Lust
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
As the Sun moves through Leo this month, it’s worth looking back at how this lion-energy has been understood across the centuries, because the card most associated with Leo in Tarot has undergone one of the strangest transformations in the deck.
In its earliest form, the card wasn’t even called Strength; it was Fortitude, one of the four cardinal virtues. The image showed a woman calmly holding a lion’s jaws shut. The message was that virtue means mastering what is wild in us. The animal passions are real and powerful, but the soul’s task is to tame them; to hold the beast in check through quiet, disciplined strength.
In Crowley’s Thoth Tarot, that whole premise has been turned on its head. His version of the card, retitled Lust, shows a different woman altogether. She rides the lion rather than restraining it, giving herself over entirely to the union rather than standing apart from it in control. Where Fortitude was about holding the line, Lust is about crossing it completely.
Crowley put the idea beautifully through the voice of Babalon herself, who is called desirable precisely because she gave herself to everything that lives. Surrender, in this telling, isn’t the opposite of power. The power of Babalon is her ability to understand by dissolving the boundary between self and other.
Maybe this August is a good time to ask which kind of Strength you’re leaning on: the strength that holds the jaws shut, or the one that surrenders in ecstatic union. In that surrender there is no attempt to direct the outcome — she has been delivered from the lust of result.
Wishing you all a warm, bright, thoroughly leonine August.
Love is the law, love under will.
— Fr. Ishmael
Upcoming Scarlet Woman Events
Sunday, August 9, 3:00 – 4:30 PM
Magick in Theory and Practice, Chapter 17
Genuine Joe’s Coffee annex to Russell’s Bakery
2525 W. Anderson Ln. #275, Austin, TX 78757
Sunday, August 16, 6:00 – 8:00 PM
Thelemic Coffee Night – Austin
Epoch Coffee
2700 W. Anderson Ln., Austin, TX 78757
Monday, August 24, 7:00 – 8:30 PM
Thelemic Coffee Night – San Marcos
Wake The Dead Coffee
1432 Old Ranch Road 12, San Marcos, TX 78666
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