Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, love is the law, love under will, there is no law beyond Do what thou wilt
Aleister Crowley died in 1947 at the age of seventy-two, he was cremated, and he left behind a philosophy that’d change occult circles forever. For twenty years after his death, his name and his voluminous writings remained for the most part undiscovered by many, then, on June 1st 1967, Crowleys face emerged, peering out at us from between the faces of Indian holy man Swami Sri Yukteswar and sex goddess Mae West, yes, I’m referring to the Beatles’ album cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The cover art was the creation of artist Peter Blake, but the inclusion of Aleister Crowley was because John Lennon “liked” the poetry of the “wickedest man in the world”.
I am not in any way suggesting that the Beatles gave rise to the popularity in Crowley in occult circles, what I am saying however, is that those, and their contemporaries, were among the first to react to a dramatic shift in human consciousness. What I’m saying, with regards to shifting human consciousness is not a new concept, the ancients believed in ages, such as the Golden Age, when humanity walked with the gods, or the Dark Age, when the gods abandoned us. Hindus believe in ages called Yugas, wherein there’s the rise and fall of cycles over thousands of millennia as our entire solar system careens around the galactic center in a huge elliptical orbit. Astrologers relate it to the zodiac, wherein we’ve left the Age of Pisces into the Age of Aquarius. But Crowley, he believed in Aeons, such as the Aeon of Isis, which was when mankind worshipped a great goddess, symbolized through Isis, then into the Aeon of Osiris, wherein mankind worshipped a singular male God, symbolized through Osiris, however, Thelemites now believe we’re in the Aeon of Horus, the individualistic Crowned and Conquering Child god, in this Aeon, Thelemites believe that humanity shall leave behind the supposed tyranny of Abrahamic religions and enter a time of greater consciousness and self-actualization.
Now you may ask why I’ve said all this, well this information illustrates the root point of understanding this religion, which is that over the past hundred or so years there has been a profound transfiguration in human consciousness, and now we’re all functioning at a completely new level than we used to, and that religion I refer to… is Thelema.