Aleister Crowley (12 page)

This was confirmed—at least to Crowley’s satisfaction—when Rose informed him that his Holy Guardian Angel, whose name, she said, was Aiwass, wanted him to receive an important message.
Aiwass, he was told, was a Secret Chief of the grade Ipsissimus—the highest one—and at noon on April 8, 9, and 10, he was to sit at his desk in his temple—they had erected one in the flat—and write down what he heard. Crowley did so, taking down the dictation with his Swan fountain pen. He remarked that Aiwass’s musical voice came over his left shoulder from the farthest corner of the room. For exactly an hour each day Aiwass spoke and what he revealed to Crowley was
The Book of the Law
.

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 cases 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