16

Crowned and Conquering

Aleister Crowley, in 1909, was at the peak of his early initiatory career. The young poet and mountaineer, now thirty-four years old, had learned nearly every branch of operative magic the Golden Dawn had to offer before his association with the order (and the order itself) collapsed in a cloud of scandal, lawsuit, and recrimination. In Ceylon, he had undergone hard training in the methods of raja yoga and Theravada Buddhism (what we now profanely call “mindfulness”) at the feet of his Golden Dawn mentor Allan Bennett, now an ordained Buddhist monk—the same man who, in a less chaste incarnation, had been Crowley’s mentor in magic and consciousness expansion through hard drugs. Next, Crowley had undergone the rigorous Abramelin Operation for contacting his holy guardian angel, while residing at Boleskine House in Scotland.

In 1904, with the aid of his wife Rose Kelly (from whom he was divorced by 1909, following her descent into alcoholism and the subsequent death of their child), he had received The Book of the Law, technically designated Liber AL vel Legis, a short document that proclaimed a New Aeon for humanity, on the strength of which he had founded his own order, the A∴A∴. Under the aegis of this new order, he was now publishing The Equinox—a hardbound encyclopedia of initiation that was to bring Crowleyanity to the world.

Fig. 16.1. Aleister Crowley in formal regalia as Baphomet, National Grand Master General Xº of Ordo Templi Orientis for Great Britain and Ireland, 1916.

With Rose now gone, Crowley, or Frater O.M., an Adeptus Exemptus of A∴A∴, gathered up young Frater Omnia Vincam, a Neophyte—terrestrially Victor Neuburg, a vegetarian and Trotskyist poet of nervous temperament—and with him absconded to Algeria. There they would undergo one of the most harrowing and profound series of events of Crowley’s magical career—the scrying of the thirty Aethyrs, which he had unsuccessfully attempted nine years before in Mexico, scrying parts of the thirtieth and twenty-ninth Aethyrs before abandoning the task. This time, however, he would endure to the end.

THE AEON OF HORUS

Just as Dee and Kelly’s visions followed a period of spiritual turbulence and confusion—the beginning of the Reformation—Crowley’s visions followed the Victorian era’s obsession with spiritualism and Theosophy, as well as Crowley’s own announcement of a new era of human spiritual development.

In 1904, while honeymooning in Cairo with his new bride, Rose, the twenty-eight-year-old Crowley had received The Book of the Law from a disincarnate entity named Aiwass. Prior to this event, Crowley had slid into a jaded Buddhist phase, and grown bored of magic, instead choosing to occupy himself with the various distractions of mundane reality. In the middle of the honeymoon, however, which included a stay in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid, Rose Crowley (née Rose Kelly) had uncharacteristically asked Crowley to show her some magic, and he had responded by performing the Bornless Ritual, a rite from the Greek Magical Papyri that purports to invoke one’s holy guardian angel, under whose authority one may control lower elementals and spirits. Rose soon entered a light trance and told Crowley, “They are waiting for you.”¹ Crowley identified the source of the message as the Egyptian god Horus, and was led by Rose to the Boulaq Museum, where she correctly picked out a funerary stele depicting Horus—the Stele of Revealing—which carried the exhibit number 666. Following this, Crowley claims to have been visited by Aiwass, a dark and hooded figure who delivered to him the three chapters of The Book of the Law over the next three days. According to Crowley, this was not a channeled writing, but was spoken out loud by an actual external being that stood behind his left shoulder and gave dictation while Crowley hurriedly transcribed in longhand. The original edition of the book would be titled Liber L, with Crowley identifying this L as the central angelic character in Dee’s Holy Table, “the sacred letter in the Holy Twelvefold Table which forms the triangle that stabilizes the universe.”²

Despite the dramatic nature of its reception, Crowley would forget about the book—which totals only 220 lines—until a few years later, when he discovered it in his attic while looking for his skis, underneath, of all things, his copies of Dee and Kelly’s angelic Watchtowers. He would later come to view the deciphering and propagation of the book, and the Thelemic philosophy he extrapolated from its contents, as the central goal of his existence; toward the end of his life, he would conclude that the transmission of The Book of the Law, and the proof he claimed it gave for the existence of beyond-human intelligences, was the one thing he had done in his life that truly mattered, the one legacy he wanted to leave for humanity.

Believing that the book’s reception showed that he had forged his own link with the Secret Chiefs that had inspired the original Golden Dawn Cipher Manuscripts—the true and invisible Rosicrucian order—Crowley would build up his new A∴A∴ to replace the Golden Dawn. This new order would carry a far more rigorous standard of training, and initiate students all the way up to the Supernals instead of only Tiphareth. He would later inherit the mantle of the Ordo Templi Orientis, a German para-Masonic order teaching its own brand of sexual magic, and reconstruct it as a vehicle for bringing The Book of the Law to a wider audience, along the lines of a standard Masonic social fraternity, rather than a training ground for adepts.

Like the earlier Rosicrucian manifestos, Crowley believed that The Book of the Law announced a new era for humanity. Instead of the numerous tribal gods of Earth, which Crowley thought represented various aspects of the natural world or of human sexuality, The Book of the Law posits three gods: Nuit, or infinite space; Hadit, or the infinitely small point; and the product of their synthesis, Ra-Hoor-Khuit, Horus, the Crowned and Conquering Child, who, among many other things, represents the state of consciousness of the mass of humanity that will dominate the coming two thousand years. Rather than matriarchal, as in the prehistoric period, or patriarchal, as in the era of recorded civilization, the new image of humanity would be childlike, dual gendered, characterized by a liberation of the species from its ancient oppressive structures, by the granting of Promethean and “magical” powers to the masses, and by humanity nonetheless embodying a generally infantile, self-obsessed, destructive nature and smashing everything in its wake, in the manner of the standard two-year-old child. Now, over a century later, it is hard not to see the validity of The Book of the Law upon spending any more than a few minutes either online or in the street, anywhere in the modern world.

This was to be a formula of emancipation from previous social constraints, but might also destroy the planet itself. World Wars I and II, the atomic bomb, the space race, AIDS, the internet, and globalization would all come to demonstrate the volatile force and fire of the Aeon of Horus, and there are still just under nineteen whole centuries of the Aeon to go.

As time progressed, however, and Crowley continued to elaborate his Thelemic religion and magical system, he would impishly drop hints relating—though not necessarily outright identifying—the entities of The Book of the Law with those of Revelation, particularly in his New Comment, written around 1921, during the Abbey of Thelema period in Cefalu.

Nuit states in The Book of the Law, I:22, that she is also known by “a secret name.” In his New Comment to I:12, Crowley states that his vision of the twelfth Aethyr revealed that this secret name is Babalon.³ Babalon is Crowley’s name (in the angelic language) for the Whore of Babylon in Revelation, who appears as the Daughter of Fortitude in the spirit diaries.

In the same New Comment (to I:1), Crowley states of Hadit that “Had is Sad, Set, Satan, Sat,”⁴ identifying Hadit with Satan outright, as well as the sun and the phallus. “Liber Samekh,” a new version of the Bornless One ritual composed the same year as the New Comment, contains an invocation to “Thou Satan-Sun Hadit,” also identified as “O Lion-Serpent Sun the Beast” and as “Thou, the Saviour!” among other imagery.⁵ Hadit is also referred to as “the Snake that giveth Knowledge & Delight” in The Book of the Law,⁶ a reference to Satan as he appears in Genesis, as well as kundalini.

Ra-Hoor-Khuit (also known in other aspects as Horus, Hoor, Hoor-par-Kraat, and Heru-Ra-Ha) announces that he is the “Crowned and Conquering Child” in the first Aethyr.⁷ Although Crowley never addresses this outright, the King James text of Revelation 6:2 identifies the first horseman of the Apocalypse as “a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.”⁸ Many evangelical Christians associate the rider of the white horse with the Antichrist, who is also the “prince who is to come” or “little horn” from the book of Daniel, who emerges from the sea upon the head of the fourth Beast (these four Beasts are unified into one zootype in Revelation 13).⁹

Fig. 16.2. Albrecht Dürer, The Four Horsemen, 1498.

A particularly strident champion of this view was the turn-of-the-century Baptist pastor Clarence Larkin, who was instrumental in pop-ularizing John Nelson Darby’s dispensationalism in America, whose somewhat manic charts of the apocalypse timeline are still in use and who would influence prominent evangelical leaders to come, particularly Billy Graham and the authors Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye.¹⁰ As Christ also appears on a white horse in Revelation 19, Larkin suspects that this prior white horse is a mockery, and thus Antichrist. Darby himself saw the first horseman as a terrestrial conqueror establishing the way for the Christ to come, again echoing the “little horn.”¹¹ Darby elsewhere states that the white horse simply denotes victorious imperial power, either of Christ or the Antichrist.¹²

A white horse appeared to Dee and Kelly on January 12, 1584, where it was identified with Christ’s arrival in Revelation 19. The very next day, Uriel gave a prophecy of the coming Antichrist or crowned and conquering “little horn,” an arrogant prince who cruelly lays waste to his kingdoms; the placement of this figure next to the white horse of Christ in the angelic sessions suggests a connection. A conquerer on a white horse, holding a spear, also appeared to Dee and Kelly immediately after the wife-swapping incident, followed by the vision of the Daughter of Fortitude, Babalon. Larkin’s later interpretation that the first white horse of Revelation represents Antichrist, and the second Christ, also echoes the delivery of divine instructions in pairs during the angelic conversations—a corrupted instruction superceded by a perfected instruction, as with the lamen, Sigillum, Holy Table, and pages of Liber Loagaeth.

This interpretation rather strongly suggests that the Aeon of Horus is an analogue of the reign of the conquering Antichrist prophesied in Daniel and Revelation—that Ra-Hoor-Khuit, the child of Babalon and the Beast, is the Antichrist who will destroy not only Christianity, but all major world religions.¹³ Crowley’s own identification of himself with the Beast 666 as a central task of establishing the Aeon of Horus supports this reading, as does Jack Parsons’s later identification with the Antichrist in order to establish the reign of Babalon (see chapter 17, “In the Shadow of the Cross”).

The first horseman is often referred to as “Pestilence,” although this role is sometimes conflated with the fourth or pale horse. Crowley may have been wryly hinting at this in his 1925 “Tunis Comment” to The Book of the Law, in which he states that all who discuss the book will be shunned as “centres of pestilence.”¹⁴

Perhaps most blatantly, the very association of the original title of the book—Liber L—with the Holy Table suggests that it is an extension of Dee and Kelly’s apocalypse machine.

THE VISION AND THE VOICE

The doctrine of The Book of the Law is short and succinct, meant to be read and digested by the reader on their own terms. It would be elaborated on by several more books received around 1907, which together make up The Holy Books of Thelema. 1909’s The Vision and the Voice then takes The Holy Books and builds up a fully fledged cosmology around them.

The angelic workings of The Vision and the Voice were conducted while crossing the Algerian desert with Neuburg in 1909, with Crowley calling one Aethyr per day using the nineteenth call and then entering a trance state to scry, with Neuburg recording Crowley’s spoken descriptions of what he was seeing. As a scrying implement, Crowley employed a “great golden topaz (set in a Calvary cross of six squares, made of wood, painted vermillion) engraved with a Greek cross of five squares charged with the Rose of forty-nine petals.”¹⁵ In order to assure that a full written record was left of the Aethyrs, Crowley writes that he purposefully resisted going into full trance, instead choosing to maintain enough presence of mind that he could conceptualize his experiences as “astral” mystery plays, to be recorded by Neuburg, rather than pure meditative absorption. To prepare himself, Crowley cleared his mind by repeating a Muslim mantra from Surah 112 of the QuÊ¿ran, while walking across the desert to create states of physical exhaustion, so that his body would not disturb his mind. This mantra was recited 1,001 times per day, with each recitation followed by a prostration.

Crowley and Neuburg approached scrying the Aethyrs as a progressive series of visionary initiations into the true nature of the Aeon of Horus, and while The Book of the Law announces the New Aeon, its gods, and its laws, The Vision and the Voice shows the background workings and cosmic shifts behind its advent, and firmly establishes its theology in relation to prior religious systems. The visions related in the Aethyrs elucidate an immense amount of material from the Western esoteric tradition, combining imagery from the books of Genesis, Exodus, Daniel, Maccabees, Revelation, the Gospels, and others; Gnosticism; Vajrayana Buddhism; Qabalah; the various Mediterranean mystery cults; Islam; Dee and Kelly’s work; Solomonic magic; Freemasonry; Rosicrucianism; the Golden Dawn; and Crowley’s nascent Thelemic religion, forming a grand overview of thousands of years of Western religious history.

This is markedly different from the use of the Aethyrs outlined by Dee in Liber scientiae, where they are assigned to zodiacal regions of the sky and the various geographical divisions of the earth. Crowley instead ascribed the Aethyrs to the Tree of Life, and interpreted their contents through the lens of the Golden Dawn’s Qabalistic correspondences. In particular, Crowley’s Aethyrs are concerned with the sephira Binah, represented by Babalon, and Chokmah, represented by the Beast 666, also called Chaos.

Multiple mappings of the Aethyrs to the Tree exist—one proposed by the Golden Dawn, in which the Aethyrs map to the ten sephiroth in the worlds of Yetzirah, Briah, and Atziluth successively,^*75 and another schema that is mentioned in the ninth Aethyr, after Crowley passes the Abyss, in which the Aethyrs are arranged as a flaming sword descending through the sephiroth,^*76 an image that likely corresponds with both the flaming sword in Genesis 3:24 as well as the description of the final, wrathful form of Christ, in Revelation 1:16, who appears with a sharp two-edged sword emerging from his mouth. On the other hand, any one-to-one mapping of the sephiroth to the Aethyrs is contradicted by the angel of the twelfth Aethyr (below the Abyss), who explains that they interpenetrate, but do not directly correspond, and that further-more the Aethyrs are a deeper font of initiated wisdom than the Tree of Life, as they contain the secrets of the aeons and of Thelema itself.¹⁶

Crowley’s progress through the Aethyrs took on the pattern of a Golden Dawn–style temple initiation, but rather than being conducted in a Masonic lodge, the initiating officers were the beings he met in the Aethyrs themselves—the Governors of each Aethyr and their attendant servitors, whose names were given to Dee and Kelly along with the calls in the spirit actions. Likewise, each Aethyr opens with the vision of a sigil or “admission badge,” much as were employed in the Golden Dawn temple initiations, followed by a veil that is rent to reveal the vision of the Aethyr, another Golden Dawn procedure. Studying the Golden Dawn initiations, particularly the Neophyte initiation, will help make sense of the Aethyrs, as will understanding that Crowley saw this working as his initiation into the 8°=3^□ degree of the Golden Dawn (assigned to Binah) and therefore into the Third Order, composed not of terrestrial individuals but of disincarnate adepts, those who have crossed the Abyss and made it to Binah—the true Invisible College—whom he meets after crossing the tenth Aethyr and entering the City of the Pyramids. In doing so, Crowley himself was now spiritually prepared to remanifest the Golden Dawn system on his own terms.

As the visions are concerned with Crowley’s initiation into Binah, the central protagonist of the Aethyrs is the Whore of Babylon, whose name Crowley reworked as BABALON in the angelic language, who is the personification of Binah within the visions. This is the same being that appears in Revelation and as the Daughter of Fortitude in the final Dee and Kelly sessions; Crowley, according to his Confessions, had read Casaubon before embarking on his Algerian trip with Neuburg. Babalon’s sigil, which also became the seal of the A∴A∴, is the central heptagon from the Sigillum Dei Aemeth. The overall narrative of the visions is of Crowley’s progressive sanctification, illumination, and annihilation within the sphere of Binah/Babalon. Completing this process would grant him the grade of Magister Templi, 8°=3^□ in the A∴A∴, a “Third Order” grade that was only theoretical in the Golden Dawn; hence, Crowley believed that he received his initiation on the “inner planes” from the Governors of the thirty Aethyrs, rather than human initiators.

Simultaneously to the initiation of the candidate Crowley himself, the Aethyrs show the “changing of the guard” of the temple officers, much as a Masonic lodge promotes and rotates its officers at the end of each Masonic year. Golden Dawn officers, who followed the Masonic style, were meant to represent the Egyptian gods and their regency over the universe. As signified by the reception of The Book of the Law, and demonstrated tangibly in the Aethyrs, the role of the Hierophant (holding the place of the Worshipful Master in Masonry) now passes from Osiris (as it was during Crowley’s temple initiations) to Horus (as described in The Book of the Law, I:49). The ramification is a corresponding shift in the order of the universe.

For Crowley, this was about more than a political shake-up in a tiny para-Masonic body (or his own power grab); it was about the universal and historical forces that the officers in the order represented. Importantly, Osiris, for Crowley, is represented by Christ, Christianity, and the cult of the “Dying God,” while Horus is an analogue of Antichrist, signaling the end of the Christian era. As such, one possible reading of Crowley may be that he was consciously fulfilling the angels’ plan of initiating the Apocalypse and the end of history, by embodying the forces of the Beast, Babalon, and Antichrist, as an effort toward catalyzing the events of Revelation and therefore triggering the inevitable return and millennial rule of Christ.

This would have been in keeping with Crowley’s upbringing among the Plymouth Brethren, John Nelson Darby’s fundamentalist, evangelical splinter group from the Church of England, and Crowley’s early absorption of Darby’s dispensationalism—the belief that God advances his plan for humanity through distinct eras or cycles (“progressive revelation”), and that God’s mode of revealing himself and his expectations for humanity change in each time period. During each of these epochs, Darby taught, Earth is administered to and maintained by human agents as a test of faithfulness toward God’s dispensation, culminating in the Rapture, in which Christ’s elect will literally disappear from Earth at the time of the Second Coming, leaving the unsaved behind.

Crowley, who was raised in the even more severe Exclusive Brethren subsect of the Plymouth Brethren, was not allowed to read any literature except the Bible until he left for university, and was physically and psychologically abused at his evangelical boarding school—including an incident at the age of twelve in which he was put in solitary confinement for almost a year over a false accusation of sodomy, damaging his kidneys. Crowley, like Nietzsche, would understandably come to see Christianity as the root of all evil and the spiritual torment of humanity, and identify himself, even from his earliest memories, with the entities of Revelation, specifically the Beast 666.¹⁷

As soon as he was free at university, Crowley would rebel through dandyism, decadent art, prostitution, homosexuality, drugs, ceremonial magic, demonology, writing extreme pornography, making direct published attacks on Christianity (as in The Sword of Song), and an obsession with the literary character of Satan as the adversary to the spiritual stultification he had experienced as a boy. Yet in doing so, he never strayed far from the spiritual imprint of his youth. Even his new religion of Thelema, which emerged from his involvement with the Golden Dawn and subsequent reception of The Book of the Law, carries deep similarities to the dogma of the Exclusive Brethren, such as the emphasis on primacy of text over clergy, extreme discipline, and, of course, dispensationalist cosmology. Crowley cast himself in an adversarial role to the Christianity he knew, but perhaps only in so much as to uphold it and fulfill the dispensationalist idea of human stewardship during the Great Tribulation. Indeed, Darby even used the word aion, from the original Greek, to denote a historical period of God’s dispensation.¹⁸ The term aion was in wide use in Christian Zionist circles, and appears in William E. Blackstone’s hugely popular 1908 tract Jesus is Coming.¹⁹ Blackstone was a fierce and highly politically successful campaigner for the establishment of a Jewish state,²⁰ and was later dubbed the “Father of Zionism” by the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.²¹

Understanding Crowley’s “Satanism” and antagonism to Christianity as him playing a necessary and affirming role within the broader theology and script of evangelical Christianity is crucial to assessing his work and character. Rebelling against the Christian worldview by embracing Satan is akin to rebelling against the popularity of Star Wars by putting on a Darth Vader mask. Crowley’s Thelemic religion may claim only a few thousand adherents worldwide, yet has had a disproportionate impact on Western culture; the counterculture revolutions of the sixties effectively turned many of Crowley’s more digestible ideas into the dominant culture. In this sense, Thelema might metaphorically be seen as a covert-ops division of evangelical Christianity, as it is the branch of Christianity concerned with hastening the Apocalypse by enacting and embodying the reign of Antichrist—even if this is somewhat obscured on the surface, and to lower initiates.

Crowley himself states, in his Confessions, “My falling away from grace was not occasioned by any intellectual qualms; I accepted the theology of the Plymouth Brethren. In fact, I could hardly conceive of the existence of people who might doubt it. I simply went over to Satan’s side; and to this hour I cannot tell why.”²²

As discussed in the introduction, dispensationalist ideas inspired not only Crowley but the American evangelical movement’s pursuit of intervention in the Middle East, which is explicitly concerned with enacting Revelation. And like the Brethren, modern evangelicals see the need for human agency in the stewardship of God’s plan;²³ the Left Behind series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, which are among the most read books in America, and which dramatize a dispensational version of Revelation, are a major cultural artifact of this population-wide push toward biblical literalism and its direct geopolitical enactment.

If Dee gave America its beginning, the Plymouth Brethren gave it its eschatology and apocalyptic goal . . . and as we shall see, their greatest son Edward Alexander Crowley started the final countdown. First the rituals, then the nuclear weapons.

THE BEAST 666

Much of the text of The Vision and the Voice can be seen as an example of apophatic theology or via negativa, the attempt to come to an understanding of God by stripping away all descriptions or previous attempts at perception of divinity, as by their very nature these limited human models or linguistic representations must fall far short of the truth, instead becoming blocks to direct perception or gnosis. Over the course of the Aethyrs, the symbols of not only Christianity but also other religions (including Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism) are subverted, superseded, or dramatically shown to be false perceptions of deeper truths, deeper truths that are next revealed by the guardians of the Aethyrs themselves. Many parts of The Vision and the Voice resemble The Wizard of Oz, with Crowley tearing away the masks of God and finding that the man behind the curtain is not what he seems. (Crowley’s own Liber OZ, written in 1941, likewise reveals that “there is no god but man.”)²⁴

While the thrust of The Vision and the Voice seems to be the establishment of a new spiritual narrative to come after the end of the Christian era, as colored by The Book of the Law and Crowley’s stellar Egyptian gods Nuit, Hadit, and Ra-Hoor-Khuit, it is impossible to divorce Crowley’s work from Revelation (particularly when, as discussed above, these gods are seen as at least in one sense blinds for the Whore of Babylon, Satan, and the Antichrist). There is, indeed, a more sinister current at work in the Aethyrs—not just apophatic or even antinomian, but explicitly adversarial and Satanic. Though Crowley, his human personality, and his preconceived notions about reality are being reduced to nothing but a pile of dust in Binah, this is not the end goal. In the twenty-fifth Aethyr, Crowley is given a clear spiritual mandate that he must become the human representative of the anti-logos, which is manifest as the Beast 666, Chaos, Τὸ Μέγα Θηρίον, To Mega Therion.

Christian symbolism is subjected to inversion as the Aethyrs progress: the four beasts of Daniel are replaced, Jesus and Jehovah are shown as figures of ridicule whose time has passed, the doctrine of sin and salvation is rejected, the Agnes Dei is shown to be a predatory demon, the monogram of the Jesuits is revealed as an outdated conception of the universe, and the Ichthys and even Augustinian doctrine itself are overturned by the incoming magical formula of Crowley’s Aeon of Horus. In this New Aeon, it is one’s own Will (Θελημα) that is to be done—not God’s, as was (and is) suggested in the Lord’s Prayer. Rather than Christ and the Virgin Mary, the Beast 666 and Babalon are to be the objects of worship, which are here shown as superior and holy symbols that have only been misunderstood by lower initiates. The end result is an elaborate and elegant inversion not just of the cross but of Christian doctrine itself, point by point, in which the follower is (broadly speaking) to enact Revelation, rather than the Gospel, as dogma, taking the side of the Adversary. And this is a fairly logical step forward in the angels’ quest for a world religion as unveiled in the spirit diaries—not as a fulfillment, or as a supersession of Christianity (as Crowley believed) but as a preliminary to the millennial rule of Christ, as described in Revelation 13.

To simply interpret The Vision and the Voice as revealing a new Satanic doctrine, however, is still too simplistic of a read. Like many of the spirit actions, the revelations in The Vision and the Voice operate on supernal logic—that is, through paradoxical statements. As the book is concerned with crossing the Abyss, and duality cannot exist above the Abyss because duality is a quality of manifestation and the Supernals are unmanifest, the Aethyrs are saturated with nondual statements, the resolution of dualities into singularities and self-contradicting symbols. For Crowley, an idea or symbol is only true inasmuch as it contains its own opposite, as this implies it is a complete concept. Good and evil, Christ and Antichrist, and many, many more apparent contradictions are wryly twisted, conflagrated, inverted, and dissolved throughout the text, which requires the high registers of Qabalistic analysis to fully appreciate; what appears to be evil in the world of samsara, Crowley assures us, is actually good from the perspective of absolute reality, and vice versa.

In addition, the cosmology of The Vision and the Voice reveals that the universe is not a monad, as Dee thought, but an infinite number of equal monads suspended in infinite space. Crowley’s cosmology instead replaces the monad with the formula zero equals two, in which existence is seen as manifest duality, and posits that by uniting and thereby destroying all apparent opposites we may liberate ourselves from them and attain to the void of emptiness, the Qabalistic zero, which is the only real “truth.” Consequently, all representatives of the monad and of monotheism—particularly Jehovah himself—are overturned and destroyed in the Aethyrs, to be replaced with the Thelemic trinity of infinite space. What is progressively revealed is both Christic and Antichristic, and a strange syzygy of both, and yet is also something wholly different—a new, stellar religion that harkens back to Egypt while it stretches across the cosmos, that feels both ancient and yet hyperfuturistic, even eternal. A hypertext to all religions in all times and places that simultaneously inverts and annihilates all of them.

Though the Aethyrs destroyed the remaining vestiges of the man Aleister Crowley, his quest to fit himself to the role of the Beast 666—that is, of becoming a human embodiment of that abstract force—would be fulfilled between 1915 and 1918 with his assumption of the 9°=2^□ grade of Magus.²⁵ During this time, Crowley largely abandoned the Golden Dawn system of Masonic, Qabalistic, and ceremonial magic in favor of the sexual magic of the OTO, which was transmitted to him by the German industrialist Theodor Reuss, another SRIA alumni (and outcast), who headed the OTO before its leadership passed to Crowley himself.

Crowley’s life in this period was preoccupied by constant testing of the OTO’s sexual methods with prostitutes, and Crowley’s growing fixation on finding a “Scarlet Woman” who would be as capable of embodying the force of Babalon as Crowley was of embodying the Beast 666. This Scarlet Woman, once located, would assist Crowley in the process of his own further initiation into the sphere of Chokmah, allowing him to pronounce his Word Thelema, which would form a new guiding principle for the world and shape it in his image.^*77 This was likely the most unhinged period of Crowley’s life, in which he immersed himself in addiction, horror, degradation, disease, and other such “mysteries of filth,” crescendoing with his establishment of the Abbey of Thelema at Cefalu, Italy, where he and a band of true believers experimented with magic (including Enochian), perverse sex, hard drugs, and mind control as a full-time occupation, until even Mussolini tired of them and expelled them from the country. (Il Duce may have been particularly annoyed with Crowley as the dictator also believed that he was the Antichrist.)²⁶

The Abbey period claimed the life of the twenty-three-year-old Oxford student Raoul Loveday, likely after drinking contaminated mountain stream water (though his widow told the press his death was due to drinking cat blood in a ritual). In another abhorrent episode, Crowley attempted to induce a goat to copulate with his current “Scarlet Woman” Leah Hirsig. When it refused to perform, Crowley took its place behind Hirsig, and afterward cut the animal’s throat, spraying the blood over Hirsig’s naked back. Hirsig is said to have next turned to the writer Mary Butts (also studying magic under Crowley) and asked, “What shall I do now?” to which Butts replied, “I’d have a bath if I were you.”^*78

In an earlier diary entry from Cefalu, which has improbably never been commented on by any of Crowley’s biographers or followers (including the generally hostile John Symonds, who also edited the diary in question), Crowley launches into an unhinged, ether-and-cocaine– fueled screed in which he exults in how he and Hirsig have mutually debased each other, which includes a passage discussing the rape and torture of his and Hirsig’s children—a five-month-old girl (who died a few months later) and a two-year-old boy.²⁷ Whether this was a druginduced, manic exercise in transgressive imagining (Crowley describes wanting to dig up and have sex with Hirsig’s deceased mother in the same passage), a coded statement (Crowley elsewhere masked references to sexual magick by describing the ritual use of orgasm, in poor taste, as “sacrificing children”), or actually occurred is impossible to verify. If it did occur, no more despicable crime can be imagined; for such a so-called man, no amount of contempt would be enough.

Many of Crowley’s modern followers, fans, and biographers have gone to extreme lengths to whitewash their hero, striving to portray Crowley as a 1960s bohemian humanist a few decades before his time, a misunderstood genius who was unfairly vilified by the press. In the final summation, however, there is no way to gloss over or excuse away Crowley’s evil. To do so would be to misread Crowley himself, even as he tells you who he is in no uncertain terms. And while Crowley’s work is brilliant, when viewed from another angle—which is, of course, the angle that most reasonable people first perceive it from—it is a wound in the world, one cutting so deep that it indeed reveals new and unglimpsed layers of reality, albeit in the same way a razor cutting through an arm to the bone does.

It would be easy to dismiss Crowley as an aberration, a failure, or as an active pawn of evil. Yet it is far more troubling to stop and consider that he simply followed his script. As Dee and Kelly’s angels put it, “The appearing and works of the devil are but of necessity.”²⁸

Of use in assessing Crowley’s role in the overall narrative of Revelation is the work of the French metaphysician René Guénon, a contemporary of Crowley’s who rejected modernity as a decayed echo of traditional and eternal wisdom, and was unilaterally critical of the Theosophist and pseudo-Masonic groups that then littered Europe (which have since disintegrated even further into what we now know as the “New Age”).

For Guénon, the true way to gnosis was through the world’s established wisdom traditions, the esoteric branches of the world’s established exoteric religions—of particular interest were Advaita Vedanta, Taoism, Platonism, esoteric Christianity, and others; he eventually converted to Sufism. Modern forms of “spirituality” divorced from their traditional roots and largely created out of the imaginations of their founders were not only false doctrines, Guénon argued, they were actually examples of counterinitiation, which instead of truly initiating an individual (furthering their psychic integration, understanding of eternal metaphysical forms and patterns, and proximity to God), took their “initiates” in the exact opposite direction, into dispersion, disintegration, nihilism, chaos, and breakdown.^*79

Counterinitiation, according to Guénon, is the nature of the modern world itself, which seems to be constructed to take us further away from ourselves at every step, into the deadening flatland of relativism rather than individual growth and progress through a real hierarchy of attainment; these counterinitiatory bodies essentially mirror the entropic course of modernity itself, rather than uniting their adherents with something higher.^*80 So ubiquitous and entrenched were such counterinitiatory attitudes and even schools that Guénon believed they would come to coalesce into an actual countertradition. This tradition, he argued, would not be primitive and unsophisticated, but would contain enough legitimate initiatory material to effectively ape the true function of tradition.^†81 It would proceed by distinct inversions of Christian symbolism, and it, itself, would comprise the reign of Antichrist. The countertradition would be concentrated in a singular individual, who would stand at the very summit of the counterhierarchy, and thereby be closest not to God but to chaos, dissolution, and hell.^‡82 Does this sound familiar?

“This being,” Guénon writes, “even if he appears in the form of a particular single human being, will really be less an individual than a symbol, and he will be as it were the synthesis of all the symbolism that has been inverted for the purposes of the ‘counter-initiation,’ and he will manifest it all the more completely in himself because he will have neither predecessor nor successor. In order to express the false carried to its extreme he will have to be so to speak ‘falsified’ from every point of view, and to be like an incarnation of falsity itself. In order that this may be possible, and by reason of his extreme opposition to the true in all its aspects, the Antichrist can adopt the very symbols of the Messiah, using them of course in an inverted sense.”²⁹

To this passage, compare not only the inversion of Christian symbols given in The Vision and the Voice, but Crowley’s document “Liber B vel Magi,” transmitted to him in 1907, which gives instructions for assuming the grade of Magus in the sphere Chokmah, which in Crowley’s case meant fully replacing his being with that of the Beast 666: “In the beginning doth the Magus speak Truth, and send forth Illusion and Falsehood to enslave the soul. . . . For the curse of His grade is that He must speak Truth, that the Falsehood thereof may enslave the souls of men.”³⁰

Such a being is not heroic, Guénon explains, but rather the most deluded of the great ranks of the deluded, so much that they are not only confused but “actually irremediably lost.” However, “if they were not so deluded they would clearly not be fulfilling a function that must be fulfilled, like every other function, so that the Divine plan may be accomplished in this world.”³¹ Even the reign of the Antichrist serves a purpose—it is essential to ending the current Manvantara (a Vedic calculation of time similar to the idea of an aeon, though much longer; 308,448,000 years as opposed to 2,000).³² Like aeons, Manvantaras are ruled over by an overseer, in this case an incarnation of Manu, the first man. With the end of the current Manvantara, according to Guénon, a new one will begin. The cosmology is broadly the same as Crowley’s, albeit using Vedic terms and timelines.

Crucially, this new era will not be brought about by the Antichrist: the role of the Antichrist is to announce a false Golden Age, which is a pure lie. Here it should be easy to see not only the Aeon of Horus (or any other supposed aeon) but all of the false Millenniums—the inevitability of Communism, the New Age, 2012, the Singularity . . . pick your own, as we never seem to run out of them. Even the end of the world as promised by Dee and Kelly’s angels for “eighty-eight” never manifested, at least not as a year. As Crowley notes in the second Aethyr, “Forecasts of the future cannot be made from Qabalistic data, which have nothing to do with terrestrial measures of time.”³³

Guénon states:

Profane people . . . have no idea what they are talking about when they announce the near approach of a “new age” as being one with which the existing humanity will be concerned. Their error, in its most extreme form, will be that of the Antichrist himself when he claims to bring the “golden age” into being through the reign of the “counter-tradition,” and when he even gives it an appearance of authenticity, purely deceitful and ephemeral though it be, by means of a counterfeit of the traditional idea of the Sanctum Regnum.³⁴

It is this false Millennium that is of necessity conquered and overcome by the Second Coming and true millennial kingdom of Christ that, for Guénon at least, is the real end of the Manvantara.

In this sense, we may take Crowley at his word that he is the Beast 666—at least a terrestrial representation thereof—and that he truly has come to proclaim a New Aeon for humanity; only that, as a good Magus, he has spoken truth to enslave with a lie, and that as a good Plymouth Brother, he has played his dispensationalist role and lied—even become the embodiment of the Lie—to prepare the way for the Truth.

CLEAN-UP IN AISLE NINETY-THREE

If Crowley carries with him such a long shadow of horror, why bother studying him at all?

Crowley’s transgressions are indeed disturbing, and it is important to show them plainly rather than engage with the personality cult and counterculture industry that has grown up around him. In addition to the incidents described above, there are Crowley’s rather cowardly refusal to help several men trapped by an avalanche during his Kanchenjunga expedition; his decades of cocaine, ether, and heroin addiction and the resultant ugly interpersonal behaviors these drugs engender; his often sociopathic treatment of women, students, and hired help; his extreme racism and anti-Semitism (including a line in his Magical and Philosophical Commentaries, III:11, in which he calls Jews “the parasites of man,” which has been deleted from later editions), and so on . . . and so on . . . and so on. Crowley, like Nietzsche, made it his lifelong project to reject Christian morality; he states, in the same Commentaries, III:20, that the ethics of The Book of the Law are “those of Evolution itself.”

Crowley was a flawed and often malevolent human being—not in a “gee shucks” way, but in a willful way. This is something he shares in common with many Catholic and Protestant clergy, Tibetan lamas, Hindu gurus, and other religious representatives who become corrupted and abuse their power. Even the greatest initiates may fall—as, one might argue, Crowley progressively did following his work in Algeria, particularly as he entered further into his own reality tunnel in which he was the sole prophet and central figure of a New Aeon, strayed further and further away from contact with other magicians who could be considered mentors or peers, surrounded himself with sycophants, and cultivated addictions to hard drugs. Indeed, some have speculated that Crowley’s adventures in Algeria—particularly entering the triangle and allowing himself to be possessed by the demon Coronzom in ZAX, the tenth Aethyr, which is described below—resulted in permanent possession, and were causally responsible for Crowley’s fall.

This does not categorically invalidate Crowley’s work, particularly The Vision and the Voice and earlier writing, which came prior to this spiritual error. It means that, like the work of any historical thinker, Crowley’s prolific output must be approached with surgical clarity to separate what is of value from that which is not—and there is much that is of value. In many cases, this means fully severing Crowley the man (and even Crowley the symbol) from Crowley’s technical writing on magic. Indeed, one of my many goals in writing this book has been properly placing magic in historical context, and liberating it from Crowley’s cult of personality (as well as the infinitely tedious “Satanism” of those who emulated him, like Anton LaVey), without discarding his technical contributions.

Aleister Crowley died long ago, as have his most prominent students. If the Western magical tradition as a whole is to advance, it must put Crowley’s work and failings in proper context—and then move on. The key to doing this is understanding that Crowley was not exemplifying the Western tradition, but that he instead created an inverted, shadow version of it.

Ultimately, Crowley is a central figure of the overall story of Dee’s magic and the angels’ architecture of Apocalypse. His study, for historical purposes, is therefore necessary. And as Carl Jung would counsel us, it is only by unflinchingly bringing the dark side into conscious awareness that we may grasp the truth, of history no less than our own selves; W. B. Yeats, Crowley’s senior in the Golden Dawn (who despised the Beast), took the Latin motto (from Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine) of Demon est Deus Inversus, “the demon is the inverse of God.” Only by facing darkness do we come to understand the light.

Here, then, is the inversion of the light.

THE AETHYRS THEMSELVES

Crowley and Neuburg’s work in the Aethyrs is summarized below, in order to complete the historical narrative of Dee and Kelly’s work, but not as a substitute for reading The Vision and the Voice. The titles of each section are taken from Crowley.³⁵

Aethyr 30, TEX

The Exordium of the Equinox of the Gods.

The universe is shown as a giant, crystal cube shaped like Harpocrates, the silent form of Horus, encompassed by a sphere. The beginning of the Aeon of Horus is announced, an event of such violence that it will shake the foundations of the universe, plunging it into darkness at the coming of the Terrible Child, who is here female (suggesting the daughter of Babalon, who appears in the ninth Aethyr).

The symbolism follows Revelation, including the opening of seals and the appearance of the twenty-four seniors. Yet here, a new world is beginning as the old one is ending. Revelation is only the end of the Old Aeon, to be replaced with the formula of the New. This new formula is announced by four archangels that guard the four corners of the universe, who open books to reveal the formula written in the angelic language. These angels represent the Tetragrammaton, as well as the four lower sephiroth; a fifth is implied but not shown. (In the twenty-eighth Aethyr, however, they are told that there is now no fifth angel—only Coronzom, and dispersion, perhaps replacing Annael as the angel of the world, as mentioned in Liber primus. Coronzom, the name of Satan in the spirit diaries, is here changed by Crowley to Choronzon so that the Hebrew enumerates to 333. Coronzom is thus the correct spelling in Enochian, with Choronzon being a transliteration into Hebrew characters.)

It is announced that the Father seeks a new bride to replace Babalon, the fallen and defiled woman. This invokes the Tetragrammaton, YHVH, by which the universe is renewed; the new Tetragrammaton that here must be formed is not only the completion of the initiation of the man Aleister Crowley, but also the establishment of the Aeon of Horus.^*83

More broadly, the vision of TEX suggests that the spiritual sights for humanity have shifted. Where once the goal was the attainment of Tiphareth (corresponding to “salvation” and represented by YHShVH, Christ), mankind must now make the harrowing journey across the Abyss to Binah, represented by Babalon. And while humanity has previously relied on the LVX formula—meaning seeking the light, as represented by the sun—it now must master the NOX formula of “darkness.” Yet NOX is not darkness in the sense of the absence of the sun’s light. It is the darkness of space, which is the concentrated light of infinite stars and galaxies, a light so strenuous that it cannot be perceived by man. To make the journey to the stars, mankind first needs a revolution in spirituality—and, at last, to be able to see beyond the shell of the individual ego.^†84

Aethyr 29, RII

The Disruption of the Aeon of Osiris.

Here, we meet the four living creatures—man, eagle, bull, and lion—who surround the Throne in Revelation, and who also correspond to the four elements. They are confused, frightened, and disoriented, for the formula of the Old Aeon has been abrogated—the old universe has been destroyed by the force of time (Saturn, Binah, Babalon)—and the New Aeon terrifies them, as the equilibrium of the universe has been disrupted. The Chaos (Chokmah, the Beast) that surrounds them, however, is only the “skeleton of a new truth,” with the formula of the New Aeon as yet to be worked out. The messiah, or Horus, is also shown as a child growing in the womb of its mother, Binah, in whose bosom he is crucified.

Aethyr 28, BAG

The Vision of the Dawn of the Aeon of Horus (Atu XVII).

The formula of the Aeon of Horus is explained as the collapsing of dualities into nothingness—as Crowley later put it, zero equals two. Binah is invoked, and Crowley is given a foreshadowing of the Abyss he must cross in the tenth Aethyr. He must pass the dual ordeals of attaining knowledge and conversation of the holy guardian angel and crossing the Abyss (and therefore his utter destruction) if he is to attain to Babalon in Binah, and he can in no way achieve this by the use of his intellect. Furthermore, the four Watchtowers are shown to be within Chesed—that is, below the Abyss, representing manifest reality. They are next folded up and subsumed within Binah.

Aethyr 27, ZAA

The Vision of the Initiation of Hecate (Atu XIV). The Redemption of the Woman of Witchcraft by Love.

In this vision, several aspects of the Goddess appear—Nuit, Diana Trivia, Artemis—resolving into Hecate, who appears with her dog Cerberus, and stirs a cauldron in which appears the forty-nine-petalled rose from the floor of the Golden Dawn Vault of the Adepti, also signifying the forty-nine calls. Her son, who is to be a Magus, will initiate the Aeon of Horus—a foreshadowing of Crowley’s attainment of the grade of Magus beginning in 1915. Further, it is stated that the Watchtowers and the Aethyrs must be reconciled, perhaps fulfilling the long-standing quest of “squaring the circle.” Hecate’s cauldron is revealed to be a lower reflection of the Cup of Babalon,^*85 which she does not understand; she offers up pearls, representing Masters of the Temple, and a dragon soon arises from the cauldron, plunging the scrying stone into darkness before Hecate aspires to Binah, and concludes by uttering a ciphered word of the Aeon.

Aethyr 26, DES

The Slave-Gods Superseded. (The Vision of Atu XX, the Stele.) The Vision of the Stele of Revealing, Abolishing the Aeon of the Slave-Gods.

The cults of Jehovah and of Jesus are here disintegrated, and give way to the cult of Thelema—as symbolized by the Stele of Revealing, the Egyptian artifact that Aleister and Rose Crowley located in the Cairo Museum at the time of the reception of The Book of the Law. It is revealed that Jehovah is a representation of the qlipha of Chesed (i.e., is the Gnostic demiurge) and that his hold on the world was broken by Christ, a representation of Tiphareth—but that neither of them even reaches to the Abyss, let alone Binah.

Jesus, who here appears with an eagle’s head,^*86 utters the shocking pronouncement that “there is no sin, and there is no salvation”—he knows this truth, but keeps silent about it, for if it gets out, nobody will care about him. As such, he is an object of worship only for those still lost in the world of Māyā, not adepts, and is the accursed child of the elements, not their father; he himself prays to Binah and Chokmah, but as they are beyond the intellect, of which he is part, it goes unheard; he despairs that though he hears all prayers, none will hear his prayer. Jesus is being progressively disintegrated by the advance of human consciousness, and humanity is anguished at the loss of its ideal; the image of Christ is instead to be replaced with the new Thelemic trinity of Nuit, Hadit, and Ra-Hoor-Khuit. The blood of Christ and the bloodshed of the Christian era is absorbed by the earth, in preparation for growing new life—fertilizer for the New Aeon. The curse of the Old Aeon, and the doctrine of sin and salvation, are now overcome in the New.

The following four Aethyrs depict the four kerubs or elemental guardians at Crowley’s initiation, which also echo the four living creatures that appear in Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation. They correspond to the modes of utterance in Crowley’s later Star Ruby ritual.

Aethyr 25, VTI

The Path of Teth. (Atu XI. The Fire-Kerub in the Initiation.) The Vision of the Fruit of the Great Work of the Beast 666. The Lion.

This Aethyr unveils the first form of the Beast 666, who appears as a lion, the fire kerub of the south.

Four kerubic angels representing Babalon, Death, Jehovah/Jesus, and the Beast 666 appear; the Beast devours Death and Jehovah, and then has his mouth closed by Babalon, as in the Strength tarot card. The Beast 666 himself, it is revealed, is the son of Set/Pan, or Satan, the Red Dragon, and the “woman clothed with the sun” in Revelation 12—a disturbing image indeed if the biblical passage is read with this in mind. Angels announce with trumpets and spears that the world is at an end, and the universe and all angels and gods in it are shown as dust motes in the eye of the Beast, who swallows up the lower sephiroth and paths. The Beast is here revealed as having the soul of Horus and the body of the lion-headed serpent of Gnosticism—Ialdabaoth, the Demiurge, potentially relating to the beings seen by Dee and Kelly during the reception of the Tablet of Earth. This imagery—snakes, trumpets, and fire—may also relate to the raising of kundalini, which arises as a serpent of fire, destroys the individual yogi’s universe, and is accompanied by trumpet sounds heard internally.³⁶

The Beast, who is known as Chaos, also progresses toward Binah and is ridden by Babalon, the Scarlet Woman. Crowley himself is to be the avatar of this being—the Beast 666, armed with all of the secrets of magick (Crowley’s spelling, used to differentiate operative magic from stage magic) as possessed by the A∴A∴ and OTO—though he is not yet fully initiated. In the wake of the Aeon of Horus he initiates, the “worldly Fire” will be purged.³⁷ The Beast is now the logos, rather than Christ; its voice is as a tremendous, martial roaring, which is somehow also articulate. Crowley must fully identify himself with the Beast-as-logos, and to do so must come to bear the sins of the entire world. The Beast now departs; its tail shows endless houses, temples, towns, wars, planets, and much more, and from the tuft at the end of it, it sprouts new universes and galaxies. Lastly, a foreshadowing of the Aeon of Ma’at, which will supersede that of Horus, is given.

Fig. 16.4. Gustave Doré, The Crowned Virgin: A Vision of John, 1866, depicting the “woman clothed with the sun” and Red Dragon from Revelation 12.

Aethyr 24, NIA

The Rose. (The Woman of Atu XIV, Minister of Babalon; the Water-Kerub in the Initiation.) The First Kiss of the Lady of Initiation.

Babalon, the consort of the Beast, here appears in the form of the woman in the Temperance or Art card of the tarot. Babalon here hints at the secrets of sex magic and is the water kerub of the west. The Aethyr is saturated with Venus and rose imagery.

Crowley will be drawn across the Abyss and his personality annihilated in Binah. To do so, he must fold up all ten sephiroth of the Tree into a single star (as in “Every man and woman is a star” and “One Star in Sight”; this is the starlight of the ajna chakra and the spark of the Pleroma spoken of in Gnosticism), which in turn must be annihilated into the infinitely small point represented by Hadit, raw consciousness itself, the point of view or Atman. In doing so, the entire manifested universe will be extinguished, as its perfect play or lila is no longer needed as a drama to initiate the seeker.

Several alchemical, Rosicrucian, Golden Dawn, and Thelemic formulae are given in Latin, centering around the letters TARO, itself the magical formulae of the tarot, by the use of which Crowley is told he can do any magic, white or black. Crowley is now drawn into a rose, becoming enraptured with it.

Aethyr 23, TOR

The Kerubim of Earth and Air. (Minor Officers in the Initiation to 8°=3^□.) The Vision of the Interplay and Identity of Earth and Air.

The two remaining kerubim are introduced: the Bull for earth and the Eagle for air, who are complementary. With the preceding two kerubim, they make up the four kerubs of the New Aeon—lion, woman, bull, and eagle—that replace the four living creatures of the previous aeon, being lion, man, ox, and eagle. The primary differences here are the replacement of man with woman, and of ox with bull, suggesting the reincorporation of sexuality into religion within the New Aeon, rather than its exclusion as “sinful,” a formula of the Black Brotherhood. (An ox is a bull that has been castrated to make it a docile and servile work animal, an apt metaphor for the effect of antisexual religions on humanity.)

Aethyr 22, LIN

The Forty-Nine–fold Table. (First Appearance of the Crowned and Conquering Child to the Exempt Adept as in the Pastos.) The Vision of the Rose, the Heart of BABALON, and of the Birth of the Universe.

The Aethyr opens with the second seven-by-seven table given to Dee and Kelly by the angels, the magic square from which the names of the angels beneath the heptagon on the Sigillum Dei Aemeth were taken—these being the planetary angels directly beneath the heptagon, the Daughters and Sons of Light, and their Daughters and Sons. The square is surrounded by gods, angels, and elementals, from highest to lowest. Crowley looks further into the square, and notes that every single letter of the table itself contains forty-nine more letters, each in the alphabet of Honorius from Agrippa. The angel tells Crowley:

As there are forty-nine letters in the tablet, so are there forty-nine kinds of cosmos in every thought of God. And there are forty-nine interpretations of every cosmos, and each interpretation is manifested in forty-nine ways. Thus also are the calls forty-nine, but to each call there are forty-nine visions. And each vision is composed of forty-nine elements, except in the tenth Aethyr, and that hath forty-two.³⁸

Crowley, taking the form of a winged egg and surrounded by angels who melt onto its surface as liquid light, touches the tablet and is enwrapped by all of the names of God, entering samadhi “behind” the table—as the table is a veil for the infinite. Returning to himself, he next gives the LVX and NOX formulae, and perceives his inner soul-star as his true self. The table, which is made of pure light, sweeps everything away, and the thundering voice of the aeon resounds as one continuous “Amen.”

Crowley is next entombed in the Pastos of the vault of Christian Rosenkreutz (from not only the Golden Dawn but the Rosicrucian manifestos themselves), recapitulating his Adeptus Minor initiation in the Golden Dawn—the traditional Golden Dawn vault itself is of seven sides, containing the Rosy Cross and the heptagram seal of Babalon, the heptagram from the Sigillum Dei, which itself is constructed from the Sevenfold Table; this demonstrates a consistent thread of symbolism running through Liber iuratus, Dee, Rosicrucianism, the Golden Dawn, and Thelema. Here Crowley hears the voice of Horus, who bids him to partake in the glory of the New Aeon. In the original ceremony, the candidate found his initiator within the Pastos, but here, Crowley himself is entombed within it.

Fig. 16.5. The Holy Sevenfold Table, in Dee’s hand. From MS. Sloane 3188.

Yet now Crowley is expelled from the Aethyr by the Sevenfold Table, for he has made the mistake of trying to rationalize the vision. Only by the sevenfold word ARARITA, symbolizing the seven planets, will he be able to overcome the intellect and attain further. He now returns to the world and sees it for what it is—sorrowful—just as the Buddha did. This again suggests Saturn, Binah, the passage of time that turns all to dust.

Aethyr 21, ASP

Ether. (The Hierophant Prepares the Candidate.) The Vision of the Ineluctable Destiny.

Proceeding through an empty, windswept expanse, with shadows of angels passing over, Crowley makes his way to an “avenue of pillars,” at the end of which is a throne supported by two sphinxes, all in black marble. Upon the throne sits an invisible figure, representing Fate, from whom all the desolation of the Aethyr comes. The figure communicates with Crowley using a rapid series of tastes that Crowley translates into Hebrew letters using Qabalistic correspondences, revealing what appears to be a prophecy that Crowley will return health to the earth by breaking the hold of sexual repression.

Crowley is meeting God “face-to-face”; God is also acting as the Hierophant in his initiation. The face of God here echoes the Qabalistic conception of the Greater and Lesser Countenances (as famously drawn by Eliphas Levi), or the beginning of the Upanishads, in which God longs to behold his countenance in the Abyss.

Using the air dagger (the elemental tool of air), Crowley attempts to cut the eyelids off the God’s three eyes, that he may open them and destroy the universe as Shiva did. This is fruitless, as Crowley must use the dagger of penance, not the air dagger, and the dagger of penance must be sharpened by ordeal.

Crowley is confronting God, but instead of a holy and glorious image, he is faced with an “Abomination of Desolation.”^*87 All in the world proceeds from this god, but none go to him, and “only those who accept nothing from me can bring anything to me.”³⁹ Yet Crowley soon realizes that this is not God, who speaks only through silence, but is instead the Ape of Thoth, that babbles to speak for God and mocks him by so doing. Yet this babble is also the pulse of his heart and the sound of his breath. This represents the voice of the mind—perhaps even the autonomous bodily functions that become deafening to the advanced meditator—that gets in the way of the perception of the truth. The silencing of this babbling marks the passage to Briah, according to James Eshelman, as it shows the silencing of the mind.⁴⁰

Yet Crowley is pushed back and expelled, because he cannot prove that he is of high enough grade to claim the vision. An angel expels him back into the world, now that he has “gazed upon the horror of the loneliness of the First;”⁴¹ furthermore, this God (Jehovah) is a relic of the Old Aeon, and Crowley is the prophet of the New, and he may instead be contented and comforted by Nuit and Hadit. Indeed, meeting God and instead “seeing the man behind the curtain,” as Crowley has, is the “Ordeal X” spoken of in The Book of the Law. For there is no monad—instead, there are infinite monads, as there are infinite combinations of zero and two, the marriage of any particular point of infinite space and any given individual viewpoint.

Transitional Note

Beyond the twenty-first Aethyr, the visions begin to take on a different character. As they come closer to the Abyss, they begin to more closely approximate supernal logic; statements now begin to contain their opposites, as above the Abyss all opposites are reconciled into unities. Therefore, it is wise not to take statements in these Aethyrs as suggesting straightforward dogma.

Aethyr 20, KHR

The Path of Kaph (Atu X). The Hierus Prepares the Candidate. The Vision of the Wheel of Fortune. The Three Energies of the Universe.

Crowley is given a vision of the “Wheel of Fortune” tarot card, which represents the world of Māyā or illusion (the bhavachakra in Tibetan Buddhism) or the whirling nature of the mind. It is here depicted as a vast sphere, rather than a wheel, and is spun by a hand (pertaining to the Hebrew letter Kaph, hand, to which the tarot card is attributed). The three forces that whirl on the wheel are the sulphur, salt, and mercury of alchemy or sattva, rajas, and tamas of Hinduism; corresponding to the physical body, intellect, and intuition.

These three forces are here attracted by three predatory beings: the wolf for the “lusts of the flesh,” the raven for the “lusts of the mind,” and the pure white lamb—the Agnes Dei itself—which attracts the unwary by simulating the pure seeking of the soul. This lamb seduces the Elect with the false doctrine of sin and vicarious salvation, and despite its innocent appearance rends them limb from limb.

The Jupiterian nature of the wheel is now shown to project solar deities; the wheel itself turns into the god Shiva Nataraj, God in his dancing form, who crushes Crowley underfoot. Crowley is given a glimpse of his holy guardian angel, with whom he longs to unite with all of his being, instead of the three false creatures of the wheel; it is affirmed that his True Will is indeed to lead mankind to unity with their own holy guardian angels, which is the next step in human evolution.

Aethyr 19, POP

The Path of Gimel. (The Hegemon between the Pillars. Preliminary: The Vision of the Unguided Universe.)

A hermit gives Crowley entry into a great vista of war, similar to the war of the mind depicted in the Bhagavad Gita, except that instead of a war with two sides, in this one every man is for himself—every combatant represents a thought. This demonstrates that thoughts are all useless noise if not organized by Understanding (Binah); this dispersion will only increase until Crowley crosses the Abyss. It is also shown that time, Saturn (represented as Sebek the crocodile god) will devour everything in the world; this can only be overcome by attaining the perspective of a Magister Templi.

The holy guardian angel will destroy the universe (for the magician); yet the angel tells him that God is the image of man, and that there is no hope in anything but man. The angel opens her book (as seen in the High Priestess card—traditionally the Torah) to a page that shows the Holy Table of Dee and Kelly’s temple furniture, which radiates light. An elaboration of the Christian formula IChThUS, the fish/vesica that represents Christ, Pisces, and the Aeon of Osiris is given.

Aethyr 18, ZEN

Tiphareth. (The King’s Chamber. The Vision of the Holy Guardian Angel.) The Instruction Concerning the Obtaining of the Vision and the Voice of the Thirty Aethyrs. The Preparation of the Candidate.

The Aethyr opens with a nightside inversion of the Crucifixion, in which Christ is an enormous crucified bat, and the thieves on either side of him are crucified children.

Crowley is next admitted by an angel into a ruby Great Pyramid of Giza; within the King’s Chamber is the true Vault of the Adepts, from the Rosicrucian manifestos and Adeptus Minor initiation of the Golden Dawn; it is filled with the light of Horus. There is also a foreshadowing of Crowley’s initiation to Magister Templi, in which this light will be extinguished in the supernal darkness of NOX; he is taken by an angel into another cell that is the birth chamber of a Magister Templi; he is born out into the pylons where Isis, Nephthys, and Ra preside over his emergence as a New Star.

Crowley is next given a much more elaborate set of instructions for more fully scrying an Aethyr (in Briah, in samadhi) by undertaking a ninety-one-hour retirement—in which a magician conducts a vigil and fasts in darkness, followed by a banishing of all other active forces, and a conjuration of the Aethyr using Dee’s temple furniture as an altar. The call is to be written on Qabalistically colored vellum in angelic (a new Qabalistic color scale and set of attributions is given) that is then burned in a lamp, following which he assumes a yoga pose at the table and the vision is then given. “For this is a holy mystery, and he that did first attain to reveal the alphabet thereof,” the angel of the Aethyr tells Crowley, meaning Kelly specifically, “perceived not one ten-thousandth part of the fringe that is upon its vesture.”⁴²

Aethyr 17, TAN

The Path of Lamed. (The Combination Gimel, Lamed, Samekh.) The Vision of the Justice or Balance of the Universe.

Here, an old friend arrives: Madimi. She appears in a new form (although Crowley does not specify what), which Crowley asks her about; she replies that “since all things are God, in all things thou seest just so much of God as thy capacity affordeth thee.” The Aethyr itself is of balance (Lamed, Libra), the scales, as the principles of balance are elaborated to Crowley; Hadit is introduced as well. The Gnostic demiurge is cursed: “Woe unto the second, whom all nations of men call the First,”⁴³ as is the true God (as in the twentieth Aethyr); only Nuit and Hadit are truly infinite. The principle of truth is elaborated—as in the weighing of the heart by a feather in the Hall of Judgment in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, one’s truth glitters forth as a Star, Hadit (the voice of the fire); this is the beginning of the “chymical wedding” of the alchemists. To continue the Wedding is to undertake the ritual of obtaining the knowledge and conversation of the holy guardian angel, and this is yet to come.

Aethyr 16, LEA

Kether. (Oath of Pe.) The Overthrow of the Slave-Gods by the Beast 666.

A virgin on a bull appears, as Pasiphaë and the Minotaur, echoing the Beast and Babalon. Next, the angels of the Holy Sevenfold Table appear again. They await Jehovah, who appears with crown, orb, scepter, and robes, yet tears them down and tramples them—the Tower is shattered, and now all men walk on their hands; human beings are now to worship from the inside out, worshipping the star of divinity within instead of the external “God.” (A reference to anal sex magic is also given.) Thelemites—the servants of the star and the snake—will now eat up the entire world like locusts; magicians shall rule the earth.^*88 All this shall proceed from the throne of the Beast, which is the Abomination of Desolation, as the Beast sends lying spirits into the world to establish the New Aeon, which ultimately will be overthrown. The Beast comes forth like a lion;^†89 those who worship him shall have every mystery that has not been revealed from the foundation of the world revealed to them, and shall have power over all of the elements (as in the Bornless One ritual); angels and gods shall walk with them. Jehovah himself will wander the wastes, will be caught and shamed by these servants of the star and snake, and be utterly humbled before the Beast 666; finally, he shall come to worship the Beast himself.

A direct image of the Beast 666 as he is—not Crowley, but an actual spiritual being—is given. He has an androgynous face, both male and female, with the Mark of the Beast^‡90 on his brow, breast, and palm; he is gigantic, with a Uraeus crown, leopard’s skin, and flaming orange apron. Nuit surrounds him invisibly, his heart is Hadit, and Ra-Hoor-Khuit is between his feet. A flaming wand is in his right hand, and The Book of the Law in his left.

Jehovah can do nothing but lie prostrate before the Beast; now the virgin on the bull returns, led by the angels of the Holy Sevenfold Table, and hints that she will give herself to the Beast. Crowley, now coming to see the glory of the Beast, rejoices that he is being purged of his Christianity.

Aethyr 15, OXO

The Vision of the Rose of Forty-Nine Petals, and of the Holy Twelvefold Table. Examination of the Candidate for Magister Templi.

In this Aethyr, Crowley is initiated into the true and invisible Rosicrucian order. Babalon appears in a form similar to Salomé; as Salomé had the head of John the Baptist removed, here Babalon gathers the heads of adepts for Nuit, much like Kali does, offering their mortal personalities as food for the gods. Through her dance, she has woven the Rose of Forty-Nine Petals, conjoined with a cross made of two pillars, perhaps the Masonic pillars Boaz and Jachin. The Rose itself is a gigantic seven-tiered amphitheater of rose marble, so large that a sun could be used as a ball thrown between those sitting in it, each tier having seven partitions; the seven tiers are for the seven suborders of the Order of the Rosy Cross. In the center is an altar surrounded by four beasts, upon which is Pan, who is worshipped under different forms by each grade of the order—this is the Sabbath.

The altar, it is revealed, is Dee and Kelly’s Holy Twelvefold Table, with the twelve angelic characters in the center. The only way to reveal the secrets of this table is to form a pool of clear water from the sweat of one’s own brow, within which the secrets will be revealed. The forty-nine petals, plus the center, together make up the fifty gates of Binah. The table becomes the universe, with every star in it a letter of the book of Enoch (presumably Liber Loagaeth), which itself is drawn from a Mystery known only to the angels and the Sevenfold Table.

Crowley is now tested by adepts from each grade of the order; upon passing, he is given the secrets of the center of the Holy Twelvefold Table, through which he may exercise control of the elements or even evil magic (if read diagonally, revealing the names of devils). He is also told that the Ensigns of Creation hold the mysteries of drawing forth the letters, and that the letters of the circumference of the table “declare the glory of Nuit”⁴⁴—that is, that they show the zodiacal powers, as each side starts from Ares (the Enochian letter Pa). The adepts chant in rapture, bringing ruin to the work of Choronzon, as they are declaring the order of the universe, rather than dispersion. The vision now suggests a method by which the angelic alphabet may be mapped to the stars, which Crowley says pertains only to the grade of Magus and thus is unrevealed.^*91

He is now withdrawn into the Rosy Cross, which sits atop a pyramid in the darkness because of exceeding “light behind”; Crowley is told that the Sevenfold Table contains the name of God written openly, and the Twelvefold Table contains his name written in concealed form. Crowley is now caught up and absorbed into the lower reflections of Nuit.

Aethyr 14, VTA

The Vision of the City of the Pyramids. The Reception of the Master of the Temple.

Here is Crowley’s final initiation to Magister Templi. Following an abortive attempt in which Crowley attempts to pierce the veil of the Aethyr, the angel of the Aire (who is Hadit, Chaos, Chokmah, and Hermes) tells him that he must invoke in darkness rather than sunlight.

By the fourteenth Aethyr, Crowley and Neuburg have ascended the mountain Daleh Addin (now called Djebel Chélia). They now break the Aethyr for six and a half hours at the urging of Hadit, and Crowley has Neuburg sodomize him, as an effort in taboo breaking and disruption of the personality, an event Crowley wrote of circuitously in the record, as sodomy was still illegal.^*92

When he re-calls the Aethyr, Crowley is surrounded by an impossibly black darkness—the complete negation of light characteristic of Binah—and told that he is now the master of the fifty gates of Binah and of the pentagram, in which spirit is glyphed as a black egg. The great sea of Binah is lightless, with no sun, star, or moon—NOX. Here there is sterility, desolation, and sorrow (as pertinent to Saturn). What Crowley had perceived to be rocks are actually masters, who are veiled and motionless, without identity; upon their bowed backs rests the universe. Crowley is told that though he began studying magic dreaming of vast powers and glories (of the four elements, seven planets, twelve zodiac signs, twenty-two tarot trumps, and forty-nine calls), he has instead become as one of these lifeless masters, who are now shown to be pyramids, each of which is also a temple of initiation and a tomb (as seen in the eighteenth Aethyr). All of the illusions of the lower sephiroth and paths have been discarded; the masters are now nothing more than pyramids of dust. Yet following their attainment, they are cast out like Satan into the lower sephiroth (each according to their nature) to fulfill their work. For fifty are the gates of Binah, and 156 are the seasons thereof.

Aethyr 13, ZIM

The Garden of Nemo. The Work of the Magister Templi.

Crowley is brought to a garden—he is now declared NEMO, No Man, for no man has looked upon the face of God and survived. Therefore, Crowley is No Man, and his work is to tend a garden of disciples prepared from the desert, watering them without favoring one over another, in the hope that one day one of them will come to take his place as the next NEMO—this garden is a new Garden of Eden. He finds an old man in a secret house who is also NEMO, who writes a book, the leaves of which are the petals of the flowers in the garden, and who hopes that one day one of his flowers will grow to be a new NEMO. In the first through fifteenth Aethyrs, there is no vision or voice but that of NEMO, and anyone who follows vision or voice will be led away to destruction; Crowley has been inoculated against illusion by the via negativa practiced upon the visions and strong delusions of the lower Aethyrs.

Aethyr 12, LOE

The Path of Cheth. The Bearer of the Sangraal. The Black Brothers.

The Chariot of the tarot appears, drawn by four sphinxes and bearing a charioteer who clasps the Holy Grail—drawn from earlier Celtic, not Christian sources, and emitting a “ruddy glow” suggesting menstruation. The air is filled with the scent of burning Cakes of Light, from The Book of the Law. The cup is that of Babalon, which contains the blood of the saints, which is now the wine of the sacrament, for she has seduced the world. This wine is Compassion—which is intoxicating, destroys all thoughts, and is made of suffering (a deeply Tibetan Buddhist teaching). Thus the mystery of Babalon is revealed; as she has become the servant of each, so is she the mistress of all, and is Understanding. This is a formula of attaining samadhi with all and everything. Babalon rides upon the Beast, who is the lord of the City of Pyramids seen in Aethyr 14, the description of which fits Ankh-af-na-Khonsu from the Stele of Revealing. She will not rest in her adulteries until the blood of all that lives is gathered up, matured into wine, and offered to her Father, whose virtue shines through her. This seems to be a statement about the culling of souls at the Apocalypse.

Yet this process shall repeat again and again, as the universe is unfolded as a rose, and closed up as a cross into a cube. This is the secret of the Rosicrucians, enacted in the Vault of the Adepti. It is also the secret of the Passover supper in Exodus 12, which is depicted as a perversion of this formula and as a method of the Black Brothers, who close their doors from the Angel of Death (Saturn) with blood, and thereby resist the world, and compassion, keeping themselves from the world and from Babalon in their lonely fortresses. The Black Brothers send forth delusion (in the form of the major religions) to war against the Holy One, but in so serving Choronzon they are eventually eaten up by Time. All this will of necessity be destroyed by forces radiating from the Supernals.

Aethyr 11, IKH

Yesod. The Frontier of the Abyss.

A magical square of the moon appears, which is rolled up to reveal a host of angels clad in armor and armed for battle, flanked by elephants, armed with thunderbolts of Zeus and the artillery of meteors. All of this imagery is consistent with the sphere of the moon. The army is defended by nine iron towers filled with silver-armored warriors who guard the Holy City of the Most High from the malice of the devil Choronzon. The number nine, Yesod, is 333 added together, with its changes stabilized (333 being the number of Choronzon).

However, Crowley must go out of the fortress that guards against the Abyss and confront Choronzon, the lord of the four Princes of Evil. The Abyss represents sickness of aspiration, will, and the essence of reality—and if anyone goes into the Abyss without Understanding (having attained to Magister Templi and NEMO), they become the slaves of Choronzon. Even the fortress itself is now attacked, but God has ordered the universe perfectly, and made it stable through eternal war. Crowley is now warned that in every Aethyr he must take the mask of the guardian therein, and that if there be one drop of blood left it will entirely corrupt him; with the words “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani,” the last word of the Aethyr, he is rushed past the last outposts into the Abyss.

Aethyr 10, ZAX

The Abyss. Choronzon, His Nature.

Here Crowley meets Choronzon, 333, the “metaphysical contrary of the whole Process of Magick.”⁴⁵

The Aethyr itself is accursed, and so the magicians are to use a specifically designed circle and triangle, as in The Goetia. Neuburg is to be in the circle, evoking with methods from the Golden Dawn and Liber iuratus, while Crowley is to be placed in the triangle, as a demon would be, and will sacrifice three pigeons therein, one at each of its corners. Neuburg will be armed with the air dagger, with which he will keep Crowley in the triangle and defend himself if need be, being bound by oath to do so. The blood of the pigeons is to form the material basis that will allow Choronzon to manifest.

As the Aethyr opens, the cry of Choronzon is given (“Zazas, Zazas, Nasatanada Zazas”).⁴⁶ Choronzon manifests, speaking through Crowley; he is the force of dispersion and of absolute chaos, of the mind in its utmost disorder, of knowledge and facts disconnected from any ordering principle (which would be Binah, Understanding). The demon takes various forms to tempt Neuburg, psychically manifesting through Crowley, who is sitting still in a yoga asana. Crowley later remarked that he was overshadowed by the demon, and did not speak as himself, remembering nothing of the ritual, other than a sense of being protected and unafraid.^*93 What remains is the qlipha of Frater O.M., the shards left over of Crowley’s personality that cannot make the jump across the Abyss.

The demon attempts to tempt Neuburg by taking the forms of a beautiful woman, a wise and holy man, a serpent; Neuburg maintained until late in life that he had literally fought a demon in Bou Saada. It consistently mocks Neuburg’s efforts to control it. It voids god names from its fundament and laughs at Neuburg’s pentagrams. Neuburg calls angels and even Crowley’s holy guardian angel; Choronzon laughs at these and says that they are only covers for the pair’s filthy sorceries. And so it continues. Neuburg cannot argue with Choronzon, because it only encourages him; he cannot threaten the demon with anger, pain, or hell, because it is all of these things. His malice is the quality of malice itself, and those who have fallen under his power are the blind who follow the blind, declaring themselves enlightened.

This is ZAX, the world of adjectives, and there is no substance therein. The demon tries tricks to distract Neuburg, while it throws sand into the circle, breaking the barrier; it rushes in and attacks Neuburg, who beats the demon back by calling upon Tetragrammaton. After being pushed away, it attempts to make Neuburg laugh at and renounce magick itself. It next appears as a naked woman, wanting Crowley’s shirt to keep herself warm. But Neuburg, valiantly, perseveres against Choronzon, who tells him that had he doubted for an instant, he would have gnawed through his spine at the neck.

Having persevered to the end, Crowley emerges from samadhi and writes BABALON in the sand with his holy ring, declaring victory over 333, and the circle and triangle are burned in a great fire to purify the place of working.

Neuburg later noted that Choronzon was terrified by silence and concentration, and could be brought to obedience by willing in silence; at one point Neuburg also found that he could disturb the demon by whistling in a “magical manner.” Neuburg obtained such skill in working with this demon that he later evoked Choronzon on his own in order to obtain information by sitting and refusing to respond to the entity’s long-winded speeches—observing that “Choronzon is dispersion; and such is his fear of concentration that he will obey rather than be subjected to it, or even behold it in another.”⁴⁷

Aethyr 9, ZIP

Malkuth. (The Pure Virgin.) The Reward of the Magister Templi.

Having passed ZAX, Crowley finds himself walking upon a “razor-edge of light suspended over the Abyss,”⁴⁸ surrounded by the armies of the Most High (IAIDA) as in the eleventh Aethyr. He is greeted by the angel of the Aire, who welcomes him as one who has given himself up fully into the Cup of Babalon, transcended the Abyss, and surrendered his human personality; he is led to the Palace of the Virgin,⁴⁹ the “curse” of the Call of the Thirty Aethyrs has now become a secret blessing. The fifty gates of Binah have now opened to the City of God (perhaps that spoken of by St. Augustine).

They come to an impossibly ornate palace, which is the body of a twelve-year-old girl: the daughter of Babalon, the glory of which is infinitely beyond anything Crowley has yet beheld, and which subsumes the glory of all the previous Aethyrs. This is the Virgin of Eternity—the Heh-final in the Tetragrammaton—who has born a child unto the king, the Yod, the father of All; she sits upon the throne of Binah and Understanding, on a sea of glass, her hair bedecked with seven stars, and her name is Koré, Malkah, Betulah, and Persephone. She is the ultimate virgin, after which young men and poets have sought, but only in vain—for no language, thought, magic, will, or imagination may come near her, all of it being of the mind. She stands on a sea of glass, as in Revelation 15:2.

Holy beyond all words, she is sending out images of exceeding beauty that proceed downward across the Abyss, cast off as the qliphoth of Binah that produce the lower worlds. So beautiful is the vision to all of Crowley’s senses that he cannot bear it except by an act of will. She is Shakti, manifesting the powers of the All-Father into the Watchtowers.

Crowley is taken by an angel into a chamber within one of the nine towers of the palace, which contains a map of the Aethyrs arranged in the form of a flaming sword proceeding through the ten sephiroth, which is above Crowley’s grade. Crowley is here given yet another method of calling the Aethyrs, possibly pertaining to Atziluth. This new method will not only cause trembling within (as in kundalini phenomena), but will also cause the world to tremble from without, by the earthquakes of judgment; the elements will swallow all. A secret of mastery is given: an adept is crowned with the Holy Spirit, but a master is filled with it.

Aethyr 8, ZID

The Holy Guardian Angel. His Instruction.

Crowley enters a pyramid of light, in which he meets his holy guardian angel—Aiwass, the Voice of the Silence, minister of Ra-Hoor-Khuit, who dictated The Book of the Law, kindling light to draw Crowley upward into the great NOX. Now that Crowley understands (is initiate into Binah), Aiwass delivers him a new set of instructions for use in attaining Knowledge and Conversation to give to humanity so that all can attain; this is to replace the earlier instructions given in the Book of Abramelin. (As with Dee and Kelly’s sessions, the angels work to clarify earlier published instructions given in grimoires.)

Just as the instructions for calling an Aethyr given in the eighteenth Aethyr call for a ninety-one-hour period of seclusion, this operation calls for a seclusion of ninety-one days. It partakes of the method-ology of Abramelin as well as the Ritual of Passing the Tuat, but uses Thelemic symbology instead of Christian, and also implements the use of the Holy Twelvefold and Sevenfold Tables. At the conclusion of this ritual the adept will return to the world, and their angel shall guide them in further initiation until they also cross the Abyss and become initiated into Binah.

This initiation will slay the aspirant, and their suffering will make them greater even than the kings of the earth, the angels of the heavens, and the gods beyond the heavens, until the aspirant meets their own holy guardian angel, and is destroyed by it in a red rain of lightning, and by the weight of their own pyramid of initiation. The holy guardian angel, it is revealed, is totally of the Supernals, and not in Gimel, for the paths crossing the Abyss are the servants of Babalon and the Beast. This is for all humanity, and those who possess this ritual are to utterly deny themselves in giving it unto those who have need of it.

Another Transitional Note

Beyond ZID, the Aethyrs begin to lock up on Crowley, because he has only been initiated to the 8°=3^□ degree of Magister Templi and no further. As such, he is only given glimpses of the remaining Aethyrs, which pertain to the 9°=2^□ Magus and 10°=1^□ Ipsissimus grades.

Aethyr 7, DEO

The Path of Daleth. The Black Brothers.

A door of Venus is opened by an angel, and from it comes flames, each of which is one of the greatest love stories of the world, forming a rose that becomes the woman clothed with the sun from Revelation 12, so beautiful that she cannot be looked upon, who is also the Fool. She transmits the logos from Chokmah to Binah and as such takes the many forms of the goddess of love, each of which is a letter in the alphabet of love; Crowley also beholds the Universal Peacock. She is the footstool of the Holy One, as Binah is his throne. Here is seen the infinite rainbow light proceeding from the prism of Chokmah.

Beneath her feet is the Abyss, a great desert wherein dwell the Black Brothers, lonely souls in black robes who swarm around howling, bumping into each other. They have grasped love and clung to it, praying at the feet of the goddess, and locked themselves up in “fortresses of love.”⁵⁰

The curse spoken in the Call of the Thirty Aethyrs is the creation of Shakti at the beginning of the world. A version of the Creation is now given in which Adam is the concealed God in the garden of the Supernals, who creates Eve, who is tempted by the serpent, who is the Messiah and kundalini, and who destroys the equilibrium of the garden. The calls are now shown to be necessary for the construction of Eden, and that it could not have been any other way.

However, the Black Brothers have misinterpreted this, because there is no path between Binah and Chesed, meaning only a spark (as in Gnosticism) proceeds from the Supernals rather than a current; “when the Stooping Dragon raised his head unto Daäth in the course of that spark, there was, as it were, an explosion, and his head was blasted. And the ashes thereof were dispersed throughout the whole of the tenth Aethyr. And for this, all knowledge is piecemeal, and it is of no value unless it be co-ordinated by Understanding.”⁵¹

The Aethyr takes the form of a brass eagle that winds about, filling the Aethyr with sparks. Babalon’s daughter returns riding a dolphin and sees the Black Brothers, who have sought to restrict love. The Black Brothers rush about in darkness, looking for something but bumping into each other because they are so shut up in their cloaks of restriction. They have shut themselves up against the natural flow of the universe, the greatest tragedy of all. If any of them were to throw off their cloak and behold Babalon’s daughter they would be redeemed by love, but none will. Yet they are still encamped on the edges of Eden, permitted to advance this far out of compassion. Babalon’s daughter, on her throne, radiates a love supreme. Even Crowley is not able to fully behold this vision, but he has been permitted to see some of it that he may meditate on it until the true vision and voice of the Aethyr is heard.

Aethyr 6, MAZ

The Vision of the Urn. The Magus 9°=2^□. The Three Schools of Magick.

This Aethyr foreshadows the attainment of the grade of Magus, as the logos, in this case as the Beast 666.

Here the angel Ave appears, from the Dee and Kelly sessions, in whom the signs of sulphur and the pentagram are harmonized by a swastika. Ave (whose name was extracted from the Sevenfold Table) is revealed as the radiance of Thoth; the Aethyr itself is suffused by images forming and dissolving faster than lightning, all illusions created by the Ape of Thoth.⁵² The Star of the tarot appears, emanating the light of the path of Aleph; Crowley is given a vision of the fixed mercury (that is, a still mind), uniting the perfected Sulphur and salt; all of them are thrown off by the swastika (Kether), which is Aleph, Beth, and Gimel; these three thunderbolts defend the Crown.

Echoing the discovery of the drunk and naked Noah by his children after the Flood in Genesis 9:21–27, a voice states that whoever likewise uncovers the nakedness of the Most High, who is drunk on the blood of the adepts imbibed from the Cup of Babalon, will be cursed. Babalon, having encouraged his drunkenness and then left him naked, summons her children to make a mockery of him. After being cursed, the three children of Babalon react to their shame in different ways, representing the three schools of magick,⁵³ and the Three Magi; because Crowley has not yet attained to Wisdom, he does not get to know which school prevails, or if the three are one or not. The Black Brothers (not to be confused with the Black School) do not reach this far, having been drowned in the Flood (Binah). The logos of God is now revealed as a lie, and must be destroyed to pass further. Having slain the logos, however, one must take its place and become the deceiver and maker of snares, baffling even those who have understanding.^*94 So have all the founders of the great religions been deceived, being bound with the curse of Thoth. As speakers of truth, they have enslaved the masses with lies, because no truth may extend beyond Binah; instead, only its reflection is shown beneath the Abyss, balanced in Beauty, which is the best road to truth. Here is established Zion, above Binah.

In the heart of the Aethyr is a Temple, which contains an Urn suspended in the air, made of fixed mercury and containing the ashes of the burned tarot, symbolizing all prior books of magic, which are now useless and have been burned up into ash. The tarot, Crowley is told, contains the entire stored wisdom of the Old Aeon. Liber Loagaeth, however, contains the first glimpse of the wisdom of the New Aeon, which has been hidden for three hundred years because Kelly (not Dee) extracted it from the Tree of Life too early, out of desperation. It is explained that Martin Luther was Kelly’s master, and overthrew the Church, but that Kelly rebelled because he saw that the Protestant era would be even worse than the Catholic. Yet Kelly did not understand Luther’s true purpose, which was to prepare the way for the Aeon of Horus.

Fig. 16.6. BABALON, engraving by Lucas Cranach, from Martin Luther’s 1522 translation of the New Testament.

Crowley is now expelled from the Aethyr by Thoth himself; he has not fully burned up his karma, and as such is not prepared to place the ashes of his personality left over from his Magister Templi initiation within the Urn, which is marked with the sigil of NOX, among others; he has not attained to full atheism, that is, burned up all of his preconceptions, and therefore is unable to directly perceive truth.^*95

Aethyr 5, LIT

The Vision of the Middle Pillar. (Arrow.) The Mystery of Atheism.

Crowley is led through an endless avenue of pylons carved from the rock of a mountain, within each of which is a god; all of the gods of all of the nations of Earth are represented, with nine avenues all going to the top of the same mountain. At the top the roads converge, with nine pylons facing the center, within which is a shrine with a circular table, held up by white and black marble statues of men and women facing inward, their buttocks worn down by the kisses of their worshippers. They all face the Supreme God, which adherents from all religions have come here to worship—but the God itself is on the table, which is far too high to reach.

Crowley is lifted up by the angel of the Aethyr, and sees that the altar is surrounded by holy men, each with a weapon in their right hand, making the sign of silence with their left. There is a silver star in the air, and on the forehead of each holy man.^†96 The password to progress further is “There is no God,” and after giving it Crowley is accepted into the circle and given a new sense of the meaning of this phrase, which he cannot fully ascertain, though he suspects it to denote that God is everywhere, and not within the shrine.

Everything is now blacked out, and the angel appears as a vast dragon that devours the universe, who tells Crowley that he has not even begun to annihilate himself—for “all that thou thinkest is but thy thought; and as there is no god in the ultimate shrine, so there is no I in thine own Cosmos.”⁵⁴ This is the truth of the Aethyr, which all religions have failed to interpret; the true God is everywhere, and the true “I” in the entirety of the human body and soul. All of the world’s religions are within the shrine, but they are only particles in the smoke of the dragon’s breath. Crowley must further purify himself; moreover, the head of this dragon is only the tail of the Aethyr. The dragon is to be slain by piercing his throat with the arrow of truth, a phallo-vaginal arrow that neither Edward Kelly nor anyone else was found worthy to wield—yet Crowley, who is the incarnation of Cagliostro (and of Kelly), is now fit to wield it. (The arrow represents the Middle Pillar of the Tree of Life.)

The Aethyr breaks; upon its second call, Crowley is brought into a further Arcanum. A child in blue light is revealed, with golden hair, curls, and deep blue eyes, holding red and blue snakes in either hand.^*97 He is Horus, the child of Isis, and tells Crowley that life is one long initiation into sorrow. He is represented by Isis, whom all know, but whose sister is Nephthys, whom few know because she is dark and feared. And behind these ideas is the goddess Maut. Horus, who is Eros, must be slain with his own bow in order to progress, and the initiate must be NEMO to do so. Crowley shoots Eros with a white arrow and a black arrow simultaneously; the white arrow fails to pierce Eros and the black one pierces Crowley’s own heart; yet their identities are exchanged, and Crowley lives while Eros dies. The Aethyr splits with thunder, and the arrow is revealed as having the plumes of Ma’at for its crowns, which is the crown of Thoth, and the Father of all Light; the shaft is the Father of all Love; the arrow is the source of all motion, but does not move itself; it is the glance of the Eye of Shiva; since it moves not, the universe is not destroyed. It is revealed that the above is not like the below. The One, critically, is the Many.

As Crowley has sought the end of all sorrow, all sorrow is now his portion; his blood is in the Cup of Babalon, his heart is the universal heart, girt with a serpent.^†98 Below the Abyss, contradiction is division, but above it, contradiction is unity. Contradiction is the marker of truth, for above the Abyss all opposites are unified. All symbols are interchangeable, for they contain in themselves their own opposites. The vision of the arrow is marvelous beyond belief; Crowley is dissolved in Ain Soph, yet the arrow itself, which now represents the Supernals, persists.

Aethyr 4, PAZ.

The Marriage of Yod and He. (The Common Tibetan Symbol.)The Seer Identifies Himself with It.

A mighty host of angels throngs a sixfold star; the day of Be-With-Us^*99 is here. For God has both created and overthrown the universe for his pleasure. Crowley beholds the god Chaos in the center of the Aethyr, with a thousand arms, each with a weapon, in a terrible and wrathful form, in copulation with Babalon’s daughter—the imagery is distinctly Tibetan, suggesting a wrathful deity fornicating with his consort. They cling tightly, merging into each other; he tears her asunder, she strangles him, both crying in pleasure and anguish, so that every cry of suffering in the universe is only one tiny “gust of wind”⁵⁵ in their continuous scream of ecstasy.

Here Chaos represents the Yod, and Babalon’s daughter the final Heh, in a new Tetragrammaton, creating a new universe—as foreshadowed in the thirtieth Aethyr. According to Crowley, this is a depiction of the Tibetan Kalachakra—which is a representation of time, and thus Saturn. Several other instances of Tibetan imagery occur in the Aethyr, including the opening hexagram (which is seen in mandalas of Vajrayogini, a similar deity to Babalon and Malkah-Koré) and a Tau that appears on the head of Chaos, which suggests the “Tenfold Powerful One” symbol of the Kalachakra, which has the same shape as the Hebrew Tau.

Crowley can barely perceive the image, as he is not yet trained enough to do so. Yet he has identified himself with the spirit of humanity, which is the Beast 666. Though the vision is beyond his understanding, he must unite himself with this marriage bed. Crowley is simultaneously torn apart and crushed back together at the molecular level, and shown that all double phenomena form two ways of looking at one phenomenon; resolved, they are peace. All of this is Chaos, which is also Peace; the Cosmos is the war of the rose and the cross, which is reunited by love under will.

Crowley now sees that Chaos is the primeval state of the universe, the blackness (NOX) that existed before the Creation.^*100 Crowley prays to this primeval night to shelter him from the madness that is the incarnation of the universe. The emergence of Cosmos from Chaos creates an imbalance where previously there was none; when the balance is returned, the Cosmos will return to the Chaos (Chokmah) from which it came. It is also revealed that everything in the manifest universe is reversed, so that “everything wherein thou hast trusted must confound thee, and that thou didst flee from was thy saviour”⁵⁶—suggesting that Satan is the true Messiah. Therefore must the four beasts of Daniel be slain, and the Sphinx of Initiation itself, as in Oedipus. All the universe awaits Aiwass, who is All, and the thousand-armed god in the vision, consort of Babalon and deflowerer of their daughter, uplifting Malkuth to the throne of Binah; this is the philosopher’s stone set on the tomb of the Tetragrammaton. The child of the queen of heaven shall be called V.V.V.V.V. Crowley is now forced back, covered by the angel HUA.

Aethyr 3, ZOM.

“The Magus” of the Tarot (ATU I). Mayan, the Maker of Illusion. The Seer in Illusion (Lilith).

The final three Aethyrs are aspects of Kether, with the first pertaining to the path of Aleph, the second Gimel, and the third Bet.

The vision is of the Magician of the tarot; to fully become initiated to this level would be to take the rank of Magus, but Crowley is here guarded from that experience, for which he is not yet fit, by being given an astral simulation of the Aethyr rather than full initiation. Here he perceives a House (the Magician is the Hebrew letter Bet, house), the “many mansions”⁵⁷ of the Father, but it shall be destroyed by the Ox (the Fool, Aleph). Crowley has previously seen the City of Pyramids in Binah; here he sees the House of the Juggler (an old title for the Magician card).

Crowley beholds the ultimate blasphemy:

O thou that hast beheld the City of the Pyramids, how shouldst thou behold the House of the Juggler? For he is wisdom, and by wisdom hath he made the Worlds, and from that wisdom issue judgments seventy by four, that are the four eyes of the doubleheaded one; that are the four devils, Satan, Lucifer, Leviathan, Belial, that are the great princes of the evil of the world. And Satan is worshipped by men under the name Jesus; and Lucifer is worshipped by men under the name of Brahma; and Leviathan is worshipped by men under the name of Allah; and Belial is worshipped by men under the name of Buddha.⁵⁸

Mary, further, is shown as a blasphemy against Babalon, for she has shut up her sexuality, and is therefore the queen of the Black Brotherhood. Babalon herself is under the power of Mayan, the magician, perfectly pure, a redeemer of all that is below; the only way across the Abyss is through her and the Beast 666; therefore, the Magician conducts his sorceries to keep the Black Brothers from profaning the sanctuary. For from Kether also springs delusion: madness as Aleph, falsehood as Bet, and glamor as Gimel.

The veil of the Aethyr is rent, and Crowley is shown the Magus of the tarot, who is a great blasphemy, and surrounded by the implements of blasphemy; he stands by a forty-two–fold table connected with the Egyptian Book of the Dead (as he is Thoth); he also represents the machinery or mill in which ether, the universal substance, is ground down and turned into matter. With his four elemental weapons he casts forth veil after veil of illusion, with a thousand shining colors ripping and tearing the Aethyr.

Crowley is terrified by this vision, but worse still is the vision of Lilith (who is Babalon), who appears as a black monkey, whose body is rotten and cancerous. She seeks to embrace Crowley, who is so horrorstruck that he cries out to be killed to end the vision. Only Lilith has dared to look into the face of the Magus; she masturbates with a crucifix, so that the worshippers of Christ “suck up her filth upon their tongues.”⁵⁹ The stench of human flesh and children’s bowels is thrust in his mouth. Because the Magician is veiled, if you try to look upon him you fall under the spell of Lilith, who is Babalon imagined by the energy of the Magician. Her blasphemy is that she has taken the name of LIL (the first Aethyr), put it on her brow, and added a Y and Th for the sign of the cross.

The illusion, however, is destroyed by a sigil of Binah that appears on the sun, and Crowley is again shown a vision of the daughter of Babalon as a beautiful and pure maiden; Crowley is also given images of women whom he would meet and have relationships with in the years to come; prophecies of Crowley’s assumption of the grade of Magus are also pronounced.

The Mercy of God protects him from seeing the fullness of the Aethyr; to proceed further he must match it for mystery and silence. He must give the sign of Babalon, and make himself one with Chaos (Chokmah)—this is a precursor of the beginning of the Great Work, which is the grinding down of Aleph, Bet, and Gimel and the approach to Kether thereby.

Choronzon is the excrement (qliphoth) of Aleph, Bet, and Gimel, his head raised to Da’ath, and the Black Brothers have declared him the child of Wisdom and Understanding—but he is the bastard of Kether only. Therefore Da’ath itself is not the child of Binah and Chokmah—that being Tiphareth—but is the sexual act that produces the child; hence the fornications of the Beast and Babalon.

Binah, ruled by Bet (Babalon under the power of the magician) guards the Abyss; hence there is no way to the supernal mystery but by Babalon and the Beast, and the Magician Mayan is set beyond them to deceive the Black Brothers lest they make themselves into a Crown—that is, make a tree from Da’ath, pure reason, which is the error of the scientists and the Buddhists, as supernal logic convicts it of essential self-contradiction. Da’ath is the peak of the intellect, and therefore a demonstration that intellect is incapable of truth.

This vision is so intense that none can endure it and live; so Crowley is only given an echo, and then returned to his body.

Aethyr 2, ARN.

The Marriage of the Seer with BABALON. Atu VI.

The secret of the Lovers card is given, which should be called “The Brothers,” and is about Cain and Abel. The child of Eve and the Serpent’s union was Cain; Abel was the first murderer, and sacrificed animals to his demon—a necessary measure to get God to listen. Cain slew Abel with the Hammer of Thor (an analogue of the swastika, a symbol of Kether), in order to also become a man and get the attention of God. Afterward, he was given the Mark of the Beast, as mentioned in Revelation, upon his brow. In this version of the card, Cain stands between his mother, Eve, on his right hand and Lilith on his left, who appears like Kali; above him is the Arrow from the fifth Aethyr, which pierces the heart of the child Abel. This is the true design of the card, and the true story from which the legend of the Fall was copied.

Crowley discovers that Revelation itself is “a recension of a dozen or so totally disconnected allegories, that were pieced together, and ruthlessly planed down to make them into a connected account,” which were then rewritten as a Christian document in the style of the Gospel of John, to satisfy a public that felt Christianity showed no real depth of spiritual teaching, only stage miracles to fool the public and theology to occupy “pedants.”⁶⁰ This is why literal predictions and timelines of the Apocalypse never come true.

A white rose now appears; a symbol of BABALON, for she has crushed the blood of everything into her cup, and no red remains.

The Aethyr breaks. Upon its second call, the brilliant white of Kether fills the stone, within which all other colors are complicit. Colors, as well as thoughts, are revealed to all be false—they are only the place where the mind of the Seer has been unable to perceive any further. Therefore “the pure light is colorless, so is the pure soul black. And this is the Mystery of the incest of CHAOS with his daughter”⁶¹—the fulfillment of a new Tetragrammaton and the creation of a new universe. This reveals the nature of evil, and of Māyā itself.

The light of the Aethyr is so pure that it prevents the formation of images, and is thus perceived as darkness. Any light that is less pure reflects into the mind and creates its endless illusions, here symbolized by the “many mansions” in the prior Aethyr; so is Babalon victorious over the magician that has “ensorcelled” her,⁶² by eradicating his mind, destroying Mayan, the Magus, the maker of illusion in the path of Bet, and placing her daughter upon her own throne.

A new interpretation of the text of the nineteenth call is given, which reverses its meaning, now that Crowley has proceeded across the Abyss and toward Kether. The call is now revealed to be the methodology by which the Supernals operate to create the universe, and a rejoicing at the opening of the ninth Aethyr and beyond. Crowley notes that he believes Kelly overlaid his Christian conditioning over the spirit sessions, and references the “horrible doctrine,” stating that “Dee forced him to reject the True Messengers, whose discourse implied antinomian Pantheism.”⁶³ Likewise, according to Crowley, Kelly miswrote the text of the nineteenth call, letting his Christian guilt warp the message.

The letter Aleph is now shown in a new alphabet, written with arrows, which corresponds to Enochian as well as the hexagrams of the I Ching.

During this entire Aethyr, Crowley feels his feet burning; the fire spreads to his whole body, which he perceives as beginning to rot.^*101 Like Prometheus, he is being tortured for stealing fire from heaven; and even the dust of the Magister Templi must be consumed by fire.^†102 Crowley’s physical body has reached the utmost limit of its ability to withstand the visions of the Aethyrs; he is completely burned out psychically. He now breaks the Aethyr once more, and goes to soak in sulfurous hot springs (in the physical world) before proceeding further.

At the next call, he is shown a reversed (outward facing) vesica piscis at the top of a black pyramid, which itself is atop a stone filled with flashes of lightning. Motherhood is the symbol of the masters, who abandon their virginity, become pregnant, and give birth. The Aethyr is swallowed by a black triangle facing downward, within which is Typhon, God of Chaos, who warns the Seer that one may deceive the virgin and the mother, but not Babalon, the ancient whore. As she possesses (or is) all phenomena, she cannot be bribed or bought with anything in manifest existence. Crowley attacks and destroys the image of Typhon with the Flaming Sword (the downward flash of manifestation in the Qabalah), but even this is futile—nothing will win against Babalon.

Crowley becomes Leviathan and the crocodile; a black rose of 156 petals is revealed, and Babalon breaks through. She is also Nuit; Crowley attempts with all his will to strain himself toward her. He now becomes not only Leviathan but Lucifer, Belial, and Satan, the four Great Princes of Evil; yet these are now seen as merely prior truths that Crowley has clung to, and become withered as they confront the higher truth of Babalon, who is thus the great defiler and “desolator of shrines.”⁶⁴ Crowley lies supine before Babalon, takes the form of Hadit and as such sings the praises of Nuit; nothing can penetrate any further.

The five senses are shown to be related to the Elemental Watchtowers; to hear the voice of the Aethyr, Crowley is told to invoke it at night with no other light except that of the half moon, which will allow him to “lay bare the womb of thine understanding to the violence of CHAOS.”⁶⁵ He must therefore end his scrying and wait for these conditions to arrive before he can continue.

On calling the Aethyr for a final time, Crowley is given the utterance of the Aethyr in the “Bathyllic” language, accompanied by music; it is the Song of the Sphinx, and of the sirens, and whoever hears it is lost—Crowley was so taken by the beauty of this song that he wrote in his footnotes that “the memory of it diminishes the value of the rest of His life, with few excepted incidents, almost to nothing.”⁶⁶

The song, an adoration to the god OAI (the reversal of the IAO^*103 formula), is given, which is a formula of mystical attainment; this Crowley would later use for the sex magic ritual described in “Liber Stellae Rubae.” Imagery of nymphs, fauns, and Pan (as consistent with Ain Soph) is given; Babalon is shown as the feminine equivalent, not the complement, of Pan. Babalon sings new songs and speaks of how she is found by men; Crowley finds himself in a Druid circle and is shown visions upon visions to distract his will—hundreds of visions within which the angel of the Aethyr takes on different masks and games. He finally meets the angel itself, who is seductive and bedecked in finery befit of Babalon, before the Aethyr is swallowed by fire. Crowley is now told that the book—either The Book of the Law, Liber Loagaeth, or both—has been opened, awakening the angels of the Aethyrs that have been asleep since the spirit actions, for three hundred years. The tomb has now been opened, “so that this great wisdom might be revealed.”⁶⁷

All that now remains is to meet Heru-Ra-Ha, the Lord of the Aeon himself.

Aethyr 1, LIL.

The Vision of the Crowned and Conquering Child, the Lord of the Aeon.

The veil of the Aethyr is that of Nuit and Hadit; Crowley is filled with the peace of Iaida (the Highest); there is no tendency anywhere, all that is left is consciousness itself. He abides in the “unalterable midnight”⁶⁸ of Nuit, in which there is no light, and therefore only peace. He has no identity, and is hanging in nothing—total initiation into NOX.

The veil opens and Crowley sees a small child “covered with lilies and roses,”⁶⁹ supported by the archangels, who are all colorless, and blind as they are pure light; endless ranks of angels stretch below them, so far that they extend beyond Crowley’s ability to see. Upon the forehead, heart, and hand of the child is the Mark of the Beast. Crowley is enrapt in samadhi. The angels lead Crowley to the child, forcing his head down in reverence—he can do nothing of his own will, but may only prostrate seven times at every step.

The child sings of its identity; it is the child of all and the father of all, and is everything and all things, Alpha and Omega. It is peace, innocence, untouched virginity, death. The child is all dualities and beyond them all, but only by manifesting as dualities may mankind reach up to him; mankind must master all of the paths of the Qabalah to attain to him. Blessed are those who have attained to look upon his face, and he hurls them from his presence as thunderbolts to “guard the ways.” Those the Seer loves will put on the garments of magick and themselves rise up, setting out upon “the neverending journey, each step of which is an unutterable reward.” Greatly blessed is Crowley for having attained this far through his perseverance; he is now a “made man”—his enemies will be thrown down without him having to do anything, and will be brought to serve him, and all will come to the Supernals to drink of immortality. “FOR I AM HORUS,” the child announces, “THE CROWNED AND CONQUERING CHILD, WHOM THOU KNEWEST NOT!”⁷⁰

Echoing the instructions that were given to Dee regarding gathering the twelve tribes of Israel, Crowley is told, “Pass thou on, therefore, O Prophet of the Gods, unto the Cubical Altar of the Universe”—possibly a reference to the Holy Twelvefold Table or the thirtieth Aethyr—“there thou shalt receive every tribe and kingdom and nation into the mighty Order that reacheth from the frontier fortress that guard the Uttermost Abyss unto My Throne. This is the formula of the Aeon. . . . ”⁷¹

And with this, the visions and voices of the Aethyrs end, with Crowley called to an apocalyptic task just as Dee had been—that of ordering and sorting the people of the world toward the worship of the Beast and Babalon. It would be only a handful of years before Crowley fully identified himself with the Beast 666 at his Magus initiation, a role he has played to the hilt and occupied in Western civilization ever since. Crowley the man is long dead, but Crowley the symbol—of rebellion, magic, and, most of all, of Satanism—is immortal.

As seen in the next chapter, the work done by Crowley and Neuburg in Algeria would resonate long after the working itself, boosting the signal of Dee and Kelly’s work and echoing throughout the twentieth century and beyond, for better and for worse.