The Unexpected Thelema of Warhammer 40,000
The Unexpected Thelema of Warhammer 40,000
In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only do what thou wilt
Back in the twilight of the 1980âs I used to go to the local library and leaf through their surprisingly large collection of Dragon magazine. Dragon was (is?) a magazine dedicated to pencil and paper role playing games, primarily of the Advanced Dungeons and/or Dragons variety. But across several years of publication, the inside of the front or back cover nearly always featured a full-color, full-page advertisement for one of the most fascinating things my adolescent eyes had yet seen: an elaborate miniature war game called Warhammer 40,000. Miniatures were the bedrock upon which most modern role playing games were built. D&D arose from a fantasy-flavored variant of historical tactical war games called Chainmail. Battletech rose next, with its vast collection of robot miniatures, bristling with guns. But compared to 40k, those titles were clown shoes. 40k was on a whole new level. It was massive in scale, pitting huge arrays of finely detailed pewter miniatures, painted with an excruciating eye for detail, against a colorful enemy faction, equally as massive, and I looked forward to each new ad which showed off all of Games Workshopâs new models. With this mild obsession came a yearning I was then-convinced would go unsatisfied for all time. Games Workshop, for all its flash and sparkle was a British company and its flagship game was an exotic property in the United States.
These were the before-times. In these days comic shops were dank, cavernous affairs, overseen by cranky men with no love for their medium. If the comic store sold anything other than comics, it was likely a large collection of baseball cards and not much else. Your friendly local game shop was a mere glimmer in the eye of young nerds who would one day blow the dust off this moldy old obsession and make it a more sunny affair, accessible to far more players than ever before. If you were lucky you might have an Eric Fuchs at the mall and they might have more than a single shelf of TSR dungeon modules, but they definitely werenât carrying the idiosyncratic and notoriously expensive models and books for Warhammer 40,000.
In time the ice would thaw and international shops would take a chance on the property and by the time second edition rolled around I had the cash on hand to buy the boxed set. And while I was hard-pressed to interest my friends in the hobby, I found a greatly meditative experience in painting each model, getting better and better with each one until I peaked at a skill-level that Iâd generously call ânot that badâ. And while I hardly ever play the game, instead occasionally seized by a frenzy of priming and painting, Iâm quite obsessed with its bottomless lore. It was during one of these recent fits that it dawned on me that the core of the gameâs expansive lore rests heavily on themes from Crowleyâs Book of the Law.
And so it goes, in the 41st millennium mankind is trapped in an endless cycle of war. Thousands of years before, in a plot gleefully stolen from Dune, mankind has discovered the means to interstellar travel by way of powerfully gifted psychics who are able to bridge gaps in deep space through a hidden dimension called The Warp. Humanity spread itself among the galaxy and learns the hard way that basically all alien life is nasty and wishes only for our swift and terrible destruction. We encounter The Eldar, the last remnants of a once-great race who now face their own extinction after millennia of decadence and the destruction of their homeworld. We find swarms of Tyranid, a horrifying insectoid race that exists only to destroy, reproduce, and consume. There are The Tau, a caricature of Stalinism that conquers in order to bring all who oppose them under their Utopian philosophy of The Greater Good. We find The Necrons, a race whose consciousness is bound to undying machines, driven mad by millions of years trapped in the stasis of tomb worlds. They live now only to exterminate all life in the galaxy. In the gameâs one light spot we find a space-faring race of green-skinned Orks, an utterly moronic but quite endearing cargo cult whose ramshackle technology absolutely should not work but does simply because they believe that it does. While explaining this race to my son it occurred to me that they will their technology to work.
Standing between us and oblivion is The Imperium of Man, a cartoonishly hyper-fascist cult of personality dedicated entirely to Emperor of Mankind, an unnamed warrior who lies in state, not alive but not entirely dead, pulling the strings as his armies span the galaxy, engaged in an endless crusade to rid it of any force that would do humanity harm. At his disposal are the ubiquitous Adeptus Astartes, perfect soldiers engineered for the harsh conditions of space, fused inside intimidating suits of armor, wielding terrifying weaponry. Each one belongs to a chapter bearing its own advantages, disadvantages, philosophy, and heraldry. Backing them up is the terrifying Adepta Sororitas, an order of warrior nuns, sealed inside similar suits of armor who set fire to heretics and literally burn out the traitors within. There is also a massive army of ordinary humans whose advantage lies in sheer numbers and a rather intimidating arsenal of armor and artillery. They mostly exist to be killed in huge numbers. Thereâs way more to it than that and if you really want to get down with it, youâre welcome to watch any of the numerous hours-long lore explanations on Youtube. My articles are long enough, as it is.
The one faction that Iâve left off the list until now is where things start to get Thelemic: Chaos.
In the canon of 40k there are, functionally, three ages. There is a sort of forgotten age from mankindâs distant past, where our dependence on high technology made us lazy and decadent. There was a terrible war, dark ages, blah blah blah. Itâs basically The Butlerian Jihad from Dune. Then comes the second age. Rising from the ashes comes The Emperor of Mankind. Heâs never named and the lore has since established that heâs an ancient being from the stone age who was born perfect and in possession of crazy-ass powers. He is The Logos embodied, Space Jesus. He rises up, pulls mankind out of the shit and filth of the apocalypse and establishes humanity as a galactic, space-faring force. Then comes the third age, The Emperorâs fall at the hands of his child, Horus. You see where Iâm going with this?
I donât know much about he men who created this game but looking them up reveals to me absolutely nothing about their personal backgrounds. Theyâre all suitably nerdy dudes, citing the usual suspects of fantasy and science fiction as inspiration for the gameâs themes and setting, but not one of them mentions anything about Aleister Crowley or an interest in the occult. 40kâs creator, Rick Priestly, cites Miltonâs Paradise Lost in an old article covering the gameâs early days, and those connections are apparent but the parallels to The Book of the Law are there and are undeniable. As well as being a realm of foul demons, The Warp and The Immaterium, out of which everything is made is a sort of analog for Nuit, space, stars, and the whole thing. Mankindâs distant past is hardly ever fleshed out and modern canon holds it in contempt by the perspective of the modern aeon. At best itâs a flimsy analog for the Aeon of Isis, but what is popularly known as 30k is very much The Aeon of Osiris as mankind rises up around an aeonic patriarchy. Humanityâs entire being hangs on a sun god. The Emperor is our savior. He wields magnificent power and is seated comfortably at the center of his own cult. We live in total submission to him and as stated right at the top of The Formula of IAO in Magick in Theory and Practice:
This Formula is the principal and most characteristic formula of Osiris, of the Redemption of Mankind.
Crowley explains in Equinox of the Gods:
the second is of suffering and death: the spiritual strives to ignore the material. Christianity and all cognate religions worship death, glorify suffering, deify corpses.
It should be noted that The Emperorâs cult is heavily based on the medieval Catholic Church. Itâs brutal and draconian. Skulls and memento mori are everywhere and I shit you not, there are so many pointy, spiky-bits that I have stabbed myself on numerous occasions while constructing and painting the models. There are units in the game whose only function is to carry holy relics into battle. The Sororitas have a unit type called Living Saints. The slightest hint of heresy is handled with the most extreme prejudice. Tiny infractions often result in the blink-of-an-eye death of billions by immolation. The word crusade appears an awful lot in the literature. Humanityâs presence throughout the galaxy is best characterized by massive gothic cathedrals, heavy use of ritual and mystery, and an utter lack of subtlety. Thereâs even a theoretically playable faction called The Inquisition who do exactly what you think they do. The Emperor also dies in this period and is kept in a state of sort of alive/sort of dead by this crazy-ass contraption that preserves his body in a perfectly Tiphareth-flavored device called The Golden Throne. He maintains some semblance of consciousness by the sacrifice of thousands of psychics a day. A DAY. If thereâs one quality of 40k that I love more than any other, itâs the gameâs total commitment to being a bit much.
You could be forgiven for dismissing this connection as something fairly common in fantasy and science fiction. The Sun God trope is nothing new to media. But itâs what comes next that proves to be the tipping point. If youâve practiced any of Crowleyâs published rituals or even some of the simplest rituals from The Golden Dawnâs ritual set, The Analysis of the Keyword, for instance, you should recognize this next part.
During this hypothetical Aeon of Osiris, The Emperor gets mankindâs shit together by cloning a group of super soldiers from his own DNA who are then scattered across the galaxy by the forces of Chaos in the same manner as the parts of Osiris, having been slain by Apophis, are scattered. The Emperor, acting as his own Isis, travels the galaxy to find them, and reconstructs his army, piece by piece. The mourning Isis, Apophis and Typhon, Osiris slain and risen. Itâs all there and Iâm not sure if I can dismiss it as coincidence.
The third age, the age of the crowned and conquering child, comes as The Emperorâs favorite son, a character literally named Horus (whose symbol is an eye), rises up with his traitor legions, fully in the thrall of Chaos, challenges the Imperium and nearly wins when he and The Emperor go head to head in a scenario that sounds like book 3 of Liber AL. Unsurprisingly, the third book of the Book of the Law is my favorite as Ra Hoor Khuit is a hardcore dude who is going to make sure that the age of Osiris comes to a fiery conclusion so the new age may be born. 40kâs Horus is voiced by the same contempt for the former Aeon as the hawk-headed Horus. Much of the 40k canon is the story of a desperate struggle between The Imperium as it claws its way away from extinction, while Chaos, a rebel order of demons which, like it or not, is the new order of intelligence in the galaxy. All the other races and factions in the game merely orbit this drama. In the great clash that nearly destroyed all of mankind, it took everything The Emperor had to destroy Horus and in spite of this lethal expenditure, Chaos remains as do the growing Traitor legions in spite of mankindâs all-or-nothing efforts to maintain a miserable meat-grinder stalemate, much like book 3 of Liber AL, where there is a violent inevitability of the new age. The Imperium walks a razor-thin tight rope over the gaping maw of extinction. The new order is desperate to be born, even if it is horribly deformed and demonic. Hey. Itâs a fantasy game void of heroes. I guess they need one faction to be unequivocally the bad guys.
There are also little details in the game which reinforce my suspicion that the gameâs creators and writers are familiar with the occult being that one of the Chaos factions is a suspiciously Hermetic/Alchemical order of chaos marines known as the Thousand Sons, among whose ranks are characters named Maat, Hathor, and Apophis. Magnus, the Thousand Sons primarch, found himself dumped on a planet where a lodge of human psychics took refuge to practice their art in privacy. And much like Crowleyâs introduction to the Golden Dawn, Magnus rose through the ranks quickly. The word is still out whether or not he annoyed his lodge mates enough for them to change the locks and call the cops. A minor-league traitor legion named The Iron Warriors is also led by a primarch named Perdurabo, Crowleyâs magical name while in the Golden Dawn. Given my dedication to the philosophy and magic of Crowley Iâm actually kind of surprised that of all the available factions in the game, the one Iâm most interested in is also the one most zealously dedicated to maintaining the old order, The Black Templars. Then again, I also love the Sororitas and the Death Korps of Krieg, leading me to believe that I may just have a fantasy of a sprawling galactic empire of dour space catholics. Meanwhile, over in Chaos land, The Ruinous Powers promised Horus and the traitors a means to break the chains and become the great men they were destined to be. Under the heel of The Emperor they would never be more than an extension of The Emperor, himself. They are individuals there with no individual will. But broken off from the oppressive chapters of Astartes, they are free to chase their true will. The traitors are very much Rick Priestlyâs own riff on the rebel angels of Paradise Lost and because itâs Warhammer, theyâre woefully broken and given over to their own worst impulses. Theyâre the same sorts of misfit archetypes that find their way to Crowley, and I can sympathize with that, being one of those people, myself. But also, because Chaos affords them the chance to really lean into their worst characteristics, they also represent the lot of people who find their way to Do What Thou Wilt and confuse it for âDo whatever I want and fuck yâall.â
The terrible irony of 40k is that the irony is often lost on fans and players. Many fans somehow see heroism in the Imperium and the Space Marines, photoshopping Donald Trumpâs fat and bloated face on to the body of the Emperor. The gameâs publisher, Games Workshop, reeling from a troubling brand-association with fascism thanks to these same MAGA losers, issued a public statement declaring Warhammer a game for everyone. It was the decent thing to do and a savvy move on behalf of capitalism. Not only do you shake off the chains your own fans gleefully heaped upon your shoulders but you open the door wider to make more money from a broader audience. The marketplace has spoken, ya stanky dunces! Youâre all slavishly devoted to the Hidden Hand until it moves in a direction you disapprove of. Unsurprisingly, a significant segment of the fandom vowed to abandon ship, their precious golden Emperor having been reduced to another victim of wokeness and cancel culture. They did not abandon ship, of course, addicted as they are to the IP, and continue to haunt social media as flaccid virginal trolls. In many ways, their steadfast vigilance to their own misunderstanding of the gameâs setting became a living testament to 40kâs canonical struggle between the putrefying forces of the old order and the wild chaos of the new. The Astarte Legions have only faith and their own interpretations of The Emperorâs Will to guide them and as a result, nothing changes, everything grows exponentially worse by the day and one wrong move will cast the entirety of humanity into the gaping maw of extinction.
40k can be funny if you let it be and just embrace the grimdark.
Finally, I leave you with this. Just watch it. Itâs fucking awesome.
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