How to Decide Anything in Three Questions (Even from a French Prison Cell)

Temptation, Gustave Moreau

Dear friends, beautiful and happy people,

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Soror Jezebel has just delivered a triumphant reply to some Caliphal O.T.O. member who asked her whether, once my current Great Magical Retirement at the Detention Center of Moulins-Yzeure comes to an end, I might possibly “come visit the United States”:

“Of course Sir Shumule wants to go to the States! You have the First Amendment! You have Michelle Rodriguez!”

Meanwhile, I have just received a rather convoluted letter from the indispensable Frater Y., who, among other things, asks me:

“Ankh-af-na-khonsu ordered that Thelemites decide ‘questions of the Law’ ‘each for himself’, but it’s not always obvious… Is there a systematic method you use when you face a dilemma, a crisis of conscience, etc., and need to settle a delicate question of the type: ‘Is this permitted by the Law / Is this forbidden by the Law?’”

Answer: Yes. I have one!

The method that (for myself! — I insist! — Let’s not risk becoming a centre of pestilence on top of everything else; I already have quite enough trouble as it is!), my method, I repeat, is the following:

Honeymoon, Serpent, Paradise : The Chioa Khan’s Threefold Protocol.

1. Spiritual or religious question → Nuit. 

The very first formal Commandment of the Law is to be Hadit (AL I:6). 

Now Hadit invariably calls Nuit “my bride” — not “my wife”, not “my spouse”, but “my bride”. 

Therefore, when I make a spiritual decision, I simply ask myself: would this mindset be appropriate on a wedding night and during a honeymoon? 

If the answer is no, I abstain. 

2. Ethical or philosophical question → Hadit. 

Hadit is < the Master > (AL II:65). 

I therefore silently recite Chapter II of The Book of the Law, look for where the old serpent has already settled the matter that is bothering me, and I obey blindly, perinde ac cadaver.

3. Practical or political question → Ra-Hoor-Khuit. 

Our duty toward the Lord of the Æon is to promulgate the Law, as it is written: < Raise the spell of Ra-Hoor-Khuit > (AL III:2). 

So I ask myself: will the action I am contemplating turn the world a little more into the radiant land of Thelema — a Garden of Delights filled with “Order and Beauty, Luxury, Calm and Voluptuousness” — or, on the contrary, into an Old Grey Land of Desolation of the non-smoking Albanian collective-farm variety? 

And I choose the Garden of Delights. 

Easy!

Meditate upon this, dear friends, and go your gorgeous ways under the protection of that spiritual sphere whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere, and which we call GOD.

Warm kisses from the Bahamas.

Love is the law, love under will.

— ☉︎ in 17° ♐︎ : ☽︎ in 14° ♌︎ : ☽︎ : Ⅴⅹⅰ.

Pilgrimage to Cythera : How I Became a Thelemite Without Giving Up a Single Orgasm

Pilgrimage to Cythera, Antoine Watteau

Dear friends, beautiful and happy people,

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

My excellent post of yesterday (magnificent text; I wrote it, so I’m allowed to say it: it’s bloody good) has earned me an avalanche of mail; extremely gratifying, though almost entirely lacking in marriage proposals or jailbreak plans. 

From this flood, one question rises above all others from my Anglophone readers, the same tireless, stubborn, eternal query:

“How did you become a Thelemite?”

Well, I must have told the story on this blog roughly 11,892 times already (in French, admittedly…), so I certainly won’t deprive you of the 11,893rd telling!

It’s very simple, really:

In my youth, I maintained that nothing had any value except the voluptuous pleasure of the senses in the contemplation and possession of the bodies of women in love.

I hoped to die the death of the Duc d’Orléans, the Regent (epectasis: death by orgasm), and that my last words would be: “What a pity…”

Then came the extraordinary privilege of reading the Prophet To Mega Thêrion (blessing & worship to him), and Liber DCCCXXXVII (The Law of Liberty) was my road to Damascus:

“This is the only point to bear in mind, that every act must be a ritual, an act of worship, a sacrament. Live as the kings and princes, crowned and uncrowned, of this world, have always lived, as masters always live; but let it not be self-indulgence; make your self-indulgence your religion.”

Make your self-indulgence your religion!

In that moment I understood why the divine sense of humour had arranged for the Regent’s death to be called epectasis, and why Babalon — the very goddess who dispenses “the voluptuous pleasure of the senses in the contemplation and possession of the bodies of women in love” — bears a name that literally means “Gate of God” (Bāb-ili(m)).

Nothing, therefore, has changed in my fundamental philosophy, except that my dying words will now be: “…a greater feast…”

Meditate upon this, dear friends, and go your gorgeous ways under the protection of that spiritual sphere whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere, and which we call GOD.

Warm kisses from the Bahamas.

Love is the law, love under will.

— ☉︎ in 16° ♐︎ : ☽︎ in 0° ♌︎ : ☉︎ : Ⅴⅹⅰ.

To Karl Germer in Esterwegen: My Lamp Is a Dead Aristocrat in Impeccable Shoes

Portrait of Sir Shumule aka David van Horn, by HIH Princess Clothilde-Naama

To Karl Germer.

Dear friends, beautiful and happy people,

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

About yesterday’s post, Soror K. wrote to me: 

‘Vintage Shumule: equal parts Thelemic sermon, decadent gossip, and sly tarot exegesis delivered with the languid arrogance of a man who knows he will never have to queue at the post office… Frankly, so rosy it could double as a tourism brochure for the New Aeon.’

That said, she is genuinely wondering about the source of my “superhuman capacity for resilience,” which she rates as “at least equal to [my] Bachic resistance.”

Easy! Besides being a textbook case of Peter Pan syndrome, I am a servant of the god Heru-ra-ha, the Crowned & Conquering Child. And resilience is the specific superpower of childhood.

But it’s a good question: It is written < there be times of darkness, and this as a lamp therein > (Liber Magi, 6) — What is your own personal portable lamp? What happy memory contains, for you, enough light that, no matter the circumstances, the < darkness and terror > around you systematically turn into < light and joy > (Liber Tzaddi, 17)?

What is it that — like Saturnus, OHO Karl Johannes Germer, who silently recited the Holy Books of Thelema to himself “from first to last and from last to first” in order to “keep in shape” during his detention in the Nazi concentration camp at Esterwegen (where reading had been forbidden him) — what, I ask, allows you to remain connected to the gods in the midst of trial?

Most prisoners think of their mother. Why not? Mom was the archetype of the bossy MILF châtelaine, and on the Freudian level that’s comforting.

Personally, though, whenever I feel a touch of the blues I think with all my strength about my late mentor in Thelema (whom, by the way, I now refer to only by the “posthumous magical pseudonym that is an inside joke”: ‘Leptopoecile Sophiæ’ (LS). His real name was dragged through quite enough mud — during the investigation and the first-instance hearing of my trial before the tribunal de grande instance of Cusset — by what passes for the judiciary in France, who painted him as the exact equivalent of the evil old wizard whom Ariana Grande hurls into a lava crater at the end of the “Break Free” video).

I would never call him my “master,” because he constantly repeated: “AL II:65 makes it clear that the ancient serpent Hadit is our Master, our guru, our rebbe, our duca, segnore e maestro, to the exclusion of all others — each of us is a disciple whom Hadit has accepted, meaning each of us is Hadit’s Holy Chosen One.”

Just evoking LS’s physical appearance, the care he took with his grooming, the degree to which his every gesture carried that effortless nonchalance that the parvenu hates in the aristocrat so much he’ll burn down the Bastille over it — that alone is enough to put me overjoyed.

Frater N. (who was also his pupil) once invited me to reflect on the fact that while our late mentor remains, for us and a few others, an invigorating memory, the Aurum Solis and the Ordo Astrum Sophiae consider him the arch-traitor to be hated above all (because he cold-bloodedly ditched them the moment he became a Thelemite), and most “hermeticists” who have mentioned him in print (especially the Martinists and the butthurt clowns of AMORC) simply report that he was ultra-authoritarian and cruel in his teaching, that he physically mistreated and punished his students, humiliated them the moment they arrived, and was particularly merciless if he detected the slightest hint of defiance.

It is true that LS invariably suspected anyone who approached him in an initiatory context of suffering from morbid masochism… :)

Why am I telling you all this?

Because Soror Sinthea — whom I call Soror Sin just to annoy her — asked me earlier today what hermeneutic meaning should be given, respectively, to the different pronouns (ye, you, thou) by which the gods address humanity in The Book of the Law.

LS once entrusted me with this Key:

‘Ye’ designates the < company of heaven > (AL I:2), i.e. the totality of all incarnate gods who constitute humanity proper — whether they are consciously Thelemites or not — as opposed to “the people” (= them), who are troglodyte monkeys (who appeared on Earth “exactly like maggots in an apple,” cf. The Paris Working), worshippers of the Blind Creature of the Slime, and dedicated to turning this marvellous Garden of Delights that is the World into the Old Grey Land of Desolation for the benefit of that Creature.

 (N.B.: In my opinion, no one has ever illustrated this essential Arcanum better than the group Telepopmusik in the music video for their track “Breathe.”)

The Ye — gods temporarily disguised as men and imprisoned in animal bodies — have the exactly opposite mission: to restore the Earthly Paradise, to destroy the Old Grey Land by promulgating (consciously or unconsciously) the Law of Thelema.

(Soror Jezebel has a brilliant formula for the concept of the “unconscious Thelemite”: “All Kim Kardashian lacks is renouncing the Armenian Apostolic Church to fulfil absolutely every condition of the ideal Scarlet Woman as described in Chapter III of Liber AL.”)

Come, O ye gods, and let us feast! — LLL 6:46 

Ye are against the people, O my chosen! — AL II:34.

‘You’ designates conscious Thelemites (those who have accepted the Law, recognised Ra-Hoor-Khuit as Lord of the Æon, and hold that The Book of the Law is the letter of Truth). 

But you who have defied the law; you who have conquered by subtlety or force; you will I take unto me, even I will take you unto me. — Tzaddi, 19. 

I will give you a war-engine. — AL III:7.

‘Thou’ designates the true being of the individual, the one the Ancient Egyptians called “the Defunct” — “Thou,” LS said, “is very precisely the one who appears before the Scales of Maat for the Weighing of the Heart — when, on the threshold of his eternal destiny it is no longer possible for him to escape who he really is through lies, psychodramas, or fallacious reasoning.” 

Therefore thou art wholly pure before Me. — Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente V:10.

thou hast no right but to do thy will. — AL I:42.

Meditating upon which, go forth, dear friends, under the protection of that spiritual sphere whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere, and which we call GOD.

Warm kisses from the Bahamas.

Love is the law, love under will.

— ☉︎ in 15° ♐︎ : ☽︎ in 16° ♋︎ : ♄︎ : Ⅴⅹⅰ.

The Minute of the Ibis: A Little Tarot for a Change

The Ibis, Gustave Moreau

Dear friends, beautiful and happy people,

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Soror K. just forwarded me – in an email that was sexy, though slightly peremptory – a humble request for clarification that Frater Amenhotep had addressed to her. 

He is currently very worried about a Tarot reading done for him by “an old Parisian Countess who’s completely mad in the head” on the very day he was definitively admitted into our Sect (October 11).

Frater Amenhotep? — Remember him: the young mathematician-scholar who used to sign “F” and who, on the 12th of August last, wrote his Application for Affiliation in these terms:

“I know who you are, Sir. You are a monster: debauched, lustful, mystical… A ‘perverse seducer who loves athletic women, flashy luxury, and sadistic violence’… A ‘lazy country squire with maximum alcoholic ancestry and suspiciously high inbreeding’… A ‘sadomasochistic Cheshire cat’… Yet, for a reason known only to the gods, the clandestine sect founded by your disciples has recognized (i.e., conferred upon) you the Beasthood… You are the legitimate Hierophant and therefore bound to teach, as it is written: ‘he must teach’ (AL I:38)…”

So, on the day he (and his companion Soror Astarté) officially became one of us, the author of that exordium consulted the Oracle of Thoth about his future within our ranks…

Now, the Celtic Cross spread done for him on that occasion (XIX . XII . XXI . III . [X]) has recently been giving our brother a whole heap of retrospective anxiety.

There is really no reason for it!

1. You see: In a Celtic Cross, the First Card shows the heart of the matter for the keen, proud, royal and lofty Thelemite. 

2. The Second Card shows how the troglodyte heathen apes of the old grey land – agents of chaos against the divine order of things, the “conspiracy of the unwelcome against him who walks his path with a light heart” – plot to obstruct the Thelemite’s Will. 

3. The Third Card shows the Decree rendered in the divine sphere by the Mighty Immortals concerning the matter. 

4. The Fourth Card shows the outcome that this Decree will have in the earthly sphere, as shaped by the Opposition between the Thelemite’s Will and the heathen undermining. 

5. The Fifth Card – obtained by theosophical reduction – gives the Counsel of the Prophet to meditate upon and put into practice during this confrontation. 

Here, then, is what we have:

1. [XIX, The Sun] What will Amenhotep’s life be like in the radiant land of Thelema? 

2. [XII, The Hanged Man] Alas! The prince to whom Amenhotep has just sworn Allegiance is currently held captive in Old Grey Land! 

3. [XXI, The Universe] Fortunately, the lord Sobek, Dweller in the Nile, great exterminator of abyssal creatures, takes up Amenhotep’s cause at the Council of the Mighty, 

4. [III, The Empress] which will result, for the latter, in a return to the Garden of Delights: “Order and Beauty, Luxury, Calm and Voluptuousness.” 

5. [X, Fortune] Word of the Prophet To Mega Thêrion 666: “Follow thy Fortune, careless where it lead thee. The axle moveth not: attain thou that.” 

I see nothing in all this but the most encouraging signs.

Meditating upon which, go forth, dear friends, under the protection of that spiritual sphere whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere, and which we call GOD.

Warm kisses from the Bahamas.

Love is the law, love under will.

— ☉︎ in 14° ♐︎ : ☽︎ in 29° ♊︎ : ♀︎ : Ⅴⅹⅰ.

Sir Shumule’s Legendary 2023 Letter To Judge Aurélie Mahé, President Judge of the Cusset Criminal Court

Note: At the general request, here is the English translation of the legendary letter I sent (with recorded delivery) from Moulins-Yzeure prison to Judge Aurélie Mahé in 2023 ev, shortly after my first-instance hearing and while awaiting her verdict.

Open Letter from Sir Shumule to Madame Judge Mahé, Presiding Judge of the Cusset Criminal Court

Bora-Bora, 11 July 2023 e.v.

Madame le Juge,

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

This is to formally express my gratitude for having invited me last Thursday to such a truly fabulous hearing.

It was a resounding success.

Being charged with “glorification of cocaine” is ultra-cool and sexy — regardless of the fact that your services didn’t even bother to put a single text of mine actually glorifying cocaine into the case file: the wording of the charge itself is furiously funky, and that’s all that matters in my eyes.

Of course, one might regret that you felt obliged to try to give some substance to this (therefore) non-case by digging up four of my former disciples — rejected by me and now seeking the revenge of dismissed lackeys — and dressing them up as “civil parties”.

(Just for the record:

The unfortunate Adriano “Jinx” Angeletti, a bewildered homeless man to whom I would gladly have tossed a few coins had my status as a detainee not prevented me — alas!

The unfortunate Aurélien “Walking Blowjob” Brunon, a whining, boring dwarf who physically started sobbing, bent over the bar with his arse in the air — and as you are well aware, Madame le Juge, body language speaks louder than any words.

The unfortunate Anne-Sophie Dos Santos, a welfare case who defected from her native trailer park and now works as a “care assistant for the elderly” — I’ve no doubt Anne-Sophie is far better suited to that job than to hermeneutics, and I wish her interesting bedpans to wipe.

The unfortunate Pauline “Used Kleenex” Brunon, who ought rather to sue whoever did her hair like that on Thursday.

You must admit, Madame le Juge, that this was hardly a dazzling cast, and for my part I had flushed these people down the toilet long ago…)

But enough of these substitutes! Let us rise above it all.

I owe you, Madame le Juge, the chance to once again behold, for a few precious hours, the sublime person of my divine wife Chloé — and since she is the most beautiful woman in the world, nothing else matters: I declare myself your eternal debtor.

(What am I saying? I even forgive Maître Falco for attacking me after having sworn on her life to Maître Szpiega that she would say nothing against me: Maître Falco is a nasty little liar, as the length of her nose already suggested. #Pinocchio)

Yes, you have my full gratitude, whatever your verdict may be, for allowing me to breathe for a moment near the one who holds my heart. Freedom without my wife means nothing to me — as I had the honour of declaring to Mr Miraoui (a third-world Cheeto in human form who played at being our investigating magistrate) and to Mrs Simon (the militant Catholic OCRVP officer — a bargain-basement Kamala Harris who looks like she works the checkout at a Vierzon supermarket — who pursued us with her sectarian hatred).

A thousand thanks, therefore!!!

And forgive me for not really knowing how to answer your vulgar question about my (I quote) “future sources of income” — it’s a question I have never asked myself. I know nothing about money: I simply throw it out the window and watch it fall.*

As for what comes next… 

Well! Not one of your remarks during the hearing was anything other than violently prosecutorial and completely biased — I don’t see why that would change on August 3. Go ahead — have fun!

Love is the law, love under will.

– Sir Shumule

*Yes, my students support me financially… For once, it’s not the taxpayers footing the bill. A man has his pride…

In Memoriam Sir Aleister Crowley

Dear Friends, beautiful and happy people,

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

The echo of the Magical Bell, when, in the equivocal sweetness of twilight, the Mass of the Phoenix is celebrated (333, 55555, 333), bears witness to the impermanence of all things : even the gods’ < lofty chosen ones > (AL 1, 50) shall be swept away, < dust lost in dust > (Cheth, 15)…

Thus, no one is unaware that the Prophet’s very last words were: “I am perplexed.”

Now, I have noticed that the English word perplexed is rendered in Hebrew as נָבוֹךְ (navokh), which has the numerical value 78 — exactly the same as the word מזלא (mezla), the direct influence from Kether.

To me, this sums up everything about Sir Aleister:

For the Heathen, who stop at the mere bark of the tree, he was a man whose life journey contained enough to make him — retrospectively — ashamed, perplexed, on his deathbed.

But for those who have the intelligence of the Mysteries, he was the Word of the Most High.

Meditating upon this, go forth, dear friends, under the protection of that spiritual sphere whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere, and which we call GOD.

And blessing & worship to the prophet of the lovely Star.

Love is the law, love under will.

— ☉ in 9° ♐︎ : ☽ in 14° ♈︎ : ☉ : Vxi.