Kemeticism is not Thelema

It's not Hermetic either

[Sophia from the Golden Girls voice] Picture it: Cairo, 1904. An eccentric occultist named Aleister Crowley and his new wife Rose are touring the Great Pyramid of Khufu for their honeymoon. Suddenly, Rose gets a vision and leads her husband to a funerary stele in the Cairo museum. Later, he will receive a new holy book from three Egyptian Gods, communicated through a being called Aiwass, that will usher in a new era of humanity.

Thus begins the saga of Aleister Crowley’s occult/religious system (there are still arguments as to if it is one or both) known as Thelema. It envisions humanity being ruled by three major periods or Aeons: the Aeon of Isis (matriarchal hunter gatherer societies focusing on an earth goddess), the Aeon of Osiris (patriarchal dying and rising gods) and the new Aeon of Horus (personal liberation and individualism, among other things). Thelema’s concept of a “new aeon” paved the way for the New Age concept later in the 1960s, inspired Jack Parsons of JPL and “Strange Angel “fame, and was used by Gerald Gardener to construct Wicca. Even L. Ron Hubbard spent time around Parsons and other Thelemites, and his system of Scientology may have been inspired in part by them.

The appearance of Egyptian deities (specifically the sky Goddess Nut, and two forms of Horus - Ra Who is Horus on the Two Horizons, and Horus of Edfu) along with the funeral stele of a priest of Khonsu as centerpieces of the system, and incorporation of solar adorations linked to Ra, Atum, Hathor and Kheper-Ra, make Thelema appear to be a continuation of the ancient Egyptian religion. However, when you scratch the surface, it becomes much less apparent.

For one thing, the ancient Egyptian religion was not a “revealed religion”: it has no holy books like the Bible or Quaran that were alleged to have been direct communications from deities. The concept of such a “Book of the Law” is more rooted in Crowley’s upbringing among the Plymouth Brethren, a Puritan Protestant Christian sect. This group in turn was influenced by Joseph Darby, who pioneered the concept of dispensationalism that many Evangelical denominations still hold to. The Three Aeons also trace back to the Joachimites who postulated three ages of mankind, only assigned to the Christian trinity rather than an Egyptian one. This too was picked up by many Puritans.

Crowley’s system also makes significant use of the Jewish Kabbalah (or at least a hermetic interpretation of it), renaissance grimoires like the Lesser Key of Solomon, the Book of Abramelin the Mage, and Elizabethan polymath John Dee’s angelic Enochian magic. While some of these may have roots in antiquity, their development is better traced to much later Hellenic, rather than Egyptian, thought. He also was heavily influenced by certain schools of Hindu Tantra and the I Ching, which were popular in his time among occultists thanks to the Theosophical Society. These arguably form the actual theological and philosophical core of Thelema.

The Egyptian Gods themselves in Thelema are also reinterpreted and turned into concepts rather than deities. Nut (called Nuit in Thelema) is turned from a Goddess of the night sky into a generalized concept of “infinite expansion”, while Horus of Edfu (called Hadit) is turned into “infinite contraction”, seen as fundamental forces of matter and motion, respectively. Ra who is Horus on the two Horizons (called Ra Hoor Khuit) is portrayed in the Book of the Law a bloodthirsty warrior, and both he and Hadit proclaim a Nietzschean ubermesnch attitude to the world at large. Ignored are the attributes of Horus that make him give light and life to all living beings, who establishes ethics and creates the universe, who destroys Set and the enemies of the kingdom out of a desire to smite evil, rather than conquest itself. In fact, these Gods are called “Egyptoid” rather than Egyptian by many Thelemites, recognizing their use as symbols with only a superficial veneer of Egyptian symbolism to them, divorced from their original theological definition and context.

Speaking of ethics, the one commandment in Thelema is “Do what thou wilt”. This is not simply “do what you want” but rather a mandate to discover the divine purpose for your life and follow it, while not interfering with others. All well and good, but in practice it ends up in bespoke moralities and relativism that would have violated Egyptian concepts of Ma’at that established a single objective set of guidelines for all mankind. The goal of attainment in Thelema also varies from Kemeticism: Thelema emphasizes tantric concepts of reincarnation and the ultimate desire to transcend all identity and selfhood to merge into divinity in this lifetime, while Kemeticism sees theosis as retaining one’s individuality while being among the divine in the afterlife. Crowley’s system of attainment incorporates sex magic, again a nod to certain eastern schools, while in Egypt sexual activity was taboo within the temple. Even their approaches to duality vary: in Thelema, opposites must be transcended and ultimately seen as no different from each other. In Kemeticism, opposites are intended to be integrated while retaining their distinction, exemplified in the political union of Upper and Lower Egypt.

We at the Temple of Horus on the Prairie know many Thelemites, and I have found them overall to be engaging, well-read and fascinating to chat with. I have no ill will to them, but I do need to make it clear that Thelema is not Kemeticism. They differ in both theology, metaphysics, influences and ethics.

Regardless, do Thelemites still worship Horus and the other Gods they mention? A case can be made that they still do. While reconstructionists prefer the ancient prayers and hymns in the spirit of authenticity, and because they give the most accurate portrayal of the Gods, people of all religions throughout history have made their own prayers, and offshoot sects are not uncommon. Giving adorations to Horus, Ra, Atum, Nuit, Hathor and Kheper-Ra, even if they are modern creations sprinkled with funerary texts, are sill adorations. Perhaps a comparison can be made between mainstream Christianity and Mormonism; the latter being a wild branch of the former that incorporated many new contemporary ideas into their theology, but is different enough to be distinct from the rest of the spectrum of Christian orthodoxy or heterodoxy.