Liber Aleph Vel CXI

Liber Aleph, or The Book of Wisdom or Folly, is one of Aleister Crowley's masterworks. It’s a tour de force through Crowley's encyclopedic mind, a sequence of 208 gems of magical wisdom written during his visit to the U.S. The book is written as an epistle to his magical 'son,' to whom he dispenses fatherly advice on a broad range of occult subjects, including qabalah, magick, yoga, mystical trances, the True Will, alchemy, drugs, sex, love, death, and the education of children, among others. Crowley writes here in a deliberately archaic style, which has the effect of exalting the mind into a kind of intellectual ecstasy. The arcane subject matter is raised to the sublime by the passionate poetic voice of its author.

Written during the winter of 1917 e.v., in his apartment in Greenwich Village, Crowley composed Liber Aleph as a series of brief letters or epistles, limiting himself to a single page for each epistle. Each one is titled by a topic description in Latin. Crowley considered Liber Aleph an extended and elaborate commentary on The Book of the Law. In it he gives us many glimpses of his vision of Thelema. The Book of the Law declares that every man and every woman is a star. So it is in De Luce Stellarum (On the Light of the Stars) that Crowley writes --

It was that most Holy Prophet, thine Uncle, called upon Earth William O'Neill, or Blake, who wrote for our Understanding these Eleven Sacred Words! --

                        If the Sun and Moon should doubt
                        They'd immediately go out.

O my Son, our Work is to shine by Force and Virtue of our own Natures without Consciousness or Consideration. Now, notwithstanding that our Radiance is constant and undimmed, it may be that Clouds gathering about us conceal our Glory from the Vision of other Stars. These Clouds are our Thoughts, not those true Thoughts which are but conscious Expressions of our Will, such as manifest in our Poesy, or our Music, or other Flower-Ray of our Light quintessential. Nay, the Cloud-Thought is born of Division and of Doubt; for all Thoughts, except they be creative Emanations, are Witnesses to Conflict within us. Our settled Relations with the Universe do not disturb our Minds, as, by Example, our automatic bodily Functions, which speak to us only in the Sign of Distress. Thus all Consideration is Demonstration of Doubt; Doubt postulateth Duality, which is the Root of Choronzon.

The prose is dense and rich with idea and imagery. Crowley succinctly elucidates the roles of the mind and the True Will in the process of accomplishing the Great Work. The thinking engine of the ego-mind, fueled by the psycho-energetic combustion of mental dualisms, is the source of our thoughts; thoughts that can gather about us like clouds, and veil the stellar brilliance of our essential Self from others and even from ourselves. For Crowley, True Will is expressed as a natural unself-consciousness, an ease that flows from being harmonious with the Tao.

There are chapters on the nuts and bolts of magickal force and its operations, but there are also ecstatic philosophical paeans such as are found in the chapter On the Universal Comedy which is called Pan --

So, therefore, o my Son, count thyself happy, when thou understandest all these Things, being one of those Beings (or By-comings) whom we call Philosophers. All is a never-ending Play of Love wherein Our Lady Nuit and Her Lord Hadit rejoice; and every Part of the Play is Play. All Pain is but sharp Sauce to the Dish of Pleasure; for it is the Nature of the Universe that hath devised this everlasting Banquet of Joy.

This passage offers a cosmic vision of the Universe as the ecstatic Love Play of the supernal Thelemic deities Nuit and Hadit. The imagery also exemplifies Crowley's legendary appetite for life. In the chapter De Virtute Tolerantia (On the Virtue of Tolerance), we find an example of Thelemic ethics:

Understand then heartily, o my Son, that in the Light of this my Wisdom all Things are One, being of the Body of our Lady Nuit, proper, necessary, and perfect. There is then none superfluous or harmful, and there is none honourable or dishonourable more than another. Lo! In thine own Body, the vile Intestine is of more Worth to thee than the noble Hand or the proud Eye, for thou canst lose these and live, but not that. Esteem therefore a Thing in Relation to thine own Will, preferring the Ear if thou love Musick, and the Palate if thou love Wine, but the essential Organs of Life above these. Have Respect also to the Will of thy Fellow, not hindering him in his way save as he may overly jostle thee in thine. For by the Practice of this tolerance thou shalt come sooner to the Understanding of this Equality of all Things in Our Lady Nuit, and so the high Attainment of Universal Love. Yet in thy partial and particular Action, as thou art a Creature of Illusion, do thou maintain the right Relation of one Thing to another; fighting if thou be a Soldier, or building if thou be a Mason. For if thou hold not fast this Discipline and Proportion, which alloweth its True Will to every Part of thy Being, the Error of one shall draw all after it into Ruin and Dispersion.

Love is the law, love under will. Thelemic tolerance is based on a respect for individual differences, founded on the mystical intuition of the unity ('the Body of our Lady Nuit'), and the recognition of the infinite interrelatedness of the manifold in the world of appearances. Thelema can be seen as that 'Discipline and Proportion' which artfully trains the will to establish and maintain its harmony with cosmic love, which is after all, the law. Ceremonial magick is a tool used by Thelemites for training the will to vibrate with cosmic love.

For someone seeking to learn more about Thelema as a magickal philosophy and a spiritual discipline, Liber Aleph is a good resource. It is a challenging book and, like many of Crowley's works, one which a novice might find rather a jump into the deep end of the pool, but it is one which yields mystical rewards for the effort of contemplating its 'Wisdom or Folly.'