by Gary Lachman
FOUR
WHAT IS THE LAW?
The Book of the Law is the crux of Crowley’s philosophy. He believed in it without qualification, and he also believed in its source as a discarnate, higher intelligence. On this point Crowley was no fake. Crowley believed in the literal truth of this new holy scripture just as his Plymouth Brethren father believed in the literal truth of the Bible. Anyone who reads Crowley’s many commentaries on The Book of the Law will agree that on this he was sincere. He begins the chapter of the Confessions dedicated to The Book of the Law with solemn words: “This chapter is the climax of this book. Its contents are so extraordinary, they demand such breadth and depth of preliminary explanation, that I am in despair.”1 He then clarifies the book’s claims, one of which, to “open up communications with discarnate intelligences,” constitutes “the supreme importance” of the work.2 Although the most likely origin of The Book of the Law is Crowley’s own unconscious mind, I accept the possibility that it may have come from a disembodied intelligence of some kind. I don’t rule out the possibility of such intelligences, although, I must admit, I have had no experience of them.
Two of Crowley’s contemporaries, however, did. W. B. Yeats and C. G. Jung both produced work that they claimed originated in a similar mysterious source. Yeats’s A Vision (1925), which presents a unique system of personality types based on the phases of the moon (and which deserves more notice), was “transmitted” by his wife through automatic writing; strangely, this happened on their honeymoon, just as with Rose and Crowley. And Jung’s strange Gnostic document The Seven Sermons to the Dead (ca. 1916) came to him in a kind of waking dream, communicated by voices who had “come back from Jerusalem” where they “found not what we sought.” Both The Seven Sermons to the Dead and The Book of the Law are written in a bombastic, quasi-biblical style, which Jung said was the language of the archetypes. That both Jung and Crowley knew their Bible must have had something to do with this; Jung’s family, too, was deeply religious. And Jung, too, believed that he communicated with “discarnate” beings such as his “inner guru,” Philemon.3 Jung himself was of two minds about the value of The Seven Sermons to the Dead and remained equivocal about it throughout his life; at one point he intended to publish it, but then changed his mind.4 And he kept his legendary Red Book, the larger collection of similarly “received” material—paintings and strange prose-poems—pretty much “top secret” during his life; it was only published in 2009, almost a half century after his death.5 That Jung was at times embarrassed about The Seven Sermons to the Dead and the material in the Red Book does not, of course, prove that it was, as he sometimes believed, a youthful indiscretion and should be ignored; many readers have gained much from it.6 But it does show that, unlike Crowley, he had his doubts about it.
But even if it was true that the voice Crowley heard was that of a discarnate intelligence, there is no guarantee that it was necessarily “higher,” or that it spoke the truth. Madame Blavatsky became Public Enemy No. 1 to many spiritualists because she argued that the voices heard at séances were not those of the beloved deceased or “spirit guides” but often that of bored, garrulous entities who were happy to tell their audiences whatever they wanted to hear.7 Anyone who reads through much “channeled” material soon has a similar experience: one recognizes its vaguely “spiritual” but strangely contentless character. Whether such communications originate in a discarnate intelligence or not, generally they are not vastly different from what we can learn through more usual means, and often enough they can be wrong. In his book on Swedenborg, who regularly spoke with angels, the psychiatrist Wilson Van Dusen has a remarkable chapter on “The Presence of Spirits in Madness,” in which he gives accounts of patients communicating with spirits. Some of these turned out to be helpful, guiding voices, but the majority were malicious troublemakers.8 The fact that The Book of the Law is written in a style remarkably similar to Crowley’s suggests that if it did come from a disembodied intelligence, it was one that knew Crowley’s work and could speak his language; Crowley’s claim that it is unlike anything he had previously written is unsupportable for anyone familiar with his work. And the kind of results Crowley was getting from his magic—in Chancery Lane and in Boleskine—suggests that he was encountering something much more along the lines of poltergeists than anything particularly “higher.” So it is quite possible that what Rose and Crowley took to be Crowley’s Holy Guardian Angel may have been an entity of a different sort.
But if gossipy spirits are too difficult to accept, there are other possibilities for what Crowley may have heard in that hotel room in Cairo. In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, the psychologist Julian Jaynes writes of the curious phenomenon of auditory hallucinations, which he believes originate in the right cerebral hemisphere. Jaynes’s radical theory is that ancient man—at least man prior to 1250 BC—did not have an interior world in the way that we do, and was not, as we are, self-conscious, conscious that we are conscious. “Pre-Homeric man” did not have a “mind space” behind his eyes, Jaynes tells us.9 He was not able to “ask himself” what he should do or carry on an inner monologue as we can (“Hmm, what shall I do today? Wash the car or finish reading Proust?”). Ancient man’s consciousness, Jaynes argues, was “bicameral,” meaning “two-chambered,” the chambers being the right and left cerebral hemispheres. In us the two sides of the brain work more or less together, although, as split-brain research has shown, under certain circumstances it becomes clear that we really have two people “inside our heads.”10 Our “ego” lives in the left cerebral hemisphere while a few centimeters away is a complete stranger, who we recognize, insofar as we do, as the “unconscious.” In ancient man this split was total; what we experience as an inner monologue, ancient man experienced as voices in his head.11 He believed that these voices were the gods, but Jaynes argues they originated in the right brain. So when confronted with some difficulty, ancient man did not ask himself “What shall I do?” but waited until his right brain—or the gods—gave him directions.
Whatever we may think of Jaynes’s theory, he provides evidence that such hallucinations are not as uncommon as we might suppose, and he offers an example from his own experience. Jaynes recounts how, when pondering the question of knowledge—what it is and how we obtain it—he lay on his couch in despair. “Suddenly, out of an absolute quiet, there came a firm, distinct loud voice from my upper right which said ‘Include the knower in the known!’” Jaynes was so startled that he shot up, convinced someone was in the room. “The voice had had an exact location,” but “No one was there!” Jaynes remarks that “I do not take this nebulous profundity as divinely inspired, but I do think that it is similar to what was heard by those who have in the past claimed such special selection.”12 What Jaynes meant was that if his hallucination had happened to ancient man—or to a modern mystic—he would have believed he had heard a message from the gods. Jaynes the scientist knows that it is merely his right brain, although hearing the phrase “include the knower in the known”—the equivalent of Crowley’s yogic insight about the union of the seer and the seen—while pondering the question of knowledge should have suggested to him that this was something more than a “nebulous profundity.” Wilson Van Dusen, also familiar with auditory hallucinations, was convinced they are not nonsense but a “representation of the person’s state or an answer to his query,” that they are, as he says, “self-symbolic” and meaningful.13 Of course an auditory hallucination cannot account for Rose’s strange behavior or inexplicable familiarity with Egyptian mythology. Some telepathic exchange between Rose and Crowley is possible; we’ve already seen how Crowley had something of the sort with his mother. But the fact that both Jaynes and Crowley describe their voices as having a specific location—for Crowley over his left shoulder, for Jaynes over his right—is suggestive.
A single auditory hallucination, however, is not the same as an hour of poetic dictation, three days running. But there are several c
ases of a poet receiving a long work all at once. Samuel Taylor Coleridge is said to have had the entire poem “Kubla Khan” come to him in an opium-inspired dream. When he awoke and began to write it down, he was interrupted and all we have is a fragment. Nietzsche, speaking of the composition of his most well-known work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, asks, “Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a distinct conception of what poets of strong ages called inspiration? . . . If one had the slightest residue of superstition left in one, one would hardly be able to set aside the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely medium of overwhelming forces.”14 The poet Rilke heard the opening lines of his Duino Elegies come to him out of a terrific wind, a very literal example of inspiration.15 These are just some examples of a poetic work coming to its author “out of the blue.”
But the main objection to considering The Book of the Law as a sacred text is what it says. The central message of The Book of the Law is that a new age has dawned for mankind, what Crowley calls the aeon of the “crowned and conquering child,” which he associates with the Egyptian god Horus. This is a time of unconstrained personal freedom, at least for a select few. This shouldn’t surprise us; Crowley’s whole history so far has been centered around his desire to “let me go my own way,” regardless of the consequences. Two previous aeons have been that of Isis, which is associated with matriarchy, and that of Osiris, the patriarchal age out of which we are supposed to be moving. The age of Isis was a pagan, nature-oriented time, when mankind felt at one with Mother Earth, a time indeed that many New Age and ecologically oriented people would like to see return. In the age of Osiris, this cozy arrangement changed and life became more serious. Man became aware of death and saw his salvation in terms of sacrifice, suffering, and resurrection. Osiris, like Christ, is a dying god; his descent into the underworld and rebirth into life was witnessed every day in the descent of the sun into the west and its rebirth in the east. With the age of Horus, we are no longer tied to Mother Earth’s apron strings, nor must we renounce the world in favor of some otherworldly redemption. We can realize ourselves here and now as gods, for that is who we really are. The formula for this realization is thelema, “will,” the word of the new aeon. It is an age of light, life, liberty, and love, as Crowley alliteratively puts it, in which the old restrictions and constraints are jettisoned and we are called upon to “do what we wilt.” But although Aiwass’s message concerns all of mankind, his view is as elitist as Crowley’s. The vast majority will find the new age catastrophic; only the followers of thelema will revel in their new liberty and joy.
In The Book of the Law, this tripartite system of ages is mirrored in the three sections of the text, given each day to Crowley, each one associated with the three central gods of the thelemic pantheon.16 There is Nuit, the Egyptian goddess of the night sky who represents the All; Hadit, a form of Horus, who is the infinitesimal point, the “complement of Nu” who is “not extended”; and Ra-Hoor-Khuit, who is the “crowned and conquering child,” born of the union of Nuit and Hadit. Ra-Hoor-Khuit is himself a version of Horus and is also associated with the god Hoor Paar Kraat, or Harpocrates, the god of silence. The Egyptian gods have several different aspects and appear in different forms and combinations, which can get confusing, so it might be best to think of the three as infinite space, the infinitesimal but infinitely ubiquitous center of that space—“God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere”—and the union of the two producing creative energy or life. Thelemites may disagree with this reading, but this is how it makes sense to me.
There are clear links between Crowley’s ages and the “precession of the equinoxes.” Because of a wobble in the Earth’s axis, every 2,160 years, the constellation against which the sun rises due east at dawn on the vernal equinox changes. Each new constellation gives its name to that age. As we have known for some time, the next constellation in line is Aquarius. Two previous ages have been that of Pisces, which started just before the birth of Christ, and Aries. Pisces is a fish, and one of the symbols of Christ is the fish. Aries is a ram and in the Arian age the ram was a sacrificial animal. Much has been made of these stellar shifts. In his book Aion (1951) Jung takes precession seriously and tries to work out a kind of “precession of the archetypes.” Crowley’s own “equinox of the gods” does not line up exactly with the shifts in precession. His new age began in 1904, when, as he said, the world was destroyed by fire. Depending on your calculation, the Age of Aquarius began in 2000, or will start in another century or so. But the main difference is that Crowley’s new age is not one in which “peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars.” It is one of destruction, chaos, “force and fire.” It will not be characterized by “harmony and understanding,” but by war; the child is conquering, and as The Book of the Law says, Horus is a “god of War and of Vengeance.”17
Yet another system of ages, which Crowley most certainly knew, is that of the twelfth-century Calabrian monk Joachim of Fiore (1135–1202). Joachim prophesized a new age of freedom that was due to arrive in 1260. Joachim saw history unfolding in three stages: the Age of the Father, characterized by the Old Testament and obedience to the laws of God; the age of the Son, beginning with Christ and carrying on to 1260, when man becomes the Son of God; and the age of the Holy Spirit, when mankind would achieve direct contact with God and experience the spiritual freedom that is the true message of Christianity. At this point, the church, its hierarchy and rules, would no longer be necessary, and the true, rather than the literal, meaning of the Gospels would prevail. As you might suspect, the church did not much care for Joachim’s forecast, but breakaway sects like the Brethren of the Free Spirit were inspired by his ideas. Like Joachim of Fiore’s Age of the Holy Spirit, Crowley’s aeon of the “crowned and conquering child” is a time of antinomianism, that is, it is a time when “Abrogate are all rituals, all ordeals, all words and signs.”18 All bets are off and we are “beyond good and evil.”
Crowley, or Aiwass, begins The Book of the Law with a phrase that has become almost as well known as “Do what thou wilt,” “Every man and every woman is a star.”19 That is to say, every man and every woman has a peculiar orbit, a trajectory all their own. This is their “true will,” and complications and problems arise only if we move out of our orbit, or if someone else moves out of theirs and interferes with ours. It is a lovely phrase and it may not be coincidental that in 1970 the funk group Sly and the Family Stone had a number-one hit with the song “Everybody Is a Star.” By that time Crowley was well-known in the counterculture, and the idea chimed in well with “doing your own thing,” a catchphrase that itself has its origins in the Upanishads, which counsel us to do our own work, however humble, rather than that of another, however grand. The lyric “Everybody is a star / One big circle going round and round” suggests Crowley’s idea that we each have a personal orbit. It does not take much to see in this an argument for being left alone and not interfered with.
But another aspect to the “orbit” idea is that we have no will but to follow it; stars cannot change their mind. Aiwass’s counsel that “Thou hast no right but to do thy will” suggests that we must do our will, that is, must keep to our orbits, which have been calculated for us ages before we were born.20 At least most of us must, as Crowley himself seemed able to shift what his will was depending on circumstances. Earlier I suggested that for all his talk of freedom and release from restrictions, there is a curious authoritarian sense to Crowley’s idea of thelema, which, keeping in mind the notion that we are stars with a unique orbit, is highly dubious. There is a Taoist sense to his idea of will; it has little to do with striving and struggle, with the kind of will that I was attracted to in Nietzsche, which has to do with effort and discipline. Crowley’s “will” is better translated as “way” in the Taoist sense. Crowley himself felt a great affinity with Taoism; he translated the Tao Te Ching, and Simon Iff, his mystical detective—Crowley’s fictionalized image of himself in old age—
is a Taoist sleuth. There is no striving or struggle in Taoism; one takes the path of least resistance. One is in tune with the cosmos and a part of it. It is going out of one’s “way” that creates problems. This is why at the beginning of Magick in Theory and Practice Crowley wants to help “the Banker, the Pugilist, the Biologist, the Poet, the Navvy, the Grocer, the Factory Girl, the Mathematician . . . fulfill themselves perfectly, each in his or her own proper function.” For “function” read “orbit” and we have these cardboard figures as “stars.” There is a curious sense of predestination to Crowley’s idea of will, and predestination was a central tenet of the Plymouth Brethren; Crowley, in fact, says that they held “predestination as rigidly as Calvin, yet this nowise interfered with complete free will,” a logical incompatibility that Crowley himself tries to accommodate and that, to my mind, ends in muddle.21 In any case, in Aiwass’s new age, there will be many who must stick to their orbits—“The slaves shall serve”—but there will be a few who are allowed more leeway.22
And leeway is certainly what they want—or at least what Aiwass has to offer. “The word of Sin is Restriction,” Aiwass told Crowley, a conclusion Crowley had reached long before.23 “Enough of Because! Be he damned for a dog,”: this was an injunction that suited Crowley’s unreflective character nicely.24 “For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect”: in other words, “Just do it,” something Crowley must have communicated to Rose to clinch their marriage.25 Other aspects of Crowley’s personality are equally accommodated. For one thing, Aiwass seems as keen on alliteration as Crowley: “Veil not your vices in virtuous words.”26 This is said in criticism of the “modest woman,” whose “veil of sorrow” must be rent to allow for the new dispensation of the Scarlet Woman who shall be “loud and adulterous,” and “shameless before all men,” and whose “eyes shall burn with desire as she stands bare and rejoicing,” all of which sounds like the sort of thing Crowley liked in a woman—we remember the Mexican prostitute whose “evil inscrutable eyes” promised a “whirlpool of seductive sin.”27 And the command to “take your fill and will of love as ye will, when, where, and with whom ye will,” is something Crowley did not need to be told twice.28 The Scarlet Woman is not alone; the Great Beast, the other favorite biblical character of Crowley’s youth, plays a central role in the new aeon, too; a peculiar one, in that Crowley is the Great Beast—no one else can be—but the Scarlet Woman is an “office,” that many woman can and did occupy, in order to “work the work of wickedness,” a project Crowley began at the age of eleven. Even Crowley’s taste for Swinburne shows through: “Hear me, ye people of sighing / The sorrows of pain and regret / Are left to the dead and the dying / The folk that not know me as yet,” scans much as Swinburne’s “Could you hurt me, sweet lips, though I hurt you? /Men touch them and change in a trice / The lilies and languors of virtue / For the raptures and roses of vice” from Swinburne’s masochistic ode to “Our Lady of Pain.”29 Aiwass also seems quite fond of the Decadent School Crowley was introduced to by his lover Pollitt: “I am the blue-lidded daughter of Sunset; I am the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky. To me! To me!”30 This would not be out of place in the famous Yellow Book, the literary magazine of the 1890s that made Pollitt’s friend Aubrey Beardsley famous. Crowley’s incipient authoritarianism comes through in the Social Darwinism Aiwass prescribes in pastiche Nietzscheanisms such as “Let my servants be few & secret: they shall rule the many & the known”; “These are dead, these fellows; they feel not. We are not for the poor and sad”; “We have nothing with the outcast and the unfit; let them die in their misery”; “Compassion is the vice of kings; stamp down the wretched & the weak.”31