The Dark Lord: H.P. Lovecraft, Kenneth Grant, and the Typhonian Tradition in Magic - Peter Levenda 2013
Strange Aeons
That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.
—H.P. Lovecraft
This child Horus is a twin, two in one. Horus and Harpocrates are one, and they are also one with Set or Apophis, the destroyer of Osiris. It is by the destruction of the principle of death that they are born. The establishment of this new Aeon, this new fundamental principle, is the great work now to be accomplished in the world.
—Aleister Crowley
Let not the reverence for the God of thy self cause thee by a misconception to lose thy reverence for the Gods who live for ever—the Aeons of Infinite Years.
—The Golden Dawn, “The Symbolism of the Admission of the Candidate”
THE CONCEPT OF THE AEON may seem like an odd place to start this discussion, but the idea that humanity has entered a new phase of existence—of evolution, perhaps—is central to the belief-system called Thelema and to Crowley's theology in general. For if Crowley's new religion was of a piece with everything that had preceded it, there would be no point to it, or to discussing it at any great length except as a curiosity.
A contemporary of Crowley, the author of gothic horror stories H. P. Lovecraft, had his own idea about Aeons: that they represented enormous lengths of time, and that the contemplation of them (and what life-forms may have evolved during them) would drive a normal person insane, as would the contemplation of the vast distances of space between the Earth and the stars. Yet, as with Crowley, he wrote that in certain cases, and with certain Aeons, “even death may die,” or will result, as Crowley wrote, in “the destruction of the principle of death.” This conquering of death has been a focus of virtually every major religion in the last five or six millenia (probably beginning with the Egyptians). This represents hope for Crowley but absolute horror for Lovecraft; for if death is overcome for some, it would be overcome for all: mass murderers, serial killers, fiendish dictators ... and the anthropoid monsters of the writer's feverish imagination.
Thus we should begin with a look at the concept of the Aeon. It has been a fractious subject among Thelemites for one of Crowley's colleagues had proposed a different schema for the Aeons, one that would have reduced Crowley's own structure significantly. Also, the idea that the end of the world is near—vide the Mayan calendar, the Nostradamus prophecies, and other chiliastic concerns—lends more significance to any discussion of the Aeons, the New Age, and the astronomical ideas they represent.
Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) claimed to be the Prophet of the new age, the Aeon of Horus, and the Book of the Law its scripture. Received over the course of three afternoons in Cairo, Egypt in April of 1904, Crowley himself rejected it at first. Some of the language is offensive, particularly when it comes to describing the world's great religions. The vehemence with which Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc are denigrated seems far from what we have come to expect of spiritual literature. However, a re-read of the first few books of the Bible would be educational in this regard, for the God of the Jews was just as vehement in his attack on all other gods, all other religions. A re-read of the Book of Revelations (also known as the Apocalypse) would reinforce this impatience of the God of Christians and Jews with any and all other forms of religious expression. This vehemence was often backed up with military force, and the massacres of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children was the bloody result. Thus the anger and hatred for earlier faiths shown in the Book of the Law is consistent with Old and New Testament attitudes, if nothing else, and seems of a piece with the contemporary world's religious polarization.
The structure of the Book of the Law is that of three chapters, each devoted to a different Egyptian deity or deities and each represented as the speech of that deity via a praeterhuman intelligence or spiritual intermediary called Aiwass, a being that Crowley later claimed was his Holy Guardian Angel. This occurred as a series of inspired or channeled scriptures over the course of those three days from April 8 to 10, 1904. The readings began after Crowley's wife—Rose Kelly—alerted Crowley to the immediacy of the contact during a visit to the Boulaq Museum in Cairo on the vernal equinox that year, at which time she drew his attention to a stele numbered 666, now known to the faithful as the “Stele of Revealing.” This particular stele was a burial plaque for a priest of the Egyptian god Mentu. The priest's name was Ankh-ef-en-khonsu. Each session took place in their apartment between the hours of 12 and 1 pm. (It is possible that the dictations occurred at the precise hour of the mid-day call to prayer, and that they would have heard the muezzin's cry outside their hotel room window right before, during or after the séance.)
It could be considered natural that the scripture would have an Egyptian coloration, considering all the external circumstances. However, the character of Crowley's own previous initiations into a British secret society known as the Golden Dawn would also have an impact on the terminology (if not the philosophy) of the text as we will see. So what we will look at first in this chapter is the nature of the “Egyptology” of the Book of the Law and its relation to the concept of the Aeons.
Egyptian Trinities
The three chapters are the utterances of the Egyptian gods Nuit, Hadit, and Ra-Hoor-Khuit (respectively). Structurally, this seems consistent with Egyptian practice. The Egyptian religion contains many such “trinities” of supreme gods at the head of the various pantheons. One of the oldest is that of Ptah, Sekhmet and Nefertum; another would be that of Amun, Mut and Khonsu. The most famous is perhaps that of Osiris, Isis and Horus. In each case, we are presented with a male god, a female goddess, and a child god. In other words, a nuclear family. We rarely, if ever, come across this type of configuration in the Tantric pantheons of Tibet and India, for instance, where the emphasis is usually on a male and a female deity; while there are offspring of these unions, they are rarely depicted as a family unit in the way of the Egyptian examples.
However, the trinity Nuit/Hadit/Ra-Hoor-Khuit is not a typical one in Egyptian texts. Nuit is a star goddess and the mother of Set and Nephthys. Hadit—according to the Book of the Law and to Crowley's subsequent writings—is either a star within that empyrean or a solar disk; as the sun is a star this is not as inconsistent as it might appear. The third god, Ra-Hoor-Khuit, has much more in common with forms of Horus—offspring of Isis and Osiris—rather than with any conceivable union of Nuit and the lesser-known Hadit (which is itself a form of Horus). We may venture to say that this combination is unique to Crowley and to the Book of the Law.
Yet, there is another deity specifically mentioned in the scripture, and that is Khonsu. Crowley, in his role as scribe of Aiwass and of the gods, is given the title Ankh af-n-Khonsu after the name of the priest whose burial plaque was the Stele of Revealing. The two terms ankh and Khonsu bear some further investigation.
Ankh, of course, is the iconic symbol of the Egyptian idea of immortality. The word ankh means “life” and is found on temples and tombs everywhere in Egypt with the associated idea of immortality and life after death. Egyptian pharaohs as well as deities are often depicted holding an ankh, sometimes also called the crux ansata or “cross with handle.”
Khonsu, however, may not be as well known. It is the name of another child god, sacred to the moon. This god was usually depicted in mummified form, but with the lock of hair on the right side of his head typical of Egyptian children of ancient times. This is used to emphasize the youth of the god with the implication that he is pre-pubescent. His mother was Mut (not to be confused with Maat), a self-created mother goddess whose symbols were the vulture and the lion and whose name means “mother.” In northern Egypt, she became identified with the lion goddess Sekhmet and, at various times, with the cat goddess Bast. Khonsu's father was Amun (sometimes Amen or Amoun), the mysterious self-created god of whom Ra was often considered to be the external image, hence the composite form Amun-Ra.
While Khonsu was a lunar deity, and often depicted as a child, he also had warrior tendencies in the Egyptian religion. He was believed to be a defender of the king, who destroyed his enemies by removing their internal organs and presenting them to the king for nourishment. This odd mythologem gave rise to one epithet of Khonsu as the “king's placenta” and, indeed, he later became identified with childbirth (just as Set would later be identified with miscarriage and abortion).
This idea of Khonsu as the king's defender shares some ideas in common with Horus, who avenged the murder of his father, Osiris. Often, Khonsu is depicted with a hawk's head—recalling Horus explicitly—with a lunar disk and crescent above it to identify him more carefully with the moon, as opposed to the more solar aspect of Horus. In addition, Khonsu was also depicted in a very suggestive way at his temple in Karnak: as “a ram-headed snake who fertilized the cosmic egg.”4 This identification of Khonsu with the Cosmic Egg of creation will have resonance later, as the vision of the Egg comes to play in the Amalantrah Working of Crowley and associates,5 as well as with the “Blue Egg of Harpocrates” in the rituals of the Golden Dawn.
But it is the presentation of Khonsu as a child that has relevance for the Book of the Law. Khonsu is referred to in Egyptian mythology as the “Moon Child,” which would become the title of one of Aleister Crowley's novels. This same image—of a child god—is found in the statues and bas-reliefs of Harpocrates, a form of Horus and, indeed, this form is mentioned in the Book of the Law several times.6 Crowley, as a “priest of Khonsu” deliberately makes the association with a child-god who is also a martial deity, a defender of the king. In the case of Khonsu's father—Amun—we have the archetype of the “Hidden God” that figures so prominently in the work of Kenneth Grant and to which we will return from time to time.
The first chapter of the Book of the Law consists of the words of Nuit, the goddess of the night sky, who is often depicted with her feet in the west, her hands in the east, and her body thus gracefully arched over the earth, and dotted with stars.
The second chapter reveals the words of Hadit, the Heru-Behdeti of the Egyptian pantheon, called Haidith in Greek. Hadit was recruited by Thoth (the Egyptian god of magic, writing, and wisdom) to assist Horus in the latter's famous battle with Set. Hadit represents a single point of light, a single star in the empyrean of Nuit. If Nuit is visualized as a circle, then Hadit would be the point in the center. In the Thelemic universe Nuit and Hadit also may represent different forms or ideas about infinity, perhaps infinite expansion and infinite contraction respectively.
The third chapter consists of the revelation of Ra-Hoor-Khuit, or Ra-Herakhty in Greek recension. This is a deity composed of two different ideas: Ra and Horus. The translation of Ra-Herakhty is “Ra, Horus on the Horizon.” Thus there is the sense that Ra—the quintessential Sun god of the Egyptians—manifests as Horus when on the horizon, i.e., when the sun is rising or setting. Horus is the son of Osiris and Isis and is the god who battled Set (in one version of the story) to avenge his father's murder. Thus, there is the implication that the identity of Horus is inextricably linked to his parentage, and that Horus's purpose as the Avenging Son thus connects him eternally with Set: a union not of love, but of war. This “unity” of Horus with Set is an idea that Crowley embraced and which appears several times in his published work.7 Ra-Hoor-Khuit is mentioned frequently throughout all three chapters of the Book of the Law, and is obviously the focal point of the scripture.
It is thus Horus—and especially the form of Ra-Hoor-Khuit—who will occupy most of the attention of Thelema, for he is the symbol of the New Aeon that replaces the earlier Aeon of Osiris. However, there is a darker—more mysterious and to some an extraterrestrial—aspect to the New Aeon, and it concerns the intermediary between Crowley and the gods of the Book of the Law: the entity known variously as Aiwaz or Aiwass.
Crowley himself referred to this being as Set-Aiwass or Shaitan-Aiwass in some of his writings,8 thus linking it with both the Egyptian god of “Evil”—Set or Seth—and with the Middle Eastern name for God's (or humanity's) “Adversary”: Shaitan, more popularly known as Satan (but “reclaimed” by the Mesopotamian sect of the Yezidis in a rehabilitated form, about which more later). This refers to a very early, predynastic (i.e., 3500-3000 BCE), form of Egyptian religion that identified Set as a god of the desert, of storms, and of rage. Much later, the Greeks at the time of the historian Herodotus (c. 484-425 BCE) identified Set with their own sea monster, Typhon. (It was this Typhon that gave its name to Kenneth Grant's new form of Thelema, the Typhonian Order, representing what he called the Typhonian/Stellar Current.) Set was also said to reside in the Great Bear constellation, and served to aid the souls of the dead to attain immortality by allowing them to climb Set's “stairway to heaven.”9 Like most Egyptian deities, Set originally had both a positive and a negative nature but in the end the negative aspect of the god won out due to popular attribution. As the sworn enemy of Horus, Set was seen as the eternal Evil One and the murderer of Horus's father, Osiris. He was also said to have been born unnaturally, ripping himself through the belly of his mother, the sky goddess Nut or Nuit who figures so prominently in the Crowley scriptures. Thus, he could be seen as an initiatory force.
Indeed, Set's role in the New Aeon could be described as that of the Grand Initiator of humanity. However, this type of initiation will be violent and imposed from outside, rather than the relatively serene form experienced by Crowley himself during his sojourn with the considerably more sedate Golden Dawn. We can see this type of violent and involuntary initiation prefigured in the psychological experiments of the world's intelligence agencies beginning in the 1950s with the phenomenon of the “Manchurian Candidate” of the Korean War era that contributed to the creation of mind control, behavior control, and psychological warfare programs that sought to unpack the secrets of the human mind by using unsuspecting innocent men, women and children as test subjects and guinea pigs.10
Thus we have a rather paradoxical relationship in which Set-Aiwass communicates the text of the Aeon of Horus (his sworn enemy) to Crowley in Cairo. Crowley elevated the status of Set far above that which obtained in dynastic Egypt, and saw in Set the type of force necessary to bring in the new Aeon. This may be considered an “initiated” view of traditional Egyptology which understands Set and Horus as implacable foes. If the myths concerning Set were little more than libels created by followers of the newer gods Osiris and Horus, what was the truth? What did Set really represent, and what is Set's relationship to the Aeon of Horus?
As Crowley's understanding of the Book of the Law matured, so did his understanding of Aiwaz, whom he declared to be none other than his Holy Guardian Angel11: a concept developed by the Golden Dawn, the secret society that had initiated him into magic. The Holy Guardian Angel or HGA can be conceived of as one's “Higher Self” or as the apotheosis of one's own spiritual identity; conversely, one's self is seen as a manifestation (one among many) of the Angel. In Crowley's case, he viewed Aiwaz to be one of the gods of ancient Sumer, thus pre-existing the Egyptian civilization and their oldest known divinity, the desert god Set, who might then be considered an avatar or emanation of the original Sumerian archetype.
In addition, Crowley proposed a composite Set-Horus “current” that would represent the combined tension of the two antagonists as a single force emblematic of the New Aeon. This was typical of Crowley's tinkering with the known Egyptology of the day. It did not reflect any new discoveries in the field, but was rather informed by his occult insight into the play of spiritual forces represented by “god forms” and ideas associated with the Egyptian gods in the consciousness of the Western mind of the early twentieth century. As we have seen, he also combined Set, Shaitan and Aiwaz into a single concept representing not only his own HGA but also a deity or devil from the little-known civilization of Sumer.12 Thus, we have the Egyptian Set, the Semitic Shaitan, and a Sumerian god identified only by the word Aiwaz or Aiwass—which has no meaning in the Sumerian language—all lumped together without regard for individual religious or social contexts. From the point of view of mainstream religious studies or anthropology—especially postmodern anthropology—this is a car wreck of a proportion equivalent to a major highway pile-up.
It is perhaps relevant to point out at this juncture that one cannot refer to any of Crowley's writings as representative of formal Egyptological theory or research. Crowley is not an academic source for this type of material. Rather, he was an interpreter of the Egyptological discoveries of his day, such as those by Gaston Maspero (1846-1916) and most especially of the amateur Egyptologist Gerald Massey (1828-1907), whose fanciful—and esoterically-oriented—descriptions of the ancient world were never taken seriously by mainstream archaeologists but which were embraced by occultists. The theories of Massey still exert an important influence over occult authors today, regardless of the fact that they are considered in error (at best) or wholly imaginary (at worst).
Crowley's interpretations—like those of Massey—were freeform, conforming to his own experiences as an occultist and magician. The occultism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries largely was indebted to universalist ideas of “common origins,” a worldview which in its extreme form took as a given the existence of an Ur-cult or Ur-religion in the remote past that provided the inspiration and basis for all future cults. Thus, the religions of Sumer and Egypt had a source in common with those of India and China, and even the Aztec and Mayan religions of Latin America. Symbols that were discovered in several vastly different locales—such as the Dragon—were believed to represent a single, common idea regardless of whether the Dragon symbol was carved on a stone block in England or seen on a porcelain fragment in China. This idea—that same or similar symbols were evidence of a single belief or cultural phenomenon—was taken to its logical conclusion by the Nazis who raced to find evidence of the swastika on ancient remains around the world, thus supporting their contention that a single, Aryan race was responsible for all of human civilization.13 We can see a similar trend in the present era with all the talk of ancient aliens having “given” the human race its science, its architecture, and its religions. In a sense, this is close to Lovecraft's idea that an ancient race from the stars once inhabited the Earth.
In Crowley's day, however, this approach was exciting and encouraged a great deal of amateur speculation on the history of the ancient world. While universalism has been discredited by the philosophers of the Frankfurt School and their associated postmodern approach to theories of knowledge and interpretation, with its fetishism of cultural differences and uniqueness, some elements of its worldview stubbornly remain. Rather than throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater, it can be acknowledged that certain aspects of the human condition—birth, death, sexuality—are identical among all members of the human race, and that while different approaches may be taken to sacralize or otherwise interpret these aspects they are nonetheless “universals” and their comparison across ethnic, racial and environmental lines may contribute to a better understanding of the human condition.
So, when Crowley wrote—seemingly recklessly—about a “Set-Horus” current in occultism, or identified Set with Shaitan and with a Sumerian Aiwaz, he was not referring specifically to these ideas as they are understood by scholars or were understood by the indigenous peoples who contributed them to the world's body of knowledge. Instead, he was emphasizing certain perceived qualities that he deemed cognate, without overmuch regard for their historical context. At the same time, one should not infer that Crowley's “Egyptology” needs to remain at odds with normative Egyptology. On the contrary, by supplementing Crowley's writings on the subject with recent scholarship in the field many advantages accrue and discoveries occur and, where necessary, corrections may be made.
A further defense of Crowley's Egyptology may be made in light of the fact that the Egyptian religion itself went through many changes over the course of its roughly three thousand—four thousand years of history. Gods and goddesses changed attributes over time, changed rulerships and characteristics, and even parentage. Their sacred sites were moved, or renamed. Their effigies defaced as new cults emerged. Often gods were merged with other gods to form new, composite forms. Thus one could make the argument—perhaps only slightly frivolously—that the Book of the Law represents a new iteration of the Egyptian religion and continues the developmental process begun in the pre-Dynastic era.
Another factor to be taken into consideration is one that is frequently ignored, even by those who claim a certain degree of expertise in this area, and that is the fact that Crowley had been initiated into the Golden Dawn and framed much of his magical and esoteric worldview within the Golden Dawn structure of rituals and instructions. Thus, we first come across Hoor-par-kraat, Osiris, Isis, Nu, Maat and many of the other Crowleyan references in this context: in the Golden Dawn rituals themselves, the ones used to initiate Crowley, which had a profound affect on his consciousness and his intellectual and spiritual development. In fact, certain phrases in the Book of the Law make no sense whatsoever without reference to those very rituals.
As an example, we can refer to the very first chapter wherein it is written:
Abrogate are all rituals, all ordeals, all words and signs. Ra-Hoor-Khuit hath taken his seat in the East at the Equinox of the Gods; and let Asar be with Isa, who also are one. But they are not of me. Let Asar be the adorant, Isa the sufferer; Hoor in his secret name and splendour is the Lord initiating. (AL I:49)
In his “New Comment” to the Book of the Law, Crowley himself clearly states:
The general allusion is to the Equinox Ritual of the G
D where the officer of the previous six months, representing Horus, took the place of the retiring Hierophant, who had represented Osiris.
Thus, the replacement of Osiris by Horus—i.e., the old Aeon by the New—was already prefigured in the rituals with which Crowley was completely familiar, but which would have been incomprehensible to an outsider. In that ritual Horus was represented by the officer known as the Hiereus (or “priest”). Osiris was the Hierophant (or “high priest”), and another of the important officers was the Hegemon (“leader” or “guide”), which was the Goddess Maat, and indeed the hall of initiations in the neophyte ceremony was called the Hall of Maat. (In the verse from the Book of the Law cited above, Asar is Osiris and Isa may be Isis or Jesus.14) Thus, the gods of the Book of the Law were speaking to Crowley in a Golden Dawn context (since the allusions make no sense outside of the very specific Golden Dawn rituals). They were using his initiation as a channel through which to communicate, to make their words known and understood.
What this means is that the cultus of Thelema and the organizations that grew out of it—the AA, Grant's Typhonian Order, etc.—have the Golden Dawn system as their base. (The OTO does not have any connection to the Golden Dawn, either through its earliest founders or its ritual structure.) Intellectually—if not spiritually—Thelema can be truly understood only within that system and is thus (from a historical point of view) a development of what began as the Golden Dawn in nineteenth century England. Crowley's own organization, the Argentum Astrum or AA, is a “perfection” of the original Golden Dawn system of grades, with the addition of the three degrees representing the three spheres at the top of the Tree of Life: the ones not assigned by the Golden Dawn itself since they were believed to be outside the understanding of normal human beings. Crowley claimed to have attained each of those degrees, and then set about reforming the Golden Dawn system by making Thelemic adjustments to all of the degree rituals, and by adding Asian mystical practices to the curriculum: including Hatha Yoga and Buddhist meditation methods and terminology.
Egyptian Aeons
Even so, Thelema was designed to be a revolutionary spiritual movement, at once as grounded in science as in faith. It would overthrow Western ideas of spirituality, of morality and ethics, by replacing them with a worldview very similar in some respects to that of Buddhism. The death of the Ego is a familiar Buddhist concept; but at the same time Crowley calls for an end to the “limitation of the Mind by Reason.” In Crowley's theology, as in some forms of Zen Buddhism, one must transcend both faith and reason in order to attain the highest illumination. Yet, paradoxically perhaps, both faith and reason are tools in the arsenal of the Thelemic magician.
How, then, is Crowley's system different from Buddhism?
In terms of Aeons, there are similarities. In Buddhist cosmology, there is the great measurement of time, or mahakalpa, which is divided into four kalpas or aeons. Each kalpa is extraordinarily long in terms of the human measurement of time and can take hundreds of thousands, or even millions or billions, of years to pass. The four basic kalpas are Vivartakalpa (the Aeon of evolution in which creation occurs), Vivartasthayikalpa (the Aeon of duration of evolution), Samvartakalpa (the Aeon of dissolution), and finally Samvartast-hayikalpa (the Aeon of the duration of dissolution). These are similar in concept to the Hindu system of yugas, described below, and are based on an idea that creation begins in a perfect or pure state—“in illo tempore”—and then gradually disintegrates through the passage of time. But there is a judgemental aspect to both the Buddhist and Hindu concepts of the Aeons, and Crowley was not immune to this concept. He characterized the Aeon of Isis as considerably more pleasant than the Aeon of Osiris, and the Aeon of Horus as a kind of necessary corrective which would culminate in an Aeon of Maat that would wipe the slate clean and start all over again.
Yet while Crowley praised Hindu and Buddhist forms of meditation, yoga, and their corresponding methods of attainment of altered states of consciousness, and instructed his students to become proficient in all of these, he rejected many of the doctrines of Buddhism—as he had all previous manifestations of religion—as superceded by his own cultus. He had difficulty accepting the core concept of Buddhism, that all existence is sorrow and that sorrow proceeds from attachment. Crowley embraced life in all its forms and could not bring himself to refrain from tasting every flavor it offered. In this he could claim to have transcended attachment by indulging in all forms of sensation, accepting none and rejecting all in the process. Yet Crowley's approach to Buddhism—as it was to all previous forms of religion, spirituality and magic—was purely mechanical and pragmatic. The previous religions were viewed as possessing technologies that could be mastered, and not faiths to believe in. Certainly their theologies were rejected as obsolete and even dangerous. As his famous couplet states:
We place no reliance on virgin or pigeon
Our method is science, our aim is religion.
Paradoxically, however, Crowley frequently refers to Asian religious concepts in his writings and indicates that he values what they represent. He speaks of samadhi, anatta, advaita, the chakras, Kundalini, lingam and yoni, and other Buddhist and Hindu concepts with approval. He strives to attain samadhi, for instance, and reprimands himself for clinging to attachment. One could be forgiven for seeing in Crowley's diaries, his Confessions, and his letters a western man attempting to dominate eastern mystical practices. However, if this was all Crowley was—a New Age proto-hippie in search of enlightenment in the hashish parlors of Nepal or the yoga studios of midtown Manhattan—then we would not be interested in him. For Crowley, these Asian systems are just that: systems. Systems to be worked. Methods to be employed. For all his attraction to Asian ways of thought and culture—perhaps starting with his friendship with Alan Bennett, the Bhikhu Ananda Metteya and one of the first Englishmen to bring Buddhism to the United Kingdom—Crowley was still a western man. He did not take the vows of a Buddhist monk, as did his close friend Bennett. He did not work under a Hindu, Buddhist or Daoist teacher or guru. It was his mission to make these disparate forms of religious experience—Asian, European—work for him, become elements of his own philosophy. The “double-wanded” power that he wrote about so frequently could be construed as Crowley himself, uniting both Asian and European paths to God in a single system. This insistence on bringing together both hemispheres to produce a “syzygy”—to use the Valentinian Gnostic term (see below)—is typical of Crowley's mindset. Indeed, he even insists that Horus is really a twin: Ra-Hoor-Khuit and Hoor-par-kraat, Horus and Harpocrates, the Avenging Son and the Babe of Silence, respectively—as if unable (or simply unwilling) to commit entirely to a single identifiable entity.
The Aeon of Horus, then, is the Age of the Child. The child will try anything once, will test boundaries, will explore each sense to its fullest capacity. The infant does not believe: it has not yet reached that point where belief is necessary as a technique of avoiding confrontation with an unpleasant reality. The infant has no ideology to restrain it, to force it to choose one path over another. As Crowley himself writes in this regard:
The child is not merely a symbol of growth, but of complete moral independence and innocence. We may then expect the New Aeon to release mankind from its pretence of altruism, its obsession of fear and its consciousness of sin. It will possess no consciousness of the purpose of its own existence. It will not be possible to persuade it that it should submit to incomprehensible standards; it will suffer from spasms of transitory passion; it will be absurdly sensitive to pain and suffer from meaningless terror; it will be utterly conscienceless, cruel, helpless, affectionate and ambitious, without knowing why; it will be incapable of reason, yet at the same time intuitively aware of truth.15
But before we investigate the Aeon of Horus—and Frater Achad's Aeon of Maat—in greater detail, we must first understand what an Aeon might be.
The usual meaning of the term is that of a period of time, usually a very long period of time, but the precise length varies from culture to culture, from context to context. It's root comes from an ancient Greek word meaning “life” and is thus conceptually related to the Egyptian ankh.
In Gnosticism—the spiritual tradition embraced by many occultists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe and the Americas—the word aeon refers to an emanation (or characteristic) of God. Thus, the Gnostic aeons include such concepts as Arche (“the beginning”) and Proarche (“before the beginning”), among other designations, with their associated references to Time. The term aeon can also be used to refer to the fullness of God perceived as an emanation itself.
Perhaps the closest in meaning and sense to Crowley's use of the term is that of the Valentinians, an early (2nd century CE) Gnostic sect for whom the aeons were created in male/female pairs called syzygies of which there were fifteen,16 for a total of thirty aeons. It is important to realize that these aeons were emanations from God and therefore divine themselves, much in the way the Jewish mystics perceived the emanations that became the sephirot of the Tree of Life.
As they were emanations, their existence took place in Time. Until that process of emanation took place, God was silent and creation had not yet begun. (This is similar to the Indian tradition that the world was not created until Parvati seduced the otherwise monastic and celibate Shiva. In this view, God has to be urged to create.)
When the emanations began, Time also began. This may explain the relationship between the concept of Aeon as “emanation” and Aeon as “period of time.” They are linked, and one presumes the other. This is what we find in Crowley's schema of the Aeon of Isis, proceeded by the Aeon of Osiris and then to the present-day Aeon of Horus. They reflect periods of time (similar to the precession of the equinoxes that has given us the “Age of Aquarius”) but they are also personified periods of time. They are periods in which the designated God or Emanation rules.
Specifically with Valentinianism, the Aeon known as Sophia (“wisdom”) caused creation as we know it to take place. Sophia is feminine, the youngest of all the Aeons. She wished to know the Father and went on a quest to find God. She may be thought of as an analogous figure to that of the Shekinah in Jewish mysticism: a feminine figure removed from the Source of creation who is then reunited with God in a mystical marriage. In the Valentinian version, she became “divided”17: one aspect of Sophia was caught down in the lower realms, in physical creation, separated from God. Another aspect—her original self—remained in the upper realms. The two aspects were separated by something called “the Limit,” which was a border between the fullness of God in the Pleroma and God's creation in the material world. This Limit18 was personified by the Valentinian concept known as Horos, which some scholars believe is the Gnostic interpretation of the Egyptian god Horus: the same Horus who figures so prominently in the Book of the Law. Interestingly, this concept was enshrined in the very origin of the Egyptian Horus, as described in the Coffin Texts and as explained by Mordechai Gilula in an article published in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology:
Coffin Texts, Spell 148 narrates the birth of Horus. Having been delivered of her son, Isis addresses him in these words: B
k s3. Hr hms r·k m t3 pn n t·k Wsr m rn·k pw n bk hr(y) znbw hwt ’Imn-rn, “O falcon, my son Horus, dwell in this land of your father Osiris in this your name of Falcon who is on (or ’aboveor’) the battlements of the mansion of Him-whose-name-is-hidden” (CT II, 221c-e). This is the actual naming of Horus who, until his birth, is referred to as B
k (219b).19
What is striking about this information is that Horus at his birth is associated with “the battlements of the mansion”: i.e., he rests atop the border between the celestial and the earthly worlds, which is precisely what the Gnostic Horos represents: the Limit. In addition, the “mansion” referred to in the Coffin Text is that of “Him-whose-name-is-hidden,” in other words, the Hidden God—the Deus Absconditus or Amun—which is the title of one of Kenneth Grant's studies of the Typhonian Current.20 This “limit” may be thought of in terms of Victor Turner's concept of liminality21: a boundary between two modes or states of being, i.e. the sacred and the profane. In this sense, Horus represents a liminal figure, one who crosses over from one state to another and thus has some of the characteristics of an initiator.
Further, the figure of Isis is cognate with a number of other feminine deities who give birth without having been impregnated in the usual way. The husband of Isis—Osiris—had been slain by his brother Set and, according to one version of the legend, cut up into fourteen pieces.22 Isis went in search of those pieces and reassembled her murdered husband in order to impregnate herself and give birth to Horus. We recall that Mary, the Mother of Jesus, was characterized as a virgin and the birth of Jesus a “virgin birth,” a parthenogenesis. Her Son became the intermediary between humanity and the invisible, hidden God, and was executed on a cross. The symbol for the Gnostic Horos was also a cross, identified astronomically as the place where the ecliptic and the zodiac meet. In the Gnostic universe, the Aeon Sophia also attempted to give birth to a child parthenogenically, i.e., without benefit of intercourse.
In India—locus of much of Grant's attention as well as considerable study by Crowley—we have another instance of creation having been the result of abnormal conception. Shiva is portrayed as a monastic living in the wild who spends most of his time in meditation. He is aroused by his wife, Uma (or sometimes Parvati), to engage in sexual intercourse. However, Shiva has enormous stamina and the couple engage in intercourse for millenia until the gods can take the sound of it no longer and distract Shiva so that he withdraws from Uma at the moment of ejaculation. Uma takes his seed—either in her mouth, or in her hand depending on the text—and impregnates herself with it, thus conceiving the created world.23 This sounds suspiciously similar to the way in which Isis conceived Horus except that in the Egyptian version the husband of Isis has been murdered, while in the Indian version, Shiva is still very much alive. Both Isis and Uma, however, give birth to sons who may be considered avengers, Uma/Parvati giving birth to Skanda,24 commander of the Devas in battle with the demon Taraka.
In India, where periods of time are inordinately huge, we are believed to be living in the yuga—or “age”—of Kali. This is a period of hundreds of thousands of years (according to some sources) which is said to have begun in the year 3102 BCE. It is the last of four yugas or ages: Satya yuga, Dvapara yuga, Treta yuga and Kali yuga. The Kali yuga is ruled by the demon Kali (not Kali the goddess), a symbol of strife and conflict, a fearsome creature sometimes depicted carrying a huge sword or other weapon.
Thus, even in India, an Aeon can be identified with a supernatural being. The names of the previous three yugas can be translated as Truth (Satya), Double (Dvapara), and Triple (Treta). These are designations that don't appear to have specific deities attached to them by name, but the ages themselves do reflect the actions of various deities in the relevant Indian texts, such as the Mahabharata. In the Indian system, the chronological order of the yugas reflects a degeneration of the quality of spirituality, from the perfect age in Satya yuga to the increasingly vice-ridden ages of Dvapara and Treta, to the thoroughly corrupt Kali yuga: an age in which Lord Krishna has completely withdrawn himself from humanity. This is paralleled in the Buddhist cosmological system of the kalpas, mentioned above.
Obviously, Crowley's concept of the Aeons is slightly more optimistic and a lot simpler. There is no specific sense of an ongoing spiritual degradation or degeneration; there are, in fact, no clear moral judgments being made at all about the spiritual quality of each Aeon; only that the processes they represent are inevitable and inescapable. Although the Aeon of Horus is identified with warlike imagery, it also represents the flowering of individual freedom through the abandonment of ideas of sin and restriction. Rather than devolve from Aeon to Aeon, human potential is reawakened in different ways, leading to an ultimate perfection. Indeed, the concept of perfectibility—so crucial to understanding western alchemy with its processes of transformation—is central to Crowley's initiatory scheme. It is the Aeon of Horus that provides the avenues through which the human population in general (rather than an elitist handful of adepts) attains this perfection. In this very important sense, Crowley's philosophy is at odds with Asian ideas of kalpas and yugas. While Buddhism, for example, provides the techniques for a dedicated individual to attain nirvana and defeat the endless cycle of rebirth, it does not propose that all of humanity will—or can—do so at once, or during a single two-thousand-year period of time, but only through many millions of years with the assistance of Boddhisattvas: human beings who have attained all but the ultimate stage of complete enlightenment but who have taken a vow not to complete the initiatory path until all sentient beings have done so first. This type of self-sacrifice is presumably anathema in Thelema, a holdover from the previous Aeon of Osiris in which a god suffers for the sake of humanity.
Crowley's scheme does reflect some controversial anthropological theories current at the time, however, proposing that there was a matriarchal society that preceded a patriarchal one. This concept was popularized in the early 20th century by such authors as Marija Gimbutas, Robert Graves, and by Margaret Murray in her influential—though heavily-criticized—works on the alleged European witchcraft cult, The God of the Witches and The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, and even earlier by the Swiss anthropologist J. J. Bachofen in his Myth, Religion and Mother Right (1861). Thus, Crowley posits a matriarchal Aeon of Isis that precedes the more patriarchal Aeon of Osiris. This matriarchal-patriarchal chronology has been largely discredited. It should be noted that there is no real historical precedent for this as an Egyptological scheme, and it does not appear in any standard works by archaeologists or other specialists in Egyptian history and religion. It comes, instead, directly from the Book of the Law.
As mentioned above, however, the Book of the Law owes much to the initiatory system that produced Aleister Crowley, that of the Golden Dawn. In this system, one of the more important and revealing initiation rituals is the very first, the Neophyte initiation ritual. Within this ritual may be discovered elements of all the succeeding ones. It is here that Maat—as Themaist,25 and as Hegemon—first appears. It is also here that one gets the first glimpse of what an Equinox of the Gods might entail, and of how the Crowleyan Aeons were conceived.
The Golden Dawn rituals were published by an initiate—Francis Israel Regardie (1907-1985)—who was an intimate of Aleister Crowley (during the period 1928-1932), and thus had a ring-side seat for much of what was taking place in the western occult world at the time. Regardie joined the Stella Matutina (a successor to the Golden Dawn that used its rituals) in 1934 and eventually (1937-1940) published their secret rituals and other material in a four-volume hardcover set, an action for which he was heavily criticized by members of the Order.
The Equinox ritual, published in Regardie's magnum opus includes a number of temple officers representing Egyptian gods, and the uttering of a password for the season. The ceremony is based on the point at which the days and nights are of equal length—the “equal night” or equinox—that takes place on the first day of spring and on the first day of autumn, the vernal and autumnal equinoxes respectively. According to the Golden Dawn ritual, a Word is changed from one equinox to the other with a corresponding change of Hierophant. This idea of an Equinox of the Gods, with a change of the guard as it were, and the creation or utterance of a new Word is central to the Book of the Law and to Crowley's entire Thelemic worldview.
The Book of the Law saga begins with Crowley and Rose Kelly (his first wife) visiting Cairo, Egypt in March of 1904. Sylphs appearing to the couple in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid on March 16, followed by a stream of cosmic messages to Rose during the next few days, convinced Crowley that Horus was in fact addressing him directly through Rose—his first Scarlet Woman. She demanded he “break all the rules” and helped him design an invocation of Horus that he successfully performed on the Spring Equinox, March 20. Now known as the “Supreme Ritual,” this is the invocation that ushered in the New Aeon, the day when “the world was destroyed by fire,” the “Equinox of the Gods.” Rose's identification of the image of Horus (Ra-Hoor-Khuit) on the Stele of Revealing (exhibit number 666 in the Boulaq Museum!) as the communicating Intelligence was the final proof for Crowley. Although the Book of the Law would not be received until weeks later, from April 8 to 10, Crowley imagines that the vernal equinox was the real starting point of the new Aeon of Horus. Of course, it is the day when—according to the Golden Dawn rubric—Horus takes over from Osiris as Hierophant, sitting on Osiris's throne in the East. In Crowley's case, what was performed ritualistically for decades within the temples of the Golden Dawn and its successors occurred in reality on March 20, 1904. If one reads the Book of the Law in this context, it all begins to make sense.
But it also raises many other questions. Many contemporary occultists, esotericists, and New Agers by definition believe that we are on the cusp of a new phase of human existence. From the rather vague concept of an Aquarian Age of peace and harmony to Doomsday predictions of mass extinction, what these ideas have in common is their lack of specific focus on the individual. Crowley's Cairo revelation—while similar in many respects to both the dreamy New Age version of a renewed humanity to the Doomsday predictions of war and violence—shifted the emphasis from general redemption and/or general holocaust to one of individual empowerment. Individual identity—and the survival of that identity—seems to be important in the Thelemic scheme of things. After all, as it is written in the Book of the Law: “Every man and every woman is a star.” (AL I:3) Thelemites believe they have something to do with creating or facilitating the New Age. This may reflect the means through which the New Age was revealed to Crowley, i.e., in the context of a secret society of magicians rather than on a mountaintop in Sinai or a cave in Saudi Arabia. It took place in a rented apartment in the city of Cairo, and was revealed to an Englishman. There thus was no specifically ethnic context to the revelation. It was not Moses among the Jews, Jesus among the Jews, or Mohammed among the Arabs. It was not even Buddha among the Indians or Lao Ze among the Chinese. The revelation came out of nowhere, to two Brits on their honeymoon in Egypt. Certainly, the deities who spoke to Crowley were Egyptian, and Crowley was in Egypt. But Crowley himself was not Egyptian, nor was his wife. Why was the revelation not made to indigenous Egyptians? Was it because, as Muslims or Coptic Christians, they presumably would not have been open to such a message? The implication is that Crowley's prior exposure to Egyptian material in the context of the Golden Dawn initiations provided the appropriate channel for the Egyptian deities to manifest, and his presence in Cairo—in the shadow of the pyramids, the Sphinx, and the Valley of the Kings—made it that much easier. Further, the manifestation of the pre-Islamic Egyptian gods in the middle of Islamic Cairo would anticipate some of the more controversial statements in the Book of the Law concerning Jesus, Mary, and most especially Mohammed:
I am in a secret fourfold word, the blasphemy against all gods of men.
Curse them! Curse them! Curse them!
With my Hawk's head I peck at the eyes of Jesus as he hangs upon the cross.
I flap my wings in the face of Mohammed & blind him.
With my claws I tear out the flesh of the Indian and the Buddhist, Mongol and Din.
Bahlasti! Ompehda! I spit on your crapulous creeds.
Let Mary inviolate be torn upon wheels: for her sake let all chaste women be utterly despised among you! (AL III: 49-55)
These sentiments were as revolting to Crowley at the time they were written as they may be to us today. The vitriol with which other faiths are attacked in these passages—in the mouth of Ra-Hoor-Khuit, the Avenging Son of Osiris—may reflect the tension that exists in Egypt over the presence of so many ancient, but pagan and polytheist, monuments in a predominantly Muslim country during an era of Islamic resurgence and identity conflict. Indeed, at the time this book is being written we are informed of certain radical Islamic groups in Egypt26 that want the pyramids and other ancient edifices destroyed in the name of the faith, in much the same way the Taliban destroyed the famous Buddha statues of Bamiyan, Afghanistan in early 2001. Thus, in the eyes of some radical religionists, it is time for a New Aeon of Islam with Arab characteristics to utterly remove all traces of pre-Islamic (i.e., non-Arab) religion anywhere they can be found—something the followers of the Prophet Muhammad attempted to do to the pyramids and the Sphinx on their drive through Egypt in the mid-seventh century CE. On November 17, 1997 there was a massacre of foreign tourists at the Temple of Hatshepsut, coincidentally at the very site where the Stele of Revealing was first discovered in 1858 by the French archaeologist François Auguste Ferdinand Mariette. The mastermind of the attack was Ayman Al-Zawahiri, at the time head of the terrorist group Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya and presently the leader of Al-Qaeda after the death of Osama bin Laden. More recently, there is the ongoing destruction of Timbuktu in Mali by Islamic radicals in that country. One should remember that one of the first official acts of the Prophet Muhammad was the destruction of the pagan shrine in Mecca that had housed 360 idols, a shrine that he transformed into the Ka'aba.
This is a pattern of behavior that, while repugnant to liberal-minded lovers of religion and culture everywhere, is represented—at least philosophically, or even ideologically—in the Book of the Law with its insistence on the destruction of the old faiths. The difference is only in the nature and character of the religion doing the destruction, and the violence with which it is attended. While there are no Thelemites charged with the destruction of Christian or Buddhist iconography—even though the titular head of the largest and most visible OTO organization is referred to as the “Caliph”(!)—the appearance of these lines in the Book of the Law conceivably could be used to signal just such a holocaust if Thelema and its followers ever get the upper hand in a country or region. We have seen how similar passages in the Qur'an have been used to justify violence against the Jews, for instance.
However, Crowley's entire life and writings are devoted to a syncretic approach to religion and spirituality—making use of whatever works from whatever culture or religion or occult practice is available—whereas the worldview of Islamic radicals is viciously opposed to such syncretism and insists on a purely Muslim-Arab interpretation of all spirituality. It is perhaps ironic that the world's most populous Muslim nation—Indonesia—is opposed to the monolithic, mono-cultural Arabist approach of Middle Eastern radicals and embraces its own multi-cultural—Hindu, Buddhist, indigenous—religious heritage as part of its national as well as its religious identity, demonstrating in real-time a syncretic approach that does not diminish their Islamic faith but seems instead to strengthen it.
While Crowley's scripture spoke of a new Aeon that would abrogate all previous Aeons, paradoxically it came in the mouths of ancient Egyptian gods. For Crowley, the Aeons are Egyptian. There is a certain element of cultural fetishism where ancient Egypt is concerned (especially among occultists and New Age followers), and in the west Egyptian crazes come and go. The American fascination with the traveling King Tut exhibit in 1976-1977 is one example, and occurred at the time that the Schlangekraft recension of the Necronomicon was being prepared for publication. So, while the New Aeon insists that “the rituals of the old time are black,” (AL II:5) it appears that incorporation of elements from one of the oldest of old religions is exempt from this critique.
The surviving liturgies of ancient Egypt—the so-called Book of the Dead and the Coffin texts, for instance—are focused on the prime concern of the Egyptians: the survival of the individual identity after death. They are focused, therefore, on Osiris who represents the totality of that meme: a dead (murdered) and resurrected god whose example promised immortality for human beings—a clear prototype of the Christian scheme that would appear thousands of years later. Horus, while an extremely important player in these events and in his cosmic battle with Set, is not the focus of his own rite with the same intensity of purpose and elaboration of ritual as his father, Osiris ... at least, not in the surviving corpus of ancient Egyptian literature. If we characterize Aeons by their namesakes—the way the Gnostics did, and particularly the Valentinians with their Aeon of Jesus, Aeon of Sophia, etc—then it stands to reason that there would be an Aeon of Horus. However, the rituals and form of worship are missing, if they ever existed. (Imagine a cult of Saint Peter or Saint Paul, or even of Emperor Constantine who legitimized the worship of Jesus in the Roman Empire.) Horus was part of the cult of Osiris, was integral to it. What Crowley's scripture seems to indicate is that Horus is by now well and truly annoyed at this state of affairs and is intent on creating his own cultus, his own liturgies, his own heroic narrative. Furthermore, it is one that does not necessarily represent death and resurrection in the way we have all come to understand that concept but is another take on the human condition entirely. It is a credit to the Egyptians that they were able to provide enough raw material—real, imagined, or purely speculative based on bits and pieces of monuments, statues, and stelae—to fuel any dozen new religions, new approaches to spirituality, new techniques for becoming ... perfect.
For comparison, we may reference the revelation received by Joseph Smith on another Equinox of the Gods, the autumnal equinox of 1823 during which time he caught a glimpse of the golden plates on which were inscribed, in “Reformed Egyptian”(!), the Book of Mormon. This scripture claimed it was the record of a Jewish tribe that had escaped to North America at the time of the fall of Solomon's Temple to the Babylonians. Joseph Smith was not Jewish and he did not pretend to be Jewish. Smith, however, was a magician, and the discovery of the golden plates came as the result of magical ceremonies conducted at that site by Smith using essentially the same rituals and the same texts that would form part of the Golden Dawn curriculum fifty years later. The revelation came in North America—upper New York State, to be precise—and not in Israel or in Egypt. The parallels with Crowley's revelations could not be stronger: two Anglo-Saxon males—one born in America, the other in England, both magicians—receive spiritual revelations that command them to form new religious movements, yet neither are of the race ( Jewish or Egyptian) from whom the revelations are received, and both involve Egyptian texts. In Smith's case, the golden tablets were written in “Reformed Egyptian” (which does not exist), and in Crowley's case the revelations began with the discovery of a stele written in Egyptian hieroglyphics (which had the obvious advantage of being written in genuine Egyptian).
Prior to the Smith “discovery” there was another Egyptian discovery, this time by the mysterious Count Cagliostro (1743-1795). Napoleon had invaded Egypt, and one of the earlier forms of the perennial Egypt craze had begun. In Cagliostro's case, it resulted in the Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry. Cagliostro claimed to be able to initiate into those mysteries and created his own Masonic lodges based on this “Egyptian” style, replete with ceremonial robes adorned with hieroglyphic embroidery. In the case of both Joseph Smith and his precursor, Cagliostro, there was safety in the fact that no one knew how to translate Egyptian hieroglyphics. The Rosetta Stone (discovered in 1799 and its code “broken” in 1822 at the earliest but not officially formalized until years later) had not yet yielded its treasures. People could say whatever they wished about the Egyptian writing and claim to be able to read and translate it.
By the time Crowley appeared on the scene, however, Egyptian writing had been decoded for eighty years and no one could claim special mystical knowledge about their contents. Egyptology had become a scientific field of study involving the new disciplines of linguistics, archaeology and anthropology, among others. Yet still the allure of the Egyptian religion remained, perhaps even stronger than before once it was revealed what all those hieroglyphics really said about gods, goddesses, rituals of embalming and promises of eternal life.
“Our method,” Crowley wrote, “is science; our aim is religion.”27 The translations of the “Book of the Dead” by E. A. Wallis Budge (1895) and others only fueled this particular fire. Thus, while Crowley was a magician in the style of both Cagliostro and Joseph Smith, and claimed Masonic titles and lineages as did both of those men, he had the benefit of access to genuine information about Egypt and Egyptian religious beliefs and practices. He was, in a sense, their apotheosis. He created a new religion—as did Smith—and a new occult order, as did Cagliostro.
Of course, it did not begin and end with Egypt alone. Along the way, Crowley incorporated much Asian religion into his new cult and was advised—specifically in the Book of the Law—to include Afro-Caribbean rites and practices as well.28 This New Aeon was to be all-inclusive and global in intellectual and spiritual reach. Is this one reason why a young Englishman on his honeymoon in Cairo was selected for this revelation and its new scripture, and not a native Egyptian?
An aspect of the Crowleyan Aeon of Horus that has not been the focus of much attention is the fact that Crowley's scripture and its associated ideas are essentially pagan, if by “pagan” we mean polytheist and even animist. The brunt of the attack of the Book of the Law against other religions is concentrated on two of the three Abrahamic faiths: Christianity and Islam. Both Jesus and Mohammad are singled out for blinding. Mary “inviolate” (by which we understand the mother of Jesus) is to be torn on a wheel. The flesh of Hindus, Buddhists, “Mongol and Din,” are to be torn out, but oddly not of their gods. (One imagines a list of all the Hindu gods to be blinded would have taken too many pages.) Crowley assumes “Mongol” to represent Confucianism,29 and “Din” by an even longer stretch to represent Judaism. His “New Commentary” to the Book of the Law is explicit in his admiration for Islam as a manly religion, devoid of what he sees as the cringing, craven quality of a religion—Christianity—that is based on accepting the sacrifice of someone else for one's sins. But the blinding of Mohammad is as necessary as that of Jesus because both prophets had the wrong “perspective.” He further claims that Hinduism “metaphysically and mystically comprehensive enough to assure itself the possession of much truth, is in practice almost as superstitious and false as Christianity, a faith of slaves, liars and dastards. The same remarks apply roughly to Buddhism.” Thus two important points are made: Hinduism and Buddhism both possess “much truth,” but their practices are corrupt. This enables Crowley to retain Hindu and Buddhist rituals, techniques, and terminology within his Thelemic framework—essentially looting a burning building. His general respect for Islam enabled him to refer in correspondence to his successors as “Caliph,” a term—from the Arabic khalifah—that represents the successors to the Prophet. Indeed, the initiation rituals of the OTO in the lower degrees use an Arab framework from the Crusader era as the template for the rites, much the way the Golden Dawn used an Egyptian temple motif. Thus, the Book of the Law seems to reserve its strongest opprobrium for Christianity: the religion in which Crowley was raised and which he despised for most of his life.
Another potential conflict arises, though, when one considers that the organization at the forefront of Thelema is the Ordo Templi Orientis, or Order of the Eastern Temple, an order identifying itself with the Knights Templar. The Templars were, of course, a Roman Catholic religious and military organization devoted to the capture of the Holy Land from Islamic control. One might think that this represents some accommodation with Christianity in a Thelemic context, but one would be mistaken. For the mythology of the Knights Templar characterizes it as a secret society with mystical elements that found itself opposed to mainstream Christianity and which, indeed, was suppressed by the Catholic Church in the fourteenth century, its famous Grand Master—Jacques de Molay—burned at the stake on false charges of heresy. Thus, identifying with the Templars does not make one a Christian in any normative sense of the word, and this would have appealed to Crowley as well as the libel associated with the Templars, that they engaged in deviant sexual practices as well as idol-worship. Crowley took as his Order name the word Baphomet, which was supposedly the name of the (non-Christian) idol that the Templars worshipped. While much scholarship recently has thrown many of these assumptions about the Order into serious doubt, the association of Templarism with the mysterious Orient of the Saracens, as well as with sexual mysticism, is the idea with which Thelema most closely identifies.
Since the Aeon of Horus is focused on individual responsibility and freedom—where “Every man and every woman is a star”—it stands to reason that its greatest foe would be Christianity, at least the Christianity as understood by Crowley himself, a faith of “slaves, liars and dastards.” Indeed, as the “Beast 666” Crowley set himself in firm opposition to the organized Church by identifying with its Apocalyptic enemy and claiming as his bride the Whore of Babylon (in Crowley's numerology renamed “Babalon”). The anti-Christianity of Crowley is obsessive, and one wonders why he even bothered. The Book of the Law has an Egyptian framework and motif; it was received in Cairo, during sessions surrounded by the cry of the muezzin from the minarets of the city's fabled mosques. Why bother bringing up Christianity at all, much less incorporating some of its elements into the Thelemic gestalt? Because, to Crowley's way of thinking, Christianity represented the old and now discredited Aeon of Osiris par excellence. For such a well-traveled and intelligent man, it seems odd that he would think that way considering that most of the world—especially the world he traveled in, Asia and the Middle East—was not Christian and never had been Christian. How was the Aeon of Osiris represented in China, for instance? Or in India?
This may seem like nit-picking to some, but it goes to the heart of an important point, one that forms the essence of the Grant-Lovecraft theme that we will take up shortly. Crowley's interpretation of the Book of the Law could be described as—if not Eurocentric then—Occident-centric. It focuses almost exclusively on western ideas about religion and spirituality, and especially on resisting any form of Christianity. It is a kind of spiritual colonialism: the ransacking of Asian religions and practices for anything of value to a system that is almost wholly focused on defeating a western obsession with sin, restriction, and the cupidity of its priests. It is quite similar to the anxiety some in the west feel over the prophecies of Nostradamus and the Mayan calendar, signalling the End of Days and an Armageddon-like final conflict. There is no such sense of this in the East. There is no such anxiety there. Their calendars are different, their religious context entirely dissimilar, their fear of an Anti-Christ non-existent. The end of the world that the west fears so much may be just that: the end of the western world as we know it, but not of “the world” ... not the “whole enchilada.”
For the Aeon of Horus to be an Aeon for all it needs to respond to all, to the anxieties of all and to the desperation of all. It has to make as much sense in Beijing as in Boston, in Jakarta as in Jersey City, in Tokyo as in Tunbridge Wells. In Chennai as in Chicago.
The importance of the Kenneth Grant material, therefore, lies in his attempt to create a more global character for Thelema by incorporating as much Afro-Caribbean and Asian elements in far more detail and with much greater insight than was available in the Crowley writings. In some cases, this meant taking the work of former Crowley colleagues and initiates far more seriously than had been done previously. It also meant that Grant would delve into the darker aspects of Thelema and of what Thelema was insinuating: that at the heart of the cultus was an acknowledgement of humanity's more sinister roots, roots that went back to pre-Dynastic Egypt and even further, to the oldest civilization for which we have any texts at all: Sumer. Crowley's writings assumed that his readers already had a strong background in comparative religion, the rituals of the Golden Dawn, and the Kabbalah. In fact, today we have far greater access to this material than Crowley did. We have the ability to develop the basic themes of Thelema in much greater depth and with a wider scope. Grant was the first proponent of Thelema to recognize this, and while many Thelemites find his writings either obscure, or heretical, or both, his research and his dedication cannot be denied.
One of Grant's fixations concerns one of Crowley's most famous disciples and critics. While Crowley believed himself to be the prophet of this new, post-patriarchal Age, the Aeon of Horus, one of his followers went on to proclaim yet another Aeon, one that began only forty-four years after the start of the Aeon of Horus.
This was Charles Stansfeld Jones (1886-1950)—known as Frater Achad—and his Aeon was proclaimed the Aeon of Maat or sometimes Ma-Ion. At first glance, this would seem to be an inconsistency if not an impossibility. How could a new Aeon begin when the last one—Crowley's Aeon of Horus—had hardly begun? Yet, as we will soon discover, this concept does have precedents.
Ma-Ion
As mentioned, Jones was one of Crowley's most important disciples and followers, a man who Crowley once claimed was his “magical son,” but who nevertheless broke with Crowley on several points of doctrine and who became a convert to Roman Catholicism, thus abandoning Thelema entirely.
According to Jones—known under a variety of occult names and mottoes but most famously as Frater Achad (“achad” being the Hebrew word for “one”)—a new Aeon began on April 2, 1948 which he called the Aeon of Maat. This would be an era of peace and love, a kind of counterpoint to Crowley's Aeon of Horus which is characterized as the era of the Crowned and Conquering Child, a somewhat more warlike image.
Achad's Aeon of Maat was named after the Egyptian goddess of the Balance. The weight of the human heart after death was measured against a single feather of Maat's headress. If the heart weighed more than the feather, the soul was doomed to an unpleasant afterlife. Thus, Maat symbolized Justice as well as Equilibrium. One could say with some justification that Maat was a more likely icon of the “Age of Aquarius” than a warlike Horus, but that depends on how one views an implacable force of Justice!
The problem with the Maat proposal is that one does not know with any certainty how long a Crowleyan Aeon is supposed to last. If one takes the traditional Western view, an Aeon is roughly equivalent to an astrological Age which corresponds to the length of time it takes for the Sun's passage through the vernal equinoctial point in one of the zodiacal signs, a process known to astronomers as the precession of the equinoxes. The precession of the equinoxes takes a total of 25,800 years; thus, the length of time of each Age—corresponding to one of the 12 zodiacal signs—is about 2,150 years. This idea that the Age corresponds to the equinoctial point is reflected in many Thelemic writings and rituals, such as the title of Crowley's own occult magazine, The Equinox, and his commentary on Liber AL, The Equinox of the Gods.
However, Crowley postulated that the Aeon of Horus began in 1904—the year he received the Book of the Law. The problem with this date is that it is not consistent with the scientific calculation of some astronomers regarding the Age of Aquarius. They declare it will not actually begin until about 2600 CE. On the other hand, many astrologers and occultists believe otherwise—proposing start dates ranging from the fifteenth century CE to a thousand years from now. In this cluttered field, Crowley's “Aeon of Horus” is only one among many contenders for the title of “current Age” and as such is perhaps just as valid as any other.
But how long does a Crowleyan Aeon last?
This is also a contentious area, for Crowley himself was not clear or consistent in his calculations. While he seemed inclined to accept the standard precessional length of time of 2,000 to 2,150 years he was not committed to it. How could he be, when a 1904 start date was inconsistent with both astronomical and astrological literature? In his various writings he admitted the possibility that an Aeon could be measured in as little as a hundred years or as many as thousands of years, stipulating that the experience of Time by the gods was not identical to human conceptions.30 Thus, when Frater Achad proclaimed the Aeon of Maat as beginning only forty-four years after the beginning of the (presumably 2,150 year long) Aeon of Horus, there theoretically was some wiggle-room for insisting on such a shortened “Aeon.” Crowley's adoption of the precessional idea of the Aeons or Ages seems pro forma, as if he accepted the 2,150 year “age” as a given rather than basing it on any specific revelation or calculation on his part, the way he accepted the matriarchal-patriarchal sequence long since abandoned by scholars. It is obvious to even the most cursory examination that two thousand years prior to 1904—i.e. the year 96 BCE—could not have been the beginning of the patriarchal Age of Osiris. The worship of Osiris had predated this period by thousands of years; further, the two thousand years prior to 96 BCE could by no stretch of the imagination be considered a matriarchal age.31
This was not Achad's only creative adjustment to the Kabbalistic system embraced by Crowley. He also went on to redesign the Tree of Life and to assign different variables to the spheres and to the paths on the Tree that connect the spheres. This type of tinkering could have important and far-reaching consequences for those brought up under the Golden Dawn, AA and OTO systems for it rendered all sorts of symbolic language inoperative and inoperable.
The Tree of Life is the primary template for the magical system that came out of the Golden Dawn. The initiatory degrees are based on the spheres of the Tree, and the corresponding instructions in magic, kabbalah, astrology, Tarot, etc are all related to the paths that connect the spheres. Thus, any re-arranging of this scheme would be anathema and would possibly question the occult attainments (or at least their analysis and interpretation) of those who had already passed through the degree system to any extent. This would include Crowley himself, of course. Achad was aware of this problem, and mentioned it briefly in the Preface to his The Egyptian Revival.
One great Authority, however, while admitting that many of the ideas are brilliant, says that he cannot accept this Reformed Order in the face of several hundred years of the old tradition, and maintains that the previous arrangement is the correct one.
While I realize that great changes in the recognized Systems of Initiation in certain Orders might be necessary if the Reformed Order of the Paths were adopted, and while recognizing the importance of the Authority mentioned above, I still maintain that this New Arrangement is worthy of the most careful consideration and study.32
Thus, what Achad was doing was redesigning an entire occult system that had taken years to produce and fine-tune, and in which hundreds of people had already been initiated and trained. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, of course, for the Golden Dawn system itself was a novel approach towards uniting a great many occult ideas into one comprehensive methodology with a flexible and internally-consistent magical vocabulary. Even the idea of assigning the twenty-two Tarot Trumps to the twenty-two paths on the Tree of Life (corresponding to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet) was no older than the nineteenth century, a legacy of the French occultist Eliphas Levi (of whom Crowley believed himself to be the reincarnation). The power and sheer beauty of that system to anyone who previously had spent years poring over the grimoires and other medieval instruction books on magic is obvious. Achad's ambition was to supplant that older framework: after all, it had been created decades before the Book of the Law revelation and thus could be considered inoperative in the Aeon of Horus.
This extended, evidently, even to the arrangement and chronology of the Aeons themselves. This type of creative interpretation of Crowley's ouevre—including various approaches to the Book of the Law—infuriated Crowley, and prompted him to issue a famous “Comment” on the Book of the Law in November, 1925 from his then-current base in Tunis in which he forbade completely any open discussion of the Book or its contents. He demanded that he and his writings be regarded as the sole authorities, and that each person should have recourse only to those two sources and to no other. (Of course, with Crowley's death in 1947, one of those two sources was rendered unavailable.)
So how could Achad's system be consistent in any way with that so painstakingly created by the Golden Dawn and developed further by Aleister Crowley, one of the Golden Dawn's most famous initiates? This question becomes more important once one realizes that Crowley considered Achad his “magical son,” the one prophesied in the Book of the Law.33 There have been a number of possible solutions put forward by defenders of Achad, but defending Achad is a thankless task. Aside from Grant and his followers, there has been very little interest in Achad's writings and theories from mainstream Thelemites. Achad is considered a heretic in the Crowley world, but before he went off the reservation he did make several important contributions to Thelema including an important “decoding” of a significant element of the Book of the Law, which is why he was anointed as Crowley's magical son.
Obviously, the most glaring challenge to Crowley's system was the inauguration of the Aeon of Maat in 1948, just five months after Crowley's death and two years before Achad's own demise. To a literal-minded observer, Achad's insistence on a new Aeon so soon after the birth of the previous one seems insane. Yet, the nature of Aeons is such that there is a precedent for Aeons running concurrently and the proof of this is in the Gnostic, Hindu and Kabbalistic traditions so beloved of Crowley himself.
In the first place, according to Valentinian Gnostic belief, the Aeons were created in male/female pairs, called syzygies. Thus every male Aeon had a female counterpart, a consort or spouse. Again, we must be clear that we are speaking of Aeons as divine emanations and not necessarily as lengths of time. However, the Egyptian Aeons as understood by Crowley were also divine emanations. They were, in fact, gods. What Achad did was to include the Aeon of Maat as a kind of “sister” or “spouse” of the Aeon of Horus, according to some commentators. While this seems at odds with Crowley's own writings on the subject it is nonetheless consistent with the Gnostic Aeons. Why should this matter? Because the main vehicle for regular Thelemic worship is something Crowley created called the Gnostic Mass.
Gnosticism is understood by many to be a mystical form of Christianity, incorporating many pagan and Greco-Egyptian elements. It is an “initiated” form of the religion, and Valentinian Gnosticism in particular fits this description quite capably. Crowley's development of the Gnostic Mass—based, he claimed, on a Divine Liturgy he witnessed in Moscow34—and its regular celebration by his Gnostic Catholic Church would seem to imply that he approved of Gnosticism, at least in some forms. The theme of the Aeons is central to most Gnostic writings, and he would have been familiar with the condemnations of it by the early Church Fathers (which fact alone would have made it attractive to Crowley).
In fact, the Gnostic teachings include a creation of the world through the illegitimate sexual desires of the last and youngest of the thirty Aeons, Sophia. It is this same Sophia that is called in some Gnostic texts “the Whore.” In different versions of the myth, Sophia is either without a consort—that is, not a member of a syzygy—or abandons her consort in the search for God the Father. She learns that the Unbegotten One has Himself begotten the Pleroma (the rarified spiritual realm where all the Aeons reside), and she wishes to imitate him by producing an offspring herself, without benefit of intercourse. This she does, but it is a monster: in some texts described as an “abortion” or as a “miscarriage.” In others as simply “the Void of Knowledge” and “the Shadow of the Name.” It is her illicit desire to become a God that results in the creation of Anger, Fear, Despair and other negative impulses which in turn create the world as we know it.
In another version of the story—mentioned above—Sophia falls far and fast from grace and is nearly out of reach of the other Aeons until she comes up against the Limit (horos) and is saved. The Limit stands between the Pleroma—the fullness of God—and the outer darkness. She then becomes reunited with her Aeon and the Pleroma is right again. The problem is, however, that her unholy Intention caused a tremor in the Pleroma and it together with her Passion is cast into the outer darkness, i.e., the Pleroma rejects this new creature and it becomes the infamous “abortion” or “miscarriage” mentioned above, a “formless entity” that requires that the Limit be erected in order to keep it away from the Pleroma, and to preserve the Pleroma from its polluting aspect. It is this entity that becomes the created world.
Eventually—according to the Valentinian Gnosis—the other Aeons become worried over their newly-perceived vulnerability. In order to quiet the Aeons and restore some sense of harmony and stability, two new Aeons are created: Christos (male) and the Holy Spirit (female). Christos has the advantage of being able to operate on both sides of the Limit, both in the Pleroma and in the outer darkness. Eventually, the Aeon of Jesus is formed and this Aeon functions solely outside of the Pleroma.
It is interesting that the two qualities that cause the Limit to be erected in the first place are precisely Intention and Passion, corollaries of Will and Love, the two determining qualities of the Thelemic system.35 Thus, as Kenneth Grant will later expound, there is an ontological link between the beliefs of Thelema concerning Will and Love on the one hand, and with the Outer Darkness on the other. And in the middle of them stand Sophia (the Whore) and the Limit (Horos, vide Horus).
These Aeons all run simultaneously, i.e., they are divine emanations and as such have no beginning or end save in the mind of God. There is a chronology which begins with an Ogdoad (an initial group of eight Aeons) and which is then augmented by ten Aeons and then twelve additional Aeons for the total of thirty original Aeons, thus suggesting a kind of sequential order but with no fixed length of time involved and, anyway, these Aeons exist in the Pleroma and are inaccessible by mere mortals. The Aeons of Christos and Jesus, however, do impact directly on the created world—the world formed from the monstrous stillbirth of Sophia. This world, composed of negative elements from Sophia's reckless quest for equality with God, is in need of Aeonic assistance and that is why—according to the Valentinians—Christos, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus were formed in order to bring order into the realm beyond the Pleroma.
A complete discussion of the Gnostic Aeons is far beyond the scope of this book and interested readers are urged to consult any of the standard works on Gnosticism, perhaps starting with Hans Jonas and his The Gnostic Religion, which covers the Valentinian Gnosis in some detail. There has been much new work done on the Valentinians (and other Gnostic groups) since the Jonas book was first published but access to a good university library or database is usually required. There will be further discussion of the Aeons in the chapters that follow, but they will be based on the information already given.
What we should take away from this chapter, however, is the fact that the Gnostics were the first to talk about Aeons in an esoteric sense, and to do so in a very detailed and complex manner reminiscent of the later books of the Jewish mystics and particularly of the Kabbalah. The Gnostics understood the Aeons in both senses of a length of time that may not be measurable in human terms, and as the emanation of a particular deity or divine characteristic. To apply this reasoning to the Crowleyan Aeon of Horus we may say—in the spirit of Gnosticism—that such an Aeon would have the characteristics of Horus (however they may be described) as well as a specific (but probably unknowable) length of time or chronology. And, most importantly, from the best available data on record we know that while the Gnostic Aeons were created in a kind of chronological order, in the end they all ran concurrently. They all existed at the same time and not in any kind of consecutive order with one ending as another began. This could be applied to the debate over the Aeon of Horus versus the Aeon of Maat; there does not need to be a “versus” at all.
But if that alone was not enough to allow an Aeon of Maat to run concurrently with the Aeon of Horus, there was yet another option.
In the Indian system of yugas or great ages we are told that they sometimes “overlapped” as in this citation from the Bhagavata-purana:
Suta Gosvami said: when the second yuga overlapped the third, the great sage [Vyasadeva] was born to Parasara in the womb of Satyavati, the daughter of Vasu.” (Bhagavata-purana, 1.4.14)
Thus there is a precedent, even in Hinduism, for overlapping yugas so why not for overlapping Aeons, their cognates? To be sure there are several different calculations for the lengths of the respective yugas; yet this implies (a) they are not based on the precession of the equinoxes through the astrological signs which most experts agree are of regular length and (b) that the yuga of one system will necessarily overlap the yuga of another, which is not a bad thing, but which gives rise to further calculations and refinements of the chronological system. And, according to the citation above, great things can happen when yugas (or Aeons) overlap.
The final approach that could be taken with respect to the Aeons is a purely Kabbalistic one, but one of which Crowley does not seem to have been aware. This system is elaborated in the Sefer ha-Temunah or the “Book of the Image,” a text that is usually dated to the thirteenth century. The “image” of the title refers to the shape of the Hebrew letters which were believed to contain certain secrets. For our purposes, however, the other value of the book is in its discussion of the shemittot (sing. shemitta) the “cosmic cycles” of the encoded Torah.
Years were counted in multiples of seven, which were themselves multiplied by seven, so that a cycle consisted of 7 x 7 years or 49 years in total. The next year—the fiftieth year—was a “jubilee” year, a year in which the sins and errors of the previous 49 years were erased and the slate cleaned and the cycle begun anew.36 This was one cycle, or shemitta.
Using this framework as a starting point, Bible and Kabbalah scholars have tried to ascertain the age of the universe. Each cycle of 7,000 (7 x 20 x 50) years is considered a Kabbalistic “age” and is related to one of the seven lower sefirot on the Tree of Life. The number 7,000 comes from a line in the Talmud37 that states the world will exist for 6,000 years and that for the 1,000 years thereafter it shall be “desolate.” According to some Kabbalists we are living in the second age, that of Gevurah or “Severity.”
Using the Jubilee formula, then, 7,000 years times 7 would equal 49,000 years which would be the age of the universe. If we are living in the second cycle, that would imply that Adam was created somewhere around 7,000 years ago (depending on where we are in the second cycle, the beginning, middle, or the end).
However, using a citation from the Midrash, “A thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday” it is indicated that a thousand human years equals only one Divine day, thus the ensuing calculations would reveal an age of the universe as something closer to 15 billion years (if we are living in the last Kabbalistic age) which—coincidentally—matches the latest scientific estimates of the age of the universe.
There are two implications pertinent to this study that can be found in the Sefer ha-Temunah. The first is that Kabbalistic ages can be identified by a series of sefirotic references. Thus, the very first year of the cycle is named after Chesed—the first of the seven sefirot below the Abyss on the Tree of Life and the only ones used for these calculations by the rabbis—which also gives its name to the entire first cycle of 7,000 years, and that the second year would be Gevurah, then Tiferet, etc. Thus, year two is the year Gevurah of the greater cycle year Chesed. But, of course, the interlocking ages do not end there and can be continued indefinitely down to the smallest unit of time.
This system is mirrored in the table of astrological hours used by ceremonial magicians, in which the first hour of Sunday—for instance—would be the hour of the Sun, the first hour of Monday would be the hour of the Moon, and so on for the seven days and the seven philosophical planets. These planetary hours are equivalent to the sefirotic attributes, for Chesed is considered the sphere of Jupiter (and hence of Thursday), Gevurah of Mars (and Tuesday), Tiferet of the Sun (and Sunday), etc. One could then just as easily take the magician's astrological hours and expand them to include years, multiples of years, etc. to arrive at corresponding planetary Aeons.
The point of this exercise is that time periods have subsets, and that these subsets have the same qualities as the various time periods themselves albeit with modifications. For example, the period Sun in the greater period Saturn (for instance) would not have the same quality of action as the period Saturn in the greater period Saturn, or the period Saturn in the greater period Sun. This system is actually used by Vedic (Indian) astrologers in their calculation method known as antardasas.
Using this as a theory, could there be an Aeon of Maat within the greater Aeon of Horus, as a subset of Horus?
As complicated—perhaps unnecessarily complicated—as all this sounds, we should be reminded of a statement by Crowley himself, when he writes:
...Aiwass, uttering the word Thelema (with all its implications), destroys completely the formula of the Dying God. Thelema implies not merely a new religion, but a new cosmology, a new philosophy, a new ethics. It co-ordinates the disconnected discoveries of science, from physics to psychology, into a coherent and consistent system. Its scope is so vast that it is impossible even to hint at the universality of its application. But the whole of my work, from the moment of its utterance, illustrates some phase of its potentiality, and the story of my life itself from this time on is no more than a record of my reactions to it.38
Thus, a new cosmology is required, and it is entirely possible that this new cosmology would have at its heart a re-interpretation of all that has been written concerning the Aeons: their nature, their number, their chronological order, and their periods of time. One stands in awe at the scope of Crowley's project for this New Aeon, and at the same time one measures it against the words of one of his contemporaries:
The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.39
Thus, Lovecraft himself was aware of the possibility of uniting the same sciences—Crowley's “disconnected discoveries” and Love-craft's “dissociated knowledge”—and was terrified that it would one day occur, and that the Aeon of Horus would become a “new dark age.”
Which leads us to the second implication contained within the Sefer ha-Temunah and in the deliberations of its sages: the idea that the world has already been created and destroyed several times over. The seventh 1,000 year period of each cycle is a time of “desolation” in which all life of the previous 6,000 years is wiped out. Depending on where we are in the great scheme of things—with experts offering opinions anywhere from the second cycle to the seventh—the world may have been destroyed at least once, and as many as six times already. This gives rise to the possibility that the 2,000 year cycle known to the astrologers could be replaced by the 7,000 year cycle known to the Kabbalists, meaning that the Aeon of Osiris (which ended, according to Crowley, in 1904) actually began in 5,096 BCE, and that the Aeon of Isis began in 12,096 BCE. Using these somewhat larger values gives us the historic coordination we need, for 5,096 BCE places us much earlier than pre-Dynastic Egypt and allows for the possibility that an Aeon of Osiris began at that time, and that there was a pre-historic matriarchal age beginning in 12,096 BCE for which there is no written record but for which circumstantial evidence in the form of goddess statues and the like may be offered to support it.40
In any event, the Typhonian understanding of the Aeons is much closer to the Gnostic concept. Each Aeon is an emanation, a manifestation of a particular God, and they all exist concurrently as separate forms of awareness, of consciousness. One could go to great lengths to try to “prove” Achad's system—the above few paragraphs give an idea as to how much calculation and speculation would be involved—but to Grant this is not necessary. The mere fact that we have imagined an Aeon of Maat is sufficient to claim its existence. To adhere to the idea of the Aeon of Horus as being exclusive to this time and place ignores the essential nature of the gods themselves as being beyond all considerations of space and time. If a middle-aged white man can sit in an ashram in Goa and commune with Kali, or a teen-aged girl can stand naked in a circle and draw down the Moon, then it is probably safe to say that Maat can be approached and her influence experienced in the present Age.
Grant's anxiety—as expressed in Nightside of Eden and in his other works—is that the Earth is being infiltrated by a race of extraterrestrial beings who will cause tremendous changes to take place in our world. This statement is not to be taken quite as literally as it appears, for the “Earth” can be taken to mean our current level of conscious awareness, and extraterrestrial would mean simply “not of this current level of conscious awareness.” But the potential for danger is there, and Grant's work—like Lovecraft's—is an attempt to warn us of the impending (potentially dramatic) alterations in our physical, mental and emotional states due to powerful influences from “outside.” This “extraterrestrial” race has already been here, already made itself known (and hence the antiquity of the Typhonian Tradition, according to Grant), and is returning to the planet in greater numbers than before and with an agenda that only the adepts would be able to divine. This concept is emphasized in the Schlangekraft recension of the Necronomicon, where it is stated:
...for thou can never know the Seasons of Times of the Ancient Ones, even though thou can tell their Seasons upon the Earth by the rules I have already instructed thee to compute; for their Times and Seasons Outside run uneven and strange to our minds, for are they not the Computors of All Time? Did They not set Time in its Place?41
Thus, once again it can be shown that the Necronomicon, Crowley, and Grant are in agreement on certain specific points of interest concerning the advent of the New Aeon. The idea that the human race is not the first on the planet is one that has been picked up and developed into an entire mythos by H. P. Lovecraft and expanded upon by Kenneth Grant. It is linked to the Lovecraftian idea of the Great Old Ones, gods—or alien creatures, or both—who came to the earth in “aeons past” and who will return again. The recurring of the Aeon of the Great Old Ones is cognate with Crowley's recurring Aeons of the Egyptian gods. It is also connected to another Lovecraftian theme, the idea that there are people on earth who are in secret communication, usually telepathically but also through ritual, with the Great Old Ones and are preparing the way for their return.
Let my servants be few & secret: they shall rule the many & the known.42
4 Geraldine Pinch, Egyptian Myth: A very short introduction, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 52.
5 A ritual that was conducted between January 14 to June 16, 1918 by Crowley and a number of others, but mostly including Roddie Minor, known as Soror Achitha 555. It should be noted that 555 is the number most closely associated with the Necronomicon, as it is the value of the word in its original Greek. Grant associates this number with the Necronomicon Current, just as 666 is identified with the Thelemic Current.
6 For instance, AL I:7: “Behold! it is revealed by Aiwass the minister of Hoor-paar-kraat.” AL II:8, “Who worshipped Heru-pa-kraath have worshipped me; ill, for I am the worshipper,” and AL III:35, “The half of the word of Heru-ra-ha, called Hoor-pa-kraat and Ra-Hoor-Khut.” Hoor-pa-kraat and Heru-pa-kraath are both original Egyptian forms of the later Greek Harpocrates. The name also figures prominently in the initiation rituals of the Golden Dawn.
7 See, for instance, Aleister Crowley, The Equinox of the Gods, Chapter 8: “This child Horus is a twin, two in one. Horus and Harpocrates are one, and they are also one with Set or Apophis, the destroyer of Osiris. It is by the destruction of the principle of death that they are born.”
8 See for instance his statement linking Aiwass with the Shaitan of the Yezidi: “Aiwaz is not a mere formula, like many Angelic names, but it is the true, most ancient name of the God of the Yezidi, and thus returns to the highest antiquity. Our work is therefore historically authentic; the rediscovery of the Sumerian tradition.” In Kenneth Grant, The Magical Revival, Friedrich Muller, London, 1972, p. 52
9 The Great Bear constellation figures prominently in both the Schlangekraft recension of the Necronomicon and in Kenneth Grant's work. The importance of this constellation—often neglected by western occultists—is detailed in the author's own Stairway to Heaven: Chinese Alchemists, Jewish Kabbalists and the Art of Spiritual Transformation.
10 See the author's trilogy, Sinister Forces: Agrimoire of American political witchcraft (Trine Day, Walterville (OR), 2005, 2011) in particular volume 3, chapter 17: “Voluntary Madness,” for a more detailed explanation of this connection.
11 See, for instance, The Equinox of the Gods: “I lay claim to be the sole authority competent to decide disputed points with regard to the Book of the Law, seeing that its Author, Aiwaz, is none other than mine own Holy Guardian Angel, to Whose Knowledge and Conversation I have attained, so that I have exclusive access to Him. I have duly referred every difficulty to Him directly, and received His answer; my award is therefore absolute without appeal.”
12 “I now incline to believe that Aiwass is not only the God or Demon or Devil once held holy in Sumer, and mine own Guardian Angel, but also a man as I am, insofar as He uses a human body to make His magical link with Mankind, whom He loves, and that He is thus an Ipsissimus, the Head of the AA” Ibid.
13 See The Master Plan by Heather Pringle, or the author's own Unholy Alliance and Ratline for more details on the anthropological fantasies of the Nazis.
14 “Isa” is the Arabic form of the name “Jesus,” and thus “Isa the sufferer” is an apt description but may not be what the Speaker intended. The Golden Dawn mudra for Isis specifically refers to her as “mourning,” and the characteristic of the Book of the Law is overwhelmingly Egyptian. While Crowley believed that Isa was a reference to Jesus, it is possible that he is mistaken in this regard. It should also be noted that the preferred pronounciation of “Isis” is “ee-set” or “ee-sa.”
15 Aleister Crowley, Confessions, p. 399
16 The number fifteen is suggestive. Grant understands it to be the number of female secretions known as kalas, which will be discussed later. Taken as a male/female pair, however, we are at the point of understanding the central secret of the OTO as well as of western esotericism generally.
17 Cf: Liber AL I:29 “For I am divided for love's sake, for the chance of union” for a Thelemite analogue. In this case the speaker is the goddess Nuit.
18 From the Greek horothetes, the “giver of limit.” Had it been Aramaic, however, the word horos would imply “father” as in hor, horah. There is some dispute on this issue. But it becomes more interesting in light of the fact that Crowley—in at least one place—confuses the Aeon of the Father with the Son. In his Confessions, in a chapter entitled “The Historical Conception on Which the Book of the Law is Based” he writes: “To recapitulate the historical basis of The Book of the Law, let me say that evolution (within human memory) shows three great steps: (1) the worship of the Mother, continually breeding by her own virtue; (2) the worship of the Son, reproducing himself by virtue of voluntary death and resurrection; (3) the worship of the Crowned and Conquering Child (the Aeon announced by Aiwass and implied in His Word, Thelema.” (Reproduced in Aleister Crowley, Magick, p. 703) In this case Crowley has once again emphasized the now-disproven chronology of matriarchy-patriarchy, but more importantly he states that the Aeon of Osiris was the Aeon of the Son (i.e., of Jesus and other slain gods; Osiris may be considered in the same category of dead and resurrected god, but in what way can Osiris be considered a “son”?). The concept of patriarchy would seem to have been replaced—in at least this single instance in Crowley's published work—by a filiarchy.
19 Mordechai Gilula, “An Egyptian Etymology of the Name of Horus” in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, p. 259, Vol. 68. (1982), pp. 259—265
20 Kenneth Grant, Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God, Friedrich Muller, London, 1973.
21 See Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. Aldine, Chicago, 1969
22 The number is interesting, and recalls the number of the Stations of the Cross in Roman Catholic churches which always number fourteen and which represent the crucifixion, i.e., a slain God.
23 This episode is discussed more fully in the author's Tantric Temples: Eros and Magic in Java, Ibis Press, Lake Worth (FL), 2011. For a more Crowleyan context, one should refer to his notes on The Paris Working (a series of occult rituals devoted to Jupiter which took place in that city from Dec 31, 1913 to Feb. 12, 1914) in which he writes: “The name of this Phallus is Thoth, Hermes or Ma. Ma is the god who seduced the Phallus away from the Yoni; hence the physical Universe. All worlds are excreta; they represent wasted semen.”
24 A word which, incidentally, means “spilled seed.”
25 This world has given some newcomers to Thelema a headache, for it seems it can be found nowhere else except in Crowley's work. A tour through the usual search engines shows up nothing. However, the term Themaist appears in the Golden Dawn rituals with some associated detail, and in several different forms, thus illustrating once more how essential it is for an understanding of Thelema and Crowley's ouevre to have access to the Golden Dawn material as a basis. See for instance Israel Regardie, The Golden Dawn, St Paul, Llewellyn, p. 339 “The Enterer of the Threshold”: “Before the Face of the Gods in the ’Place of the Threshold' is the name of Hegemon, and She is the Goddess Thma-Ae-St having the following Coptic forms: Thma-Ae-St ... Thma-aesh ... Thmaa-ett...” etc., and for the same names written in Coptic script, see p. 352 Ibid. On page 375 of the same work we find four different versions of the name Thma-Est (this time) associated with the four letters of the Divine Name, YHVH with the further clarification “In the Equinox ceremony, the Hegemon in Air, Spirit, and the principal officer. She reconciles from East to West, and from North to South, and in a circular formulae.”
26 Leaders of Egypt's Salafi party as well as some more extreme members of the Muslim Brotherhood, who began the call after the election of a Muslim Brotherhood candidate to the Egyptian presidency after the ouster of Hosni Mubarrak in 2012.
27 The slogan “The Method of Science—The Aim of Religion” appears on the title page of every volume of Crowley's occult periodical, The Equinox.
28 AL I:37: “Also the mantras and spells; the obeah and the wanga; the work of the wand and the work of the sword; these he shall learn and teach.” The terms obeah and wanga refer explicitly to Afro-Caribbean religions. This is a theme that was picked up and expanded by Grant in association with Michel Bertiaux, a Chicago-based magician who developed a system of magic out of elements of Haitian voudon. This will be discussed in greater detail in the chapters that follow. Crowley had access to some of this material through his friendship with the author and adventurer William Seabrook, but seems not to have made use of it. His interpretations of these words as published in his New Commentary are wholly implausible and ignore their obvious Afro-Caribbean meanings. Why?
29 Confucius (551-479 BCE) was not a Mongol, but a Han Chinese of Shandong Province. “Mongol” may be a reference to the religion of the Mongolians which was an indigenous religion known as Tengriism (the worship of the Mongolian deity Tengri). One will find elements of Buddhism, shamanism, and even Islam among the Mongols at various times. But at the time the Book of the Law was written, most Mongols were Buddhists and had been for centuries; alongside their indigenous religion of Tengriism which was already dying out and would be gradually replaced by atheism, introduced by the Chinese at the time of the Communist revolution. Thus, there is no legitimate way to connect Confucius with the term Mongol. “Din” is an even more difficult reference. Crowley attempts to connect it to Judaism—the Hebrew word din meaning “judgment”—but the attribution is unworthy of him, as “Din” in this context is clearly referring to another race, i.e., “Mongol and Din.” Another option is to assume that he heard the phrase incorrectly, and that “Mongol and Din” was really “Mongol ad-Din.”Ad-Din is an Arabic term for “of the faith,” and in this context the entire line may be read as “With my claws I tear out the flesh of the Indian and the Buddhist, Mongol ad-Din” or “... the flesh of the Indian and the Buddhist Mongol of the Faith.” As the Mongols were Buddhists, it may be a reference to a specific cultus or a specific personage within the cultus. There were several Muslim military leaders with the surname “ad-Din” and “al-Din” who fought the Mongols during various invasions. This is, however, a fanciful suggestion but is more logical than assuming “Din” is a reference to the Jews. Even the Islamic leader prominent in Templar lore was named Saladin, which is a Europeanization of the name Salah ad-Din..
30 For instance, in the “Old Comment” to The Book of the Law in The Equinox, volume 1 number VII: “Following him will arise the Equinox of Ma, the Goddess of Justice, it may be a hundred or ten thousand years from now; for the Computation of Time is not here as There.” He further explains this in his Confessions when he writes, “I may now point out that the reign of the Crowned and Conquering Child is limited in time by The Book of the Law itself. We learn that Horus will be in his turn succeeded by Thmaist, the Double-Wanded One; she who shall bring the candidates to full initiation, and though we know little of her peculiar characteristics, we know at least that her name is justice.” p. 399. (Thmaist is a variant of Maat used by the Golden Dawn and not found elsewhere, presumably a conflation of Themis—the Greek goddess of Justice—and Maat. Crowley explicitly identifies Thmaist with Maat, for instance in his The Book of Thoth where he identifies the ’double-wanded one’ of AL III:34 as “Maat, Themis, the Lady of the Balance”: Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth, Samuel Weiser, York (ME), 1974, p. 25)
31 This is a point that has been brought up by J. Daniel Gunther in his Initiation in the Aeon of the Child, where he states “These views are irreconcilable with historical evidence, and should therefore be reconsidered. If we are truly to understand the progression of the Aeons, it must be done by studying empirical evidence, not by static adherence to traditional interpretations. The Method of Science cannot be hamstrung by the Aim of Religion.” (Gunther, p. 166.) Gunther is a member of Crowley's AA and is considered an expert on Thelema. This same attitude should be applied to all of the Crowley material, of course.
32 Frater Achad, The Egyptian Revival, Samuel Weiser, NY, 1974
33 The relevant citation is from AL I:54-56: “Change not as much as the style of a letter; for behold! thou, o prophet, shalt not behold all these mysteries hidden therein. The child of thy bowels, he shall behold them. Expect him not from the East, nor from the West; for from no expected house cometh that child. Aum!”
34 The author, who has long personal experience of Eastern Orthodox liturgics and especially those of the Russian and Slavic churches, finds this explanation suspect as Crowley's Mass has much more in common with Roman Catholic versions of the same than with Orthodox forms. And, especially, no Orthodox clergyman or lay person would refer to the Divine Liturgy as a “Mass” which is strictly a Roman Catholic term from the Latin missa. (The Orthodox churches do not use Latin.) However, the apostolic succession of the Gnostic Catholic Church owes more to renegade Orthodox lineages than to normative Catholic ones.
35 As represented in the famous Thelemic greeting, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” and its response, “Love is the law, love under will,” both taken from the Book of the Law.
36 There is some debate over whether the Jubilee year is the 49th year or the 50th year.
37 Sanhedrin, 97A.
38 Crowley, Confessions, p. 398
39 H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu.”
40 Using this scheme, the Aeon of Horus began in 1904 and the first sub-period of Horus lasted 42 years before entering the “desolation” phase from 1946-1952 during which time Frater Achad proclaimed the Aeon of Maat. This would have been the Maat sub-period of the greater Horus period. Interestingly, 1946 plus 49 years gives us the year 2001, the year when everyone says “the world changed.”
41 Simon, Necronomicon, p. 217.
42 AL I:10