There are several questions that seem to go round and round Thelemic discussions for decades without resolution, and almost all are incapable of being resolved because many people discussing them frequently don’t even understand the actual nature of the question to begin with. A classic example is the question “Is Thelema a religion?” I have visited this topic very briefly in my essay On Thelemic Orthodoxy, but since some readers have asked for a more thorough treatment of the subject, here it is.
Now in the face of it you might think that this question is a question about Thelema. Or perhaps a question about religion. You would be wrong on both counts. It’s not actually a question of either of those things, it’s a question of linguistics.
Aleister Crowley touches upon this theme in his (literal) last word on the subject, in Chapter XXXI of Magick Without Tears:
…A religion then, is a more or less coherent and consistent set of beliefs, with precepts and prohibitions therefrom deducible.
…To sum up, our system is a religion just so far as a religion means an enthusiastic putting-together of a series of doctrines, no one of which must in any way clash with Science or Magick.
Call it a new religion, then, if it so please your Gracious Majesty; but I confess that I fail to see what you will have gained by so doing, and I feel bound to add that you might easily cause a great deal of misunderstanding, and work a rather stupid kind of mischief.
The last sentence is somewhat prescient, since there has indeed been a considerable amount of both misunderstanding and mischief in the 70 years since he wrote it. It’s also pretty funny, because it’s basically a polite way of saying “Yeah whatever, I don’t really care one way or another, just stop annoying me about it”.
But let’s examine the previous couple of sentences quoted. In paragraph two Crowley does say: “…our system is a religion”. That’s fairly clear. It’s a religion. But he goes on to qualify that with: “just so far as a religion means an enthusiastic putting-together of a series of doctrines”. So it’s the series of doctrines that defines what a religion is. This reiterates what he has already stated in the first paragraph quoted: “A religion then, is a more or less coherent and consistent set of beliefs”. Note however, that Crowley doesn’t make reference to morality or spirituality here, he doesn’t discuss or comment on which doctrines a religion should or should not have (except to say that ours should not clash with either Science or Magick); what is notable is that he is primarily interested in how religion is defined linguistically.
To sum up:
- A religion then, is a more or less coherent and consistent set of beliefs
- A religion means an enthusiastic putting-together of a series of doctrines
- Our system is a religion (because it has this stuff)
So it would seem pretty cut and dried that the question is answered, very clearly and simply. But still people argue about it, which seems illogical. Why would they argue? Well, mainly because of ideological preconceptions about what a religion is, or what they think a religion is, or what they think a religion should be. So let’s delve more closely into that.
Set Theory and Linguistics
To understand the basic problem let’s concentrate on the phrase “coherent and consistent set of beliefs” – what exactly is a “set of beliefs”?
To answer that we need to go to language analysis using set theory, which Crowley was familiar with from the works of Bertrand Russell (Crowley specifically mentions Russell in the title of Magick Without Tears chapter XXVII, so we know he was referring to his work in this period).
Now I don’t pretend to be a high-level mathematician (I am certainly not going to attempt to emulate Bertrand Russell’s detailed analysis of language construction), and I’m not a linguistic scholar either, but for the purposes of illustration let’s use a highly simplified version of Set Theory to examine in detail the essence of the problem. For example:
- Let’s define a set of living creatures that have fins.
- Lets define a set of living creatures that have gills.
- Lets define the set that includes both of those sets as “fish”
Take a dolphin. It belongs to the set of creatures that have fins. But it does not belong to the set of creatures that have gills. Therefore it does not belong to the set of both those things called “fish”.
Similarly a squid has gills, but no fins, so does not belong to the set of “fish”.
Now let us take the set of creatures called “herring”. All of the creatures in this set also belong to the set of creatures with gills. And to the set of creatures with fins. Therefore herring also belong to the set of creatures called “fish”.
And that is (basically) how we define things, and thus how the fundamentals of language work.
And once we have established that, the question of whether Thelema is a religion becomes an easy one. Let’s examine it as an abstraction:
We postulate a belief (let’s call it B). And we want to examine if it belongs to the set of religion R.
We define religion R as being composed of the set of all beliefs that contain the concept C1, plus all those beliefs that contain the concept C2, plus all of those beliefs that contain the concept C3 etc. It doesn’t actually matter what each of those concepts is, as long as they are widely agreed upon by the speakers of the language. We will return to this point later, but for now let’s assume that this set of concepts are contained within a big textbook of defined sets, which we call a dictionary (and which itself is defined as being the set of all sets that compose what we call “English”).
So we have the following sets of beliefs, for example:
- The set of beliefs which contain a moral code
- The set of beliefs which contain ritual practices
- The set of beliefs in gods or goddesses
- The set of people who follow such ritual practices and beliefs
And we define a religion as the set that contains all those listed sets.
Now let us test that with the biggest religion in the world: Christianity. Does the set of Christian beliefs contain all of the sets listed above? And the answer is yes, it does. So far so good. Islam? Yep, that too. Buddhism? Umm… We have a problem. Buddhism doesn’t have a belief in gods. But it is clearly a religion, so we have to modify our sets slightly to say that a religion may contain that set, but does not have to.
Now we come to Thelema. Does it contain the sets listed above? Yes, pretty clearly. Therefore is it a religion? Yes, pretty clearly. Problem solved.
Notice that there is no moral or even philosophical issue at play here. It is purely a function of language itself we are talking about in fairly strict mathematical terms. Doesn’t really matter whether we are talking about Thelema, Scientology, the Church of the SubGenius, whatever. In every case it is the pure application of sets that we are doing (unconsciously for the most part, but still doing).
But, some of you will no doubt be exclaiming, doesn’t language evolve? And if so, can’t I just say that I don’t think that Thelema is a religion, and alter the accepted definition? Well, actually, no you can’t. Or at least, not that easily. Language does evolve that’s true, but evolution (in any form) does not depend just on one person changing – that’s not evolution. Evolution occurs when one thing changes, and then that changed thing perpetuates itself to become established as a distinct new evolutionary entity. In other words, when a single mutant is able to reproduce to form a new genetic line. In linguistic terms, meaning occurs in a similar way. It is perpetuated via the definition being shared throughout a population using language (this is why Richard Dawkins postulated the concept of a “meme” as the linguistic equivalent of a gene in biology). So it’s not enough for you to just decide that “Thelema isn’t a religion” – in order for that statement to have meaning both the speaker and the listener and all potential listeners would have to redefine the set of religion itself, and that’s unlikely to happen with any rapidity, particularly when such redefinition is contained within a small subculture like Thelema, as opposed to the entire weight of over 200 years of defined English usage among a large percentage of the population of the world.
Let’s take a practical example to illustrate the above. We will ask a similar question:
Is Thelema a squirk?
Well, is it?
You can’t answer that question with a yes or a no, because you don’t know what a squirk is, right? And that’s because I just made that word up. Since we have no shared definition of what a squirk is, then the question literally has no meaning, since meaning can only occur through shared definition. That is why we have dictionaries: dictionaries don’t invent new words but they give words shared definition across a wide linguistic spectrum, and thus empower them with greater meaning.
It is true that shared definition can occur without a dictionary, via oral tradition, but that doesn’t negate the point – it just means that definitions created through oral tradition are shared within a considerably smaller community and thus possess less widespread meaning and are less effective as tools of communication. And since tools of communication are what words are designed to be in the first place, that makes language itself much less effective. Dr. Johnson was quite aware of this when he wrote his seminal dictionary in the 18th century, stating:
“I shall therefore, since the rules of style, like those of law, arise from precedents often repeated, collect the testimonies of both sides, and endeavour to discover and promulgate the decrees of custom, who has so long possessed whether by right or by usurpation, the sovereignty of words.”
This is why the creation of dictionaries and encyclopedias was such an important part of the scientific revolution of the Age of Enlightenment. And why it still is for those of us who take as our motto: “The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion”.
Bibliography
Dawkins, R., 1989. The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press, Oxford; New York.