Confessions of Aleister Crowley

238 THE CLAIM OF THE BOOK OF THE LAW TO OPEN UP COMMUNICATIONS WITH DISCARNATE INTELLIGENCE. In the above section I have shown that the failure of previous religions is due, not so much to hostile criticism, but to their positive defect. They have not made good their claim. It has been shown above that The Book of the Law does demonstrate the prime position of religion in the only possible way. The only possible argument, on the other side, is that the communication cannot have been made by a discarnate intelligence, because there are none such. That indeed constitutes the supreme importance of The Book of the Law. But there is no a priori reason for doubting the existence of such beings. We have long been acquainted with many discarnate forces. Especially in the last few years science has been chiefly occupied with the reactions, not {397} merely of things which cannot be directly perceived by sense, but of forces which do not possess being at all in the old sense of the word. Yet the average man of science still denies the existence of the elementals of the Rosicrucian, the angels of the Cabbalist, the Nats, Pisachas and Devas of southern Asia, and the Jinn of Islam, with the same blind misosophy as in Victorian days. It has apparently not occurred to him that his position in doubting the existence of consciousness except in connection with certain types of anatomical structure is really identical with that of the narrowest geocentric and anthropocentric Evangelicals. Our actions may be unintelligible to plants, they might plausibly argue that we are unconscious. Our real reason for attributing consciousness to our fellow-men is that the similarity of our structure enables us to communicate by means of language, and as soon as we invent a language in which we can talk to anything soever, we begin to find evidence of consciousness. The was is therefore clear for me to come forward and assert positively that I have opened up communication with one such intelligence; or, rather, that I have been selected by him to receive the first message from a new order of beings. THE HISTORICAL CONCEPTION ON WHICH THE BOOK OF THE LAW IS BASED. Just as The book of the Law reconciles an impersonal and infinite interpretation of the cosmos with an egocentric and practical viewpoint, so it makes "infinite space" speak in the language of a goddess and deals with the details of eating and drinking: Be goodly therefore: dress ye all in fine apparel; eat rich foods and drink sweet wines and wines that foam! Also, take your fill and will of love as ye will, when, where and with whom ye will! But always unto me. The emancipation of mankind from all limitations whatever is one of the main precepts of the Book. Bind nothing! Let there be no difference made among you between any one thing & any other thing; for thereby there cometh hurt. It reconciles cosmological conceptions which transcend time and space with a conventional, historical point of view. In the first place it announces unconditional truth, but in the second is careful to state that the "Magical Formula" (or system of principles) on which the practical part of the book is based is not an absolute truth by one relative to the terrestrial time of the revelation. (It is a strong point in favour of the Book that it make no pretence to settle the practical problems of humanity once and for all. It contents itself with indicating a stage in evolution.) The Book of the Law presumes the existence of a body of initiates pledged to watch over the welfare of mankind and to communicate its own wisdom little by little in the measure of man's capacity to receive it.