Therion

In the spring of 1904 a painted wooden stele stood in a glass case in Cairo, lifted from the cliffs at Deir el-Bahri some forty-six years earlier by a French excavator, its reds and blacks still holding. The catalogue number the museum had given it was 666. The Englishman in front of the case had been called the Beast since he was a boy, and he read that number the way other men read a signature on a letter addressed to them.

His name was Aleister Crowley, and Therion is what he found on the far side of it. The Greek word θηρίον means a wild animal, the kind that has to be kept away from people, and it is the word the Book of Revelation reaches for when something hauls itself out of the sea with seven heads and ten horns. Crowley’s mother had got there first, in English. Emily Bertha Bishop kept an Exclusive Brethren house in which scripture was the only furniture that mattered, and when her son would not be governed she took the worst name in the book and pinned it to him. He wrote afterwards that before he had touched his teens he already knew he was the Beast whose number is 666, and that the knowledge arrived not as dread but as something close to ecstasy.

The god proper arrives in April of that year, in a rented flat, on a honeymoon. His wife Rose Kelly had been behaving strangely for weeks, saying over and over that they were waiting for him, and it was Rose who had walked him through the museum, stopped at the stele of a Theban priest named Ankh-ef-en-Khonsu, and pointed at the falcon-headed figure painted on it. There he is. On the eighth, ninth and tenth of April, at noon each day, with the room warming toward the worst of the afternoon, Crowley sat with pen and paper while a voice dictated and his nib scratched to keep up. He called the voice Aiwass. What it gave him was Liber AL vel Legis, the Book of the Law, two hundred and twenty verses across three chapters, and the founding scripture of the religion he named Thelema.

The Beast is named five times in it, and the first mention is the one that carries the weight: the chosen priest and apostle of infinite space is the prince-priest the Beast, and in his woman called the Scarlet Woman is all power given. Nowhere does the book say what he looks like. He is appointed, not described. Every scrap of his appearance afterwards is borrowed, most of it from a first-century Greek apocalypse, which is a strange debt for a text that spends its other verses dismantling Christianity.

Crowley took the title formally on 12 October 1915, assuming the grade of Magus and adopting as his motto ΤΟ ΜΕΓΑ ΘΗΡΙΟΝ, To Mega Therion, the Great Beast. The choice was arithmetic as much as theatre. Greek letters carry numerical values, and the letters of that phrase come to exactly 666: three hundred and seventy for the article, forty-nine for the adjective, two hundred and forty-seven for the noun. He had spent years cataloguing the other things that add to the same figure. Sorath, the evil spirit of the sun. Nimrod out of Cush. Fruit of peace. His own name transliterated into Hebrew. The number is also the sum of every cell in a six-by-six magic square, and that square has long been assigned to the sun, which was the point Crowley cared about most. He wanted the Beast read as solar rather than infernal, a creature of blazing life rather than of pits.

Therion has no body of his own, and the tradition solved that by lending him one. In the tarot Crowley designed near the end of his working life, painted for him by Frieda Harris, the eleventh trump is titled Lust, and there the Beast finally becomes visible: a lion-serpent with seven heads, its ten horns rendered as snakes thrown out in every direction, and riding its back a woman lifting a cup above her head. She is Babalon. Crowley had taken the Whore of Babylon out of Revelation 17 and made her a goddess without a word of apology. Where Therion is solar and masculine, Babalon is the vessel that receives everything and refuses nothing, and neither half of the pair does anything alone.

His name is spoken aloud in practice. In the Star Ruby the magician stands at the centre of the room, turns to each quarter, cuts the air with a gesture, and among the names sent into the four corners is Therion’s. The room is small. The gesture is small. The claim being made is that the animal at the edge of the Book of Revelation is one of the powers holding the world up.

Underneath the god sits an office, and that is where the structure gets uncomfortable. Crowley argued in his commentary that the Beast and the Scarlet Woman were not persons at all but titles, roles that could be filled and vacated. In practice he never let go of the first one. He signed himself 666, published as Master Therion, and left the second post open, so that a succession of women were named Scarlet Woman and then quietly unnamed again as each arrangement curdled. He was a god who required staff.

What Therion can do follows from what he is. He is appetite with a theology attached: the force of a thing being unapologetically itself, the sun’s total indifference to whether anyone can stand it, the animal that will not come to heel. In Thelema that force is the engine of everything, because the law of the Aeon of Horus holds that each person must find and perform their own true will, and Therion is that principle given a face and a number.

The limits are just as plain, starting with age. Therion is not ancient. He was named in 1904 by a man who wrote the words down himself, and he has no myth cycle at all: no birth, no war, no death, no story to tell except the story of his own arrival. He cannot be prised away from his author either. The Beast was cut as a suit for one person to wear, fitted so precisely to Crowley’s appetites and grievances that the man’s reputation and the god’s have fused. Thelemites since have tended to read Therion as a principle rather than a person, which is the only way the figure outlives the figure who claimed it. Whether that reading was available in 1904, when the text called the Beast a prince-priest and the man with the pen took it entirely personally, is a different question.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Therion in Thelema?

Therion is a deity of Thelema, the religious system Aleister Crowley founded after receiving Liber AL vel Legis in Cairo in 1904. He represents the solar, masculine force of untamed individual will, and Crowley identified himself with the office, adopting the motto To Mega Therion in 1915. His female counterpart is the goddess Babalon.

Why is Therion associated with the number 666?

Greek letters carry numerical values, and the phrase To Mega Therion adds to exactly 666 under that system. Crowley also treated 666 as a solar number because it is the sum of every cell in a six-by-six magic square, which is traditionally assigned to the sun. He first encountered the number as a childhood insult from his mother, who called him the Beast of Revelation.

What does Therion look like?

The Book of the Law never describes Therion, so his appearance is borrowed from the Book of Revelation: a beast with seven heads and ten horns. The most familiar image is the eleventh trump of Crowley’s Thoth tarot, called Lust, where the Beast appears as a seven-headed lion-serpent whose horns are rendered as snakes, ridden by Babalon holding a cup aloft.

Is Therion the same as the Beast in the Book of Revelation?

Therion takes his name, his number and his shape from the Beast of Revelation, but Crowley inverted the meaning. Where the biblical Beast is a figure of destruction and false authority, Therion is presented as a positive solar force, the herald of a new age in which each person follows their own true will. The name is the same Greek word the Book of Revelation uses for a wild animal.

Who is Babalon and how is she connected to Therion?

Babalon is Therion’s female counterpart in Thelema, developed by Crowley from the Whore of Babylon in Revelation 17. She is the vessel that receives all experience without refusal, while Therion is the solar and masculine half of the pair. Crowley also treated Scarlet Woman as an office that living women could hold, and several of his partners were named to it in turn.

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Antichrist, Satan, Lucifer, Leviathan, Behemoth, Gog, Jesus, Horus, Thoth