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| 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.
