David Shoemaker’s Living Thelema
Living Thelema
Anima Solis Books
2013
260
David Shoemaker’s Living Thelema: A Practical Guide to Attainment in Aleister Crowley’s System of Magick is best described as handbook for those undertaking the A∴A∴ system of study.
Two points that should not put off the reader are, first, that this book assumes you already know something about ceremonial magick and the Qabalah. Not that you need to know a lot, but enough to not get lost. For an introduction to the A∴A∴, I recommend reading the first 33 pages of Eshelman’s book before reading Living Thelema.
The second problem is typography. This book was privately printed in 2013 but has the hallmarks of 1990s word processing: Hebrew is always transliterated (e.g., “aleph” instead of “א”), the paragraph justification doesn’t use hyphenation and contains distracting rivers of whitespace (just like this blog, but his blog isn’t a book!), underlining (instead of font style) is often used to delineate section transitions, and the figures (and some, but not all, references) appear to have been printed on an old 300dpi printer and pasted onto the pages—you can see the dots! I hope another edition of this otherwise fine book will eliminate these problems.
The first part of this book is called “Tools for the Journey” and various practices are discussed (e.g., how to do an LBRP). But the discussion is not meant as a tutorial—you’re supposed to already be doing the practices discussed and in need of some fine tuning or deeper thoughts on the subject. As such, this section would be helpful for the student working through the A∴A∴ system, and should be used together with other references.
The second part is called “Perspectives on the Path of Attainment” and discusses how certain ideas fit in with the course of study (e.g., the tarot, or the formula of LVX). Again, not a tutorial and probably best appreciated by someone already on the path being discussed.
The third part is called “Life Outside the Temple” and provides some excellent discussion about practical aspects of magickal study (perhaps because Shoemaker is a clinical psychologist he can provide a uniquely modern perspective). Chapters include “Dreamwork”, “Relationships”, and “Psychotherapy”. Shoemaker brings both Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell to the discussion, providing what feels like a quite modern viewpoint not often seen among those studying 19th century systems of magick.
Shoemaker is associated with the International College of Thelema (onestarinsight.org and cotnorcal.org) and the Temple of the Silver Star. He was an initiated student of Soror Meral (Phyllis Seckler). (Phyllis Seckler was initiated by Soror Estai (Jane Wolfe), who was initiated by Aleister Crowley.)