The Book of the Law (Liber al vel Legis) by Aleister Crowley

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This book has become a sort of bible of occultists and black magicians, and followers of the "religion" of Thelema which was created mostly around Crowley's believes. The book was written in three sessions at noon on three successive days, when Crowley was in Cairo. He claims an unearthly entity Aiwass dictated the book to him.

The book can be found online too:
http://www.thebookofthelaw.com/2010/11/ ... chapter-1/

However, i tried about 10 times already to read and understand it, watched a Crowley documentary, ... but nothing helps. It got halfway the first chapter and that after hours of reading, giving up but re-attempting. I am not into black magic or occultism in general, I rather abstain from such things, but the book itself does interest me purely from the point of gaining knowledge and understanding the Thelema filosophy better.

It is however extremely complex due to the use of Egyptian mythology, Greek gods, a lot of complex metaphores... I mean, apparently Nuit is the highest goddess and highest force who represents the All, whereas Hadit is the male counterpart often represented as a glowing heart inside Nuit. Then we have Horus, the child, who is a two-entity of two other Egyptian gods.
Crowley calls an era an "aeon" and each of these gods had an aeon of 2000 years, with Horus being in "charge" of the current aeon we are in. But then this is just the beginning of countless of gods, mythology references, filosophical metaphores, ...

But it's too interesting to give up. Does anyone know if a publication with explanations exists?
Has any of you read it AND understood it?



93, 93:93

Love is the Law, Love under Will

Do what thou wilt, crackedpleasures. Because the Book of the Law forbids its own interpretation, it can be difficult to find someone willing to discuss it. Like you, I found it a fascinating puzzle because I couldn't make sense of it upon first reading, and it led me to further study that has been well repaid in knowledge.

Crowley's own commentaries were published under the title _The Law Is For All_, but these also require a background in qabalah, mythology, etc. to understand them. If you're coming to these ideas for the first time, you might need to spend a while reading up on the basic concepts then tackling the Book of the Law again. There are useful sites like Thelemapedia that can fill in some of that background info for you: http://www.thelemapedia.org/index.php/Main_Page

I mainly find the book fascinating because (no offense) Crowley was a nutcase but still managed to write a very intrigueing book. I would love to understand more than just its core lines

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Love is the Law. Love under Will.
And every man and every woman is a star"

A good Crowley documentary on YouTube (made by the BBC) is "Aleister Crowley: the wickedest man in the world"

What's incredibly confusing about Crowley is that some people of very high magickal esteem with years of academics and research under their belts (such as Poke Runyon of the blogtalk Hermetic Hour) take him literally at the message of conquer, pillage, and take what you want and in that sense they themselves aren't fans of Thelema. On the other hand you have people who'd claim that every violent and seemingly sociopathic or ruthless thing said in Crowley's writings were actually code or irony requesting the opposite. Mark Passio for instance has a couple hour radio show on Youtube trying to condone Thelema as being a tipharethic state of mind (ie. tiphareth-initiated in terms of the 6th sephira of the Kabbalah/Cabalah/Qabalah) and where 'do what thou wilt' refers to the 'thou' of the higher self or holy guardian angel. My problem with that kind of massive white-wash: why did he go to such extremes to make it sound much the opposite - sex appeal?

The sense I get with Crowley is that he mixed his signals. For those who do believe in channeling - lets just say that on two of the three transmissions he didn't do too badly, by the third he started wearing on it and blending it with his own thoughts.

To those who don't believe such a thing as channeling exists - try reading the Papirus of Ani. When you read that or any other Egyption book of the Dead you'll see where Liber Al Vel Legis is practically a clone - just that in the Egyptian scrolls there's no sign of the Egyptian gods and goddesses talking about flaying another set of gods or goddesses in the way you have with Crowley's writings toward Jesus and Mohammad.

When reading up on occult matters better to stick to people whose writings you don't have to worry about performing gematria on to make sense of - ie. Rudolph Steiner, Paul Foster Case, Dion Fortune, Manly P Hall, etc.. I'd rather have my own well constructed sets of beliefs in this regard ten years down the road where getting past Crowley's 'code' is second-nature and where I can make my own assessment on his stuff rather than having to get *way* into his stuff to understand it if I were trying to build an interpretive model for it in real time - IMHO it's just not worth it and anyone who knows me would offer as well I'd make about the most unlikely thelamite.

What's incredibly confusing about Crowley is that some people of very high magickal esteem with years of academics and research under their belts (such as Poke Runyon of the blogtalk Hermetic Hour) take him literally at the message of conquer, pillage, and take what you want and in that sense they themselves aren't fans of Thelema. On the other hand you have people who'd claim that every violent and seemingly sociopathic or ruthless thing said in Crowley's writings were actually code or irony requesting the opposite. Mark Passio for instance has a couple hour radio show on Youtube trying to condone Thelema as being a tipharethic state of mind (ie. tiphareth-initiated in terms of the 6th sephira of the Kabbalah/Cabalah/Qabalah) and where 'do what thou wilt' refers to the 'thou' of the higher self or holy guardian angel. My problem with that kind of massive white-wash: why did he go to such extremes to make it sound much the opposite - sex appeal?


I would say that Crowley's works have been distorted and exploited in order to justify whatever anarchic and violent behaviour people wish to justify, this is why people tend to label Crowley as being a Satanist, even though he never labelled himself as one and such a view shows a misunderstanding of what Satanism is. It rather irritates me when people take his 'Do what thou wilt' saying out of context and then ignore the bit about 'under the law of love', which states that you can do whatever you wish as long as its not infringing upon one's freedom at all. One strays into murky philosophical areas when you try and live by that because all the time you are infringing upon someone else's freedom. It seems as if I am not limiting someone's freedom by wearing clothes and it is my right to do so, however this might infringe upon a nudist's freedom to see every person unclothed. I suppose he may have implied that humanity might have a collective will in the future and people's desires, aspirations and ideologies may be so in unity with each other that one could never infringe upon another person's freedom. It is hard to imagine what he thought but I certainly believe his writing have become distorted.

He was exceptionally prophetic nevertheless however and I think truly envisioned the world we are seeing now, which is based on pragmatic moralistic relativism rather than one of dogmatic idealism, whether it be religious or political idealism. I think this is what he means when he is talking about the Aeon of Horus. In the Aeon of Isis, people worshiped religions that focused on the worship of the earth and nature, the feminine life force. Then the age of Osiris was born and people began following the dead-desert religions we have nowadays such as Christianity. Man was blind and thus needed the vice of dogmatic, patriarchal religion in order to give him certainty in the world and give him a fixed, objective morality by which to abide. Now I think we are seeing what Crowley called the Aeon of Horus, which began in the sixties, in which people are taking more control over how they live their lives. Although, religion has not died completely people are becoming more and more skeptical of it. The same goes for dogmatic forms of political ideology. People are becoming more skeptical I would say also of communism and capitalism and any other kind of fixed political thought and instead are realizing that we are individuals with our own individualistic needs and desires.

He has been labelled as being a satanist, a rapist and a child-murderer but none of these things I would say are rational claims based on empirical. He stated in his Confessions that he killed over 150 children a year, which provoked outrage but he was actually referring to masturbation. Good old Crowley, his humor was always conventional

I at least follow the irony logic up to this point. He has in Liber Oz that there is no god but man however he claimed to be channeling Egyptian deities through Aiwass; he clearly wasn't an atheist. If he was trying to talk about the whole celestial spark theory where we're god's mirrors or as Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin would put it with man as God's book - he chose an exquisitely strange way of conveying it and seemed to work incredibly hard for notoriety.

I used to be fascinated with the occult. What ultimately kept from staying interested was the required investment; copper daggers, more books, crystals, etc.
Once, I put a curse on a schoolmate as a joke. I met him years later, and he said "I think it worked"

I tried LBRP a few times just for memory using my finger and I couldn't see myself pointing a dagger up at source, even if it were simply a motion to initiate a draw-down.