Do What Thou Wilt

by Lawrence Sutin

  The stakes intensified on March 18. For Rose—who had by now become the empowered Ouarda the Seer—was able to reveal to Crowley that the voice seeking, through herself, to address him was that of Horus. Crowley was taken aback, for his wife had, by his testimony, no knowledge of or interest in Egyptology and could scarcely have had a reason to speak the name of that particular god. Crowley now cross-examined Ouarda in detail as to attributes of Horus. Ouarda answered each query correctly. Further, she gave correct responses even when Crowley calculated, on the spot, an arbitrary, nontraditional symbol for Horus and asked Ouarda to choose it from a list of five. Due to his inexact memory, Crowley offered two different possible times for this rigorous cross-examination: March 18, or between March 20 and March 23. If the latter range is correct, then the accuracy of Ouarda’s answers becomes far less mysterious. For on March 18 and 19, the seeress had transmitted to Crowley a ritual for the invocation of Horus which was performed with “great success” on March 20. This ritual contained detailed recitations of the nature and forms of Horus that could have given Ouarda the answers to subsequent questions posed by Crowley.

  The invocation of Horus afforded the remarkable information, recorded by Crowley in his Book of Results, that a new Equinox of the Gods had arrived—that is, a new spiritual aeon had begun—and that “I am to formulate a new link of an Order with the Solar Force.” This latter title referred to Horus, who had been invoked in his form as the Sun. As for the precise meaning of “new link,” this was not yet clear. But one point was plain: The formulation of this link would necessarily mean the end of Mathers’s old Order, the Golden Dawn; the invocation had confirmed, for Crowley, that “the Secret Chiefs of the Third Order [beyond the First and Second Orders of the Golden Dawn] [ … ] had sent a messenger to confer upon me the position which Mathers had forfeited.” Crowley had wrestled with the question of a final break with Mathers for nearly four years. Now, at last, he felt certainty: “G.D. to be destroyed, i.e. publish its history & its papers. Nothing needs buying. I make it an absolute condition that I should attain samadhi, in the God’s own interest. My rituals work out well, but I need the transliteration.”

  This encapsulated battle plan was carried out—Crowley would, five years later, publish the history and rituals of the Golden Dawn in The Equinox. The statement “Nothing needs buying” seems to refer to Crowley’s conviction that Mathers was entitled to no rights to or payment for those rituals—the same position he took with respect to Mathers’s work on The Goetia. As for the “absolute condition that I should attain samadhi in the God’s own interest,” the tone conveys a bargain struck between Horus and Crowley: If the latter was to serve properly as a “new link,” his spiritual attainments would have to include Samadhi, the ultimate yogic state that had eluded him in Ceylon. As for the need for a “transliteration” of his rituals, this likely refers to Crowley’s work, at this time, in developing new magical formulae that would form the basis for the rituals and ordeals created by Crowley some two years later for his new magical order—the A∴A∴ (commonly termed the Argenteum Astrum or Silver Star).

  But even with the “great success” of March 20, Crowley remained suspicious of Ouarda. How could his wife have suddenly become a medium? He decided upon a further test of her powers. Together, on March 21, they went to the Boulak Museum, which neither of them had visited before. Here, with two floors of exhibits to wander through, Crowley instructed Ouarda to find the god Horus without any sort of assistance. Again, her involvement with the March 20 invocation could have been of assistance here, but this possibility is not discussed by Crowley. Ouarda passed by several representations of Horus, a fact he “noted with silent glee.” But then they went upstairs:

  A glass case stood in the distance, too far off for its contents to be recognized. But W. recognized it! “There,” she cried. “There he is!”

  Fra. P. [Crowley] advanced to the case. There was the image of Horus in the form of Ra Hoor Khuit painted upon a wooden stele of the 26th dynasty—and the exhibit bore the number 666!

  In this account, in The Temple of Solomon the King, Crowley portrayed Ouarda’s finding of the stele (an upright, inscribed and illustrated slab) as a stunning confirmation of her mediumship. By contrast, in the Confessions, Crowley described himself as unmoved at the time. The stele was “quite obscure and undistinguished” and the catalogue number 666 merely an “obvious coincidence.”

  From March 23 to April 7, Crowley endured a fallow period, uncertain of what was to come of the promised “new link.” He did arrange for an assistant curator of the Boulak Museum to translate the hieroglyphic text inscribed on the two sides of stele number 666. This text was, shortly thereafter, versified by Crowley; excerpts from this versification would be included in The Book of the Law. The text elaborates upon the central image of the stele, portraying what would become the divine triumvirate of Thelema: Nuit, Hadit, and Ra-Hoor-Khuit. Framing the scene is the sky goddess Nuit, her arching body forming the heavens while her hands and feet touch the earth. Below her is a Winged Globe—the solar Horus, or Horbehutet; Crowley called this god form Hadit. Beneath these two is an Egyptian priest, Ankh-af-na-khonsu, addressing an enthroned Horus in the form of Ra-Hoor-Khuit—a hawk-headed king surmounted by a cobra headband and a solar disk.

  It was during this period that Ouarda revealed to her husband that the source of the knowledge she had been transmitting was an emissary of Horus with the mysterious name of “Aiwass.” Ouarda could provide no further details as to Aiwass, who gave her information only as he (Crowley imagined Aiwass as male in essence) saw fit. As Crowley described the situation: “Any questions that I asked her were either unanswered, or answered by a Being whose mind was so different from mine that we failed to converse. All my wife obtained from Him was to command me to do things magically absurd. He would not play my game: I must play His.” On or about April 7, certain definite orders were issued by Aiwass through Rose. The drawing room of the honeymoon flat they had leased in Cairo was to serve as a “temple.” Crowley was ordered “to enter the ‘temple’ exactly at noon on the three days following, and write down what I heard during one hour, nor more nor less.”

  Thus it was that, on April 8, 9, and 10, 1904, the three chapters of the Book of the Law were written down by Crowley. The method was as follows: Crowley would enter the temple a minute early, so as to seat himself—with a Swan fountain pen and an ample supply of typewriter paper—so as to be ready precisely at noontime. He was alone; Ouarda no longer served as a mediumistic intermediary. Now it was Crowley who would hear the voice of Aiwass. He described this voice as “a rich tenor or baritone” of “deep timbre, musical and expressive, its tones solemn, voluptuous, tender, fierce, or aught else as suited the moods of the message.” Aiwass spoke without accent—it sounded to Crowley like a pure “English-in-itself.”

  Crowley, seated at a writing table which faced a southern wall, never spoke aloud during the sessions and never actually saw Aiwass. He heard the voice coming from behind him, seemingly from a corner of the room. And yet Crowley experienced, during the three days, a vivid “visualization” of Aiwass within his own “imagination.” In this visualization, Aiwass possessed “a body of ‘fine matter,’ or astral matter, transparent as a veil of gauze or a cloud of incense-smoke. He seemed to be a tall, dark man in his thirties, well-knit, active and strong, with the face of a savage king, and eyes veiled lest their gaze should destroy what they saw.” The clothing of Aiwass vaguely suggested Assyrian or Persian, as opposed to Arab, dress. In sum, Crowley—at this time—took Aiwass to be an “astral” being or “angel” of an order such as he had encountered before in his magical practice.

  He would, in the decades to come, frequently weigh and revise this assessment. Aiwass would become, during these ruminations, “a God or Demon or Devil”; and/or a “praeterhuman” intelligence; and/or a minister or messenger of other Gods; and/or “mine own Guardian Angel”; and/or perhaps (this speculation he fought off with might and m
ain) his own subconscious self. At times, Aiwass inhabited a human body and thus became “a man as I am,” as Crowley put it in The Equinox of the Gods; Crowley had “been permitted to see Him in recent years in a variety of physical appearances, all equally ‘material’ in the sense in which my own body is so.” Yet, despite these sightings, of certainty there was none. The very first sentence of The Equinox of the Gods tellingly refers to Aiwass as “a Being whose nature he [Crowley] does not fully understand.”

  According to The Book of the Law itself: Aiwass was “the minister of Hoor-Paar-Kraat”—the Lord of Silence, another of the forms of Horus, equivalent to the Greek Harpocrates. Crowley would later comment that from Aiwass came “the Speech in the Silence.” This “Speech” came intensely at Crowley through each of the three hours of the three days. He filled sixty-five handwritten pages and “pushed hard to keep the pace” by Aiwass, who seemed “alert about the time-limit.” Throughout, Crowley felt himself a mere scribe. At times, what he wrote perplexed and disturbed him—indeed, these feelings would persist, as to certain of the passages, for the rest of his life. Crowley later described the “compulsion” that drove on his pen:

  I remember clearly enough the impulse to refuse to go on, and the fierce resentment at the refusal of my muscles to obey me. Reflect that I was being compelled to make an abject recantation of practically every article of my creed [ … ] I was proud of my personal prowess as a poet, hunter, and mountaineer of admittedly dauntless virility; yet I was being treated like a hypnotized imbecile, only worse, for I was perfectly aware of what I was doing.

  Much as Crowley emphasized his struggle, he also allowed that there was a fundamental unity of spirit between Aiwass and himself that was essential if the dictation was to proceed: “As is well known, there is a limit to the power of the hypnotist; he cannot overcome the resistance of the unconscious of his patient. My own unconscious was thus in alliance with Aiwaz; taken between two fires, my conscious self was paralyzed so long as the pressure lasted.”

  Leaving aside, for now, the question of who or what Aiwass was, we shall turn instead to what he had to say and how he said it. Immediately, one confronts Crowley’s own vehement adjurations against interpretation of the Book by anyone but himself. It is an odd contrast: Crowley invites outside scrutiny of his life as a means of assessing the validity of the Book; but once the reader commences a study of the text, it is the command of the Book that Crowley, and Crowley alone, is capable of resolving its ambiguities. The reader, if perplexed, must alone consult Crowley’s own commentaries—and there are a number of these, pursued in various forms over the next two decades. They are by no means consistent in their interpretations, and Crowley himself disparaged their quality and acumen on more than one occasion. Nonetheless, his stance on his own authority was firm: “I lay claim to be the sole authority competent to decide disputed points with regard to The Book of the Law, seeing that its Author, Aiwaz, is none other than mine own Holy Guardian Angel, to Whose Knowledge and Conversation I have attained, so that I have exclusive access to Him. I have duly referred every difficulty to Him directly, and received His answer; my award is therefore absolute without appeal.”

  The Book hardly admits of easy summary, much less analytical proof. It is composed of three chapters of roughly equal lengths, each of which contains a sequence of numbered passages—66, 75, and 79 respectively, a total of 220 in all—that Crowley referred to, in Biblical fashion, as “verses,” even though most of the passages are in prose (albeit a highly emotional charged or “poetic” prose). The spelling and grammar are still more idiosyncratic; in Chapter III of the Book it is declared that “Spelling is defunct.” For Crowley, the awkward spellings and style served two functions—as fertile material for intricate kabbalistic interpretations, and as evidence that he himself, as a “Master of English,” could not have authored such a text.

  While all of the chapters were dictated by Aiwass, each is in the voice of a different god or goddess depicted on the Boulak Stele. In Chapter I, the speaker is Nuit, the goddess of the heavens. In Chapter II, it is Hadit, a solar form of Horus. In Chapter III comes Ra-Hoor-Kuit (“Horus of the Two Horizons”)—that is, Horus the son of Isis and Osiris who, as avenger of the latter’s murder, becomes the warrior-slayer of Set or Typhon, the serpent of the Nile. It is Horus, in his many forms, whom Crowley affirms as the archetypal and governing god of his New Aeon. Horus is the spiritual “son” of the previous “mother” and “father” Aeons of Isis and Osiris; one of his epithets in The Book of the Law is the “Crowned and Conquering Child.” Crowley offered this summary of the aeonic progressions: “The first period is simple, quiet, easy, and pleasant; the material ignores the spiritual; the second is of suffering and death: the spiritual strives to ignore the material. Christianity and all cognate religions worship death, glorify suffering, deify corpses. The new Aeon is the worship of the spiritual made one with the material, of Horus, of the Child, of the Future.”

  In Chapter I, Nuit informs Crowley that he is to be her “prophet” and to serve as “my heart & my tongue!” Crowley (whom Nuit terms “the Beast,” just as Crowley’s mother had) and his “Scarlet Woman” (a figure, as is “the Beast,” from the Revelation of St. John) will bestow The Book of the Law to humankind, for whom they will represent, on the earthly plane, the cosmic union of Nuit (the infinite) and her male consort Hadit (the point or center). Nuit is a passionate goddess and demands no less of her worshippers:

  Come forth, o children, under the stars, & take your fill of love!

  I am above you and in you. My ecstasy is in yours. My joy is to see your joy. [I, 12–13]

  The “glory of the stars” [I, 15] is the ultimate fulfillment that is potentially available to all of humankind: “Every man and every woman is a star” [I, 3]. But to force a star to contract is to hasten the process of its extinction. Nuit warns: “The word of Sin is Restriction[ … ] There is no bond that can unite the divided but love: all else is a curse.” [I, 41] With this verse, ironically, the concept of Sin—from which Crowley yearned to escape—is transported whole cloth into The Book of the Law.

  But however seductive and enthralling stardom might seem, this is not a call to anarchy. There is a Law that Nuit is bestowing, and she is firm on that point that “the Law is for all.” [I, 34] The “word of the Law” [I, 39] is given in Greek; transcribed into English it is thelema, meaning will. The worshipers of the New Aeon may be termed “Thelemites” [I, 40]. Nuit offers this tersely monosyllabic summation of the Thelemic teaching: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” [I, 40] As previously mentioned, this is the most famous—and notorious—verse in the Book, and is also readily misunderstood.

  There is an obvious literary precursor here. Rabelais, in the concluding chapters of his Gargantua (1534), described an ideal community—one drawn in distinct contrast to what Rabelais saw as the corruption rife within the Christian monastic orders—named “Theleme.” The governing maxim of this community was “Do what you will.” In his later essay “The Antecedents of Thelema” (1926), Crowley claimed that Rabelais had, in his Gargantua, foreseen the future coming of Crowley, the Great Beast. Questions of prophecy aside, Rabelais was no precursor of Thelema. Joyous and unsystematic, Rabelais blended in his heterodox creed elements of Stoic self-mastery and spontaneous Christian faith and kindness. The Thelema of Crowley is, by contrast, a break rather than an embrace with the past, particularly the Christian past. Crowley also found similarities in the Book to the thinking of Nietzsche, whom he had not read prior to April 1904. Nietzsche wrote of a conscious will to power that could be embraced by the Ubermensch (superior human; mensch includes both sexes) who harmonizes the chaotic emotions within us. Embrace of the will to power rids us of Ressentiment, the incessant inner pain borne by those of a “slave” morality who naturally resent the Ubermensch. For Nietzsche, a fierce critic of Christianity, Ressentiment is fatally embedded in the pieties of the Church. But again, there are vital differences between Niet
zsche and the Book. Nietzsche frankly affirmed the desire for power, while Crowley sublimated it within the quest for self-transcendence. Nietzsche accepted no gods, while Crowley put forward a new pantheon. Finally, Nietzsche denied that his truths were binding on others, while Crowley proselytized a New Aeon.

  Justice to the conception of true will put forward in The Book of the Law demands that its persistent linkage—by uninformed critics—with unbridled anarchy and wayward licentiousness be refuted. To an extent, Crowley has himself to blame for the misunderstanding. In the subsequent decades of his life, there were few indulgences, no matter how egregious, that he failed to attribute to his true will, as opposed to an all-too-human set of conflicting and limited desires. But the Thelemic true will of The Book of the Law, and of Crowley’s commentaries thereon, is a purified state that emerges only after the secondary personality and its emotional ties are left behind utterly: “For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is in every way perfect.” [I, 42] The governing bulwark that Crowley did impose—or that was imposed upon him by the Book—was that true will must be balanced by love, by which he meant neither sentimentality nor romantic love nor even the idealized love of all humankind, but rather the energized focus of one’s entire being—including one’s sexual energies: “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!” [I, 57] The law of “the dove” was viewed by Crowley as repressed and hypocritical Christian love—a false choice. There is a surprising dictum of St. Augustine, a formative shaper of the Christian tradition: “Love, and do what thou wilt.” But the love alluded to by St. Augustine, as Crowley noted, is unguided by will: “St. Augustine’s thesis is that if the heart be full of love, one cannot go wrong.” The willed serpent love (“the awakening of the Kundalini,” as Crowley described it) is true Thelemic love: