There is no god but man.
These are the words written atop “
Liber OZ,” a short work describing “the rights of man” in the New Aeon.
The old Aeon was the Aeon of Osiris, the Father and the Suffering man, encapsulated in the figure of Jesus Christ; before that was the Aeon of Isis, the pagan era. This is now the Aeon of the Crowned & Conquering Child.
Even Jesus foretold of this mystery when he said “And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (
Matthew 18:3).
Thelema asserts in its own
Bible that “Every man and every woman is a star” and that godhead is “above you & in you” and “the flame that burns in every heart of man, and in the core of every star.”
God is not some Being outside of ourselves. He is not some cloudy figure, perhaps an old man of sorts, that watches our every move and judges us. He is not a stern father that judges and rebukes you, but “the Child-Voice of Love in thine own Soul!”
In a sense, Jesus was an example of the Man-God, who was both Man and God. In him was God made Man and Man made God. Even as he says, “I and my Father are one.” (
John 10:30)
In the symbol we sign each message with, the Unicursal Hexagram, we show God and Man as One. Traditionally, the Hexagram is formed of two separate triangles representing interlocking opposites of male & female, god & man, spirit & matter, etc. The unicursal hexagram – which literally means a hexagram that can be drawn in one stroke without lifting up a pen – symbolically asserts a unity between these complements.
One reason Christianity is dead is that the symbols are unbalanced. We praise good & life, and fear evil & death. In Thelema:
“My adepts stand upright; their head above the heavens, their feet below the hells.” (
Liber Tzaddi)
Since God is All, and since Man’s true identity is One with God’s (and God’s true identity one with Man’s) we move beyond opposition into unity with All things from Highest to Lowest. As it is said: “Love is the law, love under will” and Love means Union. Again it is written:
There is no grace,
There is no guilt,
This is the law:
DO WHAT THOU WILT.
God is expressed by Doing one’s own Will, which if pure is one with God’s will and God’s will is one with your own Will, and in that Thou art God. This is not a judgmental god of sin and hell and fear of punishment and endless retribution.
“Remember all ye that existence is pure joy; that all the sorrows are but as shadows; they pass & are done; but there is that which remains… Beauty and strength, leaping laughter and delicious languor, force and fire, are of us.”
Thelemites even go so far as to call themselves Atheists because they identify so closely with God. As it is said: “To admit God is to look up to God, and so not to be God. The curse of duality.”
We simultaneously deny the dogmatic Theistic god of superstition and assert our identity so closely with the God who is All that we admit of No Other. This is the secret meaning of saying “There is no god”: ”This refers to the spiritual experience of Identity. When one realizes one’s Truth there is no room for any other conception.
It also means that the God-idea must go with other relics of the Fear born of Ignorance into the limbo of savagery. We speak of the Idea of God as generally understood, God being “‘something ‘not ourselves’ that makes for righteousness.”"
The true God is one with ourselves, for “There is no god but man!”
