FOLLOW A WORD THROUGH THE COLLECTION
Search the corpus.
Phrase search ignores case and repeated whitespace. All-words search finds whole words anywhere on the same page. OCR errors can affect results.
109 matching pages
Page 1 of 61996 · PDF PAGE 184
Chapter III & Verses 58-60 185 I have myself practiced constantly to prove the Law by many and divers modes in many and divers spheres of thought, until it has become absolutely fixed in me, so much so that it appears an “identical equation,” axiomatic indeed, and yet not a platitude, but a very sword of Truth to sunder every knot at a touch. As the practical ethics of the Law, I have formulated in words of one syllable my declaration of the RIGHTS OF MAN Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. There is no god but Man. Man has the righ…
1996 · PDF PAGE 185
…d by Aiwaz to confirm His Law, without knowing what it is about. For instance: “God’s wind from nowhere which is called the Will; and is man’s only excuse upon this earth,” was written by so triv ial a Fat Man as Gilbert Keith Chesterton in The Flying Inn.1 1 [G. K. Chesterton, The Flying Inn (1914), ch. 17.] 61. There is an end of the word of the God enthroned in Ra’s seat, lightening the girders of the soul. Commentary: Note that Heru-ra-ha is not merely a particu lar form of Ra, but the God enthroned in Ra’s seat. That is, His Kingdom on e…
1996 · PDF PAGE 144
…nterpart, with whom “love under will” is the fulfilment of the Law, in a sublimer sphere. But there are no rules until one finds them: a man leaving Ire land for the Sahara does well to discard such “indispensable” and “proper” things as a waterproof and a blackthorn for a turban and a dagger. The “moral” man is living by the no-reason of Laws, and that is stupid and inadequate even when the Laws still hold good; for he is a mere mechanism, resourceless should any danger that is not already provided for in his original design chance to arise. …
1996 · PDF PAGE 194
…o the other With a spell for their mystical girth, The earth and the wonderful West, When I flourished, o earth, on the breast! The dead man Ankh-f-n-Khonsu Saith with his voice of truth and calm: O thou that hast a single arm! O thou that glitterest in the moon! I weave thee in the spinning charm; I lure thee with the billowy tune. The dead man Ankh-f-n-Khonsu Hath parted from the darkling crowds, Hath joined the dwellers of the light, Opening Duant, the star-abodes, Their keys receiving. The dead man Ankh-f-n-Khonsu Hath made his passage into…
1996 · PDF PAGE 24
Chapter I A- Verses 1—3 25 Further, this verse is to be taken with the next. The “company of heaven” is Mankind, and its “unveiling” is the assertion of the independent godhead of every man and every woman! Further, as Khabs1 (see verse 8) is “Star,” there is a further meaning; this Book is to reveal the Secret Self of a man, i.e. to initiate him. 1 [Usually khaib in modern Egyptian transliteration.] 2 [A Crowley diary from 1919 e.v.; the relevant passage is quoted on p. 26.] 3. Every man and every woman is a star. Commentary: This thesis is fu…
1996 · PDF PAGE 167
… The evident interpretation of this is to take the word to be “Do what thou wilt,” which is a secret word, because its meaning for every man is his own inmost secret. And it is the most profound blasphemy possible against all “gods of men”, because it makes every man his own God. We may then take it that this Solar-Phallic Heru-ra-ha1 is Each Man Himself. As each independent cell in our bodies is to us, so is each of us to Heru-ra-ha. Each man’s “Child”-consciousness is a Star in the Cosmos of the Sun, as the Sun is a Star in the Cosmos of Nuit…
1996 · PDF PAGE 91
…:3 1:41 who “bowed humbly to the Authority of” the Pope, or the Bible, or the Sanhedrin, or the Oracle of Apollo, or the tribal Medicine-Man, nonetheless expressed truly his own Wish to abdicate responsibility. In the light of this Book, we now know that the centre is everywhere, the circumference nowhere; that “Every man and every woman is a star”, a “Khabs,” the name of the house of Hadit; that “The word of Sin is Restriction.” To us, then, “evil” is a relative term; it is “that which hinders one from fulfilling his true Will.” (E.g., rain is…
1996 · PDF PAGE 44
Chapter I * Verses 41-42 45 42. Let it be that state of manyhood bound and loathing. So with thy all; thou hast no right but to do thy will. Commentary: “manyhood bound and loathing.” An orga nized state is a free association for the common weal. My personal will to cross the Atlantic, for example, is made effective by cooperation with others on agreed terms. But the forced asso ciation of slaves is another thing. A man who is not doing his will is like a man with cancer, an independent growth in him, yet one from which he cannot get free. Th…
1996 · PDF PAGE 168
… self-sacrifice. One must not for a moment suppose that this verse supports the historicity of “Jesus.” “Jesus” is not, and never was, a man; but he was a “god,” just as a bundle of old rags and a kerosene tin on a bush may be a “god.” There is a man-made idea, built of ignorance, fear, and meanness, for the most part, which we call “Jesus,” and which has been tricked out from time to time with various gauds from Paganism, and Judaism. The subject of “Jesus” is, most unfortunately, too extensive for a note; it is treated fully in my book 888.1 …
1996 · PDF PAGE 174
…olice, and the other on its brink, at the mercy of the husband’s boot at the first sign of insubordination or even of failure to please. Man’s torture-chamber had tools inexhaustibly varied; at one end murder crude and direct to subtler, more callous, starvation; at the other moral agonies, from tearing her child from her breast to threatening her with a rival when her service had blasted her beauty. Most masterful man, yet most cunning, was not thy supreme stratagem to band the woman’s own sisters against her, to use their knowledge of her psy…
1996 · PDF PAGE 117
…ur minds would still insist that casuality itself was the effect of some cause. Our daily experience hammers home this conviction; and a man’s mental excellence seems to be measurable almost entirely in terms of the strength and depth of his apprecia tion thereof as the soul of the structure of the Universe. It is the spine of Science which has vertebrated human Knowledge above the slimy mollusc whose principle was Faith. We must not suppose for an instant that The Book of the Law is opposed to reason. On the contrary, its own claim to authori…
1996 · PDF PAGE 59
… there be any material substance soever endowed with Magical properties, one must class, primus inter pares, that vehicle of essential humanity which is the first matter of that Great Work wherein our race shares the divine prerogative of creating man in its own image, male and female. It is evidently of minor importance whether the will to create be consciously formulated. Lot in his drunkenness served the turn of his two daughters, no less than Jupiter, who prolonged the night to forty-eight hours in order to give himself time to beget Hercul…
1996 · PDF PAGE 109
…he Anglo-Saxon in this possession of the “fear-of- God” and “Sin” psychopathies. Truth is so terrible to these detestable mockeries of humanity that the thought of self is a realization of hell. Therefore they fly to drink and drugs as to an ansesthetic in the surgical operation of introspection. The craving for these things is caused by the internal misery which their use reveals to the slave-souls. If you are really free, you can take cocaine as simply as salt-water taffy. There is no bet ter rough test of a soul than its attitude to drugs. …
1996 · PDF PAGE 26
Chapter I A Verses 3—4 27 circumference inwards. This is what is meant when we say that woman has no soul. It explains fully the difference between the sexes.1 1 [Surviving fragment from “The Book of the Great Auk.” See also The Book ofThoth, pp. 15-16, and Part III of Book 4, Parts I-IV, rev. ed., p. 248n.] 2 [The “Star-Sponge” Vision was usually characterized by Crowley as “Nothingness with Twinkles”; see p. 79.] 3 [A lake in Bristol, New Hampshire.] 4 [A lengthy technical commentary to this verse, omitted by Dr. Wilkin son, is given as Appe…
1996 · PDF PAGE 182
…hat stifling and suffocating gas which is yet food for vegetable, as it is poison to animal, life. We have here a picture of the average man, of a fool. He has no will of his own, is all things to all men, is void, a repeater of words of whose sense he knows nought, a drifter, both idle and violent, compact partly of fierce passions that burn up both him self and the other, but mostly of inert and characterless nonentity, with a little heaviness, dullness, and stupefaction for his only positive qualities. Such are the “fools” whom we despise. …
1996 · PDF PAGE 66
…covery of oxygen, to account for combustion.] It stands plain, even to sceptical reason—indeed, most of all to the sceptic—that our talisman, one microscopic serpent of which can build for itself such a house as to rule men’s bodies for a generation like Alexander, or their minds for an epoch like Plato, cannot be destroyed or diminished by any conceivable force. When this talisman comes forth from its fortress, its action begins. The ancient Jewish Rabbins knew this, and taught that before Eve was given to Adam, the demon Lilith conceived by t…
1996 · PDF PAGE 129
130 The Law is for All 1:34 veils itself from its nature. Thus the vast bulk of humanity is obsessed by an abject fear of freedom; the principal objections hitherto urged against my Law have been those of people who cannot bear to imagine the horrors which would result if they were free to do their own wills. The sense of sin, shame, self distrust, this is what makes folk cling to Christianity-slavery. People believe in a medicine just insofar as it is nasty; the meta physical root of this idea is in sexual degeneracy of the masochis tic typ…
1996 · PDF PAGE 56
…inent to add that the above ethical theories have stood the test of practice. Experiment shows that complete removal—in the most radical manner—of all the usual restric tions on conduct results, after a brief period of uneasiness of var ious kinds, in the subject dropping entirely into the background; the parties concerned became natural, and led what would con ventionally be called “strictly moral” lives without even knowing that they were doing so.) As a Postscript, let me contrast with the above theories two actual cases of Marriage as it…
1996 · PDF PAGE 172
Chapter III A Verse 55 173 woman’s nature as seen by the clear eyes of those who would lose money if they misjudged her; and they are loathsomely revolting to read. Her mental and moral characteristics are those of the parrot and the monkey. Her physiology and pathology are hideously disgusting, a sickening slime of uncleanliness. Her virgin life is a sick ape’s, her sexual life a drunken sow’s, her mother life all bulging filmy eyes and sagging udders. These are the facts about “innocence;” to this has man’s Chris tian Endeavour dragged her w…
1996 · PDF PAGE 210
…hyself, o my prophet, thy stature shall surpass the stars. They shall worship thy name, foursquare, mystic, wonderful, the number of the man; and the name of thy house 418. 79. The end of the hiding of Hadit; and blessing & worship to the prophet of the lovely Star!