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| © Copyright Peter Crawford 2014 |
TO
Liber AL vel Legis
(The Book of the Law)
(The Book of the Law)
"The Aeon is a Child at Play...”
- Heraclitus, around 500 BC
In March of 1904 Aleister Crowley was visiting Egypt on honeymoon with his wife Rose.
Fresh from the raging internecine battles surrounding the collapse of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Crowley was somewhat disillusioned with magick at this time.
Nevertheless, we are told that he performed a ritual as a demonstration for his new bride, and was very surprised when she entered a state of trance and began to insist that "They are waiting for you !" and saying “It is all about the Child. He who waits is Horus.”
Taking her to the Boulak Museum in Cairo, he tested Rose by asking her to show him an image of Horus, and was quite amused when she passed by several.
Then she pointed to a glass case in the distance and insisted that this was what he sought, and it turned out to be a small funerary stele (XXVIth Dynasty) for a priest of ancient Thebes named Ankh-af-na-Khonsu.
This point of contact depicted a scene of the enthroned hawk-headed sun-god Horus with the priest making offerings before him; above them are a falcon-winged solar disk and the surrounding image of Nuit, goddess of the heavens, framing the whole composition.
Very significantly for Crowley, this artifact was listed in the museum catalogue as Stele #666; it later became known as the 'Stele of Revealing'.
This is the foundation myth of Thelema (which is the greek word for Will, paired with Agape or Love, both of whose numerology totals 93; hence his system is known as the 93 Current).
Rose continued to insist that forces from beyond were seeking to contact him, and directed him to perform a ritual in a room with many mirrors and employing some correspondences alien to his Golden Dawn training, which he summarized as:
“To be performed before a window open to the E. or N. without incense. The room to be filled with jewels, but only diamonds to be worn. A sword, unconsecrated, 44 pearl beads to be told. Stand. Bright daylight at 12.30 noon. Lock doors. White robes. Bare feet. Be very loud. Saturday. Use the Sign of Apophis and Typhon.”
So, he acquired a translation of the text from the stele, rendered it into verse, devised what he called 'The Ritual of Invocation According to the Divine Vision of W. the Seer', and performed it upon March 20th, now known as the 'Equinox of the Gods' (and documented in his book of the same name, a full account of the experience, quoted above).
The result changed his life, the course of modern occult philosophy, and perhaps even future history.
At the hours of noon on April 8th, 9th, and 10th in the year 1904, Aleister Crowley received the transmission known as 'Liber AL vel Legis': 'The Book of the Law' in the Victorious City of Cairo in Egypt.
While at first he claims to have rejected it, this philosophically revolutionary vision of a New Age of Thelema was ultimately to radically transform his understanding of the universe, his practice of the Great Work, and his legacy to the unsuspecting world.
'Liber AL vel Legis' s.f. CCXX, as it came to be called, is very obviously quite different in tone and style to any of Crowley's other works at that time.
A prose poem in three chapters totaling 220 verses, it is primarily expressed in terms of an ancient Egyptian cosmology, yet its rather surreal narrative stream of consciousness might also contain encoded echoes of visionary elements reminiscent of many other inspired influences: arcane, hermetic, alchemical, gnostic, astrological lore; the works of Nietzsche; the Angelic Enochian workings of Dee & Kelly in Elizabethan times; the Tarot and the Golden Dawn; modern physics and psychology.
These are the secret archetypes of our collective memory, our cultural heritage.
'Liber AL vel Legis' somehow merges cosmology, philosophy, politics, ethics, prophecy, art, sensuality and magick into a coherent whole, expressed through the mysterious personas of three pagan cosmic 'god-forms'.
Savagely beautiful, erotic and cryptic, subtle and violent, with gorgeously bizarre jewels of imagery, strange numerological riddles and existential, spiritual, immoral and apolitical musings, the text somehow forms a unique and coherent whole.
While much (but not all) of it may be congruent with the rather unusual personality of Crowley, the voice is clearly not truly his.
Indeed, he always insisted that 'Liber AL vel Legis' was not just something that erupted from his own deep mind, but verifiable proof of contact with a 'disembodied consciousness' from outside.
Perhaps all so-called 'Holy Books' are somewhat influenced by the minds of their Prophets, as a ray of light is tinted with colour as it passes through a jewel; but the lives of such seers and shamans often seem to have somehow prepared them to receive a vision and to explain it as well: Moses wandered in the desert, some say Jesus spent his missing years in India, Mohammed meditated in a cave and the Buddha under a tree, and Crowley entered into the 'Vault of the Adepts'.
His quest through magick and yoga clearly made him something of an appropriate instrument of the gods, and like these others he taught.
Other than parables and sixth-hand accounts we really know comparatively little about the personalities of most of history’s earlier prophets.
While most religious leaders have laid down rigid dogmas to be followed slavishly, Crowley is almost unprecedented, and very modern, in his exaltation of the 'path of the individual'.
In reading 'Liber AL vel Legis' we must also confront the oversized personality of Crowley himself, as the human vehicle of its transmission.
Comparisons might also be made with other transmissions even more recent: C.G. Jung's Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (Seven Sermons to the Dead), G.’.D.’. poet W.B. Yeats’ odd work 'A Vision', Blavatsky's 'Book of Dyzan', and even 'OAHSPE' and the 'Book of Mormon'.
And if we remain even remotely willing to suspend our disbelief sufficiently to accept the validity of any of these, it would seem rather unfair not to extend the same courtesy to Crowley.
Much of his later writing is in a sense a commentary upon this prophecy of 'Liber AL vel Legis'; however his most succinct message, generally known as the 'Short or Tunis Comment', reads as follows:
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
The study of this Book is forbidden. It is wise to destroy this copy after the first reading. Whosoever disregards this does so at his own risk and peril.
These are most dire.
Those who discuss the contents of this Book are to be shunned by all, as centres of pestilence. All questions of the Law are to be decided only by appeal to my writings, each for himself.
There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt.
Love is the law, love under will.”
- The priest of the princes, Ankh-f-a-Khonsu
Those who study Crowley’s work are most often drawn to his magical practices, and while his system was largely drawn from the Golden Dawn’s paradigm, it was also inspired by the eastern practices of Yoga and Tantra and even Sufism.
This merging of diverse cultural traditions is a key element of the 93 Current, the theory being that with the ‘Dawning of the Age of Aquarius’ the Age of the Child is being born, that with these changing astrological influences we are entering a New Age.
This mutation of the cosmic forces, it is suggested, is altering the Noosphere of the human mind or the Jungian collective unconscious, as well as the surreal estate of the 'Astral Plane', the contents of the 'Akashic Record'.
Horus as the Zeitgeist, the 'Spirit of the Age', the ruling God or 'Archon of our Times', is present at the New Birth of a New Earth, a Spiral of Change.
The mythic and psychic forces of this Word upon our World are transforming all of Humanity.
“Our spiritual consciousness acts through the will and its instruments upon material objects, in order to produce changes which will result in the establishment of the new conditions of consciousness which we wish. That is the definition of Magick.”
- Aleister Crowley, Confessions
The High Magick spoken of in Liber AL vel Legis' is ultimately creative and deeply personal, and centered in the Self of each sovereign individual.
The credo is: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Every man and every woman is a star. Love is the law, love under will.”
The meaning of this is that every single person should make his or her own existence into a work of Art, a celebration of Being, a forging of Destiny.
To become who we are really meant to be, to fully control how we live, to fulfil our core purpose as well as our every desire, is the meaning of the Crowleyan concept of 'True Will': not merely an indulgence in random caprice, but giving life to our highest aspirations, fully experiencing our souls to the ultimate extent of bliss, through every brilliant and bizarre excess we can imagine.
There is no salvation or damnation here; just the living light of countless conscious Stars, burning brightly for all time and thus imprinted into the diamond fabric of Forever, each shining as a beacon to all, a call to freedom and ecstasy and adventure, to unique moments of meaning in a strange and miraculous Universe
Thelema proclaims that this Dance is eternal Joy.
This strange revelation is now regarded as a prophecy of the age to come, and as the sacred grimoire of its magick; to absorb it by deep study is therefore the work and play of every Thelemic magician.
The quantum cosmology it describes is perfectly modern: the innermost individual consciousness or viewpoint of each observer continuously interacts with the entire universe, which is Everything and Nothing.
The quantum cosmology it describes is perfectly modern: the innermost individual consciousness or viewpoint of each observer continuously interacts with the entire universe, which is Everything and Nothing.
All aspects of the worlds we think we know are created by their blissful love-play, and are to be freely experienced to the fullest in every possible or impossible way.
The conceptual framework from which this paradigm emerges is based upon the notion of a procession of symbolic periods in human history: first, the Age of Isis the Great Mother goddess, the time of paganism and shamanism, hunting and tribal life; followed by the now-fortunately-ending Age of Osiris the Father god, when monotheism and revealed religions, agriculture and writing and cities took hold.
Now, according to 'Liber AL vel Legis', we are entering the Age of Horus the Child, a time of both rapidly advancing technology and an anarchistic magical revival, of freedom from imposed dogmas, of revolution and ecstasy, expressed by an archetype whose double or androgynous nature reconciles the matriarchy and patriarchy of the previous ages.
The sequence concludes with the mysterious future Age of Maat, whose balance of Truth has been foreshadowed today, but has yet to fully unfold.
This fourfold paradigm of human evolution is often seen as rising from the prehistoric Nameless Aeons, and will perhaps be followed in turn by an unimaginable Wordless Aeon.
The Gods of AL & Khem
“O King, you are the essence of all the gods, and Horus has protected you, you having become the essence of him.”
- Utterance 589, Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts
The First Chapter of 'Liber AL vel Legis' contains the words of the Goddess described as Nuit, the Queen of Heaven, the all-embracing body of space and time, the Universe Herself, defined as ‘Infinite Space, and the Infinite Stars thereof’; and this qabalistic notariqon of ‘Infinite Space, Infinite Stars’ clearly identifies her as ISIS, and shows her double nature as both the diamond void of empty space as well as the physical form of the galaxies and all within them.
In ancient Egypt the great goddess Isis is often portrayed as paired with her sister Nephthys as the twin guardians of life & death:
In ancient Egypt the great goddess Isis is often portrayed as paired with her sister Nephthys as the twin guardians of life & death:
"... they understand the horizontal circle, which divides the invisible part of the world, which they call Nephthys, from the visible, to which they give the name Isis; and as this circle equally touches upon the confines of both light and darkness, it may be looked upon as common to them both...”
The usage of this Egyptian pantheon runs through Thelema, and we may therefore syncretistically identify her with the whole range of Egyptian goddesses, for the many deities of the Two Lands or Double Kingdom of ancient Khem constantly transform in the subtle interplay of their aspects and attributes.
Emerging from the primordial waters of the void at the beginning of time, these ‘neters’ or Aeons - emanations or archetypical principles form an ever-shifting whirl of kaleidoscopic images, which express the various forms that the ONE may assume.
Prominent among those who are most clearly linked to Nuit (variously spelled as Nu, Nuit, and Nuith in Liber AL) are these:
First is the Nun, the vast dark chaotic ocean of the waters of space which predate the creation of the universe, and which is usually seen as more of a cosmic principle than a personified being.
Second and most clearly is Nut, the night-sky goddess represented as a beautiful woman, her body jewelled with stars, arched over the world. At times Nut is also depicted as the divine Cow, an animal form also taken by both Isis and Hathor, whose four hooves rest upon the four quarters of the earth and whose belly is speckled with stars. Nut’s symbol is a water-jar.
Third, there is also an early royal goddess named Neith, who might well reflect the spelling of Nuith.
As a dually sexed gynander, who is seen as the virgin mother of the Sun, she rules both warfare and skilful crafts, and also became (like Isis) one of the great universal forms of the Goddess.
She is most often associated with Athena, and also in Greek terms the celestial Hera (like Hathor, also a cow-goddess) who might possibly be cognate to Nuit as a personification of the sky. The symbol of Neith is two crossed arrows.
Fourth, there is the above-mentioned Nephthys, sister of Isis, wife of Set, and mother of jackal-headed Anubis; a very old but rather shadowy figure without a well-defined cult, but who may indeed have ruled in the realm of death, while Isis controlled the fields of life.
Her symbol is a hieroglyph that represents a house with a door, and she was the guardian of both the homes of mortals and the temples of the Gods.
Fifth, Isis herself is among the best-known deities of Egypt, as a Great Mother (of the god Horus), a Mistress of Magick, a universal goddess who later absorbed the symbolism of many others in the pantheon, and whose worship became widespread throughout much of the Mediterranean world and the even wider Roman empire.
Her symbol is the throne, and she was also strongly linked to the sacred kingship.
Her iconography as a seated queen nursing the child Horus.
Sixth, her most primal form is Hathor, the ‘House of Hor’ or bride of Horus (or of Ra as the Sun), who is seen as the day sky as Nuit is the night.
She is found throughout all of Egypt from very early times and great annual festivals and processions ritually commemorated their sacred marriage.
In Liber AL her name appears transliterated as Ahathoor, and she is an important yet secret presence in the book.
“In Egypt (the cow) was revered primarily as a representation of the sky goddess Hathor, who was seen as mother and spouse of the Sun; as the mother of Horus; as the grandmother of the Egyptian king; as the goddess of joy, dance and music (in the form of a young woman); as the image of hope and the renewal of life; as the living soul of trees; and as the mistress of the mountains and the dead. Among other forms, she could appear as gleaming gold or assume the shape of a lioness.”
Seventh, perhaps, is the Lady Babalon !
And all her lovely avatars… many if not all the other goddesses may also be assimilated as forms of this Great Universal Goddess Nuit, including Tefnut and Sekhmet and Maat.
“The goddess Nut was primarily the personification of the vault of the heavens… the firmament which separated the earth from the encircling waters of chaos out of which the world had been created… she was not only the great sky whose ‘laughter’ was the thunder, and whose ‘tears’ were the rain, but she was also the ‘mother’ of the heavenly bodies who were believed to enter her mouth and emerge again from her womb each day.
The sun was thus said to travel through the body of the goddess during the night hours and the stars travelled through her during the day.
Several scholars have suggested that Nut may have originally represented the Milky Way, as Spell 176 of the 'Book of the Dead' refers to this broad band of stars which crosses the night sky and the following spell begins with an invocation of Nut, and some representations of the Ramesside Period show stars around the figure of the goddess as well as on her body.
There is astronomical evidence which may support the equation.
The pre-dawn sky at winter solstice in pre-dynastic Egypt the Milky Way would have looked remarkably like a stretched out figure with arms and legs touching the horizons in exactly the manner in which the goddess was often later depicted.
Furthermore, at the time of the winter solstice the sun would have arisen in the area of the goddess’s figure - her pudendum - from which it would be imagined to be born, just as nine months earlier, at the spring equinox, the sun would have set in the position of the goddess’s head - suggesting it was being swallowed.
Nut also became inextricably associated with the concept of resurrection in Egyptian funerary beliefs, and the dead were believed to become stars in the body of the goddess.”
The Second Chapter expresses the god as Had, Hadit, or Hadith, the omnipresent center of all consciousness, the seed of the true self, the universal yet unique point of view wherein every man or woman is seen as a holy star in the infinite body of Nuit.
This entity is usually depicted as a hawk-winged solar orb or disk, a symbol also popular in Babylon as well:
"An ancient conception of heaven held that it was the wings of a falcon stretched out over the world. A drawing on a First Dynasty tomb shows the solar bark, together with a Horus falcon, on a pair of wings thus symbolizing heaven.
From the Fifth Dynasty onwards a sun disc was placed between the pair of wings, hence the image of heaven became a solar symbol.
Originally the winged disc belonged to the god Behdet whose epithet was 'he with coloured plumage' and who had already merged with Horus at an early date.
With that, Behdeti began to assume the role of Horus who was identified with the king.
The two uraei which surrounded the solar disc towards the end of the Old Kingdom were a part of royal symbolism; there are New Kingdom representations in which the snake's heads wear the Upper and Lower Egyptians crowns respectively.
After the New Kingdom the winged disc appeared as a symbol of protection above temple doors and at the top of stelae."
In terms of 'Liber AL vel Legis' (and its visual template, the ancient artefact known as the ‘Stele of Revealing‘) this deity is thus identified with the Horus of solar fire who is portrayed as the winged globe.
As the quintessential polarity, Nu and Had may be seen as any of the pairs of gods in Egyptian (or any other) mythology: as the dark waters of the Nun and the lotus-born sun-god Atum-Ra who rises from them; as the primal formative dyads of Tefnut and Shu (heat & moisture and cool air & light), or Nut and Geb (who are the arching vault of heaven and body of earth); as Isis and Osiris, or Nephthys and Set; as Sekhmet and Ptah, Mut and Amoun, Maat and Thoth... the interwoven pantheons of Egypt are archaic yet sophisticated, elegant and evocative, and reward deep study and devotion with arcane insight and sorcerous power.
The ancient pagan gods are often very complex personalities, like any other living and growing beings, and in exploring the energies and symbols of these archetypes one achieves new heights and depths of meaning.
An all-to-often-quoted aphorism of modern hermetics claims “All gods are one god, all goddesses are one goddess, and there is one initiator.”
That Initiator is, according to 'Liber AL vel Legis', now Ra-Hoor-Khuit.
There has been some debate (and even considerable controversy) about the etymology of Hadit as used in Liber AL; I quote from the online version of Crowley’s Comments, with thanks:
The Third Chapter more fully expresses Horus (the High One) as the Lord of the New Age; in ancient Egypt he appears under very many names and forms in different locations and historical periods.
Many of the major pantheons of Khem (and there were any number of local cosmologies) were ruled by father/mother/son triads: Osiris, Isis, Horus are probably still the best known to the casual reader, but there are also Amoun, Mut, Khonsu or Ptah, Sekhmet, Nefertum or Amoun-Ra, Hathor, Ihy and others who are prominent.
So Horus is the 'Holy Child', the ever-becoming one, and the defining god of the sacred kingship: every deceased pharaoh became one with his father Osiris, and every son and royal heir was then crowned as the living and incarnate Horus.
In later times all humans were seen as resurrected by or joining with the group-soul of Osiris as the god of the dead in the afterlife, and perhaps today we may consider ourselves as the embodied forms of Horus, the Crowned and Conquering Child of 'Liber AL vel Legis' : each of us arising as a star in the body of Nuit, which is one of the earliest known models of the soul in the Egyptian afterlife.
Horus is seen in a sense as Twins, as having a double aspect: 'Horus the Elder', the solar lord of kingship and victory in battle, the incarnation of the supreme sun-god Ra; and 'Horus the Younger', son of Isis and Osiris, the innocent holy child, the eternally reborn Babe in the Lotus.
In 'Liber AL vel Legis' they are named Ra-Hoor-Khuit and Hoor-par-kraat (and as several other variations discussed below); they may represent the various processes of turning outwards and inwards, of union with the external Nuit by eternal expansion and the internal Hadit by an infinite contraction, of the paths of active magick and passive mysticism or yoga, of speech and silence, of the light and the darkness, of the central star and the boundless cosmic void spinning and spiralling with whirlpool galaxies.
In Egyptian cosmology the supreme sun-god Ra sails over the sky in the solar boat by day, but during the night his orbital journey passes through the gates and caverns of the underworld, the Duat or land of the dead, and is assaulted by monsters of the deep who are eternally battled by the company of the gods who sustain our world; these twin realms of waking and dream (or nightmare) reflect the creative tension that cycles between Primordial Chaos and Divine Order.
This polarity and infinite potential is also what makes us fully human.
The Hero’s Journey of the sun-god Ra-Hoor is also the evolutionary path of the individuation of the soul or psyche in the New Age, now going beyond the pendulum swing between death & rebirth and into the knowledge (gnosis) of the continuity of consciousness: 'the unfragmentary non-atomic fact of my universality' (AL c.I, v.26).
In order of appearance in the text, and assuming that there is meaning in every aspect and numeration of the orthography of AL, the variant spellings are:
Hoor-paar-kraat - Ra-hoor-khuit - Hoor - Heru-pa-kraath - Ra-hoor-khu - Ra-hoor-khut - Hrumachis - Heru-ra-ha - Hoor-pa-kraat
“Ra-Hor Khut was, as the Boulaq translation tells us, “chief of the gods” who faces Ankh-f-na-khonsu on the stele.
Thankfully, there is a god of Egypt’s history, spelled only in a slightly different manner, as Ra-heru-Khuti.
This is a compound name of the gods, of Ra, Horus and Khuti.
There is only one reference with Crowley’s spelling of “Khuit.”
She was an ancient female deity from Anthribes that later became directly associated with Hathor.
It is not surprising then, that Crowley chose the spelling of a goddess that was the personification of the great power of nature which was perpetually conceiving and creating.
She was “the mother of her father," and “the daughter of her son.”
Thus, Ra-Hoor-Khuit was the Father, the Son and the Mother, a potent triad in one magical formula.
And after saying this all-encompassing powerful name, what could possibly be conveyed but the power of silence, with the sign of silence.
This indicates a very radical change in the historical relations between deity and humanity: Mother and Father are inevitably external, caring yet different beings, and often seen as distant or superior.
The Child, however, is All of Us: we are by nature and in our very own being the manifestation of consciousness, and hence of divinity itself.
This may lead us on to an essential concept of the Maatian system: N’Aton, the potential group-mind or collective existence of humanity, the fully evolved soul of our race, - that ultimate goal toward which humanity strives.
If this is indeed the path of our spiritual evolution, then the Age of Horus is the unique development of the fully self-realized Individual, which must be completed and then transformed into the awakening of Unity that becomes the soul of our species in the Aeon of Maat.
We must first attain our own 'True Wills' in order to create the next step, the World-Mind.
The goddess Maat was one of the major cosmic forces of the Egyptian pantheon, seen almost as an abstract concept, representing Truth, balance, justice, breath, life, order, law and straightness.
Her symbols are the Feather against which the soul was weighed in the Scales in the hall of judgment after death, and the strange narrow plinth with one straight and one angled edge usually seen beneath the Throne, which represents the primeval mound or First Hill that emerged from the waters of space at the time of Creation; it is also perhaps a measuring rod, and is seen in the ramps that led in to the inner sanctum of temples.
The first duty of the Pharaoh as King was to maintain the order and justice of the world.
She is often portrayed as winged, and images of her were given as offerings at the end of rituals to sustain the World.
Maat might now be represented by the hieroglyph of the Mouth, as Horus is by the Eye.
An essential key to The Book of the Law is the word AL (or EL, meaning God), which reverses as LA (Not or naught), implying the identity or reconciliation of Had & Nu, All & Nothing, being & non-existence, life & death.
These dual modes of reality form the pattern of the universal dance, just as linked pairs of opposites largely defined the Gnostic chain of Aeons and Archons.
The constant themes of duality, paradox, twins, doubles, reflections, significant reversals of words, puns, and essential polarity are at the core of a system perhaps best expressed in the metamathematical formula of 0 = 2.
In Thelemic terms, the Void manifests itself as pairs of opposites.
Our creation oscillates between cosmos & chaos, universe & emptiness, Hadit & Nuit.
Divinity seen simply as the ONE, which perpetually obsesses most religious philosophies, is a shifting chimera that exists as an ongoing yet momentary paradox of unity or in-betweeness, in the 'hieros-gamos' or sacred marriage of the two extremes.
Perhaps one way to express this is that we are equally defined by What One Is and What One Is Not.
The Book of the Law can be read on many levels, and in many ways, and everyone must find their own method of interpreting the formulas presented.
Ultimately the path must be shown by the psychological formula of ‘solve et coagula’, or analysis and synthesis.
Experience must be examined, divided into its component parts, reunited, and ultimately absorbed into a burst of orgasmic energy which transforms the individual.
“The Self is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere found.”
Nuit is the infinite circle or Zero, and Hadit is the dual-natured secret center, and a circle with a point in the middle is both the Eye and the symbol of the Sun, which is Ra-Hoor-Khuit.
Perhaps the most personally essential element of this vision is the energizing unity of Love and Will (Agape and Thelema), of Nuit and Hadit living as their incarnate avatars, - as perception and action, Night and Day, silver and gold.
Many become two, two one, one naught.
‘Every man and every woman is a star.’
“The Holy Book or Scripture is anterior to all things, but it gradually reveals itself as that which precipitates breath to form Heaven, Earth and the Space Between.
Image of the world in superimposed sheets that are individually transparent and readable, it represents a pledge of alliance with the innumerable deities and the function between Heaven and Earth.
The Book is bestowed upon the adept so that he can discover the secret form and hidden geography of the stars and the celestial currents of the heavens, of the mountains and rivers on earth, and of the vital circuits of the human body.
It invites the adept, both within himself as well as externally, to travel throughout all of the immense universe.
Striding forth and measuring the universe, he enjoys and elevates himself - though he is unmoved - during his thousand-mile journey.
The scriptures are dramatic plays of light, or of light upon light, where the eyes and stars illuminate the way - scintillating mirrors that reflect with a doubled and redoubled brilliance so that mysteries are uncovered and truth is unveiled."
Crowley’s view of magick and myth was heavily influenced by Eliphas Levi (who he claimed as a previous incarnation), and by Sir James Frazer’s classic 'The Golden Bough', and also the egyptological writings of Sir E.A.Wallis Budge of the British Museum… who is unfortunately a century out of date.
Immersion in the culture of ancient Egypt is invaluable in contacting these gods.
However, it is also extremely important to note that while the powerful Egyptian deities explored above all flow into those of Thelema, they have now evolved into very different forms, just as human thought and modern cultures have mutated.
The cosmic deities or functions or principals or aspects of ourselves found in 'Liber AL vel Legis' are something miraculous and completely new.
They are the gods of the Presaent Age, not of the Stone Age, and manifest uniquely and individually.
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