A Teacher
Lon Milo DuQuette
Psychological-symbolic ritual stance
The transmission
Lon Milo DuQuette is an American occultist, author, and musician, a longtime senior official of the O.T.O., known for explaining the densest material of ceremonial magic with disarming clarity and humor.
Across books such as Low Magick, The Magick of Aleister Crowley, and his works on Tarot and Enochian, he has made Thelemic and Golden Dawn magic genuinely accessible.
He is especially identified with a psychological-symbolic stance, crystallized in his often-quoted maxim that “it’s all in your head… you just have no idea how big your head is”—a framing that treats magical entities and operations as real and effective while locating their primary theater of operation in consciousness.
DuQuette’s contribution to the lineage is his lucid articulation of the psychological model of magic: the position that ritual works by engaging the operator’s own deep mind and symbolic faculties, whatever the ultimate ontological status of spirits and forces.
This stance—rigorous about practice yet agnostic-to-psychological about metaphysics—represents the mature convergence of ceremonial magic with depth psychology (Jung, Fortune, Regardie) and aligns the tradition closely with the mind-power family, where the decisive variable is always the trained inner state.
By making this framing approachable and explicit, DuQuette helps the Atlas articulate the key interpretive question that runs through all of it: are these operations changing reality, or changing consciousness, or are those the same claim in different vocabularies?
What they gave
Psychological model of magic: Framed ritual as primarily engaging the operator’s deep mind and symbols.
- “How big your head is”: Held magical efficacy and psychological framing together without contradiction.
- Accessible exposition: Made Thelemic/Golden Dawn magic clear to a wide modern audience.
- Metaphysical agnosticism: Modeled rigorous practice with humility about ultimate claims.
In their words
It’s all in your head — you just have no idea how big your head is.
By doing our True Will, we have the inertia of the entire universe to assist us.
It is only by working the rituals, that any significant degree of understanding can develop. If you wait until you are positive you understand all aspects of the ceremony before beginning to work, you will never begin to work.
But the Magician knows that the pure Will of every man and every woman is already in perfect harmony with the divine Will; in fact they are one and the same. It is the Magician’s Great Work to endeavor to remove the obstacles that hinder his or her perfect realization of that Will and then proceed to execute it.
If we can’t wake up to the fact that deep down inside we are good, then we deserve to remain asleep dreaming we are evil.
It is now possible for humanity to awaken to the liberating fact that each of us is a star, as unique and self-radiant as our celestial counterparts. Instead of desperately trying to determine the will of God and then clumsily attempting to cooperate with it, each of us must now come to realize that our will, if properly understood and executed, is already in harmony with the divine will.
The gods of one age become the devils of the age to follow. The priests look forward to the age to come and see only the end of the world.
Do I think I’m a holy man? Sometimes.
The line they stand in
Taught by / Influenced by: Aleister Crowley and Thelema (O.T.O.); Golden Dawn/Kabbalah; Jungian psychological framing.
- Taught / Influenced: accessible modern ceremonial magic; the psychological model of magic; popular occult education.
Revelations they taught
Orders & Societies
Essential Works
- My Life with the Spirits1999
- The Chicken Qabalah of Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford2001
- Low Magick2010