Aliester Crowley got his “Do What Thou Wilt” Philosophy from a Catholic Priest!

Note: François Rabalais was a Franciscan Friar who wrote a series of fictional novels entitled Gargantua and Pantagruel.

The Abbey of Thelema is a small house which was used as a temple and spiritual centre, founded by Aleister Crowley and Leah Hirsig in Cefalù (Sicily, Italy) in 1920. In the 16th century, François Rabelais used Thélème, the French form of the word, as the name of a fictional Abbey in his famous books, Gargantua and Pantagruel. The name of Crowley’s Temple was borrowed from the Franciscan friar François Rabelais's satire Gargantua and Pantagruel, where an Abbaye de Theleme (Abbey of Thelema) is described as a sort of "anti-monastery" where the lives of the inhabitants were "spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure." This idealistic utopia was to be the model of Crowley's commune, while also being a type of magical school… It is in the first book where Rabelais writes of the Abbey of Thélème, built by the giant Gargantua. It pokes fun at the monastic institutions, since his abbey has a swimming pool, maid service, and no clocks in sight. But below the humor was a very real concept of utopia and the ideal society. Rabelais gives us a description of how the Thelemites of the Abbey lived and the rules they lived by:

“Their whole life was ordered not by laws, rules and regulations but according to their volition and free-will. They got up when it seemed good to do so; they drank, ate, worked and slept when the desire came over them. No one woke them up; no one compelled them to drink, to eat nor to do anything else whatsoever. Gargantua had laid that down. There was but one clause in their Rule: Do what thou wilt.”
-Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais Translated by M. A. Screech pages 372-373.

In case anyone think such an accusation is far fetched, Crowley himself admitted that the origin of the phrase “Do what thou wilt” came from Rabelais,

“IT HAS BEEN remarked by some critics of the Law of Thelema that the words "Do what thou wilt" are not original with the Master Therion¹… This is true enough, in its own way: we have, firstly, the word of St. Augustine: "Love, and do what thou wilt." This is however, as the context shows, by no means what is meant by The Book of the Law. St. Augustine's thesis is that if the heart be full of Love, one cannot go wrong… Far more important is the Word of Rabelais, Fais ce que veulx [Fr. "Do what thou wilt"]. The sublime Doctor does indeed intend, so far as he goes, to set forth in essence the Law of Thelema, very much as it is understood by the Master Therion himself.”
-The Antecedents of Thelema by Aliester Crowley (1926), Printed in The Revival of Magick, edited by Hymenaeus Beta & R. Kaczynski.

¹Master Therion is a name that Aleister Crowley used to refer to himself.

𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝕁𝕖𝕤𝕦𝕚𝕥𝕠𝕔𝕣𝕒𝕔𝕪 𝔼𝕩𝕡𝕠𝕤𝕖𝕕