Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Human beings have evolved as symbol makers and symbol users. We communicate in language. We are motivated by emotion. We dream in metaphors. We survive by working together.
Our ability to work together has provided astonishing benefits to us and promoted the rise of large civilisations, but it has also caused great harm to the natural world that we depend on for support. Never more so than today.
As a result, we are facing a catastrophic environmental reckoning. Both ignorance and awareness of that glaring reality has been dividing us. One faction strives to conserve a halcyon past that never was. Another prepares to survive a future whose details are yet unrealised.
In 2023, the Opus Dei affiliated Kevin D. Roberts, President of the Heritage Foundation, published the following in his introduction to Project 2025.
Environmental ideologues would ban the fuels that run almost all of the world’s cars, planes, factories, farms, and electricity grids. Abandoning confidence in human resilience and creativity in responding to the challenges of the future would raise impediments to the most meaningful human activities. They would stand human affairs on their head, regarding human activity itself as fundamentally a threat to be sacrificed to the god of nature.
– Project 2025, Introduction, page 11
To a conservative Roman Catholic Christian the “god [lower-case ‘g’] of nature” would be Satan.
In a Ross Douthat interview with Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of Palantir Technologies, Mr. Thiel said:
The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop. … In our world, it’s far more likely to be Greta Thunberg.
– The New York Times, 26 June 2025
Greta Thunberg has been an effective advocate for awareness of climate change.
Kevin Roberts and Peter Thiel, two notable Christian ideologues talking about Armageddon, identify present-day climate change activists as their adversaries, Satan or Antichrist.
Gods are symbols in the form of persons. Gods are real symbols but imaginary persons. The class includes gods and goddesses of every type and description, supernatural one-and-only-true God Almighties, angels, including Holy Guardian Angels, devils, heroes, and villains.
We attribute Theory of Mind to them. Gods reside in our subconscious minds, as well as our waking awareness, and can root as deeply as the pre-verbal unconscious mind. They become part of the furniture of our sense of self.
Self exists in relation to others. In the absence of effective relationships with others, the sense of self becomes unreliable, which in turn, causes anxiety. Relationship with a permanent and unchanging God reduces anxiety and may provide a sense of control, however illusory. Likewise, a belief in Karma explains your social status, however spurious the logic.
Change is hard. It often feels easier to accept a bad situation than to face the unknown.
Which would be more successful in a collapsing social order: a collection of obedient followers lead by a hero, or a swarm of independent operators each self-lead yet fulfilling a common purpose? To put it another way, is God out there ruling over what is born or is God in here inspiring genius?
The social order I and my fellow baby-boomers have taken for granted is collapsing, slowly but surely, even as I write these words. What is collapsing is a culture of the domination and exploitation of nature. In the new world, we must cooperate with nature to survive.
Arguably, the first god is the breast. A more or less universal word for mother is some form of mama or nana. This echoes vocalisation of suckling: amn-amn-amn. Conversely, vocalisation of spitting out of the breast would be apa, ad-ad-ad, or bab-pbb, leading to papa, dad, or baba: words meaning father.
After the breast, the infant’s world expands to include mother as a separate person, father, siblings, dolls, grandparents, other children, et cetera in the development of self.
In childhood, the self is nebulous and identified within the family. With the onset of puberty, we face separation anxiety and identity crisis. In the arousal of sexual desire, the self solidifies, becomes more personal, and develops in relation to society outside the family.
The dark and mysterious unconscious mind finds its shape in childhood. In adults, the unconscious can be intentionally programmed by willed sexual expression. But what would cause you to reprogram elements of your unconscious? In a word: loss.
A mind programmed by shame becomes rigid and inflexible, less able to respond effectively to change. Humiliation of children as a means of pedagogy by parents, teachers, and other authority figures is endemic around the world. Those batted between praise and humiliation, pride and shame, are divided within: a loss of personal integrity.
With the oncoming environmental collapse will come social collapse, first evinced by authoritarian and totalitarian government restrictions aimed at preserving obsolete institutions. Humans naturally rebel when they discover there is no real safety in external control and oppression.
Changing past assumptions and behaviour patterns is difficult. We feel the loss of ego support before we feel the greater benefits of moulting obsolete versions of self. It is easy to get stuck in rigidity, particularly when we project self into a god, hero, or an antique set of moral precepts.
Tell people there’s an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.
– George Carlin
Everyone who imagines an invisible man in the sky, imagines a different invisible man in the sky. Every Christian prays to their own versions of Jesus. The hopeful child of Christmas is not the same symbol-in-the-form-of-a-person as the tortured seditionist of Easter.
The hateful adversary of Abrahamists is not the same Satan as my hawk-headed Sun-god of nature who sees beyond the horizons of birth and death. Or is it? Are not the cycles of birth, procreation, death, and rebirth the adversaries of those who wish to live forever in an imagined paradise as separate and unique individuals?
After all, nothing of the self survives the death-birth boundary between incarnations. Does anything? Yes. I call it Eternal Self (Atman). Aleister Crowley called it Holy Guardian Angel, after Abramelin. But the reality hiding behind these labels is found deep within pre-verbal unconscious awareness and is thus ineffable.
In Anil Seth’s 2021 book, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, the computational neurologist proposes
the idea that the brain is a “prediction machine,” and that what we see, hear, and feel is nothing more than the brain’s “best guess” of the causes of its sensory inputs. …that the contents of consciousness are a kind of waking dream — a controlled hallucination — that is both more than and less than whatever the real world really is.
– Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, chapter 4.
Note the TED video “Anil Seth: How your brain invents your ‘self’.” And this one entitled “Your Brain Hallucinates Your Conscious Reality.”
For all practical purposes, consciousness is a byproduct of metabolism and self is an artefact of consciousness. Self has no actual substance, nor do projections of self as gods or devils.
We are programmed for survival by aeons of evolution. We did not evolve for accurate perceptions of reality, nor were we fabricated by a supernatural God. Ego, the sense of self as separate from others, may be necessary to negotiate human society, but pride and shame limit our connections to nature’s reality.
Gods and devils are fragments of self projected outwards and usually disowned. Jesus is an example of a disowned projection of self. To gain agency in our own lives we must take responsibility for the gods we make. Failure to own our versions of God and Devil renders us slaves to priests and aristocrats who, themselves, are not ultimately responsible for their behaviour. It’s “God’s will” or “The Devil made me do it.”
I was told I had to find myself, so I went looking. When finally I succeeded, there was no one there.
Jesus is outside and communal, a product of consensus. Satan is inside and personal, a product of experience.
Names are often descriptive of those who possess them. Essentially, Jesus means Son of God and Satan means Child of Nature. It is creation and permanence on the one hand, evolution and change on the other: the supernatural vs nature, fantasy vs reality.
European Renaissance occultists repurposed medieval Hebrew Qabalah (alphanumerical bible analysis) for the purposes of western Hermetic number mysticism.
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יהשוה is a European Renaissance occult alternate spelling of the biblical Joshua, יהושע. Of the roughly 4,000 Jewish holy men crucified by the Romans for the crime of sedition around the beginning of the Common Era, scores if not hundreds were named Jesus.
The Greeks called J(יYod) o(הHé) sh(שShin) u(וVav) a(הHé) Ιησους (Ihsous). The Romans called Joshua IESVS (Iesus, Jesus). The Muslims call him عِيسَىٰ ٱبْنُ مَرْيَمَ (Isa ibn Maryam), Jesus son of Mary.
יהשוה, IEShVE, inserts the letter Shin (ש) into the middle of the ineffable Hebrew name of the God of Moses, יהוה (IEVE), Jehovah.
This spelling, IEShVE (Joshua/Jesus), provides a symbol representing Jesus, as spirit, crucified on the four classical elements — Fire, Water, Air, and Earth — or consciousness jailed in an animal body. Believers wish to escape this “vale of tears” and ascend to a state of pure spirit in heaven.
Christian doctrine claims that a supernatural God Almighty!!! fabricated perfect human beings and cast them down into the material world where they, in their errors of “sin,” were to aspire to return to a state of perfection in heaven. Failing this they are to be discarded to eternal shame and despair in hell, depicted as the caldera of a volcano resulting from the Sun’s journey through the underworld. Thus much of Christian thought is concerned with escaping the limitations of the flesh for a higher order of consciousness after death, maintaining individuality while depreciating “corrupt” nature.
Note the reluctance to group letters from the Tetragrammaton when expressing the numbers 15 and 16 in gematria: Tet-Vav (9+6) rather than Yod-Hé (10+5), and Tet-Zain (9+7) rather than Yod-Vav (10+6). These workarounds show reverence regarding the ineffable name and point to the reluctance of ancient Hebraists to award the original Joshua a spelling which so obviously means Son of God.
Also there is the salience of the letters ש (Shin), meaning tooth, and ע (Ayin), meaning eye.
Shin (ש), from which Leonard Nimoy derived the Vulcan Salute 🖖, is an initialism of El Shaddai, God Almighty. When flesh and bones have turned to dust, tooth enamel remains; when the body is gone, the spirit remains; when parents are gone, children remain. Shin represents “that which remains.” Joshua means child of Yahweh/Jehovah, or Son of God.
Ayin (ע), meaning “eye,” refers to the Evil Eye of the Pharaoh’s Sun-god Horus, , representing Satan: that which is material, base, and common (vulgar), that is to say: nature.
So the biblical Joshua — יהושע (Yod-Hé-Vav-Shin-Ayin), YEUSʔ — begins with the first three letters of the Tetragrammaton, יהו (Yod-Hé-Vav), then adds שע (Shin-Ayin), God and Satan, spirit and matter.
The denotation of the metaphor is given by Jesus in KJV-Matthew 5:38 “An eye for an eye (ע), and a tooth for a tooth (ש).” That is to say: Satan (eye) for Satan and God (tooth) for God. So turn the other cheek?
The connotation of the metaphor is given by Jesus in KJV-Matthew 22:21 “Render therefore unto Caesar the things (ע: mundane) which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things (ש: sacred) that are God’s.”
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שטן (STN), or Satan, is a Hebrew word meaning “adversary.” Taking Shin as spirit, Tet as procreation (Atu XI Lust, the Lion Serpent), and Nun as continuation (as in בןBet (house)
Nun
(continuation), ben or bin, “continuation of the house,” or “son”), STN is spirit continued by procreation, or Child of Nature. Satan is biological evolution.
Eye of Ra Eye of Horus
All Sun-gods are Satan, the God of Nature.
שטןShin (300)
Tet (9)
Nun (50)
Satan (359), Satan — as 359 — does not appear often in Aleister Crowley’s Qabalah, probably because the number is so obviously significant that he wanted students to discover its qabalistic associations for themselves. Instead he often referenced Satan simply as the number 15 due to Atu XV The Devil which is assigned to the letter ע (Ayin), as above. Nonetheless, he identified Satan as the secret name of Horus in his comment on 220,3:74.
220,3:74. Book of the Law,
chapter 3: verse 74
There is a splendour in my name hidden
and glorious, as the sun of midnight is
ever the son.
Perhaps refers to the addition of the name to 418.
418 is the number of Abrahadabra, which is the Word of the Aeon, the Great Work, and also gematria of the full spelling of the Hebrew letter ח, Het or Cheth: חיתHet (8)
Yod (10)
Tav (400)
Het (418). The Egyptian hieroglyph Het — 
or 
, meaning courtyard or house — is cognate with the Hebrew letter Het (ח), the Greek letter Eta (Η/η), and the Latin letter H/h. The Sun-god Horus is Satan (359). The hieroglyph of the Sun-goddess Hathor, House of Horus, is thus 359 plus 418 equals 777, the “son,” the number of a Thelemite, which symbolises the god in his temple, the Eternal Self in the Heart chakra. See 718,2:23-24, Thelemite Grades, and the Tree of Life.
That the secret name of Horus is Satan shines a different light on the Book of the Law, chapter 1: verse 49.
220,1:49. Book of the Law,
chapter 1: verse 49
Abrogate are all rituals, all ordeals, all
words and signs. Ra-Hoor-Khuit hath
taken his seat in the East at the Equinox
of the Gods; and let Asar be with Isa,
who also are one. But they are not of
me. Let Asar be the adorant, Isa the
sufferer; Hoor in his secret name and
splendour is the Lord initiating.
Asar, or Ausar, is Osiris. Isa ibn Maryam is Jesus son of Mary. Hoor, Horus, Ra-Hoor-Khuit in his secret name and splendour is Satan. The Lord initiating is the Sun — nature itself.
The apocalypse, or revelation, which is destroying religion is:
There is no supernatural in reality.
Harry Potter flies on a broomstick in fiction. Jesus saves his lambs in fiction. The supernatural exists only in fiction.
Twice 359 is 718, the Stélé of Revealing, the Abomination of Desolation (from a portent of thoroughly alone). When you discover that the God you projected is not objectively real, you feel utterly alone. “He is not there again.” After that terrible loss of ego support, you realise that you are free. However, freedom entails responsibility. You may feel wobbly on your feet for a while, but a new world opens to your awareness.
You do not have a “friend” in Satan, who is your own Holy Guardian Angel, the core of your own being and consciousness. The Angel is not “out there,” it is in here-and-now. It is only a person insofar as you are a person. The Eternal Self is much deeper than personhood and self. It is the aspect of your consciousness that incarnated as you.
The star-god Hadit, who voices the second chapter of the Book of the Law, says,
220,2:8. Book of the Law,
chapter 2: verse 8
Who worshipped Heru-pa-kraath have
worshipped me; ill, for I am the worshipper.
Heru-pa-kraath is Horus the Child, a symbol of innocence. Hadit says: “I am the flame that burns in every heart of man, and in the core of every star.”
Shaitan, Satan, or Set, is Hoor-paar-Kraat, the concealed aspect of Horus, whose manifest side is Ra-Hoor-Khuit.
– The Magical Revival, p. 54, Kenneth Grant, 1972
The aim of Thelema is to unite waking awareness with core being, making all levels of one’s consciousness an integrated whole.
The realisation that you create every person that bolsters your ego/identity leaves you alone. We may regard the Sun as God and even give it a personal name — Satan, Ra, Ra-Hoor-Khuit (Ré-Horakhty), Hoor-paar-kraat (Harpocrates) Heru-ra-ha, Helios, Sol, etc. — but there is no real person there, just the mask of a symbol. Satan symbolises the cycles of nature and the Sun, father of nature. Earth’s great oceans of liquid water are the mother.
Aleister Crowley put it this way in Magick in Theory and Practice.
The Devil does not exist. It is a false name invented by the Black Brothers to imply a Unity in their ignorant muddle of dispersions. A devil who had unity would be a God.*
* ‘The Devil’ is, historically, the God of any people that one personally dislikes. This has led to so much confusion of thought that The Beast 666 has preferred to let names stand as they are, and to proclaim simply that Aiwaz — the solar-phallic-hermetic ‘Lucifer’ — is His own Holy Guardian Angel, and ‘The Devil’ Satan or Hadit of our particular unit of the Starry Universe. This serpent, Satan, is not the enemy of Man, but He who made Gods of our race, knowing Good and Evil; He bade ‘Know Thyself!’ and taught Initiation. He is ‘the Devil’ of the Book of Thoth, and His emblem is Baphomet, the Androgyne who is the hieroglyph of arcane perfection. The number of His ATU is XV, which is Yod Hé, the Monogram of the Eternal, the Father one with the Mother, the Virgin Seed one with all-containing Space. He is therefore Life, and Love. But moreover his letter is Ayin, the Eye; he is Light, and his Zodiacal image is Capricornus, that leaping goat whose attribute is Liberty. (Note that the ‘Jehovah’ of the Hebrews is etymologically connected with these. The classical example of such antinomy, one which has led to such disastrous misunderstandings, is that between Nu and Had, North and South, Jesus and John. The subject is too abstruse and complicated to be discussed in detail here. The student should consult the writings of Sir R. Payne Knight, General Forlong, Gerald Massey, Fabre d'Olivet; etc. etc., for the data on which these considerations are ultimately based.)
– Magick in Theory and Practice, chapter 21, part II [text and footnote], (circa 1920)
The term “Black Brother” refers to a real adept who, when faced with personal annihilation in the Abyss, balks, choosing to maintain their ego and personhood. They step out of the cycles of birth and death which mark eternal life. They do not reincarnate but slowly dissipate after the death of the body. They maintain their individuality to the end.
The term has nothing to do with skin colour. A Black Brother is black because their Ka (Svadhisthana: establishment of self), which shades their bright, shiny, solar Khu (Anahata: pure, stainless), becomes so dense that the Khu’s light cannot escape their almighty Self-Regard. Cut off from physical reality, the Khu eventually withers and dies, breaking the link between the Eternal Self and its incarnation.
Among those who see beyond the horizons of birth and death, a Black Brother is a failure, a tragedy, and a dire threat to anyone who regards them as an example to follow. Neither the dog nor the Black Brother have visible auras, but the dog never had a Khu to begin with, while a Black Brother wilfully killed their’s. Unlike the rest of us, the dog and the Black Brother do not reincarnate because there is nothing to reincarnate, no Holy Guardian Angel at the centre of their being.
In Thelemic terms, the difference between a King and a slave is that the King finds the temple of their Holy Guardian Angel, opening a channel of communication between Eternal Self and incarnation, and is able to do their inmost Will. The slave remains unaware of, and disconnected from, the interface between Angel and incarnation.
Aiwaz, Aiwass, or Satan, is an archetype of the Holy Guardian Angel, yours and mine. My Holy Guardian Angel appeared androgynous in a vision in 1971, before I ever started on the path of Thelemic initiation. James Beck’s vision of Aiwass in the Book of Codes also implied androgyny. And Llee Heflin’s vision in 1968, the same.
I contrast the self-described Demon Crowley — his persona as the Beast 666 of KJV-Revelation 13:18 — with Frater Perdurabo (Brother I-will-endure), the sincere seeker after truth. Crowley well knew that ego/identity is laughably insubstantial and ultimately meaningless.
“Osirian religion is a Freudian phantasy fashioned
of man’s dread of death and ignorance of nature.”
– Aleister Crowley, M.T.P., chapter 5.
We become what we worship; we shape our gods and, thereafter, our gods shape us. Do you choose to be a supernatural victim or resigned to your karmic fate? Do you choose to discover your inmost Will and see beyond the horizons of birth and death? It is a matter of choice.
The sky-goddess Nuit says,
220,1:57.Book of the Law,
chapter 1: verse 57
Invoke me under my stars! Love is the
law, love under will. Nor let the fools
mistake love; for there are love and love.
There is the dove, and there is the serpent.
Choose ye well! He, my prophet, hath
chosen, knowing the law of the fortress,
and the great mystery of the House of God.
Aleister Crowley’s injunction to his followers, his Great Work, is for each to attain the Knowledge and Conversation of their own Holy Guardian Angel, as he had when Aiwass dictated The Book of the Law to him in April, 1904.
He remembered what he had done to attain that signature experience and wrote about his methods to get to the state of consciousness in which Aiwass contacted him.
It is said that for every step one takes towards one’s Holy Guardian Angel, He takes two towards his client.
– Magical and Philosophical Commentaries on the Book of the Law, Aleister Crowley’s comment on 220,1:13.
Some years after receiving the Book of the Law, Crowley began to write extensively about sex-magic, i.e., magick, as he was enjoined to do, in 220,1:37.
Using autosexual Magick in conjunction with Asana and Ritual makes achieving the Knowledge and Conversation of your Holy Guardian Angel possible within just a few years. See the Order of the Golden Dawn in One Star In Sight.
Religion binds people together in common belief. Thelema is technology. It does not matter what you believe, it matters what you do.
Thelema is granular: “star & star, system & system; let not one know well the other!”
Religion is glutinous, founded on shared belief in a divine or cosmic law.
Truth is a product of cognition. It is discovered through experience.
Meaning is a product of reason. It is an articulation of cause and effect.
The secret star-god Hadit who voices the second chapter of the Book of the Law, says, “But remember, o chosen one, to be me.” – 220,2:76.
The secret sky-goddess Nuit who voices the first chapter of the Book of the Law, says,
220,1:21. Book of the Law,
chapter 1: verse 21
With the God & the Adorer I am nothing: they
do not see me. They are as upon the earth;
I am Heaven, and there is no other God
than me, and my lord Hadit.
Worship the Sun, your world is bright. Become the Sun, your world is night.
When the Adorer is Hadit, Nuit is everything.
Love is the law, love under will.
Nemo Pandragon, 2026
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CREATIVE COMMONS
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I transliterate the Hebrew letter ה (Hé) as the Greek epsilon (Ε/ε) and English E/e to avoid confusion with ח (Het, or Cheth), which is cognate with eta (Η/η) and H/h.
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A metaphor is made of two parts: a denotation and a connotation. The denotation is a definitive representation, a symbol, what Freud called the manifest content. The connotation is the significance of the metaphor, what it means, that Freud called the latent content.
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