Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Aleister Crowley’s 72-year lifespan included three distinct periods:
- 1875 to 1904: Darbyite childhood and disillusioned young adulthood before the Book of the Law.
- 1904 to 1922: Reception of the Book of the Law and roughly eighteen years of productive exposition regarding its meaning and methods.
- 1922 to 1947: Heroin addiction, efforts to monetise Thelema, and poverty.
His first life began as Edward Alexander Crowley in an Exclusive Plymouth Brethren family. His beloved and venerated father died when he was just 11 years old: a crippling loss.
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” — young Alick 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 the 28-year-old Aleister Crowley received Liber AL vel Legis, the Book of the Law, in April 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 a number of useful books on yoga, ritual, and magick.
Crowley was an accomplished ceremonial magician and meditator before he received Liber 220. Thereafter, he explored sex-magic — the use of sex for worship — in practice and in theory.
The symbolic language of the Book of the Law, and the rest of Liber 440, is Tarot. Tarot is both a map of consciousness and a memory palace. Crowley 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 beyond freelance writing. He did not choose to make a profit from his publishing efforts. When his inheritance 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 own 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.
