best tradesmen, architects, academics etc. from the countryside and fromother cities with stricter regimes. The liberal laws, coupled with the need fora better educated work force, began to undermine the old-fashioned Feudalcosmology. People became increasingly aware that there were alternativesto the dogmas put forward by the Church. Earlier I showed how cosmologywas crucial in perpetuating the feudal system, and with better education, theold model of the Divine Hierarchy was increasingly challenged. ‘When Adamdelved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?’ From simple slogans forthe peasants to complex theological doctrines for the better educated, dissentspread. New revolutionary movements were not hampered by lack of acoherent ideology, as had been the case in the 1381. All over Europe, smallprincipalities and kingdoms began to break away from the church and movetowards more egalitarian systems of government. The whole fabric of societywas changing very quickly, and people desperately looked for a concept ofwhere these changes were going to lead, for some sort of precedent. Not forthe first time, they began to look back to the Roman Empire, and to think ofrecent changes as a revival of ancient ideas. The French term for revival,Renaissance, has lent its name to this period in history.

In Eastern Europe, the Roman Empire had not fallen to the barbarians asit had in the west. It had struggled along as the Byzantine Empire, successfullydefending itself against successive waves of invaders, until the OttomanTurks finally overran it in the fifteenth century. Unlike their colleagues in thewest, the Byzantine scholars had existed in continuity from Hellenistic times.Many of the works of the classical world, which had been lost to the Latin-speaking west, had been preserved in the Greek-speaking east.. When theTurks swept into Byzantium, many academics moved west, where the new‘universities’ were hungry for their knowledge. The Italian universities,previously restricted to the study of theology, medicine and law, rapidly tookup the ancient scholarly traditions brought by the Byzantine exiles. Perhaps

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the most important contribution of the Greek scholars was the ‘studiahumanitatis’ an academic package of five subjects, traditionally grammar,rhetoric, poetry, ethics and history. The ‘humanities’, as they are now known,contained not only whole branches of learning that had been lost to the west,but also a whole new concept about the purpose of learning.

Diagram from Bovillus.The diagram above shows a humanist view of the scholarly process. On

the bottom rung we have the lazy man, who is supposed to be of the natureof stone and is said to merely exist; then the glutton, of the nature of a tree,who lives; the poseur, who is equated with the horse, and possessessentience; and finally the scholar, ‘homo studius’, the only truly intelligentcreature. The idea, which was very radical in the Medieval world, was thatone could advance oneself through study. According to the humanistmovement, people were no longer merely allotted a place in society whichthey duly occupied, but could raise themselves through study.

The Hermetic movement, which was originally a movement within thehumanist camp, took the whole process a stage further. As the new wave ofscholars dug ever deeper into the pile of newly available Greek sources, theybegan to discover the mystical and magical side of the ancient world. Themost influential of the ancient mystics were Plato (who gave his name to the‘Neoplatonist’ movement) and a certain ‘Hermes Trismegistus’, a sage inthe Graeco-Egyptian tradition. One of the central concepts of Hermeticphilosophy was that there was a relationship between the man and thecosmos: they were identical reflections of each other, the microcosm and themacrocosm. A natural harmony existed between the two, a harmony whichcould be deliberately enhanced to produce miraculous results. Magic hadbeen reborn. Of course magic had never really disappeared, but I’m nottalking here about the fetish dolls and potions of the village witch, or thesurvivals of the ancient Germanic and Celtic shamans, but a revival of the‘high magic’ that had built the pyramids, inspired the Greek oracles andsustained the Roman Empire. It spread mainly amongst the cream ofEuropean thinkers, and was consequently seen as much more respectable.It is important to note that the Hermetic and Neo-Platonist movements werenot solely concerned with the practice of magic - their philosophy claimed afundamental synthesis between the arts, sciences, politics and religion, awhole world-view applicable to every part of human existence. In the

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predominantly Christian society of Medieval Europe, moral authority stemmedfrom God, and it was the divine sanctification of the office of king which gaveit the moral authority to rule. The new Hermetic sects, particularly theRosicrucians, claimed a direct link with God through mystical revelation. Thisgave them the right to ignore not only the bogus theology of a corrupt church,but also the temporal authority of the rulers they sponsored. To the FeudalOverlords, who were kept in power as much by the cosmological model ofthe Divine Hierarchy as by military might, the Rosicrucians represented avery real threat.

Any absolute differentiation between the Golden Dawn and Thelemawould be oversimplistic, and yet it is fair to say that the Golden Dawn hadmore in common with the medieval view than Thelema, which is closer to theposition of the Renaissance Hermeticists and Rosicrucians.

I’ve already talked briefly about the attitudes of Thelemites and GoldenDawn traditionalists to spiritual authority. The Golden Dawn and its succes-sors think that spiritual authority is synonymous with rank in the Order. Thisis basically the same idea as the medieval church espoused, that spiritualauthority was dependent on your position in a hierarchy. Like the Pope, theChief of the Order was answerable directly to God, and mediated betweenthe deity and humanity. Although the Golden Dawn acknowledged thepossibility of advancement through magical endeavour, they also thought itneeded the sanctification of a superior in the Order, a curious combination ofthe Medieval and Rosicrucian perspectives. The original Rosicrucians heldthat they had direct contact with God through magical and mystical revelation.If the True Will is seen as the ‘divine seed’, the God within, then ‘Do whatthou wilt’ becomes a rather accurate depiction of the Rosicrucian view.Indeed, ‘do what thou wilt’ was itself a Hermetic axiom contemporary withthe Renaissance.

Thelemic and Golden Dawn philosophy were divided just as strongly onthe subject of political authority. ‘There is no law beyond do what thou wilt’seems to sum up the Thelemic version fairly nicely. I doubt that any of youin this room feel any moral obligation to follow a law which you feel is out ofsympathy with your True Will. This is essentially the same as the attitude ofthe Rosicrucians, who refused to recognise the legitimacy of any authorityless harmonious with the Divine Will than themselves. Although the GoldenDawn played host to some radical thinkers, it could never be thought of as aradical movement. It never took up a position which could be described as a

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challenge to authority, perhaps because of its masonic links and it’s leaderspretensions towards the aristocracy.

Thelema is a more wholistic magickal philosophy than the Golden Dawnversion. In Thelema every act is considered magickal, whether posting aletter or evoking a demon, as all actions require some sympathy with the TrueWill. In this sense, Thelema is much closer to the original Rosicrucian idealthan the Golden Dawn. Like Thelemites, the Rosicrucians sought a perfectharmony between mankind and godhead, a harmony which needed to extendto every branch of science, art, politics and music. Most Golden Dawnmembers saw magic as something which went on in a circle, and tended todraw a firm divide between their magickal activities and the rest of their lives.I would go so far as to say this is a natural laziness - none of us want to acceptthe demands of the insights that magick produces, so we build up artificialbarriers to guard the parts we don’t want to change. If you're not careful -and I’m sure the practising magicians in this room will know what I’m talkingabout here - the actual ceremonial work becomes a colourful sideshow whichhelps to distract from the main problems rather than draw them to yourattention. It is therefore important that a magickal philosophy contains somepointers towards integration, so that the various parts of ourselves don’t pullin different directions. The concept of the True Will provides this unifyingdoctrine, demanding that we constantly pay attention to every aspect of ourlives. The Hermetic ideal of a magician came from the humanist ideal of theperfected man, and recognised that ritual alone cannot produce that perfec-tion, but merely point in the right direction. Magic for the Rosicruciansprovided the key to the other disciplines that made up homo sapiens - theaware man. The ideal of the Renaissance magus was the polymath, who sawthe true harmony of all things. Though his knowledge was limited, Crowleyconstantly strained to develop parallels between magick and science, art andmathematics. I like to think that this kind of syncretism is once more becominga distinctive feature of Thelema.

A constant criticism of Crowley from the Golden Dawn traditionalists isthat he broke his oath of secrecy to the Order by publishing their rituals,adapted to Thelema, in The Equinox. Paradoxically, one of the originalRosicrucian criticisms of western magicians was their secrecy. The follow-ing is from a translation of the Fama Fraternitatis, one of the originalRosicrucian manifestos published at the beginning of the 17th century. Itdescribes Christian Rosenkreutz’s experiences in the Islamic world.

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‘Every year the Arabians and Africans do send one to another, enquiringone of another out of their arts, if happily they had found out some betterthings, or if experience had weakened their reasons. Yearly there camesomething to light, whereby the mathematics, physics and magic (for inthose are they of Fez most skilful) were amended. As there is nowadaysin Germany no want of learned men, magicians, cabalists, physicians andphilosophers, were there but more love and kindness among them, or thatthe most part of them would not keep their secrets close unto themselves.’

You can see from this that the Rosicrucians sought cooperation betweenthe magickal groups, directly urging their contemporaries to be less tightfistedwith their secrets. The passage also speaks of progress being made. This isanother important difference between Thelemic and Golden Dawn philoso-phy. The Golden Dawn rituals were thought to work because of theirantiquity, because they were supposedly preserved or adapted from the‘original’ Rosicrucian rituals. Mathers and Westcott both made a big deal outof the cypher manuscripts when they founded the Order, and judging by thesurviving correspondence it seems likely it was the ‘genuine’ historical natureof the rituals which attracted many of their members. Crowley, on the otherhand, openly admitted the originality of his own constructions. The GoldenDawn, in their Historic Lecture for Neophytes, gave a great long spiel aboutthe ‘cypher manuscripts’ and a long and fictitious history of the Order.Crowley, in his History Lection of the A\ A\ , dismissed the genuineness ofthe manuscripts as being of ‘no whit, such literature being judged by itself, notby its reputed sources.’ He reintroduced the spirit of progress in the hispublication, The Equinox, with its motto ‘The method of science, The aim ofreligion.’ Because in Thelema the effect of a ritual derives from its harmonywith the True Will, we are free to experiment with any techniques which wethink of as effective. This attitude is now common to most thinking occultistsof all traditions, but it re-emerged with Crowley and Thelema.

Another important difference between Thelema and G.D. Hermetica istheir perceived relevance to society. Although Crowley’s apocalyptic visionsof the inception of the Aeon of Horus were somewhat pompous andoverblown, he did at least have a vision of the relationship between magickand the shape of society. The Golden Dawn, for the most part, were contentto carry on as a little secret society practising magic, as Yeats put it ‘a clublike any other’. As I have already demonstrated, the original Rosicrucian

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movement was very political. As Frances Yates has pointed out in TheRosicrucian Enlightenment, the original Rosicrucian pamphlets madespecific allusions to the contemporary political situation, and made specificstatements about the kind of society they wanted to create. As far as politicalauthority is concerned, then, Thelema is much closer to the Rosicrucianmovement than the Golden Dawn.

Equinox frontispiece[At this point the author presented an overhead summing up all the abovewhich was followed by a question and answer session]

So, how did the Hermetic movement change so much between its zenithin the early 17th century and its revival by the Golden Dawn nearly 300 yearslater? The original Rosicrucian and Hermetic movements were poised at oneof the great cusp points in European history. Politics, science, religion and thearts were all changing beyond recognition. The Hermetic philosophy offereda unifying theory for these developments. It saw them all in the context of are-emerging relationship between humanity and deity. For the precedingthree hundred years, there had been a growing obsession with millinarianism,the idea of some great cosmic change, an apocalypse, to be followed by a new

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Golden Age. This was doubtless a product of the grinding poverty, servitude,plague and unending war which typified the medieval period. The recentchanges in society were looked at in a religious as well as a historicalperspective. The rediscovery of the ancient world brought with it thepossibility of the long-heralded Golden Age, which in Christian and Jewishterms meant the establishment of God’s reign on earth. There was atremendous hunger for change, and the new religious and political movementsof the day established themselves in the hope of bringing about this New Age.

In Medieval Europe, secret societies were a very popular and powerfulway of spreading alternative political doctrines. In a time when dissent waspunishable by torture and death, caution was advisable. Many of the majorpolitical and religious movements of the day began in secret, with only a fewvery committed individuals prepared to come out into the open. The importantthing to remember is that they all thought their time would come, and that itwould come soon. For many it did, but history was not that kind to theRosicrucians. No sooner had the Rosicrucians announced their existencebefore the 30 years war the Catholic counter-reformation drove them backinto obscurity. Many of the Protestant monarchs and Princes of Europe, whilehappy to embrace Hermetic ideas during their conflict with Catholicism, soonchanged their tune when they rose to power. The new breed were, of course,just as keen to keep the peasants in their place, and the religious persecutionsof the 17th and 18th centuries were common to Catholic and Protestantcountries alike. No surprise, then, that the secret societies chose to remainsecret. Continuing to exist only as an underground, the Hermetic movementbecame increasingly divorced from contemporary political and religioustrends. It was a similar story for the arts and sciences. After the time of DaVinci, Dee, Paracelsus and Agrippa, science and art began to becomeprogressively more divided. The theories of Descartes and Newton had noroom for the Hermetic principles of microcosm and macrocosm, or for thesubjectivity of individual mystical experience.

The Hermetic movement, then, was robbed of its relevance to the arts andsciences and to the politico-religious situation. Along with the ChivalricOrders of Knighthood and the Freemasons, the Hermetic and Rosicruciansects disappeared into the twilight world of secret societies. The associationof these movements, which overlapped continuously from the 17th century,continued until the Golden Dawn, who borrowed their name from theRosicrucians, their grade-structure from the Freemasons and their flashy

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gear from the orders of chivalry.With the advent of ‘science’ came miraculous new inventions. The new

mechanical marvels helped to convince scholars that they had finallysurpassed the ancients, that the Renaissance was over, and the new ‘Age ofReason’ had arrived. The Rosicrucian movement, on the other hand, stayedfirmly stuck in the Renaissance. Through the 18th and 19th century, it wastheir fate to be revived, revived and revived again. No generation of Hermeticmagicians dared to reach the conclusion the early scientists had, namely thattheir understanding had surpassed the ancients. That is, until Crowley. It isin Thelema that the Hermetic movement has finally moved from Renaissanceto Enlightenment, from past to present.

Earlier I used the model of the Renaissance to show how Thelemarepresents several crucial developments from the Golden Dawn tradition. Ithink that it is of vital importance for us today to realize that thesedevelopments are still in progress. We must realize that Crowley, howevergreat his achievements, only represents the origin of the Thelemic system, notits perfection.

Although Crowley challenged many of the authoritarian attitudes of hisforebears, in others he imitated them. The main example of this is thehierarchical magickal order. Since Crowley’s death the old hierarchicalorders, with their tendencies to produce secretive, competitive behaviour,have thankfully started to give way to more communal groups and societies.The future, I believe, has little to do with orders and charters, or even with thewritings of Aleister Crowley. The future lies in our capacity to carry out theGreat Work, to manifest the True Will which lies dormant within each andevery one of us, and to show others how to do the same. We’ve got to sortout the wheat from the chaff, to realize which parts of Crowley’s Thelemaare redundant and regressive, and replace them. I’m happy to say that I thinkthere’s a sea change happening within the Thelemic community at themoment, that even those organizations which have in the past been tradition-ally conservative have realized there’s still plenty of progress to be made.

The Rosicrucian and Sufi ideas of cooperation are also continuing todevelop. The existence of meetings such as this Symposium are testament tothe fact that we now exist in a pluralistic community, sharing ideas andswapping techniques, motivated by the idea of progress instead of merely abetter imitation of our predecessors. In so doing we are at last starting to movebeyond Crowley in our conception of Thelema. In answer to the challenge of

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the Sufi of Rum, we are beginning to stop worshipping the jug, and startingto look for the water.

Crowley’s attitude to political authority was rather more exemplary thanhis attitude to his disciples. He never seemed to give a toss about the law, butnever seemed to get into any serious trouble. As the twentieth century drawsto a close, it is becoming obvious that the great political movements which hadhoped to deliver ordinary people from oppressive authority have comprehen-sively failed to come up with the goods. Indeed, it could be said they haveproduced some of the nastiest, most oppressive regimes of the last hundredyears. The lesson, for me, is that removing the external means of oppressiononly does half the job. The slave mentality, taught in schools and in theworkplace, is deeply encoded in our individual and social psyches, and takesa lot of shifting. As far as I’m concerned, magic in general and Thelema inparticular has many important lessons for us in this regard. Unfortunately,these lessons will go unlearned if we are unable to improve our accessibilityto interested parties.

Another area in which Thelema surpassed the Golden Dawn was in itswholistic attitude. Over the last century, it has historically been a trend thatexperts in magick have been experts in little else. At last this is changing. Itis more and more common to hear magicians talking about ideas from otherdisciplines, such as anthropology, psychology, the ‘new physics’ and math-ematics, and the arts. I think this is particularly positive, because the greattruths and fundamental principles of other disciplines often have more of realvalue to teach us than the minutiae of obscure magickal systems.

On a final note, it is very interesting to me that Hermetics and Thelemafinally seem to be reaching maturity in an age with remarkable parallels to theRenaissance. One again we’re in an age where society is changing veryrapidly. Again, economic factors are demanding a more educated workforce,and telephones, radio, television and computers are fulfilling the placeoccupied the printing press in the Renaissance. Cars and aeroplanes havemade the world a smaller place, as the first ocean-going ships did 500 yearsago.

I argued earlier that Hermetic magic began to lose its way when it lost itsrelevance to religion and politics, and the arts and sciences. This centuryseems to be marking a new convergence. With the New Agers, religionseems to be moving back towards the esoteric. Even the Christians, it seems,

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are desperately stealing our clothes, offering meditation classes and greenpolitics in a last-ditch attempt to outlast the Aeon of Osiris. Artists andmusicians are again looking to magickal and mythical ideas for inspiration.Science has finally found objectivity to be a dead end, and is once morebeginning to consider the perspective of the observer as of vital importance.Like our forebears in the 17th century, I believe we are standing at one of thegreat cusp points in world history, a time when magickal ideas are once morecoming to the fore. We have been presented with an opportunity that has notexisted since the counter-reformation crushed the hopes of the Rosicruciansand their kin over 300 years ago. Are we to be the Ushers of a new GoldenAge, or are we merely surfacing briefly before disappearing back intoobscurity. The choice, I think, is ours. Thank you for listening.

Divergence and convergence of politics, religion etc.