Aleister Crowley

From the Lesson

Nietzsche wrote the diagnosis. Jung built the clinic. But between the diagnosis and the clinic there is a third figure whose life is the operative demonstration of what a transvaluation of values actually looks like when a single human being tries to live it — Aleister Crowley (1875–1947).

In April 1904, in a rented flat above the Boulaq Museum in Cairo, Crowley received (or, if one prefers, produced) the text he named Liber AL vel Legis — The Book of the Law. Its central formula, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law," is not a licence for appetite but a compressed restatement of the exact ethical instrument Nietzsche had forged twenty years earlier in Also sprach Zarathustra: the doctrine of self-legislation, of the individual as the source of his own values, of the sovereign yes of the child at the end of the Three Metamorphoses.

Thelema as Operative Nietzscheanism

Nietzsche's Übermensch is a horizon; Crowley's True Will is a discipline for walking toward it. Where Nietzsche says become who you are, Crowley builds a curriculum for finding out who that is: a graded system of yogic, ritual, and analytical exercises (Liber O, Liber E, Liber Jugorum, Liber Resh) whose stated purpose is to strip away the inherited values Nietzsche had named as slave-morality, and to leave the practitioner face-to-face with what the A∴A∴ charter calls the Holy Guardian Angel — a term that, translated out of the Golden Dawn's romantic vocabulary, means very nearly what Jung would soon be calling the Self.

"Do what thou wilt" is not "do as you please." Crowley is emphatic on this point in the Old Comment and New Comment to Liber AL, and in the essays collected as Magick in Theory and Practice (Paris, 1929). Thelema — Greek θέλημα, will in the deep sense — is the trajectory of your True Will, and finding it requires the exact hygiene Nietzsche prescribed: the sounding of every inherited idol, the withdrawal of every priestly consolation, the refusal of every metaphysical debt.

Will to Power → True Will

Nietzsche's Wille zur Macht was mistranslated and misused for a century as an appetite for domination. Crowley, who read Nietzsche in the original German and who quotes Zarathustra explicitly in the Confessions (Chapter 47), understood it correctly: Wille zur Macht is the drive of a living thing toward the fullest expression of what it structurally is. An oak tree's will to power is to become the biggest, most fully oak-shaped oak it is capable of becoming; a river's will to power is to flow. A human being's will to power is the True Will — the trajectory unique to that individual, encoded (Crowley says) in the natal chart, the ancestry, the body, the daimon — and the ethical task is to discover and to travel it.

This is the transvaluation made flesh. Where slave morality says be small so you may be safe, Thelema says find your True Will and travel it, even if it cost you the world. Where the priest says submit, the Thelemite says know. Where the herd says fit in, the Thelemite says find your Star. The formula "Every man and every woman is a star" (Liber AL I:3) is the transvaluation of values expressed as cosmology: no hierarchy of souls, no chosen people, no priestly mediation — every consciousness a sovereign centre of its own orbit.

The Cautionary Shadow

Crowley's life is also the demonstration of what happens when the Nietzschean hygiene is not fully applied. His addictions (heroin, cocaine), his cruelties, his squandered inheritance, his failures as a father — these are not to be edited out. They are the shadow of the operation, and they are the reason Nietzsche's diagnostic must always precede Crowley's operative work. The Antichrist-hygiene is the antibody against the specific temptations to which the working magician is exposed: the inflation of the ego that mistakes itself for the Self, the addiction to intensity that mistakes noise for signal, the collapse of discipline into appetite. Read Crowley without Nietzsche and you get a fashionable libertine; read Crowley with Nietzsche and you get a laboratory notebook of the magnum opus — including its explosions.