But to love me is better than all things.[ … ] 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! [I, 61]
The tone of lustful urgency here is remarkable. There are parallels in the invocations of Śiva and Sakti in the Hindu Tantras, as well as in the Biblical Song of Solomon. Even so, the ravenous passion of Nuit is unique in tone. For Crowley, in his later commentary on the Book, this passion stood as a mark of its spiritual superiority to the Christian gospels: “Nuit cries: ‘I love you,’ like a lover; when even John reached only to the cold impersonal proposition ‘God is love.’ She woos like a mistress; whispers ‘To me!’ in every ear; Jesus, with needless verb, appeals vehemently to them “that labour and are heavy laden.’”
Given Crowley’s own bisexuality, it is striking that the erotic imagery of the Book is pronouncedly heterosexual. The explicit instructions on ecstastic union all pertain to the coupling of male and female, as, for example, this maxim on marriage and sexual freedom: “O man! refuse not thy wife, if she will! O lover, if thou wilt, depart!” There is, however, a general clause in which Nuit assents to all manner of sexual preference and conduct, so long as they are in worship of her: “Also, take your fill and will of love as ye will, when, where and with whom ye will! But always unto me.” [I, 51] In his commentary on this verse, Crowley was forthright in defending the equality of homosexual practice: “Every one should discover, by experience of every kind, the extent and intention of his own sexual universe.[ … ] 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 of public opinion, or medieval morality, or religious prejudice would wish he were otherwise.” Yet Crowley went on to complain of the vehemence of those who insisted on the unique “spiritual, social, moral and intellectual advantages” of love between men.
Crowley expressed his disagreement by way of a Biblical metaphor—that of Peter, who denied Christ, after his seizure by the Romans, in fulfillment of the prophecy made to him by Jesus that “before the cock crows you will have disowned me three times.” (John 14:38) Crowley wrote of public advocates of homosexuality: “Why can’t they let one alone? 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.” Crowley here misremembered the Bible, for the cock crowed but once for Peter, whose name here may be serving as a blasphemous pun. This passage underscores Crowley’s reluctance to devote himself openly to the cause of homosexual freedom. Thelema would admit the natural propriety of homosexual relations—a signal step in itself, for the time. But Thelema would not—under Crowley’s leadership—publicly champion them.
Judged purely on style, Chapter I is the finest portion of The Book of the Law. Chapter II—in the male voice of Hadit—is far more shrill. The promised ecstasy is not so much seductive as insistent. Hadit offers elaborations—and a warning: The New Aeon of love and will will be a time of force, blasphemy, and thorough transformation. The contrast in tone between the two chapters is in keeping with the distinctive characters of these two divinities. Nuit, the sky goddess, is “manifestation”—sensual and expansive. Hadit, whose lineage in Egyptian religion is far more obscure, is in “hiding”—contracted male energy, the Kundalini to be awakened in the New Aeon: “I am the flame that burns in every heart of man, and in the core of every star. I am Life, and the giver of Life, yet therefore is the knowledge of me the knowledge of death.” [II, 6] Just as do Jehovah and Jesus, Hadit offers the promise of an eternal blessing to those who will believe:
There is a veil: that veil is black. It is the veil of the modest woman; it is the veil of sorrow, & the pall of death: this is none of me. Tear down that lying spectre of the centuries: veil not your vices in virtuous words: these vices are my service; ye do well, & I will reward you here and hereafter. [II, 52]
Intertwined with this call to freedom—the freedom to love one’s true will or fate—is the fierce scorn of Hadit for the weak. Crowley had never been a democrat, nor even a particularly empathetic human being. At times, in his commentaries on this chapter, his sense of justice seemed to prevail, and the disdain of Hadit was interpreted symbolically. For example, Hadit declares: “We have nothing with the outcast and the unfit: let them die in their misery.” [II, 21] Crowley argued, in 1909, that “‘the poor and the outcast’ are the petty thoughts and the Qlipothic [evil] thoughts and the sad thoughts. These must be rooted out, or the ecstasy of Hadit is not in us. They are the weeds in the garden that starve the flower.” But in the early 1920s, Crowley the Social Darwinist and amateur eugenicist drew literal and practical conclusions from the very same verses. The Self weeding out its petty thoughts becomes Nature weeding out the unfit:
Nature’s way is to weed out the weak. This is the most merciful way, too. At present all the strong are being damaged, and their progress hindered by the dead weight of the weak limbs and the missing limbs, the diseased limbs and the atrophied limbs. The Christians to the lions!
Our humanitarianism, which is the syphilis of the mind, acts on the basis of the lie that the king must die. The king is beyond death; it is merely a pool where he dips for refreshment. We must therefore go back to Spartan ideas of education; and the worst enemies of humanity are those who wish, under pretext of compassion, to continue its ills through the generations. The Christians to the lions!
In Chapter III, the presiding god of the New Aeon, Horus—in his form as the warrior god Ra-Hoor-Khuit—speaks directly for the first time. Crowley may be taken at his word when he declared, in the Confessions, that “The third chapter seemed to me gratuitously atrocious.” We have the testimony of Gerald Yorke, one of Crowley’s closest friends in the last decades of his life, that the warning to “Sacrifice cattle, little and big: after a child” [III, 12] caused Crowley particular disquiet. Yorke noted that Crowley “could never bring himself” to sacrifice cattle or a child, and thus rejected a literal interpretation. (One alternative interpretation, posed in Magick (1930), employed “child” as a cipher for the semen used in sexual magic.)
The message of Ra-Hoor-Khuit is one of fearful cataclysms and of radical spiritual transformation. Crowley wrote that Ra-Hoor-Khuit manifested an “inhuman cruelty and wantonly senseless destructiveness as he avenged Isis our mother the Earth and the Heaven for the murder and mutilation of Osiris, Man, her son.” In short, the Old Aeon of the dying god—of man preoccupied by his sins and mortality—must be avenged by the New Aeon, in which humanity recognizes its own innate divine spirit. The transformation from Old Aeon to New must be total. Fire, blood, and blasphemy are prominent amongst the birth pangs. There will be ecstatic realizations for the worthy Thelemite. It is by the teachings of Horus that readers of the Book must expect to live—and die.
If there is a singular surprise in the message of Ra-Hoor-Khuit as interpreted by Crowley, it is in the role of woman in the New Aeon. Crowley, the Beast 666, desperately required his Scarlet Woman, whose spiritual essence was whoredom. But to understand the significance of this seemingly horrific coupling, one must turn to the Biblical Book of Revelation, wherein the enemy of Christianity is named Babylon (a term that many Biblical scholars believe to have served as a cipher to express the author’s politically dangerous hatred for Rome). The “famous prostitute” cited in Revelation—she who is named, in Crowley’s Book, the “Scarlet Woman”—is explicitly identified with Babylon, while her “scarlet beast” is identified with devilish powers. When Crowley, in his Thelemic writings, revels in his Scarlet Woman and her whoredom, he is thus spitting in the eye of
the Christian vision. But Revelation had been, in turn, an equally vehement rejection of the pagan mystery creeds, in Greece and the Middle East, that had honored the sacred prostitutes of temple worship. The Book of the Law may thus be seen as an attempt at redress.
Ra-Hoor-Khuit, in Chapter III, addresses the Scarlet Woman in the tone of a stern father god who will punish or reward her according to the degree of her proper worship. She is to defy the Christian ethos—“If pity and compassion and tenderness visit her heart” then “vengeance” will follow. [III, 43] She is further to exult in her sexuality and her true will—to live out the role of the prostitute as execrated in Revelation. For this, the rewards shall be great:
But let her raise herself in pride! Let her follow me in my way! Let her work the work of wickedness! Let her kill her heart! Let her be loud and adulterous! Let her be covered with jewels, and rich garments, and let her be shameless before all men!
Then will I lift her to pinnacles of power: then will I breed from her a child mightier than all the kings of the earth. I will fill her with joy: with my force shall she see & strike at the worship of Nu: she shall achieve Hadit.
[III, 44–45]
In one commentary, Crowley described the symbiosis of the Beast and his Scarlet Woman: “I, the Beast 666, am called to shew this worship & to send it forth into the world: By my Woman called the Scarlet Woman, who is any Woman that receives and transmits my Solar Word and Being, is this my Work achieved: for without Woman man has no power. By Us let all men learn that all that may be is their Way of Joy for them to go, and that all souls are of the Soul of True Light.” Crowley also adjured that the roles of Beast and Scarlet Woman were not open to individual assumption: “I and my woman alone are chosen for this Work; all others are best and truest as they seek Nuit in their own Way.”
His wife, Rose, he took to be the first Scarlet Woman, and he further believed—by the year 1909, when their marriage was in disarray—that the prophesied punishment of Ra-Hoor-Khuit had overtaken her for her disobedience. There would be many more Scarlet Women in his life, and romantic love of the type that had drawn him to Rose was, he insisted, not a necessary element. Rather, it was essential that “the attraction should be spontaneous and irresistable” and that “the machinery should be constructed on similar principals. The psychology of the one should be intelligible to the other.” Such, in brief terms, were the conscious principles that Crowley would employ in seeking out his future Scarlet Woman. As for the “child” that the Scarlet Woman might bear, Crowley did not apply this verse to any of his own future biological children, but rather to the creation of “magical” or spiritual children through the sacramental sexual act. This aspect of his interpretation of the Book will be discussed at greater length in Chapter Seven.
As we have seen, Crowley was typical of his time in his reductive attitudes toward women. For example, he argued that “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.[ … ]” The assignment of a governing true will to an entire gender seems to contradict the sense of self-discovery that lies at the heart of Thelema. Nonetheless, if Crowley the prophet did not become a feminist by modern standards, he did emerge somewhat from the pervasive chauvinism of his day, going so far as to decry sexual harassment in the workplace (though the harassment he addressed pertained to the frank enjoyment of sex by women workers, rather than to unwelcome advances): “The best women have always been sexually free, like the best men; it is only necessary to remove the penalties for being found out. Let women’s labor organizations support any individual who is economically harried on sexual grounds.” He also made a pertinent comment as to public health that bears upon the present controversy over public identification of AIDS cases, though Crowley was here addressing heterosexual female—as opposed to gay and lesbian—social freedom: “Sexual disease will be easier to track and to combat, when it is no longer a disgrace to admit it.”
As for prostitution, it would be the paradoxical triumph of the Scarlet Woman, the Whore of Babalon, to preside over the extinction of that societal ignominy. Where sexual freedom prevails, payment for gratification declines: “Prostitution (with its attendant crimes) will tend to disappear, as it will cease to offer exorbitant profits to those who exploit it.” To those who would seek to defile Thelema by pointing to its celebration of whoredom, Crowley cited the fact that prostitution was socially tolerated, and even tacitly encouraged, in England and throughout the Christian West. Nearly two thousand years after Revelation, Crowley sought to redeem the sacred whore and to overthrow the Christian malaise; as in Revelation, the imagery is of girding oneself for apocalyptic battle:
It is we of Thelema who truly love and respect woman, who hold her sinless and shameless even as we are; and those who say that we despise her are those who shrink from the flash of our falchion as we strike from her limbs their foul fetters.
Do we call woman whore? Ay, verily and amen, she is that; the air shudders and burns as we shout it, exulting and eager.
O ye! Was not this your sneer, your vile whisper that scorned her and shamed her? Was not “whore” the truth of her, the title of terror that you gave her in your fear of her, coward comforting coward with furtive glance and gesture?
But we fear her not; we cry whore, as her armies approach us. We beat on our shields with our swords. Earth echoes the clamor!
The closing of the third chapter, and of the Book itself, asserts, “The Book of the Law is Written and Concealed. Aum. Ha.” Written, because it is revealed; concealed, because the ignorant will fail to understand it. Just prior to this, Ra-Hoor-Khuit issues a singular boast as to the impact of the Book. Fools may deride its meaning. “Yet to all it shall seem beautiful. Its enemies who say not so, are mere liars.” [III, 68] If it be allowed (as Crowley did allow) that the Book is by no means a uniform stylistic triumph, there is an element of truth to this claim. There have been, and will be, readers aplenty who are appalled by the Book. But a fair assessment would allow that, intermingled with crudities of content and style, there may be found verses that attain to a rhythmic, compelling beauty. Consider, by way of a final example, this piercing exhortation of Hadit: “A feast for fire and a feast for water; a feast for life and a greater feast for death!”
The question of style returns one to the vexing issue of authorship. Crowley’s insistence on the “praeterhuman” or—sometimes more emphatically—“divine” origin of the text has given pause even to some of Crowley’s most ardent supporters. A frequent approach has been to make the question seem irrelevant. For example, Israel Regardie (a student, and later a biographer, of the Beast) insisted that “It really makes little difference in the long run whether The Book of the Law was dictated to him by a preterhuman intelligence named Aiwass or whether it stemmed from the creative deeps of Aleister Crowley. The book was written. And he became the mouthpiece for the Zeitgeist, accurately expressing the intrinsic nature of our time as no one else has done to date.” At root, such arguments boil down to this assertion: Take the Book on its own merits as a remarkable text. But there is—from the biographical perspective—a serious flaw here, which is that Aleister Crowley, Beast and Prophet, would have none of it. He did not wish to be let off the hook, as it were, of divine inspiration. True, there were times when Crowley wrestled with the theory that the Book was the product of his own subconscious. But his combative response to this theory was twofold. First, he challenged its proponents to provide “a reason for this explosive yet ceremonially controlled manifestation [the dictation of the Book], and furnish an explanation of the dovetailing of Events in subsequent years with His word written and published.” Further, Crowley argued that “the law of Parsimony of Thought” served as a rebuttal, as the assumption that “I am, unknown to myself, possessed of all sorts of praeternatural knowledge and power” was an unnecessary elaboration upon a simpler explanation—divine revelation. Neither of these objections is weighty; indeed
, they are so weak as to cast doubt on Crowley’s ability to perceive the merits of his own case. In this present era of therapeutic glibness, there are numerous psychological explanations to offer as to the Book and its lingering impact upon Crowley: wish fulfillment; obsessive identification and oedipal competition with his dead father, who preached the word of God but attained little power or recognition; megalomania coupled with denial; cognitive dissonance that wove even contradictory phenomena into the web of a controlling belief. The list could go on. As for the law of parsimony, most persons would find it more—not less—parsimonious to look to unconscious influences than to accept that the god Horus had declared, to Crowley the chosen one, a New Aeon for humankind.
But to challenge Crowley’s arguments here is not to deny that the Book can possess—for readers who pursue its teachings earnestly—a weight and import that parallels that of other scriptural texts in other religions. One cannot conclusively establish—except by fiat—the respective spiritual merit of, say, the Bible, the Koran, the Science and Health of Mary Baker Eddy and The Book of the Law. The Book can and does serve as a scripture for a few thousand modern-day Thelemites. There are those who have warped certain verses of the Book to justify the worst of themselves; but this can be done with the Bible as well.
Do What Thou Wilt Page 18