In fall of 1903 he published Ahab as a companion volume to Jezebel. This edition consisted of twelve copies on vellum and 150 on handmade paper. Because it was set in Caxton type, the book was difficult to read and garnered little comment at all from the press. In November, Crowley dashed off a hasty note to Blackett, his agent at Kegan Paul: “Called suddenly away to distant lands,”67 he wrote. He was going on his honeymoon.
Rose of the World deserved a better honeymoon than the obscure inn of some small Scottish town. Man of the world that he was, Crowley planned a cosmopolitan getaway, taking them to Bertolini’s at Naples, on to Cairo for a short visit, to Ceylon to meet Allan Bennett, then to China.
In Cairo, as elsewhere, Crowley went to great trouble to impress his beloved, whom he now embraced with characteristic passion. A night in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Giza struck him as romantic, so he arranged it. They marched to the pyramid and had dinner; then Crowley dismissed the servants and took the dinner candles with them down into the chamber. Surrounded by mysteries as old as civilization itself, Crowley demonstrated for Rose his magical skills: He took out the Goetia and, crouched over the dim candlelight, straining to make out the words, he recited:
Thee, I invoke, the bornless one.
Thee, that didst create the Earth and the Heavens:
Thee, that didst create the Night and the day.
Thee, that didst create the darkness and the Light.
As he became enraptured in the reading, he stood upright and recited with feverish drama. Pausing only to catch his breath, he noticed something odd: He no longer crouched over the candle, straining to read. The chamber glowed with astral light, and he could now read without difficulty.
While the results encouraged him, he reminded himself he was now a married man. Extinguishing the candle, he blackened the room again and sought his bride in the darkness.
Crowley next wrote for this wife the poem “Rosa Mundi,” which he would publish in 1905. To accompany it, Kelly offered Crowley an illustration dubbed “The Blood Lotus” after the poem of the same title in White Stains (later reprinted in Oracles). Fearing his reputation might suffer by association with Crowley, Kelly later reconsidered and asked him not to use it.68
In December, as the newlyweds headed toward Ceylon, Rose announced she thought she was pregnant. Overjoyed, Crowley canceled their visit and prepared to return to Europe, where she would receive proper care. However, since they had come this far, Crowley suggested, “Let’s go and kill something for a month or two, and if you’re right, we’ll get back to nurses and doctors.” So they headed south of Ceylon to Galle so he could show Rose what a great big game hunter her husband was. Pitching camp in a lakeside bungalow, Crowley kept busy stalking leopards, cheetahs, elephants, buffalo, and wild boars. Then, studying the low trees that grew along the shore, their branches jutting over the water, Crowley noticed new game. The bats that covered these branches while sleeping had red fur and white breasts. They looked like small foxes, and would make a fine toque for Rose and waistcoat for himself.
They took a boat onto the lake and floated silently under the sleeping bats. Crowley readied his gun, took aim, and fired. The gunshot echoed through the forests as the sky turned black with startled bats. He shot hastily at the escaping mammals until a scream pierced his ears. Rose! he thought, and spun around to find a wounded bat caught in her hair, thrashing about as wildly as she.
Even after AC managed to extract the bat from her hair and determined his wife was unharmed, Rose had difficulty calming down. He took her back to dry land, drew the mosquito netting around their bed, and climbed in beside her, soothing her and convincing her to rest until he too drifted off. In sleep, he heard the sound of a squealing bat. It persisted until, half conscious, he realized it was no dream. “Rose?” he whispered, prepared to ask, “Do you hear that?” He called her once, twice; but no reply came. He lit a candle and in its flickering light found Rose clinging naked to the mosquito netting frame, squealing wildly like a bat. She failed to respond to his voice, and resisted his efforts to help her down. When at last he got her back onto the bed, she scratched, spat, and bit at him like the creature that had taken a bullet.
In the morning, Rose was fine again. Crowley was unsure whether to attribute the spectacle to pregnancy or, as he later described it, “the finest case of obsession that I ever had the good fortune to observe.”69
Leaving the wilderness, they stopped in Kandy, where Crowley wrote Why Jesus Wept. On January 28, 1904, they left for Suez, reaching Port Said by February 8. They continued back toward Cairo the next day, where they opted to rest. Crowley registered them into a hotel as “Prince Chioa Khan, and his Princess, Ouarda.” The names were Arabic for Master Beast and Rose.
Because Scotland got so cold and damp in the winter, they decided to remain in Cairo until spring. So, on March 14, Prince Chioa Khan and Ouarda took a flat in a corner house near Cairo’s museum in the fashionable European quarter. Two days later, in another demonstration of magical prowess, Crowley attempted to show Rose the sylphs, elemental spirits of the air. Entering the north room of the flat, which he had converted into his temple, he began to conjure the mystical creatures for his wife.
Crowley didn’t notice Rose’s vacant stare until she began to mutter, “They are waiting for you.” At first, he paid no attention. When it happened again the next day during a repeat of his conjuration, he grew annoyed. “They are waiting for you,” she hazily insisted. “It is all about the child; all Osiris.” Crowley attributed it to morning sickness or alcohol, and proceeded to invoke. Finally, on the third day in a row when Crowley performed the conjuration, Rose’s eyes glazed over, and she muttered, “He who waits is Horus,” Crowley raised an eyebrow. Rose didn’t read mythology, let alone study it. How did she come up with that name? Was she actually in contact with the god? Her comment piqued his interest, and he seized the opportunity to cross-examine her.
“How do you know Horus is telling you all this?” he asked her. “Can you identify him?” She said she could, and he proceeded to test her about the god: his appearance and corresponding color, weapon, planet, and numbers; his moral qualities; his enemy. To Crowley’s astonishment, she answered every question correctly. The odds of her doing this by chance was infinitesimal.
The twenty-sixth dynasty funerary stele of Theban priest Ankh-f-n-Khonsu, referred to in The Book of the Law as the Stele of Revealing. (photo credit 5.4)
As a final test, Crowley took Rose to the museum and asked her to point to the image of Horus. As she walked among the many steles and statues, passing various images of Horus along the way, Crowley smiled knowingly. Rose headed upstairs and pointed to a glass case across the room. “There he is.”
Crowley squinted at the case, unable to make it out from this distance, and walked toward it. He found a wooden funerary stele from Egypt’s twenty-sixth dynasty (c. 725 BC) that the Theban priest Ankhefenkhons I (or Ankh-f-n-Khonsu, in Crowley’s era), had designed for himself. It depicted Ra-Hoor-Khuit or Ra-Herakhty, the composite deity of the sun god, Ra, with his son, Horus. Glancing at the exhibit, Crowley’s heart leapt as he noticed it bore catalog number 666.
Having passed her test, Rose advised Crowley how to properly invoke Horus. He protested about form and style, but she insisted he perform the ritual as given. If he followed instructions, she promised, he would have results on Saturday or Sunday. Since the next day was Saturday, he followed the absurd directions and met with no success.
On Sunday, March 20, at 10 p.m., he again conducted the ceremony. This time, he learned this was the time of the Equinox of the Gods. While the GD celebrated the astronomical equinox that marked the first day of spring or autumn, in this case it referred to the beginning of the first day of a new age. According to this view, religious thought followed regular patterns: the world’s oldest religions worshiped nature and the earth mother and are identified (arbitrarily) with the Egyptian mother-goddess Isis. In more recent history, religions w
ere patriarchal and ultimately cast with suffering or dying figureheads such as Jesus, Adonis, and Attis; thus this phase of history was identified with the Egyptian slain and resurrected patriarch Osiris. The viewpoint that would become dominant in the next phase of humankind was typified by Horus, the son of Isis and Osiris. Adherence to this view of cosmic cycles betrays Crowley’s Brethren upbringing, for dispensationalism, the belief that history proceeds in a series of stages or dispensations, is a common fundamentalist doctrine.70
Crowley also learned that the speaker of these messages was not Horus himself but a messenger named Aiwass or Aiwaz. Crowley regarded the name with suspicion, thinking Rose manufactured it from the Arabic word “aiwa” (yes) which she had heard in Cairo. Years would pass before Crowley accepted Aiwass as the actual name of his holy guardian angel. Even in his last years, however, Crowley remained uncertain about the nature of Aiwass:
The only point undetermined is whether He is a discarnate Being, or … a human being, presumably Assyrian, of that name. And that I simply do not know, and cannot reasonably surmise, because I do not know the limits of the powers of such an One.71
For the next two weeks, Crowley busied himself with stele 666. He dined with the museum’s curator and expressed an interest in the artifact. Named by Crowley as Brugsch Bey, this curator was actually German Egyptologist Émile Brugsch (1842–1930); “Bey” along with “Pasha” were titles awarded him by the Egyptian government for his service to the Cairo and Boulak Museums.72
Brugsch arranged for his French assistant to translate and reproduce the stele. The inscriptions, it turned out, were adaptations from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Once Crowley received the French translation, he set it to verse.
On April 7, Rose went into a trance and gave new instructions to her husband: for the next three days, he was to enter the temple in their flat precisely at noon and write down what he heard. He would stop again precisely at 1 o’clock. By this time, he believed Rose’s instructions and followed them.
The next day, Crowley stepped into his temple at noon and sat at his desk, pen and paper ready. He waited for something to happen. Anticipation clenched him. What if nothing happened? he wondered. Then he reconsidered: What if something did?
Then it did: from behind his left shoulder, a voice spoke to him: “Had! The manifestation of Nuit. The unveiling of the company of heaven.” Crowley described the experience in these words:
The Voice of Aiwass came apparently from over my left shoulder, from the furthest corner of the room. It seemed to echo itself in my physical heart in a very strange manner, hard to describe.… The voice was of deep timbre, musical and expressive, its tones solemn, voluptuous, tender, fierce or aught else as suited the moods of the message. Not bass—perhaps a rich tenor or baritone.
The English was free of either native or foreign accent, perfectly pure of local or caste mannerisms, thus startling and even uncanny at first hearing.
I had a strong impression that the speaker was actually in the corner where he seemed to be, in a body of “fine 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 dress was not Arab; it suggested Assyria or Persia, but very vaguely.73
He scribbled down the words frantically as Aiwass proceeded. “Every man and every woman is a star. Every number is infinite; there is no difference. Help me, o warrior lord of Thebes, in my unveiling before the Children of men!”74
Aiwass described the Egyptian sky goddess Nuit, who represented the universe, infinite and complete. Although all things were part of her, she willingly separated into distinct elements, identities, and objects so that all the universe could experience the joy of union. Her message was clear enough: “For I am divided for love’s sake, for the chance of union75. Take your fill and will of love as ye will, when, where, and with whom ye will! But always unto me76. Love is the law, love under will.”77 She called not for gratuitous sex, but for love as a transcendent experience, as the divine union of male and female principles. In exchange for this adoration, “I give unimaginable joys on earth.”78
The point of this disquisition became clear with the words, “This that thou writest is the threefold book of Law.”79 Its verses contained the basic tenets of Thelemic philosophy: “The word of the law is .80 … Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law … thou hast no right but to do thy will. Do that and no other shall say nay. For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect.”81 The crux of this philosophy was the notion of True Will, expressed by the Greek word for “will,” or thelema. As part of the cosmic scheme, every being was imbued with a purpose to which it must devote itself. One’s Will should be pursued to the exclusion of all else, barring activities—such as resting, eating, and working—that make the pursuit possible. In this view, if everyone were to do one’s Will, there would be no conflict in the world. Magic was the means of discovering one’s Will.
The phrase “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”82 was not entirely original with this book. St. Augustine himself had declared, “Love and do what you will.”83 An angel told John Dee, “Do that which most pleaseth you … wherefore do even as you list.” Satirist Francois Rabelais (c. 1494–1553) wrote “Faictz ce que vouldras,”84 and described an Abbaye de Thélème. And Sir Walter Besant (1836–1901) and James Rice’s (1843–1882) novel The Monks of Thelema describes a church similar to Rabelais’s Abbey.85 However, The Book of the Law was original in its interpretation of those eleven words.86
After an hour elapsed, the voice vanished with the statement, “The Manifestation of Nuit is at an end.”87
Over the next two days, Crowley recorded two more chapters of what would become The Book of the Law, the cornerstone of his magical philosophy of Thelema. His life would never again be the same.
Chapter two is a small drama, a clash between the author and the scribe. Whereas Nuit represented infinity, the “speaker” of chapter two, Hadit, represented the finite point, or Nuit made manifest. When he announced, “Remember all ye that existence is pure joy,”88 Crowley objected. The First Noble Truth of Buddhism taught that existence was sorrow. Aiwass responded, “O prophet! thou hast ill will to learn this writing. I see thee hate the hand & the pen, but I am stronger.”89 As the dictation continued, Crowley surrendered to the rapture of the words. After dictating magical ciphers and formulae, Aiwass observed, “Thou art exhaust in the voluptuous fullness of the inspiration.”90 Indeed, the experience swept him away in ecstasy and exhausted him.
Notions of existence being enjoyable appeared long before The Book of the Law. Tantra, for instance, imbued itself with similar life-positive viewpoints. However, such philosophies were generally driven underground by those who preferred to think of mankind dangling over the abyss of hell like a loathsome spider. Thus civilization had been shaped by asceticism, austerity, abstinence, sorrow, suffering, and sin. The Book of the Law marked a break with that perspective, proclaiming “The word of Sin is Restriction.”91 Original or not, such was the message Crowley received on that second day.
The final chapter was a disturbing and apocalyptic speech by the war god Ra-Hoor-Khuit. Amidst practical instructions and identification of Crowley as the Great Beast also fall its most repugnant statements: “With my Hawk’s head I peck at the eyes of Jesus as he hangs upon the cross. I flap my wings in the face of Mohammed & blind him. With my claws I tear out the flesh of the Indian and the Buddhist, Mongol and Din. Bahlasti! Ompehda! I spit on your crapulous creeds.”92 The scribe was shocked by these declarations, and this initial reaction prevented him for some time from accepting the book. Only later would he understand these passages to symbolize the abrogation of old creeds.
Three days, three hours, and The Book of the Law was recorded. The process was not without problems: When, writing page 6 of the manuscript, he
heard the words “the unfragmentary non-atomic fact of my universality,” he failed to understand: “Write this in whiter words, but go on,” Aiwass instructed. So, after the fact, Crowley changed the words to “The omnipresence of my body.” Similarly, when writing verse sixty of chapter one, Crowley missed a sentence. Rose herself later added the words, “The Five Pointed Star with a Circle in the Middle, & the circle is Red.” Rose also corrected chapter three, verse seventy-two, where Crowley misheard the phrase, “Force of Coph Nia.”
Throughout the manuscript, Aiwass left space for Crowley to add his poetic translations of the stele. This he did, also adding missing punctuation and verse numbers. With that, The Book of the Law was completed.
Crowley always maintained that this book originated from outside his own intelligence. As he wrote to a student in 1936,
The Book of the Law is not in any way my work.… It is not inspired. It was dictated, and the only duty of a scribe is to take down accurately what is said. In this particular case, the scribe disagreed heartily with a very great deal of the material. This frequently happens in business offices. But I should not recommend you listen to the financial opinion of a girl who is transcribing the letters of J.P. Morgan at eighteen dollars a week.93
Nevertheless, one may reasonably ask whether The Book of the Law represented a startling revelation, or whether Crowley had prefigured some of its contents in his own work. Certainly, the notion of Will as has been described previously had crept into Crowley’s thinking, even appearing in his letters to Gerald Kelly. He had already identified himself with the Great Beast in The Sword of Song. Adumbrations of “Do what thou wilt” occur in numerous earlier sources. And the corrupted magical formula “abracadabra,” as restored in The Book of the Law, turns up three years earlier in Crowley’s 1901 diary, where he “Designed Abrahadabra for a pantacle.”94 Nevertheless, subsequent events would convince Crowley that The Book of the Law was dictated by a being possessed of knowledge far greater than his own. “It is the only known document which carries in itself proof that its author belongs to a totally different Order of Being; he sees things from a point beyond our conception.”95
Perdurabo Page 19