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MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS |
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Chapter LXVI: VampiresCara Soror, Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. So you want me to tell you all about Vampires? Vampire yourself! I ask you, how does this come within the scope of your enquiries? Is this information essential to your Accomplishment of the Great Work? As the Government might say "Is your journey really necessary?" So musing, I rang you up for details. Vampires, you say, might be a temptation to yourself, or they might sap your energy. Very good. I will tell you the little I know. Listen to Eliphas Lévi! He warns us against a type of person, fearless and cold-blooded, who seems to have the power to cast a sudden chill, merely by entering the room, upon the gayest party ever assembled. Tête-à-tête, they shake one's resolution, kill one's enthusiasm, devitalize one's faith and courage. Yes, we all know such people. Mercury, by the way, is the planet responsible. I have examined a considerable number of nativities, both of murderers and of people murdered; in both cases it was not a "malefic" that did the dirty work, but poor tiny innocent silvery-shining Mercury! "Fie for same, you naughty planet! is it not John Henry Newman that sang of Lucifer? I doubt it. You, however, are thinking more of the vampire of romance. Bram Stoker's Dracula and its kindred. This is a splendidly well-documented book, by the way; he got his "facts" and their legal and magical surroundings, perfectly correct. It is easy enough to laugh at vampires if you live in Upper Tooting, or Surbiton, or one of those places where no self-respecting Vampire would wish to be seen. But in a lonely mountain village in Bulgaria you might feel differently about it! You should remember, incidentally, that the evidence for vampires is as strong as for pretty well anything else in the world. There are innumerable records extant of legal proceedings wherein the most sober, responsible, worthy and well-respected citizens, including the advocates and judges, investigated case after case with the utmost minuteness, with the most distinguished surgeons and anatomists to swear to the clinical details. Endless is the list of well-attested cases of bodies dug up after months of burial which have been found not merely flourishing with all the lines of life, but gorged with fresh blood. I cannot help feeling that all the superior-person explanations—which explain nothing—about collective hysteria and superstition and wish fulfillment and the rest of the current tomfool jargon, are just about as hard to believe as the original straight forward stories. The man who shook his head on being shown a giraffe, and said "I don't believe it," is quite on a par with he pontifical wiseacres of Wimpole Street. It is egomaniac vanity that prompts disbelief in phenomena merely because they lie outside the infinitesimally minute pilule of one's own personal experience. When I crossed the Burma-China frontier for the first time, who should I meet but our Consul at Tengyueh, the admirable Litton, who had by sheer brains and personality turned the whole province of Yunnan into his own Vice-royalty? We lunched together on the grass, and I hastened to dig into the goldmine of his knowledge of the country. About the third or fourth thing he said to me was this: "Remember! whatever anyone tells you about China is true." No words have ever impressed me more deeply; they sank right in and were illuminated by daily experience until they had justified themselves a thousand times over. That goes for Vampires! Oh yeah! (you vulgarly interpolate) and how does it go with the Master's unfathomably sage discourse on Doubt. Sister, you're loopy! Sister, if I may doubt all the people who have been to Africa or the Zoo and seen that giraffe, why must I cling with simple childlike trust to the people that say they've been all over Hell and parts of Kansas, and haven't seen one, and therefore such things cannot possibly be? Of the two dogmatic assertions, I should unquestionably prefer the positive statement to the negative. In 1916, I was the first trained scientific observer to record the appearance commonly called "St Elmo's fire" indiscreetly revealing this fact in a letter to the New York Times. I was pestered for the next six months and more by professors of physics (and the rest) from all over the U.S.A. The Existence of the phenomenon had been doubted until then because of certain theoretical difficulties. That, sister, is the point. If a statement is hard to reconcile with the whole body of evidence on the laws of the subject, it is rightly received with suspicion. A moment with great Huxley, and his illustration of the centaur in Piccadilly, reported to him (he humorously hypothesizes) by Professor Owen. What occasions Huxley's doubt, and inspires the questions by means of which he seeks to confirm or to discredit it? Just this, no more: here is the head and torso of a man fitted to the shoulders of a horse; how are the mechanical adjustments effected? In the same strain, he pointed out that for an angel to have practicable wings as in Mediaeval pictures, the breast-bone would have to stand out some five feet in front of the body. (The poor fellow, of course, was densely ignorant of the mechanics of the Astral Plane. I am, for once, "on the side of the angels.")* Am I digressing again? No, not really; I am just putting forward a case for keeping an open mind on the subject of Vampires, even of the Clan Dracula. But certainly there is little or no evidence of the existence of that species in England. How then is the subject in any way important to you? Thus, that there are actually people running about all over the place, who actually possess, and exercise, faculties similar to those mentioned by Lévi, but in much greater intensity, even of a kind far more formidable, and directed by malignant will. There is a mighty volume of theory and practice concerning this and cognate subjects which will be open to you when—and if—you attain the VIII° of O.T.O. and become Pontiff and Epopt of the Illuminati. Further, when you enter the Sanctuary of the Gnosis—oh boy! Or, more accurately, oh girl! Not that the O.T.O. is a Young Ladies' and Gentlemen's Seminary for Tuition in Vampirism,1 with a Chair (hardly suitable) for Werwolves, and Beds of Justice—that sounds more apt—for Incubi and Succubi;2 far from it! But the forces of Nature employed in these presumably abominable practices are similar or identical. The doctrine of "Vital Force" has been so long and so completely exploded that I hardly need to tell you that in some still undiscovered (or, rather, unpublished) and unmeasured form it is certainly a fact. Haven't I told you one time how we nearly starved on Iztaccihuatl with dozens of tinned foods all round us, they being ancient; of how one can get drunk on half a dozen oysters; of how the best meat I have ever eaten is half-raw Himalyan sheep, cut up and thrown on the glowing ashes before rigor mortis had set in?3 There is a difference between living and dead protoplasm, whether the chemist and his fellow twilight-gropers admit it or no. I do not blame the ignorance of these fumblers with frost-bitten fingers; b ut they make themselves conspicuously assinine when they flaunt that ignorance as the Quintessence of Knowledge; Boeotian bombast! There are forms of Energy, their Order too subtle to have been properly measured hitherto, which underlie and can, within certain limits, direct the gross chemical and physical changes of the body. To deny this is to be flung headlong into the arms of Animal Automatism. Huxley's arguments for this theory are precisely like those of Bishop Berkeley: unanswerable, but unconvincing. This letter is not, to every comma, the ineluctable, apodeictic, automatic, reaction to the stimulus of your question; and no one can persuade me that it is. Of course that unpersuadability is equally a factor in the equation; it is quite useless to try to "answer back." Only, it's silly! (And, in the meanwhile, the mathematical physicists are knocking the bottom clean out of their ship by shewing that causality itself is little more than a maniac's raving!) * For all that, they move without flapping them. As Swinburne says: "Swift without feet, and flying without wings."4 So then, we may—at least!—get busy. It is easy enough to bore one's neighbour—look how I bore you! But that is usually an unintentional business. Is it possible to intensify the devitalizing process, so as to weaken the victim physically, perhaps even almost to the point of death? Yes. How? The traditional method is to get possession of some object or substance intimately connected with the victim. On this you work magically so as to absorb its virtue. It is best if it was as recently as possible part of his living tissue; for instance, a nail-paring, a hair plucked from his head. Something still alive or nearly so, and still part of the complex of energies that he included in his conception of his body. Best of all are fluids and secretions, notably blood and one other of supreme importance to the continuity of life. When you can get these still alive to their function, it is best of all. That is why it is not so highly recommended to tear out and devour the heart and liver of your next-door neighbour; you have gone far to destroy just that which is of most importance to you to keep alive. Doubtless you will reply with some apparent justice, indeed most plausible is such ratiocination, that by taking into your own body, and so preserving the life of, his heart and liver, the whole of his "vital energies" will desert the sinking ship of the physical tissue, and rush to the lifeboat provided by the vampire. Never forget that you confer an inestimable benefit upon the victim by absorbing his lower point of Energy into your higher. Read your Magick, Chapter XII!5 You say this strongly, my dear Sister in the Lord; your thesis is impeccably stated, your arguments are cogent, plangent, not to be repeated. But—this I pout to you most solemnly—what experimental evidence do you adduce? How many hearts, how many livers, have been your spiritual sustenance? Have you excluded every source of error? Have you—here, you know the routine; write it all down and send it along to be vetted! Be that as it may, I once knew a lady of some seventy summers. She came of a noble Polish family; she was short, sturdy, rather plump but singularly agile; good-looking in a brutal sort of way. But—her eyes! For fifty years she had lived nearly all the year round in her chateau in Touraine. She had plenty of money, and had always surrounded her- self with a dozen or more boys and young men. (By young I mean up to forty). She not only looked twenty-five but she lived twenty-five. It was a genuine, natural, spontaneous twenty-five, not a gallant effort. She would dance the night through and go a long walk in the morning. You may apply to her for details of the treatment; I dare say she is still about, thought I did hear that she moved to South America when she saw 1914 coming. In any case, you have had some fairly plain hints so I can say in all simplicity, "Go thou and do likewise!" I think my old friend Claude Farrère had more than an inkling of these matters; the idea of using young cellular tissue to fortify the old is plainly stated in La maison des hommes vivants; but as to the method of transmission his water was drawn form Wells (H.G.) After that—you will agree that I have written enough. Love is the law, love under will. Fraternally, 666 1: See De Arte Magica; the chapter on Vampirism is titled "Of a certain other method of Magick not included in the instruction of O.T.O." – T.S. 2: See Liber XXIV, chapter on Incubi and Succubi – T.S. 3: See Crowley's essay "On Food," printed in the Teitan Press edition of Amrita – T.S. 4: The quote is from Atalanta in Calydon, chorus "Who hath given man speech?" – T.S. 5: ... and note that the "male child" (p.95) equals the Serpent. Chapter LXVII: FaithCara Soror, Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Dear me! dear me! this is very unexpected. I wrote you a long while ago about doubt, and now I suppose the seed fell in fertile ground! My chaste remarks have prompted a new question "arising out of the previous answer, Sir." You point out quite correctly that the doubt of which I wrote in passages of such burning eloquence is after all what used to be called "philosophic" doubt; and by "philosophic" people apparently meant something rather like "Pickwickians." Not the genuine McCoy, determining action, but—well, rather like scoring points in an intellectual game. Now then (air connu) what is Faith? There are two kinds; and they are almost exact opposites. (N.B. The word is allied to Bide: there's some idea of endurance (or perhaps repose) in it. Cf Peter!?!?!?) Then the third kind, which is moral, not intellectual; as in "good faith," bona fide, yours faithfully; and this is probably the hallmarked sense, for it implies just that endurance which goes with bide, and is not dependent in any way upon reason or conviction. This then I may dismiss as impertinent to the question in your letter, and stick to the other two. Faith in its Meaning Number One was perfectly well defined by the schoolboy: "the faculty of believing that which we know to be untrue." It is at least the acceptance of any statement as true without criticism, examination, verification, or any other method of test. Faith of this sort is evidently the main symptom of the moron, the half-wit, the village idiot. It is this kind of faith upon the possession and exercise of which religious persons always insist as the first condition of salvation. Here is my own lamentable foresight on the subject!
Sometimes, note well! they are even frank about it, and say plainly that there would be no merit in it if there were any reasonable basis for it! This position is at the worst both honest and intelligible; the only trouble is that there is no possible means of deciding which to two conflicting statements to accept. In faith of this kind there are of course in practice delicately shaded degrees; these depend mostly upon the authority of the speaker and your relations with, and opinion of, him. In practice, moreover, faith is usually tinged—should I say clouded?—by questions of probability. I see no need to weary you with examples of varying degrees; it is enough to dismiss the subject with the remark that faith is not true faith if any considerations of any kind sully its virgin nullity. To prop faith is to destroy it: I am reminded of Mr. Harry Price's young lady of Brocken fame, who was so timorously careful of her virginity that she never felt it safe unless she had a man in bed with her. What is the other kind of faith? Like its hostile twin, it must have no truck with reason, at least no conscious truck, or it ceases to possess a moral meaning. It is that confidence* in oneself which assures one that the long shot at the tiger will fly true to the mark, that the tricky putt will go down, that the man one never beat before will go down this time; also its horrid contrary, the moral certainty that something will go wrong, even with the easiest problems, with one hundred to one in one's favour. I think the official answer is that one's certainty is in reality based upon subconscious calculation, so that faith has nothing whatever to do with it. If there is any answer to this, I don't know it. After all, that is neither here nor there; there is but one material issue: how to acquire that kind of faith. Suppose we hunt it up in that precious Book of Lies! Any luck? Sure, kiddums, here we are!
Nothing in that to contradict the official view, is there? Nothing in biology either. Or in Blake: "If the Sun and Moon should doubt Or in that other chapter of the Book of Lies:
Or in The Book of the Law. You know the passage well enough. Conclusion: this discussion has for ever abolished the use of the word faith to imply conscious belief of any sort. At least, if there should ever be an element of awareness, it is of the nature of a sudden leap into daylight of the quintessence of a mass of subconsciously selected and ordered experience. Then what, if you please, did Paul mean when he wrote "Faith is the substance of things hoped-for, the evidence of things unseen." Oh, spot the Lady! Love is the law, love under will. Yours etc. P.S. Don't take any wooden money. P.P.S. I have a marvelous proposition for you; I wouldn't let in anyone on it but my very best friend: there's a man in San Luis Potosi in a mine there; he stole about $20,000 worth of gold dust and now he's afraid to get rid of it, but he knows I'm safe and knows how to handle it and I've been his very best friend for twenty years, and he's as straight as a die, and I know he'd let us have it for $10,000 and I've only got $4,000—and that is where you come in! * "Confidence" = cum, with; fidere, to trust = to trust fully. This confidence of which I write is usually a sort of "hunch". 1: Originally published in The Winged Beetle (1910). Chapter LXVIII: The God-LettersCara Soror, Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Maybe it was Devanagri that
began it! This "sacred" character, used rightly for Sanskrit alone, is
supposed (so Allan Bennett told me) to be constructed on—can one call
them ideographic?—principles. The upright line is the soft palate; the
horizontal the hard; and the line between them shows the position of the
tongue when one pronounces the letter. He demonstrated this most
elegantly for the letter T ( However, it did start me thinking (why?) about the possibility of a direct relation between the sound of a letter and its meaning in some primitive manner of speech. So I used to alarm my fellow-citizens, usually passengers on a liner, by spending most of my time repeating some unhappy letter over and over, while I looked into my mind to see if the sound suggested any particular idea. (It was rather fun, you know; but it was most certainly one of the most delicate, subtle, and difficult experiments that I have ever undertaken.) Bound to flop, obviously, from the word "gun", if only because the same- sounding word in different languages—sometimes even in the same!—has often not merely diverse, but diametrically opposed meanings. Think of Bog, or Bug, the Russian word for God (I do think "Bogey" comes from this, though!); think of the dam of a stream, and of a young thing, and damn. Think of all the different kinds of box and cock and rock. (G. K. Chesterton must have made tens of thousands of pounds out of it!) Think of "let", meaning both to prevent and to allow. Think of "check" to a chess-player, a banker, a draper, a waitress, a fox-hunter and a Slovak! The importance of all this: I'm sure I've told you how Thoth, God of all Magick, the Wisdom and the Word, is usually shown with style and papyrus, as inventor of writing, which is the real Magical Art. Hence "grimoire" is nothing but grammar; to cast a "spell" explains itself; and the Angel (e.g. of a Church, see Revelations I, II) was merely the Secretary.1 Never mind! I was thinking of language in its (supposed) primal state, when grunts and groans and moans and yells and squeaks and the like were the nearest anybody ever got to: "Sweet articulate words And yet I persisted. I wanted to go right back, before letters were put together to make words at all. This is, I believe, almost wholly original work, though I'm not sure that Fabre d'Olivet didn't skate round the edges. I put to myself this question: when I pronounce the letter so-and-so, what thought or class of thought tends to arise in my mind? (If you practise this in public, people may wonder!) With the vowels, one does seem to find a natural correspondence. (I wrote a ballet "The Blind Prophet" on these lines, long before it struck me to investigate on scientific lines). The Hindus knew this with their A-U-M: A is the open breath, U the controlled force, M no breath at all. (See Magick, pp. 45-49). To me I is a shrill feminine sound, as O is the roar of the male. U is pursed, E hardly significant. As to Magick, the Gnostics were chili con carne plus molten platinum plus a few girls I have known on the vowels. Their incantations consist almost entirely of combinations of these.2 Seven at a time is very frequent; in fact it seems sometimes as if their theurgy depended on variations of these combinations. Their theology, too. Never mind that just now! But the consonants? That is a harder nut to crack. Students of language have been accustomed to group the consonants exactly as we now happen to require. Here, in brief, is the list: Dentals, Labials, Gutturals. Various modifications extend them to fifty-nine and there are twenty- seven vowels. I shall naturally concern myself only with those that matter to the subject: in practice, the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew Alphabet will serve for this preliminary study, especially as in that case, we have already the attributions. I will begin by classing them.3
You will note that either Jupiter or Luna occurs in every case; in two, doubly. Guttur, moreover, is the Latin word for throat. Both planets emphasize the soft open expansive aspects of Nature; they both refer accordingly to the feminine throat, the tube either of present or of future Life. (Jupiter, when in Sagittarius, has an aggressive, masterful, male side; but his letter when there is Samekh.) Now pronounce these letters; observe the motions of opening and expulsion of the breath. Well, then, you will no longer wonder at that list we had in another letter of the words Cwm, coombe, quean, queen, and so on; also (?) quill, queer, quaintest, curious, (?) quick, (?) quince: especially with the U vowel, which sounds prehensile, ready to suck. Kupris (or Ctytto) the Greek or Syrian Aphrodite-Venus, is the outstanding example in Theogony. But, you ask, what has all this to do with the Gods? Patience, child; this will develop as we proceed. Let us look at the dentals. These, for the profane scholar, include the "sibilants," and "liquids."
Here, we see at one glance, there is no such simple obvious relationship, as in the previous list. Nor indeed is there, to my ear, any close connection in the sounds. Better luck, perhaps, with the last lot.
Not a bit of it; almost worse than before. Here, then, I say it, weeping, with agonized reluctance, the Holy Qabalah has let us down with a bump! (It did look, too, didn't it, as if it was all going to go so miraculously well!) All is not lost—not even honour! Suppose you reflect that (after all) Hebrew is a late language, invented; far, far removed from the primitive grunts and groans (with their corresponding motions) that we set out to study. Let us take the high hand, and say that the Guttural Correspondence doesn't rime with anything, that it is just an amazing piece of sheer luck: nay, that it should serve us as a warning not to be led away like Macbeth—you remember how Banquo warned him that "Oftentimes, to win us to our harms, —and breaks off abruptly to speak with his cousins. Never forget the abiding temptation of men of science, the hidden rocks on which so many have been wrecked, to generalize on insufficient data. May the gods keep us from that! I dread it more than all the other snags put together. With all due caution, therefore, let us attack our puzzle from the other end; let us see what astral experiment tells us about the philology of it! Good! We'll call it D-Day and drop our paratroops. D is a sharp, sudden, forceful explosive sound, cut off smartly. Now then I can't tell whether you will connect this with ejaculation, with the idea of paternity. Whether or no, a vast number of people did so in the dawn of speech. Even to-day children seem instinctively to say "Dad" for "Father," though no allowance can be made for cases of mistaken identity. And the most ancient Father-Gods of the oldest and simplest civilizations are thus named. In Sumer He was AD, or ADAD, whence the later Egyptian Hadit, and the Semitic Adonai. (There are also words like AVD, the creative Magick). So also the Greeks in Syria knew Adonis, and the Latin Deus is itself the general word for God. Again, Valhalla houses Odin, Woden; and there are others. When the dental is complicated to a sibilant, as we shall see later, another idea is introduced; while the lightening of the sound to T has yet another effect. Sanskrit also helps us with such roots as DETH, to show, DAM, to tame, DEVK, to lead, DHEIGH, to knead, mould, DHER, to support, DO, to give, DHE, to put and a while group of words like Deva, a divine being. But that comes later: meanwhile, practise pronouncing these names, as also English words such as Do, Deed, Dare, Drive, Doubt, Dig, Dog, Dive, Duck, Dub while exploring the Abyss of your mind, and see whether you do not soon associate the D-sound with a swift, hard, definite, fertile and completed act. For a fair test, take only the oldest and simplest words, words which might naturally be wanted in the Stone Age. The next sound-group to be considered may conveniently be N. Here at once we have innumerable Gods and Goddesses flocking up: Nu, Nuit, Ann, Noah, John, Oannes, On, Jonah, et al. With the exception of On, a special case, all these divine or semi-divine Beings refer to the Night, the Starry Heavens, the Element of Water, the North, the Mother-Goddess, as appears when we consider their legends and rituals. N, Nun, means a fish and refers to the water sign of Scorpio. (Note, later when we reach Sh, that Joshua was the Son of Nun.) To me the sound gives the idea of a continuum, an eternal movement; and this is of course our Thelemic conception of the Universe, the "Star-sponge," of which I have elsewhere written at such length. But at the moment I am especially desirous that you should compare and contrast this letter with the S Sound. (S or Sh combined with T is discussed rather fully in Magick, pp. 336-8)5 You should find it child's play to determine the significance of the sibilant. It is the one letter which necessitates the exposure of the skeleton! (I.e., the Subconscious). Hence "Hush!" it is the hiss of the snake, great Lord of Life and Death—(life? yes, the spermatozoon, child!) "Silence! Danger! There is a man somewhere about." The savage reaction. And, sure enough, Ish is the Hebrew for man (Mankind is ADM, Adam, Sanskrit Admi, the Father and Mother conjoined. "Male and Female created They Man.") The S-gods are innumerable. Asar (Asi, Isis, is his female twin) Astarte, Ishtar or Ashtoreth, Set, Saturn, Shu, Zeus, (into whom the D intrudes, because S is the male as N the female, and D the father as M the mother) and the Jesus group. Here is the idea of the South, or East, both quarters referring, in ways very slightly divergent, to the element of Fire, the Sun, the Father-God in his aspect as the Holy Ghost. The ancient tradition appears in the Gospels: the Lesser Mysteries of John, beheaded with the Sword, and consumed on a Disk, and the Greater Mysteries of Jesus, pierced with a Wand, and consumed in a Cup. All same Tarot! I am not at all sure how far it is wise to take this letter. To make it complete, we should need a Book about three times the size of The Book of Thoth, and I should want another half-century of research before I started to write it! As this seems for divers reasons a little awkward in practice, I am rather afraid that we must content ourselves with this very sketchy account: always, when one touches the subject, one "goes all woolly." One lacks not only completeness, but precision. Then there is the "over-lapping" nuisance, and the fact that the natures and the names of the Gods change slowly as time goes by. The confusion! The contradictions! I could wish to be the proverbial bargee. Oh! I could go on making excuses for another hour! I can't be helped; and I feel that I shall have rendered you quite a bit of service by calling your attention to the existence of the subject, by stimulating you to research, by suggesting certain potential lines on which to attack the same, and perhaps even by giving you a few tips which you may find useful in practical Magick. The subject is closely bound up with Mantra-Yoga, and with Invocation. You will doubtless have noticed (for instance) that many chapters of the Q'uran have the letter L for a leit-motif. Islam attaches immense importance to this liquid L, as it appears in Allah (compare the Hebrew L-Gods, AL, Aloah, Elohim, A'alion, etc., and look up the L-idea in your Book of Thoth, and in Magick, pp. 331 sqq.6) and other peculiarly sacred names and words. Before cursing my way to dinner—oh! how I hate the need of food unless I am practising the "Ninth Art" and disguise myself as a gourmet—I must mention the letter M. This is the only letter that can be pronounced with the lips firmly closed; it is the beginning of speech, and so the Mother of the Alphabet. (Distinguish from N, the letter of the Female). Look up Magick again; Chapter VII (pp. 45-49) gives a good account of M in discussing AUM. Note, too, the root MU "to be silent," form which we have the words Mystic, Mystery and others. As the letter of the Mother it appears to this day in nature everywhere, the first call of the child to "Mamma." In nearly every language, moreover, the word for Mother is based on M. Madar, Mere, Mutter, Umm, AMA or AIMA and the rest. The vibrant R suggests light-rays: Ra, the Sun; the labials bring to mind the curves in Natureùyou will soon discover the words with a few little experiments; the T is a D, only lighter, quicker and younger—and so Good-night! Love is the law, love under will. Fraternally, 666 1: Grk., αγγελλος, a messenger or envoy; one that announces (Liddell & Scott intermediate) – T.S. 2: For multiple examples of this kind of thing, see also The Greek Magical Papyri in Translaiton (Uni. of Chicago Press, 1986, 1992) – T.S. 3: In a note to Kabbalah Unveiled (I.Z.Q. cap. XIX. s. 694) Mathers gives the division thus:
(Resh is said to be classed as a gutteral by some, a dental by others) – T.S. 4: Here represent the obsolete Greek letter digamma. 5: The reference is to the discussion of the formula of LAShTAL in the essay accompanying Liber V vel Reguli – T.S. 6: The reference is again to Liber V – T.S. Chapter LXIX: Original SinCara Soror, Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. It was at Dover. I had passed the Customs Inspector. Turning back, I said: "But perhaps I ought to have declared my Browning?" Much agitated, he muttered: "How ever did I come to miss that?" and began all over again. I helped him out: "You see, you were thinking of pistols, I of poetry." (There is a lesson in that!) And now you—of all people!—fire him off at me. "Gold Hair" you write; "what about R.B's defence of Christianity?" You mean, of course, "'Tis the faith that launched point-blank its dart It is impossible to commit all the possible logical errors in the course of a single syllogism; but he has an honest try.
For one thing, I have yet to learn who told the "lie." It was not until Rousseau that we had the nonsense about the "noble savage." But it is at least true that man's deepest instincts, being natural and necessary, are, for him, "right." It is true that an artificial society creates artificial crimes; but this is not "Original" Sin; on the contrary. What's that you say? I laugh! I wondered when you were going to pull me up, and send me packing to my Skeat about what "Sin" means. O.K. Police routine does beat the gifted amateur. Sin, astonishingly, means real! Curtius tells us "Language regards the guilty man as the man who it was." Then, what is "guilt"? A.S. gylt, trespass; in our own Thelemic language, "deviation from (especially in the matter of excess, trespasser) the True Will." Please take notice that most of the words which denote misconduct imply wandering, either from the home or from the path: error, debauch, wrong (=twisted), wry, evil (excessive) detraquer, go astray, and several others. So I too leap into the breach with Curtius, and point out that "Language itself asserts the doctrine of the True Will." But what says The Book of the Law? It is at pains to define Sin in plain terms: "The word of Sin is Restriction. ..." (AL I, 41). From the context it seems clear that this refers more especially to interference with the will of another. This statement is the first need of the world to-day for we are plagued with Meddlesome Matties, male and female, whose one overmastering passion is to mind other peoples' business. They can think of nothing but "control." They aim at an Ethic like that of the convict Prison; at a civilization like that of the Bees or the Termites. But neither history nor biology acquaint us with any form of progress achieved by any of these communities. Penal settlements and Pall Mall Clubs have not even made provision for the perpetuation of their species; and all such "well-ordered" establishments are quite evidently defenceless against any serious change in their environment. They have failed to comply with the first requirements of biology; at best, they stagnate, they achieve nothing, they never "get anywhere." A settled society is useful at certain periods; when, for instance, it is advisable to consolidate the gains gotten by pioneer adventurers; but history shows with appalling clarity that the very qualities which serve to protect must inevitably destroy the very conditions which they aim to preserve. Hey! Hasn't the dear old Book of Lies got its word on the subject? Never known to fail!
That settles it. We do progress; but how? Not by the tinkering of the meliorist; not by the crushing of initiative; not by laws and regulations which hamstring the racehorse, and handcuff the boxer; but by the innovations of the eccentric, by the phantasies of the hashish-dreamer of philosophy, by the aspirations of the idealist to the impossible, by the imagination of the revolutionary, by the perilous adventure of the pioneer. Progress is by leaps and bounds, but breaking from custom, by working on untried experiments; in short, by the follies and crimes of men of genius, only recognizable as wisdom and virtue after they have been tortured to death, and their murderers reap gloatingly the harvest of the seeds they sowed at midnight. Damn it! All this is so trite that I am half ashamed to write it; and yet—everyone acquiesces with a smile, and goes off to vote another set of fetters for his feet! Sin? This is the sin of sins: Restriction. All boots from the one last: all beautifully polished on parade; the March of Time will find not much but hobbling! More of this when I answer your letter (just in as I drew rein to read this over) about Education. Love is the law, love under will. Fraternally, 666 P.S. On reading this, I note that I passed over with deserved contempt the theory of "original sin" in the sense which you probably meant me to take: the defect deliberately implanted in man by "Old Nobodaddy" with no better object than to prepare the grotesquely tragic farce of the "Atonement." I will merely remark that no idea at once so base and so contemptible, so bestial and so idiotic, can challenge its ignoble absurdity. Rotten with sex-perversion, it is a noisome blend of sadism and masochism based on the most abject form of fear. The only argument for it is that it ever did exist; but it does not exist for wholesome minds. Chapter LXX: Morality (1)Cara Soror, Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. "Tu l'as voulu, Georges Dandin!" I knew from the first that your sly, insidious, poisoned poniard, slipped in between my ribs, would soon or late involve a complete exposition of the whole subject of Morality. Of we go! What really is it? The word comes from Mos, Latin for custom, manner. Similarly, ethics: from Greek ΕΘΟΣ, custom. "It isn't done" may be modern slang, but it's correct. Interesting to study the usage of "moeurs" and "manières" in French. "Manner" from "manus"—hand: it is "the way to handle things." But the theological conception has steered a very wrong course, even for theology; brought in Divine Injunction, and Conscience, and a whole host of bogeys. (Candles in hollow turnips deceive nobody out- side a churchyard!) So we find ourselves discussing a "palely wandering" phantom idea whose connotations or extensions depend on the time, the place, and the victim. We know "the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban," and the difference between Old and New Testament morality in such matters as polygamy and diet; while the fur flies when two learned professors go down with a smart attack of Odium Theologicum, and are ready to destroy a civilization on the question of whether it is right or wrong for a priest (or presbyter? or minister?) to wear a white nightie or a black in the pulpit. But what you want to know is the difference between (a) common or area morality, (b) Yogin—or "holy man's" morality, and (c) the Magical Morality of the New Aeon of Thelema. 1. Area Morality: This is the code of the "Slave-Gods," very thorougly analysed, pulverized, and de-loused by Nietzsche in Antichrist. It consists of all the meanest vices, especially envy, cowardice, cruelty and greed: all based on over-mastering Fear. Fear of the nightmare type. With this incubus, the rich and powerful have devised an engine to keep down the poor and the weak. They are lavish alike with threats and promises in Ogre Bogey's Castle and Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. "Religion is the opium of the people," when they flinch no longer from the phantom knout. 2. _Eight Lectures on Yoga gives a reasonable account of the essence of this matter, especially in the talks on Yama and Niyama. (A book on this subject might well include a few quotations, notably from paragraphs 8, 9 and 10 in the former). It might be summarized as "doing that, and only that, which facilitates the task in hand." A line of conduct becomes a custom when experience has shown that to follow it makes for success. "Don't press!" "Play with a straight bat!" "Don't draw to five!" do not involve abstract considerations of right and wrong. Orthodox Hinduism has raped this pure system, and begotten a bastard code which reeks of religion. A political manoeuvre of the Brahmin caste. Suppose we relax a little, come down to earth, and look at what the far-famed morality of the Holy Man was, and is, in actual practice. You will find this useful to crush Toshophist and Antroposophagist1 cockroaches as well as the ordinary Christian Scolex when they assail you. In the lands of Hinduism and (to a less extent) of Islam, the Sultan, the Dewan, the Maharajah, the Emir, or whatsoever they call "the Grand Pandjandrum Himself, with the little round button on top," it is almost a 100 per cent rule that the button works loose and is lost! Even in less exalted circles, any absolute ruler, on however petty a scale, is liable to go the whole hog in an unexceptionably hoggish fashion. He has none to gainsay him, and he sees no reason for controlling himself. This suits nearly everybody pretty well; the shrewd Wazir can govern while his "master" fills up on "The King's Peg" (we must try one when champagne is once again reasonably cheap) and all the other sensuous and sensual delights unstinted. The result is that by the time he is twenty—he was probably married at 12—he is no longer fitted to carry out his very first duty to the State, the production of an heir. Quite contrary to this is the career of the "Holy Man." Accustomed to the severest physical toil, inured to all the rigours of climate, aloof from every noxious excess, he becomes a very champion of virility. (Of course, there are exceptions, but the average "holy man" is a fairly tall fellow of his hands). More, he has been particularly trained for this form of asceticism by all sorts of secret methods and practices; some of these, by the way, I was able to learn myself, and found surprisingly efficacious. So we have the law of supply and demand at work as uncomplainingly as usual: the Holy Man prays for the threatened Dynasty, blesses the Barren Queen; and they all live happy ever after. This is not an Arabian Night's Tale of Antiquity; it is the same today: there are very few Englishmen who have spent any time in India who have not been approached with proposals of this character. Similar conditions, curiously enough, existed in France; the "fils à papa" was usually a hopeless rotter, and his wife often resorted to a famous monastery on the Riviera, where was an exceptionally holy Image of the Blessed Virgin Mary, prayers unto whom removed sterility. But when M. Combes turned out the monks, the Image somehow lost it virtue. Now get your Bible and turn up Luke VIII, 2! When the sal volatile has worked, turn to John XIII 2,32 and ask a scholar what any Greek of the period would have understood by the technical expressions there unambiguously employed. Presently, I hope, you will begin to wonder whether, after all, the "morality" of the middle classes of the nineteenth century, in Anglo-Saxon countries, is quite as axiomatic as you were taught to suppose. Please let me emphasize the fact that I have heard and seen these conditions in Eastern countries with my own ears and eyes. Vivekananda—certainly the best of the modern Indian writes on Yoga—complained bitterly that the old greymalkin witches of New York who called themselves his disciples had to be dodged with infinite precaution whenever he wanted to spend an evening in the Tenderloin. On the other hand, the Sheikh of Mish—and a very holy Sheikh he was—introduced his "boy friend" as such to me when I visited him in the Sahara, without the slightest shame or embarrassment. Believe me, the humbug about "morality" in this country and the U.S.A., yes, even on the Continent in pious circles, is Hobgoblin No. 1 on the path of the Wise. If you are fooled by that, you will never get out of the stinking bog of platitudinous mouthings of make-believe "Masters." Need I refer to the fact that most of the unco' guid are penny plain hypocrites. A little less vile are those whose prejudices are Freudian in character, who "compound for sins that they're inclined to, By damning those they have no mind to." Even when, poor-spirited molluscs, they are honest, all that twaddle is Negation. "Hang your clothes on a hickory limb, and don't go near the water!" does not produce a Gertrud Ederle. Thank God, the modern girl has cast off at least one of her fetters—the ceinture de chastété! Perhaps we have now relaxed enough; we see that the "Holy man" is not such a fool as he looks; and we may get on with our excursions into the "Morality" of the Law of the New Aeon, which is the Aeon of Horus, crowned and conquering child: and—"The word of the Law is Θελημα." 3. So much of The Book of the Law deals directly or indirectly with morals that to quote relevant passages would be merely bewildering. Not that this state of mind fails to result from the first, second, third and ninety-third perusals! "When Duty bellows loud 'Thou must!' is all very well, or might be if the bellow gave further particulars. And one's general impression may very well be that Thelema not only gives general licence to to any fool thing that comes into one's head, but urges in the most emphatic terms, reinforced by the most eloquent appeals in superb language, by glowing promises, and by categorical assurance that no harm can possibly come thereby, the performance of just that specific type of action, the maintenance of just that line of conduct, which is most severely depreciated by the high priests and jurists of every religion, every system of ethics, that ever was under the sun! You may look sourly down a meanly-pointed nose, or yell "Whoop La!" and make for Piccadilly Circus: in either case you will be wrong; you will not have understood the Book. Shameful confession, one of my own Chelas (or so it is rather incredibly reported to me) said recently: "Self-discipline is a form of Restriction." (That, you remember, is "The word of Sin ...".) Of all the utter rubbish! (Anyhow, he was a "centre of pestilence" for discussing the Book at all.) About 90 % of Thelema, at a guess, is nothing but self-discipline. One is only allowed to do anything and everything so as to have more scope for exercising that virtue. Concentrate on "...thou hast no right but to do thy will." The point is that any possible act is to be performed if it is a necessary factor in that Equation of your Will. Any act that is not such a factor, however harmless, noble, virtuous or what not, is at the best a waste of energy. But there are no artificial barriers on any type of act in general. The standard of conduct has one single touchstone. There may be—there will be—every kind of difficulty in determining whether, by this standard, any given act is "right" or "wrong": but there should be no confusion. No act is righteous in itself, but only in reference to the True Will of the person who proposes to perform it. This is the Doctrine of Relativity applied to the moral sphere. I think that, if you have understood this, the whole theory is now within your grasp; hold it fast, and lay about you! Of course, there must be certain courses of action which, generally speaking, will be right for pretty well everybody. Some, per contra, will be generally barred, as interfering with another's equal right. Some cases will be so difficult that only a Magister Templi can judge them, and a Magus carry them wisely into effect. Fearsome responsibility, I should say, that of the Masters who began the building-up of the New Aeon by bringing about these Wars! (I do wish that we had the sense to take our ideas of Peace conditions from the Bible, as our rulers so loudly profess that they do. The Enemy knows well enough that there is no other way to make a war pay.) Now then, I hope that we have succeeded in clarifying this exceptionally muddy marish water of morality from most of its alien and toxic dirt; too often the Aspirant to the Sacred Wisdom finds no firm path under his feet; the Bog of Respectability mires him who sought the Garden of Delights; soon the last bubbles burst from his choked lungs; he is engulfed in the Slough of Despond. In the passive elements of Earth and Water is no creative virtue to cleanse themselves from such impurity as they chance to acquire; it is therefore of cardinal importance to watch them, guard them, keep their Purity untainted and unsoiled; shall the Holy Grail brim with poison of Asps, and the golden Paten be defiled with the Bread of Iniquity? Come Fire, come Air, cleanse ye and kindle the pure instruments, that Spirit may indwell, inform, inspire the whole, the One Continuous Sacrament of Life! We have considered this Morality from quite a number of very different points of view; wrought subtly and accurately into final shape, you should find no further difficulty in understanding fully at least the theoretical and abstract aspects of the business. But as to your own wit of judgment as to the general rules of your own private Code of Morals, what is "right" and what is "wrong" for you, that will emerge only from long self-analysis such as is the chief work of the Sword in the process of your Initiation. Love is the law, love under will. Yours fraternally, 666 P.S. Most of this is stated or implied in AHA!
1: This is a reference to the school of thought of Rudolf Steiner. By the time of this writing, Steiner's students were being taught that Crowley was a "bad man." Tit for tat. Anthroposophy presents a merging of several branches of mysticism with dance and movement. It rewards study, but one shouldn't mention A.C. at the Steiner schools until one has acquired what one wants! – WEH. 2: John XIII, 2-3 in the King James translation reads: "And supper being ended, the devil having now put into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, to bretray him; Jesus knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he was come from God, and went to God." Crowley, or the typesetter, or transcriber, may have got the references slightly confused, as Luke VIII, 3 (KJV) reads: "And Joanna, the wife of Chuza Herod's steward, and Susanna, and many others, which ministered unto him of their substance." Crowley alludes to this verse in a similar connection in The Gosepl According to Saint Bernard Shaw – T.S.
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);
but I was never able to follow this up with most of the other fifty-
five (isn't it?) letters.