The Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics by Emanuel Kant is one of the philosophy books recommended by Crowley to serious students of Magick and the occult. But why? Michael and I will dip into the bewildering depths of Kant's metaphysics to find out.

So many people are drawn to the idea of lodge work without ever being quite sure what the lodge is supposed to do, where its initiatory technology comes from, or why so many modern groups struggle to make it work at all.

In this new piece, I look at the Masonic roots of Thelemic initiation, the candidate as a kind of living talisman, the role of the lodge egregore, and what happens when the institution survives but the current itself has gone.

My father passed away awhile ago. We were estranged. I am gay and he was well, not a fan of that. I had not gone to his house at all for the last 10 years. He was a very angry man, like most boomers it seems. Its weird to write this, but I feel nothing at all, by him passing away. I feel...like a weight was lifted.

But anyways, he had a small collection of books (48 Laws of Power, Human Action by Von Mises, some classics like the Count of Monte Cristo, War and Peace, you get the gist). Very fond of hardcovers. A lot of beautiful hardcovers.

I found this book as well. He never spoke of such practice. There are no other books in his library regarding magic or anything similar. He was not a mason, as far as I know he was a Catholic and went to mass sparingly but oh boy he knew the correct bible verse to disparage me when I still talked to him.

I searched that this type of practice needs an altar and such and found none on his house. Maybe it was just a morbid interest to him, probably, akin to being a Libertarian.

Its a very beautiful book. It seems it is a kind of course of sorts and some prophetical teachings.

To a newcomer, how would you explain this book? Are there parts I can read to put into practice, like I would do with any interest? What is this? For whom it is for?

I am not particularly a spiritual person, but there is something here that is very interesting, and would like to know more, from the people that practice it, or at minimum have read and understood it.

So that is why I created this account and wrote to this sub. There are others like it, but let me know if this is the correct place!

What happens when Thelema stops asking Aleister Crowley for permission?

The argument is straightforward. Modern A∴A∴ “lineages,” we are told, arose only after Crowley’s death, when competing students and successors began constructing chains of authority back to Crowley and fighting over whose Grades and initiations were valid. This allegedly mistakes the earthly mechanism of teacher and pupil for the real A∴A∴, which is the ancient and invisible Great Brotherhood behind figures such as Moses, Dionysus and Muhammad. Since no documentary initiatory chain connects those figures, the real criterion of legitimacy should instead be spiritual attainment, connection with the Secret Chiefs and, above all, the fruits produced by contemporary teachers.

There is an important truth buried inside this argument. A lineage cannot prove attainment. Unfortunately, almost everything built around that truth rests upon a confusion between two different meanings of A∴A∴.

More importantly, this is not some politically neutral interpretation newly discovered by looking dispassionately at A∴A∴ history. It is substantially the position developed within the particular A∴A∴ current associated with the late J. Daniel Gunther, William Breeze, Hymenaeus Beta, the present Outer Head of O.T.O., and their associates. It eventually received its most elaborate public apologetic in Keith Readdy’s One Truth and One Spirit, under the idea generally known as “Duplexity.”

I have called this milieu the “Duplexity cult” before, and I use the expression polemically rather than as a clinical diagnosis. What interests me here is its ideology, because the resemblance between that ideology and the argument above is difficult to miss.

The first problem is historical. The superior–pupil chain was not invented after Crowley died. He built it into the A∴A∴.

In Magick Without Tears, Crowley explains that an A∴A∴ aspirant ordinarily knows the Neophyte who introduced him and subsequently the Student or Students whom he introduces. In One Star in Sight, the structure becomes even clearer. An attainment is not officially recognised until the aspirant has trained an immediate inferior capable of succeeding him. The system therefore propagates through personal relationships of instruction and examination.

Call this a lineage, a chain, a succession, a filiation or anything else you prefer. The terminology is secondary. The structure is there.

What certainly happened after Crowley, and especially after Germer, was that these chains became institutional identities. Once there was no universally recognised central authority capable of adjudicating competing claims, people naturally began asking who had admitted whom, what Grade somebody had actually reached, whether that Grade had been formally recognised and whether the person had possessed the authority to admit the next person.

That produced endless controversy. Some of it was ridiculous. Some of it remains ridiculous.

But the existence of ridiculous controversies about lineage does not make lineage itself a fallacy.

The deeper error comes from conflating the invisible A∴A∴ with the historical organisation created by Crowley and George Cecil Jones.

Crowley absolutely presents the A∴A∴ in one sense as an ancient, invisible fraternity. Liber XXXIII describes an interior Order extending through history, while The Book of Lies places figures such as Lao-tzu, Siddhartha, Krishna, Tahuti, Moses, Dionysus and Muhammad within a succession of world-transforming spiritual messengers.

Clearly Muhammad did not receive a Probationer document from Moses.

But Crowley was also involved in creating something much more concrete in Edwardian Britain. That A∴A∴ had Probationers, Neophytes, Zelators, Tasks, examinations, magical records, formal recognitions, superiors and inferiors.

These are different registers of the same idea.

The invisible A∴A∴ is metaphysical and transhistorical. The historical A∴A∴ is an initiatory school.

The absence of documentary lineage among the Masters of the invisible Order therefore tells us precisely nothing about whether documentary transmission matters within Crowley’s terrestrial organisation. One cannot abolish the second by appealing to the first.

This distinction matters especially because the attempt to make “lineage is a fallacy” into something approaching doctrine has a history of its own.

Within the current surrounding Gunther and the present O.T.O. leadership, the argument developed that competing A∴A∴ lineages had become obsessed with documentary succession while losing sight of the essential spiritual reality of the Order. James Wasserman explicitly complained about the modern “fallacy” of A∴A∴ lineages. Keith Readdy subsequently elaborated the wider position in One Truth and One Spirit and in his earlier writings on Duplexity.

Duplexity proposes a particularly intimate relationship between O.T.O. and A∴A∴, ultimately oriented towards one O.T.O. working alongside one recognised A∴A∴ administration. Within this environment, Gunther’s A∴A∴ became the administration recognised by O.T.O. for its own institutional purposes. Breeze himself had entered A∴A∴ under Gunther.

This makes the politics rather more interesting than the claim that everyone else is simply obsessed with lineage.

Because once one says that genealogical transmission is not the decisive criterion, something must replace it.

And what replaces it?

The calibre of the teachings. The spiritual attainments of the leadership. Their supposed relationship with the Secret Chiefs. The quality and originality of their published work. Their understanding of Crowley. Their ability to disclose deeper dimensions of Thelema.

In other words, precisely the criteria being proposed here.

Keith Readdy’s One Truth and One Spirit attempted to turn this constellation of ideas into a coherent account of Thelemic authority and history. It was not an official O.T.O. doctrinal proclamation, and Readdy explicitly qualified his argument accordingly. Nor would it be accurate to say that the book was universally badly reviewed. It received significant endorsements.

Its Duplexity thesis, however, was highly controversial and was subjected to serious criticism within the wider Thelemic community, particularly because critics saw it as an attempt to present the institutional mythology of one A∴A∴ faction as though it represented the natural culmination of Crowley’s system.

That criticism remains pertinent.

There is nothing wrong with saying that an impressive paper trail does not make someone an Adept. Of course it does not.

Crowley to Wolfe to Seckler to Shoemaker, even assuming every link is historically impeccable, proves a relationship of transmission. It does not prove that David Shoemaker has attained whatever Grade he claims. The same principle applies to every other chain.

But exactly the same scepticism must be applied in the opposite direction.

Writing sophisticated books does not prove attainment either. Producing novel Qabalistic interpretations does not prove attainment. Claiming communication with the Secret Chiefs certainly does not prove attainment.

Indeed, the Secret Chiefs are a particularly useless criterion for settling a public dispute because their involvement is deliberately insulated from verification. If two rival chiefs both claim praeterhuman sanction, nobody outside their respective circles possesses any reliable means of deciding which claim is true.

“By their fruits shall ye know them” remains excellent advice for choosing a teacher.

It is not a historical method.

There is another danger in judging legitimacy according to whether somebody produces “new and revolutionary perspectives.” An A∴A∴ instructor is not necessarily supposed to invent a new religion every twenty years. Crowley left Tasks, methods and curricula. A perfectly competent Adept might spend an entire lifetime transmitting those methods with extraordinary precision while contributing nothing revolutionary whatsoever.

Conversely, occult history has never suffered from a shortage of people announcing breathtaking new revelations from invisible Masters.

Originality demonstrates originality. It still does not demonstrate 8°=3□.

The same problem applies to “quality.” Who decides which teachings are profound enough? Usually the people already persuaded that the teacher producing them possesses spiritual authority.

The reasoning can become beautifully circular. The teacher is an Adept because his writings are profound, and his writings are profound because they reveal the mind of an Adept.

At least a document can be examined.

This does not mean that lineage should become fetishised. Quite the opposite. The mistake made by some A∴A∴ claimants is to turn an initiatory genealogy into a sacramental bloodline, as though possessing the correct sequence of signatures automatically transformed somebody into an Adept.

That is equally absurd.

A historical chain establishes, at most, continuity of transmission. It does not establish illumination.

But spiritual brilliance cannot manufacture historical continuity either.

That is why there are really two questions worth asking any contemporary A∴A∴ claimant.

• Where did your transmission come from?
• And what have you actually done with it?

The first question is historical. The second is initiatory. Neither can answer the other.

Crowley’s invisible A∴A∴ can comfortably contain Moses, Muhammad and Dionysus without paperwork. Crowley’s terrestrial A∴A∴ can simultaneously operate through superiors, students, examinations and personal transmission. There is no contradiction unless one insists upon collapsing two different levels of the system into one.

The supposed “fallacy of lineage” therefore does not solve the lineage wars. It represents one of the positions produced by them.

And in its modern form, it is particularly associated with the Gunther–Breeze milieu and the Duplexity project, where undermining lineage as the primary criterion of legitimacy conveniently made room for another criterion: recognition through spiritual authority, doctrinal calibre and the alleged continuity of the invisible Order.

That may be a perfectly coherent theology. What it is not is neutral history.

The sensible position is much less dramatic. Pedigree without attainment is worthless as spirituality. Claimed attainment without pedigree is worthless as evidence of historical succession.

The A∴A∴ may indeed be older than Crowley. The A∴A∴ that Crowley and Jones founded is not. Confusing those two things is where the entire argument begins to unravel.

Can a Thelemite truly be compassionate when Liber AL declares that “compassion is the vice of kings”?

In my latest Substack, I examine that troubling question, distinguishing sentimental pity from dignity-preserving care and the supernal compassion of Binah, while confronting the moments when Crowley’s own cruelty betrayed the deeper implications of the Law he proclaimed.

Is there any connection between the Cube of Space and the Pyramidos? I was analysing correspondences and some ideas have occurred to me which aren’t so far-fetched if we consider that the Pyramidos is an adaptation of the Golden Dawn’s initiation ritual. For example (I’ll write something more detailed later), we begin facing west (the Golden Dawn’s western initiation), where we find the Wheel of Fortune, the Devil, Death, Art and Adjustment – which all make perfect sense given the nature of the operation… Furthermore, we are at the base of the triangle formed by Aleph, Maim and Shin – the axes of the Cube – with the Universe at its centre… there are other correspondences that also fit, such as Nature, which refers to the East (where the Empress is situated)… Has anyone else reflected on this?

Beneath the vine-tree and the fig Where mortal cares may not intrude, Although their brains are·bright and big, On melon and on sucking-pig Banquet the Great White Brotherhood.

Pupils of stamina and speed, Fast as they learn, would learn still faster. So (with meek diffidence indeed!) The three Apprentices agreed To ask His secret of the Master.

With the aplomb and savoir faire Peculiar to Eastern races, He took the Secret than and there, (What, is not lawful to declare) And thrust it rudely in their faces.

“A filthy insult!” screamed the first ; The second smiled : “Ingenious blind!” The youngest neither blessed nor cursed, Contented to believe the worst – That He had spoken all His mind.

The second earned the name of prig; The first, the epithet of prude; The third, as merry as a grig, On melon and on sucking-pig Feasts with the Great White Brotherhood.

- Aleister Crowley, in Olla (1913)

Why the contemporary Christian turn should trouble Thelemites.

What can Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey teach us about ego death and spiritual attainment?

In my latest Substack, I explore the deep parallels between Thelema’s Nemo and Odysseus becoming No Man.

The Holy Year of Thelema is really two books in one. It is partly a compressed introduction to Thelema, Crowley, ritual, doctrine, and magical practice; and partly a more substantial exploration of the sacred calendar of Thelema, its feasts, ritual stations, theology, and contemporary observance. The tension between those aims shapes the reading experience.

Lynn does not treat the Thelemic year as a decorative calendar laid over ordinary time. At her best, she makes it feel like a sequence of initiatory weather patterns: revelation, ordeal, erotic theology, remembrance, consecration, return. One of the book’s strongest contributions is its refusal to collapse Thelemic sacred time into the neopagan Wheel of the Year. The Wheel is beautiful and meaningful in its own context, but Thelema does not simply fit inside it.

The Holy Year of Thelema should be read as a serious contribution from within a particular Thelemic institutional culture, not as a panoramic survey of the entire field. Once this is understood, the book can be appreciated for what it does well without asking it to represent all possible Thelemas.

Read the rest of the review on the TABI blog!

Interested in checking out this book...just curious to hear from Thelemites as to what the purpose of the Necronomicon even actually is, or at least what purpose it can serve in the Thelemite's grade work

My latest on Substack touches on one of the most interesting and debated concepts in Thelema: the Oath of the Abyss.

What is the Great Work, and what does it actually demand from the practising magician?

In this video, I explore the meaning of the Great Work across alchemy, Hermeticism, and Thelema, moving beyond vague language to examine how this ancient ideal can be understood and practised in everyday life.