666: BEYOND HETERONORMATIVITY AND GENDER BINARISM

Equally it is better for the androgyne, the urning*, or their feminine counterparts to
endure blackmailers private and public, the terrors of police persecution, the disgust,
contempt and loathing of the vulgar, and the self-torture of suspecting the peculiarity to
be a symptom of a degenerate nature, than to wrong the soul by damning it to the hell of
abstinence, or by defiling it with the abhorred embraces of antipathetic arms.
Every star must calculate its own orbit. All is Will, and yet all is Necessity. To swerve
is ultimately impossible; to seek to swerve is to suffer.
The Beast 666 ordains by His authority that every man, and every woman, and every
intermediately-sexed individual, shall be absolutely free to interpret and communicate
Self by means of any sexual practices soever, whether direct or indirect, rational or
symbolic, physiologically, legally, ethically, or religiously approved or no, provided only
that all parties to any act are fully aware of all the implications and responsibilities
thereof, and heartily agree thereto." Aleister Crowley, commentary on Liber AL I:51.

* In 1864-65, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs used the term urningthum to represent male homosexuality.
Several other terms were added to include women and bisexuals, along with four different types
of gay man.

As I am a cisgender male who mostly goes by masculine pronouns, I am not qualified to speak
on behalf of cisgender women or any transgender individuals. However, on the Kinsey Scale I
am most definitely a 6 (5 if I’m drunk); many of my interests and traits (between a quarter and a
third, approximately) fall into the modern social categories as being distinctly “feminine.”
As a teen, my main musical preference was hard rock and heavy metal, so I let my hair grow
down past my shoulders. I was catcalled by men in passing vehicles several times a week, for
over five years. When I moved to San Francisco (my mother’s birthplace) at the age of 19, I was
often mistaken for a ciswoman. It probably didn’t help that even at this age I was only 5’ 5” tall.
Lesbian woman constantly hit on me until I spoke, and for weeks, the drag queens around Polk
kept insisting that should do drag. Now, I can’t say that because of this experience, I know what
it's like to be a woman. I CAN’T. But I learned firsthand what it was like to be negatively
TREATED like a woman in public, through harassment and objectification. And even in
relationships, there were several men, both out and closeted, who were trying to sexually
feminize me. Even the gay community was too heteronormative for my tastes, and I was
seriously disappointed with roles such as top and bottom, butch and femme. Ironically, my
friends constantly told me I came off like a butch dyke.

I first heard about Crowley at 15, when I decided to turn away from Christianity and embrace
witchcraft. At this time, I was already aware of my own attraction to my male schoolmates (since
I was in 8th grade). Reading about his bisexuality in Colin Wilson’s The Occult gave him (and
his “Do what thou wilt”) an edge over all the other occult personalities that I soon discovered.
That Winter, I read the Book of the Law for the first time. And from the very introduction, such
words likewise caught my attention: “Observe for yourselves the decay of the sense of sin, the
growth of innocence and irresponsibility, the strange modifications of the reproductive instinct
with a tendency to become bisexual or epicene.”
 But without going into further details about my own personal life experiences, let us take a
closer look into the sexuality and gender self-expression of the Beast 666. It is widely known
that Crowley had several male lovers throughout his life:
1) Jerome Pollitt, a professional stage female impersonator, about whom he wrote, “I
lived with Pollitt as his wife for some six months and he made a poet out of me.”
2) Victor Neuburg, a poet who soon became one of Crowley’s greatest students for a
short time, who went on to become Dylan Thomas’ mentor.
3) Walter Gray, an African-American Jazz musician he met in New York City.
4) Walter Duranty, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist.
5) Shabdomar, a Morrocan described as “love at first sight. He is Energy incarnate...”
There were many other men who weren’t identified, men he usually met in bathhouses. At one
point, C. F. Russell [Frater Genesthai] consented to sodomize Crowley in a three-way with Leah
Hirsig, but wrote in his diary, “I couldn't get a bone-on.” Later, Crowley wrote: “Now I’ll shave
and make up my face like the lowest kind of whore and rub on perfume and go after Genesthai
like a drunken two-bit prick-pit in old New Orleans.” But this only made Crowley seem more
repulsive to Russell.

Two photos of Jerome Pollitt

On the subject of gender, in Chapter 2 of The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, he describes

himself as such:

While his masculinity is above the normal, both physiologically and as witnessed by his
powerful growth of beard, he has certain well-marked feminine characteristics. Not only
are his limbs as slight and graceful as a girl’s but his breasts are developed to quite
abnormal degree. There is thus a sort of hermaphroditism in his physical structure; and
this is naturally expressed in his mind... He has been able to philosophize about nature
from the standpoint of a complete human being; certain phenomena will always be
unintelligible to men as such, others, to women as such. He, by being both at once, has
been able to formulate a view of existence which combines the positive and the negative,
 the active and the passive, in a single identical equation. Finally, intensely as the savage
male passion to create has inflamed him, it has been modified by the gentleness and
conservatism of womanhood.

These sentiments are also to be found in his comment on Liber LXV, chapter V, verse 44: “The
male must have completed himself and become androgyne; the female, and become gynander.
This incompleteness imprisons the soul. To think ‘I am not woman, but man’ or vice versa, is to
limit one’s self, to set a bar to one’s motion.”

Crowley took the name Baphomet as his magical motto in the O.T.O.; to him, Baphomet was
“the Androgyne who is the hieroglyph of arcane perfection” and “the Hermaphrodite fully
grown.” Levi refers to the androgyne of Khunrath in his description of Baphomet, as well as
Ardhanari, the composite form of Shiva and Parvati. Crowley’s Ritual of the Star Ruby was
modeled after Baphomet, and in this ritual the Cross Qabalistic uses the phrase Ω ΦΑΛΛΕ.
Although it is generally translated as “O Phallus,” the total Qabalistic value of Ω ΦΑΛΛΕ is
1366. ΚΤΕIΣ, the Vulva, is 535 and ΦΑΛΛOΣ, the Phallus, is 831. 535 + 831 = 1366.

Going outside the limits of Crowley’s writings regarding the Law of Thelema, we currently
face a dilemma in prevailing attitudes of gender essentialism. From the sexual division of labor
to reinforcing gender stereotypes on children through a system of reward and punishment, there
is a violent resistance to acknowledge that traditional roles are social constructs. Even the name
of science is being recruited to uphold outdated modes of masculinity and femininity. In 2000,
Simon Baron-Cohen had Jennifer Connellan do a ridiculous test on newborn babies to “prove”
that male brains are NATURALLY different than female brains, merely by showing each baby the
following two photos. The one on the left is supposed to appeal to the alleged social qualities of
femininity, while the one on the right is supposed to appeal to the alleged mechanical qualities of
masculinity.

The results showed that 40% of the boys (LESS THAN HALF) were the gender stereotypes
they were expecting, even though 1 out of 4 boys turned out to be female-brained, and the
remaining 35% could not be bothered one way or another. (The girls were 36% stereotypical,
17% male-brained, while the rest surpassed boys in the independent behavior category with
47%.) And yet, whenever issues of gender are addressed, the majority will use this very test —
this very poorly conducted test — is being hailed as proof that girls are girls and men are men.
Yet, by this very test that is being offered to prove gender essentialism, 25% of XY humans
would logically be transwomen, and 17% XX humans transmen. And also by this logic, if we go
by averages, then 2 out of 5 individuals would basically be non-binary, if society would allow
them to be.
[It should here be noted that gender and sexuality are not necessarily the same; so even if the
above test was the slightest bit accurate in its example of gender/sex determination, it would say
even less about the sexuality of each baby once they reached puberty and their individual
development on to adulthood. There is a huge percentage of transmen who prefer cismen and
likewise with transwomen with ciswomen.]

As we progress in this Aeon of Horus (regardless of whether one accepts Aeonic Succession or
not), the less we allow authoritarian governments and societies to control our self-expression, the
more we should expect to see genderfluid and non-binary individuals to defy heterosexist norms
out in the open. And as Thelemites, we should welcome this progression toward liberation from
the slave-god shackles of the Osirian age patriarchy. Of course, it should be obvious that this is
not to say that that there is anything wrong with being heterosexual or cisgender.