The Great Work

The term Great Work (magnum opus) is a term used in Hermeticism and in certain occult traditions and religions such as Thelema.

Eliphas Levi (1810–1875), one of the first modern ceremonial magicians and inspiration for the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, discussed the Great Work at length, expanding it from the purely alchemical towards the more spiritual:

Furthermore, there exists in nature a force which is immeasurably more powerful than steam, and by means of which a single man, who knows how to adapt and direct it, might upset and alter the face of the world. This force was known to the ancients; it consists in a universal agent having equilibrium for its supreme law, while its direction is concerned immediately with the great arcanum of transcendental magic... This agent...is precisely that which the adepts of the middle ages denominated the first matter of the Great Work. The Gnostics represented it as the fiery body of the Holy Spirit; it was the object of adoration in the secret rites of the Sabbath and the Temple, under the hieroglyphic figure of Baphomet or the Androgyne of Mendes.

He further defined it as such:

The Great Work is, before all things, the creation of man by himself, that is to say, the full and entire conquest of his faculties and his future; it is especially the perfect emancipation of his will.

Within Thelema, the Great Work is generally defined as those spiritual practices leading to the mystical union of the Self and the All. Its founder, author and occultist Aleister Crowley, said of it in his book Magick Without Tears:

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