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The concept of the so-called True Will can be a tricky little beast. It’s thrown around by many who seem to latch onto it as some kind of catch-all for their behavior at any given moment. It’s my “True Will” to do XYZ—from skydiving to couch surfing to bedding someone else’s husband/wife/partner/etc (or trying to, at least).¹

What exactly is True Will anyway?

True Will is a Crowleyism.²

Nowhere in any of the Class A texts, or in the Book of the Law specifically, is the phrase used. The closest functional equivalent is ‘pure will’ [AL 1.44]. Yet so much of Crowley’s work points to a singular concept underlying the meaning of True Will/Pure Will that being pedantic about it seems, well, pedantic. Part of the issue is Crowley likes to be Crowley: pompous, meandering, difficultly obtuse in places, and (of course) pretends he is the ‘Master of the English Language.’ But the concept he presents is straightforward nearly everywhere. What “we” have done is alternately defined True Will as a mush of esoteric nonsense within a mishmash of external sources, as an impotent “whatever I feel like” excuse, or as some equally asinine bullshit from the echo chamber like “find out what you want to do with your life and then do it.”³

True Will is, ultimately, that which gives direction to the motion of a Star.

That seems simple enough, but the devil is in the details, and I know many can and will disagree on those details. Some have attempted to claim that True Will is the same as “Free Will.” But let’s be clear: the universe, according to Thelemic doctrine, is inherently deterministic.⁴

The Book of the Law provides us with the breakdown of how this all works in relation to us as individuals and the intent of our existence: True Will is the specific, essential direction [So with thy all; thou hast no right but to do thy will; AL 1.42b] of the motion (or existence) [divided for love’s sake, for the chance of union; AL 1.29] of any given Star.

Crowley comments on this latter again in Magick Without Tears where he writes, “There is no Being apart from Going.”⁵

Put another way, the general motion of Hadit [the ground of Becoming] is what separates [i.e., causes the existence of] the Star from Nuit [the ground of Being]. But it is this aspect of True Will [meaning-itself] that solidifies a deterministic understanding of our essential direction.

To sum it up even more simply:

But what do we do with this information? What is the point of understanding such minutiae of True Will?

Nothing.

Yup. Nothing. We could all go through life just fine without needing any of this information at all. And I would submit that most people on this planet do just fine without knowing anything about True Will. If anything, attempting to run around “trying to discover one’s True Will” only increases the level of angst in life.

I mean, everyone still has a True Will that influences their existential nature. Just because you may or may not be accidentally following your True Will is no reason to believe that you actually know it. You can walk down the street and not know that you’re headed Due North save that you have a general idea that you’re headed in a “northerly” direction because the Sun is setting in that-erly direction on your left side. But you could be headed precisely Due North only by sheer accident. Until you get a working compass, you’ll not know for sure.

But do you care? I mean, do you really care whether you are going Due North or just “north-ish-ly” or even just “that-a-way” by interest or instinct? Maybe you do. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you just need a compass. Maybe you need a map. What kind of map? (And with that, we’ll stop and move on. The map conversation is for an entirely different time!)

But since we’re here, let’s see what we can do with all this information anyway, right?