In Which I Dump Out My Purse

Do what thou wilt or whatever.

I’m Nick, the Melaninated Magician. I’m a 33-year-old Black Queer Non-Binary person (they/them in the chat if you please). I’m married and live in small-town West Central Florida with my wife and my in-laws. For the last year-ish, I’ve been doing HR work for a medium-sized healthcare company; prior to that, I was professionally political. I’m originally from Chicago and have lived all across the US. I consider myself a pretty progressive person; the thing that holds me back from being a leftist honestly is that I’m not pissed enough for it. I’ve got some mental health conditions that I have recently come to terms with mean that I’m disabled; so does my wife.

All of these things inform how I engage with my religious life. I guess I’m a Thelemite? My apprehension at claiming that label is informed by all those identities, but they also explain why Thelema is central to my self-conception. There is so much space to be oneself built into the Law of Thelema. But so much of that space is absolutely crushed by the spaces, physical and virtual, that Thelemites build and maintain. That isn’t a unique perspective, but it’s worth it to lay out as groundwork for this blog’s raison d’être.

There are so many reasons why Organized Thelema doesn’t work right now, and many of those have to do with the lack of space for people to actually interrogate what it means to “Do what thou wilt.”

Some of it is about the centrality of Crowley to all of this. Some of it is about the comfort that some Thelemic “leaders” have with sitting at the same table as Fascists. Some of it is about other Thelemic “leaders” actually BEING Fascists. Some of it is about the culture and theology surrounding Thelema creating aesthetic space almost exclusively for Goths and their derivatives and too much intellectual space for edgelords and assholes. And those things are all reinforced by the fact that there are only about 31 Thelemites: disagreements are actually only about the same 5 things, and there are only 2 different perspectives on each of those 5 things.

The only way any of this changes is for those of us who see these problems to be bold and speak up in public. I’m aiming to do that. You should expect to read some stuff about the Occulture writ large, some stuff about Thelema as a culture, and some stuff about Thelema as a philosophy. I’ll do my best to be honest about where I’m being pretty traditional, and where I’ve left orthodoxy at the door. If we’re lucky, it’ll give some space for good discussion. If we aren’t, I’m about to get a bunch of Nazis in my mentions.

Either way, I’m coming for throats.

Love is the law; love under will or something.

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