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From: tim@k.cs.cmu.edu.ARPA (Tim Maroney)
Newsgroups: net.politics,net.religion
Subject: Re: "Secular Humanism" banned (Crowley & Will)
Message-ID: <535@k.cs.cmu.edu.ARPA>
Date: Sat, 14-Sep-85 08:15:54 EDT
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Posted: Sat Sep 14 08:15:54 1985
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Thanks, Laura; rather weird that you beat both me and Owen (the two
Thelemites here) to Crowley's defense, but it's appreciated.  I posted
Crowley's "The Message of the Master Therion" as sent to me by Josh Gordon,
when I was sending the New Age mailing list digests to net.religion a few
months ago (before fundamentalist flak convinced me that it was a bad idea).
This explained "Will" in fairly clear terms.  Now I'll post part two of my
"Introduction to Thelema", still in production, which deals explicitly with
"Will" as a basis for a moral system.  Or, as Bruce Smith would say, "Would
you like some Thelemic literature?  Would you like to buy a flower?"

Thelemic Morality
=================

The fundamental tenet of Thelema is that the supreme moral principle is
"Do what thou wilt."  First, look at what this is not.  Governments and
monotheistic religions adopt a uniform approach to morality, that of a list
of taboos.  Although the Mosaic Law is rather different in content from the
U.S. Penal Code, it is identical in approach.  A subset of all possible
actions is set down in writing and forbidden.  The worthlessness of this
approach should be clear: no such list can exhaust the possibilities of
immorality, and any attempt to make it do so creates an impenetrable
document.  The common man will never be able to do more than scratch its
surface; only a few scholars or lawyers will be able to apprehend its
entirety.  Thus the list of taboos forms no real moral guide.  It is to
virtually everyone just an ambiguous source of possible punishment, an
unknowable and impersonal force demanding fear and respect.

On the surface of it, "Do what thou wilt" is just as bad, or worse.  It
would seem to mean that one should do whatever one pleases, without regard
for morality.  However, the Book says more than "There is no law beyond
Do what thou wilt."  Allow me to quote briefly:

"The Word of Sin is Restriction....  thou hast no right but to do thy will.
Do that, and no other shall say nay.  For pure will, unassuaged of purpose,
delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect."

Clearly this "will" is rather different from the animal will, or that which
is normally called "force of will" or "will-power".  It is a divine, a
transcendent, Will which is referred to.  All "Sin", all "wrong", is but
the Restriction of that divine Will.  The relation to Taoistic concepts in
the latter sentence is apparent.

So now consider a society in which all keep to "Do what thou wilt".  None
imposes an obstacle to the Will of another; each seeks to know and do
her or his own Will to the fullest.  No one is content to sit all day,
rotting the mind with passive stimuli, kissing ass at work and squelching
any individual thoughts that may arise by mischance.  (We have all seen the
ostracism that afflicts those who dare disagree with their neighbors, and
would never dare incur that or abstain from its infliction, would we?  Such
is the cry of the middle classes.)  No one lives by deceiving others or
by violating their will to own property; no one kills, rapes, or commits
other crimes which restrict the Will of another.  In short, the
completeness of morality, both all aspiration to Godhead and all worthwhile
taboo, is expressed in that one phrase, "Do what thou wilt".

Of course, such a society will never exist, but morality is inherently
quixotic.  (Why will it never exist?  Because institutions devoted to the
lists of taboos exist, and under "Do what thou wilt" it would be immoral to
destroy them by force, provided they do not directly attack our freedoms.)
Society can never reach perfection; interpersonal morality consists largely
of determining what that impossible perfection would be like, and conforming
one's own behavior to it as much as possible.

There is a real psychological difference between the Law of "Do what thou
wilt", and the list of taboos.  To verify this, try to explain "Do what thou
wilt" to a fundamentalist Christian, an Orthodox Jew, or some other who is
emotionally or dogmatically attached to one of the lists of taboos.  The
person will prove simply incapable of understanding non-taboo-based morality
in most cases.  The difference is what Crowley liked to call the
Sin-Complex.  The taboo-monger cries "Not my will but thine be done!"  He
sees himself as a cringing worm, bereft of all virtue and capable of good
only when under the control (or at the least guidance) of some force outside
himself.  This attitude is useful to religious and political leaders, and
thus its predominance.  Who understands and follows the Law knows that,
though subject to a myriad ignoble attractions and repulsions, she or he
contains the divine spark that redeems all the rest, awaiting only the Work
to bring it to light.  The psychological benefits of realizing that one's
core is good, not evil, are immense; in fact, there is a school of
psychoanalysis, the Rogerian, which deals with nothing else.

Thelema is the foe of all sexism.  The third verse of the first chapter (a
rather prominent position!) is "Every man and every woman is a star", thus
explicitly denying all sexist ideas.  Furthermore, the cosmological model
involves the uniting of the goddess Nuit with the god Hadit to form the
hermaphroditic Ra-Hoor-Khuit, rather than a male god spurting out the
Universe in an act of masturbatory genesis, or a female goddess who
parthenogenetically birthed all life.  The Universe is the dynamic union of
male and female, not the creation of either alone.  Numerous parallels from
Hinduism and Buddhism will no doubt occur to the East-inclined reader.

The only "evil" is not direct restriction of the Will.  The release from
restriction can create an unbalanced response which is not in conformity
with the Will.  Rather than returning to the Will, one may swing to the
opposite extreme from the former restriction.  For instance, a slave who
seeks to enslave his or her former masters rather than seek equality for
all, or a person who reacts against religion dominated by a single gender by
forming a religion dominated by the other gender rather than a sexually
egalitarian religion, or someone who reacts against hypocritical standards
of "good" by identifying himself with "evil".  These are extreme cases; the
unbalance involved in reaction against Restriction can be far more subtle.

One predominant feature of morality is the carrot and stick aspect.  Why
should you follow an inconvenient moral code?  In the list of taboos
approach, the answer is simple: you will be punished if you transgress, and
rewarded if you keep to the straight and narrow.  The Hindu idea of karma
and its variants such as the Law of Three are similar.  There is no
"official" Thelemic position.  It seems evident that seeking to know and do
the Will will lead to a less painful and restricted life.  Crowley himself
believed in karma in the literal reincarnatory sense; I don't believe in the
afterlife, but I do feel that acts of deceit and such carry their own
psychological penalty which is immediate and self-inflicted.  I don't mean
guilt, which fails to effect many people; I mean paranoia in its overt and
subtle manifestations.  Most people are insufficiently introspective to see
that their enjoyment of life is dwindling when they increase their use of
deceit, but the negative effects are no less real for that.  The crooked
businessman, the liar, the thief, the murderer: all are always on the run,
always looking over their shoulder to see who's either trying to do to them
what they have done to others or found out about their misdeeds.  The
attitude of these people is always that the world is "dog eat dog"; they can
never reach any real contentment or rest.

Recently, an attempt has been made to improve upon "Do what thou wilt" by
prepending "An it harm none".  I ask that anyone devoted to this formula
realize that I am only speaking what seems to me the truth, the result of
sincere analysis.  I formerly accepted this formulation, but came to see
that it was seriously flawed.

The "Wiccan Rede", as the modified version of the Law is usually called,
misses the point of "Do what thou wilt" from both the negative and positive
perspectives.  Negatively, the Law is non-interference, not non-harm.  The
will to harm is valid in unusual cases.  For instance, an Allied soldier in
the Second World War should not be called "immoral" for removing Axis
soldiers from incarnation: the Nazis were deliberately engaged in an
enterprise whose goal was to thwart the wills of all Jews, and any others
who disagreed with the Nazi party line.  Yet under the Rede that Allied
soldier could not have pulled his trigger, because it is harming someone to
injure or kill him.  It is no use to object that under the Rede the Nazi
would be likewise restrained, because such situations do arise in the real
world and must be dealt with.  Under the Law it is clear: the Nazi is not
acting in accord with his will because he acts to block the wills of others,
and therefore it is not a violation of his divine will to force him to stop
this interference.

Certainly causing harm is something any sane person seeks to avoid whenever
possible, and most obstacles can be gone around instead of destroyed.  But
to elevate non-harm to a primary position in one's morality is to ignore the
reality, that harming is not only justifiable but necessary in some cases.
At the turn of the century, many occultists and theosophists staggered under
the burdens of the right wing, such as anti-Semitism and fascism; as the
next century approaches, many occultists and witches stagger under the
burdens of the left, such as pacifism.  Both must be transcended.

It is also possible to interfere with another's Will without doing any
"harm" as far as the person interfering is aware.  To pick another extremely
clear-cut example, Soviet psychiatrists honestly believe that to oppose the
state is a mental illness.  They are thus, as far as they know, not harming
someone by removing such opposition.  All "harm" short of the infliction of
physical injury is a subjective judgment, so the actions of the brainwashers
are in accord with the Rede.  Under the Law, however, no such fallacy is
possible:  that this is interference with the person is an undeniable,
objective fact.  A closer-to-home example of "harmless" interference, and of
how it is permitted by the Rede, is provided by the president of Covenant of
the Goddess who told me she would like to see violent sports made illegal.

Of course, it is possible to define harm in terms of interference, but then
why not just use the original version?  Still, I can't see anything wrong
with the Rede under that interpretation, except that it is still only the
negative, the forbidding, half of morality.

The positive perspective on the Law is that one is to learn and do the
divine Will.  This is wholly lacking in the modified version.  The Rede can
be paraphrased as "Do whatever you feel like so long as it doesn't hurt
anyone."  The mere human will is the only thing mentioned: at least, I have
never seen any Wiccan commentator take the Rede in any other light.  Where
is the aspiration in this?  Where is the moral obligation to realize one's
fullest potential?  Morality is not simply to refrain from evil, but to do
good; but you would never know that from the Rede.

I have spent so much time on this because pacifism is a serious fallacy, a
Restriction of the Will of the same order as a taboo against premarital sex.
In fact, if one examines the beliefs of the leading original exponents of
pacifism in this century, such as Gandhi, their sexual priggishness is
obvious.  This is not a coincidence.  Remember always that to strike is as
blessed as to stroke, provided only that it is the true Will to do so.
-=-
Tim Maroney, Carnegie-Mellon University, Networking
ARPA:	Tim.Maroney@CMU-CS-K	uucp:	seismo!cmu-cs-k!tim
CompuServe:	74176,1360	audio:	shout "Hey, Tim!"


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