Confessions of Aleister Crowley

381 This psychological paradox, by the way, is very frequent. Again and again I have made important discoveries with tedious toil only to remember, in the hour of triumph, that I had written them down years earlier. It seems that I do not know what I am writing, or even understand what I have written. The poem ends with "Blessing and worship to the Beast, the prophet of the Lovely Star". Henceforth I must be no more an aspirant, no more an adept, no more aught that I could think of as myself. I was the chosen prophet of the Masters, the instrument fit to interpret their idea and work their will. I cannot say whether I realized this identification of myself with the messenger of the Masters, this resolution of my complex equation into a simple expression, in which the x of my individuality was eliminated, made it possible for the Secret Chiefs to initiate me fully as a Master of the Temple, three years since my prudent refusal to accept it. {610} 66 I had no special magical object in going to Algiers, which I reached on November 17th. As my chela, I took Frater Omnia Vincam, a neophyte of the A.'. A.'. disguised as Victor Neuburg. We merely wanted to rough it a bit in a new and interesting corner of the planet of which we were parasites. We hastily bought a few provisions, took the tram to Arba and after lunch started south, with no particular objective beyond filling our lungs with pure air and renewing the austere rapture of sleeping on the ground and watching the stars, serenely silent above us, till the face of sleep, kissing our eyes, hid them from us in her heavy and holy hair. On the twenty-first we reached Aumale, after two nights in the open and one at a hovel that may have looked so tired on account of its sisypean struggle to pretend to be an hotel. I cannot imagine why or how the idea came to me. Perhaps I happened to have in my rucksack one of my earliest magical notebooks, where I had copied with infinite patience the Nineteen Calls or Keys obtained by Sir Edward Kelly from certain angels and written from his dictation by Queen Elizabeth's astrologer with whom he was working. The sixth book of their magical workings was translated by Casaubon and is one of the very few genuine and interesting works of Magick of any period. Much of their work still defies explanation, though I and Frater Semper Paratus, an Adeptus Major of A.'. A.'., have spent much time and research upon it and cleared up many obscure points. The fact which stamps this working as sincere is this: over one hundred squares filled with letters were obtained --- in a manner which no one has quite understood. Dee would have one or more of these tables (as a rule 49x49), some full, others lettered only on alternate squares, before him on a writing table. Kelly would sit at what they called the Holy Table and gaze into a "shew-stone" which, with some of the talismans on the table, may be seen in the British museum. Kelly would see an angel in the shew-stone, who would point with a rod to letters on one of these charts in succession. Kelly would report, "He points to column 6, rank 31" and so on, apparently not mentioning the letter, which Dee found and wrote down from the "table" before him. This seems to imply that Kelly did not know what words would be formed. If he did, we must assume that he knew the position of each of the 2,401 letters in each of the tables, which seems a somewhat surprising accomplishment. When the angel had finished, the message was {611} rewritten backwards. (It had been dictated backwards as being too dangerous to communicate forwards --- each word being in its nature so powerful that its direct communication would have evoked forces which were not wanted at that time.) These Keys or Calls being rewritten backwards, there appeared conjurations in a language which they called "Enochian" or Angelic. It is not a jargon; it has a grammar and syntax of its own. It is very much more sonorous, stately and impressive than even Greek or Sanskrit, and the English translation, though in places difficult to understand, contains passages of a sustained sublimity that Shakespeare, Milton and the Bible do not surpass. To condemn Kelly as a cheating charlatan --- the