From time to time, I still glance at the absolute clusterfuck that is the main Thelema subreddit, and today I found this post that I believe merits a thorough analysis.

Fundamentally, the post misfires because it treats Thelema as if it were primarily an exercise in comparative mythology, a kind of intellectual Lego set where you can swap names, edit genealogies, and declare a new “supreme” deity by narrative fiat. But Thelema is not trying to win an Egyptology argument, nor to rebuild an antique pantheon with better internal consistency. It is offering a lived, initiatory formula for consciousness, ethics, and practice, and the god-names function less like “characters” in a mythology and more like living technical emblems for specific modes of experience, especially once you actually start doing the Work. That is why the post’s cleverness feels busy yet spiritually tone deaf.

Start with the very first claim: “In Thelema, all deities that existed before Nuit have been removed, and she has been given absolute supremacy.” That’s simply the wrong conceptual frame. Nuit is not presented as “supreme” in a monotheistic sense, and she explicitly resists being collapsed into “The One.” In The Aleister Crowley Manual, I tried to frame this cleanly: as the circumference she is “all,” but in a closed system “all” and “nothing” mirror each other, and the moment you distinguish a point within the whole, you get the polarity of self and other. Nuit even says that with “the God & the Adorer”, she is “nothing,” and that the “only God” is the two of them together, a complementarity whose sum is 0. The Reddit post hears a goddess-name and immediately reaches for supremacy and precedence, which are exactly the wrong instincts for a dyadic metaphysic trying to retrain perception away from crude hierarchy.

This is also why the “Norse version” proposal collapses into wordplay. If you can get a workable Hadit by adding an extra L to “Hel” so it becomes “Hell,” you have already defined the project as aesthetic bricolage rather than spiritual technology. Hadit, is not “a god of a place” but a seed-point of identity and a mode of interiority: existentially isolated, at the centre, the “one in us who worships,” and a model that forces the student to abandon neat binaries and tidy boxes when thinking about these “vast aggregates of consciousness we call ‘deities.’” That is not a linguistic trick. It is a disciplined way of naming a pressure, a stance, a gnosis that appears when practice has sharpened the instrument.

More broadly, the post misses something that must be stated without ambiguity: the Thelemic gods are not “the Egyptian gods, correctly arranged.” They are “Egyptoid at best,” as I have written many times, and their meanings are not necessarily tied to their historical namesakes; conflating them with older mythologies can “complicate and dilute” the new Thelemic meanings. In other words, the post complains that Thelema “restructured the Egyptian pantheon,” but the complaint assumes Thelema’s aim is fidelity to the Egyptian pantheon in the first place. It is not. Thelema is interested in what those god-images do when invoked, contemplated, and integrated. Whether the mythic backstory matches a museum label is, from a magical standpoint, secondary to whether the symbol unlocks the intended interior and exterior results.

You can see the same point from another angle in The Book of Lies, where the triad is framed as a “negative Trinity” whose statements are, in an ultimate sense, identical, harmonising Being, Becoming, and Not-Being as modes of conceiving the universe. This is metaphysical engineering. Once you grasp that, the question “what gods were behind Nuit in Egyptian mythology?” becomes about as decisive as asking what earlier drafts were behind a final theorem. Interesting historically, occasionally suggestive symbolically, but not the criterion by which the system stands or falls.

Thelema also insists, again and again, that the point is verifiable transformation, not armchair belief or decorative myth-making. Liber AL vel Legis promises “certainty, not faith,” and over time each step is “acknowledged by a response,” until certainty is no longer a mood but a demonstrated relationship between aspiration and result. Crowley makes the same promise concrete in Magick Without Tears when discussing Nuit’s words “certainty, not faith,” treating it as a straightforward reassurance aimed at practice, not speculation. A project whose centre of gravity is “how would we redesign the Norse pantheon?” is therefore orbiting the wrong star. It may be creatively fun, but it is not Thelema’s core business.

None of this means you cannot translate the Thelemic formula into other symbolic languages. Crowley himself worked toward an integrative correspondential machine, aiming to unite “all philosophical and magical systems soever” under the schema of the Holy Qabalah, with Tarot as a major organising element. But the operative word is schema: disciplined correspondences that remain internally consistent, psychologically charged, and magically testable, not arbitrary rearrangements that feel clever in a comment thread. And, as Shoemaker notes in Living Thelema, the pantheon of Nuit, Hadit, and Ra-Hoor-Khuit is already “ripe and ready” as living gateways into inner processes; you do not need to import or impose a foreign set of names to make the engine run.

But even if one insisted on a “Norse translation” anyway, the first correction would be methodological: do not hunt for one-to-one character substitutions. Hunt for functional equivalences that preserve the formula: unbounded field, the point of view or spark within it, and the dynamic, willed, initiatory expression that arises from their union.

With that constraint in place, Nótt is a weak candidate for Nuit, because she is a personified night with narrative ties, not “Infinite Space, and the Infinite Stars thereof.” A closer Norse cosmological analogue for Nuit is the Ginnungagap, not because it is “a goddess,” but because it is the imageless expanse that makes manifestation thinkable. For Hadit, “Hel” is also a weak fit because it anchors you in underworld topography and inherited moral colouration, whereas Hadit is a centre-point of identity and ecstatic impetus. If you wanted a Norse-flavoured Hadit, you would do better to build a symbol around the spark of inwardness and motion: an “ember” of Muspelheim at the heart of the void, or a runic point-principle that is experienced as the irreducible “I” at the centre of sensation and will. Then, for Ra-Hoor-Khuit, Odin is not obviously the best candidate, because Odin reads more naturally as the sacrificed seeker, the initiator who wins wisdom through ordeal, rather than the visible, solar-martial object of worship and “lord initiating”. If you wanted a Norse-hued expression of that initiatory, world-changing force, you might look instead to the post-Ragnarok survivals and renewals, or to a deliberate composite that carries both sovereignty and victorious emergence, while remaining something you can actually invoke and test in ritual without turning it into fan fiction.