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Introduction to Aiwass.com

eye of ra Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.eye of horus

Aiwass composed The Book of Perfection, Liber 440, and made it real in the world via two of his incarnations: Edward Alexander (Aleister) Crowley (1875 – 1947) and James Charles Beck (Jimmi Rocket) (1954 – 2004).

Liber 440 comprises three books: Liber 220, Liber 718, and Liber 77.

The core of Liber 440 is Liber 220, the Book of the Law. It was dictated to Aleister Crowley in April, 1904, by Aiwass.

Liber 718, the Book of Codes, is Aiwass’s own comment on the Book of the Law. It was dictated to James Beck in January, 1976.

Liber 77, the Book of Oz is a sequel to the Book of the Law. It was dictated to James Beck in January and February, 1977, by Aiwass.

77,3:26. Book of Oz,
chapter 3: verse 26

These three, 220, 718, and, lastly, 77, shall form the trinity of scripture at the heart of the Thelemic Vedas. I shall grant thee no more.

Aiwass followed Liber 440 with Liber 75 vel Luciferi, a “conversation” dictated to James Beck, circa 1979.

So who or what is Aiwass? Aiwass is an archetype of what Aleister Crowley labelled “Holy Guardian Angel” and “Silent Self.”

The third verse of the Book of the Law says, “Every man and every woman is a star.” The Book of Codes, chapter 3: verse 8 says, “The stars are thine angels.” So, every man and every woman is their own Holy Guardian Angel. They are their Angel’s mind and body in the world.

The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage prescribes, in the second of three books, a strict regime of study, prayer, and ritual to be carried out in social isolation and sensory deprivation, whose goal is the “Knowledge and Conversation” of your own “Holy Guardian Angel.”

For Aleister Crowley, Aiwass was that Angel, and the writing of Book of the Law was his K&C of HGA.

Abramelin calls him Holy Guardian Angel. I adopt this:
  1. Because Abramelin’s system is so simple and effective.
  2. Because since all theories of the universe are absurd it is better to talk in the language of one which is patently absurd, so as to mortify the metaphysical man.
  3. Because a child can understand it.
– The Temple of Solomon the King,
The Equinox, Vol. 1, No 1, page 159.

The “patently absurd” theory of the universe from which the label Holy Guardian Angel comes is Christian.

I call it “Eternal Self” after Aldous Huxley’s Introduction to the 1944 Prabhavananda-Isherwood translation Bhagavad Gita: The Song of God.

At the core of the Perennial Philosophy we find four fundamental doctrines.
[…]

Third: man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.

Fourth: man’s life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.
– The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley, 1944.

Note that “self,” as separate from not-self, is external to the unity that we only point towards with notions such as Holy Guadian Angel, Silent-Self, or Eternal Self. We have to call it something, yet it is so different from regular waking awareness that it is ineffable.

The “thou” in “Do what thou wilt” is your own Holy Guardian Angel, the consciousness that incarnated as you.

When I first read the Book of the Law, it rang bells deep in my unconscious mind, for it spoke in the voice of my own Eternal Self, which had been touring me around the astral planes.

The purpose of Aiwass.com is to make Liber 440 available to reincarnating ΘελημιτεςTelhmites, the Kings and Queens of Thelema.

Book of Lives

I saw and heard my Holy Guardian Angel in a deeply affecting vision more than fifty years ago. Llee Heflin had a similar vision four years earlier in 1968. James Beck wrote down his vision of Aiwass in chapter 5, verse 12 of 1976’s the Book of Codes.

One vision, about two years before the vision of my Angel, I call the Book of Lives vision.

Book of Lives

I saw a large book before me. Its spine was wider than the height of its cover. Seemingly millions of pages were bound in that book; each page was gossamer thin; each page represented an entire lifetime in the world. The book was open to my lifetime.

There were wormholes or channels of awareness running through from page to page, future and past. I could feel snippets of perception and emotion cascading down these channels — like reflections in parallel mirrors — as the same moments of contact are experienced in different lifetimes.
– Book of Lives vision, Nemo Pandragon, 1970.

My girlfriend suggested that I was perceiving a different dimension of time, a dimension at right angles to regular clock time. We experience this “other” dimension of time only in the most intimate present, for that is where it coincides with our experience of reality.

In one way or another, every practice relevant to discovering and connecting with the level of our own being labelled “Holy Guardian Angel” brings us into the present.

What I portray as a third Cartesian dimension of time for the sake of illustration in the graphic, physicists describe as a second dimension of time, an axis measured on a scale of imaginary numbers. The imaginary number i = −1 or i2 = −1.

The Science News 15 December 2021 article, titled Quantum physics requires imaginary numbers to explain reality, reviews two experiments demonstrating that complex numbers — a combination of real and imaginary numbers — are needed to explain the experimenters’ empirical results.

Initiation means The Journey Inwards: nothing is changed or can be changed; but all is trulier understood with every step. The Magus of the Gods, with His one Word that seems to overturn the chariot of Mankind in ruin, does not in fact destroy or even alter anything; He simply furnishes a new mode of applying the existing Energy to established Forms.
– Aleister Crowley, Little Essays Toward Truth: Mastery, 1938

This is the same Journey Inwards as taken by meditators. A major component of Thelemic practice is sitting meditation, specifically Dharana, encapsulated in the term Asana.

Ritual is meditation in motion. By asserting a circle and sequentially addressing the four cardinal directions, times of day, and seasons through the symbolism of the four cardinal signs of the zodiac — Aries, Cancer, Libra, and Capricorn — one creates a psychological vortex. With practice, the circle produces a temple within which one may reach higher (more intimate) states of consciousness.

Magick — the use of sex for worship, and the recycling of hormone-laden secretions — amplifies the neuroplastic effects of Asana and Ritual. These three practices, working together, are the means of journeying inwards.

We begin by intentionally directing our orgasms to a symbol of the sky-goddess Nuit. This simple act causes a shift in our perspective, a shift that shakes the foundations of our enculturated world-view.

Science is not as important as the other three elements of ARMS (Asana, Ritual, Magick, and Science). Critical thinking, however is vitally important. Tarot, with its Tree of Life core, provides a map of consciousness and a language to describe different levels of awareness; it is the language of Liber 440. Knowledge of the carbon cycle and the biochemistry of metabolism detail how every thought ultimately comes from sunlight. A basic understanding of neurology and psychology is also useful.

An initiation is an insight which opens a new level of consciousness to waking awareness. The new perspective is accommodated by the ordeal consequent to the initiation. Without the ordeal, the insight is soon forgotten or becomes a mere eidolon.

At first, not knowing how to respond in the new world revealed by the insight, we make a mess of things and slide into the trough of the initiation-ordeal cycle. To rectify the mess we made, we must take up ARMS (Asana, Ritual, Magick, and Science).

With practice we become adept. The skills, developed while living in the new world unveiled by the insight, eventually become second nature.

Sine wave showing iniitiation-ordeal cycle

Having climbed back up to the peak of the initiation-ordeal cycle, it begins again with the next step on the ladder of initiation.

77,3:16. Book of Oz,
chapter 3: verse 16

Is there no end to the falling and climbing? This is the secret of Sisyphus, that angelic beast. That the climbing and falling is ever a joyous task, that this life and death is truly an unearned reward.

Though the level of adeptship achieved by previous incarnations is passed to subsequent incarnations of the Angel as potential consciousness, each new incarnation must experience the initiatory cycles for themself. Initiation-ordeal cycles progressively link the mind-body complex to the Holy Guardian Angel.

220,2:9. Book of the Law,
chapter 2: verse 9

Remember all ye that existence is pure joy;
that all the sorrows are but as shadows; they
pass & are done; but there is that which
remains
.

That which remains” is the adeptship which is passed along to subsequent incarnations of the Angel as potential consciousness.

xyz coordinates, z is imaginary number axis
In this graphic, the Tree of Life, a pre-scientific map of con­scious­ness, stands in red at right angles to normally perceived temporal reality.
• The innermost being — Eternal Self or Holy Guardian Angel — is sym­bol­ised by Kether, sephira 1. The outermost waking awareness of the physical mind-body complex is symbolised by Malkuth, sephira 10. The temple of the Eternal Self — Angel-Beast interface, House 418 — is sym­bol­ised by Tiphereth, sephira 6, the Sun.
• The Word of the Ordeals which make initiated con­scious­ness real in the world, is ABRAX (ABRX).

Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley’s 72-year lifespan included three distinct periods:

  1. 1875 to 1904: Darbyite childhood and disillusioned young adulthood before the Book of the Law.
  2. 1904 to 1922: Reception of the Book of the Law and roughly eighteen years of productive exposition regarding its meaning and methods.
  3. 1922 to 1947: Heroin addiction, efforts to monetise Thelema, and poverty.

His first life began in an Exclusive Plymouth Brethren family. His beloved and venerated father died when he was just 11 years old.

Abandoned to the cold care of his mother — whom he described as “a brainless bigot of the most narrow, logical and inhuman type” — and uncle — “a Cotton Mather minus imagination” — he suffered the usual repressions, beatings and other humiliations of an Evangelical Christian boyhood in 1880s and ’90s Victorian England. Perhaps moreso, for his trust in Jesus left with his father, he was bisexual, and his disgust with dispensationalism, and eventually all forms of religion, only grew.

His second life began when, as a 28-year-old, Aleister Crowley received Liber AL vel Legis, the Book of the Law, in 1904.

I was at the time of this revelation, a rationalistic Buddhist, very convinced of the First Noble Truth: “Everything is Sorrow”.
– Magical and Philosophical Commentaries on the Book of the Law, Crowley’s comment on 220,2:10.

The fact of the matter was that I resented The Book of the Law with my whole soul. For one thing, it knocked my Buddhism completely on the head. Remember all ye that existence is pure joy; that all the sorrows are but as shadows; they pass & are done; but there is that which remains.

I was bitterly opposed to the principles of the Book on almost every point of morality. The third chapter seemed to me gratuitously atrocious. My soul, infinitely sad at the universal sorrow, was passionately eager to raise humanity. And lo! the Magical Formula denounced pity as damnable, acclaimed war as admirable and in almost every other way was utterly repugnant to my ideas. I did not understand the fundamental principles of the initiation of mankind; and (in my own case) I did not realize that Aiwass was not necessarily responsible for the character of his message any more than the newspaper for reporting an earthquake.
– The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, ed. Symonds & Grant, chapter 50, pp 403-404.

He then spent the next 18 years coping with the Book of the Law by expanding on its message in all his writing.

Crowley was an accomplished ceremonial magician and meditator before he received Liber 220. The symbolic language of Liber 440 is Tarot, both a map of consciousness and a memory palace. He rectified Tarot’s attributions in the light of 220,1:57.

There is no supernatural in reality, so it is not possible to use Tarot or I Ching, for example, to tell the future definitively. However, it is possible to use mystical methods to interact with your own unconscious mind, although the observer effect obstructs every self-conscious mystical operation. The unconscious mind is usually a mystery to waking awareness, but it is the interface between the incarnation and their Eternal Self, their Holy Guardian Angel.

Until he was 46 years old, Aleister Crowley had never held down a real job or developed saleable skills. He did not choose to make a profit from his publishing efforts. When his money ran out, he was at a loss for how to make a living.

By January, 1922, Aleister Crowley was addicted to heroin, which had been prescribed to him for the bronchitis he suffered after damaging his lungs by remaining for more than two months at high altitude while on the 1902 expedition to climb K2. Emphysema made his life a misery and only heroin seemed to help. He was never able to defeat his heroin addiction.

During this period, two of Aleister Crowley’s most useful books were published. Magick in Theory and Practice, Book 4 Part III, was published in Paris in the inopportune year 1929. The Book of Thoth was published in wartime 1944.

The inherent poverty of a heroin addict blighted the last 25 years of Aleister Crowley’s sojourn in the world, stripped away many of his superstitions and hammered his ego. This was just the beginning of the Ordeal A, the ordeal consequent of initiation to the grade Ipsissimus (most self, a misnomer).

Crowley knew that “self” is external to the Holy Guardian Angel, that self is a creation of the mind.

The gems of wisdom contained in Liber 440 are occulted by language seemingly designed to offend and enflame the ego, the sense of separate self. That language is transparent to an adept according to their level of initiation. Each re-reading of Liber 440 is a self-psychotherapy session when you take the Journey Inwards.

Crowley did not get everything right, but reading his writing over the years on my Journey Inwards, I noticed that Aleister Crowley always was there before me, expressing thoughts that have significance only to those who had experienced the initiation-ordeal cycle of the grade he was addressing. If I saw this, others who do the work will see it and realise they are not bat-shit crazy after all.

Aiwass communicated inimitable information through the mind and body of his Aleister-Crowley incarnation to the outer temporal world. That information had the shape given it by a Victorian-Era occultist and bon vivant.

CrowleyAt14
Aleister Crowley at 14 years old.
His Evangelical upbringing contributed to his lexicon and his fascination with number mysticism.
The resulting PTSD furthered the vehemence of his satanism and ultimately his drug addictions.

James Beck

James Charles Beck was born in Los Angeles, California, at 23:30 PST on 30 November 1954, which was 07:30 GMT on 1 December in Hastings, UK, where Aleister Crowley had died precisely seven years earlier.

Jim Beck was not the reincarnation of Aleister Crowley. He was a reincarnation of Aiwass.

The fourth of five children in a family of Lutherans, he grew up in Beaverton, Oregon. He was good at languages, played piano, and was interested in comparative religion.

718,5:9. Book of Codes,
chapter 5: verse 9

I have missed thee, my scribe, and am glad at thy return. I have watched thee over the years as thou grew from babe to man. Now that thou art man, I claim thee as mine own. I am Aiwass, the minister of Him who is silent, and the backbone of the fiery globe. It was me who spoke to thee in the fulness of thy fear, in thy childhood, when you prayed to the slave-god for assurance. The words that I spoke you do not remember. They are: Fear not, o chosen one, I shall be with thee unto the end of eternity. I cast a fog over thy mind, I made thee forget, now thou barely believest me.

Him who is silent” is Hoor-paar-kraat, Harpocrates, Horus the Child, the Son of Silence.

The described event occurred when Jim was eight years old, one morning while he was getting ready for school.

He had real skills when he received Liber 718, as evinced in the following verse from chapter five.

718,5:2. Book of Codes,
chapter 5: verse 2

If thou hadst not done thine invocation according to Abrahadabra in thine well-etched radiant four-starred circle, I indeed would have remained in the Aethyr till thou hadst replenished thine energies with sleep. So be it! The message shall begin. This is the end of the Book of Codes, called by many the prophesied Comment (though it be but the final comment by authorization of 93).

It takes a lot of diligent practice to produce a “well-etched radiant four-starred circle,” but his motivation was as a student, a follower, not the master.

He believed he was very much a somebody, as he had been told again and again by Aiwass. Had he come through the Ordeal B, he would have known with certainty that he was nobody, but a thin page in a thick book. Instead, he faced the Ordeal A unawares. The Ordeals X and A are blind ordeals.

The Ordeal A is the consequence of initiation to the grade Ipsissimus. The Ipsissimus enters all of the four gates of the Palace of Four Gates at once. Lesser grades enter the four gates, or doors, in turn: X, R, and B.

The Angel’s new incarnation comes into the world with the potential for initiation to the grade achieved in the previous incarnation. The initiations can come in jumbled order, but during their lifetime in the world the adept works through all the corresponding ordeals in order, from the Ordeal X onward, but the Ipsissimus faces them all at once in the Ordeal A.

In the Book of the Law, Aiwass treated the 26th dynasty Egyptian scribe Ankh-af-na-Khonsu — author of the Stélé of Revealing which cued the writing of the Book of the Law — and Aleister Crowley as the same person.

220,1:36. Book of the Law,
chapter 1: verse 36

My scribe Ankh-af-na-khonsu, the
priest of the princes, shall not in one
letter change this book; but lest there
be folly, he shall comment thereupon
by the wisdom of Ra-Hoor-Khu-it.

James Beck inherited the potential-for-consciousness of an Ipsissimus. When Aiwass granted him initiation to the grade of Ipsissimus on 17 February 1977, in 77,3:26, the Ordeal A for the James Beck incarnation of Aiwass began.

718,3:19. Book of Codes,
chapter 3: verse 19

My chosen know you, and the Kings shall recognize you as the Son of the Beast: as the Beast himself.

James Beck’s life deteriorated after 1977. In 1980 he was in a car accident (as a passenger) in which he suffered the compound fracture of a femur. Within 13 years his wife, 181, who had loved and supported him while he soaked up red wine and made desultory efforts at writing, finally left him. In the subsequent 13 years Jim spent time as a crack cocaine addict in San Francisco; resided at a Catholic Monastery in Ava, Missouri, near his mother’s house; became a Pentecostal lay preacher; and died of bone cancer after many years of aplastic anaemia.

718,4:29. Book of Codes,
chapter 4: verse 29

The end of the chapter approacheth, but one more remaineth, which I shall reveal unto thee tomorrow. Thou shalt hesitate in obeying the ordeals of this book. Every day thou dost so, thou shalt fall farther into poverty and despair. Once the demands are met, the promises shall be fulfilled.

The demands were not met by the James Beck incarnation of Aiwass. He did not write a verse for verse comment on the Book of Codes. This task will fall to a subsequent incarnation of Aiwass.

Looking back on it, I think the James Beck incarnation could never have obeyed the ordeals given in the Book of Codes or fulfilled the stated tasks. After Crowley’s larger-than-life personality, Beck was a cypher.

77,2:12. Book of Oz,
chapter 2: verse 12

We are atheists; we who see God!
Write me! Love me! Starlike muse!
For Aiwass is thy mask.
Yet masks are real on earth.

Normally, the incarnation is the “person” of the Angel, but in the case of James Beck the Angel will go down in history as the person, or mask, of an important but next to unknown incarnation.

718,5:10. Book of Codes,
chapter 5: verse 10

Thy life is of little importance to the fulness of Time.

As I knew him in the last nine months of his life, by letters and telephone calls, James Beck was both bewildered and narcissistic to the point of solipsism. I was shocked at his decline, and deeply saddened.

He never realised that the ordeal follows the initiation. To initiate means to begin. He never had the gumption to seriously face his all-encompassing ordeal.

220,1:53. Book of the Law,
chapter 1: verse 53

… Also, o
scribe and prophet, though thou be of the
princes, it shall not assuage thee nor
absolve thee
.

James Charles Beck died on 9 January 2004, about five weeks after his 49th birthday.

JimBeck in his late 20s
James Beck in his late 20s.
A Crowley fanboy who tried out magick, and it worked! Having been trained by Aiwass since childhood, he had the skills to connect deeply enough to receive a much larger volume of text from Aiwass than Crowley had.
However, when he was granted initiation to the grade Ipsissimus (Crown), inherited from the Crowley incarnation of Aiwass, the training wheels came off.
He lacked the steely self-determin­ation to survive the consequent ordeal. He was a naïve innocent from suburban Oregon.
The ordeal broke him down over the next 26 years: all in service to subsequent incarnations of Aiwass.

Duteous One

I am the subsequent incarnation of the Holy Guardian Angel whose previous incarnation was Charles Robert John Stansfeld Jones (2 April 1886 – 24 February 1950). I was born on 3 February 1951.

I am mentioned in Liber 75 vel Luciferi, verse 42.

75:42. Liber Luciferi:
verse 42

Also shall there be success for the duteous one, that little child so sweet to my heart, burdened with travail and depression.

Yes, I am diffident, but I adore Liber 440 and duty calls.

I believe conversations like Liber 75 vel Luciferi have a temporal scope largely coincidental with the incarnations of their amanuenses. They may be one way to identify subsequent incarnations of Aiwass.

Liber 440, in contrast, has a temporal scope of about 2,200 years.

My rôle in this incarnation is Opener of the Ways. My guess is that successive incarnations of my Angel will also be Openers of the Ways.

Frater Altzba of 93 Publishing was arguably the first Opener of the Ways for Liber 440 in 1977, insofar as he typeset — on a Linotype caster — and paid for the first (letterpress) printing of Liber 440, proofread in collab­ora­tion with James Beck.

In addition to 625 copies printed on high-quality book paper with a soft cover, 93 copies were printed “in red and black ink upon beautiful paper made by hand.”

I saw my Holy Guardian Angel as an opaque and seemingly objective entity in a deeply affecting vision in 1972. My Angel gave its name as Ω, Omega, and instructed “I must be created.”

At first I thought the statement was an oxymoron. Eventually, I realised that all “I”s are created, not just the Angel.

I have been struggling with an internal conflict all my life. On the one hand, I have been betrayed by belief so often that I have become an adamant empiricist.

On the other hand, I have experienced telepathy, clairvoyance, astral travel, and other senses of my body of light (Ka) since I was a child. In none of those experiences were the four fundamental conservation laws of physics abrogated.

The observer effect makes it difficult to articulate reasonable cause-and-effect scenarios to explain how the senses of the body of light work in reality, but I think in terms of signal-to-noise ratio. Asana reduces the noise. Ritual increases the signal.

The supernatural is not an option, for it is false reasoning which answers honest questions with falsehoods and blind belief.

Truth is the product of experience. The product of reason is meaning. It is best not to confuse meaning with truth. They are not the same.

I resolve this conflict by shifting my perspective inwards from the gross material world toward vistas of adeptship. Time, dimension, and causality look different from different points of view. Nature is deeper than it appears on the surface.

Self is a persona — a mask — created by the mind-body complex to aid competition in human society. LSD can temporarily remove the “I,” permitting information which would otherwise remain obscure for the non-adept to rise from the unconscious mind, through the subconscious to waking awareness, where it can be remembered and examined.

The vision of my Holy Guardian Angel capped a mass of information that had been uploaded into my unconscious mind over a number of LSD trips. Only small amounts of that information rose to waking awareness at the time. I had no intellectual structure to accommodate it, so I was highly motivated to learn the basics of Crowley’s Qabalah: the Tree of Life and The Book of Thoth.

718,2:18. Book of Codes,
chapter 2: verse 18

How camest thou to the knowledge of Brahman, of Buddha, and the Ancient of Days, when all have said thou must give up this world to have that other? ’Tis my blessing and approval, the very light of Ra shone through the lens of Aiwass, minister and focal point of the swelling current.

All my previous visions had been strictly conceptual. The vision of the Angel was objective and opaque. Its voice was loud and clear.

Certainly the vision of the Angel was a creation of my brain. The identification of the vision with Aleister Crowley’s notion of a Holy Guardian Angel is my intellect at work. But I am unable to deny the overwhelming telepathic presence of my Angel in that vision, or its previous and subsequent influence in my life.

It is real to me, but fiction to you. Just as your Holy Guardian Angel is fiction to me and, if you link your waking awareness to your Angel, real to you.

We are not to worship the Khu, to fall in love with our Magical Image. To do this — we have all done it — is to forget our Truth. If we adore Form, it becomes opaque to Being, and may soon prove false to itself. The Khu in each of us includes the Cosmos as he knows it. To me, even another Khabs is only part of my Khu. Our own Khabs is our one sole Truth.
– Magical and Philosophical Commentaries on the Book of the Law, comment on 220,1:9.

In the first chapter of Little Essays Toward Truth, Aleister Crowley wrote “that the perceptible Universe is an extension, or phantasm, of the nervous system.”

In his 1944 The Book of Thoth, Crowley wrote,

each one of us has his own universe all to himself, and it is not the same as anybody else’s universe.
– The Book of Thoth, Introduction, page 17.

In Anil Seth’s 2021 book, “Being You: A New Science of Consciousness,” the computational neurologist proposes

the idea that the brain is a “prediction machine,” and that what we see, hear, and feel is nothing more than the brain’s “best guess” of the causes of its sensory inputs. … that the contents of con­scious­ness are a kind of waking dream — a controlled hallu­cina­tion — that is both more than and less than whatever the real world really is.
– Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, chapter 4.

Professor Seth writes that a hallucination is an “uncontrolled perception.”

Human beings are symbol makers and symbol users. Gods are a class of symbols; they are symbols in the form of persons. Gods are valuable symbols in that we become what we worship. We shape our gods and, thereafter, our gods shape us.

Evil is that which causes harm. Harm is loss. Creating a god, disowning it, then insisting that it created you, sets up a vicious cycle of harm, for it separates you from yourself. Disowned community gods are used to control and exploit people by means of shame.

In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.
– Thomas Jefferson

Guilt is for what you do; it can be repaired. Shame is for what you are. You cannot change what you are, but you can twist yourself into a semblance of honourableness. Shame divides us from ourselves. Fear is humiliating. It causes shame and leads to hate. This is how demagogues gain power over polities: divide with shame, conquer with hate.

Nothing is worse for children than to be humiliated; they should be brought up to realize that they are “kings and priests unto God.”
– The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, page 473.

77,2:12. Book of Oz,
chapter 2: verse 12

I speak of fearsome Death,
Yet Death is not thine.
Master Death; do not fear.
Live for as long as the Will declares.
Die when the Will so dictates.
Thou art no celestial slave.
Thy race has advanced
Not all of past deeds are hon’rable.
The Aeon is a New Way
The old Ways are but partial in their truthfulness.

If we wish to be free, to choose for ourselves, we must take responsibility for the gods we make.

Every Christian creates their own versions of Jesus. The hopeful baby of Christmas is not the same symbol-in-the-form-of-a-person as the tortured seditionist of Easter. Jesus is a symbol of unchanging permanence: semper idem, a Rock of Ages.

No wonder Abrahamists, with their permanent and unchanging God, regard ever-changing nature as their adversary. Satan means “adversary.” The Sun at night was always a time of fear until electric street lighting, telephony, and portable 2-way radio banished most robbers and rapists from the night.

I think the unconscious mind is not merely a storehouse of introjects and neuroses. The unconscious is also a sense organ with its own uncontrolled perceptions of reality, perceptions that rise to the subconscious where they are given form as dreams and visions which then rise to waking awareness.

Our nervous and sensory systems evolved to advantage survival, not to perceive objective reality accurately. We can change our subjective experience of the world by changing our perspective.

We gain initiation to deeper degrees of adeptship by striving to find (LA) our psychic centre (ShT), then acting from that fulcrum to lever (AL) our world. This is Crowley’s LAShTAL formula.

We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.
– Mahatma Gandhi, Indian Opinion, 1913.

Ancient Egyptian 1 / 6
Central column of Tree of Life showing, from Kether, Khabs, Khu, Ka, and Ha.
Idiom 2 / 6
Central column of Tree of Life showing, from Kether, Holy Guardian Angel, House 418, Astral Body, and Physical Body.
Psychology 3 / 6
Central column of Tree of Life showing, from Kether, Innocence, Unconscious, Subconscious, and Waking Awareness.
Qabalah 4 / 6
Central column of Tree of Life showing, from Kether, Kether, Tiphereth, Yesod, and Malkuth.
Chakras 5 / 6
Central column of Tree of Life showing, from Kether, Sahasrara, Anahata, Svadhisthana, and Muladhara.
AA Grades 6 / 6
Central column of Tree of Life showing, from Kether, Ipsissimus, Man of Earth, Zelator, and Neophyte.
Clicking or tapping on backward or forward advances or retreats through six intellectual frameworks describing the four major levels of con­scious­ness depicted on the Tree of Life.

War-Engine

Near the beginning of the third chapter of the Book of the Law, Ra-Hoor-Khuit mentions a “war-engine.”

Note Aleister Crowley’s original comments, which follow the text of verses three to eight:

220,3:3. Book of the Law,
chapter 3: verse 3

Now let it first be understood that I am
a god of War and of Vengeance. I shall
deal hardly with them.

This whole book seems intended to be interpreted literally. It was so taken by the scribe at the time.

Yet a mystical meaning is easy to find. Exempli gratia; vv. 4-9.

220,3:4. Book of the Law,
chapter 3: verse 4

Choose ye an island!

An Island = one of the Cakkrams or nerve-centres in the spine.

220,3:5. Book of the Law,
chapter 3: verse 5

Fortify it!

Fortify it = Concentrate the mind upon it.

220,3:6. Book of the Law,
chapter 3: verse 6

Dung it about with enginery of war!

= Prevent any impressions reaching it.

220,3:7. Book of the Law,
chapter 3: verse 7

I will give you a war engine.

= I will describe a new method of meditation by which

220,3:8. Book of the Law,
chapter 3: verse 8

With it ye shall smite the peoples and
none shall stand before you.

Ye shall easily suppress invading thoughts.

The “none” that shall stand before you is the sky-goddess Nuit.

The Sun-god Ra-Hoor-Khuit, in his chapter of the Book of Codes, says:

718,1:15. Book of Codes,
chapter 1: verse 15

Know also that my island is my temple: most especially a particular House. Het. This is most needful, that my war-engine is of the magical kind, that the Blood of the Moon is its fuel and the priest’s Osiris is its motor.

The war-engine turns out to be a ritual of magick (sex-magic) in which menstrual blood is its fuel and the priest’s penis is its motor. The resulting sexual secretions are collected on ginger-cinnamon cookies (cakes of light) and eaten, acting as a potent hormonal drug to alter consciousness.

Ra-Hoor-Khuit’s “secret house” is Het, the Holy Guardian Angel’s temple, the Anahata chakra, the House 418.

Almost all writers who address the subject, abjure the use of menstrual blood and attribute the behaviour to a transgressive or “left-hand” path. Note that the Latin word for left is “sinister,” attributed to the distaff side. It is just another example of the irresponsible ethos of male dominance over, and suppression of, female power.

In a letter dated April 30, 1943, which appears in Aleister Crowley’s Introduction to Magick Without Tears, he states: “But I have published openly all the secrets.” At the end of the letter he goes on to say,

Secrets. There is one exception to what I have said about publishing everything: that is, the ultimate secret of the O.T.O. This is really too dangerous to disclose; but the safeguard is that you could not use it if you knew it, unless you were an advanced Adept; and you would not be allowed to go so far unless we were satisfied that you were sincerely devoted to the Great Work. See (One Star In Sight.) True, the Black Brothers could use it; but they would only destroy themselves.
– Magick Without Tears, Introduction, page 9.

I can attest to the fact that the magickal technique of the Hermit is a dangerously powerful means of deep brain programming. It is powerful for it recruits the inner unconscious mind to the task of survival. It is dangerous for we expect it to be similar to the outer subconscious mind in which ego has power, but ego and reason are external to the unconscious. God or Karma are creations of the subconscious mind that block the deeply intuitive perceptions of the unconscious mind over which ego does not hold sway.

As an 18-year-old, I had sex with my girlfriend during her menstrual flow. I did it out of ignorance. It blew up my life by exposing the vast wealth of my unconscious mind to waking awareness. It was still a place of mystery, the realm of gods and devils.

Decades later, having achieved the necessary degree of initiation, I initially suffered two painful accidents in close succession. I persisted, nonetheless. I did not notice the significant salutary effects of our efforts until later. When I did see beneficial results, they were profound and they remain today in my lived experience and the lived experience of my wife of 44 years.

Crowley wrote, in The Confessions, page 72, “ ‘The libido of the unconscious’ is really ‘the true will of the inmost self.’ ” This pivotal understanding is easily lost within that book’s 892 pages of text. The unconscious is the domain of the Order of the Rosy Cross.

220,1:40. Book of the Law,
chapter 1: verse 40

Who calls us Thelemites will do no
wrong, if he look but close into the
word. For there are therein Three
Grades
, the Hermit, and the Lover, and
the man of Earth. Do what thou wilt
shall be the whole of the Law.

718,2:24. 718,2:24
The Hermit be the Grade of Adeptus Major, for in this Art are woman and man conjoined in blasphemous bliss; and, lastly, below the Abyss be the Grade of the Lover, and this be the secret of secrets, that man with man, and woman with woman, is a most powerful magick wrought in the fulness of unity. Now, many of the uninitiate shall hear of our methods. Some will mock and some will ponder. Some shall practice without the aid of formal training, but curse them not for this: Not all of my servants shall be found in mine abbeys.

The training is arduous and requires extensive practice. It begins with the Neophyte who faces the Ordeal X.

X symbolises the magickal elixir.

When the Neophyte gives one particle of dust in the love of Nuit, that is, intentionally focuses their sexual expression, the psychological effect is to shift their perspective ever so slightly. But that shift begins a cascade that soon crumbles all their assumptions regarding the rigid permanence of their world.

Thus begins the Ordeal X. Most, these days, eventually retreat into the familiar blindness. Few come to really understand Nuit and Hadit, which is required to progress to the grade Zelator.

It takes lifetimes to gain any Thelemic grade. Once achieved, the grade is passed to subsequent incarnations of the Angel as potential consciousness. Potential consciousness caused me to go through all the initiation-ordeal cycles that lead to the coalface worked on by C.S. Jones. I got dragged into Thelema, more or less kicking and screaming.

It is said that for every step one takes towards one’s Holy Guardian Angel, He takes two towards his client.
– Magical and Philosophical Commentaries on the Book of the Law, Crowley’s comment on 220,1:13.

In the Book of the Law Ra-Hoor-Khuit says,

220,3:49. Book of the Law,
chapter 3: verse 49

I am in a secret fourfold word, the blasphemy against
all gods of men.

Importantly, the Sun-god Ra-Hoor-Khuit — the visible object of worship — is in the magickal elixir. Often in Liber 440, “word” refers to the elixir. Blasphemy is “spoken” sacrilege.

In the Book of Codes Ra-Hoor-Khuit says,

718,1:11. Book of Codes,
chapter 1: verse 11

Thou shalt fight in the temple and fight in the field, and wherever thou goest thy cry shall be Thelema and the secret fourfold Word. (My scribe has described “Tzedeq” as this word, and while he speaks Truth, his discovery is hardly as important as he may have claimed; certainly it serves to establish him as my son.)

Tzedeq is an alternate name for the Hebrew letter צTzedeq (90), Tsaddi the English X. The associated Tarot major arcanum is Atu IV The Emperor, alchemical Sulphur, semen: the power of creation and destruction. Atu III The Empress, the letter דDalet (4), Dalet which has the value four, is alchemical Salt, the female contribution — both the White Eagle and the Red Eagle: the power of manifestation. The other “four,” of the fourfold Word of the Elixir, is Chesed, sephira number four on the Tree of Life, the perspective of the Lover, thus alchemical Mercury: the power of change.

Alchemical Salt is the power of manifestation, and the Red Eagle is the most powerful of all. “In…the Scarlet Woman is all power given.” The depreciation of women is arch-stupidity. “We shall instigate an honest matriotism.

The sky-goddess Nuit says,

220,1:62. Book of the Law,
chapter 1: verse 62

At all my meetings with you shall the
priestess say — and her eyes shall burn
with desire as she stands bare and rejoicing
in my secret temple — To me! To me!
calling forth the flame of the hearts of all in her
love-chant.

Liber 440 asserts, over and over again, that there must be joy in every magickal act. If the participants are joyful, they contribute a greater balance of supportive hormones to the elixir, which then reinforces desirable neural programming.

If you pursue chastity — direct your lust to a symbol of Nuit — you can use magick to advance your Journey Inwards on the path of initiation. But Nuit is secret: known to adepts. The Zelator has won through the Ordeal X, knows Nuit by experience, so is an adept. The Neophyte, who faces the Ordeal X, is not an adept.

Chastity may thus be defined as the strict observance of the Magical Oath; that is, in the Light of the Law of Thelelma, absolute and perfect devotion to The Holy Guardian Angel and exclusive pursuit of the Way of the True Will.
– Little Essays Toward Truth, Chastity, 1938.

That level of focus takes a great deal of practice. The practice of ARMS (Asana, Ritual, Magick, and Science) is indispensable for training the mind and body to be sufficiently chaste (sincere) to participate in the Ritual of the War-Engine.

718,1:23. Book of Codes,
chapter 1: verse 23

Yet the knowledge of the Elixir is reserved for my servants. Let not the insincere contribute their blood; the God shall not dwell therein.

(Remember that the Sun-god is in the Word of the Elixir.)

Knowledge of the Elixir cannot be read off a page or learned by instruction. Only personal experience can provide real knowledge of the Elixir. The Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel must have been achieved by participants in the Ritual of the War-Engine for them to generate beneficial results. These participants are Thelemites, members by right of their actual adeptship in the Royal College of the Rosy Cross.

Het (418) Hor (359)
The secret name of Horus is שטןShin (300)
Tet (9)
Nun (50)
Shin-Tet-Nun (359)
,
Satan, 359. The Sun. (See 220,1:49)
The Angel’s temple is חיתHet (8)
Yod (10)
Tav (400)
Het-Yod-Tav (418)
,
Het, 418. The Moon. (See Atu VII The Chariot, attributed to the Hebrew letter ח, Het.)
The Sun in his temple is 777, both the sun of midnight, Kephra, and the noonday Sun, Ahathoor (Het-Hor).
Every actual Thelemite is 777, conjoining the Sun (359) and the Moon (418).

In Sum

Thelema is the opposite of religion. Its social ethos is granular, not glutinous.

The word “religion” comes from the Latin: ligare, to tie, and religare, to bind. Religion, Abrahamic or Samsaric, is an age-old con used by priests — those with secrets — and aristocrats — those with swords — to enslave the laity, the better to gain social position and material resources for themselves. Religion depends on and promotes competition between individual egos under the rubric of common cause against defined enemies, typically other religions and aristocracies, but always against anarchic nature.

Thelema is technology, the study of method. Aleister Crowley’s “Great Work” uses systematic methods to discover, and unite with, the inmost root of the individual’s being: their own Holy Guardian Angel. The Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel is not the most important goal of Thelema, it is the only goal of Thelema. Everything else depends from the K&C of HGA. Having reached that goal, the rest is refining and strengthening the connection.

The truth is not out there. It is in here. The search for your most intimate centre, your Holy Guardian Angel, is the aim. What you discover about reality along the way is the point. Each initiation-ordeal cycle changes your perspective which opens a new view of reality.

The Angel is symbolised by Horus, the falcon who, from his vantage in the sky, sees beyond the horizons of birth and death.

We cannot know what our true Will is, we can only do it. Knowledge is at the level of mind. Will is at the more internal level of being: Binah and Chokmah.

718,5:6. Book of Codes,
chapter 5: verse 6

To be good by Victoria’s standards, or even Roosevelt’s, is to be evil by way of the revelations of Aiwass.

718,5:7. Book of Codes,
chapter 5: verse 7

Now let it be understood that this evil is but a word to signify a lack of wholeness in the individual, as to the outer and the inner. There is no law beyond Do What Thou Wilt.

Liber 440 is a communication from Aiwass, a Holy Guardian Angel, to the Holy Guardian Angel in each of us. Its language challenges the sense of self at every turn! The deeper the level of adeptship, the more the ego is sublimated to the true Will, and the easier it is to perceive the jewels of wisdom scattered throughout Liber 440.

77,3:7. Book of Oz,
chapter 3: verse 7

Deeper sinks the thoughtless mind. The point is like a little star on the tip of a penpoint. Yet that star is the Mother of galaxies.

The “self” is really just a web of relationships. Gods and devils are symbols in the form of persons on whom to attribute theory of mind and with whom one may have relationships. Gods represent aspects of your own psychological makeup. Thelemic practices — like psychotherapy — smite those fragmentary egos (the peoples) resolving them to zero. The result is to free-up neurones that had been trapped in subconscious neurotic eddies sucking up energy and attention. A healthy and resilient mind has a survival advantage over one bound up in restriction and fear.

The foundation of today’s wealth — money and social status — rests on the extraction and burning of fossil fuels. The resulting carbon pollution has increasingly degraded the air, land, and seas of our world.

The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around.
– Gaylord Nelson

As the economy of nature fails, human economies fail, and demagogues promising salvation from want and fear briefly thrive.

Nothing is more characteristic of the totalitarian movements in general and of the quality of fame of their leaders in particular than the startling swiftness with which they are forgotten and the startling ease with which they can be replaced.
– Hanna Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, chapter 10.

Liber 440 is written for a post-apocalyptic world. Apocalypse means “from hiding,” or revelation. The revelation that destroys religion and the superstitions that bind, is found in these six words:

There is no supernatural in reality.

Nature is much deeper than most seem to have realised.

Leadership in the new aeon is of those with the deepest insight into the balance of nature. Nature is not moral. Nature is not fair. Nature is prolific.

The world’s initiation happened at the Equinox of the Gods in April, 1904. We have been sliding into the trough of the initiation-ordeal cycle for 121 years, now. Somewhere along the line we will hit bottom and begin the long, arduous climb to a new civilisation, one much more in harmony with nature.

eye of ra Love is the law, love under will.eye of horus

Nemo Pandragon, 2025

Creative Commons licence

Footnotes



Aiwass, like all Holy Guardian Angels, is androgynous, i.e., non-binary, but is referred to by male pronouns in Liber 440.
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See The Great Beast by John Symonds, 1951, chapter XIX – The Fountain of Hyacinth.
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This image was cleaned up and enhanced in Adobe Photoshop.
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Note this excerpt from page 11 of the Introduction to Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership by the Opus Dei affiliated Roman Catholic Christian and current president of The Heritage Foundation, Kevin D. Roberts, PhD.

Environmental ideologues would ban the fuels that run almost all of the world’s cars, planes, factories, farms, and electricity grids. Abandoning confidence in human resilience and creativity in responding to the challenges of the future would raise impediments to the most meaningful human activities. They would stand human affairs on their head, regarding human activity itself as fundamentally a threat to be sacrificed to the god of nature.
– Kevin D. Roberts, PhD

The Christian supernatural adversary, “the god of nature,” is Satan, the Sun in the earth which pokes out as lakes of fire and brimstone in the calderas of volcanoes in ancient myths. But the Sun at night is the same Sun as the Sun in the day, the father of everything that lives on our planet.

Apparently environmentalists are satanists.

The words of Kevin D. Roberts, PhD contextualise Liber 75 vel Luciferi, verses 19 to 22. It is wicked and harmful to treat nature as an adversary rather than an ally. After more than 2,000 years of this guff, the Sun-god Satan says, “I kill thee for thou hast killed me.
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