Editorials

Mere Thelema has a new home. It is the same publication with the same editors, the same commitment to serious writing on Thelema, and the same archive of pieces our contributors have given us since we began. We rebuilt everything underneath it, starting from one question: what would a Thelemic magazine look like if it were built for the writing first?

The old site did its job. It was a general-purpose blog platform, though, and essays that depend on footnotes, sources, and careful argument never sat comfortably in it. The new Mere Thelema was designed around the kind of work we actually publish. Here is what that means for you, whether you come to read or to write.

Every essay is set in type chosen for long reading, with room for the page to breathe. Footnotes open where you are instead of sending you to the bottom of the page and back. Citations are real citations, so you can see exactly what an author is drawing on. Pull quotes, sidebars, and image galleries are part of how a piece is written, not decoration added afterward. What the author built in the editor is what you read.

The magazine is organized into columns, each with its own masthead and lead-feature layout: Arts & Letters, Inquiry, Reviews, Features, Conversations, Editorials, Field Notes and Marginalia. Open a column, and it looks like the front of a section in a printed magazine. A column page is also a good place to start if you want to know what we're about.

New work is released in issues, and every past issue has its own page in the archive. Longer projects run as series, so you can read them in the order they were meant to be read. Search goes beyond titles into the text itself, and you can narrow results by category, tag, or author. The pieces carried over from the old site are all here, and old links still take you to them.

Sign in and you get a private reading space we call the Ephemeris. It keeps:

To save a passage, select it on the page. If you'd like to share one, the site turns it into a quote card: a typeset image of the passage with the author and title, ready to post anywhere.

Follow an author, and we'll email you when they publish something new. Follow a topic, and you'll hear when new work appears under it.

There's no feed to keep up with and no algorithm deciding what you see, just a note when something you asked for arrives.

Members can listen to essays in a voiced audio edition, which helps with a long piece on a commute or a walk. Any piece can be saved as a clean PDF for printing or study. Each essay also comes with a ready-made citation, because work worth reading is often worth citing.

Much of Mere Thelema is free to read. Membership opens the rest, including the audio editions, and it supports the writers and Mere Thelema directly. One account covers you across the full ecosystem¹ of The Thelema Foundation, so the login you make here works wherever the Foundation's platforms meet.

If you've ever pasted an essay into a web form and watched your footnotes fall apart, this part is for you. Submissions are written in the same editor our editors use for publication. Footnotes, citations, pull quotes, sidebars, images, and galleries are all built in, and you can see how the page will look while you write it.

When Mere Thelema originally launched, we provided the beta version of the Mere Thelema Manual of Style. To be blunt, that edition had challenges; it didn’t serve its purpose well; and it was hard to read and use. With additional help and direction from experts in the field, The Thelema Foundation is launching the second, fully rewritten iteration of the only style guide specifically focused on Thelemic and esoteric writing: Ashlar: A Manual of Perfected Style for Thelemic and Esoteric Publishing.

For use with Mere Thelema, we recommend the advice in the Student Guide of the Ashlar, while keeping the main style guide for deeper needs or fringe cases. A printable citation quick reference sheet is also available.

It is all live now and ready for use: https://www.ashlarguide.com

You submit from your own system account. Once we accept your first piece, you become a Mere Thelema author, and you choose how you're credited. You can publish under your own name, or under a pen name, and you can keep up to five pen names for different kinds of work. Each name has its own public author page, with its own bio, links, and body of work.

Nothing on the site makes a profile for you. You create your pages yourself, from your own dashboard, and you decide what's on them.