Alethiology, Part 1

Toward a Thelemic Therapeutic Orientation

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

Personal Introduction

If I said that psychology is a hobby of mine, that’s probably a bit dishonest.

To provide a little context, as a research psychologist my focus started out in the study of the empirical divide between mental disorders and intense spiritual experiences and the interaction between them, including exploring new measures of examining such spiritual experiences in light of coexisting mental disorders (specifically, but not exclusively, Cluster A personality disorders and other delusional disorders) across cultural differences.¹

My clinical experience has primarily been within residential facilities with homeless and displaced youth, as well as community health for individual therapy across a spectrum of disorders with a specialty in personality disorders (Clusters B & C) for adults and Autism Spectrum Disorder for young adults. I head a small collaborative teaching/practice group focused on alternative forms of therapy, including Lego therapy, collaborative worldbuilding, and therapeutically applied role-playing games with older youth and adults.

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t think my credentials really matter, but I also don’t want any of this to come across as me just pulling it out of my ass as if I’ve channeled it out of the Great Beyond. It also doesn’t guarantee that anything I present here is empirically valid or reliable.² It just means that I’ve thought it through a bit more than over a couple of Crown & Cokes last weekend after watching some videos on YouTube.

Disclaimer

That said: the information herein is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The information may not be applicable to everyone, and you should consult a qualified mental health professional for personalized advice. The information does not establish a therapist-patient³ relationship. No one should delay seeking professional mental health assistance in emergencies or when facing severe mental health issues. The information may not be accurate or complete.

Blah. Blah. Blah. You get the idea.

I’m strictly throwing out some ideas for discussion to see if the shit floats with other smart people. Or if it’s just something that gets laughed at, and I go back to the drawing board with a couple more Crown & Cokes.

The State of Mental Health

Mental health, as a field, is broken.

There. I said it. I figured we might as well get it out of the way early before someone decides they want to take me on in the comments and make a fool out of themselves.

You won’t get any argument out of me on this subject. The field is broken. I know it. You know it. We all know it.

Many of us in the field are doing the best we can with the tools we have.

It’s not enough. We know that too.

Yet I take pride in my work despite knowing the system is rigged against my patients and despite knowing there is a systemic problem in the world that breaks down my patients the moment they walk out of my office, making my job all the harder the next time they walk back into my office.

Mental Health and Occulture: Real Talk

Occulture⁴ has been under study for decades. Apparently, we’re an easy target and all too willing to fill out questionnaires for money. For those who say “I’ll write down anything to fuck with a questionnaire,” you’d be surprised how many won’t and are quite honest with such things. It’s why researchers provide confidentiality in the first place.

I’ve always found it ironic that the general teachings within The Occult™ are an overall improvement and empowerment of one’s life, and yet occulture (taken as a whole of all “magical subcultures and self-identified magical-ly peoples”⁵) allegedly boasts one-half to two-thirds of its population to have mental health issues—the highest ratio of any religious subculture—ranging from non-clinical depression to schizophrenia—and then tries to write off those mental disorders as “magical abilities.” It also allegedly claims the highest ratio of disabled individuals of any religious subculture primarily for mental health or obesity-related reasons, the latter usually related to the former.

In short, there is very little improvement or empowerment in most people’s lives through any practices in The Occult™ despite all the New Age blather one finds from the YouTube gurus. It’s a lot of (not-so-real) talk. Or, as Marco might say, it’s a lot of armchairing and not a lot of magick. Or I think he might say that. I’m putting words in his mouth now.

More to the point, though, is that mental health professionals make a lot of assumptions about those of us who are involved in occult practices, that it’s our practices that are the source of our psychoses. They didn’t listen carefully enough in class, apparently, when we were all taught that correlation doesn’t equal causation.

But as a researcher, I do have to ask if they aren’t on to something anyway: are our practices causing our problems? Or is it the manner in which we frame our premises?

• “Take this course, and you’ll be happy, healthy, and wise!”

• “For $400, you too can know. Your. True. Will! Ta. Da!”

• “If you do x ritual, you’ll get y result; and if you don’t, then it’s a you problem”—which sounds an awful lot like prosperity gospel talk—”so you’ll need to buy z talisman from me for $666 to guarantee results next time!”

• “SHIT! Tomorrow is Mercury in Gatorade again! Time to buckle up!”

Or how about this one?

• “[F]ind out what you want to do with your life and then do it.”⁶

I can feel the pressure of existential angst already. I mean, at sixteen, I wanted to be an actor; at twenty-five, all I wanted was to be free from a marriage to the daughter of Satan so I could run away with a stripper and be a drug addict; at fifty-five, all I wanted was to be a decent human being who had great conversations with other decent human beings. Christ! Now what?

But one of my original goals as a therapist was to work with our specific community within the framework of our specific community but also with the understanding of our larger “pagan community” in all its diversity of spirituality and magick, even the parts that I didn’t understand personally. I just wanted to be open-minded enough to allow a patient to bring their framework into my office and help me understand where they were coming from so that I could tease out the differences between their worldview and any actual mental health issues they were facing. Not everything we face is a mental health issue. Sometimes, it’s just a life challenge that requires a sounding board (me) to be present and listening.

With that in mind, though, I’ve never really found the majority of the theoretical orientations with which we approach mental health and occulture together are all that conducive to working toward a functional mental health model for occultists. Even modern positive psychology comes from a perspective of traditional psychology that is saturated in a standard Christian-influenced framework no matter how secular (or “humanistic”) we attempt to make it. It all comes from the foundation that suggests we, as individuals, are inherently “broken.”

As a Thelemite, I reject this premise.

Theoretical Orientations

Every clinician has a set of organizing principles, whether or not they understand them or can articulate them. Many I know accept their basic worldview from the general principles they were taught by their parents and other cultural institutions (school, church, etc).

Most of the time, I think it’s just a passive acceptance of their own personal values that arranges their orientation toward how they approach working with clients and patients. Not that there is anything specifically wrong with this; I just think it’s lazy, and, in my opinion, it makes for a terrible way of approaching therapy.

But what is a theoretical orientation? The APA Dictionary of Psychology defines it as such,

A theoretical orientation is “an organized set of assumptions or preferences for given theories that provides a counselor or clinician with a conceptual framework for understanding a client’s needs and for formulating a rationale for specific interventions.”⁷

In other words—and let’s just be straight up about it here—a theoretical orientation is our professional (working) bias.

Let me give some examples of theoretical orientations.⁸ Some of these definitions are better than others in showing the underlying premises, but they’ll work for my purposes here. See if you can “hear” the underlying premise as you read through these.

Most people know the big three:

• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT):⁹ Aims to help clients develop psychological flexibility by accepting difficult thoughts and emotions while committing to positive behavior change. ACT emphasizes the importance of living in the present moment and engaging in values-based actions that align with one's goals and aspirations.

• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT): A type of psychotherapy that focuses on changing negative thought patterns and behaviors that contribute to mental health problems. The therapy is based on the idea that thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are interconnected and that changing one can positively impact others.

• Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT): A therapy that combines cognitive-behavioral techniques with mindfulness practices to help clients regulate their emotions and improve their relationships with others.

In underlying theory, I ground my approach in Internal Family Systems and Psychosynthesis more than any others.

• Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS): A type of therapy that focuses on healing the internal system of sub-personalities and promoting personal growth and self-awareness.¹⁰

• Psychosynthesis: Focuses on integrating and synthesizing different aspects of the self to achieve personal growth and self-realization.

In practice, while generally eclectic, I’m solidly aligned with a reality-gestalt-existentialist therapeutic approach with the additional use of the big three above as may be required by a patient’s needs.

• Existential Therapy: A form of psychotherapy focusing on the client's experience of existence and the meaning and purpose of life. It is based on the philosophy of existentialism, which emphasizes the importance of free will, choice, and personal responsibility in shaping one's life.

• Gestalt Therapy: A form of humanistic therapy that focuses on the client's experience in the present moment and emphasizes personal responsibility, awareness, and self-acceptance.

• Reality Therapy: Emphasizes taking responsibility for one's actions and making choices that align with personal values and goals.

Finally, I have either experience or training in the following modalities, and they inform a lot of the underlying thoughts I have about mental health and therapy, though they don’t enter a lot of my practice (except narrative and play therapy used to be pretty useful when I worked in residential). Self-determination theory was a major influence during grad school during my research years and also in the pre-grad years while I was working on the Cartography model.

• Logotherapy: Focuses on finding meaning in life and taking responsibility for one's choices and actions.

• Narrative Therapy: A therapy that emphasizes the importance of personal stories and how they shape one's perception of the world.

• Self-Determination Theory: A theory that focuses on people's innate psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, and suggests that meeting these needs is essential for psychological growth and well-being.

• Transpersonal Psychotherapy: A therapy that combines psychological and spiritual approaches to promote personal growth and self-transcendence.

So that gives you some background and a little sketchy theoretical outline—though it says way more about me than I intended—but I hope it peels back the curtain just a bit on how psychology approaches theoretical orientation of mental health modalities toward patients. There are lots of them. And I mean, lots. There is no one right way to approach mental health. If anything, I’ve found that each individual will more likely take an eclectic mix of modalities that is tailored to their unique personality.

And that’s what makes even trying to create a theoretical orientation so crazy in the first place.

So let’s talk about that for a moment.

I have struggled to find anything within a generalized pagan or even specifically animist, polytheist, or witchcraft/Wicca paradigm that comes close to having the ability to support its own independent theoretical orientation for a therapeutic approach. For all of them I have explored so far, any generic, liberal, religious orientation will do by merely modifying the underlying singular expression of “God” into any other deity/deities involved. The assumptions of Christianity, for instance, will apparently work just fine for a general pagan population.

But when we talk about mental health specifically from a Thelemic perspective, what are we attempting to accomplish? What is the goal of a new theoretical orientation anyway? What is our foundation? What are our starting assumptions?

Do we take the neo-Nietzschean angle that we are all little islands without attachments to anything or anyone else and should just pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps and suck it up?

How do we interpret clinical depression or the aftermath of grief in light of verses from the Book of the Law that say things like “all the sorrows are but as shadows” [AL 2.9b] or Crowley’s insistence that we shouldn’t have sympathy for others? There are plenty of Thelemites who will offer some kind of trite spiritual or psychological bypassing rather than tackle such difficult questions—and this is a very real concern that such a theoretical orientation built on the premises of Thelema has to take into consideration because we do have so much unusual baggage already floating around from both Crowley and those that have little understanding of mental health who take his nonsensical reliance on social Darwinism literally or who just take an uncritical approach to Crowley at all and accept every word he wrote as gospel truth.

Premises of a Thelemic Theoretical Orientation

Where do we start?

First, let’s start with the premise that Thelema and mental health are compatible and that mental health hygiene is important. If we go back to the Thelemic Cartography model, mental health falls under our upper left (subjective) or psychological quadrant. This is the quadrant of our mental states, emotional states, our perceptions. So long as we are incarnated and have a functioning Khu, our mental health is also “in play” as a part of this whole life experience just as much as our physical health.

Liber Librae offers some advice: “Worship, and neglect not, the physical body which is thy temporary connection with the outer and material world.”¹¹ If we are advised not to neglect the physical body, then we can extrapolate that our mental body (the mind) is likewise to not be neglected. In fact, that text goes on to say, “Therefore let thy mental Equilibrium be above disturbance by material events; strengthen and control the animal passions, discipline the emotions and the reason, nourish the Higher Aspirations.”¹² I think the rest speaks for itself in support of that same conclusion.¹³

Next, I think it is important to premise that the goal of a Thelemic therapeutic orientation is not religious indoctrination but an approach to mental health that provides a solid foundation for successful cognitive and emotional hygiene. Therapy can be used in service of the Great Work, but therapy is not a replacement for the Great Work.¹⁴

Finally, when I consider the ideas that might begin to formulate a theoretical orientation for a potential therapeutic approach, and when informed by my own understanding of Thelema, I find the following assumptions could be made:

1. Individuals are neither inherently broken nor inherently lack wellness; and

• The keyword here is inherently.

  • As psychoanalysis (Freud and the behaviorist schools) gave way to humanistic psychology, there was a shift from an inner sense of pathology and unconscious negativity to a sense of goal-oriented direction, self-actualization (Maslow), and holistic wellness. We have a decent foundation here, but it’s not quite a Thelemic view of the individual since it still assumes a sense of inherent brokenness (influenced by Abrahamic religious ideologies) under everything that needs to achieve actualization to be whole.

• We have to be careful here, though, because some could interpret this as a “nothing is actually wrong in your life; you’re just not leaning into your perfection” kind of spiritual and/or psychological bypassing. We absolutely want to refrain from doing that. Real people have real problems, no matter how essentially (or inherently) unbroken or perfect we may be.

2. Individuals cannot be separated from their environment, experiences, or expressions, but must be engaged in each of these areas intimately through love under will; and

• Existentially, we all have problems out here in the real world. Remember that Crowley tells us that we are here because we “suppose that the Perfect enjoys [the] experience of (apparent) Imperfection.”¹⁵ Just because it is the “(apparent) Imperfection” is no reason to assume that it doesn’t have very real repercussions for us out here in the existential world.

• To this end, we are connected to our:

  • Environment: Each of us exists within a specific environment (or subset of several environments [ecosystem]—home, school, work, social circle, etc.). We are not separate from our environment but a vital part of it. We take shape from it as much as we actively shape it by participating in it.

  • Experiences: Our experiences are unique to us. No one else can have them. No one else can share them. Even when we “do the same things” as others, our experiences of those things are different from others. We cannot be separated from those unique experiences.

  • Expressions: In this case, I mean our presentation to the world around us, the literal expression of ourselves. The specific configuration of the four dimensions of our Khu makes each of us unique. Again, in an existential manner, we are connected to these dimensions in a way that cannot be separated from the “who we are” part of life.

• For the sake of our mental health, I believe that all three of these aspects must be considered. While this may seem obvious, you’d be surprised how many therapists I’ve seen leave out (or dismiss some aspect of) one or more of these when talking to their “clients.”

• When I say individuals must be engaged “intimately through love under will,” I mean in the sense of union (love) in relation to the individual (will) and their own complexes within each of the experiential domains. A therapist can assist in leading them through whatever appropriate techniques, but ultimately, the work is up to each individual to engage those experiences and complexes themselves.

3. Individuals are not static creatures but dynamic within objective, subjective, intersubjective, and interobjective dimensions of individual and collective perspectives; and

• Thelema does not posit static “creatures made by God” and placed on earth to just live and die. The Book of the Law says that “every man and every woman is a star” [AL 1.3] therefore, each of us has a dynamic orbit.

  • Along with this goes the whole construction of a Star (see Thelemic Cartography), including conceptions of the Self.

• We all exist within the four experiential domains, both individually (behaviorally and psychologically) and collectively (culturally and systemically).

4. Each therapeutic concern of the individual must be addressed in some manner across all four dimensions of the individual, even if one or more dimensions are predominant over others.

• When talking about mental health, so many practitioners leave out some important pieces of the puzzle when talking to a patient. We aren’t supposed to, mind you. But it happens more often than you might think. Food insecurity, poverty, and domestic violence are issues that can mimic mental health diagnoses that aren’t necessarily easy to solve but also aren’t mental health diagnoses. But it is also usually within our ability to help provide assistance for those issues. And we should!

Certainly, these are merely some initial thoughts, but I think they represent the start of a productive direction.

Thelemic Psychology: A Possible Theoretical Orientation

In putting this all together into a coherent Thelemic theoretical orientation, it might read something like this:

1. The human experience can be explicated simply as Perfection-experiencing-Imperfection for the purpose of accumulating change.

This provides us with the basis of pathology without demeaning ourselves in the process. Imperfection is life being experienced. The experience of joy is as imperfect and bodily as the experience of grief, yet both are necessary for life fulfillment. There is no difference save in degree and the experience we accept of each as necessary at that moment. I also have to be careful to note that this principle is not a moral value statement. Grief still sucks. New Relationship Energy is still elating.

This is one of the single most important keys of a Thelemic therapeutic approach. And, I think, it’s one of the most dangerous for someone who isn’t properly prepared to utilize it in an appropriately therapeutic and theologically accurate manner.

As mentioned previously, we have to be careful of spiritual and psychological bypassing. It is very easy to turn this into either (a) a sense of fatalism where nothing matters, so why bother, or (b) toxic positivity where we avoid or minimize negativity to avoid processing difficult situations and/or emotions.

2. There is only a single essential (authentic) self¹⁶ with a multiplicity of existential masks/garments or subpersonalities. There is no "higher" or "lower" Self/self dichotomy.

Both Assagioli’s Psychosynthesis and Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems explain the concept of subpersonalities (and I reference AL 2.58 here with mask and garments for “doctrinal flavor”). This concept assumes that every individual contains a diverse set of internal parts that embody distinct elements of personality, feelings, roles, and perceptions. I’ll approach this concept in a different essay. It’s far too complex for an introductory piece like this.

I continue to stand on the premise of there being no higher or lower Self/self dichotomy. Crowley also said as much, going so far as to call it one of only three “heresies” that I can find in all his writings.¹⁷

3. Each individual and each experience of the individual is an existential composite of the four experiential domains—objective, subjective, interobjective, and intersubjective.

4. There are interior and exterior modes of individual and collective expression for the sole purpose of aggregating experience.

These two points go together, even if they are separate statements.

This provides our operational parameters (3) and objectives (4). From a therapeutic position, the domains can only be separated and examined categorically but not experientially. We exist within all four domains simultaneously.

Likewise, we are neither islands unto ourselves nor herds of mindless sheep. We like to politically throw such terms around but the reality is neither is accurate.

5. Underlying these four domains is a sense of self-awareness and a sense of direction (True Will) that can be discovered and assimilated to best express our purpose (why) in life.

We cannot approach the individual in any therapeutic manner through a single lens. We must explore all aspects of the individual and the situation in which the individual finds themselves. All encounters of the Khu with external or internal stimuli are a matter of relationship. This is, in part, because our identity, our is/this-ness, is not formed through any kind of material or mystical substance but through relationships, or what we might call movement-in-relation, to other situations/circumstances, including other individuals. All of our complexes and experiences are best examined via those relationships. The Cartography model offers a map for this journey of discovery.

Defining Alethiology

Can we then come up with a brief description of what a Thelemic therapeutic orientation might look like?

My term for this approach is alethiology, the study of [personal] truth.¹⁸

• A form of psychotherapy that focuses on the personal archaeology of lived meaning and purpose via integral, dynamic relationships across four experiential domains.

While alethiology could be used in a more traditional therapeutic manner to help identify and change troubling thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, it is a more holistic approach to life exploration, adjustment, and balance than typical psychotherapy. Future essays will examine practical modalities and exercises utilizing alethiology that would not at all be surprising to the average occultist.

Alethiology, Part 2

Love is the law, love under will.

1. I’m actually better known for having proposed a radically new hypothesis for Stockholm Syndrome, though I would certainly rewrite it today should I revisit the topic, and I have moved away from that area of research, so I probably never will. However, I admit the last several years have focused on clinical work rather than research. I hope to get back to it eventually. Quite frankly, there is a lot of work to be done in this area of spiritual experiences and mental health.

2. Reliability and validity are concepts used to evaluate the quality of information, tools, or methods used in psychology. Reliability refers to the consistency of results, while validity concerns the extent to which the assessment measures what it is intended to measure. (The third element in assessment is accuracy.)

This is one reason why I smirk when I hear people say that “self-diagnosis is valid.” Big fucking deal. Self-diagnosis is valid because self-diagnosis measures what it intends to measure: the self measuring (assessing) the self. But that doesn’t mean it’s either reliable or accurate. A scale that measures a living human newborn at 1300lbs is valid. It measures what it intends to measure: weight. But it’s neither reliable nor accurate—because no living human newborn in a standard earth-bound environment is ever 1300lbs. Self-diagnosis needs a better argument than validity because we’re talking about data, not your identity.

3. To explain why I use patient rather than client, I’ll quote the following in full:

Even though many nonmedical mental health professionals (counselors, counseling psychologists, social workers, etc.) have been taught not to use the term “patient” because it is associated with the medical model, the word patient is etymologically derived from the Latin patiens, which means one who suffers; in contrast, the etymology of the word client refers to one who is dependent on another, as with a peer contractor or consumer of expert services. I think it is worthwhile for mental health professionals to consider using the word patient, rather than client, while also being clear that this does not imply that patients are necessarily “sick” or “disordered.” Paraphrasing Sadler, being a patient implies a certain woundedness, and words such as client or consumer are poor fits for this: “client and consumer aren't simply inappropriate terms; they are dehumanizing; they make a human existential need more closely akin to a desire for a business transaction, placing health care in the ethos of conspicuous consumption.” This is the spirit in which I use the word “patient.” [Marquis, Andre. 2018. Integral Psychotherapy: A Unifying Approach. Routledge, xix. (internal citations removed for brevity)]

No individual who comes to see me is “dependent on me.” But they all suffer in some manner, and we work through that suffering together until “all the sorrows are but as shadows.”

4. I use “occulture” as shorthand for a larger “occult community” with impunity and without a lot of precision. I just kind of fling it about as meaning “us” as a whole. If I need to mean something precise, I’ll be precise. However, defining our community and general “paganism” has been difficult for generations. Using the standard “earth-based, nature-oriented polytheistic religions” [Harris, Kevin A., Kate M. Panzica, and Ruth A. Crocker. 2016. “Paganism and Counseling: The Development of a Clinical Resource.” Open Theology 2 (1). https://doi.org/10.1515/opth-2016-0065, 873.] definition is workable but needs some expansion since it doesn’t cover Thelema very well, for starters, and feels limited to more Wiccan/Witchcraft-adjacent practices.

5. The majority of the studies I’ve read are focused on the United States. I’ve read a few that have been done outside the States that trend toward the same results, but I want to ensure that I’m clear about the parameters of my understanding of these things.

6. Campbell, Colin D. 2018. Thelema: An Introduction to the Life, Work & Philosophy of Aleister Crowley. Llewellyn Worldwide, 74.

7. American Psychological Association. 2015. APA Dictionary of Psychology. Edited by Gary R. VandenBos. APA Books, 1080 (emphasis mine).

8. All these bullet point examples in this section are quotes from: Allen, Luke R. 2024. “Ultimate Counseling Theories List.” Luke R. Allen, PhD. March 10, 2024. https://lukeallenphd.com/comprehensive-list-of-counseling-theories.

9. This is the therapeutic orientation that “Frater Entelecheia” is pushing in his videos without any training or self-awareness of what he’s doing. Caveat emptor.

10. I have a great story where a patient of mine went home and turned my boring illustration of IFS “parts” (sub-systems) into a Dungeons & Dragons set of characters in a pub for themselves (with the bartender representing the Self), and I’ve not been able to go back to my own illustration ever again. I’ve taken that lead and found some way to modify the original illustration for different patients from Wizard of Oz to Star Wars to Farscape to Full Metal Alchemist to Pokemon.

11. Crowley, Aleister, and Hymenaeus Beta. 1990. The Equinox: The Review of Scientific Illuminism : The Official Organ of the O.T.O.: The Equinox III(10). Weiser Books, 84.

12. Crowley, The Equinox III(10), 84 (emphasis mine).

13. While no one state of physical or mental health is ideal for everyone, we can safely assume there is one that is ideal for you. The goal of both physical and mental health, in my opinion, is to find the equilibrium that is yours.

14. I will come back another time to the absurd notion of a “psychological model of magick.”

15. Crowley, Aleister. 1996. The Law Is for All: The Authorized Popular Commentary to Liber AL vel Legis sub figura CCXX, the Book of the Law. Edited by Louis Wilkinson and Hymenaeus Beta. New Falcon Publications, 33.

16. When I originally wrote this, I was convinced that the statement about the “single essential (authentic) self” was accurate. While I am not entirely unconvinced, I do have doubts. I’ll provide a counter idea to this in Hall of Mirrors: The Multiverse of the Self at a later time.

17. I admit to stretching this statement a bit. He specifically stated the HGA wasn’t the Higher Self.

18. However, I have considered alethiogenesis, the unfolding of personal truth, as a viable alternative.