What Aleister Crowley Meant by True Will

Eleven words made Aleister Crowley notorious, and almost everyone who repeats them gets them wrong. "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law" sounds like a permission slip for appetite. Crowley, a man with no shortage of appetites, insisted it meant something closer to the opposite: find the one thing a life is actually for, then do nothing else.

That gap between the slogan and its meaning is the whole story of Thelema, the religion he founded.

Three afternoons in Cairo

Crowley was born in 1875 in Royal Leamington Spa, studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and in 1898 joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, London's leading school of ceremonial magic. By the spring of 1904 he was in Cairo on honeymoon with his wife, Rose Kelly.

What happened there is documented by Crowley alone, which is worth keeping in view. In his telling, Rose led him to an Egyptian funerary stele in the Bulaq Museum. It carried the inventory number 666. Then, on April 8, 9 and 10, between noon and one o'clock each day, a voice in their apartment dictated three short chapters. He named the speaker Aiwass, described it as an intelligence beyond the human, and later identified it as his own Holy Guardian Angel.

The result was The Book of the Law, a prose poem in three chapters, each given to an Egyptian-styled deity: Nuit, Hadit and Ra-Hoor-Khuit. Britannica is careful to say the book was allegedly transmitted, and that caution is correct. There is no evidence for the dictation beyond the testimony of the man holding the pen. Writers including the biographer Lawrence Sutin have argued that the text reflects Crowley's own mind and literary habits rather than an outside source.

One detail complicates the cynical reading, though it does not settle anything. By his own account Crowley disliked what he had written, found the violent third chapter repellent, and resisted the book before building his life around it.

An old motto, turned inside out

Thelema is simply the Greek word for will, and Crowley was not the first to hang a philosophy on it. In the 16th century François Rabelais imagined an Abbey of Thélème whose single rule was that residents should do as they pleased, on the theory that well-bred, virtuous people left to themselves would behave well. In the 18th century Sir Francis Dashwood borrowed the motto for his Hell-fire Club at Medmenham Abbey, where it covered obscene parodies of Christian ritual.