Analyzing Liber AL vel Legis
A close analytical reading of the Book of the Law, the root text of Thelema.
Sam's longest and most ambitious piece of theological work, written in 1993. It opens with the bare facts: over three days in April 1904 a Golden Dawn adept named Aleister Crowley wrote down 220 verses, taken as dictation from a discarnate entity after a series of magical workings with his wife. The resulting text — Liber AL vel Legis, the Book of the Law — has been lauded, repudiated and reviled by turns, and has nonetheless shaped the modern Pagan resurgence in ways few outside it appreciate. Sam's aim is to place it in the genre of sacred writing, work out what it actually says, and ask what it implies for religious practice.
The obstacle he names is silence. The scribe forbade commentary, so almost none exists; what there is was written by people without theological training, in occultist jargon, for a closed community. Sam argues he is unusually placed to break that silence — an adept of the same order and a practitioner of its forms, trained in Yoga, sorcery, Tantra, alchemy, Buddhism and witchcraft, and writing inside a formal theological education whose public framework he applies deliberately. His methods are several: let the text define its own terms and read it structurally; unpack the Golden Dawn Egyptology it uses; and, centrally, interpret Liber AL as a symbolic embodiment of Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of organism, on the wager that Crowley and Whitehead were intuiting a similar character in experience and expressing it in the vocabularies each knew. He suggests the illumination runs both ways, and adds a third strand — Tibetan Buddhism — proposing that Liber AL may best be read as a tantra, and specifically as something like a terma, a treasure text dictated by a discarnate being and surfacing when it is needed, a genre the West has no framework for.
The section on canon sets out the interpretive assumptions. Because the text calls itself a law for all, references that look aimed at Crowley personally must also read generally, or the book has no universal claim. The apparent self-contradictions — love as the law set beside the harsher verses of the third chapter — Sam takes as spoken on different levels, reading the ruthless passages as the iconography of Ra-Hoor-Khuit, in the way one reads the wrathful figures of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. He is blunt that Liber AL has been read as misanthropic and read badly, naming Hitler and L. Ron Hubbard, and stakes the whole essay on the claim that these are digressions from a core message about working with one another in mutual sovereignty.
The cosmological chapter maps the three voices — Nuit, Hadit, Ra-Hoor-Khuit — onto Whitehead's scheme: Hadit as the actual entity, everywhere the centre; Nuit as the world of that entity and as God in Whitehead's sense, the extensive continuum, the receptacle, the region of all potential and the lure toward novelty; their relation as lovers being the creative act itself. From there Sam reads Nuit's promise of redemption from pain as Whitehead's God the co-sufferer pushed further into co-enjoyment, and locates Thelema's soteriology in division being the source of hurt and love the only bond that unites the divided. The final section traces word, law and will — logos, nomos, thelema — through Greek, Hebrew and Christian usage, arguing that Thelema answers the dead end where Christ is the sole Word and Law and the only model of will is submission, and rendering the key phrase as: the intelligence of ordering is will. That will he identifies with Whitehead's subjective aim, derived from the divine aim and therefore inherently coordinated with every other will. A long postscript lists the research the essay leaves open, and closes by insisting the silence around the text has to be broken for its value to be reachable at all.
Originally published at samwebstermage.com →