Thelemas Public Ceremony

The Gnostic Mass, formally Liber XV, is the central public ritual of Thelema, written by Aleister Crowley in 1913 for the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica associated with the Ordo Templi Orientis. Modelled in outward shape on the Christian and Eastern Orthodox liturgy, it recasts that structure in Thelemic terms: it is celebrated by a Priest and a Priestess with a congregation, employs an altar, and culminates in the consecration and consumption of bread (a Cake of Light) and wine. Its symbolism centres on the interaction of the Priest and Priestess as an enactment of a cosmic polarity, and its recurring proclamation is the Thelemic maxim that there is no law beyond doing one's true will. Written the year after Crowley took up leadership of the O.T.O., it remains the order's principal ceremony and the most performed of his rituals, studied by historians of modern Western esotericism as a deliberate reworking of Catholic liturgical form.