Introducing the New Mere Thelema

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.

For readers

Pages built for long reading

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.

Columns with their own character

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.

Issues, series and an archive you can use

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.

Your Ephemeris

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

• History: what you've read, which you can switch off at any time.

• Bookmarks: pieces you've saved for later.

• Following: the writers and topics you follow.

• Quotes: passages you've saved from anything you read.

• Privacy and Record: what we hold about you, in plain view.

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 the writers you care about

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.

Listen, keep and cite

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.

Membership

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.

For writers

A real writing tool

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.

An improved style guide

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

One account, all your names

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.

An editorial process you can see

After you submit, you can follow your piece through review from its status page. If the editors ask for revisions, you'll get an email that takes you straight to the revision screen, even if you have to sign in first. Every draft is kept in the piece's history, so nothing you wrote is lost between rounds. When your piece is published, the people who follow you hear about it.

The Open Call

We run Open Calls on specific themes. The current one is always at www.merethelema.com/open-call, with the brief and submission details. It's a good way in if you've been meaning to write for us and wanted a place to start.

Reprints welcome

Our policy on reprints will be relaxed for a while. Work that first appeared elsewhere can run here too, with credit to the original publication and a link back to it. If you have a piece that deserves a second life in front of this readership, send it.

Why we built it this way

Most publishing software is built around managing content. We wanted software built around reading and writing it. The editorial machinery is still there, and it is thorough, but its job is to get good work in front of readers in the form the writer meant it to be read and in a way the readers can return to use again.

Start with the current issue, or go straight to a column. If you have something to say, the Open Call is waiting.

Mere Thelema is published by The Thelema Foundation.