xviii 
PREFACE 
literature to read other than the Bible until he was about 
twelve years of age. Thus he became steeped in Biblical lore, 
having read it and studied it throughout the years. 
His mother, in moments of exasperation no doubt, would 
call him a "beast." With his knowledge of the Bible, it did 
not take him long to find out about the Beast of the Book of 
Revelation, the Beast who was anti-Christ, the Beast whose 
number was 666. He ultimately identified himself with that 
Beast, without question aided and abetted by his mother. 
When the time came to revolt and to turn against the 
religion of his family, with all the venom and brilliance that 
he, and only he, could muster, there could be no alternative 
but that he had to ally himself with those forces which were 
opposed to the stupidities his mother stood for. So he 
became the Beast. And since Revelation counted the number 
of the Beast and found it to be 666, the number of a Man, he 
turned all his Qabalistic and philosophical skill in later years 
toward finding this number in any meaningful word or motto 
that came his way. Still later, after he had received Liber 
Legis and was forced, as it were, to obey its precepts, then it 
was that he began to sign all communications with that 
significant number. 
Several of the letters describe a method for studying the 
Qabalah which deserves more than casual notice. I am calling 
attention 
to it specifically for fear that otherwise this 
approach may be overlooked in the mass of new ideas which 
will be hurled at the student if he is approaching this subject 
for the first time. 
The method is one that he started to use shortly after 
joining the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn when taken 
under the wing of Allan Bennett who had become his guru. 
Wherever he went, he took special notice of any person, 
object or event with a view to placing it on the Qabalistic 
Tree of Life. Slowly, in this way, he became adept in using 
the Tree as a referent for all phenomena whatsoever, and the 
so-called stereotyped attributions of color, planet, Tarot