Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
There’s something exquisitely tragic about watching a cathedral rot from the inside. The spires still stand — proud, carved, glinting in the sun like they remember something — but the choir has lost its breath. The incense is synthetic. The Virgin now smiles like a therapist. Christianity, that once-raging fire of mysticism, dread, and cosmic longing, has become a wellness brand.
The corpse of God has been taxidermied.
Friedrich Nietzsche saw it first. Not just that “God is dead,” but that we killed Him — not with violence, but with boredom. With a thousand compromises. With lukewarm faith and theological spreadsheets. He wasn’t rejoicing. He was mourning — like a prophet clawing at the edge of a cliff no one else saw coming. Without the sacred, we had nothing but mirrors. And worse: the idiots began applauding the reflections.
Crowley knew it too. But rather than clutch pearls, he pulled out a dagger and went down into the tomb. If Nietzsche was the eulogist, Crowley was the undertaker. He saw that what had been passed off as divine for centuries was little more than fossilized authority wrapped in incense. He spat on the mitre, kicked over the chalice, and wrote his own Gospel — dictated by a disembodied voice in Cairo while the Empire slept. It wasn’t rebellion for rebellion’s sake. It was initiation. It was the first breath of something actually divine, buried under millennia of powdered wigs and Latin guilt.
Evola, half magician, half fascist monk, peered even further into the abyss. For him, religion had been emasculated. No longer a rite of passage into transcendence, but a societal sedative. What was once a cosmic ladder now resembled a bureaucratic elevator playing soft hymns. In the traditional world he mourned — rightly or wrongly — there had been order: vertical, initiatory, noble. In the modern world? Only the horizontal. The mass. The herd. A great flattening of the soul into a spreadsheet of trauma and pronouns.
Woke culture — not in its propagandized, Fox News form, but as a sociological mechanism, a managed rebellion — is the Frankenstein’s child of postmodern guilt and neoliberal pageantry. It is not a grassroots movement, but a simulated dissent, financed and curated by the very systems it claims to oppose. It dangles identity as a stand-in for substance, and inflates pain into moral currency. Here, personality is mistaken for soul; trauma becomes a performance art. The sacred is flattened into spectacle, and the Great Work is replaced by the Great Whine — a theatre of grievances designed not to liberate, but to pacify. Its central commandment — “do not offend” — is policed not by priests, but by algorithms and HR departments, and in its own way is more effective than the Vatican ever dreamed. For in this new religion, no one is crucified — they are simply de-platformed.
Catholicism? A shadow of its former grandeur. Once, it built cathedrals that pierced the sky. Now, it attracts teenagers in pleated skirts praying in Latin as if mimicking Gregorian chant will resurrect the bones of Aquinas. The new breed of “trad caths” cry for mantillas and censers, imagining themselves as foot soldiers of Christendom while posting thirst traps between rosaries. Their LARPing is a parody of Traditionalism so bland and domesticated that even the most iron-blooded fascist of the last century would scoff. There is no mystery here, no fire, no divine terror — just cosplay with better typography. Crowley mocked this in the Mass of the Phoenix, not because he hated Christ, but because he hated the mediocrity that wore His skin like a uniform.
Islam, once a storm of discipline and lunar ecstasy, now mutters into its own reflection. In its most extreme incarnations, it drapes itself in blood and bureaucracy — stoning women, lynching lovers, and calling it divine jurisprudence. Its sacred geometries, once inscribed by mystics under stars, now echo inside shopping malls named after sheikhs who bathe in gold and fly tigers to brunch. The great caliphs are gone; what remains is either brutal farce or petrochemical decadence. In places like Dubai — a glass mirage of luxury stitched over slave labor — Islam is no longer religion but brand strategy, a crescent on the corporate logo of global capital. And the West, that eternal opportunist, smiles and shakes hands, buying oil with one hand while drone-striking weddings with the other. There is no holy war — only business contracts signed in Mecca’s shadow.
Even Judaism, once a burning tree of names and silence, with its Kabbalistic spine of fire and storm, has collapsed inward — weaponized into a machine of lawfare and ethnic exceptionalism. Once it gave birth to mystics who wrestled with angels in the void; now it sponsors a concrete state with drones, walls, and messianic missiles. Israel, that brutal echo of ancient yearning, has made the sacred tribal again — a temple made of tanks. Its claim to holiness is no longer etched in cosmic silence but tattooed on bombs. What was once the inner garden of the soul is now a contested checkpoint. And the Shekhinah weeps, not from exile, but from the cheap nationalism done in her name.
The neo-spirituals fare no better. They paint with symbols they don't understand and chant in tongues they found on Pinterest. They demand ancient power without sacrifice, vision without initiation. They shuffle tarot cards and call it gnosis; they burn sage over trauma and call it transcendence. Everything is softened, aestheticized, safe. The ritual is dead, but its corpse is dressed well for Instagram.
And then — the new pagans. A schizophrenic revival of altars they barely remember. Their gods wear Viking helmets and quote Evola out of context. Beneath their mead and masculinity lies a cracked screen playing Burzum videos and racial fantasies. They do not seek the sacred; they seek purity, which is its own modern heresy. They worship the blood — not as a mystery, but as an identity. What was once myth has been reduced to meme, what was once tribal memory now weaponized nostalgia. There is no Allfather in their Asatru — only daddy issues wrapped in runes.
We are not witnessing a return of religion — we are watching its taxidermy. Stiff, posed, ghoulishly grinning, propped up for tourist photos. But the eyes are glass, and the gods — if they ever were there — have fled.
It’s a ritual collapse. The sacred has been so democratized that it has lost all voltage. Everyone’s a witch now. Everyone’s an oracle. But no one’s been initiated. No one’s bled in the circle. No one has stared into the face of their Angel and trembled. They have Airbnbs for ayahuasca and TikToks for tarot — but no contact. No risk. No sacrifice.
Against this backdrop of caricature and collapse, Thelema stands — scarred, strange, but alive. It has not escaped the modern disease entirely. Reddit threads filled with cattle bleating, “Was Crowley problematic?” or demanding that Thelema means whatever they feel today, clutter the corridors of what should be initiation. They seek to universalize it, water it down, make it "inclusive" by amputating its canon, ignoring the vast, terrible, magnificent corpus left behind by Crowley and our Brothers and Sisters who bled their Will into being. They say, “There is no doctrine,” and yet write manifestos. They declare, “Do what thou wilt” — but only if it aligns with whatever Twitter says is ethical this week, while never once doing the Work, never once invoking a god, never once encountering the abyss that Crowley described with such radiant dread. They chirp about “personal Thelema,” but the only thing personal about it is their refusal to transform. And still, by some miracle, the real current flows — in rituals done in silence, in orders that hold their flame in the dark, in those few who dare to let the abyss gaze back and do not blink.
Thelema is not a faith for the masses, nor should it be. It is a fire that burns off the dross of culture, not a warm bath for ego. It does not belong to the Left or the Right, to the marginalized or the powerful. It belongs to those who dare, and to them alone.
What Evola called “regression of the castes” — the spiritual and social inversion where the lowest instincts rule the highest domains — is no longer an observation; it is our lived reality. Kings have become clowns. Priests, marketers. Warriors, influencers. The modern world is governed not by initiates or philosopher-kings, but by bureaucrats of the soul: therapists, HR departments, policy consultants, TikTok gurus. We are told this is freedom, when in fact it is the cruelest tyranny — the tyranny of sameness, of horizontality, of nothing above, nothing within. It is a world of infinite surfaces, no depths. No ascent, because there's no longer a mountain to climb. The sacred has been priced out of the market.
Nietzsche, laughing madly in the ruins of God’s tomb, gave us the last warning. “Beware,” he said, “the Last Man — who makes everything small.” The Last Man fears suffering, beauty, transcendence — because they require hierarchy. They require something to be greater than oneself. And so, he trades the unknown for the comfortable, the sublime for the digestible. He wants his gods to be therapists, his revolutions bloodless, his truths optional. He winks and shrugs, saying: “We have invented happiness.” What he means is: we have anesthetized longing.
Today’s world is not just post-Christian — it is post-human. Not in the transhumanist sense of silicon and circuits, but in the deeper, sadder sense: it has abandoned the vertical axis of Being. In rejecting the Cross, it did not find liberation — it found weightlessness. Not the eagle’s flight, but the tumble of an empty plastic bag across a dead parking lot.
Evola’s Ride the Tiger wasn’t a slogan — it was a grim strategy for surviving the Kali Yuga. He did not ask us to fix this world, because this world is not broken — it is rotting, and rot is not mended, it is transcended. The Traditional man, for Evola, does not preach, does not convert, does not entertain. He stands. Alone if needed. Like a ruined column that still reaches toward Heaven long after the temple has crumbled.
And Thelema? It shares this verticality. It whispers: There is something above you, but it is also within you. It does not flatter the ego — it purifies it through ordeal. Where modernity says “you are perfect as you are,” Thelema says “you are a tomb of stars; now rise.” Crowley did not promise healing. He promised war — with the false self. And for those who emerged bloodied but unbowed, he promised ecstasy.
There is no room in Thelema for the post-modern sickness of self-as-brand. The True Will is not a vibe. It is not a kink. It is not a feeling. It is a divine trajectory written before your birth and sealed in the blood of the stars. To discover it is to murder your illusions. To do it is to cease being human in the common sense of the word. You become a creature of the Aeon. Not better — but real.
So yes, the God of the herd is dead.
But there are still gods who breathe through blood and song and sex and silence. They wait not in heaven, but in the spaces between your heartbeat. The old philosophers — the true ones — knew this. They stood on the edge of civilization, not weeping, but laughing like jackals under an eclipsed sun.
And they whispered, as they fell into fire:
"Let the dead bury the dead. We have stars to resurrect."
Love is the law, love under will.