The Book of the Law: Three Days in Cairo

In March 1904, in Cairo, Rose Kelly, the wife of the English occultist Aleister Crowley, fell into what he called a trance and told him that the god Horus was waiting for him. To test her, he took her to the museum and asked her to find Horus. She walked past several images and stopped at a small painted wooden stele of a priest named Ankh-ef-en-Khonsu standing before the falcon-headed god. Its museum number was 666, the number of the Beast of Revelation, which Crowley had taken as his own. On 8, 9 and 10 April, at noon, Crowley sat at a desk in their rooms and, he said, wrote down the words of a voice that spoke from behind him. The result was Liber AL vel Legis, the Book of the Law.

The book

• Three chapters, one for each day, written in an hour each, on 65 sheets of paper.
• Chapter I speaks as Nuit, the goddess of the night sky; chapter II as Hadit, the point at her centre; chapter III as Ra-Hoor-Khuit, a warlike form of Horus.
• Crowley named the speaker Aiwass, a "praeterhuman intelligence", and regarded the book as a revelation announcing a new age, the Aeon of Horus.
• Its key sayings: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law" (I:40), "Love is the law, love under will" (I:57), and "Every man and every woman is a star" (I:3). In Thelema, "will" means one's true purpose, not whim.

Lost and found

Crowley was at first reluctant to follow the book. The manuscript was mislaid, and in 1909 he found it in the attic of his house, Boleskine, on Loch Ness, while looking for a pair of skis. He took this as a sign and published the text that year. The book forbids any change to its text, and printed editions have since included a facsimile of the handwriting, errors and corrections included.

Symbology and sacred encoding

Numbers and letters. Crowley used gematria constantly, and the book itself invites it: it says a later "child" will find its key, and verses such as II:76 give strings of letters and numbers never explained. Its number, 220, is the count of its verses.

The stele. The Stele of Revealing (Cairo Museum, A 9422) is a genuine funerary stele of the 25th–26th Dynasty, about the seventh century BCE, showing the priest before Ra-Horakhty under the arching sky goddess Nut. Crowley had its texts translated and worked them into the book. The 666 is its inventory number in the museum's old Bulaq register, a coincidence that Crowley read as a sign.

The unicursal hexagram. Thelema's emblem, a six-pointed star drawn in a single line, was popularised by Crowley; its earlier history is unclear.

Connections

Theosophy & the Occult Revival (ch37). Compare the Book of Shadows (V72), which borrowed from it, the Emerald Tablet (V03) for another text claimed as revelation, and the Papyrus of Ani (V20) for the Egypt it drew on.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/book-of-the-law.html