The Aspirant to the Great Work has performed all the necessary preliminaries. She has devoted most of her spare time to sitting in Asana, hurling pentagram rituals about with ease, and Rising on the Planes. In the home stretch, she has dedicated her every resource to that Supreme Invocation, that which will bring her Knowledge and Conversation of her Holy Guardian Angel. After nine or eighteen months (depending on which edition she’s using) she attains a perfect Samadhi in which the promised Visitation occurs. The Angel shows her many visions, after which she knows exactly why she is here, what she is supposed to do with her life, and the location of every sock lost in the dryer for the past twenty years. She now has her Divine Mission Statement, and to waver from it in so much as the style of her hair will invite disaster. But should she pursue it (without lust of result, of course) faithfully she will be rewarded with health, wealth, and length of days. Yea, health, wealth, and length of days. Amen.

It’s an appealing theme, but the character of the narrative is too obviously clean, too plainly teleological to attribute to it any serious validity. That the progenitor of this mythic synecdoche of attainment says as much in numerous places (directly in Magick in Theory and Practice, indirectly elsewhere) is hardly the only, or even strongest, argument in favor of this view.

The mythos is easily dealt with (though it’s surprising how many Thelemites do speak as though the above is what they expect). “It’s just a metaphor.” Yes. For what?

It is all well and good to say that something was not meant to be taken literally. After all, what’s wrong with a little mythologizing in order to inspire what can be very difficult work. Nothing, provided that the metaphor points to something functional.

The question then, is simply: does it?

Let us turn to The Message of the Master Therion, where Crowley formally delineates the idea of True Will:

Take this carefully; it seems to imply a theory that if every man and every woman did his and her will—the true will—there would be no clashing. “Every man and every woman is a star,” and each star moves in an appointed path without interference. There is plenty of room for all; it is only disorder that creates confusion.

In Magick in Theory and Practice we see much the same again:

7. Every man and every woman has a course, depending partly on the self, and partly on the environment which is natural and necessary for each. Anyone who is forced from his own course, either through not understanding himself, or through external opposition, comes into conflict with the order of the Universe, and suffers accordingly.

So, the basic idea behind the myth remains. We each have a “course” determined by circumstance and the “true nature” of our own being. Others have pointed out that this is more or less Aristotle’s entelechy of the human soul. Hardly the stuff of radical self-transformation.

The thing is, I don’t think Crowley actually believed this. In other places he denies the existence of a self, true or otherwise. In his Message he spins the idea of “pure will, unassuaged of purpose” will with “purpose unassuaged,” and tells us that “It is Nirvana, only dynamic instead of static—and this comes to the same thing in the end.”

The extent of Crowley’s doctrinal knowledge of Buddhism is a question that would send us on a major digression. I would say briefly that both the pioneer nature of Western knowledge of Buddhism in the early twentieth century combined with the “interruption” of the New Aeon’s arrival limited Crowley’s intellectual comprehension of the Dharma. It is also my opinion that he was enough of a skilled practitioner, and his immersion in the Buddhist milieu deep enough that many realizations leaked through without his being aware of the source.

He was certainly aware of the doctrine of Dependant Origination. What he describes in the above sounds a great deal like the circumstances one finds oneself in as a result of being time and space bound in manifestation with other time and space bound entities. It certainly doesn’t sound like Nirvana, “dynamic” or otherwise. The Aristotlean “soul” would also fall short of this lofty attainment.

Weaving together two threads we can get a third thing. We need to go back to the foundations of Crowley’s ontology to see what he was really getting at here, rather than simply accepting an idea that turns to air when examined closely. Along with the Buddhist perspective, Crowley employed the Qabalah in his Work.

From the Qabalah we get a different view of the soul. While still essentialist in the ultimate sense, it, like Buddhism, sees material manifestation as an epiphenomena. The Cosmos in this system is composed of Four Worlds, each more abstract as one ascends the Tree of Life. And the soul is similarly divided into five parts. It is the task of the practitioner to bring the various parts of the soul into unity.

This sounds more promising as a starting point for positive action. While the practices of thinking backwards and such can help us discover the particulars of our Ruach’s constitution, it’s asking a bit much for them also pilot us beyond that. In fact, Crowley suggests these practices not for 5=6, where one attains to K of HGA, but in 7=4, as preparatory to crossing the Abyss. The fact that his Message tells us to do them as a method of discovering our True Will tells us something important, I think.

First, it tells us that K of HGA is not equivalent to discovering ones True Will. Or, more accurately, it is not the whole of that process. It’s incomplete. One has not fulfilled the whole of the Law.

The Law is Love. Will makes it whole. The method of attaining Knowledge and Conversation is an act of Love. This is the nature of ones relationship to the Angel. Love.

Through that Love, we learn to pilot through manifestation, those particulars into which we have been born. Through this we get hints of the bigger, broader reality behind it. And then, after we have heard our Angel’s voice in everything, we cross, and fine the True Will behind the forms we have been playing with.

And more: the Angel can only teach us the best way to manage our Will. We have always been doing so, just poorly. Not only have you no right but to do your Will. You have no say in the matter. You can only do it well or not. Everyone is a Thelemite. Some people just know it.

This is by no means a complete picture. What I have attempted is to divorce the idea of True Will from the almost Calvinist determinism that seems to be the common understanding.

But still:

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Love is the Law, Love under Will.

Concepts can be considered Islands brought out of the sea of terra incognita through sheer mental effort. From the Etic sea comes an Emic cross section. Like the manifestation of the Elder Gods, whose nature is so abstract and strange that They impact our reality only in the same way a sound wave can be reflected on a metal plate coated in sand. .

When we learn magick, we are given a set of Signatures, essences which can be used to call forth corresponding potentials from Chaos. Over time, concepts and maps get built around these Signatures. An example of these would be the Tree of Life.

An interesting phenomena occurs when individuals deal with the Tree of Life on the one hand, and the Qlippoth on the other. Those dealing with the Tree have basically the same kinds of experiences. They encounter the same entities and so forth. Failure to do so is taken to mean that one has missed the mark. .

The Qlippoth are a different story. Some working with the “Adverse Tree” experience eldritch, Lovecraftian horrors. Others simply enter formless spaces with only vauge impressions as to where they are. .

It would appear that formalization of the Tree has created an “Island” which the repeated practice of Aspirants has made more or less constant. The Qlippoth, long defamed and shunned, have no such formalization. Each has a title, and an association with a Sepiroth to which they said to be “opposite” or the “unbalanced energies” of. But there is no sustained practice at the level that the Tree has received. .

I would argue that exploration of already formed Islands constitutes training and study, while exploration of the Qlippoth is an example of the real purpose of magick. That is, to bring something new through to manifestation. Magick has long been at the vanguard of social change. America was a dream in the eyes of occultists like John Dee and Bacon long before anyone brought it into being. Liber AL heralded the beginning of the end of the Modern age of centralized “Truth” and the beginning of atomized “Truths.” .

It is as if long ages of practice have created both the means for crafting a vehicle (think Iamblichan Theurgy) and a map of the previously constructed Islands. With each new Island, magick opens a Gate that brings forth changes in the world. .

Each “doctrine” can thus be considered less a representation of reality than a Working in and of itself. It is the discovery of a potential, which it then seeks to integrate in the matrix of preexisting Workings. .

Finally, it should be remembered that each Island is only a relatively solid and coherent aggregate of Chaos. Thus one will encounter morphings, non-local communications with similarly constituted Islands. Sirens that sing tunes in harmony with those a thousand miles away. .

The choice facing the magician, at a certain point in their career, is whether to stay on an Island, and like a Lotus Eater avoid the shiftings of Chaos around them. Or to venture out on their self-made vehicle, the Boat of Their Soul, and begin crafting/discovering new Islands in the Terra Incognita. .

The common conception of the Qlippoth is quite simple: they are the personifications of the imbalanced force of a particular Sephira. This very simple idea, however, does not begin to explain why they should be considered “evil.” “Evil” implies a moral choice, a decision on the part of these forces. Where there is no choice, there can be no evil. “Evil” also implies an essence or nature, something inherent in the structure of the personification that should not obtain in the context of a continuum of “balance and imbalance.”

There are a number of ways to model the Qlippoth. The one encountered most often is that suggested by the literal meaning of the word “Qlippoth”: shells. This model also tends to associate the Qlippoth with “filth” and, most importantly for our purposes “excrement.” The reason that this is important is that excrement is a deeply rooted metaphor for territorial conflict. The second neurological circuit in the human brain concerns itself with boundaries and the aggression needed to defend them. It is wired into the set of nerves that connects to the anus. As Robert Anton Wilson says “Wild primates mark their territory with excrement, domesticated primates (humans) mark their territory with ink excretions on paper.” Wilson further points out the language of territorial conflict: “Shove it up your ass”, “You’re full of shit” and so on.

The Qlippoth are also typically pictured in a second Tree that either lies beneath the “good” Tree of Life, or, in Kenneth Grant’s system, behind it (sort of). Given the territorial language used to describe the Qlippoth, I would rather see them as the “Shadow” of the “Good” Sephiroth. They are a part of them, but are rejected, and lay outside the borders, “beyond the pale”.

The Qlippoth could be considered, then, the “ghetto” of the Tree of Life. They may in fact be the result of imbalance in a particular Sephira, just as a ghetto can be considered the result of an imbalanced economic system. But they have acquired a moral overlay, just as a ghetto has. They exist because the “system” of a Sephira depends or is assumed to depend on focusing on the “acceptable” manifestations of that energy. Yet they are treated, by virtue of their very victimhood, quite literally like shit. In exactly the same way that the residents of a ghetto are treated as expendable by large corporations who are allowed to build factories which spew out carcinogenic chemicals in just these economically depressed areas.

This is where the metaphor becomes more pertinent. A ghetto is not simply a modern concentration camp with invisible borders that keeps the consequences of economic unsustainability at bay. It is a breeding ground for crime and disease. Thus it represents a real danger to the well being of the people who benefit from the system that created it.

Likewise, we make a mistake if we continue to moralize and consider the Qlippoth entities which are inherently evil, rather than circumstantially dangerous. It is not the Qlippoth which are evil, but the way the Qabalistic system has been used as a way to hide from unpleasant, or simply strange, elements of our own being.

We do well to remember that, in the Abremilin Operation, the first task after achieving Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Gaurdian Angel is to invoke and subdue the Four Princes of Evil. A less domination oriented way of saying this would say invite the Shadow in, and discover with it how you can both work together to achieve the Great Work.

“Evil” is a concept which divides Self from Other. It murders the nuance of a situation, and reduces it to a dualistic “war” that achieves only a partial and temporary victory. As Magi, it is our task to transcend, not only our own genetics and programming, but the oppressive and violent models which have been ingrained in even those systems designed to aid the Great Work. By entering the Ghetto of our own being, we can liberate the valuable and unique elements that lie, probably depressed in a gutter, waiting for their chance to awaken.

The phrase “beyond the pale” originated in the 18th Century (at the latest) and the occupation of Ireland by English rulers and troops. The “pale” was the area surrounding Protestant Dublin, and was guarded by English soldiers. The area beyond was considered dangerous, full of wild, red headed Irish Catholics who probably turned into banshees at night and robbed cradles and impregnated good English wives with their unholy Papist seed.

So, once again we see that a term used to denote extreme moral transgression has it’s roots in classism, racism, and fear of the Other. It would be interesting if we hadn’t come to expect as much. .

If we are to Wake Up, “beyond the pale” is exactly where we must go. Not because of any kind of love for what some call the “dark side” but because whole regions of our psyche have been declared “no go zones” by society and whatever other influences caused us to build a guarded area around our minds. We then call this compound (and do not doubt Camus when he tells us we live in an armed camp) the “real world”..

Transgression may well start out as an overt attempt to catch the guard’s attention. We offend and outrage them, trying to show that we are free of their control. .

But all the while, under their shocked countenance, the guards are laughing at us. In our first explorations into the shadow of society, we have done little else but affirm the opinions of the guards, the censors, the dictators. We have acted like Grand Guingol clowns. Our outrageous actions have been a parody of what they expect, not a true exploration of the Outside. .

The moment we realize this is when the real journeys Beyond the Pale begin. We take off our makeup and put on simple, unobtrusive garments that allow us to sneak out the back way. Then we begin to see the Outside, the Other, for what it really is. Some of it is friendly, some of it ugly, some of it beautiful. .

Now we begin to make friends on the Outside, and they tell us things we didn’t know before, things we ignored when we were parading before the guards. We bring them through the back doors, entertain them in our private rooms, perhaps make love to them. Eventually, we have inside the walls a fifth column, and the city will never be the same. The walls may never fully crumble, but the policies of our watch will be far more liberal than before. .