Post #27. The Great Beast in Egypt: Aleister Crowley and the Revelation of The Book of the Law
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After the collapse of the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley, disillusioned and seeking a new source of magical authority, embarked on a series of travels that would take him across the world. He climbed mountains in Mexico and the Himalayas, he studied yoga and Buddhism in the East, and he continued his experiments in ceremonial magic. However, it was in Cairo, in 1904, that he received the revelation that would change the course of his life and the history of Western occultism: a short, cryptic, and terrifyingly powerful text known as Liber AL vel Legis, or The Book of the Law.
The Cairo Working: A Honeymoon and a Magical Operation
Crowley was in Cairo on his honeymoon with his new wife, Rose. Rose, who had no previous experience with magic, began to enter into a series of strange trances. She told Crowley that a messenger of the Egyptian god Horus was trying to contact him. Crowley, initially sceptical, tested her by taking her to the Boulak Museum and asking her to point out the image of Horus. She led him directly to a funerary stele, the Stele of Revealing, which depicted Horus receiving a sacrifice. The exhibit number of the stele was 666, the number of the Beast from the Book of Revelation, a number with which Crowley had long identified.
Convinced that he was on the verge of a major magical communication, Crowley performed a ritual of invocation. On three successive days, April 8th, 9th, and 10th, at noon, he entered his hotel room and, he claimed, a discarnate intelligence named Aiwass dictated to him the three chapters of The Book of the Law.
The Three Chapters: A New Trinity of Gods
The Book of the Law is a concise and enigmatic text, written in a distinctive, poetic, and often violent style. It is divided into three chapters, each dictated by a different Egyptian deity:
Chapter I (Nuit): The first chapter is the voice of Nuit, the goddess of the infinite night sky, the boundless expanse of possibility. Her message is one of freedom, of ecstasy, of the love that is the law. Her famous pronouncement, "Every man and every woman is a star," is a radical statement of individual divinity.
Chapter II (Hadit): The second chapter is the voice of Hadit, the infinitely small point, the secret centre of every star. He is the hidden, fiery core of individual consciousness, the will to live, the perpetual motion of existence. His message is one of fierce individualism, of the will to power, of the joy of battle and of life.
Chapter III (Ra-Hoor-Khuit): The third chapter is the voice of Ra-Hoor-Khuit, a form of the hawk-headed god Horus. He is the crowned and conquering child, the god of the new age, or "aeon," that is dawning. His message is one of war, of vengeance, of the destruction of the old order and the establishment of a new one based on the principle of the individual will.
The Law of Thelema: Do What Thou Wilt
The central message of The Book of the Law is summed up in a single, powerful, and deeply misunderstood phrase: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." This is not, as it is often portrayed, a call for hedonistic self-indulgence. It is a call for the discovery and the performance of one’s true will, one’s unique purpose in life. For Crowley, every individual has a true will, a divine destiny, and the goal of life is to discover that will and to do it, and nothing else.
This new law, which Crowley called the Law of Thelema (the Greek word for "will"), was a radical break with the old religions of the Aeon of Osiris, the dying god. Christianity, with its emphasis on sin, on sacrifice, on self-denial, was, for Crowley, a slave religion, a religion that had enslaved the human spirit. The new Aeon of Horus would be an age of freedom, of individualism, of the god-man who recognises his own divinity and lives according to his own true will.
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The Book of the Law identified Crowley himself as the prophet of this new aeon, the Great Beast 666, whose job it was to communicate this new law to humanity. This was a role that Crowley would embrace with relish for the rest of his life. He saw himself as a new Mohammed, a new Buddha, a new Christ, a figure who would overthrow the old religions and usher in a new age of human history.
Crowley’s reception of The Book of the Law was the single most important event of his life. It was the foundation of his entire magical system, the source of his prophetic authority, and the driving force behind his often bizarre and controversial career. It was a revelation that would transform him from a rebellious Golden Dawn magician into the most influential and infamous occultist of the 20th century.
London, the city that had birthed the Golden Dawn, would become the headquarters for Crowley’s new Thelemic movement. From his base in the city, he would publish his books, gather his disciples, and wage a magical war against the old order. The black magic temple of London had found its new high priest, a man who was ready to take its dark, chaotic energies and to shape them into a new and terrible form.
In our next post, we will explore the magical orders that Crowley founded, the A∴A∴ and the O.T.O., and the practical techniques of his new system of Thelemic magic.
The law is for all. The love is for all. The law is the law and is not to be broken. Follow the Secret City series.
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