The Vision and the Voice

Several pieces of text and footnotes scattered throughout the Book of Thoth reference “The Paris Working” and “The Vision and the Voice”. These two magical workings are also quoted at great length in the Appendices occurring in the middle of the published book and in shorter segments within a few of the Major Arcana.

We will return to these workings in more detail in the third book of this present trilogy however we will now introduce them for context in the Major Arcana. These two series of magical workings were amongst Crowley’s first fully developed experiments with sex magick and both involved Victor Benjamin Neuburg (1883 – 1940) with whom Crowley was involved at the time.

The Vision and the Voice was an intense series of inner journeys into the thirty Enochian “Aethyrs”, first taking place in Mexico in 1900 and concluded in Algeria in 1909.

The Paris Working took place in that city over January and February of 1914, and commenced on New Years Eve on 31st December 1913 with an invocation of Thoth:

At 11:40 therefore did I duly open the Temple, invoking also Thoth by the Egyptian formulae. [149]

The accounts of these workings are dense with symbolism and doctrine, much of which formed Crowley’s concept of Thelema in addition to the Book of the Law . They also provide much of the early symbolism and relationship of symbols for the tarot. The Vision and the Voice deals with the crossing of the Abyss, which is the final stage of the dissolution of the self into an ongoing experience of unified reality.

We will refer to relevant sections throughout the examination of the Major Arcana in particular, seeing how the visions often included tarot images re-cast in Crowley’s own mind. An interesting section of one of the first visions (of the 24th Aethyr) also analyses the word TARO as Tres Annos Regimen Oraculi and other variations. [150]