Aleister Crowley
Section
The Book Of The Law (Liber AL vel Legis)
The Old and New Commentaries to Liber AL
vel Legis (The Book Of The Law) Chapter I
by Aleister Crowley
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Most of the text below has been entered
by Frater H.B., except for the text of Liber AL (entered
by Frater Ebony and proofread by many others), The Old
Comment and portions of the New Comment omitted by L. Wilkenson
in his abridgement. This text of Liber 220 has been restored
by comparison with an early surviving typescript of the
work, except for Chapter II, the portion not covered by
the typescript available at this time.
The Old Comment has been restored by BH, except for Chapter
II, from the TS. In that portion, the Old Comment has been
restored from less reliable sources and may need further
revision to Crowley's text. The New Comment to Chapter II
also needs further revision and expansion beyond the Wilkenson
abridgement.
Some verses of Liber AL have were not
individually commented by Crowley in this text. Some have
only a New Comment, and not an Old one. Crowley's footnotes
have been moved up into the text and enclosed in double
angle brackets: <<Crowley
note>>.
Again, for the comment to Chapter II, these may be in need
of further correction to the original.
All other notes are enclosed in curly brackets, with attribution
of origin: {WEH NOTE: ...} if no attribution of origin is
given, the content of the curly brackets is an interpolation
of a gap in the TS. These gaps were intended to be filled
by hand-written symbols and foreign letters not available
on the typewriter used to prepare the TS. They are in a variety
of hands, sometimes missing altogether. The accuracy of these
interpolations is very high, but not certain.
L I B E R A L vel L E G I S
sub figura CCXX
as delivered by
(LXXVIII) XCIII unto DCLXVI
with a commentary by
T H E B E A S T
----
In the first edition this Book is called L. L is the sacred
letter in the Holy Twelve-fold Table which forms the triangle
that stabilizes the Universe. See "Liber 418".
L is the letter of Libra, Balance, and 'Justice' in the Taro.
This title should probably be "AL", "El",
as the 'L' was heard of the Voice of Aiwaz, not seen. "AL" is
the true name of the Book, for these letters, and their number
31, form the Master Key to its Mysteries.
In order that the ethical and philosophical comment should
be "understanded of the common people", without
interruption, I have decided to transfer to an Appendix {WEH
NOTE: The Appendix has not yet been recovered.} all considerations
drawn from the numerical system of cipher which is interspersed
with the more straightforward matter of this Book. In that
Appendix will be found an account of the character of this
cipher, called "Qabalah", and the mysteries thus
indicated; because of the impracticability of communicating
them in verbal form, and of the necessity of proving to the
student that the Author of the Book is possessed of knowledge
beyond any yet acquired by man.
The First Chapter
AL I,1: "Had! The manifestation of Nuit."
The Old Comment
1. Compare II.1, the complement of this verse. In Nu is Had
concealed; by Had is Nu manifested. Nu being 56 and Had
9, their conjunction results in 65, Adonai, the Holy Guardian
Angel. Also Hoor, who combines the force of the Sun with
that of Mars. Adonai is primarily Solar, but 65 is a number
sacred to Mars.
See the "Sepher Sephiroth" ,and "The Wake
World" in "Know Om Pax" for further details
on 65.
Note moreover, the sixty-five pages of the MS. of Liber
Legis.
Or, counting NV 56, Had 10, we get 66, which is (1-11).
Had is further the centre of the Key-Word ABRAHADABRA.
The New Comment
The theogony of our Law is entirely scientific, Nuit is Matter,
Hadit is Motion, in their full physical sense.<<The
Proton and the Electron, in a metaphysical sense, suggest
close analogies.>> They are the Tao and Teh of Chinese
Philosophy; or, to put it very simply, the Noun and Verb
in grammar. Our central Truth -- beyond other philosophies
-- is that these two infinities cannot exist apart. This
extensive subject must be studied in our other writings,
notably "Berashith", my own Magical Diaries,
especially those of 1919, 1920 and 1921, and "The
Book of Wisdom or Folly". See also "The Soldier
and the Hunchback". Further information concerning
Nuit and Hadit is given in the course of this Book; but
I must here mention that the Brother mentioned in connexion
with the "Wizard Amalantrah" etc. (Samuel bar
Aiwaz) identifies them with ANU and ADAD the supreme Mother
and Father deities of the Sumerians. Taken in connexion
with the AIWAZ identification, this is very striking indeed.
It is also to be considered that Nu is connected with North,
while Had is Sad, Set, Satan, Sat (equals "Being" in
Sanskrit), South. He is then the Sun, one point concentring
Space, as also is any other star. The word ABRAHADABRA is
from Abrasax, Father Sun, which adds to 365. For the North-South
antithesis see Fabre d'Olivet's "Hermeneutic Interpretation
of the Origin of the Social State in Man". Note "Sax" also
as a Rock, or Stone, whence the symbol of the Cubical Stone,
the Mountain Abiegnus, and so forth. Nu is also reflected
in Naus, Ship, etc., and that whole symbolism of Hollow Space
which is familiar to all. There is also a question of identifying
Nu with On, Noah, Oannes, Jonah, John, Dianus, Diana, and
so on. But these identifications are all partial only, different
facets of the Diamond Truth. We may neglect all these questions,
and remain in the simplicity of this Her own Book.
AL I,2: "The unveiling of the company of heaven."
The Old Comment
2. This book is a new revelation, or unveiling of the hold
ones.
The New Comment
This explains the general theme of this revelation: gives
the Dramatis Personae, so to speak.
It is cosmographically, the conception of the two Ultimate
Ideas; Space, and That which occupies Space.
It will however appear later that these two ideas may be
resolved into one, that of Matter; with Space, its 'Condition'
or 'form', included therein. This leaves the idea of 'Motion'
for Hadit, whose interplay with Nuit makes the Universe.
Time should perhaps be considered as a particular kind or
dimension of Space.<<In "Berashith" all qualities
soever are considered as so many dimensions. I see no reason,
19 years later, for receding from this view.>>
Further, this verse is to be taken with the next. The 'company
of heaven' is Mankind, and its 'unveiling' is the assertion
of the independent godhead of every man and every woman!
Further, as Khabs (see verse 8) is "Star", there
is a further meaning; this Book is to reveal the Secret Self
of a man, i.e. to initiate him.
AL I,3: "Every man and every woman is a star."
The New Comment
This thesis is fully treated in "The Book of Wisdom
or Folly". Its main statement is that each human being
is an Element of the Cosmos, self-determined and supreme,
co-equal with all other Gods.
From this the Law "Do what thou wilt" follows
logically. One star influences another by attraction, of
course; but these are incidents of self-predestined orbits.
There is, however, a mystery of the planets, revolving about
a star of whom they are parts; but I shall not discuss it
fully in this place.
Man is the Middle Kingdom. The Great Kingdom is Heaven,
with each star as an unit; the Little Kingdom is the Molecule,
with each Electron as an unit. (The Ratio of these three
is regularly geometrical, each being 10 to the 22 times greater
in size than its neighbour.)
See "The Book of the Great Auk" for the demonstration
that each 'star' is the Centre of the Universe to itself,
and that a 'star' simple, original, absolute, can add to
its omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence without ceasing
to be itself; that its one way to do this is to gain experience,
and that therefore it enters into combinations in which its
true Nature is for awhile disguised, even from itself. Analogously,
an atom of carbon may pass through myriad Proteus-phases,
appearing in Chalk, Chloroform, Sugar, Sap, Brain and Blood,
not recognizable as "itself" the black amorphous
solid, but recoverable as such, unchanged by its adventures.
This theory is the only one which explains "why" the
Absolute limited itself, and why It does not recognize Itself
during its cycle of incarnations. It disposes of "Evil" and
the Origin of Evil; without denying Reality to "Evil",
or insulting our daily observation and our common sense.
I here quote (with one or two elucidatory insertions) the
original note originally made by Me on this subject.
May 14, 1919, 6.30 p.m.
All elements must at one time have been separate -- that
would be the case with great heat. Now when atoms get to
the sun, when we get to the sun, we get that immense, extreme
heat, and all the elements are themselves again. Imagine
that each atom of each element possesses the memory of all
his adventures in combination. By the way, that atom, fortified
with that memory, would not be the same atom; yet it is,
because it has gained nothing from anywhere except this memory.
Therefore, by the lapse of time and by virtue of memory,
a thing (although originally an Infinite Perfection) could
become something more than itself; and thus a real development
is possible. One can then see a reason for any element deciding
to go through this series of incarnations (god, that was
a magnificent conception!) because so, and only so, can he
go; and he suffers the lapse of memory of His own Reality
of Perfection which he has during these incarnations, because
he knows he will come through unchanged.
Therefore you have an infinite number of gods, individual
and equal though diverse, each one supreme and utterly indestructible.
This is also the only explanation of how a being could create
a world in which war, evil, "etc". exist. Evil
is only an appearance because, like "good", it
cannot affect the substance itself, but only multiply its
combinations. This is something the same as mystic monism,
but the objection to that theory is that God has to create
things which are all parts of himself, so that their interplay
is false. If we presuppose many elements, their interplay
is natural. It is no objection to this theory to ask who
made the elements -- the elements are at least there; and
God, when you look for him, is not there. Theism is "obscurum
per obscurius". A male star is built up from the centre
outwards, a female star from the circumference inwards. This
is what is meant when we say that woman has no soul. It explains
fully the difference between the sexes.
{WEH NOTE: Although Crowley evidently felt that this characterization
was true simply, it should be noted that this comment is
not CLASS A. The idea of center outwards and circumference
inwards may actually have described the impression received
by a male of the Victorian age in regard to men and women.
Certainly every male mystic has the state here described
as "circumference inward", "...no soul" and "female" at
the time of reception --- vide Liber LXV. Equally, every
woman who acts positively from awareness of her identity
would qualify for "center outwards", "soul" and "male" in
this sense. What Crowley identified as sex-linked may better
be considered as modality linked, with the sexual linkage
as much an accident of culture as anything else.}
AL I,4: "Every number is infinite; there is no difference."
The New Comment
This is a great and holy mystery. Although each star has
its own number, each number is equal and supreme. Every
man and every woman is not only a part of God, but the
Ultimate God. "The Centre is everywhere and the circumference
nowhere". The old definition of God takes new meaning
for us. Each one of us is the One God. This can only be
understood by the initiate; one must acquire certain high
states of consciousness to appreciate it.
I have tried to put it simply in the note to the last verse.
I may add that in the Trance called by me the "Star-Sponge" --
see note to v. 59 -- this apprehension of the Universe is
seen as an astral Vision. It began as "Nothingness with
Sparkles" in 1916 E.V. by Lake Pasquaney in New Hampshire,
U.S.A. and developed into fullness on various subsequent
occasions. Each 'Star' is connected directly with every other
star, and the Space being Without Limit (Ain Soph) the Body
of Nuith, any one star is as much the Centre as any other.
Each man instinctively feels that he is the Centre of the
Cosmos, and philosophers have jeered at his presumption.
But it was he that was precisely right. The yokel is no more
'petty' than the King, nor the earth than the Sun. Each simple
elemental Self is supreme, Very God of Very God. Ay, in this
Book is Truth almost insufferably splendid, for Man has veiled
himself too long from his own glory: he fears the abyss,
the ageless Absolute. But Truth shall make him free!
It must be understood from the beginning that this book
contains the keys of all the knowledge necessary for the
operation of the Magical Formulae of the world during the
Aeon which it initiates. In this very early verse is already
given a Master Key to mathematics and metaphysics. On applying
this to current problems of thought, it will be discovered
that the long-fast doors fly open at a touch.
Let use briefly examine the implications of this statement.
It should not occasion surprise to find that the Book of
the Law not only anticipates the conclusion of the greatest
modern mathematicians like Poincare, but goes beyond them.
It was necessary that this should be the case, so that the
book might be, beyond question, the expression of a mind
possessed of superior powers to any incarnated mind soever.
It may clarify the subject if we venture to paraphrase the
text. The first statement "Every number is infinite" is,
on the face of it, a contradiction in terms. But that is
only because of the accepted idea of a number as not being
a thing in itself but merely a term in series homogeneous
in character. All orthodox mathematical argument is based
on definitions involving this conception. For example, it
is fundamental to admit the identity of 2 plus 1 with 1 plus
2. The Book of the Law presents an altogether different conception
of the nature of number.
Mathematical ideas involve what is called a continuum, which
is, superficially at least, of a different character to the
physical continuum. For instance, in the physical continuum,
the eye can distinguish between the lengths of one-inch stick
and a two-inch stick, but not between these which measure
respectively one thousand miles and one thousand miles and
on inch, though the difference in each case is equally an
inch. The inch difference is either perceptible or not perceptible,
according to the conditions. Similarly, the eye can distinguish
either the one-inch or the two-inch stick from one of an
inch and a half. But we cannot continue this process indefinitely
-- we can always reach a point where the extremes are distinguishable
from each other but their mean from neither of the extremes.
Thus, in the physical continuum, if we have three terms,
A, B, and C, A appears equal to B, and B to C, yet C appears
greater than A. Our reason tells us that this conclusion
is an absurdity, that we have been deceived by the grossness
of our perceptions. It is useless for us to invent instruments
which increase the accuracy of our observations, for though
they enable us to distinguish between the three terms of
our series, and to restore the theoretical Hierarchy, we
can always continue the process of division until we arrive
at another series: A', B', C', where A' and C' are distinguishable
from each other, but where neither is distinguishable from
B'.
On the above grounds, modern thinkers have endeavoured to
create a distinction between the mathematical and the physical
continuum, yet it should surely be obvious that the defect
in our organs of sense, which is responsible for the difficulty,
shows that our method of observation debars us from appreciating
the true nature of things by this method of observation.
However, in the case of the mathematical continuum, its
character is such that we can continue indefinitely the process
of division between any two mathematical expressions so-ever,
without interfering in any way with the regularity of the
process, or creating a condition in which two terms become
indistinguishable from each other. The mathematical continuum,
moreover, is not merely a question of series of integral
numbers, but of other types of numbers, which, like integers,
express relations between existing ideas, yet are not measurable
in terms of that series. Such numbers are themselves parts
of a continuum of their own, which interpenetrates the series
of integers without touching it, at least necessarily.
For example: the tangents of angles made by the separation
of two lines from coincidence to perpendicularity, increases
constantly from zero to infinity. But almost the only integral
value is found at the angle of 45 degrees where it is unity.
It may be said that there is an infinite number of such
series, each possessing the same property of infinite divisibility.
The ninety tangents of angles differing by one degree between
zero and ninety may be multiplied sixty fold by taking the
minute instead of the degree as the co-efficient of the progression,
and these again sixty fold by introducing the second to divide
the minute. So on ad infinitum.
All these considerations depend upon the assumption that
every number is no more than a statement of relation. The
new conception, indicated by the Book of the Law, is of course
in no way contradictory of the orthodox view; but it adds
to it in the most practically important manner. A statistician
computing the birth-rate of the eighteenth century makes
no special mention of the birth of Napoleon. This does not
invalidate his results; but it demonstrates how exceedingly
limited is their scope even with regard to their own object,
for the birth of Napoleon had more influence on the death-rate
than another other phenomenon included in his calculations.
A short digression is necessary. There may be some who are
still unaware of the fact, but the mathematical and physical
sciences are in no sense concerned with absolute truth, but
only with the relations between observed phenomena and the
observer. The statement that the acceleration of falling
bodies is thirty-two feet per second, is only the roughest
of approximation at the best. In the first place, it applies
to earth. As most people know, in the Moon the rate is only
one-sixth as great. But, even on earth, it differs in a marked
manner between the poles and the equator, and not only so,
but it is affected by so small a matter as the neighborhood
of a mountain.
It is similarly inaccurate to speak of "repeating" an
experiment. The exact conditions never recur. One cannot
boil water twice over. The water is not the same, and the
observer is not the same. When a man says that he is sitting
still, he forgets that he is whirling through space with
vertiginous rapidity.
It is possibly such considerations that led earlier thinkers
to admit that there was no expectation of finding truth in
anything but mathematics, and they rashly supposed that the
apparent ineluctability of her laws constitutes a guarantee
of their coherence with truth. But mathematics is entirely
a matter of convention, no less so than the rules of Chess
or Baccarat. When we say that "two straight lines cannot
enclose a space", we mean no more than we are unable
to think of them as doing so. The truth of the statement
depends, consequently, on that of the hypothesis that our
minds bear witness to truth. Yet the insane man may be unable
to think that he is not the victim of mysterious persecution.
We find that no reason for believing him. It is useless to
reply that mathematical truths receive universal consent,
because they do not. It is a matter of elaborate and tedious
training to persuade even the few people when we teach of
the truth of the simplest theorems in Geometry. There are
very few people living who are convinced -- or even aware
-- of the more recondite results of analysis. It is no reply
to this criticism to say that all men can be convinced if
they are sufficiently trained, for who is to guarantee that
such training does not warp the mind?
But when we have brushed away these preliminary objections,
we find that the nature of the statement itself is not, and
cannot be, more than a statement of correspondences between
our ideas. In the example chosen, we have five ideas; those
of duality, of straightness, of a line, of enclosing, and
of space. None of these are more than ideas. Each one is
meaningless until it is defined as corresponding in a certain
manner to certain other ideas. We cannot define any word
soever, except by identifying it with two or more equally
undefined words. To define it by a single word would evidently
constitute a tautology.
We are thus forced to the conclusion that all investigation
may be stigmatized as obscurum per obscurium. Logically,
our position is even worse. We define A as BC, where B is
DE, and C is FG. Not only does the process increase the number
of our unknown quantities in Geometrical progression at every
step, but we must ultimately arrive at a point where the
definition of Z involves the term A. Not only is all argument
confined within a vicious circle, but so is the definition
of the terms on which any argument must be based.
It might be supposed that the above chain of reasoning made
all conclusions impossible. But this is only true when we
investigate the ultimate validity of our propositions. We
can rely on water boiling at 100 degrees Centigrade,<<In
revising this comment, I note with amusement that it had
escaped me that 100 degrees C. is by definition the temperature
at which water boils! I have seen it boil at about 84 degrees
C. on the Baltoro Glacier, and determined my height above
sea-level by observing the boiling point so often that I
had quite forgotten the original conditions of Celsius.>> although,
for mathematical accuracy, water never boils twice running
at precisely the same temperature, and although, logically,
the term water is an incomprehensible mystery.
To return to our so-called axiom; Two straight lines cannot
enclose a space. It has been one of the most important discoveries
of modern mathematics, that this statement, even if we assume
the definition of the various terms employed, is strictly
relative, not absolute; and that common sense is impotent
to confirm it as in the case of the boiling water. For Bolyai,
Lobatschewsky, and Riemann have shown conclusively that a
consistent system of geometry can be erected on any arbitrary
axiom soever. If one chooses to assume that the sum of the
interior angles of a triangle is either greater than or less
than two right angles, instead of equal to them, we can construct
two new systems of Geometry, each perfectly consistent with
itself, and we possess no means soever of deciding which
of the three represents truth.
I may illustrate this point by a simple analogy. We are
accustomed to assert that we go from France to China, a form
of expression which assumes that those countries are stationary,
while we are mobile. But the fact might be equally well expressed
by saying that France left us and China came to us. In either
case there is no implication of absolute motion, for the
course of the earth through space is not taken into account.
We implicitly refer to a standard of repose which, in point
of fact, we know not to exist. When I say that the chair
in which I am sitting has remained stationary for the last
hour, I mean only "stationary in respect to myself and
my house". In reality, the earth's rotation has carried
it over one thousand miles, and the earth's course some seventy
thousand miles, from its previous position. All that we can
expect of any statement is that it should be coherent with
regard to a series of assumption which we know perfectly
well to be false and arbitrary.
It is commonly imagined, by those who have not examined
the nature of the evidence, that our experience furnishes
a criterion by which we may determine which of the possible
symbolic representations of Nature is the true one. They
suppose that Euclidian Geometry is in conformity with Nature
because the actual measurements of the interior angles of
a triangle tell us that their sum is in fact equal to two
right angles, just as Euclid tells us that theoretical considerations
declare to be the case. They forget that the instruments
which we use for our measurements are themselves conceived
of as in conformity with the principles of Euclidian Geometry.
In other words, them measure ten yards with a piece of wood
about which they really known nothing but that its length
is one-tenth of the ten yards in question.
The fallacy should be obvious. The most ordinary reflection
should make it clear that our results depend upon all sorts
of condition. If we inquire, "What is the length of
the thread of quicksilver in a thermometer?", we can
only reply that it depends on the temperature of the instrument.
In fact, we judge temperature by the difference of the coefficients
of expansion due to heat of the two substances, glass and
mercury.
Again, the divisions of the scale of the thermometer depend
upon the temperature of boiling water, which is not a fixed
thing. It depends on the pressure of the earth's atmosphere,
which varies (according to time and place) to the extent
of over twenty per cent. Most people who talk of "scientific
accuracy" are quite ignorant of elementary facts of
this kind.
It will be said, however, that having defined a yard as
the length of a certain bar deposited in the Mint in London,
under given conditions of temperature and pressure, we are
at least in a position to measure the length of other objects
by comparison, directly or indirectly, with that standard.
In a rough and ready way, that is more or less the case.
But if it should occur that the length of things in general
were halved or doubled, we could not possibly be aware of
the other so-called laws of Nature. We have no means so-ever
of determining even so simple a matter as to whether one
of two events happens before or after the other.
Let us take an instance. It is well known that the light
of the sun requires some eight minutes to reach the earth.
Simultaneous <<Simultaneity, closely considered, possesses
no meaning soever. See A.A.Eddington, "Space, Time and
Gravitation", 61.>> {WEH NOTE: SIC. This is page
51 in Eddington, op. cit. 1920 edition, 1959 reprint: "The
denial of absolute simultaneity is a natural complement to
the denial of absolute motion ..."} phenomena in the
two bodies would therefore appear to be separated in time
to that extent; and, from a mathematical standpoint, the
same discrepancy theoretically exists, even if we suppose
the two bodies in question to be only a few yards one more
remote than the other. Recent consideration of these facts
has show the impossibility of determining the fact of priority,
so that it may be just as reasonable to assert that a dagger-thrust
is caused by a wound as vice versa. Lewis Carroll has an
amusing parable to this effect in "Through the Looking-Glass",
which work, by the way, with its predecessor, is packed with
examples of philosophical paradox. <<If I strike a
billiard ball, and it moves, both my will and its motion
have causes long antecedent to the act. I may consider both
my Work and its reaction as twin effects of the eternal Universe.
The moved arm and ball are part of a state of the Cosmos
which resulted necessarily from its momentarily previous
state, and so, back for ever. Thus, my Magical Work is only
on of the cause-effects necessarily concomitant with the
cause-effects which set the ball in motion. I may therefore
regard the act of striking as a cause-effect of my original
Will to move the ball, though necessarily previous to its
motion. But the case of Magical work is not quite analogous.
For I am such that I am compelled to perform Magick in order
to make my Will to prevail; so that the cause of my doing
the Work is also he cause of the ball's motion, and there
is no reason why one should precede the other, See Book 4,
Part III, for a full discussion. (Since writing the above,
I have been introduced to "Space, Time and Gravitation",
where similar arguments are adduced.)>>
We may now return to our text "Every number is infinite".
The fact that every number is a term in a mathematical continuum
is no more an adequate definition than if we were to describe
a picture as Number So-and-So in the catalogue. Every number
is a thing in itself,<<I regret to find myself in disagreement
with the Hon. Bertrand Russell with regard to the conception
of the nature of Number.>> possessing an infinite number
of properties peculiar to itself.
Let us consider, for a moment, the numbers 8 and 9. 8 is
the number of cubes measuring one inch each way in a cube
which measures two inches each way; while 9 is the number
of squares measuring one inch each way in a square measuring
three inches each way. There is a sort of reciprocal correspondence
between them in this respect.
By adding one to eight, we obtain nine, so that we might
define unity as that which has the property of transforming
a three-dimensional expansion of two into a two-dimensional
expansion of three. But if we add unity to nine, unity appears
as that which has the power of transforming the two-dimensional
expansion of three aforesaid into a mere oblong measuring
5 by 2. Unity thus appears as in possession of two totally
different properties. Are we then to conclude that it is
not the same unity? How are we to describe unity, how know
it? Only by experiment can we discover the nature of its
action on any given number. In certain minor respects, this
action exhibits regularity. We know, for example, that it
uniformly transforms an odd number into an even one, and
vice versa, but that is practically the limit of what we
can predict as to its action.
We can go further, and state that any number soever possesses
this infinite variety of powers to transform any other number,
even by the primitive process of addition. We observe also
how the manipulation of any two numbers can be arranged so
that the result is incommensurable with either, or even so
that ideas are created of a character totally incompatible
with our original conception of numbers as a series of positive
integers. We obtain unreal and irrational expressions, ideas
of a wholly different order, by a very simple juxtaposition
of such apparently comprehensible and commonplace entities
as integers.
There is only one conclusion to be drawn from these various
considerations. It is that the nature of every number is
a thing peculiar to itself, a thing inscrutable and infinite,
a thing inexpressible, even if we could understand it.
In other words, a number is a soul, in the proper sense
of the term, an unique and necessary element in the totality
of existence.
We may not turn to the second phrase of the text: "there
is no difference". It must strike the student immediately
that this is, on the face of it, a point blank contradiction
of all that has been said above. What have we done but insist
upon the essential difference between any tow numbers, and
show that even their sequential relation is little more than
arbitrary, being indeed rather a convenient way of regarding
them for the purpose of coordinating them with out understanding
than anything else? On a similar principle, we number public
vehicles or telephones without implication even of necessary
sequence. The appellation denotes nothing beyond membership
of a certain class of objects, and is indeed expressly chosen
to avoid being entangled in considerations of any characteristics
of the individual so designated except that cursory designation.
when it is said that there is no difference between numbers
(for in this sense I think we must understand the phrase),
we must examine the meaning of the word 'difference'. Difference
is the denial of identity in the first place, but the word
is not properly applied to discriminate between objects which
have no similarity. One does not ask, "What is the difference
between a yard and a minute?" in practical life. We
do ask the difference between two things of the same kind.
The Book of the Law is trying to emphasize the doctrine that
each number is unique and absolute. Its relations with other
numbers are therefore in the nature of illusion. They are
the forms of presentation under which we perceive their semblances;
and it is to the last degree important to realize that these
semblances only indicate the nature of the realities behind
them in the same way in which the degrees on a thermoetric
scale indicate heat. It is quite unphilosophical to say that
50 degrees Centigrade is hotter than 40 degrees. Degrees
of temperature are simply conventions invented by ourselves
to describe physical states of a totally different order;
and, while the heat of a body may be regarded as an inherent
property of its own, our measure of that heat in no way concerns
it.
We use instruments of science to inform us of the nature
of the various objects which we wish to study; but our observations
never reveal the thing as it is in itself. They only enable
us to compare unfamiliar with familiar experiences. The use
of an instrument necessarily implies the imposition of alien
conventions. To take the simplest example: when we say that
we see a thing, we only mean that our consciousness is modified
by its existence according to a particular arrangement of
lenses and other optical instruments, which exist in our
eyes and not in the object perceived. So also, the fact that
the sum of 2 and 1 is three, affords us but a single statement
of relations symptomatic of the presentation to us of those
numbers.
We have, therefore, no means soever of determining the difference
between any two numbers, except in respect of a particular
and very limited relation. Furthermore, in view of the infinity
of every number, it seems not unlikely that the apparent
differences observed by us would tend to disappear with the
disappearance of the arbitrary conditions which we attach
to them to facilitate, as we think, our examination. We may
also observe that each number, being absolute, is the centre
of its universe, so that all other numbers, so far as they
are related to it, are its appanages. Each number is, therefore,
the totality of the universe, and there cannot be any difference
between one infinite universe and another. The triangle ABC
may look very different from the standpoints of A, B, and
C respectively; each view is true, absolutely; yet it is
the same triangle.
The above interpretation of the text is of a revolutionary
character, from the point of view of science and mathematics.
Investigation of the lines here laid down will lead to the
solution of these grave problems which have so long baffled
the greatest minds of the world, on account of the initial
error of attaching them on lines which involve self-contradiction.
The attempt to discover the nature of things by a study of
the relations between them is precisely parallel with the
ambition to obtain a finite value of Pi. Nobody wishes to
deny the practical value of the limited investigations which
have so long preoccupied the human mind. But it is only quite
recently that even the best thinkers have begun to recognize
that their work was only significant within a certain order.
It will soon be admitted on all hands that the study of the
nature of things in themselves is a work for which the human
reason is incompetent; for the nature of reason is such that
it must always formulate itself in proportions which merely
assert a positive or negative relation between a subject
and a predicate. Men will thus be led to the development
of a faculty, superior to reason, whose apprehension is independent
of the hieroglyphic representations of which reason so vainly
makes use.<<See "Eleusis", A. Crowley Collected
Works, Vol. III, Epilogue.>> {This then will} be the
foundation of the true spiritual science which is the proper
tendency of the evolution of man. This Science will clarify,
without superseding, the old; but it will free men from the
bondage of mind, little by little, just as the old science
has freed them from the bondage of matter.
This science is the proper and particular study of initiates,
and its principia are formulated in the Book of the Law.
This Book may therefore be regarded as indicating a complete
revolution in human affairs, for it advances mankind in the
most radical manner. The road of attainment to self-realisation
is made open as never before has been done in the history
of the planet.
AL I,5: "Help me, o warrior lord of Thebes, in my unveiling
before the Children of men!"
The Old Comment
5. Nu, to unveil herself, needs a mortal intermediary, in
the first instance.
It is to be supposed that ankh-f-n-khonsu, the warrior lord
of Thebes, priest of Men Tu, is in some subtle manner identical
with either Aiwass or the Beast.
The New Comment
Here Nuit appeals, simply and directly, recognizing the separate
function of each Star of her Body. Though all is One, each
part of that One has its own special work, each Star its
particular Orbit.
In addressing me as warrior lord of Thebes, it appears as
if She perceived a certain continuity or identity of myself
with Ankh-f-n-khonsu, whose Stele is the Link with Antiquity
of this Revelation. See Equinox I, VII, pp. 363-400a, for
the account of this event.
The unveiling is the Proclamation of the Truth previously
explained, that the Body of Nuith occupies Infinite Space,
so that every Star thereof is Whole in itself, an independent
and absolute Unit. They differ as Carbon and Calcium differ,
but each is a simple "immortal" Substance, or at
least a form of some simpler Substance. Each soul is thus
absolute, and 'good' or 'evil' are merely terms descriptive
of relations between destructible combinations. Thus Quinine
is 'good' for a malarial patient, but 'evil' for the germ
of the disease. Heat is 'bad' for ice-cream and 'good' for
coffee. The indivisible essence of things, their 'souls',
are indifferent to all conditions soever, for none can in
any way affect them.
AL I,6: "Be thou Hadit, my secret centre, my heart & my
tongue!"
The Old Comment
6. The recipient of this knowledge is to identify himself
with Hadit, and thus fully express the thoughts of her
heart in her very language.
The New Comment
Nuit formulates me as Hadit, especially in the three centres
of consciousness of her Being. IN this way, for this purpose,
I became the complement of Her.
These centres are those of Love, Life and language. Duality
is the condition of all three. It will appear later how it
is that None and Two are identical; they are distinct in
our minds only because those minds are conscious, and therefore
think of "two" as their own state. But the unconscious
mind thinks Nothing, and is Nothing. Yet it is the same mind.
Nuith selects three centres of Her Body to become "Two" with
Hadit; for she asks me to declare Her in these three. Infinite
freedom, all-embracing, for physical Love; boundless continuity
for Life; and the silent rhythm of the Stars for Language.
These three conceptions are Her gift to us.
AL I,7: "Behold! it is revealed by Aiwass the minister
of Hoor-paar-kraat."
The Old Comment
7. Aiwass -- see Introduction. He is 78, Mezla, the "influence" from
the Highest Crown, and the number of cards in the Tarot,
Rota, the all-embracing Wheel.
Hoor-paar-Kraat -- see II, 8.
Aiwass is called the minister of Hoor-paar-Kraat, the God
of Silence; for his word is the Speech of the Silence.
The New Comment
Aiwass is the name given by Ouarda the Seer as that of the
Intelligence Communicating. See note to Title.
Hoor-paar-Kraat or Harpocrates, the "Babe in the Egg
of Blue", is not merely the God of Silence in a conventional
sense. He represents the Higher Self, the Holy Guardian Angel.
The connexion is with the symbolism of the Dwarf in Mythology.
He contains everything in Himself, but is unmanifested. See
II:8.
He is the First Letter of the Alphabet, Aleph, whose number
is One, and his card in the Tarot is The Fool, numbered Zero.
Aleph is attributed to the "Element" (in the old
classification of things) of Air.
Now as "One" or Aleph he represents the Male Principle,
the First Cause, and the free breath of Life, the sound of
the vowel A being made with the open throat and mouth.
As Zero he represents the female Principle, the fertile
Mother. (An old name for the card is Mat, from the Italian
'Matto', fool, but earlier also from Maut, the Egyptian Vulture-Mother-Goddess).
Fertile, for the 'Egg of Blue' is the Uterus, and in the
Macrocosm the Body of Nuith, and it contains the Unborn Babe,
helpless yet protected and nourished against the crocodiles
and tigers shown on the card, just as the womb is sealed
during gestation. He sits on a lotus, the yoni, which floats
on the 'Nile', the amniotic fluid.
In his absolute innocence and ignorance he is "The
Fool"; he is the 'Saviour', being the Son who shall
trample on the crocodiles and tigers, and avenge his father
Osiris. Thus we see him as the "Great Fool" of
Celtic legend, the "Pure Fool" of Act I of "Parsifal",
and, generally speaking, the insane person whose words have
always been taken for oracles.
But to be 'Saviour' he must be born and grow to manhood;
thus Parsifal acquires the Sacred Lance, emblem of virility.
He usually wears the 'Coat of many colours' like Joseph the
'dreamer'; so he is also now the Green Man of spring festivals.
But his 'folly' is now not innocence but inspiration of wine;
he drinks from the Graal, offered to him by the Priestess.
So we see him fully armed as Bacchus Diphues, male and female
in one, bearing the Thyrsus-rod, and a cluster of grapes
or a wineskin, while a tiger leaps up by his side. This form
is suggested in the Taro card, where 'The fool' is shown
with a long wand and carrying a sack; his coat is motley.
Tigers and Crocodiles follow him, thus linking this image
with that of Harpocrates.
Almost identical symbols are those of the secret God of
the Templars, the bi-sexual Baphomet, and of Zeus Arrhenothelus,
equally bi-sexual, the Father-Mother of All in One Person.
(He is shown in this full form in the Tarot Trump XV, "the
Devil".) Now Zeus being lord of Air, we are reminded
that Aleph is the letter of Air.
As Air we find the "Wandering Fool" pure wanton
Breath, yet creative. Wind was supposed of old to impregnate
the Vulture, which therefore was chosen to symbolize the
Mother-Goddess.
He is the Wandering Knight or Prince of Fairy Tales who
marries the King's Daughter. This legend is derived from
certain customs among exogamic tribes, for which see "The
Golden Bough".
Thus one Europa, Semele and others claimed that Zeus --
Air<<Zeus obtained Air for his kingdom in the partition
with Hades, who took Fire, and Poseidon, who took Water.
Shu is the Egyptian God of the Firmament. There is a great
difficulty here, etymologically. Zeus is connected with IAO,
Abrasax, and the Dental Sibilant Gods of the Great Mysteries,
with the South and Hadit, Ada, Set, Saturn, Adonai, Attis,
Adonis; he is even the "Jesus", slain with the
Lance, whose blood is collected in a Cup. Yet he is also
to be identified with the opposite party of the North and
Nuit, with the "John" slain with the Sword, whose
flesh is placed upon a Disk, in the Lesser Mysteries, baptizing
with Water as "Jesus" with Fire, with On, Oannes,
Noah, and the like.
It seems as if this great division, which has wrought such
appalling havoc upon the Earth, were originally no more than
a distinction adopted for convenience. It is indeed the task
of this Book to reduce Theology to the interplay of the Dyad
Nuith and Hadith, these being themselves conceived as complementary,
as Two equivalent to Naught, "divided for lvoe's sake,
for the chance of union.">> -- had enjoyed them
in the form of a beast, bird, or what not; while later Mary
attributed her condition to the agency of a Spirit -- Spiritus,
breath, or air -- in the shape of a dove.
But the "Small Person" of Hindu mysticism, the
Dwarf insane yet crafty of many legends in many lands, is
also this same "Holy Ghost", or Silent Self of
a man, or his Holy Guardian Angel.
He is almost the "Unconscious" of Freud, unknown,
unaccountable, the silent Spirit, blowing "whither it
listeth, but thou canst not tell whence it cometh or whither
it goeth". It commands with absolute authority when
it appears at all, despite conscious reason and judgment.
Aiwass is then, as this verse 7 states, the "minister" of
this Hoor-paar-Kraat, that is of the Saviour of the World
in the larger sense, and of mine own "Silent Self" in
the lesser. A "minister" is one who performs a
service, in this case evidently that of revealing; He was
the intelligible medium between the Babe God -- the New Aeon
about to be born -- and myself. This Book of the Law is the
Voice of his Mother, His Father, and Himself. But on His
appearing, He assumes the active form twin to Harpocrates,
that of Ra-Hoor-Khuit. The Concealed Child becomes the Conquering
Child, the armed Horus avenging his father Osiris. So also
our own Silent Self, helpless and witless, hidden within
us, will spring forth, if we have craft to loose him to the
Light, spring lustily forward with his cry of Battle, the
Word of our True Wills.
This is the Task of the Adept, to have the Knowledge and
Conversation of His Holy Guardian Angel, to become aware
of his nature and his purpose, fulfilling them.
Why is Aiwass thus spelt, when Aiwaz is the natural transliteration
of OIVZ{WEH NOTE: This word is not certain.}? Perhaps because
he was not content with identifying Himself with Thelema,
Agape, etc. by the number 93, but wished to express his nature
by six letters (Six being the number of the Sun, the God-Man,
etc.) whose value in Greek should be A=1, I=10, F=6, A=1,
S=200, S=200: total 418, the number of Abrahadabra, the Magical
Formula of the new Aeon! Note that I and V are the letters
of the Father and the Son, also of the Virgin and the Bull,
(See "Liber 418") protected on either side by the
letter of AIR, and followed by the letter of Fire twice over.
AL I,8: "The Khabs is in the Khu, not the Khu in the
Khabs."
The Old Comment
8. Here beings the text.
Khabs is the secret Light or L.V.X.; the Khu is the magical
entity of a man.
I find later (Sun in Virgo, An VII) that Khabs means star.
In which chase cf. v.5.
The doctrine here taught is that that Light is innermost,
essential man. Intra (not Extra) Nobis Regnum Dei.
The New Comment
We are not to regard ourselves as base beings, without whose
sphere is Light or "God". Our minds and bodies
are veils of the Light within. The uninitiate is a "Dark
Star", and the Great Work for him is to make his veils
transparent by 'purifying' them. This 'purification' is
really 'simplification'; it is not that the veil is dirty,
but that the complexity of its folds makes it opaque. The
Great Work therefore consists principally in the solution
of complexes. Everything in itself is perfect, but when
things are muddled, they become 'evil'. (This will be understood
better in the Light of "The Hermit of Esopus Island",
q.v.) The Doctrine is evidently of supreme importance,
from its position as the first 'revelation' of Aiwass.
This 'star' or 'Inmost Light' is the original, individual,
eternal essence. The Khu is the magical garment which it
weaves for itself, a 'form' for its Being Beyond Form, by
use of which it can gain experience through self-consciousness,
as explained in the note to verses 2 and 3. This Khu is the
first veil, far subtler than mind or body, and truer; for
its symbolic shape depends on the nature of its Star.
Why are we told that the Khabs is in the Khu, not the Khu
in the Khabs? Did we then suppose the converse? I think that
we are warned against the idea of a Pleroma, a flame of which
we are Sparks, and to which we return when we 'attain'. That
would indeed be to make the whole curse of separate existence
ridiculous, a senseless and inexcusable folly. It would throw
us back on the dilemma of Manichaeism. The idea of incarnations "perfecting" a
thing originally perfect by definition is imbecile. The only
sane solution is as given previously, to suppose that the
Perfect enjoys experience of (apparent) Imperfection. (There
are deeper resolutions of this problem appropriate to the
highest grades of initiation; but the above should suffice
the average intelligence.)
AL I,9: "Worship then the Khabs, and behold my light
shed over you!"
The Old Comment
9. That Khabs is declared to be the light of Nu. It being
worshipped in the centre, the light also fills the circumference,
so that all is light.
The New Comment
We are to pay attention to this Inmost Light; then comes
the answering Light of Infinite Space. Note that the Light
of Space is what men call Darkness; its nature is utterly
incomprehensible to our uninitiated minds. It is the 'veils'
mentioned previously in this comment that obstruct the
relation between Nuit and Hadit.
We are not to worship the Khu, to fall in love with our
Magical Image. To do this -- we have all done it -- is to
forget our Truth. If we adore Form, it becomes opaque to
Being, and may soon prove false to itself. The Khu in each
of us includes the Cosmos as he knows it. To me, even another
Khabs is only part of my Khu. Our own Khabs is our one sole
Truth.
AL I,10: "Let my servants be few & secret: they
shall rule the many & the known."
The Old Comment
10. This is the rule of Thelema, that its adepts shall be
invisible rulers. This, it may be remarked, has always
been the case.
The New Comment
The nature of magical power is quite incomprehensible to
the vulgar. The prophet Ezekiel besieging a tile in order
to destroy Jerusalem, and the adventure of Hosea with Gomer,
seem as absurd to the 'practical' man as do the researches
of any other scientific man until the Sunday Newspapers
have furnished him with a plausible explanation which explains
nothing. ("Book 4", Part III, must be read in
this connexion.)
"My servants"; not those of the Lord of the Aeon. "The
Law is for all"; there can be no secrecy about that.
The verse refers to specially chosen 'servants'; perhaps
those who, worshipping the Khabs, have beheld Her light shed
over them. Such persons indeed consummate the marriage of
Nuit and Hadit in themselves; in that case they are aware
of certain Ways to Power.
There is also a mystical sense in this verse. We are to
organize our minds thoroughly, appointing few and secret
chiefs, serving Nuit, to discipline the varied departments
of the conscious thought.
AL I,11: "These are fools that men adore; both their
Gods & their men are fools."
The Old Comment
11. "The many and the known" both among Gods and
men, are revered; this is folly.
The New Comment
It is a fact of meditation that everything which becomes
manifest is instantly recognized as unreal. All perfect
unveiling solves, wholly or in part, the equation "Something
equals 0/0." (See comment on verse 28.) Adeptship
is little more than ability to perceive this 0/0 phase
of "Something" in respect of larger and larger "Somethings".
A verse with so sacred a number as 11 is likely to mean
very deep things. Probably much concerning the function of
The Fool is concealed in it.
It has been shewn in a previous note that the principal
Gods, and men, that men have adored, are in one way or another
represented in the Tarot card "The Fool". The statement
in the text is, superficially, either a platitude or a petulance;
neither sounds like the tone of Nuit. A third alternative?
Can we have "phrased" it carelessly, or punctuated
it incorrectly? Or is there a Qabalistic puzzle or a mystic
submeaning concealed? The subject changes instantly, as it
seems. I prefer to suggest that these "fools" are "Silent
selves", impotent babes unborn; then verse 12 continues "Come
forth!", that is, bring your Holy Guardian Angel from
the womb of your subconsciousness. Then, "take your
fill of love"; that is, do your True Will, whose mode
of fulfilment is love, as explained later in this chapter.
AL I,12: "Come forth, o children, under the stars, & take
your fill of love!"
The Old Comment
12. The Key of the worship of Nu. The uniting of consciousness
with infinite space by the exercise of love, pastoral or
pagan love. But vide infra.
The New Comment
The whole doctrine of 'love' is discussed in the Book "Aleph
(Wisdom or Folly)" and should be studied therein. But
note further how this Verse agrees with the comment above,
how every Star is to come forth from its veils, that it may
revel with the whole World of Stars. This is again also a
call to unite or 'love', thus formulating the Equation 1
(-1) = 0<<The Hon. Bertrand Russell might prefer to
write this: 1 (-1) = 0. For Initiates of the IXth degree
of O.T.O. it could be expressed: Phi K - T = 0, where Phi
- K = 0, and Phi and K are both positive integers.>>,
which is the general magical formula in our Cosmos.
"Come forth" -- from what are you hiding? "under
the stars", that is, openly. Also, let love be 'under'
or 'unto' the Body of Nuith. But above all, be open! What
is this shame? Is Love Hideous, that men should cover him
with lies? Is Love so sacred that others must not intrude?
Nay, 'under the stars', at night, what eye but theirs may
see? Or, if one see, should not your worship wake the cloisters
of his soul to echo sanctity for that so lovely a deed and
gracious you have done?
AL I,13: "I am above you and in you. My ecstasy is
in yours. My joy is to see your joy."
The Old Comment
13. This doctrine implies some mystic bond which I imagine
is only to be understood by experience; this human ecstasy
and that divine ecstasy interact. A similar doctrine is
found in the Bhagavad Gita.
The New Comment
Note that Space is omnipresent.<<Perhaps I should have
defined the word "Space". The task is far from
easy. Space (including Time) is one of the conditions necessary
to the illusion of duality. But when Nuith says "I am
Infinite Space and the Infinite Stars thereof" (verse
22) there must be some other meaning. May I define it as "totality
of the possibilities of giving Form to Being", and thus
equivalent to "Matter", which manifests "Motion"?
This at least suits the verse under present discussion; for
the Feminine Idea is to take delight in enabling the Masculine
Idea to express itself by its means. There should be no difficulty
for the student of modern mathematical philosophy in conceiving
Matter and Space as identical. He may find it less easy to
assent to a personification capable of speech. But I shall
not resent the interpretation of Her speech as being the
rhetorical device of AIWAZ. Devotion to Her, Knowledge of
Her, may perfectly well be understood as the process of extending
the human consciousness to apprehend the supra-rational idea
thus presented. It was obviously necessary, from a practical
point of view, to phrase this Book in terms of common parlance,
concealing the more recondite Arcana in in the numerical
and literal cipher. When, then, I say "Space is omnipresent",
it is almost the equivalent of "Anything is always liable
to happen.">> The cause of 'sorrow' is the 'imaginary'
solutions of continuity in this substance. Ecstasy is produced
by the resolution of these illusions. Observe well that to
beings in a state of strain or sorrow the "Great Work" is
bound to appear in the guise of a relief or joy. But this
is not to assert Samadhi, that unity with the universe which
brings relief and joy by "love", as an "absolute
good". It is only good relatively to our present condition
as beings divided by Illusion from Nuit. When one returns
to the 'simple' state, one soon begins to think out a new
route through the Universe, and devise new combinations in
the Great Game called Seeing Life.
In Nature few elements are lone wolves. Most of them are
being thrown in and out of combination constantly; on suns
this occurs with lordly vehemence.
Note that Nuith, although She is Infinite Space, speaks
as an individual might do, often enough. This is not that
She is 'talking down to our level'; it is a fact. In the
Cosmos almost any aggregation can think and act as an Ego.
For instance, the cells of our bodies are each units, diverse
in composition and character, living each a life of its own.
Yet we think and act for them, and say "I". The
stars are the cells of Her Body. Each one of us is such a
cell; not less itself but more because of its secret function
in Her.
It should be evident that Nuith obtains the satisfaction
of Her Nature when the parts of Her Body fulfil their own
Nature. The sacrament of live is not only so from the point
of view of the celebrants, but from that of the divinity
invoked.
It is said that for every step one takes towards one's Holy
Guardian Angel, He takes two towards his client.
What do I mean by "beings divided by Illusion from
Nuith", in the first paragraph? This, that we are limited
mentally, that we realize only an infinitesimal fraction
of the possible forms of expression. We can hardly even imagine
ourselves as living on another planet, or in the Sun; much
less as apprehending the Universe by means of a totally different
set of senses. Yet most of us who are not mere placental
amnoites possess an instinct which persistently regrets our
incapacities. It is bad enough to be dependent on scientific
instruments for our knowledge of all but the grossest of
the wonders and splendours of the Universe; but worse that
we are aware of an infinite variety of order of phenomena,
such as electricity, magnetism, chemical action, and a host
of others, which we can explore only by indirect means, interpret
only by obviously inadequate symbols, and understand only
in terms of arbitrary relations with our animal-sense-perceptions.
We know theoretically that every object must react to every
other object; and it is evident that each type of reaction
may be as overwhelmingly interesting as those which happen
to affect us. What unimaginable rapture to be able to observe
magnetic fields or molecular movements as directly as we
do the Ocean and the Ant-heap! It is the task of the Initiate
to adapt himself to the Totality of Existence, and to develop
in himself the means of apprehending it wholly and fully.
AL I,14: "Above, the gemmed azure is
The naked splendour of Nuit;
She bends in ecstasy to kiss
The secret ardours of Hadit.
The winged globe,the starry blue,
Are mine, O Ankh-af-na-khonsu!"
The Old Comment
14. This verse is a direct translation of the first section
of the stele. It conceals a certain secret ritual of the
highest rank, connected with the two previous verses.
The New Comment
This is a poetic description of the symbolism of the Stele.
It is suitable fore such minds as approach Truth in this
manner rather than by way of Science or Philosophy.
It contains a Formula of Magick Art, connected with the
Stele. Also, less ineffably, it boasts the consummation of
the marriage of Hadit and Nuit in the priest. That is, he
has freed Hadit, in the core of his Star, from the illusion-veils
of the Khu, so that the two Infinities become one, and none;
and create, in the manner shortly to be described, a new
Finite.
This Finite will evidently be an expression of the particular
mood of its Father and Mother at the moment of its conception.
Obviously, this "Child" cannot add to the Universe;
it is therefore inevitably twin (Horus and Harpocrates, Osiris
and Typhon, Jesus and Barabbas) in Nature, formed of equal
and opposite elements. When the Operation is mystical in
character, the "Child" does not appear at all in
this manifested form as Two, but as Naught. In the consciousness
of the Adept, this is called Samadhi. He has united himself
with, and lost himself in, Nuit. When the "Child" appears
as Two, it is Magick, as the other is Mysticism. This is
the essential difference between these Arts.
AL I,15: "Now ye shall know that the chosen priest & apostle
of infinite space is the prince-priest the Beast; and in
his woman called the Scarlet Woman is all power given. They
shall gather my children into their fold: they shall bring
the glory of the stars into the hearts of men."
The Old Comment
15. The authority of the Beast rests upon this verse; but
it is to be taken in conjunction with certain later verses
which I shall leave to the research of students to interpret.
I am inclined, however, to believe that "the Beast" and "the
Scarlet Woman" do not denote persons, but are titles
of office, that of Hierophant and High Priestess ( Vau
and Gimel ), else it would be difficult to understand the
next verse.
The New Comment
The definition of "infinite space" offered in the
Comment on verse 13 is useful here. My Work is in great part
to insist upon the infinite possibilities of human development.
Man has too slavishly acquiesced in his limitations. Science
itself has shewn itself almost as intolerant as Religion
toward certain lines of research. Indeed, every element of
society has added its energy to the opposition which bars
each pioneer with undiscriminating stupidity. Darwin, Pasteur,
Lister, and Jenner met with the same ferocious cowardice
as Shelly and Luther; they were assailed on every ground
from Religion and Morality upwards; every falsehood that
malice could invent was circulated about them. In short,
they were treated then as I am being treated now; and I am
resolute to prosecute my Work now as they were resolute then.
That which is beneath is like that which is above. The Beast
and the Scarlet Woman are avatars of Tao and Teh, Shiva and
Sakti. This Law is then an exact image of the Great Law of
the Cosmos; this is an assurance of its Perfection.
It is necessary to say here that The` Beast appears to be
a definite individual; to wit, the man Aleister Crowley.
But the Scarlet Woman is an officer replaceable as need arises.
Thus to this present date of writing, Anno XVI, Sun in Sagittarius,
there have been several holders of the title.
1. Rose Edith Crowley nee Kelly, my wife. Put me in touch
with Aiwas; see Equinox 1, 7, "The Temple of Solomon
the King." Failed as elsewhere is on record.
2. A doubtful case. Mary d'Este Sturges nee Dempsey. Put
me in touch with Abuldiz; hence helped with Book 4. Failed
from personal jealousies.
3. Jeanne Robert Foster nee Oliver. Bore the "child" to
whom this Book refers later. Failed from respectability.
4. Roddie Minor. Brought me in touch with Amalantrah. Failed
from indifference to the Work.
5. A doubtful case, Marie Rohling nee Lavroff. Helped to
inspire Liber CXI. Failed from indecision.
6. A doubtful case, Bertha Almira Prykryl nee Bruce. Delayed
assumption of duties, hence made way for No. 7.
7. Lea Hersig. Assisted me in actual initiation; still at
my side, An XVII, Sol in Sagittarius. (P.S. & An XIX,
Sol in Aries).
"Prince-priest" is an unusual word, and not in
tone with other references to me. I suspect therefore a secret
cipher of some sort. For one thing, it is an anagram of PRINCEPS
ITER, not bad for Alastor the Wanderer, or PRINCIPS ERIT,
he shall be the chief (see verse 23). But such Qabalah is
hardly to be considered serious. The recurrence of the letters
PRI is however curious and may be significant. The combination
PR in most Aryan Languages gives the idea of "Before." P
and R are the letters of Mars and Sol respectively. Now Mars
is referred to the number 5, and Sol to the number 6; both
to the idea "Force and Fire", though in different
ways. Now "Force and Fire" is the attribute of
Ra-Hoor-Khuit, Lord of the Aeon; and 5 and 6 are mystically
mated to represent the Accomplishment of the Great Work in
Abrahadabra, the Word of the Aeon. (See, for this Word, infra
Qabalistic Appendix). The termination ST is the coronal combination
XXXI which we shall notice often enough later on.
The Beast, besides 666 correspondences, is by English sound,
the Magus (Beth, Mercury, etc.) of this ST. S has in the
Tarot the card numbered XX, which represents the Stele of
Revealing, and is called the Judgment; i.e., the ending of
an Aeon. T has the card numbered XI and is called Strength.
It is the card of Leo and represents Babalon and the Beast
conjoined.
"Their fold"; not only a sheepfold, but as if
it were written "their embrace".
AL I,16: "For he is ever a sun, and she a moon. But
to him is the winged secret flame, and to her the stooping
starlight."
The Old Comment
15. In II, 16, we find that HAD is to be taken as 11 (see
II, 16, comment). Then Hadit = 421, Nuit = 466.
421 - 3 (the moon) = 418
466 + 200 (sun) = 666
These are the two great numbers of the Qabalistic system
that enabled me to interpret the signs leading to this revelation.
The winged secret flame is Hadit; the stooping starlight
is Nuit; these are their true natures, and their functions
in the supreme ritual referred to above.
The New Comment
The sun and moon, in their occult sense, are secondary representatives
of this original duality which is a phase of the Qabalistic
Zero. Other correspondences are Yun {SIC, s.b. "Yang" ?WEH}
and Yin, Yod and He, etc. But most such dualities have
been conceived in very gross and unphilosophical forms.
Of course, it is impossible to grasp this subject properly
by reason; only the understanding developed by meditation
and spiritual experience avails. Initiation is pantomorphously
progressive.
Note that the Secret Divine Letter ShT which is the key
of this book is by shape the Sun united with the Moon C =
Sh, O = t CO = Sht. {WEH NOTE: Elsewhere Crowley calls this
sign "the secret sigil of the Beast" and it is
depicted by a crescent attached to the left side of a circle.
Sometimes the circle is dotted. Sometimes the Greek lower
case letters sigma-theta are written connectively for this
(vide. Liber MCCLXIV, value 209, first edition, OTONL-6 and
note 28).}
AL I,17: "But ye are not so chosen."
The Old Comment
17. "Ye" refers to the other worshippers of Nuit,
who must seek out their own election.
The New Comment
That is, there is a special incarnation of Nuit and Hadit
for the Beast and the Scarlet Woman, as opposed to the
general truth that every man and woman are images of these
ineffable Beings.
Note that a woman, having no soul of her own, can be used
always as a 'Form' for any Being. This explains why Nuit
can incarnate at will in successive women, careless of the
physical limits of life. {WEH NOTE: Crowley's opinion regarding
the soul-less state of women refers to a matter of expression.
He believed it more generally, but probably based it on Victorian
male conceptions of "unliberated women". The Comment
to this and the previous verse may say more about the defensive
insecurity of Crowley the man than the verses of Liber AL.
In Chapter I Comment, remember that all this is a male mind
trying to contemplate the revelations of a goddess. Square
peg and round hole problems may arise.}
I feel a certain necessity to explain that an 'avatar' implies
rather a release from the limits of personality than anything
else. The Scarlet Woman and I are peculiarly representative
of Nuit and Hadit by virtue of our attainments in making
our consciousness omniform as They re. It must not be supposed
that our original individualities can claim any special prerogatives
as such.
AL I,18: "Burn upon their brows, o splendrous serpent!"
The Old Comment
18. The serpent is the symbol of divinity and royalty. It
is also a symbol of Hadit, invoked upon them.
The New Comment
For the images in this and the next verse see the Stele of
Revealing, to which they allude.
The Serpent is the Uraeus, with the powers of Life and Death,
wise, ecstatic, immortal; winged and hooded, that he may
go as a god swiftly and silently. It refers in this place
especially to Hadit.
AL I,19: "O azure-lidded woman, bend upon them!"
The Old Comment
19. Nuit herself will overshadow them.
The New Comment
These two verses 18, 19, seem to be interpolated by Aiwaz,
invoking the Gods to The Beast and The Scarlet Woman, perhaps
as a formal Consecration.
AL I,20: The key of the rituals is in the secret word which
I have given unto him.
The Old Comment
20. This word is perhaps ABRAHADABRA, the sacred word of
11 letters.
The New Comment
For this word see Appendix {WEH NOTE: The Appendix has not
yet been recovered. Kenneth Grant, in his "Magical
and Philosophical Commentaries ..." pp. 105-108 has
a lengthy extension here. The providence of the extension
is not definitely known to be Crowley at this writing,
hence cannot be included here.}. ABRAHADABRA is "The
key of the rituals" because it expresses the Magical
Formulae of uniting various complementary ideas; especially
the Five of the Microcosm with the Six of the Macrocosm.
AL I,21: "With the God & the Adorer I am nothing:
they do not see me. They are as upon the earth; I am Heaven,
and there is no other God than me, and my lord Hadit."
The Old Comment
21. Refers to the actual picture on the stele. Nuit is a
conception immeasurably beyond all men have even thought
of the Divine. thus she is not the mere star-goddess, but
a far higher thing, dimly veiled by that unutterable glory.
This knowledge is also to be attained by adepts; the outer
cannot reach to it.
The New Comment
The importance of this verse lies in the assertion of the
metaphysical entity of Our Lady, Her incomprehensibility
to normal sense.
The Method of invoking Nuit is given in Liber XI (see Equinox
I, VII). Note the initials of God and Adorer GA, the Earth.
Note that Heaven is not a place where Gods Live; Nuit is
Heaven, itself. And "Heaven" is of course "a
place wherein one may fulfil oneself", conformably to
the definition of Nuit as Space previously offered.
AL I,22: "Now, therefore, I am known to ye by my name
Nuit, and to him by a secret name which I will give him when
at last he knoweth me. Since I am Infinite Space, and the
Infinite Stars thereof, do ye also thus. Bind nothing! Let
there be no difference made among you between any one thing & any
other thing; for thereby there cometh hurt."
The Old Comment
22. A promise -- not yet fulfilled. P.S. since (An V) fulfilled)
A charge to destroy the faculty of discriminating between
illusions.
The New Comment
We have here a further conception of the cosmographical scheme.
Nuit is All that which exists, and the condition of that
existence. Hadit is the Principle which causes modifications
in this Being. This explains how one may call Nuit Matter,
and Hadit Motion, in the highest physico-philosophical
sense of those terms.
We are asked to axquiesce in this Law of Nature. That is,
we are not to oppose resistance to the perfect fluidity of
the "Becoming" of Nature. Similarly, we are not
to attach more importance to any one momentary appearance
than to any other.
For, the moment we do so, we confirm illusion of Duality.
We assert Imperfection as absolute instead of as a device
of Perfection for self-appreciation.
The Secret name was revealed in the Sahara desert -- see
Liber 418, 12 Aethyr, Equinox I, V, Suppl. pp. 82-87.
This question of making "no difference" as ordained
is to regard the whole of the non-Ego or universe apparently
external to the Self as a single phenomenon; Samadhi on any
one thing becomes therefore Samadhi on The Whole. The mystic
who "availeth in this" can then perform his Great
Work of "love under will" in a single operation
instead of being obliged to unite himself with the non-Ego
piecemeal. But see also the Comment on verse 4, above.
Notice the word "hurt", from he French "heurter",
meaning to knock against an obstacle. There is thus a strictly
technical accuracy in the choice of the term.
AL I,23: "But whoso availeth in this, let him be the
chief of all!"
The Old Comment
23. The chief, then, is he who has destroyed this sense of
duality.
The New Comment
This chief is of course no more or less than others. The
limitations of our dualistic language obscure the meaning
of these loftier Words. Chieftainship is to be understood
as one of the illusions; but, in respect of that plane,
a fact. The facts of Nature are perfectly true in so far
as their mutual relation is concerned; their invalidity
refers only to their total relation with the philosophical
canon of Truth.
The word "all" is not to be taken as elliptical
for "all men"; it means that such an one is completely
master of his universe. For when one has become indifferent
to phenomena, and accepts any one of them as necessary, indeed
as an essential part of the whole, he has made himself Lord
of the Whole as such. In fact, it is obvious on quite rational
grounds that this must be the case. My discrimination between
artichokes and arsenic puts me at the mercy of a million
circumstances, from my cook to my wife.
AL I,24: "I am Nuit, and my word is six and fifty."
The Old Comment
24. Nu = 6 + 50 = 56.
The New Comment
One must observe the special significance of these numbers,
not only conjoined, but separate. For 6, Vau, is the Bull;
and 50, Nun, the Scorpion. But 6 is also the number of
the Sun, our Star. The N of Nu is therefore the Dragon
-- "Infinite Space" -- and V is "the Infinite
Stars" thereof. The ITH is the honorific termination
representing Her fulfilment of Creative Force. "I" being
the Inmost Force, and "Th" its Extension.
The Dragon in current symbolism refers to the North or Hollow
of Heaven; thus to the Womb of Space, which is the container
and breeder of all that exists.
Liber Aleph should be consulted for further information
as to the magical import of Scorpio and Taurus.
AL I,25: "Divide, add, multiply, and understand."
The Old Comment
25. Dividing 6/50 = 0.12.
0, the circumference, Nuit.
., the centre, Hadit.
1, the Unity proceeding, Ra-Hoor-Khuit.
2, the Coptic H, whose shape closely resembles the Arabic
figure 2, the breath of Life, inspired and expired. Human
consciousness, Thoth.
Adding 50 + 6 = 56, Nu, and
Concentrating 5 + 6 = 11, Abrahadabra, etc.
Multiplying 50 x 6 = Shin, and Ruach Elohim, the Holy Spirit.
I am inclined to believe that there is a further mystery
concealed in this verse, possibly those of 418 and 666 again.
The New Comment
See Qabalistic Appendix. {WEH NOTE: Appendix not yet recovered.
K. Grant, op. cit., adds several paragraphs here which
appear to come from Crowley. This is not provided in this
text for lack of certainty of the providence.}
AL I,26: "Then saith the prophet and slave of the beauteous
one: Who am I, and what shall be the sign? So she answered
him, bending down, a lambent flame of blue, all-touching,
all penetrant, her lovely hands upon the black earth, & her
lithe body arched for love, and her soft feet not hurting
the little flowers: Thou knowest! And the sign shall be my
ecstasy, the consciousness of the continuity of existence,
the omnipresence of my body."
The Old Comment
26. The prophet demanding a sign of his mission, it is promised;
a Samadhi upon the Infinite.
This promise was later fulfilled -- see "The Temple
of Solomon the King", which proposes to deal with the
matter in its due season. (P.S. It did so, vide Equinox I.)
The New Comment
In the MSS., the last 5 words of this verse do not occur.
The original reading is 'the unfragmentary non-atomic fact
of my universality'.
This phrase was totally beyond the comprehension of the
scribe, and he said mentally -- with characteristic self-conceit
-- "People will never be able to understand this." Aiwass
then replied,
"Write this in whiter words. But go forth on."
He was willing that the phrase should be replaced by an
equivalent, but did not wish the dictation to be interrupted
by a discussion at the moment. it was therefore altered (a
little later) to "the omnipresence of my body."
It is extremely interesting to note that in the light of
the cosmic theory explained in the notes to verse 3 and 4,
the original phrase of Aiwass was exquisitely and exactly
appropriate to his meaning.
It take this opportunity of quoting from Professor Eddington,
Op. Cit., a passage which should make it perfectly clear
that the "mystical", "irrational", "paradoxical" conception
of Nuit expressed in this chapter has a parallel in the sober
calculations of a perfectly orthodox astronomer in the undeniably
practical University -- a poor thing, but mine own -- of
Cambridge:
"Whenever there is matter there is action and therefore
curvature; and it is interesting to notice that in ordinary
matter the curvature of the space-time world is by no means
insignificant. for example, in water of ordinary density
the curvature is the same as that of space in the form of
a sphere of radius 570,000,000 kilometers. The result is
even more surprising if expressed in time unites; the radius
is about half-an-hour.
"It is difficult to picture quite what this means;
but at least we can predict that a Globe of water 570,000,000
km. radius would have extraordinary properties. Presumably
there must be an upper limit to the possible size of a globe
of water. So far as I can make out a homogeneous mass of
water of about this size (and no larger) could exist. It
would have no centre, and no boundry, every point of it being
in the same position with respect to the whole mass as every
other point of it -- like points ion the surface of a sphere
with respect to the surface. Any ray of light after travelling
for an hour or two would come back to the starting point.
Nothing could enter or leave the mass, because there is no
boundary to enter or leave by; in fact, it is coextensive
with space. There could not be any other world anywhere else
because there isn't an 'anywhere else'.
"The mass of this volume of water is not so great as
the most moderate estimates of the mass of the stellar system".
AL I,27: "Then the priest answered & said unto
the Queen of Space, kissing her lovely brows, and the dew
of her light bathing his whole body in a sweet-smelling perfume
of sweat: O Nuit, continuous one of Heaven, let it be ever
thus; that men speak not of Thee as One but as None; and
let them speak not of thee at all, since thou art continuous!"
The Old Comment
27 - 31. Here is a profound philosophical dogma, in a sense
possibly and explanation and Illumination of the propositions
in "Berashith".
The dyad (or universe) is created with little pain in order
to make the bliss of dissolution possible. Thus the pain
of life may be atoned for by the bliss of death.
This delight is, however, only for the chosen servants of
Nu. Outsiders may be looked on much as the Cartesians looked
on animals. Yet, of course, this is only on the plane of
Illusion. One must not discriminate between the space marks.
(P.S. The Crhistian is one who has acquiesced in his own
dishonour; a renegade from manhood).
The New Comment
The physical description of the onset of this ecstasy refers
to the actual facts at the period of receiving this knowledge.
The attempt to resolve All into One is a philosophical blunder.
It explains nothing; neither how One came to be, nor how
Two came to be. The only sound conception is that of "Zero
not extended" with a phase of "Something" ("0
degree = X") which makes the answer to both questions
self-evident.
The idea "One" is intelligible enough as the result
of the resolutions of Two. But in itself it is meaningless
because of the absence of any co-ordinates. A point can heave
no qualities except as it is related to a second point. It
is only 'high' if there be another which is 'low'. It cannot
even be said to exist unless there be something which does
not exist.
Note the word 'continuous' repeated. It suggests the "continuum" of
modern mathematical philosophy.
On the other hand, the constitution of Nuit is 'atomic'
(verse 26) or discontinuous. She is in fact the reconciliation
of these contradictory ideas. It is important for us to grasp
the philosophical situation formally; and this demands a
some-what close analysis. The definitions of Cantorian and
Dedekindian continuity should be sought in Bertrand Russell,
Op. Cit.; it is sufficient here to explain that by the continuity
of Nuit I conceive conditions similar to those of the sphere
of water described in the quotation in the note to verse
25. Any point in this sphere would be indistinguishable from
any other point in a certain sense; or at least the distinction
might be considered as arbitrary and illusory. Yet there
is no reason why we should not choose to fix our attention
on any particular point or system of points for the purpose
of amusing ourselves -- analogously to the explanation above
put forward (notes on vv. 3 & 4) of incarnation. The
constitution of our illusion will evidently be atomic. The
facts that {...}, and that the subtraction of (a) the inductive
numbers, (b) the inductive numbers greater than n, (c) the
odd numbers, from {...} give respectively zero, n and {...}
as the result, do not interfere with the finite character
of the relation between n and n 1. The transfinite properties
of {...} do not destroy the atomic character of the series
of which it is the sum.
Let us investigate the nature of existing ideas a little
more closely. First of all, Nuit, being the totality of possibilities
of Form, is not only one series, but the sum of all series.
We are justified in conceiving any collection of ideas soever
as a homologous series, for we have the right to choose the
function which will serve to arrange them as our design requires.
To protest that such a choice is arbitrary, fantastic or
irrational is to assert the authority of some self-appointed "normal
mind" as absolute in Nature. The failure of philosophers
to transcend their own mental limitations has reduced all
their systems to circular arguments, and all their ontologies
to Solipsism, however elaborately they have endeavoured to
to cloak the fact with sophistries. You cannot tie a true
knot in a cord with a closed circuit. All knowledge is relative
to the mind which contains it.
Consider "incommensurable" numbers, such as 1
and 2. This coy surd is insensible to the fascinations of
the deftest Dedekindian Cult. It may be approached within
limits as narrow as we choose to appoint; yet there remains
a "great gulf fixed" which is utterly impassable.
The surd is simply not in the series; you might as well try
to find Consciousness by making microtome sections of the
brain. Yet the relation between 1 and 2 is perfectly clear
and simple; there is no incommensurability about it at all.
It is (for one thing) the ratio of the hypoteneuse of a right-angled
isoceles triangle to one of the other sides, in Euclidian
geometry. The difficulty of commensuration can exist only
in minds obsessed by the atavistic necessity of counting
cowries or wives on the fingers.
Let me then maintain that such collections as "The
thoughts of a man's lifetime" constitute a series in
the same sense as the inductive numbers. This collection
conforms perfectly with Peano's 'ideas' and 'proposition'.
Every thought is a thing in itself; it is determined by its
predecessors and determines its successors; it is concatenated
with them by 'psychological time'. Briefly, it fulfils every
condition required by the definition. (The 'recurrenee' of
a thought is no objection, for the identity is superficial,
like that of a digit in a long decimal. "My aunt",
whom I now think of, is not the aunt I thought of last year,
any more than the 4 in the second place of .0494 is the same
as that in the fourth place.)
Any thought in this series possesses a chain of sub-thoughts
which connect it with its neighbours; these may be discovered
by the proper psychological methods. "The Words of the
insane are mountain-tops"; two successive thoughts may
be compared to two snow summits rising above cloud-banks;
they are not isolated, but joined by certain geologically
necessary formations. But each pair of such sub-thoughts
may be similarly investigated, and so on ad infinitum. Each
thought is inevitably itself, although it is related to all
other possible thoughts. There are not two thoughts of which
we can say that one either merges into, or necessarily begets,
the other. Any series of thoughts is therefore a true inductive
series, exactly as the "natural numbers" are, with
the added properties that it is real and omniform. It is
atomic, its elements being intrinsically individual; and
yet a continuum, since its intervals are susceptible of subdivision
indefinitely prolonged without producing any diminution of
these properties of the original series. The difference between
successive thoughts and successive numbers is that by inserting
r terms between p and q -- p:p : p 2 : --- p (2 -1) : q --
we apparently approximate the members, so that p-q (p 2)-(p
); while the sub-thoughts which intervene between my impression
on waking "A fine frosty morning" and my reaction "I'll
go skating" come to me from very various departments
of my mind, and no two of them are in any way more closely
connected than their culmination in consciousness is to its
forerunner. But this difference is in reality an illusion
born of the obsession already diagnosed; 2 is nearer to 1
and to 3 than 3 is to 1 only in respect of one particular
function. Full comprehension of the true nature of number,
as conceived by this Book, should enable the mind to transcend
its "normal" trammels.
It will no doubt be objected that these speculations, even
if correct, are sterile; or, even worse, discouraging to
that study of the relations between phenomena which has been
the basis of all advance in knowledge.
I might deny the reality of the progress, since it has only
exposed the self-contradictions, and emphasized the mysteries,
which beset us. But I prefer to take my stand on the ground
that we have been totally wrong, hitherto, in our fundamental
attitude to the Universe. The only possible issue from the
vicious circle wherein we are penned is to refuse resolutely
to allow ourselves to accept (1) the evidence of our senses,
(2) the pleadings of our minds, (3) the reactions between
phenomena as tokens of Truth. All objects are equally capable
of conveying any given impression to us; it is merely a question
of arranging the conditions of the experiments. We can add
or subtract any conceivable quality at will. Thus, "there
is no difference"; and each existence is inscrutably
itself. We are only the more deceived as it multiplies its
Protean projections.
Our proper course is to destroy the instruments of perception
which we at present possess, recognizing that they are no
more than personal prejudices which limit and delude us in
every way. Our senses assure us that the earth is flat, and
that the Sun moves across it, until we amend their assertions
by the aid of instruments, and of reason. Yet the astronomer
with his telescope is no less arbitrary than the cave-man
with his eye. We are like the Snark in the Barrister's dream,
witnesses, lawyers, and judge in one. We have no standard
independent or ourselves; and we know only too well that
our witnesses, the senses, are neither competent, clear,
trustworthy, intelligent, or even capable of giving evidence
on the actual issues.
The mid is in even worse plight. Obviously, its judgments
must be based on its own laws, and we have no shadow of reason
for supposing that these possess any authority beyond their
own jurisdiction. We know that the Structure of the brain
has been determined by the animal struggle to survive: it
is adapted to the conditions of environment. It is the serf
of brute passions, the ape of atavism, the dupe of sense,
and the automaton of accident. We have no right to assert
that its internal reactions correspond to the external world
in any way whatever. Officially recognized thinkers are only
just beginning to realize what mystics have known since the
Morning Star glimmered through the haze on the horizon of
History, that the Laws of Thought are only expressions of
the bondage of the thinker. Apart from the dependence of
mind upon the unreliable, symbolically communicated, and
fragamentary affidavits of sense, apart from the imperfections
inseparable from its origin, our judgments are necessarily
no more than representations of the consistency of one part
of our internal structure with another. We cannot lift ourselves
by pulling at our toes. We now know that our most fixed axioms
are as arbitrary as a madman's delusions. There is nothing
to prevent a man from asserting that "Things which are
both equal to the same thing are both greater than each other" and
constructing a geometry conformable thereto: neither by reasoning
nor by experience could it be proved that his system was
not the "truth" of Nature. More, the word "truth" itself
has proved on analysis to contain no intelligible significance,
but to be an empirical symbol of what can only be described
as symptoms of cerebral inadequacy.
Still worse, even so far as the conclusions of reason express
the relations of an animal with itself, they disclose not
the consistency which is the test of the fulfilment of this
limited function, but an inherent self-contradition which
shatters the validity of the entire process. For the "Law
of Contradiction" is the Court of final Appeal which
has been the authority for every step. I quote once more
from the Hon. Bertrand Russell, Op. Cit.:
"The comprehensive class we are considering, which
is to embrace everything, must embrace itself as one of its
members. In other words, if there is such a things as "everything",
then "everything" is something, and is a member
of the class "everything". But normally a class
is not a member of itself. Mankind, for example, is not a
man. Form now the assemblage of all classes which are not
members of themselves. This is a class: is it a member of
itself or not? If it is, it is one of those classes that
are not members of themselves, i.e. it is a member of itself.
Thus of the two hypotheses -- that it is, and that it is
not, a member of itself -- each implies its contradictory.
This is a contradiction, similar contradictions ad lib." {WEH
NOTE: I'm sorry. I just can't keep shut. This is just the
bloody fallacy of FOUR TERMS!}
This author, perhaps the mightiest mind of its type now
living, proceeds gallantly to go "over the top".
But he is always, sooner or later, drowned in the "blood" of
a new contradiction, or the "mud" of mystery. He
finds himself constantly compelled to assume some axiom which
has been proved to be incapable of being proved, or crushed
by the certainty that even in the event of his proving all
his propositions, the sum of their statement amounts to this,
that, so far as he is anybody or anything, he is himself.
Professor Eddington, in the masterly exposition of modern
thought already quoted, presents, clearly enough, the case
against supposing that any phenomenon soever is a "fact" in
any absolute sense.
Each account of it must be incomplete, symbolic, and variable
with the position and faculties of the observer.
"By his theory of relativity, Albert Einstein has provoked
a revolution of thought in physical science."
"The achievement consists essentially in this: -- Einstein
has succeeded in separating far more completely than hitherto
the share of the observer and the share of external nature
in the things we see happen. The perception of an object
by an observer depends on his own situation and circumstances;
for example, distance will make it appear smaller and dimmer.
We make allowance for this almost unconsciously in interpreting
what we see. But it now appears that the allowance made for
the motion of the observer has hitherto been too crude, --
a fact overlooked because in practice all observers share
nearly the same motion, that of the earth. Physical space
and time are found to be closely bound up with this motion
of the observer; and only an amorphous combination of the
two is left inherent in the external world. When space and
time are relegated to their proper source -- the observer
-- the world of nature which remains appears strangely unfamiliar;
but it is in reality simplified, and the underlying unity
of the principal phenomena from this new outlook have, with
one doubtful exception, been confirmed when tested by experiment."
I must confess that I was amazed with every amazement when
so the the eminent astronomer failed to follow up this brilliant
outburst by turning the devastation of his artillery upon
the ramparts of the citadel whose outlying defenses he had
shattered with such stupendous thunderbolts. Now came it
that the very act of detecting so subtly, and removing so
skillfully, the mote in his neighbour's eye, did not suggest
to him that he might be incommoded by the beam of his own?
Aware of the errors introduced into his calculations by the
comparatively steady, regular, and imperceptible motion of
his earth-borne body, how not to be stricken aghast to contemplate
the possible consequences of taking, as a fixed and absolute
point for the base of his triangulations, and unknown and
uncontrollable engine in violent, erratic and incalculable
action, neither to be mastered nor measured, his mind? Who
dare presume to set limits to the eccentricities of a brain
which is the logical conclusion for a love-harried, witch-burning,
god-fearing, fox-hunting, cannibal ape, spice with tubercle,
syphilis, insanity and the rest of the poisons for one premise
and an unintelligible and accidental environment for the
other? Is not every thought determined, and its validity
indeterminable, especially by its owner? Who then shall decide
what "trustworthy reasoning" may mean?
At the very least, we must eliminate as far as possible
very obvious source of error, such as personality (in particular)
involves. But further, we must regulate the motion of the
mind, control it, bring it to a standstill. It may be --
I know that it is -- that as soon as thought is prevented
from bewildering us with its torrential turmoil, we may become
aware that we posses a subtler and steadier organ of apprehension.
This is in fact one of the principal points of initiation.
AL I,28: "None, breathed the light, faint & faery,
of the stars, and two."
The New Comment
Now appears the plain statement of the Perfect Metaphysick.
It may be as well to quote the essential passages from
'Bereshith' in connexion with this matter.
"I ASSERT THE ABSOLUTENESS OF THE QABALISTIC ZERO."
When we say that the Cosmos sprang from 0, what kind of
0 do we mean? By 0 in the ordinary sense of the term we mean "absence
of extension in any of the categories".
When I say "No cat has two tails" I do not mean,
as the old fallacy runs, that "Absense-of-cat possesses
two tails"; but that "In the category of two-tailed
things, there is no extension of cat".
Nothingness is that about which no positive proposition
is valid. We cannot truly affirm: "Nothingness is green,
or heavy, or sweet".
Let us call time, space, being, heaviness, hunger, the categories.
If a man be heavy and hungry, he is extended in all these,
besides, of course, many more. But let us suppose these five
are all. Call the man X; his formula is then
t s b h h
X . If he now eat he will cease to be extended in hunger;
if he be cut off from time and gravitation as well, he will
now be represented by the formula
s b
X . Should he cease to occupy space and to exist, his formula
would then be
0
X . This expansion is equal to 1; whatever X may represent,
if it be raised to the power of 0 (this meaning mathematically "If
it be extended in no dimension or category"), the result
is Unity, and the unknown factor X is eliminated.
Now if there was in truth 0, "before the beginning
of years", THAT 0 WAS EXTENDED IN NONE OF THE CATEGORIES,
FOR THERE COULD HAVE BEEN NO CATEGORIES IN WHICH IT COULD
EXTEND! If our 0 was the ordinary 0 of mathematics, there
was not truly absolute 0, for 0 is, as I have shown, dependent
on the idea of categories. If these existed, then the whole
question is merely thrown back; we must reach a state in
which 0 is absolute. Not only must we get rid of all subjects,
but of all predicates. By 0 (in mathematics) we really mean
0 to the n, where n is the final term of a natural scale
of dimensions, categories, or predicates. Our Cosmic Gee,
then, from which the present universe arose, was Nothingness,
extended in no categories, or, graphically, 0 to the 0. This
expression is in its present form meaningless. Let us discover
its value by a simple mathematical process.
0 1-1
0 = 0 = 01/01 ( Multiply by 1 = n/n ) Then 01/n x n/01 =
0 x infinity
Now the multiplying of the infinitely great by the infinitely
small results in SOME UNKNOWN FINITE NUMBER EXTENDED IN AN
UNKNOWN NUMBER OF CATEGORIES. It happened, when this our
Great Inversion took place, from the essence of all nothingness
to finity extended in innumerable categories, that an incalculably
vast system was produced. Merely by chance, chance in he
truest sense of the term, we are found with gods, men, stars,
planets, devils, colours, forces, and all the materials of
the cosmos; and with time, space, and causality, the conditions
limiting and involving them all.
Remember that it is not true to say that our 0 to the 0
existed; nor that it did not exist. The idea of existence
was just as much unformulated as that of toasted cheese.
But 0 to the 0 is a finite expression, or has a finite phase,
and our universe is a finite universe; its categories are
themselves finite, and the expression "infinite space" is
a contradiction it terms. The idea of an absolute and of
an infinite God is relegated to the limbo of all similar
idle and pernicious perversions of truth. Infinity remains;
but only as a mathematical conception as impossible in nature
as the square root of -1."
This passage was written in 1902, E.V., before the revelation
of the Law. It remains true that 'infinite space is a contradiction
in terms', and so on; but this is no argument against the
Cosmogeny of this Book. For above the Abyss every idea soever
is necessarily a contradiction in terms; see Liber 418 for
the demonstration of this.
There is much more on these points in Liber Aleph, and in "The
Urn".
"Breathed" and "light" are highly significant
words, implying the duality of creation in breath -- inspiration
and expiration -- and that of vibratory light; while breath
is also Aleph, whose card is numbered Zero; and Light is
L.V.X. 120, the Rosy Cross, wherein the Positive is dissolved
in the Negative.
AL I,29: "For I am divided for love's sake, for the
chance of union."
The New Comment
I quote from "The Book of Lies (falsely so-called)".
THE OYSTER
The Brothers of A.'.A.'. are one with the
Mother of the child.
The Many is as adorable to the One as the
One is to the Many. This is the Love
of These: creation-parturition is the
Bliss of the One; coition-dissolution
is the Bliss of the Many.
The All, thus interwoven of These, is Bliss.
Naught is beyond Bliss.
The Man delights in uniting with the Woman;
the Woman in parting from the child
The Brothers of A.'.A.'. are Women; the Aspirants
to A.'.A.'. are Men."
In order to have Motion one must have Change. In fact, one
must have this in order to have anything at all. Now this
Change is what we call Love. thus "love under will" is
the Law of Motion. The re-entrant character of this Motion
is difficult to conceive; but the Aspirant is urged to try
to assimilate the idea. A Hindu might compare the Cosmic
process to a churn which out of milk made butter to feed
a milk-producing woman, every step in the cycle being a Progress
of Joy.
Time is necessarily created by us in order to make room
for the apparent existence of the duality which we devise
for the presentation of unity, or nihility.
"Two things" must evidently exist either in two
places, or at two times, or both; else they would be indistinguishable.
Two phenomena which differ in time would be considered simultaneous
if separated in space so that our observation of the former
were delayed, for several reasons; and it is fairly easy
to realize the possibility. But it seems as if separation
in space were somehow more intractable. I can see no priori
reason for this distinction; I think it arises from the fact
that space is directly presented to our senses, while time
is proper to the mental apprehension of impressions.
Our universe is (after all) in one place, so far as we are
concerned, i.e., in our sensoria, so that any two impressions
can only be registered by us as consecutive. Even when we
are aware of their simultaneity, we are compelled to place
them in sequence. Our sensorium makes no distinction between
concrete and abstract ideas in this respect. Sensory impressions
and general ideas are equally grist for the mill. But we
make a distinction between our record of events whose sequence
is a necessary part of our comprehension of them, and those
which are independent of our history. We insist on the sequence
of school and college, but our general judgments are recognized
as independent of time. This is peculiarly the case with
our idea of the Ego, which we instinctively regard as if
it were eternal and unchanging, though in fact it grows and
decays continually. Yet we think of the incidents of boyhood
as having occurred to the Ego, forming part of its character.
Now since this Ego is only conscious by virtue of having
formulated itself, or the Universe (as it happens to view
the case), in the form of Duality, and since all the experiences
of the Ego are necessary to it, as all phenomena soever are
necessary, it is permissible to regard the totality of the
experience of the Ego as the presentation in duality of a
single simultaneous fact.
In other words, life is an attempt to realize one's own
nature in one's own soul.
The man who fails to recognize it as such is hopelessly
bewildered by the irrational character of the universe, which
he takes to be real; and he cannot but regard it as aimless
and absurd. The adventures of his body and mind, with their
desires for material and moral well-being, are obviously
as foredoomed to disaster as Don Quixote's. He must be a
fool if he struggles on (against inexorable fate) to obtain
results which he knows can only end in catastrophe, a climax
the more bitter as he clings the more closely to his impossible
ideals.
But once he acquiesces in the necessity of the course of
events, and considers his body and mind as no more than the
instruments which interpret himself to himself by means of
dualistic presentation, he should soon acquire a complete
indifference to the nature of the incidents which occur to
him.
It is not surprising that these incidents should occur in
an apparent disorderly sequence any more than that the coours
of a picture, or the words of a story, should not be disturbed
according to an a priori classification, as in a Lexicon
or a colourman's catalogue. His task as a connoisseur is
to recognize the idea of the artist, and this he can only
do by appreciation of the complete work. he must analyze
the assemblage of elements, and assign the correct value
to each, comprehending the intention of each relative to
the finished design.
It will be said that nobody can realize himself so long
as the presentation is imperfect, that is, so long as he
is incarnated. This is no doubt true in all rigour; but one
can obtain an approximation to the intended self-knowledge
by withdrawing for a time to the monistic form of self-consciousness,
which does not distinguish between the Ego and the Non-Ego;
in other words, by attaining Samadhi. But the first experience
of Samadhi will then naturally be an ecstasy devoid of name
or form, and containing no elements distinguishable as such;
and we know this to be the case. One has simply deprived
oneself of the means of expression, and all dual consciousness
disappears, together with its forms, time and space. One
concludes from this that the Universe is identical with the
Ego, and all things dissolve into a formless essence characterized
by knowledge and bliss. But this early stage of Samadhi is
an illusion, a sort of drunken dizziness. (So in sexual love,
the ecstasy abolishes the Ego, apparently; it forgets that
duality was its cause, and must be equally real with itself,
in one sense or another). But subsequent Samadhi teaches
the adept that his universal instantaneous Unity exists as "None
and Two"; and he learns that his Samadhi is peculiar
to himself as well as common to all.
He becomes able to experience the truth of the statements
in the Book of the Law, the nature of Nuith and Hadith, and
of himself as a Star, unique, individual, and eternal, but
yet a part of the Body of Nuith, and therefore identical
with all other stars in that respect.
He realizes himself as the "bed in working" of
Nuith and Hadit, as a particular form assumed by the latter
for the sake of Variety in his "play" with the
former; and he partakes in this play by his self-realization,
which he synthesizes from the "events of his life".
He understands that these events are the resultant of the
Universe as applied to him, so that his experience is equally
unique and universal, each star being the centre of the cosmos,
and the Cosmos applicable as a whole to each star.
The experiences of each angle of a triangle are common to
all, for one can express any relation as a function of any
angle, at will. Each may be taken as the starting-point of
the study of the properties to the triangle. But each angle
is necessary to the triangle, and each is equally important
to its existence. Each is bound to the others, and moreover
each is in a sense illusory in respect of the triangle, which
is an idea, simple and ideal, whose unity is compelled to
express itself and manifest its properties by extension as
a plane figure. For no triangle can express the idea of a
triangle. Any triangle must be either equilateral, isosceles
or scalene, either acute, right-angled, or obtuse; and no
one triangle can be all these at once; while the idea of
a triangle includes all these, and infinite other, possibilities.
In a similar way, Nuith and Hadith include all possible
forms of existence; they can only realize Themselves by creating
an infinite variety of forms of Themselves, each one real
as it is Their image, illusory as it is a partial and divided
aspect of Them.
Each such Star is intelligible to Them, as a poem is to
its author as a part of this soul mirrored by his mind. But
it is not intelligible to itself, because it has no relation
with any other ideas; it only knows itself as the babe of
its mother Nuith, to whom it yearns, being stirred by its
father Hadith to express that instinctive attachment by inarticulate
cries.
To know itself, each such Star, or Soul, must eat of the
Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, by accepting
labour and pain as its portion, and death as its doom. That
is, it must reveal its nature to itself by formulating that
nature as duality. It must express itself by a series of
symbolic gestures ostensibly external to it, just as a painter
reveals one facet of his Delight-Diamond by covering a canvas
with colours in such a way that the picture seems at first
sight to represent something outside himself. It must, in
fact, repeat for itself the original Magick of Nuith and
Hadith which created it.
As They made Themselves visible piecemeal by fashioning
particular Souls, expressing the Impersonal and Absolute
Homogeneity by means of Personal Relative Heterogeneity,
so, not forgetting their true nature as forms of the Infinite,
whereby they are one with all, must the stars devise methods
of studying themselves.
They must make images of themselves, apparently external,
and they must represent their highly complex qualities in
a duality involving space and time. For each Star is of necessity
related to every other star, so that no influence is alien
to its individuality; it must therefore observer its reaction
to every other star.
Just so are most chemical elements possessed of but few
qualities directly appreciable by our senses; we must learn
their natures by putting them into relation with the other
Elements in turn. (Note well that this knowledge were impossible
unless there were a variety of elements; so also the fact
of our self-consciousness proves the existence of individual
souls; all related, all parts of the One Soul, in one sense,
but none the less independent in themselves, eternal entities
expressing particular elements of existence).
Each star is in itself immune and innocent; its proper consciousness
is monistic; it must therefore employ a body and mind as
the instruments for interpreting its relations with other
souls, and comparing its nature with theirs. For the mind
perceives the contrast of the Self and the not-Self, and
presents its experiences, classified and judged, to the soul
as documents for the dossier; and the body reports to the
mind the impressions received from its contact with alien
forms as the senses receive them.
It must naturally require many incarnations for the soul
to begin to know itself with any degree of perfection; and
one may recognize advanced souls by their minds, which understand
the a nature of their work, are indifferent to the body's
preference for any special forms of experience, and seek
eagerly after novel adventures (like a philatelist after
rare stamps) to complete the collection. They are also as
a rule both very careful and very careless about their bodily
welfare, taking pains to preserve their powers for the purpose
of gaining new experiences, but utterly indifferent to them
as valuable in themselves. They rule them with a rod of iron,
and train them like pugilists; but they risk them recklessly
whenever the Work demands it.
It is important to understand the necessity of our present
Universe. Perfection could do not otherwise than create Imperfection.
But was there not original Imperfection? No; for Perfection
is hardly more than that original state, since we cannot
conceive the total as susceptible of addition.<<Note
that {?infinity?}, the sum of the series of natural numbers,
is not increased in value by the addition, or diminished
by the subtraction of any finite number. Yet 2 is greater
than ... ! The fact illustrates our "Naught and Two" theory
in a most instructive manner.>> This is another view
of the God going through the combinations, on a larger scale,
and shows not only why He does it, but why He must do it.
But is not all this based on the accident that I personally
am bored by omniscience on any given matter? Yes, but Imperfection
is a fact, and a God whom Perfection did not bore would not
have created Imperfection. But why not suppose a wicked God,
or a foolish God? Things which seem to me wrong, or stupid,
are so because I am the sole judge. But these things are
not my creations, but those of other Gods. True, but those
Gods are all part of me, so far as I know them. So then,
in my own nature are these contrary Gods, which (as above
said) I have created in myself to give variety. You see that
you cannot conceive these divers 'Gods without conceiving
also a Whole, in which the entire equation cancels out to
Naught. One cannot conceive it as a Unity, because 1 to the
0 power like 1 to the first power, 1 to the 2nd power, etc.,
is only one, 1, and cannot become 2 by reflection, as I thought
75 {WEH NOTE: Sic. This is not possible and must be a typo
in the TS. Grant Op. Cit. gives "18".}years ago,
because there is nothing else to reflect it, or it could
not be both All and One. (A heterogeneous One, with a mirror
in its All, would be two). Now Evil is only minus to anyone's
Plus; you cannot have an Evil to destroy the Whole (or we
have Two again.) Therefore no Evil can possibly do any harm;
it can only be part of the Play. The Whole is destroyed as
soon as understood; that is, it is conceived as zero to the
zero power again; this then bursts forth in some new combination,
with no gain or loss except (perhaps ? ?) the gain due to
Time, as explained elsewhere. But in this case what is Time?
It is a fundamental condition of experience, to say nothing
of memory, so is necessary to the Finity Phase of zero to
the zero power, that is, to any Universe where change occurs.
Is there any possible connexion between two successive such
Phases? No; they must be alike in one respect that they each
cancel out, so Balance is a necessary principle. More so
than time; for one could have a Samadhis Phase which developed
Nirvi-Kalpa instantly. But if no Time, then a Unity, which
could never become Naught; no such Phase is possible. Duality
is therefore the nature of any manifested Universe.
1 exists, true; but only by a fiction; for there is always
a -1 to cancel it. But we get the illusion of 1 when we add
1/2 to 1/2 or 1/3 to 2/3, etc., things -- each conscious
of its fractional character -- seeking to be whole. Now the
bigger any 'One' gets, the more conscious it is of its "Minus
One' wife, the more clearly it sees that 'One; is illusion,
and had better cancel out. The general process of Initiation
is therefore the same for all possible universes.
From the standpoint of Physics, the original Inertia expresses
itself as two complementary forms of Energy -- the small
active Negative Electron (Hadit) and the large passive Positive
Electron (Nuit). (It has recently been shown that the mass
of Matter is zero). When these satisfy each other, two phenomena
occur: (1) their opposed equalities cancel out to Zero. (Perhaps
even to 0 to the 0 power, thus restoring the original Indeterminate
Nothing). (2) a "child" is born of the union; i.e.,
a positive phenomenon is ;produced, whose nature is entirely
different from that of either of its 'parents'; for it is
finite, and possesses limitations and qualities of its own.
Groups of such primaeval units form the various kinds of
'atom', according to the number and geometric disposition
thereof. (This involves projection in space and time, ideas
which are not necessary to the Electrons, they being simply
ideas posited to serve as a basis for any dualistic expression
to which Zero may be equated, such as Being and Form, Matter
and Motion. We invent Space, Time, Sense-Impression, etc.
to enable us to distinguish between "experiences" to
express our conception of the multiplicity of the possibilities
contained in the Idea of Zero. Each human consciousness being
a case of one particular way of grouping elements, its conception
of the Cosmos is limited by the necessary relations of that
group to other groups. It grows by "union" with
such groups, and is glad, partly because it satisfied its
Oedipus-complex by thus approaching Nuit, partly because
it fulfils its natural function of Creation.
AL I,30: "This is the creation of the world, that the
pain of division is as nothing, and the joy of dissolution
all."
The New Comment
This verse is written for men who are still in division,
and sore about it; the pain is only in their idea of it.
One should compare this thought with the Freudian psychology,
which regards all separation from the 'Mother' as heroic
but painful. But has a hero really no compensations? Besides,
separation is itself a relief, just so soon as the strain
becomes irksome, as in parturition.
As to "the joy of dissolution" the reference is
to Samadhi, the trance in which Subject and Object become
one. In this orgiastic ecstasy is experienced at first; later,
the character of the consciousness changes to continuously
calm delight, and later still, the delight deepens in a manner
wholly indescribable. The technical terms used by Oriental
Initiates to denote these conditions are untranslatable;
in any case, they serve rather to darken counsel.
There is a Qabalistic aphorism concerning the words 'nothing'
and 'all'; for this and similar matters see the Appendix.
{WEH NOTE: The Appendix has not yet been recovered}.
AL I,31: "For these fools of men and their woes care
not thou at all! They feel little; what is, is balanced by
weak joys; but ye are my chosen ones."
The New Comment
All this talk about 'suffering humanity' is principally drivel
based on the error of transferring one's own psychology
to one's neighbour. The Golden Rule is silly. If Lord Alfred
Douglas (for example) did to others what he would like
them to do to him, many would resent his action.
The development of the Adept is by Expansion -- out to Nuit
-- in all directions equally. The small man has little experience,
little capacity for either pain or pleasure. The bourgeois
is a clod. I know better (at least) than to suppose that
to torture him is either beneficial or amusing to myself.
This thesis concerning compassion is of the most palmary
importance in the ethics of Thelema. It is necessary that
we stop, once for all, this ignorant meddling with other
people's business. Each individual must be left free to follow
his own path. America is peculiarly insane on these points.
Her people are desperately anxious to make the Cingalese
wear furs, and the Tibetans vote, and the whole world chew
gum, utterly dense to the fact that most other nations, especially
the French and British, regard 'American institutions' as
the lowest savagery, and forgetful or ignorant of the circumstance
that the original brand of American freedom -- which really
was Freedom -- contained the precept to leave other people
severely alone, and thus assured the possibility of expansion
on his own lines to every man.
AL I,32: "Obey my prophet! follow out the ordeals of
my knowledge! seek me only! Then the joys of my love will
redeem ye from all pain. This is so: I swear it by the vault
of my body; by my sacred heart and tongue; by all I can give,
by all I desire of ye all."
The Old Comment
32. The rule and purpose of the Order; the promise of Nuit
to her chosen.
The New Comment
It is proper to obey The Beast, because His Law is pure Freedom,
and He will give no command which is other than a Right
Interpretation of this Freedom. But it is necessary for
the development of Freedom itself to have an organization;
and every organization must have a highly-centralized control.
This is especially necessary in time of war, as even the
so-called 'democratic' nations have been taught by Experience,
since they would not learn from Germany. Now this age is
pre-eminently a 'time of war', most of all now, when it
is our Work to overthrow the slave-gods.
The injunction "seek me only" is emphasized with
an oath, and a special promise is made in connection with
it. By seeking lesser ideals one makes distinctions, thereby
affirming implicitly the very duality from which one is seeking
to escape. Note also that "me" may imply the Greek
MH, "not". The word 'only' might be taken as '{?Ayin-Lamed-Nun-Vau?}'
with the number of 156, that of the Secret Name BABALON of
Nuith. There are presumably further hidden meanings in the
key-word 'all'.
AL I,33: "Then the priest fell into a deep trance or
swoon, & said unto the Queen of Heaven; Write unto us
the ordeals; write unto us the rituals; write unto us the
law!"
The Old Comment
33. The prophet then demanded instruction; ordeals, rituals,
law.
The New Comment
Law, in the common sense of the word, should be a formulation
of the customs of a people, as Euclid's propositions are
the formulation of geometrical facts. But modern knavery
conceived the idea of artificial law, as if one should
try to square the circle by tyranny. Legislators try to
force the people to change their customs, so that the "business
men" whose greed they are bribed to serve may increase
their profits.
'Law' in Greek, is NOMOC, from NEM , and means strictly "anything
assigned, that which one has in use or possession";
hence "custom, usage", and also "a musical
strain". The literal equivalence of NEM and the Latin
NEMO is suggestive. In Hebrew, 'Law' is ThORA and equivalent
to words meaning "The Gate of the Kingdom" and "The
Book of Wisdom".
AL I,34: "But she said: the ordeals I write not: the
rituals shall be half known and half concealed: the Law is
for all."
The Old Comment
34. The first demand is refused, or, it may be, is to be
communicated by another means than writing.
(It has since been communicated)
The second is partially granted; or, if fully granted, is
not to be made wholly public.
The third is granted unconditionally.
The New Comment
The Ordeals are at present carried out unknown to the Candidate
by the secret Magick Power of The Beast. Those who are
accepted by Him for initiation testify that these Ordeals
are frequently independent of His conscious care. They
are not, like the traditional ordeals, formal, or identical
for all; the Candidate finds himself in circumstances which
afford a real test of conduct, and compel him to discover
his own nature, to become aware of himself by bringing
his secret motives to the surface.
Some of the Rituals have been made accessible, that is,
the Magical Formulae have been published. See "The Rites
of Eleusis", "Energized Enthusiasm", "Book
4, Part III", "etc".
Note the reference to 'not' and 'all'. Also the word 'known'
contains the root GN, 'to beget' and 'to know'; while 'concealed'
indicates the other half of the Human Mystery.
AL I,35: "This that thou writest is the threefold book
of Law."
The Old Comment
35. Definition of this book.
The New Comment
The instruction to write for three days from noon to one
o'clock each day had already been given to The Beast. (See
Preface to this Commentary).
AL I,36: "My scribe Ankh-af-na-khonsu, the priest of
the princes, shall not in one letter change this book; but
lest there be folly, he shall comment thereupon by the wisdom
of Ra-Hoor-Khu-it."
The Old Comment
36. The first strict charge not to tamper with a single letter
of this book.
The comment is to be written "by the wisdom of Ra-Hoor-Khuit",
i.e., by open, not initiated wisdom.
The New Comment
Again we find the words Prince and Priest, but differently
placed in their phrase.
The Beast is here definitely identified with the priest
of the 26th Dynasty whose Stele forms the Pantacle (so to
speak) of the new Magick. He is moreover identified with
the scribe. It is of immense importance to the stability
of the Law to have a Book not merely verbally but literally
inspired, so that even errors in spelling and grammar have
a secret significance. (That this must be so is guaranteed
by the literary preeminence and impeccable orthography of
the Beast as a man). But the great thing is the Standard
to which all disputes may be referred. It is also necessary
to give weight to the authority of The Beast, lest ignorance,
folly, or cunning misinterpret the text.
AL I,37: "Also the mantras and spells; the obeah and
the wanga; the work of the wand and the work of the sword;
these he shall learn and teach."
The Old Comment
37. An entirely new system of magic is to be learnt and taught,
as is now being done.
The New Comment
Mantras may be defined as sentences proper to concentration
of the mind by virtue of their constant repetition. (See
Book 4, Part I, Chapter II).
Spells are methods of communicating the will to other beings.
(See Book 4, Part III).
The Obeah is the magick of the Secret Light with special
reference to acts; the wanga is the verbal or mental correspondence
of the same. The work of the wand is that of Union; of the
sword, Division; these correspond to the two Phases of the
Cosmic cycle described above. (See Book 4, Part II and III).
For the root OB (AVB = 9), see Appendix;{WEH NOTE: Appendix
not yet recovered} it may be connected with the word "Obey".
The "obeah" being the acts, and the "Wanga" the
words, proper to Magick, the two cover the whole world of
external expression.
"The Equinox" and "Book 4" are full
of instruction on all these matters in great detail, and
the student must make them his guide.
But I feel bound to observe that they must be studied merely
as classics, just as a musician studies Bach and Others.
He cannot compose by copying or combining their works; they
serve him only as indications of the art of expression. He
must master the technique, theory and practice, of music,
til the general principles are absorbed, and he has command
of the language, to use it to express his Will.
So with Magick; the student must understand and assimilate
the basic propositions, and he must be expert in the drill
of the practical details.
But that is merely ground-work: he must then conceive his
own expression, and execute it in his own style. Each star
is unique, and each orbit apart; indeed, that is the corner-stone
of my teaching, to have no standard goals or standard ways,
no orthodoxies and no codes. The stars are not herded and
penned and shorn and made into mutton like so many voters!
I decline to be bellwether, who am born a Lion! I will not
be collie, who am quicker to bite than to bark. I refuse
the office of shepherd, who bear not a crook but a club.
Wise in your generation, ye sheep, are ye to scamper away
bleating when your ears catch my roar on the wind! Are ye
not tended and fed and protected -- until word come from
the stockyard?
The lion's life for me! Let me live free, and die fighting!
Now one more point about the obeah and the wanga, the deed
and the word of Magick.
Magick is the art of causing change in existing phenomena.
This definition includes raising the dead, bewitching cattle,
making rain, acquiring goods, fascinating judges, and all
the rest of the programme. Good: but it also includes every
act soever? Yes; I meant it to do so. It is not possible
to utter word or do deed without producing the exact effect
proper and necessary thereto. Thus Magick is the Art of Life
itself.
Magick is the management of all we say and do, so that the
effect is to change that part of our environment which dissatisfies
us, until it does so no longer. We "remould it nearer
to the heart's desire."
Magick ceremonies proper are merely organized and concentrated
attempts to impose our Will on certain parts of the Cosmos.
They are only particular cases of the general law.
But all we say and do, however casually, adds up to more,
far more, than our most strenuous Operations. "Take
care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves." Your
daily drippings fill a bigger bucket than your geysers of
magical effort. The "ninety and nine that safely lay
in the shelter of the fold" have no organized will at
all; and their character, built of their words and deeds,
is only a garbage-heap.
Remember, also, that, unless you know what your true will
is, you may be devoting the most laudable energies to destroying
yourself. Remember that every word and deed is a witness
to thought, that therefore your mind must be perfectly organized,
its sole duty to interpret circumstances in terms of the
Will so that speech and action may be rightly directed to
express the Will appropriately to the occasion. Remember
that every word and deed which is not a definite expression
of your Will counts against it, indifference worse than hostility.
Your enemy is at least interested in you: you may make him
your friend as you never can do with a neutral. Remember
that Magick is the Art of Life, therefore of causing change
in accordance with Will; therefore its law is "love
under will", and its every movement is an act of love.
Remember that every act of "love under will" is
lawful as such; but that when any act is not directed unto
Nuith, who is here the inevitable result of the whole Work,
that act is waste, and breeds conflict within you, so that "the
kingdom of God which is within you" is torn by civil
war.
To the beginner I would offer this programme.
1. Furnish your mind as completely as possible with the
knowledge of how to inspect and to control it.
2. Train your body to obey your mind, and not to distract
its attention.
3. Control your mind to devote itself wholly to discover
your true Will.
4. Explore the course of that Will till you reach its source,
your Silent Self.
5. Unite the conscious will with the true Will, and the
conscious Ego with the Silent Self. You must be utterly ruthless
in discarding any atom of consciousness which is hostile
or neutral.
6. Let this work freely from within, but heed not your environment,
lest you make difference between one thing and another. Whatever
it be, it is to be made one with you by Love.
----------------
Why am not I to learn and teach the work of the Cup and
of the Disk? Is it because they are the feminine weapons?
Shall the Scarlet Woman attend to these? The Book does not
say so; the passives are ignored. I feel the omission as
a lack of balance, the only case of the kind in the Book.
This makes me certain that there is a special meaning. This
wand and sword may not be the wand and sword, or rather dagger,
of the elemental weapons. The Wand may be that of the Fool,
the sword that of justice, whose letters are A & L; AL
is the Key of the whole Book.
We may also take them as simple symbols, the one as that
of Love, the other as that of War. But, looking back over
sixteen years, what have I learnt and taught? Surely the
work of the wand, the free use of the Will to create, and
the way to give power to the Will. I have set it up and caused
men to worship it, for its name is God-in-action. As to the
work of the sword, I have fought, I have shorn shams asunder,
I have anatomized my mind as no man has done since Gautama.
Last, I have shown how pure analysis leads to the highest
Trance, and unveils the absolute Truth.
If this text imply more than this, I know not of it; I ask
pardon of Them that fashioned me and chose me for Their minister.
AL I,38: "He must teach; but he may make severe the
ordeals. "
The Old Comment
38. The usual charge in a work of this kind. Every man has
a right to attain; but it is equally the duty of the adept
to see that he duly earns his reward, and to test and train
his capacity and strength.
The New Comment
These ordeals are prepared by the Magical Power of The Beast.
It is however not necessary for Him to know consciously
what He is doing, and it is a very alert young Magician
who knows what he is undergoing, and why.
AL I,39: "The word of the Law is Thelema."
{"Thelema" is in Greek letters in the MS}
The Old Comment
39. Compare Rabelais. Also it may be translated, "Let
Will and Action be in harmony."
But {Thelema} also means Will in the Higher sense of Magical
One-pointedness, and in the sense used by Schopenhauer and
Fichte.
There is also most probably a very lofty secret interpretation.
I suggest:
The -- the essential {Aleph-Taw}, Azoth, etc.
Word -- Chokmah, Thoth, the Logos, the Second Emanation.
of -- the Partative, Binah, the Great Mother,
the -- Chesed, the paternal power, reflection of the "The" above.
Law -- Geburah, the stern restriction.
is -- Tiphereth, visible existence, the balanced harmony
of the Worlds.
{Thelema} -- The idea embracing all this sentence in a word.
Or: {Theta} The -- {Teth}, the Lion "Thou shalt unite
all these
symbols into the form of a Lion."
{Epsilon} Word -- {He}, the letter of Breath, the Logos.
{Lambda} of -- {Lamed}, {Libra} the Equilibrium.
{Eta} the -- {Cheth}, 418, Abrahadabra.
{Mu} Law -- {Mem}, The Hanged Man, or Redeemer.
{Alpha} is -- {Aleph} The 0 (Zero, Nuit, which is Existence).
{Thelema} -- the sum of all.
The New Comment
By 'the word' one means the magical formula, symbol, or expression.
Study the whole nature of the number 93, that of {?Thelema?}
in the Appendix. {WEH NOTE: Appendix not yet recovered.}
Liber Aleph has also much wisdom upon the Will. After absorbing "Berashith",
and seeing that Will has come by Chance, the question arises,
is Chance in any way bound by Necessity? Is there a limit
to possibility? Could there, for example, be a Something
which is not resolvable into 0 to the 0 power? The question
of {Alpha-Nu-Alpha-Gamma-Kappa-Eta} confronts the Magus in
His meditations. For this verse, though, we may take things
very simply and obviously: the change from the Osiris formula
to that of Horus is intelligible enough. (See Comment on
verse 49).
AL I,40: "Who calls us Thelemites will do no wrong,
if he look but close into the word. For there are therein
Three Grades, the Hermit, and the Lover, and the man of Earth.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law."
The Old Comment
40. {Theta-epsilon}, the Hermit, {Yod} invisible, yet illuminating.
The A.'. A.'.
{lambda-eta}, the Lover, {Zain} visible as is the lightning
flash. The College of Adepts.
{mu-alpha}, The Man of Earth, {Pe}, the Blasted Tower. The
3 keys add up to 31 -- {Lamed-Aleph}, Not and {Aleph-Lamed},
God. Thus is the whole of {Thelema} equivalent to Nuit, the
all-embracing. 31 x 3 = 93. See the Tarot trumps for further
study of these Grades.
{Theta-epsilon} = 14, the Pentagram, rule of Spirit over
ordered Matter. Strength and Authority ( {Teth} and {He}
) and secretly 1 + 4 = 5, the Hierophant, {Vau}, V. Also
{Leo Aries}, the Lion and the Ram. Cf. Isaiah. It is a "millennial" state.
{lambda-eta} = 38, the Key=word Abrahadabra, 418, divided
by the number of its letters, 11. Justice or Balance and
the Charioteer of Mastery. A state of progress; the church
militant.
{mu-alpha} = 41, the Inverted Pentagram, matter dominating
spirit. The Hanged Man and the Fool, the condition of those
who are not adepts.
"Do what thou wilt" need not only be interpreted
as license or even as liberty. It may for example be taken
to mean Do what thou (Ateh) wilt; and Ateh is 406 = {Taw-Vau}
= T, the sign of the cross. The passage might then be read
as a charge to self-sacrifice or equilibrium.
I only put forward this suggestion to exhibit the profoundity
of thought required to deal even with so plain a passage.
All the meanings are true, if only the interpreter by illuminated;
but if not, they are false, even as he is false.
(P.S. There was a sub-intention in the above paragraphs
for the benefit of -- Dwarfs!)
The New Comment
It is explained in Liber 418 that: "The man of earth
is the adherent. The lover giveth his life unto the work
among men. The hermit goeth solitary, and giveth only of
his light unto men."
Thus we have in the Order, the Mystic, the Magician, and
the Devotee. These correspond closely to the Nuit -- Hadit
-- Ra-Hoor-Khuit Triad.
This last sentence of this paragraph is in a sense the sum
of this whole Book; for it is the threefold Book of Law.
It is therefore the Message of the Beast, His word as a Magus
that He must utter. It will be well therefore to reprint
the substance of the Message which he first promulgated on
his formal initiation into that Grade.
LIBER II.
THE MESSAGE OF THE MASTER THERION
"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law."
"There is no Law beyond Do what thou wilt."
{THELEMA} -- Thelema -- means Will.
The Key to this Message is this word -- Will. The first
obvious meaning of this Law is confirmed by antithesis; "The
Word of Sin is Restriction."
Again: "... thou hast no right but to do thy will.
Do that, and no other shall say nay. For pure will, unassuaged
of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way
perfect."
Take this carefully; it seems to imply a theory that if
every man and every woman did his and her will -- the true
Will -- there would be no clashing. "Every man and every
woman is a star.", and each star moves in an appointed
path without interference. There is plenty of room for all;
it is only disorder that creates confusion.
From these considerations it should be clear that "Do
what thou wilt" does not mean "Do what you like." It
is the apotheosis of Freedom; but it is also the strictest
possible bond.
Do what thou wilt -- then do nothing else. Let nothing deflect
thee from that austere and holy task. Liberty is absolute
to do thy will; but seek to do any other thing whatever,
and instantly obstacles must arise. Every act that is not
in definite course of that one orbit is erratic, an hindrance.
Will must not be two, but one.
Note further that this will is not only to be pure, that
is, single, as explained above, but also "unassuaged
of purpose". This strange phrase must give us pause.
It may mean that any purpose in the will would damp ti; clearly,
the "lust of result" is a thing from which it must
be delivered.
But the phrase may also be interpreted as if it read "with
purpose unassuaged" -- i.e. with tireless energy. The
conception is, therefore, of an eternal motion, infinite
and unalterable. It is Nirvana, only dynamic instead of static
-- and this comes to the same thing in the end.
The obvious practical task of the magician is then to discover
what his will really is, so that he may do it in this manner,
and he can best accomplish this by the practices of Liber
Thisarb (see Equinox I, VII, 105) or such others as may from
one time to another be appointed.
It should not be perfectly simple for everybody to understand
the Message of the Master Therion.
Thou must (1) Find out what is thy Will, (2) Do that Will
with (a) one-pointedness, (b) detachment, (c) peace.
Then, and then only, art thou in harmony with the Movement
of Things, thy will part of, and therefore equal to, the
Will of God. And since the will is but the dynamic aspect
of the self, and since two different selves could not possess
identical wills; then, if thy will be God's will, Thou art
That.
There is but one other word to explain. Elsewhere it is
written -- surely for our great comfort -- "Love is
the law, love under will."
This is to be taken as meaning that while Will is the Law,
the nature of that Will is Love. But this Love is as it were
a by-product of that Will; it does not contradict or supersede
that Will; and if apparent contradiction should arise in
any crisis, it is the Will that can guide us aright. Lo,
while in the Book of the Law is much Love, there is no word
of Sentimentality. Hate itself is almost like Love! Fighting
most certainly is Love! "As brothers fight ye!" All
the many races of the world understand this. The Love of
Liber Legis is always bold, Virile, even orgiastic. There
is delicacy, but it is the delicacy of strength. Mighty and
terrible and glorious as it is, however, it is but the pennon
upon the sacred lance of Will, the damascened inscription
upon the swords of the knightmonks of Thelema.
Love is the law, love under will."
There are many other mysteries in this Word, so that it
is impossible to write a full commentary. The Book Aleph
(Wisdom or Folly) is almost wholly devoted to its explanation.
Let every Star see to it that its own life is a wise comment
on this word!
"Three grades". There is a very curious parallel
to this passage in Mr. Aldous Huxley's "Crome Yellow" Chap.
XXII. He works out a theory of a "Rational State" on
precisely these lines: {WEH NOTE: Warning to those intending
publication of the Commentaries. Besides obtaining O.T.O.
permission to use the O.T.O. copyright material, it may be
necessary to obtain permission from the owner(s) of the following
quoted material.}
"Mr. Scogan waved away the interruption. 'There's only
one thing to be done', he said. 'The men of intelligence
must combine, must conspire, and seize power from the imbeciles
and maniacs who now direct us. They must found the Rational
State'
"The heat that was slowly paralyzing all Denis's mental
and bodily faculties seemed to bring to Mr. Scogan additional
vitality. he talked with an ever-increasing energy, his hands
moved in sharp, quick precise gestures, his eyes shown. Hard,
dry, and continuous, his voice went on sounding and sounding
in Denis's ears with the insistence of a mechanical noise.
"'In the Rational State', he heard Mr. Scogan saying,
'human beings will be separated out into distinct species,
not according to the colour of their eyes or the shape of
their skulls, but according to the qualities of their mind
and temperament. Examining psychologists, trained to what
would now seem an almost superhuman clairvoyance, will test
each child that is born and assign it to its proper species.
Duly labelled and docketed, the child will be given the education
suitable to members of its species, and will be set, in adult
life, to perform those functions which human being of his
variety are capable of performing.'
"'How many species will there be?' asked Denis."
"'A great many, no doubt,' Mr. Scogan answered: 'the
classification will be subtle and elaborate. But is is not
in the power of a prophet to go into details, nor is it his
business. I will do no more than indicate the three main
species into which the subjects of the Rational State will
be divided. ... The three main species, will be these: the
Directing Intelligences, the Men of Faith, and the Herd.
Among the Intelligences will be found all those capable of
thought, those who know how to attain to a certain degree
of freedom -- and also, how limited, even among the most
intelligent, that freedom is! -- from the mental bondage
of their time. A select body of Intelligences, drawn from
among those who have turned their attention to the problems
of practical life, will be the governors of the Rational
State. They will employ as their instruments of power the
second great species of humanity -- the men of Faith, the
Madmen, as I have been calling them, who believe in things
unreasonably, with passion, and are ready to die for their
beliefs and their desires. These wild men, with their fearful
potentialities for good or for mischief, will no longer be
allowed to react casually to a casual environment. There
will be no more Caesar Borgias, no more Luthers and Mohammeds,
no more Joanna Southcotts, no more Comstocks. The old-fasioned
Man of Faith and Desire, that haphazard creature of brute
circumstance, who might drive men to tears and repentance,
or who might equally well set them on to cutting one another's
throats, will be replaced by a new sort of madman, still
externally the same, still bubbling with seemingly spontaneous
enthusiasm, but, ah, how very different from the madman of
the past! For the new Man of Faith will be expending his
passion, his desire, and his enthusiasm in the propagation
of some reasonable idea. He will be, all unawares, the tool
of some superior intelligence.'
"Mr. Scogan chuckled maliciously: it was as though
he were taking a revenge, in the name of reason, on the enthusiasts.
'From their earliest years, as soon, that is, as the examining
psychologists have assigned them their place in the classified
scheme, the Men of Faith will have had their special education
under the eye of the Intelligences. Moulded by a long process
of suggestion, they will go out into the world, preaching
and practicing with a generous mania the coldly reasonable
projects of the Directors from above. When these projects
are accomplished, or when the ideas that were useful a decade
ago have ceased to be useful, the Intelligences will inspire
a new generation of madmen with a new eternal truth. The
principal function of the Men of Faith will be to move and
direct the Multitude, that third great species consisting
of those countless millions who lack intelligence and are
without valuable enthusiasm. When any particular effort is
required of the Herd, when it is thought necessary, for the
sake of solidarity, that humanity shall be kindled and united
by some single enthusiastic desire or idea, the Men of Faith,
primed with some simple and satisfying creed, will be sent
out on a mission of evangelization. At ordinary times, when
the high spiritual temperature of a Crusade would be unhealthy,
the Men of Faith will be quietly and earnestly busy with
the great work of education. In the upbringing of the Herd,
humanity's almost boundless suggestibility will be scientifically
exploited. Systematically, from the earliest infancy, its
members will be assured that there is no happiness to be
found except in work and obedience; they will be made to
believe that they are happy, that they are tremendously important
beings, and that everything they do is noble and significant.
For the lower species the earth will be restored to the centre
of the universe and man to preeminence on the earth. Oh,
I envy the lot of the commonality in the Rational State!
Working their eight hours a day, obeying their betters, convinced
of their own grandeur and significance and immortality, they
will be marvellously happy, happier than any race of men
has ever been. They will go through life in a rosy state
of intoxication, form which they will never awake. The Men
of Faith will play the cup-bearers at this lifelong bacchanal,
filling and ever filling again with the warm liquor that
the Intelligences, in sad and sober privacy behind the scenes,
will brew for the intoxication of their subjects.'"
{WEH NOTE: It is characteristic of Crowley's blind side
that he saw no hint of satire in this passage. If success
is the proof, all theories of utopian dependence on ant-like
social order should be highly suspect. The flaw is four-fold:
1. omission of social mobility. 2. assumption of enduring
intelligence linked with good will in the higher class. 3.
preposterous ignorance of the limitations of tests and techniques.
4. failure to understand human motivation. All structured
utopias are stagnating tyrannies. No utopian philosopher
has yet devised a state which would have allowed that particular
individual, the utopian philosopher himself, to survive childhood!
Such fantasmogoria as these arise from the detritus of the
elder age. Crowley himself once remarked to Grady McMurtry
that he (Crowley) had been born before the age of Thelema
and that it would take someone born in the age to fully comprehend
the age.}
AL I,41: "The word of Sin is Restriction. O man! refuse
not thy wife, if she will! O lover, if thou wilt, depart!
There is no bond that can unite the divided but love: all
else is a curse. Accursed! Accursed be it to the aeons! Hell."
The Old Comment
41, 42. Interference with the will of another is the great
sin, for it predicates the existence of another. In this
duality sorrow consists. I think that possibly the higher
meaning is still attributed to will.
The New Comment
The first paragraph is a general statement or definition
of Sin or Error. Anything soever that binds the will, hinders
it, or diverts it, is Sin. That is, Sin is the appearance
of the Dyad. Sin is impurity.<<One cannot say that
it was "Sin" for Naught to restrict itself within
the form of Two; on the contrary. But sin is to resist
the operation of the reversion to Naught. "The wages
of Sin is Death;" for Life is a continual harmonious
and natural Change. See Liber 418 and Liber Aleph.
Sin (See Skeat's Ety. Dict.) is connected with the root "es",
to be. This throws a new light on the passage. Sin is restriction,
that is, it is 'being' as opposed to 'becoming'. The fundamental
idea of wrong is the static as opposed to the dynamic conception
of the Universe. This explanation is not only in harmony
with the general teaching of the Book of the Law, bit shows
how profoundly the author understands Himself.>>
The remainder of the paragraph takes a particular case as
an example. There shall be no property in human flesh. The
sex-instinct is one of the most deeply-seated expressions
of the will; and it must not be restricted, either negatively
by preventing its free function, or positively by insisting
on its false function.
What is more brutal than to stunt natural growth or to deform
it?
What is more absurd than to seek to interpret this holy
instinct as a gross animal act, to separate it from the spiritual
enthusiasm without which it is so stupid as not even to be
satisfactory to the persons concerned?
The sexual act is a sacrament of Will. To profane it is
the great offence. All true expression of it is lawful; all
suppression or distortion is contrary to the Law of Liberty.
To use legal or financial constraint to compel either abstention
or submission, is entirely horrible, unnatural and absurd.
Physical constraint, up to a certain point, is not so seriously
wrong; for it has its roots in the original sex-conflict
which we see in animals, and has often the effect of exciting
Love in his highest and noblest shape. Some of the most passionate
and permanent attachments have begun with rape.{WEH NOTE:
but see the New Comment on verse 51.} Rome was actually founded
thereon. Similarly, murder of a faithless partner is ethically
excusable, in a certain sense; for there may be some stars
whose Nature is extreme violence. The collision of galaxies
is a magnificent spectacle, after all. But there is nothing
inspiring in a visit to one's lawyer. Of course this is merely
my personal view; a star who happened to be a lawyer might
see things otherwise! Yet Nature's unspeakable variety, though
it admits cruelty and selfishness, offers us no example of
the puritan and the prig! {WEH NOTE: Crowley's determined
ignorance of Natural History as a subject of study is ably
presented by his own direct affirmation in several of his
works. Harem oriented species, including seals, sheep, cows,
... have a puritanical prig at the top of the pecking order.
Pack and colony animals, such as wolves and meercats, often
allow sex between only two individuals in the pack. At least
it's not as bad as the parish priest who denounced homosexuality
with the observation that it did not occur in animals, including
dogs!}
However, to the mind of Law there is an Order of Going;
and a machine is more beautiful, save to the Small Boy, when
it works than when it smashes. Now the Machine of Matter-Motion
is an explosive machine, with pyrotechnic effects; but these
are only incidentals.
Laws against adultery are based upon the idea that woman
is a chattel, so that to make love to a married woman is
to deprive the husband of her services. It is the frankest
and most crass statement of a slave-situation. To us, every
woman is a star. She has therefore an absolute right to travel
in her own orbit. There is no reason why she should not be
the ideal hausfrau, if that chance to be her will. But society
has no right to insist upon that standard. It was, for practical
reasons, almost necessary to set up such taboos in small
communities, savage tribes, where the wife was nothing but
a general servant, where the safety of the people depended
upon a high birth-rate. But to-day woman is economically
independent, becomes more so every year. The result is that
she instantly asserts her right to have as many or as few
men or babies as she wants or can get; and she defies the
world to interfere with her. More power to her -- elbow!
The War has seen this emancipation flower in four years.
Primitive people, the Australian troops for example, are
saying that they will not marry English girls, because English
girls like a dozen men a week. Well, who wants them to marry?
Russia has already formally abrogated marriage. Germany and
France have tried to 'save their faces' in a thoroughly Chinese
manner, by 'marrying' pregnant spinsters to dead soldiers!
England has been too deeply hypocritical, of course, to
do more than "hush things up"; and is pretending
'business as usual', though every pulpit is aquake with the
clamour of bat-eyed bishops, squeaking of the awful immorality
of everybody but themselves and their choristers. Englishwomen
over 30 have the vote; when the young 'uns get it, good-bye
to the old marriage system.
America has made marriage a farce by the multiplication
and confusion of the Divorce Laws. A friend of mine who had
divorced her husband was actually, three years later, sued
by him for divorce!!!
But America never waits for laws; her people go ahead. The
emancipated, self-supporting American woman already acts
exactly like the 'bachelor-boy'. Sometimes she loses her
head, and stumbles into marriage, and stubs her toe. She
will soon get tired of the folly. She will perceive how imbecile
it is to hamstring herself in order to please her parents,
or to legitimatize her children, or to silence her neighbours.
She will take the men she wants as simply as she buys a
newspaper; and if she doesn't like the Editorials, or the
Comic Supplement, it's only two cents gone, and she can get
another.
Blind asses! who pretend that women are naturally chaste!
The Easterns know better; all the restrictions of the harem,
of public opinion, and so on, are based upon the recognition
of the fact that woman is only chaste when there is nobody
around. She will snatch the babe from its cradle, or drag
the dog from its kennel, to prove the old saying: "Natura
abhorret a vacuo. For she is the Image of the Soul of Nature,
the Great Mother, the Great Whore.
It is to be well noted that the Great Women of History have
exercised unbounded freedom in Love. Sappho, Semiramis, Messalina,
Cleopatra, Ta Chhi, Pasiphae, Clytaemnaestra, Helen of Troy,
and in more recent times Joan of Arc (by Shakespeare's account),
Catherine II of Russia, Queen Elizabeth of England, George
Sand, "George Eliot." Against these we can put
only Emily Bronte, whose sex-suppression was due to her environment,
and so burst out in the incredible violence of her art, and
the regular religious mystics, Saint Catherine, Saint Teresa,
and so on, the facts of whose sex-life have been carefully
camouflaged in the interests of the slave-gods. But, even
on that showing, the sex-life was intense, for the writings
of such women are overloaded with sexual expression passionate
and perverted, even to morbidity and to actual hallucination.
Sex is the main expression of the Nature of a person; great
Natures are sexually strong; and the health of any person
will depend upon the freedom of that function.
(See "Liber CI", "de Lege Libellum",
Cap. IV, in "The Equinox" III (1).)
AL I,42: "Let it be that state of manyhood bound and
loathing. So with thy all; thou hast no right but to do thy
will."
The New Comment
"Manyhood bound and loathing." An organized state
is a free association for the common weal. My personal will
to cross the Atlantic, for example, is made effective by
co-operation with others on agreed terms. But the forced
association of slaves is another thing.
A man who is not doing his will is like a man with cancer,
an independent growth in him, yet one from which he cannot
get free. The idea of self-sacrifice is a moral cancer in
exactly this sense.
Similarly, one may say that not to do one's will is evidence
of mental or moral insanity. When "duty points one way,
and inclination the other", it is proof that you are
not one, but two. You have not centralized your control.
This dichotomy is the beginning of conflict, which may result
in a Jekyll-Hyde effect. Stevenson suggests that man may
be discovered to be a "mere polity" of many individuals.
The sages knew it long since. But the name of this polity
is Choronzon, mob rule, unless every individual is absolutely
disciplined to serve his own, and the common, purpose without
friction.
It is of course better to expel or destroy an irreconcilable. "If
thine eye offend thee, cut it out." The error in the
interpretation of this doctrine has been that it has not
been taken as it stands. It has been read: If thine eye offend
some artificial standard of right, cut it out. The curse
of society has been Procrustean morality, the ethics of the
herd-men. One would have thought that a mere glance at Nature
would have sufficed to disclose Her scheme of Individuality
made possible by Order.
AL I,43: "Do that, and no other shall say nay."
The Old Comment
43. No other shall say nay may mean -- NO-Other (Nuit) shall
pronounce the word No, uniting the Aspirant with Herself
by denying and so destroying that which he is.
The New Comment
The general meaning of this verse is that so great is the
power of asserting one's right that it will not long be
disputed. For by doing so one appeals to the Law. In practice
it is found that people who are ready to fight for their
rights are respected, and let alone. The slave-spirit invites
oppression.
AL I,44: "For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered
from the lust of result, is every way perfect."
The Old Comment
44. Recommends "non-attachment." Students will
understand how in meditation the mind which attaches itself
to hope of success is just as bound as if it were to attach
itself to some base material idea. It is a bond and the aim
is freedom.
I recommend serious study of the word unassuaged which appears
not very intelligible.
The New Comment
This verse is best interpreted by defining 'pure will' as
the true expression of the Nature, the proper or inherent
motion of the matter, concerned. It is unnatural to aim
at any goal. The student is referred to "Liber LXV",
Cap. II, v. 24, and to the "Tao Teh King". This
becomes particularly important in high grades. One is not
to do Yoga, etc., in order to get Samadhi, like a schoolboy
or a shopkeeper; but for its own sake, like an artist.
"Unassuaged" means "its edge taken off by" or "dulled
by". The pure student does not think of the result of
the examination.
AL I,45: "The Perfect and the Perfect are one Perfect
and not two; nay, are none!"
The Old Comment
45. Perhaps means that adding perfection to perfection results
in unity and ultimately the Negativity. But I think there
is much more than this.
The New Comment
Here begins one of the characteristically difficult passages
of this Book. The author, Aiwaz, is careful to identify
Himself at intervals by such Speech. The interpretation,
when thoroughly grasped, is invariably quite overwhelming
by its simplicity. It is for this reason that this Book
should be studied with all assiduity; at any moment the
answer to your own deepest problem may be signalled to
you from the Stars.
AL I,46: "Nothing is a secret key of this law. Sixty-one
the Jews call it; I call it eight, eighty, four hundred & eighteen."
The Old Comment
46. 61 = {Aleph-Vau-Nun}. But the True Nothing of Nuit is
8, 80, 418. Now 8 is {Cheth}, which spelt fully is 418
-- {Cheth-Yod-Taw}. And 418 is Abrahadabra, the word of
Ra-Hoor-Khuit. Now 80 is {Pe}, the letter of Ra-Hoor-Khuit.
(Qy. this?) (Could 80 = {infinity} 0. Infinity x Zero?)
The New Comment
See Appendix {WEH NOTE: Appendix not yet recovered.}
AL I,47: "But they have the half: unite by thine art
so that all disappear."
The Old Comment
47. Let us, however, add the Jewish half, 61.
8 + 80 + 418 = 506. Cf. Verses 24, 25.
506 + 61 = 567 = 27 x 21 = ?
But writing 506 qabalistically backwards we get 605, and
605 + 61 = 666.
666 = 6 x 111, and 11 = {?Aleph?} = 0 in Taro.
666 = 1 + 2 + ... 36, the sum of the numbers in the Magic
Square of Sol.
666 = the Number of the Beast.
Or, taking the keys, 8, 80, 418, we get VII, XVI, VII, adding
to 30.
30 + 61 = 91 = {Aleph-Mem-Nun}, Amen.
This may unite Nuit with Amoun the negative and concealed.
Yet to my mind, she is the greater conception, that of which
Amoun is but a reflection.
The New Comment
See Appendix {WEH NOTE: Appendix not yet recovered.}
AL I,48: "My prophet is a fool with his one, one, one;
are not they the Ox, and none by the Book?"
The Old Comment
48. See above for 111.
"My prophet is a fool," i.e. my prophet has the
highest of all grades, since the Fool is {Aleph}.
I note later (An V, Sol in Aquarius) that v. 48 means that
all disappears when 61 + 8, 80, 418, are reduced to 1. And
this may indicate some practical mystic method of annihilation.
I am sure (Sol in Libra, An VII) that is is by no means the
perfect solution of these marvellous verses.
The New Comment
I think that the surface meaning of this verse is to answer
the unspoken criticism of the scribe, who did not see how
to find a zero value for such an equation. It assured him
that it was only necessary to find a Unity Value.
AL I,49: "Abrogate are all rituals, all ordeals, all
words and signs. Ra-Hoor-Khuit hath taken his seat in the
East at the Equinox of the Gods; and let Asar be with Isa,
who also are one. But they are not of me. Let Asar be the
adorant, Isa the sufferer; Hoor in his secret name and splendour
is the Lord initiating."
The Old Comment
49. Declares a New System of Magic, and initiation. Asar-Isa
is now the Candidate, not the Hierophant. Hoor -- see Cap.
III -- is the Initiator.
The New Comment
This verse declares that the old formula of Magick -- the
Osiris-Adonis-Jesus-Marsyas-Dionysus-Attis-etcetera formula
of the Dying God -- is no longer efficacious. It rested
on the ignorant belief that the Sun died every day, and
every year, and that its resurrection was a miracle.
The Formula of the New Aeon recognizes Horus, the Child
crowned and conquering, as God. We are all members of the
Body of God, the Sun; and about our System is the Ocean of
Space. This formula is then to be based upon these facts.
Our "Evil", "Error", "Darkness", "Illusion",
whatever one chooses to call it, is simply a phenomenon of
accidental and temporary separateness. If you are "walking
in darkness", do not try to make the sun rise by self-sacrifice,
but wait in confidence for the dawn, and enjoy the pleasures
of the night meanwhile.
The general illusion is to the Equinox Ritual of the G.'.
D.'. where the officer of the previous six months, representing
Horus, took the place of the retiring Hierophant, who had
represented Osiris.
Isa is the Legendary "Jesus", for which Canidian
concoction the prescription is to be found in my book bearing
that title, "Liber DCCCLXXXVIII".
AL I,50: "There is a word to say about the Hierophantic
task. Behold! there are three ordeals in one, and it may
be given in three ways. The gross must pass through fire;
let the fine be tried in intellect, and the lofty chosen
ones in the highest. Thus ye have star & star, system & system;
let not one know well the other!"
The Old Comment
50. Our system of initiation is to be triune. For the outer,
tests of labour, pain, etc. For the inner, intellectual
tests. For the elect of the A.'.A.'., spiritual tests.
Further the Order is not to hold Lodges, but to have a
chain-system.{WEH NOTE: This was written when Crowley had
not yet joined O.T.O. and before he chartered O.T.O. lodges}
The New Comment
It would be improper to make extended commentary on this
verse, since the nature of the ordeals is not to be written.
It is only necessary to say that these ordeals are singularly
thorough in all ways, and cannot be dodged. They are real,
not formal, tests of the candidate.
Persons accustomed to the schoolboy jokes of Freemasonry
please take notice.
AL I,51: "There are four gates to one palace; the floor
of that palace is of silver and gold; lapis lazuli & jasper
are there; and all rare scents; jasmine & rose, and the
emblems of death. Let him enter in turn or at once the four
gates; let him stand on the floor of the palace. Will he
not sink? Amn. Ho! warrior, if thy servant sink? But there
are means and means. Be goodly therefore: dress ye all in
fine apparel; eat rich foods and drink sweet wines and wines
that foam! Also, take your fill and will of love as ye will,
when, where and with whom ye will! But always unto me."
The Old Comment
51. The candidate will be brought through his ordeals in
divers ways. The order is to be of freemen and nobles.
The New Comment
The first section of this verse is connected with the second
only by the word 'therefore'. It appears to describe an
initiation, or perhaps The initiation, in general terms.
I would suggest that the palace is the 'Holy House' or
Universe of the Initiate of the New Law. The four gates
are perhaps Light, Life, Love, Liberty -- see "De
Lege Libellum". Lapis Lazuli is a symbol of Nuit,
Jasper of Hadit. The rare scents are possibly various ecstasies
or Samadhis. Jasmine and Rose are Hieroglyphs of the two
main Sacraments, while the emblems of death may refer to
certain secrets of a well known exoteric school of initiation
whose members, with the rarest exceptions, do not know
what it is all about.{WEH NOTE: Probably a slap against
Freemasonry in decadence.}
The question then arises as to whether the initiate is able
to stand firmly in this Place of Exaltation. It seems to
me as if this refers to the ascetic life, commonly considered
as an essential condition of participation in these mysteries.
The answer is that "there are means and means",
implying that no one rule is essential. This is in harmony
with our general interpretation of the Law; it has as many
rules as there are individuals.
This word 'therefore' is easy to understand. We are to enjoy
life thoroughly in an absolutely normal way, exactly as all
the free and great have always done. The only point to remember
is that one is a 'Member of the Body of God', a Star in the
Body of Nuith. This being sure, we are urged to the fullest
expansion of our several Natures, with special attention
to those pleasures which not only express the soul, but aid
it to reach the higher developments of that expression.
The act of Love is to the bourgeois (as the 'Christian'
is called now-a-days) a gross animal gesture which shames
his boasted humanity. The appetite drags him at its hoofs;
it tires him, disgusts him, diseases him, makes him ridiculous
even in his own eyes. It is the source of nearly all his
neuroses.
Against this monster he has devised two protections. Firstly,
he pretends that it is a Fairy Prince disguised, and hangs
it with the rags and tinsel of romance, sentiment, and religion.
He calls it Love, denies its strength and truth, and worships
this wax figure of him with all sorts of amiable lyrics and
leers.
Secondly, he is so certain, despite all his theatrical-wardrobe-work,
that it is a devouring monster, that he resents with insane
ferocity the existence of people who laugh at his fears,
and tell him that the monster he fears is in reality not
a fire-breathing worm, but a spirited horse, well trained
to the task of the bridle. They tell him not to be a gibbering
coward, but to learn to ride. Knowing well how abject he
is, the kindly manhood of the advice is, to him, the bitterest
insult he can imagine, and he calls on the mob to stone the
blasphemer. He is therefore particularly anxious to keep
intact the bogey he so dreads; the demonstration that Love
is a general passion, pure in itself, and the redeemer of
all them that put their trust in Him, is to tear open the
raw ulcer of his soul.
We of Thelema are not the slaves of Love. "Love under
will" is the Law. We refuse to regard love as shameful
and degrading, as a peril to body and soul. We refuse to
accept it as the surrender of the divine to the animal; to
us it is the means by which the animal may be made the Winged
Sphinx which shall bear man aloft to the House of the Gods.
We are then particularly careful to deny that the object
of love is the gross physiological object which happens to
be Nature's excuse for it. Generation is a sacrament of the
physical Rite, by which we create ourselves anew in our own
image, weave in a new flesh-tapestry the Romance of our own
Soul's History. But also Love is a sacrament of trans-substantiation
whereby we initiate our own souls; it is the Wine of Intoxication
as well as the Bread of Nourishment. "Nor is he for
priest designed Who partakes only in one kind."
We therefore heartily cherish those forms of Love in which
no question of generation arises; we use the stimulating
effects of physical enthusiasm to inspire us morally and
spiritually. Experience teaches that passions thus employed
do serve to refine and to exalt the whole being of man or
woman. Nuith indicates the sole condition: "But always
unto me."
The epicure is not a Monster of gluttony, nor the amateur
of Beethoven a 'degenerate' from the 'normal' man whose only
music is the tom-tom. So also the poisons which shook the
bourgeois are not indulgences, but purifications; the brute
whose furtive lust demands that he be drunk and in darkness
that he may surrender to his shame, and that he lie about
it with idiot mumblings ever after, is hardly the best judge
even of Phryne. How much less should he venture to criticize
such men and women whose imaginations are so free from grossness
that the element of attraction which serves to electrify
their magnetic coil is independent of physical form? To us
the essence of Love is that it is a sacrament unto Nuith,
a gate of grace and a road of righteousness to Her High Palace,
the abode of peerless purity whose lamps are the Stars.
"As ye will." It should be abundantly clear from
the foregoing remarks that each individual has an absolute
and indefeasible right to use his sexual vehicle in accordance
with its own proper character, and that he is responsible
only to himself. But he should not injure himself and his
right aforesaid; acts invasive of another individual's equal
rights are implicitly self-aggressions. A thief can hardly
complain on theoretical grounds if he is himself robbed.
Such acts as rape, and the assault or seduction of infants,
may therefore be justly regarded as offences against the
Law of Liberty, and repressed in the interests of that Law.
It is also excluded from "as ye will" to compromise
the liberty of another person indirectly, as by taking advantage
of the ignorance or good faith of another person to expose
that person to the constraint of sickness, poverty, social
detriment, or childbearing, unless with the well-informed
and uninfluenced free will of that person.
One must moreover avoid doing another injury by deforming
his nature; for instance, to flog children at or near puberty
may distort the sensitive nascent sexual character, and impress
it with the stamp of masochism. Again, homosexual practices
between boys may in certain cases actually rob them of their
virility, psychically or even physically.
Trying to frighten adolescents about sex by the bogeys of
Hell, Disease, and Insanity, may warp the moral nature permanently,
and produce hypochondria or other mental maladies, with perversions
of the enervated and thwarted instinct.
Repression of the natural satisfaction may result in addition
to secret and dangerous vices which destroy their victim
because they are artificial and unnatural aberrations. Such
moral cripples resemble those manufactured by beggars by
compressing one part of the body so that it is compensated
by a monstrous exaggeration in another part.
But on the other hand we have no right to interfere with
any type of manifestation of the sexual impulse on a priori
grounds. We must recognize that the Lesbian leanings of idle
and voluptuous women whose refinement finds the grossness
of the average male repugnant, are as inexpungably entrenched
in Righteousness as the parallel pleasures of the English
Aristocracy and Clergy whose aesthetics find women disgusting,
and whose self-respect demands that love should transcend
animal impulse, excite intellectual intimacy, and inspire
spirituality by directing it towards an object whose attainment
cannot inflict the degradation of domesticity, and the bestiality
of gestation.
Every one should discover, by experience of every kind,
the extent and intention of his own sexual Universe. He must
be taught that all roads are equally royal, and that the
only question for him is "Which road is mine?" All
details are equally likely to be of the essence of his personal
plan, all equally 'right' in themselves, his own choice of
the one as correct as, and independent of, his neighbour's
preference for the other.
He must not be ashamed or afraid of being homosexual if
he happens to be so at heart; he must not attempt to violate
his own true nature because public opinion, or mediaeval
morality, or religious prejudice would wish he were otherwise.
The oyster stays shut in his shell for all Darwin may say
about his "low stage of evolution", or Puritans
about his priapistic character, or idealists about his unfitness
for civic government.
The advocates of homosexuality - "primus inter pares",
John Addington Symonds! -- hammer away like Hercules at the
spiritual, social, moral, and intellectual advantages of
cultivating the caresses of a comrade who combines Apollo
with Achilles and Antinous at the expense of escaping from
a Chimaera with Circe's head, Cleopatra's body, and Cressida's
character.
Why can't they let one alone? I agree to agree; I only stipulate
to be allowed to be inconsistent. I will confess their creed,
so long as I may play the part of Peter until the cock crow
thrice.
They urge more strenuously still the claims of homosexuality
to heal the hurts and horrors of humanity, almost the 'complete
cohort'. On this point I concur that they argue indiscutably,
with sober sense to support and stress of suffering to spur
them. They prove with Euler's exactness and Hinton's passion
that heterosexuality entrains an infinity of ills; jealousies,
abortions, diseases, infanticides, frauds, intrigues, quarrels,
poverty, prostitution, persecution, idleness, self-indulgence,
social stress, over-population, sex-antagonism. They show
with Poincare's precision that Jesus and Paul struck at the
heart of hell when they proclaimed marriage a scourge, and
offered the testimony of John and Timothy to support the
plea of Plato on behalf of paederastic passion. Out of the
Court there slunk Mark Antony, his toga to his face, one
of the legion of lost souls that woman had withered; behind
him groped blind Samson, disinherited Adam, feeling his way
along the table where they had piled countless papyri writ
with woes of kings and sages woman-wrecked, and many a map
of towns and temples torn and trampled beneath the feet of
Love, their ashes smouldering still, and smoky with song
to witness how Astarte's breath had kindled and consumed
them. Extinguished empires owned that their doom was the
device of Venus, her vengeance on virility.
By Paul sat Buddha smiling, Ananda's arm about his neck,
while Mohammed paced the floor impatiently between two warrior
comrades, his belt bearing an iron key, a whip and a sword,
wherewith to limit women's liberty, their love their life,
lest to his loss they lure him.
The Beast is there also, aloof, attentive. He will not weigh
the evidence in the balances of any particular kind of advantage.
He will not admit any standard as adequate to assess the
absolute. To him, the pettiest personal whimsy outweighs
all wisdom, all philosophy, all private profit and all public
prudence. The sexual obol of the meanest is stamped with
the signature of his own sovereign soul, lawful and current
coin no less than the gold talent of his neighbour. The derelict
moon has the same right to drift round Earth as Regulus to
blaze in the heart of the Lion.
Collision is the only crime in the cosmos.
The Beast refuses therefore to assent to any argument as
to the propriety of any fashion of formulating the soul in
symbols of sex. A canon is no less deadly in love than in
art or literature; its acceptance stifles style, and its
enforcement extinguishes sincerity.
It is better for a person of heterosexual nature to suffer
every possible calamity as the indirect environment-evoked
result of his doing his true will in that respect than to
enjoy health, wealth and happiness by means either of suppressing
sex altogether, of debauching it to the service of Sodom
or Gommorrah.
Equally it is better for the androgyne, the urning, or their
feminine counterparts to endure blackmailers private and
public, the terrors of police persecution, the disgust, contempt
and loathing of the vulgar, and the self-torture of suspecting
the peculiarity to be a symptom of a degenerate nature, than
to wrong the soul by damning it to the hell of abstinence,
or by defiling it with the abhorred embraces of antipathetic
arms.
Every star must calculate its own orbit. All is Will, and
yet all is Necessity. To swerve is ultimately impossible;
to seek to swerve is to suffer.
The Beast 666 ordains by His authority that every man, and
every woman, and every intermediately-sexed individual, shall
be absolutely free to interpret and communicate Self by means
of any sexual practices soever, whether direct or indirect,
rational or symbolic, physiologically, legally, ethically,
or religiously approved or no, provided only that all parties
to any act are fully aware of all implications and responsibilities
thereof, and heartily agree thereto.
Moreover, the Beast 666 adviseth that all children shall
be accustomed from infancy to witness every type of sexual
act, as also the process of birth, lest falsehood fog, and
mystery stupefy, their minds, whose error else might thwart
and misdirect the growth of their subconscious system of
soul-symbolism.
"when, where, and with whom ye will!"
The phrase "with whom" has been practically covered
by the comment on "as ye will". One need no more
than distinguish that the earlier phrase permits all manner
of acts, the latter all possible partners. There would have
been no Furies for Oedipus, no disaster for Othello, Romeo,
Pericles of Tyre, Laon and Cythna, if it were only agreed
to let sleeping dogs lie, and mind one's own business. In
real life, we have seen in our own times Oscar Wilde, Sir
Charles Dilke, Parnell, Canon Aitken and countless others,
many of them engaged in first-rate work for the world, all
wasted because the mob must make believe to be "moral".
This phrase abolishes the Eleventh Commandment, Not to be
Found Out, by authorizing Incest, Adultery, and Paederasty,
which every one now practices with humiliating precautions,
which perpetuate the schoolboy's enjoyment of an escapade,
and make shame, slyness, cowardice and hypocrisy the conditions
of success in life.
It is also the fact that the tendency of any individual
to sexual irregularity is emphasised by the preoccupation
with the subject which follows its factitious importance
in modern society.
It is to be observed that Politeness has forbidden any direct
reference to the subject of sex to secure no happier result
than to allow Sigmund Freud and others to prove that our
every thought, speech, and gesture, conscious or unconscious,
is an indirect reference!
Unless one wants to wreck the neighbourhood, it is best
to explode one's gunpowder in an unconfined space.
There are very few cases of "perverted hunger-instinct" in
moderately healthy communities. War restrictions on food
created dishonest devices to procure dainties, and artificial
attempts to appease the ache of appetite by chemical counterfeits.
The South-Sea Islanders, pagan, amoral and naked, are temperate
lovers, free from hysterical "crimes of passion",
sex obsessions, and puritan persecution-mania; perversion
is practically unknown, and monogamy is the general custom.
Even the civilized psychopaths of cities, forced into every
kind of excess by the omnipresence of erotic suggestions
and the contact of crazed crowds seething with suppressed
sexuality, are not wholly past physic. They are no sooner
released from the persistent pressure by escaping to some
place where the inhabitants treat the reproductive and the
respiratory organs as equally innocent than they begin insensibly
to forget their 'fixed idea' forced on them by the fog-horn
of Morality, so that their perversions perish, just as a
coiled spring straightens itself when the external compulsion
is removed. They revert to their natural sex-characters,
which only in rare cases are other than simple, pure, and
refined. More, sex itself ceases to play Principal Boy in
the Pantomime of Life. Other interests resume their proper
proportions.
We may now inquire why the Book is at pains to admit as
to love "when" and "where" we will. Few
people, surely, have been seriously worried by restrictions
of time and place. One can only think of lovers who live
with fearsome families or in inhospitable lodgings, on a
rainy night, buffeted from one police-bullied hotel to another.
Perhaps this permission is intended to indicate the propriety
of performing the sexual act without shame or fear, not waiting
for darkness or seeking secrecy, but by daylight in public
places, as serenely as if it were a natural incident in a
morning stroll.
Custom would soon surfeit curiosity, and copulation attract
less attention than a new fashion in frocks. For the existing
interest in sexual matters is chiefly because, common as
the act is, it is closely concealed. Nobody is excited by
seeing others eat. A "naughty" book is as dull
as a volume of sermons; only genius can vitalize either.
Beyond this, once love is taken for granted, the morbid
fascination of its mystery will vanish.
The pander, the prostitute, the parasite will find their
occupation gone.
Disease will go straight to the doctor instead of to the
quack, as it does; the altars of Mrs. Grundy run red with
the blood of her faithful!
The ignorance or carelessness of a raw youth will no longer
hound him to hell. A blighted career or a ruined constitution
will no more be the penalty of a moment's exuberance.
Above all, the world will begin to appreciate the true nature
of the sexual process, its physical insignificance as one
among many parts of the body, its transcendent importance
as the vehicle of the True Will and the first of the sheaths
of the Self.
Hitherto our sexual tabus have kept far ahead of Gilbert
and Sullivan. We have made love the lackey to property, as
who should pay his rent by sneezing. We have swaddled it
in politeness, as who should warn God off the grass.
We have muddled it up with morality, as who should frown
at the Himalayas on the one hand, and, on the other, regulate
his behaviour by that of an ant-heap.
The Law of Thelema is here!
(It appears pertinent to add that the above ethical theories
have stood the test of practice. Experiment shows that complete
removal -- in the most radical manner -- of all the usual
restrictions on conduct results, after a brief period of
uneasiness of various kinds, in the subject dropping entirely
into the background; the parties concerned became natural,
and led what would conventionally be called 'strictly moral'
lives without even knowing that they were doing so.)
As - Postcript, let me contrast with the above theories
two actual cases of Marriage as it is in England.
No.1. Mr. W., a solicitor and gentleman farmer of considerable
wealth: a Plymouth Brother. Called, in Southsea, Hants.,
where he practised: "The Honest Lawyer." Every
time that his wife gave birth to a child, or miscarried,
she lay for weeks -- often months -- between life and death,
with peri-typhlitis or peritonitis set up by the difficulties
of parturition. Yet this man, knowing this well, had gone
on and on remorselessly. When I knew him he had 18 children
living, and two more were born during that period. It was
evidently his view that he had an absolute Right to impregnate
his wife, and that it was her business whether she lived
or died. During all these years she was no sooner well enough
to leave her bed than she was again "in the family way".
Thus in 25 years, she was never permitted so much as a month's
good health. This Mr. W. was a most kindly genial man, devoted
to her and his family, genuinely pious and tenderhearted.
But it never occured to him to refrain from exercising the
Right which he possessed to endanger her life every year.
(He suffered intensely with anxiety for his wife's health.)
No. 2. Mr. H., a very skilful engraver and die-sinker, a
man of refined tastes and delicate feelings, sensitive beyond
the common even of men in a far higher station of life and
with a much better education. Since childhood he had suffered
continually from an incurable form of Psoriasis. This kept
him in a state of almost constant irritation, spoilt his
sleep, and made him lament that he was "a leper".
In fact, the scales of the eruption were so plentiful that
his sheets had to be cleaned every morning with a dustpan
and brush! He could only obtain relief (before trying to
sleep) by being rubbed with oil of wintergreen, which filled
his whole house with a loathsome, stench. One would have
thought that the first wish of a man thus afflicted would
be to sleep alone, that it would be utterly repugnant and
revolting to him to sleep with another person, for his own
sake, apart from any consideration for her. But his wife,
herself an invalid -- a huge obese greasy woman (of middle
age when I knew the family) suffering from rheumatoid arthritis,
tubercular trouble in the arms, etc. etc. -- was his Wife,
she must be immediately available should Mr. H. want to exercise
his conjugal Right. (In this case, too, Mrs. H. was likely
to die if impregnated.) The extraordinary feature is that
so extremely sensitive and refined a man could be so disgustingly
callous on such a matter. Even vulgar people fear to appear
physically repulsive to the person whom they love. It seems
as if the fact of Marriage destroys every natural characteristic,
and has a set of rules of its own diametrically opposed in
spirit and letter to those which govern Love. I confidently
appeal to impartial observers to say whether the ideals of
the Book are not cleaner, more wholesome, more human, and
more truly moral than those of Marriage as it is.
AL I,52: "If this be not aright; if ye confound the
space-marks, saying: They are one; or saying, They are many;
if the ritual be not ever unto me: then expect the direful
judgments of Ra Hoor Khuit!"
The Old Comment
52. But distinctions must not be made before Nuit, either
intellectually, morally, or personally.
Metaphysics, too, is intellectual bondage; avoid it!
Otherwise on falls back to the Law of Hoor from the perfect
emancipation of Nuit. This is a great mystery, only to be
understood by those who have fully attained Nuit and her
secret Initiation.
The New Comment
It is not true to say either that we are separate Stars,
or One Star. Each Star is individual, yet each is bound
to the others by Law. This Freedom under Law is one of
the most difficult yet important doctrines of this Book.
So too the ritual -- our lives -- must be unto Nuith; for
She is the Ultimate to which we tend, the asymptote of
our curve. Failure in this one-pointedness sets up the
illusion of duality, which leads to excision and destruction.
"Direful:" because Ra-Hoor-Khuit is a "God
of war and vengeance;" See Cap. III.
The doctrine of the previous verses, which appears not merely
to allow sexual liberty in the ordinary sense, but even to
advocate it in a sense which is calculated to shock the most
abandoned libertine, can do no less than startle and alarm
the magician, and that only the more so as he is familiar
with the theory and practice of his art. "What is this,
in the name of Adonai?" I hear him exclaim: "is
it not the immemorial and unchallenged tradition that the
exorcist who would apply himself to the most elementary operations
of our Art is bound to prepare himself by a course of chastity?
Is it not notorious that virginity is by its own virtue one
of the most powerful means, and one of the most essential
conditions, of all Magical works? This is no question of
technical formula such as may, with propriety, be modulated
in the event of an Equinox of the Gods. It is one of those
eternal truths of Nature which persist, no matter what the
environment, in respect of place or period."
To these remarks I can but smile my most genial assent.
The only objection that I can take to them is to point out
that the connotation of the word 'chastity' may have been
misunderstood from a scientific point of view, just as modern
science has modified our conception of the relations of the
earth and the sun without presuming to alter one jot or tittle
of the observed facts of Nature. So we may assert that modern
discoveries in physiology have rendered obsolete the Osirian
conceptions of the sexual process which interpreted chastity
as physical abstinence, small regard being paid to the mental
and moral concomitants of the refusal to act, still less
to the physical indications. The root of the error lies in
the dogma of original sin, as a result of which pollution
was actually excused as being in the nature of involuntary
offence, just as if one were to assert that a sleep-walker
who has fallen over a precipice were any less dead than Empedocles
or Sappho.
The doctrine of Thelema resolves the whole question in conformity
with the facts observed by science and the proprieties prescribed
by Magick. It must be obvious to the most embryonic tyro
in alchemy that if there be any material substance soever
endowed with magical properties, one must class, primus inter
pares, that vehicle of essential humanity which is the first
matter of that Great Work wherein our race shares the divine
prerogative of creating man in its own image, male and female.
It is evidently of minor importance whether the will to
create be consciously formulated. Lot in his drunkenness
served the turn of his two daughters, no less than Jupiter,
who prolonged the night to forty-eight hours in order to
give himself time to beget Hercules.
Man is in actual possession of this supreme talisman. It
is his "pearl of great price," in comparison with
which all other jewels are but gew-gaws. It is his prime
duty to preserve the integrity of this substance. He must
no allow its quality to be impaired either by malnutrition
or by disease. he must not destroy it like Origen and Klingsor.
He must not waste it like Onan.
But physiology informs us that we are bound to waste it,
no matter what be our continence, so long as we are liable
to sleep; and Nature, whether by precaution or by prodigality,
provides us with so great an excess of the substance that
the reproduction of the human race need not slacken, though
the proportion of men to women were no more than 3 to the
1000. The problem of efficiency consequently appears practically
insoluble.
We are now struck with the fact that Nuit commands us to
exercise the utmost freedom in our choice of the method of
utilizing the services of this our first, our finest and
our fieriest talisman; the license appears at first sight
unconditioned in the most express and explicit terms that
it is possible to employ. The caveat, "but always unto
me," sounds like an afterthought. We are almost shocked
when, in the following verse, we discover a menace, none
the less dread because of the obscurity of its terms.
Our first consideration only adds to our sense of surprised
repugnance. It becomes evident that one type of act is forbidden,
with the penalty of falling altogether from the law of liberty
to the code of crime; and our amazement and horror only increase
as we recognize that this single gesture which is held damnable,
is the natural exercise of the most fatidical function of
nature, the innocent indulgence of irresistible impulse.
We glance back to the previous verse -- we examine our charter.
We are permitted to take our fill and will of love as we
will, when, where and with whom we will, but there is nothing
said about why we will. On the contrary, despite the infinite
variety of lawful means, there is one end held lawful, and
no more than one. The act has only one legitimate object;
it must be performed unto Nuit. Further reflection reassures
us to some extent, not directly, in the manner of the jurist,
but indirectly, by calling our attention to the facts of
Nature which underlie the ethics of the question. Nuit is
that from which we have come, that to which we must return.
Evasion of the issue is no more possible than was alternation
of the antecedent. From Nuit we received this talisman, which
conveys our physical identity through the ages of time. To
Nuit, therefore, we woe it; and to defile any portion of
that purest and divinest quintessence of ourselves is evidently
the supreme blasphemy. Nothing in nature can be misapplied.
It is our first duty to ourselves to preserve the treasure
entrusted to us: "What shall it profit a man if he gain
the whole world and lose his own soul?"
The nature of man is individual. No two faces are identical,
still less are two individuals. Unspeakable is the variety
of form and immeasurable the diversity of beauty, but in
all is the seal of unity, inasmuch as all cometh from the
womb of Nuit -- to it returneth all. The apprehension of
this sublimity is the mark of divinity. Knowing this, all
is liberty; ignorant of this, all is bondage. As no two individuals
are identical, so also, there can be no identity between
the quintessential expressions of the will of any two persons;
and the expression of each person, in the first instance,
as his purely physical prerogative, is his sexual gesture.
One cannot say that any significance of that gesture is
forbidden, for "There is no law beyond Do what thou
wilt." But this may and shall be said, that a significance
with indicates ignorance or forgetfulness of the central
truth of the Universe, is an acquiescence in that opacity
caused by the confusion of the veils which conceal the soul
from the consciousness, and thus create the illusion which
the aspirant calls Sorrow, and the uninitiate, Evil.
The sexual act, even to the grossest of mankind, is the
agent which dissipates the fog of self for one ecstatic moment.
It is the instinctive feeling that the physical spasm is
symbolic of that miracle of the Mass, by which the material
wafer, composed of the passive elements, earth and water,
is transmuted into the substance of the Body of God, that
makes the wise man dread lest so sublime a sacrament suffer
profanation. It is this that has caused him, in half-instinctive,
half-iontellectual half-comprehension of the nature of the
truth, which has driven him to fence the act about with taboos.
But a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. His fear has
created phantoms, and his malobservation suggested precautions
scarce worthy to be called empirical. We see him combat analogous
difficulties in a precisely similar manner. History shows
us the physician defending mankind against plague, with exorcisms
on the one hand and useless herbs on the other. A charred
stake is driven through the heart of a vampire, and his victim
is protected with garlic. The strength of God, who can doubt?
The strength of taste and of smell are know facts. So they
measured strength against strength without considering whether
the one was appropriate to the other, any more than as if
one were to ward off the strength of steel swords by the
strength of the colour of one's armour. Modern science, by
correct classification, has expounded the doctrine of the
magical link. We no longer confuse the planes. We manipulate
physical phenomena by physical means; mental by mental. We
trace things to their true causes, and no longer seek to
cut the Gordian knot of our ignorance by the sword of a postulated
Pantheon.
Physiology leaves us in no doubt as to the power of our
inherited talisman. And modern discoveries in psychology
have made it clear enough that the sexual peculiarities of
people are hieroglyphs, obscure yet not unintelligible, revealing
their histories in the first place, in the second, their
relations with environment in the present, and, in the third,
their possibilities with regard to the modification of the
future.
In these supremely important verses of the Book of the Law,
it becomes clear that Nuit is aware of all these facts, and
that she regards them as no less than the combination of
the lock of the strong room of the future. "This" (doctrine)
shall regenerate the world, the little world, my sister." The
misunderstanding of sex, the ignorant fear like a fog, the
ignorant lust like a miasma, these things have done more
to keep back humanity from realization of itself, and from
intelligent cooperation with its destiny, than any other
dozen things put together. The vileness and falseness or
religion itself have been the monsters aborted from the dark
womb of its infernal mystery.
There is nothing unclean or degrading in any manifestation
soever of the sexual instinct, because, without exception,
every act is an impulsively projected image of the Will of
the individual who, whether man or woman, is a star; the
Pennsylvanian with his pig no less than the Spirit with Mary;
Sappho with Atthis and Apollo with Hyacinth as perfect as
Daphnis with Chloe or as Galahad vowed to the Graal. The
one thing needful, the all-perfect means of purification,
consecration, and sanctification, is independent of the physical
and moral accidents circumstantial of the particular incident,
is the realization of love as a sacrament. The use of the
physical means as a Magical Operation whose formula is that
of uniting two opposites, by dissolving both, annihilating
both, to create a third thing which transcends that opposition,
the phase of duality which constitutes the consciousness
of imperfection, is perceived as the absolute negative whose
apprehension is identical with that duality, is the accomplishment
of the Great Work.
The anacephalepsis of these considerations is this:
1. The accidents of any act of love, such as its protagonist
and their peculiarities of expression on whatever plane,
are totally immaterial to the magical import of the act.
Each person is responsible to himself, being a star, to travel
in his own orbit, composed of his own elements, to shine
with his own light, with the colour proper to his own nature,
to revolve and to rush with his own inherent motion, and
to maintain his own relation with his own galaxy in its own
place in the Universe. His existence is his sole and sufficient
justification for his own matter and manner.
2. His only possible error is to withdraw himself from this
consciousness of himself as both unique in himself and necessary
to the norm of nature.
To bring down this doctrine to a practical rule for every
man or woman by which they may enjoy, in perfection, their
sexual life and make it what it rightly is, the holiest part
of the religious life, I say 'holiest' because it redeems
even physical grossness to partake with spiritual saintship,
the intention of this Book of The Law is perfectly simple.
Whatever your sexual predelictions may be, you are free,
by the Law of Thelema, to the the star you are, to go your
own way rejoicing. It is not indicated here in this text,
thought it is elsewhere implied, that only one symptom warns
that you have mistaken your true Will, and this, if you should
imagine that in pursuing your way you interfere with that
of another star. It may, therefore, be considered improper,
as a general rule, for your sexual gratification to destroy,
deform, or displease any other star. Mutual consent to the
act is the condition thereof. It must, of course, be understood
that such consent is not always explicit. There are cases
when seduction or rape may be emancipation or initiation
to another. Such acts can only be judged by their results.
The most important condition of the act, humanly speaking,
is that the attraction should be spontaneous and irresistible;
a leaping up of the will to create with lyrical frenzy. this
first condition once recognized, it should be surrounded
with every circumstance of worship. Study and experience
should furnish a technique of love. All science, all art,
every elaboration should emphasize and adorn the expression
of the enthusiasm. All strength and all skill should be summoned
to fulfil the frenzy, and life itself should be flung with
a spendthrift gesture on the counter of the Merchant of Madness.
On the steel of your helmet let there be gold inlaid with
the motto "Excess."
The above indications are taken from a subsequent passage
of the third chapter of this Book.
The supreme and absolute injunction, the crux of your knightly
oath, is that you lay your lance in rest to the glory of
your Lady, the Queen of the Stars, Nuit. Your knighthood
depends upon your refusal to fight in any lesser cause. That
is what distinguishes you from the brigand and the bully.
You give your life on Her altar. You make yourself worthy
of Her by your readiness to fight at any time, in any place,
with any weapon, and at any odds. For her, from Whom you
come, of Whom you are, to Whom you go, your life is no more
and no less than one continuous sacrament. You have no word
but Her praise, no thought but love of Her. You have only
one cry, of inarticulate ecstasy, the intense spasm, possession
of Her, and Death, to Her. You have no act but the priest's
gesture that makes your body Hers. The wafer is the disk
of the Sun, the star in Her body. Your blood is split from
your heart with every beat of your pulse into her cup. It
is the wine of Her life crushed from the grapes of your sun-ripened
vine. On this wine you are drunk. It washes your corpse that
is as the fragment of the Host, broken by you, the Priest,
into Her golden chalice. You, Knight and Priest of the Order
of the Temple, saying Her mass, become god in Her, by love
and death. This act of love, thought in its form it be with
a horse like Caligula, with a mob like Messalina, with a
giant like Heliogabalus, with a pollard like Nero, with a
monster like Baudelaire, though with de Sade it gloat on
blood, with Sacher-Masoch crave for whips and furs, with
Yvette Guilbert crave the glove, or dote on babes like E.T,Reed
of "Punch"; whether one love oneself, disdaining
every other like Narcissus, offer oneself loveless to every
love like Catherine, or find the body so vain as to enclose
one's lust in the soul and make one lifelong spinthria unassuaged
in the imagination like Aubrey Beardsley, the means matter
no whit. Bach takes one way, Keats one, Goya one. The end
is everything: that by the act, whatever it is, one worships,
loves, possesses, and becomes Nuit.
The act of love can no more "trammel up his consequence" than
any other act. As long as you possess the talisman, it must
be used from time to time, whether you will or no. If you
injure the quality, or diminish the quantity, of that quintessence,
you blaspheme yourself, and betray the trust reposed in you
when you accepted the obligation of that austerely chivalrous
Order called Manhood. The powers of the talisman are irresistible
like every other natural force. Every time they are used,
a child must be begotten. this child must be in your own
image, a symbol of your nature, an expression of your true
subconscious Will.
It is, of course, only once in many times that the conditions
allow of the production of a human child. What happens when
(either by chance or by design) that obvious effect is prevented?
The materialist may imagine that with the destruction of
the complex, it becomes harmless, its potentialities aborted,
just as the violence of sulphuric acid comes to naught if
it be neutralized by caustic soda. But he is a very poor
materialist if he says so. The full possibilities of the
acid must be accounted for in one way or another. If it does
not dissolve a metal, it may carbonize a sugar, generate
a gas, give off heat, or in one way or another fulfill absolutely
every possibility which it inherited from the forces that
went to make it. It is manifestly a contradiction of the
laws of the Conservation of matter and energy, that a substance
should lose by being transformed. I is contrary to Nature
that a man, with potentialities which can transform the face
of the earth, should become nothing but inert carrion when
he happens to die. Everything that he was must inevitably
persist; and if the manifestation be not to one set of senses,
why then, to another! The idea of creation from nothing of
something and the destruction of something to nothing, exploded
with the theory of Phlogiston.
It stands plain, even to sceptical reason -- indeed, most
of all to the sceptic -- that our talisman, one microscopic
serpent of which can build for itself such a house as to
rule men's bodies for a generation like Alexander, or their
minds for an epoch like Plato, cannot be destroyed or diminished
by any conceivable force.
When this talisman comes forth from its fortress, its action
begins. The ancient Jewish Rabbins knew this, and taught
that before Eve was given to Adam, the demon Lilith conceived
by the spilth of his dreams, so that the hybrid races of
satyrs, elves and the like began to populate those secret
places of the earth which are not sensible by the organs
of the normal man.
I take it as certain that every offering of this talisman
infallibly begets children on one plane or another of this
our cosmos, whose matter is so varied in kind. Such a child
must partake of its father's nature; and its character will
be determined, partly by the environment in which it is bred
to manifestation, lives, and ultimately changes in what we
call death, and partly by the inmost will of the father,
perhaps modified to some extent by his conscious will at
the time of his slipping the leash.
This being so, it becomes tremendously important to a man
that he should become conscious of his true inmost wills,
of his essential nature. This is the Great Work whose attainment
constitutes adeptship, provided that the consciousness recognizes
that its own dependence on circumstance makes it no more
than a troubled image in foul water of the sun which is that
Silent Self. If such a man wants to develop his powers, he
must use this tremendous talisman to create in his own image.
Although this talisman has such miraculous might, it is
also intensely sensitive. Put in an unsuitable environment,
it may produce grotesque or malignant perversions of its
father's Word. We are all aware that fine children are born
of healthy mothers who are true and worthy mates of their
husbands. The children of hate, of debauch, of sickness,
nearly always bear witness in body and mind to the abuse
of the talisman. Not only the sins of the father but those
of the mother, yes, more those of their social surroundings,
are visited on the children to the third and fourth generation.
Nay, more, the mischief can never be mended. A man can destroy
in a minute his kingdom, inherited from unnumbered dynasties
of biological prudence.
It will also be admitted, without reference to Magick, that
the abuse of the talisman leads to moral, mental and spiritual
misfortune. Crime and insanity, as well as disease and debility,
are constantly seen as the direct result of mismanaging the
sexual life, either tactically, strategically, or both.
The Book of the Law emphasizes the importance of these considerations.
The act of love must be spontaneous, in absolute freedom.
The man must be true to himself. Romeo must not be thrust
on Rosaline for family, social, or financial reasons. Desdemona
must not be barred from Othello for reasons of race or religion.
The homosexual must not blaspheme his nature and commit spiritual
suicide by suppressing love or attempting to pervert it,
as ignorance and fear, shame and weakness, so often induce
him to do. Whatever the act which expresses the soul, that
act and no other is right.
But, on the other hand, whatever the act may be it is always
a sacrament; and, however profaned, it is always efficient.
To profane it is only to turn food into poison. The act must
be pure and passionate. It must be held as the union with
God in the heart of the Holy of Holies. One must never forget
that a child will be born of that deed. One must choose the
environment appropriate to the particular child which one
wills to create. One must make sure that the conscious will
is written, on the pure waters of a mind unstirred, in letters
of fire, by the Sun of the Soul. One must not create confusion
in the talisman, which belongs to the Silent Self, by letting
the speaking self deny the purpose which produced it. If
one's true Will, the reason of one's incarnation, be to bring
peace on earth, one must not perform an act of love with
motives of jealousy or emulation.
One must fortify one's body to the utmost, and protect it
from every disaster, so that the substance of the talisman
may be as perfect as possible. One must calm the mind, increasing
its knowledge, organizing its powers, resolving its tangles,
so that it may truly apprehend the Silent Self, judge partial
pleas and unbalanced opinions, while supporting the concentration
of the Will by its fortified frontiers, and, with unanimous
enthusiasm, acclaiming the Lordship of the thought which
expresses the act. The Will must seal itself upon the substance
of the talisman. It must be, in alchemical language, the
Sulphur which fixes the Mercury which determines the nature
of the Salt. The whole man, from his inmost Godhead to the
tip of his tiniest eye-lash, must be one engine, cumbered
with nothing useless, nothing inharmonious; a thunderbolt
from the hand of Jove. It must give itself utterly in the
one act of love. It must cease to know itself as anything
but the Will. It must not have the will; it must transform
itself completely to be the Will.
Last of all, the act must be supreme. It must do and it
must die. From that death it must rise again, purged of that
Will, having accomplished it so perfectly that nothing is
left thereof in its elements. It must have emptied itself
into the vehicle. So shall the child be whole of spirit.
But this is not enough. The ground in which the seed is
cast must be suitable for its reception. The climate must
be favorable, the soil must be prepared, and the enemies
of the young child that seek its life must be driven beyond
range of malice. These points are obvious enough, if applied
to the ordinary affair of breeding children. One needs the
right woman, and the right conditions for her. It applies
even more closely to other acts, for woman is protected by
generations of biological adaption, whereas spiritual children
are more easily diseased and deformed, being of subtler and
more sensitive matter. So infinitely varied are the possibilities
of creation that each adept must work out each problem for
himself as best he can. There are magical methods of making
a link between the force generated and the matter on which
it is desired to act; but these are, for the most part, best
communicated by private instruction and developed but personal
practice. The crude description is a bare frame-work, and
(even so) more often misleads than not.
But the general rule is to arrange all the conditions beforehand
with intent to facilitate the manifestation of the thing
willed, and to prevent the dangers of abortion by eliminating
discordant elements.
For instance: a man seeking to regain health should assist
his Magical Will by taking all possible hygenic and medical
measures proper to amend his malady. A man wishing to develop
his genius as a sculptor will devote himself to study and
training, will surround himself with beautiful forms, and,
if possible, live in a place where nature herself testifies
to the touch of the thumb of the Great Architect.
He will choose the object of his passion at the nod of his
Silent Self. He will not allow the prejudice, either of sense,
emotion, or rational judgement, to obscure the Sun of his
Soul. In the first place, mutual magnetism, despite the masks
of mind, should be unmistakable. Unless it exists, a puissant
purity of passion, there is no Magical basis for the Sacrament.
Yet, such magnetism is only the first condition. Where two
people become intimate, each crisis of satisfaction between
the terminals leaves them in a proximity which demands mutual
observation; and the intense clarity of the mind which results
from the discharge of the electric force makes such observation
abnormally critical. The higher the type of mind, the more
certain this is, and the greater the danger of finding some
antipathetic trifle which experience tells us will one day
be the only thing left to observe; just as a wart on the
nose is remembered when the rest of the face is forgotten.
The object of Love must therefore be one with the lover
in something more than the Will to unite magnetically; it
must be in passionate partnership with the Will of which
the Will-to-love is only the Magical symbol. Perhaps no two
wills can be identical, but at least they can be so sympathetic
that the manifestations are not likely to clash. It is not
enough to have a partner of the passive type who bleats "Thy
will is done" - that ends in contempt, boredom and distrust.
One wants a passion that can blend with one's own. Where
this is the case, it does not matter so much whether the
mental expression is syndromic; it is, indeed, better when
two entirely different worlds of thought and experience have
led to sister conclusions. But it is essential that the habit
of mind should be sympathetic, that the machinery should
be constructed on similar principles. The psychology of the
one should be intelligible to the other.
Social position and physical appearance and habits are of
far less importance, especially in a society which has accepted
the Law of Thelema. Tolerance itself produces suavity, and
suavity soon relieves the strain on tolerance. In any case,
most people, especially women, adapt themselves adroitly
enough to their environment. I say "Especially women",
for women are nearly always conscious of an important part
of their true Will; the bearing of children. To them nothing
else is serious in comparison, and they dismiss questions
which do not bear on this as trifles, adopting the habits
required of them in the interest of the domestic harmony
which they recognize as a condition favourable to reproduction.
I have outlined ideal conditions. Rarely indeed can we realize
even a third of our possibilities. Our Magical engine is
mighty indeed when its efficiency reaches 50% of its theoretical
horse-power. But the enormous majority of mankind have no
idea whatever of taking Love as a sacred and serious thing,
of using the eye of the microscopist, or the heart and brain
of the artist. Their ignornace and their shame have made
Love a carcass of pestilence; and Love has avenged the outrage
by crushing their lives when they pull down the temple upon
them.
The chance of finding a suitable object of Love has been
reduced well nigh to zero by substituting for the actual
conditions, as stated in the above paragraphs, a totally
artificial and irrelevant series; the restrictions on the
act itself, marriage, opinion, the conspiracy of silence,
criminal laws, financial fetters, selections limited by questions
of race, nationality, caste, religion, social and political
cliqueishness, even family exclusiveness. Out of the millions
of humanity the average person is lucky if he can take his
pick of a couple of score of partners.
I will here add one further pillar to my temple. It happens
only too often that two people, absolutely fitted in every
way to love each other, are totally debarred from expressing
themselves by sheer ignorance of the technique of the act.
What Nature declares as the climax of the Mass, the manifestation
of God in the flesh, when the flesh is begotten, is so gross,
clumsy and brutal that it disappoints and disgusts. They
are horribly conscious that something is wrong. They do not
know how to amend it. They are ashamed to discuss it. They
have neither the experience to guide nor the imagination
to experiment. Countless thousands of delicate-minded lovers
turn against Love and blaspheme Him. Countless millions,
not quite so fixed in refinement, accept the fact, acquiesce
in the foulness, till Love is degraded to guilty grovelling.
They are dragged in the dirt of the night-cart which ought
to have been their "chariot of fire and the horses thereof".
This whole trouble comes from humanity's horror of Love.
For the last hundred years, every first-rate writer on morals
has sent forth his lightnings and thunders, hailstones and
coals of fire, to burn up Gommorrah and Sodom where Love
is either shameful and secret, or daubed with dung of sentiment
in order that the swinish citizens may recognize their ideal
therein. We do not tell the artist that his art is so sacred,
so disgusting, so splendid and so disgraceful that he must
not on any account learn the use of the tools of his trade,
and study in school how to see with his eye, and record what
he sees with his hand. We do not tell the man who would heal
disease that he must not know his subject, from anatomy to
Pathology; or bid him undertake to remove an appendix from
a valued Archbishop the first time he takes scalpel in hand.
But love is an art no less than Rembrandt's, a science no
less than Lister's. The mind must make the heart articulate,
and the body the temple of the soul. The animal instinct
in man is the twin of the ape's or the bull's. Yet this is
the one thing lawful in the code of the bourgeois. He is
right to consider the act, as he knows it, degrading. It
is, indeed for him, an act ridiculous, obscene, gross, beastly;
a wallowing unworthy either of the dignity of man or of the
majesty of the God within him. So is the guzzling and the
swilling of the savage as he crams his enemy's raw liver
into his mouth, or tilts the bottle of trade gin, and gulps.
Because his meal is loathly, must we insist that any methods
but his are criminal? How did we come to Laperouse and Nichol
from the cannibal's cauldron unless by critical care and
vigorous research?
The act of Love, to the bourgeois, is a physical relief
like defaecation, and a moral relief from the strain of the
drill of decency; a joyous relapse into the brute he has
to pretend he despises. It is a drunkenness which drugs his
shame of himself, yet leaves him deeper in disgust. It is
an unclean gesture, hideous and grotesque. It is not his
own act, but forced on him by a giant who holds him helpless;
he is half madman, half automaton when he performs it. It
is a gawky stumbling across a black foul bog, oozing a thousand
dangers. It threatens him with death, disease, disaster in
all manner of forms. He pays the coward's price of fear and
loathing when pedlar Sex holds out his Rat-Poison in the
lead-paper wrapping he takes for silver; he pays again with
vomiting and with colic when he has gulped it in his greed.
All this he knows, only too well; he is right, by his own
lights, to loathe and fear the act, to hide it from his eyes,
to swear he knows it not. With tawdry rags of sentiment,
sacksful of greasy clouts, he swathes the corpse of Love,
and, smirking, sputters that Love had never a naked limb;
then as the brute in him stirs sleepily, he plasters Love
with mire, and leering grunts that Love was never a God in
the Temple Man, but a toothsome lump of carrion in the corner
of his own stye.
But we of Thelema, like the artist, the true lover of Love,
shameless and fearless, seeing God face to face alike in
our own souls within and in all Nature without, though we
use, as the bourgeois does, the word Love, we hold not the
word "too often profaned for us to profane it;" it
burns inviolate in its sanctuary, being reborn immaculate
with every breath of life. But by 'Love' we mean a thing
which the eye of the bourgeois hath not seen, nor his ear
heard; neither hath his heart conceived it. We have accepted
Love as the meaning of Change, Change being the Life of all
Matter soever in the Universe. And we have accepted Love
as the mode of Motion of the Will to Change. To us every
act, as implying Change, is an act of Love. Life is a dance
of delight, its rhythm an infinite rapture that never can
weary or stale. Our personal pleasure in it is derived not
only from our own part in it, but from our conscious apprehension
of its total perfections. We study its structure, we expand
ourselves as we lose ourselves in understanding it, and so
becoming one with it. With the Egyptian initiate we exclaim "There
is no part of us that is not of the Gods;" and add the
antistrophe: "There is no part of the Gods that is not
also of us."
Therefore, the Love that is Law is no less Love in the petty
personal sense; for Love that makes two One is the engine
whereby even the final Two, Self and Not-Self, may become
One, in the mystic marriage of the Bride, the Soul, with
Him appointed from eternity to espouse her; yea, even the
Most High, God All-in-All, the Truth.
Therefore we hold Love holy, our heart's religion, our mind's
science. Shall He not have His ordered Rite, His priests
and poets, His makers of beauty in colour and form to adorn
Him, His makers of music to praise Him? Shall not His theologians,
divining His nature, declare Him? Shall not even those who
but sweep the courts of His temple, partake thereby of His
person? And shall not our science lay hands on Him, measure
Him, discover the depths, calculate the heights, and decipher
the laws of His nature?
Also: to us of Thelema, thus having trained our hearts and
minds to be expert engineers of the sky-cleaver Love, the
ship to soar to the Sun, to us the act of Love is the consecration
of the body to Love. We burn the body on the altar of Love,
that even the brute may serve the Will of the Soul. We must
then study the art of Bodily Love. We must not balk or bungle.
We must be cool and competent as surgeons; brain, eye and
hand the perfectly trained instruments of Will.
We must study the subject openly and impersonally, we must
read text-books, listen to lectures, watch demonstrations,
earn our diplomas ere we enter practice.
We do not mean what the bourgeois means when we say "the
act of love". To us it is not the gross gesture as of
a man in a seizure, a snorting struggle, a senseless spasm,
and a sudden revulsion of shame, as it is to him.
We have an art of expression; we are trained to interpret
the soul and the spirit in terms of the body. We do not deny
the existence of the body, or despise it; but we refuse to
regard it in any other light than this: it is the organ of
the Self. It must nevertheless be ordered according to its
own laws; those of the mental or moral Self do not apply
to it. We love; that is, we will to unite: then the one must
study the other, divine every butterfly thought as it flits,
and offer the flower it most fancies. The vocabulary of Love
is small, and its terms are hackneyed; to seek new words
and phrases is to be affected, stilted. It chills.
But the language of the body is never exhausted; one may
talk for an hour by means of an eye-lash. There art intimate,
delicate things, shadows of the leaves of the Tree of the
Soul that dance in the breeze of Love, so subtle that neither
Keats nor Heine in words, neither Brahms nor Debussy in music,
could give them body. It is the agony of every artist, the
greater he the more fierce his despair, that he cannot compass
expression. And what they cannot do, not once in a life of
ardour, is done in all fulness by the body that, loving,
hath learnt the lesson of how to love.
"Addendum": More generally, any act soever may
be used to attain any end soever by the magician who knows
how to make the necessary links.
AL I,53: "This shall regenerate the world, the little
world my sister, my heart & my tongue, unto whom I send
this kiss. Also, o scribe and prophet, though thou be of
the princes, it shall not assuage thee nor absolve thee.
But ecstasy be thine and joy of earth: ever To me! To me!"
The Old Comment
53. The prophet is retained as the link wither the lower.
Again the word "Assuage" is used in a sense unintelligible
to me.
The New Comment
It is clear that this 'kiss' (i.e. this Book) will regenerate
Earth by establishing the Law of Liberty. 'My heart and
my tongue' seems a mere phrase of endearment; but has possibly
some deep significance which at present escapes me.
The second paragraph is perhaps in answer to some unspoken
thought of my own that my work was accomplished. No: though
I be 'of the princes' with the right to enter into my reward,
it is my destiny to continue my Work.<<"assuage
thee:" satisfy thing aspiration to attainment. "absolve
thee:" relieve thee from further duty.>> I am
however promised ecstasy, i.e. Samadhi and joy of earth;
and this promise has been fulfilled without limit. The last
words "ever To me! To me!" have a double sense.
My motto at that time was OV MH -- "No! certainly not," the "Not
That! Not That!" of certain very exalted Hindu mystics.
Our Lady of the Stars not only calls me to Her, but bestows
upon me as a name 'To me' -- To {Mu-eta} -- "The Not",
the Attainment of that Aspiration expressed in my motto.
And {To Mu-eta} adds to 418!
Note, yet a third time, the word 'prince' as applied to
the Beast.
AL I,54: "Change not as much as the style of a letter;
for behold! thou, o prophet, shalt not behold all these mysteries
hidden therein."
The Old Comment
54, 55, 56 to the word "child."
A prophecy not yet (May, 1909 O.S.) fulfilled, as far as
I know. I take it in its obvious sense. (Fulfilled An. XII,
Sun in 0 degrees Cancer).
The New Comment
The subject changes most abruptly, perhaps answering some
unspoken comment of the scribe on the capital T's in 'To
me'.
This injunction was most necessary, for had I been left
to myself, I should have wanted to edit the Book ruthlessly.
I find in it what I consider faults of style, and even of
grammar; much of the matter was at the time of writing most
antipathetic. But the Book proved itself greater than the
scribe; again and again have the 'mistakes' proved themselves
to be devices for transmitting a Wisdom beyond the scope
of ordinary language.
AL I,55: The child of thy bowels, he shall behold them.
The New Comment
Here is the first reference to a 'child' who will complete
the Work connected with this Book. It is only necessary
to say that this Child has indeed appeared, fulfilling
in a very remarkable way the peculiar conditions indicated
in this Book. The full account is too elaborate to insert
in this place; it will be found in the Record of my Initiation
to the Grade of Magus. here I note only the time of his
conception, An. XII, Sun in 0 degrees Cancer.
The matter of this child is exceedingly obscure; and it
may prove difficult to determine between rival claimants.
Frater Lampada Tradam had not a bad case. I believe that
many candidates may appear; Time and the Hour run through
the roughest day; and there is one very definite test which
can hardly be evaded.
It is evident, moreover, from Chapter II, verse 39, that
there is more than one 'child'. Further comment on this matter
is to be found in the appropriate places.
An XVI, Sun in Capricornus. I decide to summarize the essential
facts of this matter as follows:
In the Magical Diaries of The Beast, we find that during
the beginning of 1914, again at the end of that year, and
finally between March 26 and May 30 of that year, he made
three separate series of Magical Operations. The First two
unconsciously, and the last one more or less consciously,
toward the attainment of the Grade of Magus.
As a result of these operations, he met a series of persons
who acted as officers in the ceremony of his initiation.
We are here only concerned with Jeanne Robert Foster, nee
Jeanne Julie Ollivier.
On july 8, 10, 13, 14, 23, Sept. 12 (2 operations) Sept.
16, Magical Operations were performed with the object of
begetting a child. On Sept. 23, this woman, who had taken
the mystic name of Soror Hilarion, assisted The Beast in
obtaining the word of the Equinox, this word being, so to
speak, a concentrated symbolic representation of the events
of the six months following. This word obtained by her was "Mebulae" which,
though it was not apparent at the time, is evidently suggestive
of the birth of a Star.
Exactly nine months later than this Equinox, Frater Achad
became a Babe of the Abyss, as is described very fully indeed
in his record, some of the essential part of which will be
found in the Appendix {WEH NOTE: The Appendix has not been
recovered. See Frater Achad's Liber XXXI, not the same as
Crowley's Liber XXXI, for more information.} As it turned
out, this child justified his identification as such, not
only in the cipher (there cometh one -- i.e. Achad -- to
follow thee) but by discovering "the key of it all."
AL I,56: "Expect him not from the East, nor from the
West; for from no expected house cometh that child. Aum!
All words are sacred and all prophets true; save only that
they understand a little; solve the first half of the equation,
leave the second unattacked. But thou hast all in the clear
light, and some, though not all, in the dark."
The Old Comment
56. From the word "Aum".
All religions have some truth.
We possess all intellectual truth, and some, not all, mystic
truth.
The New Comment
All previous systems have been sectarian, based on a traditional
cosmography both gross and incorrect. Our system is based
on absolute science and philosophy. We have "all in
the clear light", that of Reason, because our Mysticism
is based on an absolute Scepticism. But at the time of
this writing I had very little mystic experience indeed,
as my record shows. The Fact is that I was far, far from
the Grade even of Master of the Temple. So I could not
properly understand this Book; how then could I effectively
promulgate it? I comprehended but dimly that it contained
my Word; for the Grade of Magus then seemed to me unthinkably
high above me. Also, let me say that the True Secrets of
this Grade are unfathomable and awful beyond all expression;
the process of initiation thereto was continuous over years,
and contained the most sublime mystic experiences -- beyond
any yet recorded by man -- as mere incidents in its terrific
Pageant.
The "equation" is the representation of Truth
by Word.
AL I,57: "Invoke me under my stars! Love is the law,
love under will. Nor let the fools mistake love; for there
are love and love. There is the dove, and there is the serpent.
Choose ye well! He, my prophet, hath chosen, knowing the
law of the fortress, and the great mystery of the House of
God.
All these old letters of my Book are aright; but * is not
the Star. This also is secret: my prophet shall reveal it
to the wise."
{*In MS, a mark in this place is commonly read as the Hebrew
letter Tzaddi.}
The Old Comment
57. "Invoke me" etc. I take literally. See Liber
NV for this ritual.
Love under will -- no casual pagan love; not love under
fear, as the Christians do. But love magically directed and
used as a spiritual formula.
The fools (not here implying {Aleph} fools, for III, 57,
says, All fools despise) may mistake.
This love, then, should be the serpent love, the awakening
of the Kundalini. The further mystery is of {Pe} and unsuited
to the grade in which this comment is written.
The last paragraph confirms the Tarot attributions as given
in 777, with one secret exception.
The New Comment
"Love is the law, love under will", is an interpretation
of the general law of Will. It is dealt with fully in the
Book "Aleph".
I here insert a few pertinent passages from that Book.
"This is the evident and final Solvent of the Knot
Philosophical concerning Fate and Freewill, that it is thine
own Self, omniscient and omnipotent, sublime in Eternity,
that first didst order the Course of thine own Orbit, so
that that which befalleth thee by Fate is indeed the necessary
Effect of thine own Will. These two, then, that like Gladiators
have made War in Philosophy through these many Centuries,
art made One by the Love under Will which is the Law of Thelema.
O my Son, there is no Doubt that resolveth not in Certainty
and Rapture at the Touch of the Wand of our Law, and thou
apply it with Wit. Do thou grow constantly in the Assimilation
of the Law, and thou shalt be made perfect.
Behold, there is a Pageant of Triumph as each Star, free
from Confusion, sweepeth free in its right Orbit; all Heaven
acclaimeth thee as thou goest, transcendental in Joy and
in Splendour; and thy Light is as a Beacon to them that Wander
afar, strayed in the Night. Amoun."
The "old comment" covers the rest of this verse
sufficiently for the present purpose.
I see no harm in revealing the mystery of Tzaddi to 'the
wise'; others will hardly understand my explanations.
Tzaddi is the letter of The Emperor, the Trump IV, and He
is the Star, the Trump XVII. Aquarius and Aries are therefore
counterchanged, revolving on the pivot of Pisces, just as,
in the Trumps VIII and XI, Leo and Libra do about Virgo.
This last revelation makes our Tarot attributions sublimely,
perfectly, flawlessly symmetrical.
The fact of its so doing is a most convincing proof of the
superhuman Wisdom of the author of this Book to those who
have laboured for years, in vain, to elucidate the problems
of the Tarot.
AL I,58: "I give unimaginable joys on earth: certainty,
not faith, while in life, upon death; peace unutterable,
rest, ecstasy; nor do I demand aught in sacrifice."
The Old Comment
58. The Grace of Our Lady of the Stars.
The New Comment
These joys are principally (1) the Beatific Vision, in which
Beauty is constantly present to the recipient of Her grace,
together with a calm and unutterable joy; (2) the Vision
of Wonder, in which the whole Mystery of the Universe is
constantly understood and admired for its Ingenium and
Wisdom. (1) is referred to Tiphereth, the Grade of Adept;
(2) to Binah, the grade of Master of the Temple.
The certainty concerning death is conferred by the Magical
Memory, and various Experiences without which Life is unintelligible.
"Peace unutterable" is given by the Trance in
which Matter is destroyed; "rest" by that which
finally equilibrates Motion.
"Ecstasy" refers to a Trance which combines these.
"Nor do I demand aught in sacrifice" -- The ritual
of worship is Samadhi. But see later, verse 61.
AL I,59: My incense is of resinous woods & gums; and
there is no blood therein: because of my hair the trees of
Eternity.
The Old Comment
59. "Because", etc. This mystical phrase doubtless
refers to some definite spiritual experience connected with
the Knowledge of Nuit.
The New Comment
It seems possible that Our Lady describes Her hair as "the
trees of Eternity" because of the tree-like structure
of the Cosmos. This is observed in the 'Star-Sponge' Vision.
I must explain this by giving a comparatively full account
of this vision.
The 'Star-Sponge' Vision.
There is a vision of a peculiar character which has been
of cardinal importance in my interior life, and to which
constant reference is made in my magical diaries. So far
as I know, there is no extant description of this vision
anywhere, and I was surprised on looking through my records
to find that I had given no clear account of it myself. The
reason apparently is that it is so necessary a part of myself
that I unconsciously assume it to be a matter of common knowledge,
just as one assumes that everybody knows that one possesses
a pair of lungs, and therefore abstains from mentioning the
fact directly, although perhaps alluding to the matter often
enough.
It appears very essential to describe this vision as well
as is possible, considering the difficulty of language, and
the fact that the phenomena involve logical contradictions,
the conditions of consciousness being other than those obtaining
normally.
The vision developed gradually. It was repeated on so many
occasions that I am unable to say at what period it may be
called complete. The beginning, however, is clear enough
in my memory.
I was on a retirement in a cottage overlooking Lake Pasquaney
in New Hampshire. I lost consciousness of everything but
an universal space in which were innumerable bright points,
and I realized this as a physical representation of the Universe,
in what I may call its essential structure. I exclaimed: "Nothingness,
with twinkles!" I concentrated upon this vision, with
the result that the void space which had been the principal
element of it diminished in importance; space appeared to
be ablaze, yet the radiant points were not confused, and
I thereupon completed my sentence with the exclamation "But
what Twinkles!"
The next stage of this vision led to an identification of
the blazing points with the stars of the firmament, with
ideas, souls, etc. I perceived also that each star was connected
by a ray of light with each other star. In the world of ideas,
each thought possessed a necessary relation with each other
thought; each such relation is of course a thought in itself;
each such ray is itself a star. It is here that logical difficulty
first presents itself. The seer has a direct perception of
infinite series. Logically, therefore, it would appear as
if the entire space must be filled up with a homogeneous
blaze of light. This however is not the case. The space is
completely full; yet the monads which fill it are perfectly
distinct. The ordinary reader might well exclaim that such
statements exhibit symptoms of mental confusion. The subject
demands more than cursory examination. I can do no more than
refer the critic to the Hon. Bertrand Russell's "Introduction
to Mathematical Philosophy", where the above position
is thoroughly justified, as also certain positions which
follow. At the time I had not read this book; and I regard
it as a striking proof of the value of mystical attainment,
that its results should have led a mind such as mine, whose
mathematical training was of the most elementary character,
to the immediate consciousness of some of the most profound
and important mathematical truths; to the acquisition of
the power to think in a manner totally foreign to the normal
mind, the rare possession of the greatest thinkers in the
world.
A further development of the vision brought the consciousness
that the structure of the universe was highly organized,
that certain stars were of greater magnitude and brilliancy
than the rest. I began to seek similes to help me to explain
myself. Several such attempts are mentioned later in this
note. Here again are certain analogies with some of the properties
of infinite series. The reader must not be shocked at the
idea of a number which is not increased by addition or multiplication,
a series of infinite series, each one of which may be twice
as long as its predecessor, and so on. There is no "mystical
humbug" about this. As Mr. Russell shows, truths of
this order are more certain than the most universally accepted
axioms; in fact, many axioms accepted by the intellect of
the average man are not true at all. But in order to appreciate
these truths, it is necessary to educate the mind to thought
of an order which is at first sight incompatible with rationality.
I may here digress for a moment in order to demonstrate
how this vision led directly to the understanding of the
mechanism of certain phenomena which have hitherto been dismissed
with a shrug of the shoulders as incomprehensible.
"Example No. 1". I began to become aware of my
own mental processes; I thought of my consciousness as the
Commander-in-Chief of an army. There existed a staff of specialists
to deal with various contingencies. There was an intelligence
department to inform me of my environment. There was a council
which determined the relative importance of the data presented
to them -- it required only a slight effort of imagination
to think of this council as in debate; I could picture to
myself some tactically brilliant proposal being vetoed by
the Quarter-Master-General. It was only one step to dramatize
the scene, and it flashed upon me in a moment that here was
the explanation of 'double personality': that illusion was
no more than a natural personification of internal conflict,
just as the savage attributes consciousness to trees and
rocks.
"Example No. 2." While at Montauk I had put my
sleeping bag to dry in the sun. When I went to take it in,
I remarked, laughingly, "Your bedtime, Master Bag," as
if it were a small boy and I its nurse. This was entirely
frivolous, but the thought flashed into my mind that after
all the bag was in one sense a part of myself. The two ideas
came together with a snap, and I understood the machinery
of a man's delusion that he is a teapot.
These two examples may give some idea to the reader of the
light which mystical attainment throws upon the details of
the working of the human mind.
Further developments of this vision emphasized the identity
between the Universe and the mind. The search for similes
deepened. I had a curious impression that the thing I was
looking for was somehow obvious and familiar. Ultimately
it burst upon me with fulminating conviction that the simile
for which I was seeking was the nervous system. I exclaimed: "The
mind is the nervous system," with all the enthusiasm
of Archimedes, and it only dawned on me later, with a curious
burst of laughter at my naivete, that my great discovery
amounted to a platitude.
From this I came to another discovery: I perceived why platitudes
were stupid. The reason was that they represented the summing
up of trains of thought, each of which was superb in every
detail at one time. A platitude was like a wife after a few
years; she has lost none of her charms, and yet one prefers
some perfectly worthless woman.
I now found myself able to retrace the paths of thought
which ultimately come together in a platitude. I would start
with some few simple ideas and develop them. Each stage in
the process was like the joy of a young eagle soaring from
height to height in ever increasing sunlight as dawn breaks,
foaming, over the purple hem of the garment of ocean, and,
when the many coloured rays of rose and gold and green gathered
themselves together and melted into the orbed glory of the
sun, with a rapture that shook the soul with unimaginable
ecstasy, that sphere of rushing light was recognized as a
common-place idea, accepted unquestioningly and treated with
drab indifference because it had so long been assimilated
as a natural and necessary part of the order of Nature. At
first I was shocked and disgusted to discover that a series
of brilliant researches should culminate in a commonplace.
But I soon understood that what I had done was to live over
again the triumphant career of conquering humanity; that
I had experienced in my own person the succession of winged
victories that had been sealed by a treaty of peace whose
clauses might be summed up in some such trite expression
as "Beauty depends upon form".
It would be quite impracticable to go fully into the subject
of this vision of the Star-Sponge, if only because its ramifications
are omniform. It must suffice to reiterate that it has been
the basis of most of my work for the last five years, and
to remind the reader that the essential form of it is "Nothingness
with twinkles".
I conclude this note, therefore, by quoting certain chapters
of Liber Aleph, in which I have described various cognate
forms of the vision.
"De Gramine Sanctissimo Arabico."
"Recall, o my Son, the Fable of the Hebrews, which
they brought from the City of Babylon, how Nebuchadnezzar
the Great King, being afflicted in his Spirit, did depart
from among Men for Seven Years' Space, eating Grass as doth
an Ox. Now this Ox is the Letter Aleph, and is that Atu of
Thoth whose Number is Zero, and whose Name is Maat, Truth,
or Maut, the Vulture, the All-Mother, being an image of Our
Lady Nuith, but also it is called the Fool, who is Parsifal,
'der reine Thor', and so referreth to him that walketh in
the Way of the Tao. Also, he is Harpocrates, the Child Horus,
walking (as saith David, the Badawi that became King, in
his Psalms) upon the Lion and the Dragon; that is, he is
in Unity with his own Secret Nature, as I have shewn thee
in my Word concerning the Sphinx. O my Son, yester Eve came
the Spirit upon me that I also should eat the Grass of the
Arabs, and by virtue of the Bewitchment thereof behold that
which might be appointed for the Enlightenment of mine Eyes.
Now then of this may I not speak, seeing that it involveth
the Mystery of the Transcending of Time, so that in One hour
of our Terrestrial Measure did I gather the Harvest of an
Aeon, and in Ten Lives I could not declare it."
"De quibusdam Mysteriis, quae vidi."
"Yet even as a Man may set up a Memorial or Symbol
to import Ten thousand Times Ten Thousand, so may I strive
to inform thine Understanding by Hieroglyph. And here shall
thine own Experience serve us, because a Token of Remembrance
sufficeth him that is familiar with a Matter, which to him
that knoweth it not should not be made manifest, no, not
in an Year of Instruction. Here first then is one amid the
Uncounted Wonders of that Vision: upon a Field Blacker and
Richer than Velvet was the Sun of all Being, alone. Then
about Him were little Crosses, Greek, overrunning the Heaven.
These changed from Form to Form geometrical, Marvel devouring
Marvel, a Thousand Times a Thousand in their Course and Sequence,
until by their Movement was the Universe churned into the
Quintessence of Light. Moreover at another Time did I behold
All Things as Bubbles, iridescent and luminous, self-shining
in every Colour and every Combination of Colour, Myriad pursuing
Myriad until by their perpetual Beauty they exhausted the
Virtue of my Mind to receive them, and whelmed it, so that
I was fain to withdraw myself from the Burden of that Brilliance.
Yet, o my Son, the Sum of all this ammounteth not to the
Worth of one Dawn-Glimmer of Our True Vision of Holiness."
"De quodam Modo Meditationis."
"Now for the Chief of that which was granted unto me,
it was the Apprehension of those willed Changes or Transmutations
of the Mind which lead into Truth, being as Ladders unto
Heaven, or so I called them at that Time, seeking for a Phrase
to admonish the Scribe that attended on my Words, to grave
a Balustre upon the Stele of my Working. But I make Effort
in vein, o My Son, to record this Matter in Detail; for it
is the Quality of the Grass to quicken the Operation of Thought
it may be a Thousandfold, and moreover to figure each Step
in Images complex and overpowering in Beauty, so that one
hath not Time wherein to conceive, much less to utter, any
Word for a Name of any one of them. Also, such was the Multiplicity
of these Ladders, and their Equivalence, that the Memory
holdeth no more any one of them, but only a certain Comprehension
of the Method, wordless by Reason of its Subtility. Now therefore
must I make by my Will a Concentration mighty and terrible
of my Thought that I may bring forth this Mystery in Expression.
For this Method is of Virtue and Profit; by it mayst thou
come easily and with Delight to the Perfection of Truth,
it is no Odds from what Thought thou makest the first Leap
in thy Meditation, so that thou mayst know how every Road
endeth in Monsalvat, and the Temple of the Sangraal."
"Sequitur de hac re."
"I believe generally, on Ground both of Theory and
Experience, so little as I have, that a Man must first be
Initiate, and established in Our Law, before he may use this
Method. For in it is an Implication of our Secret Enlightenment,
concerning the Universe, how its Nature is utterly Perfection.
Now every Thought is a Separation, and the Medicine of that
is to marry Each one with its Contradiction, as I have showed
formerly in many Writings. And thou shalt clasp the one to
the other with Vehemence of Spirit, swiftly as Light itself,
that the Ecstasy be Spontaneous. So therefore it is expedient
that thou have travelled already in this Path of Antithesis,
knowning perfectly the Answer to every Griph or Problem,
and thy Mind ready therewith. For by the Property of the
Grass all passeth with Speed incalculable of Wit, and an
Hesitation should confound thee, breaking down thy Ladder,
and throwing back thy Mind to receive Impression from Environment,
as at thy first Beginning. Verily, the Nature of this Method
is Solution, and the Destruction of every Complexity by Explosion
of Ecstasy, as every Element thereof is fulfilled by its
Correlative, and is annihilated (since it loseth Separate
Existence) in the Orgasm that is consummated within the Bed
of thy Mind."
"Sequitur de hac re."
"Thou knowest right well, o my Son, how a Thought is
imperfect in two Dimensions, being separate from its Contradiction,
but also constrained in its Scope, because by that Contradiction
we do not (commonly) complete the Universe, save only that
of its Discourse. Thus if we contrast Health with Sickness,
we include in their Sphere of Union no more than one Quality
that may be predicted of all Things. Furthermore, it is for
the most Part not easy to find or to formulate the True Contradiction
of any Thought as a positive Idea, but only as a Formal Negation
in vague Terms, so that the ready Answer is but Antithesis.
Thus to White one putteth not the phrase "All that which
is not White," for this is void, formless, and not clear,
simple, and positive in Conception. But one answereth Black,
for this hath an Image of his Significance. So then the Cohesion
of Antitheticals destroyeth them only in Part, and one becometh
instantly conscious of the Residue that is unsatisfied or
unbalanced, whose Eidolon leapeth in thy Mind with Splendour
and Joy unspeakable. Let not this deceive thee, for its Existence
proveth its Imperfection, and thou must call forth its Mate,
and destroy them by Love, as with the former. This Method
is continuous, and proceedeth ever from the Gross to the
Fine, and from the Particular to the General, dissolving
all Things into the One Substance of Light."
"Conclusio de hoc Modo Sanctitatis."
"Learn now that Impressions of Sense have Opposites
readily conceived, as long to short, or light to dark; and
so with Emotions and Perceptions, as love to hate, or false
to true; but the more Violent is the Antagonism, the more
is it bound in Illusion, determined by Relation. Thus, the
Word "long" hath no Meaning save it be referred
to a Standard; but Love is not thus obscure, because Hate
is its twin, partaking bountifully of a Common Nature therewith.
Now, hear this: it was given unto me in my Visions of the
Aethyrs, when I was in the Desert of Sahara, by Tolga, that
above the Abyss, Contradiction is Unity, and that nothing
could be true save by Virtue of the Contradiction that is
contained in itself. Behold therefore, in this Method thou
shalt come presently to Ideas of this Order, that include
in themselves their own Contradiction, and have no Antithesis.
Here then is thy Lever of Antinomy broken in thine Hand;
yet, being in true Balance, thou mayst soar, passionate and
eager, from Heaven to Heaven, by the Expansion of thine Idea,
and its Exaltation, or Concentration as thou understandest
by thy Studies in the Book of the Law, the Word thereof concerning
Our Lady Nuith, and Hadith that is the Core of every Star.
And this last Going upon thy Ladder is easy, if thou be truly
Initiate, for the Momentum of thy Force in Transcendental
Antithesis serveth to propel thee, and the Emancipation from
the Fetters of Thought that thou hast won in that Praxis
of Art maketh the Whirlpool and Gravitation of Truth of Competence
to draw thee unto itself."
AL I,60: "My number is 11, as all their numbers who
are of us. The Five Pointed Star, with a Circle in the Middle, & the
circle is Red. My colour is black to the blind, but the blue & gold
are seen of the seeing. Also I have a secret glory for them
that love me."
The Old Comment
60. Nu = 56 and 5 + 6 = 11.
The Circle in the Pentagram? See Liber NV.
The uninitiated perceive only darkness in Night; the wise
perceive the golden stars in the vault of azure.
Concerning that Secret Glory it is not here fitting to discourse.
The New Comment
The general significance of the number 11 is Magick, particularly
that form of it which is Love under Will; for it unites
the 5 and the 6. Thus Abrahadabra has 11 letters; and 418
= 11 x 38.
This number must be thoroughly studied by the Qabalah. See
Appendix {WEH NOTE: Appendix not yet recovered.}
In the original MSS. the second paragraph begins "The
shape of my star is" -- and then breaks off -- the Scribe
was unable to hear what was being said. This was presumably
because his mind was so full of preconceived ideas about
the different kinds of stars appropriate to various ideas.
An alternate phrase was subsequently dictated to the Scarlet
Woman, and inserted in the manuscript by her own hand.
This star is the pentagram, with the single point at the
top. The points touch the parts of Nuith's body as shown
in the Stele. The earth-point marks the position of her feet,
the fire-point, that of her hands, the other three points
-- air, spirit, and water respectively -- refer to "my
secret centre, my heart, and my tongue."
AL I,61: "But to love me is better than all things:
if under the night-stars in the desert thou presently burnest
mine incense before me, invoking me with a pure heart, and
the Serpent flame therein, thou shalt come a little to lie
in my bosom. For one kiss wilt thou then be willing to give
all; but whoso gives one particle of dust shall lose all
in that hour. Ye shall gather goods and store of women and
spices; ye shall wear rich jewels; ye shall exceed the nations
of the earth in splendour & pride; but always in the
love of me, and so shall ye come to my joy. I charge you
earnestly to come before me in a single robe, and covered
with a rich headdress. I love you! I yearn to you! Pale or
purple, veiled or voluptuous, I who am all pleasure and purple,
and drunkenness of the innermost sense, desire you. Put on
the wings, and arouse the coiled splendour within you: come
unto me!"
The Old Comment
61. Practical and literal; yet it may be doubted whether "to
lose all in that hour" may not refer to the supreme
attainment, and that therefore to give one particle of dust
(perhaps the Ego) or the central atom Hadit, her complement,
is the act to achieve. (For 'dust' see Liber 418.)
The New Comment
This ritual has been thoroughly worked out as an Official
Instruction of A.'.A.'. Liber NV, sub figura XI, see Equinox
I, VII, page 11.
AL I,62: At all my meetings with you shall the priestess
say-and her eyes shall burn with desire as she stands bare
and rejoicing in my secret temple-To me! To me! calling forth
the flame of the hearts of all in her love-chant.
The Old Comment
62, 63. Again practical and literal. Yet the "Secret
Temple" refers also to knowledge incommunicable -- save
by experience.
The New Comment
It is evident that Our Lady, in her Personality, contemplates
some more or less open form of worship suited for the laity.
With the establishment of the Law something of this sort
may become possible. It is only necessary to kill out the
sense of 'sin', with its false shame and its fear of nature.
P.S. The Gnostic Mass is intended to supply this need. "Liber
XV". It has been said continuously in California for
some years.
AL I,63: "Sing the rapturous love-song unto me! Burn
to me perfumes! Wear to me jewels! Drink to me, for I love
you! I love you!"
The New Comment
All those acts which excite the divine in man are proper
to the Rite of Invocation.
Religion, as understood by the vile Puritan, is the very
opposite of all this. He -- it -- seems to wish to kill his
-- its -- soul by forbidding every expression of it, and
every practice which might awaken it to expression. To hell
with this Verbotenism!
In particular, let me exhort all men and all women, for
they are Stars! Heed well this holy Verse!
True Religion is intoxication, in a sense. We are told elsewhere
to intoxicate the innermost, not the outermost; but I think
that the word "wine" should be taken in its widest
sense as meaning that which brings out the soul. Climate,
soil, and race change conditions; each man or woman must
find and choose the fit intoxicant. Thus hashish in one or
the other of its forms seems to suit the Moslem, to go with
dry heat; opium is right for the Mongol; whiskey for the
dour temperament and damp cold climate of the Scot.
Sex-expression, too, depends on climate and so on, so that
we must interpret the Law to suit a Socrates, a Jesus, and
a Burton, or a Marie Antoinette and a de Lamballe, as well
as our own Don Juans and Faustines.
With this expansion, to the honour and glory of Them, of
Their Natures, we acclaim therefore our helpers, Dionysus,
Aphrodite, Apollo, Wine, Woman, and song.
Intoxication, that is, ecstasy, is the key to Reality. It
is explained in "Energized Enthusiasm" "The
Equinox" I(9)) that there are three Gods whose function
is to bring the Soul to the Realization of its own glory:
Dionysus, Aphrodite, Apollo; Wine, Woman, and Song.
The ancients, both in the highest civilizations, as in Greece
and Egypt, and in the most primitive savagery, as among the
Buriats and the Papuans, were well aware of this, and made
their religious ceremonies 'orgia', "Works". Puritan
foulness, failing to understand what was happening, degraded
the word 'orgies' to mean debauches. It is the old story
of the Fox who lost his tail. If you cannot do anything,
call it impossible; or, if that be evidently absurd, call
it wicked!
It is critics who deny poetry, people without capacity for
Ecstasy and Will who call Mysticism moonshine and Magick
delusion. It is manless old cats, geldings, and psychopaths,
who pretend to detest Love, and persecute Free Women and
Free Men.
Verbotenism has gone so far in certain slave-communities
that the use of wine is actually prohibited by law!
I wish here to emphasise that the Law of Thelema definitely
enjoins us, as a necessary act of religion, to "drink
sweet wines and wines that foam". Any free man or woman
who resides in any community where this is verboten has a
choice between two duties: insurrection and emigration.
The furtive disregard of Restriction is not Freedom. It
tends to make men slaves and hypocrites, and to destroy respect
for Law. {WEH NOTE: Evidently Crowley wrote this around the
time of the American Prohibition. He denies virtue in illegal
use, but advocates vigorous effort to change law.}
Have no fear: two years after Vodka was verboten, Russia,
which had endured a thousand lesser tyrannies with patience,
rose in Revolution.
Religious ecstasy is necessary to man's soul. Where this
is attained by mystical practices, directly, as it should
be, people need no substitutes. Thus the Hindus remain contentedly
sober, and care nothing for the series of Invaders who have
occupied their country from time to time and governed them.
But where the only means of obtaining this ecstasy, or a
simulacrum of it, known to the people, is alcohol, they must
have alcohol. Deprive them of wine, or beer, or whatever
their natural drink may be, and they replace it by morphia,
cocaine, or something easier to conceal, and to take without
detection.
Stop that, and it is Revolution. As long as a man can get
rid of his surplus Energy in enjoyment, he finds life easy,
and submits. Deprive him of Pleasure, of Ecstasy, and his
mind begins to worry about the way in which he is exploited
and oppressed. Very soon he begins furtively to throw bombs;
and, gathering strength, to send his tyrants to the gallows.
AL I,64: "I am the blue-lidded daughter of Sunset;
I am the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky."
The Old Comment
64. The supreme affirmation.
AL I,65: "To me! To me!"
The Old Comment
65. The supreme adjuration.
AL I,65: "The Manifestation of Nuit is at an end."
The Old Comment
66. The end.
Continued In Chapter II
|
