Chapman starts with reminding us where Aleister’s sympathy for the Devil originated from. As a young boy he loved his father very much and accompanying the fundamentalist Christian on his travels through the English countryside, preaching the word of the Lord, made him very much admire his dad. When at the age of eleven his father died, it left him utterly bereft but also made him furious with the Lord. This was compounded by a period of serious cruelty by the headmaster at boarding school for a sin he hadn’t even committed and by the time he was in his teens the juvenile Crowley went looking for sin on the grounds that if it wasn’t an affront to the Plymouth Brethren it wasn’t worth doing. And yet – as Alan quite lovingly puts it – he still reached beyond the damned material world, now maintaining a private piety within a Christian theology of his own, one motion always developing in tandem with the other: One flaunting rebellious damnation, the other longing for spiritual truth.

In his search for Satan, he reads Waite’s ‘The Book of Black Magic and of Pacts’. It gives him nothing but a lifelong contempt for black magic but leads him to ‘The Cloud upon the Sanctuary’ and the discovery of an Inner Church. This Church is Divine Intelligence Itself, inwardly realised in suitable human beings and outwardly at work in the world. It is mystical experience which gives one membership of this church. Instructions are to be provided directly by the Spirit of Wisdom Herself. Its purpose is the regeneration of the world.

He had found what he was looking for. Turning inwardly, without realising what he was in for, he asked the Inner Church to prepare him to become suitable for joining the School of the Prophets.

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The Spirit of Wisdom delivers. Chapman cuts right to the chase with giving us a tight outline of a string of synchronicities that lead Crowley straight to where he needs to go. 

His fellow mountaineer, friend and mentor Oscar Eckenstein gets him to meet an alchemist, Julian Baker who points him toward the Order of the Golden Dawn. The Inner Church is behind all Outer Churches – institutions which are necessary for leading the different cultures back to spiritual truth – and the Golden Dawn was just such an Outer Church. But first Baker introduces him to a real magician, George Cecil Jones who presents him with a method for working with the Inner Teacher in the form of The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, just translated by MacGregor Mathers, the head of the Order. It was not an official part of the Golden Dawn curriculum, nor an operation that anyone in the Order had attempted yet. The Young Turk looses no time and buys apartments to start his training. As soon as he joins the Order, its most talented member Alan Bennett moves in with him to begin his tutelage, all within a year.

In ‘The Cloud upon the Sanctuary’ it says that as soon as the Outer Church becomes political, the Inner Church withdraws, to leave behind a dead institution. Or one in turmoil. This is pretty much what happened to the Golden Dawn but Crowley had picked up from it what he needed to keep his own connection with the Inner Church going. He joined Bennett in India, gave his all to the practice of Yoga and reached his goal of receiving the mystical experience of Dhyana. 

When he returned to Boleskin, the house at Loch Ness which he bought to perform the Abramelin working, he did start the operation but got distracted by Rose Kelly and they went on a honeymoon.

At the time, his study in Magick was solidly based on Reason, so when in Cairo Rose started babbling like an oracle, he was not impressed. After extensively grilling her though, he eventually accepted the possibility that the gods were wanting to speak to him and he managed to put aside his fashionable Buddhist materialism, at least for the three days of the writing of the Book of the Law. But to bring the message from The Book of the Law to the public was not a walk in the park.

The way it is dressed up is so repulsive that he paid en enormous price for it, just as the book foretold him: terrible loss, persecution, social humiliation and betrayal. When the inevitable accusations of being a false prophet would come, only cold-heartedness and selfish devotion to the task could be the way forward. Later on when he confronted his shadow into the extreme and put his bi-sexuality on trial, he ends up with such a bad reputation that he became utterly taboo. But as Crowley being taboo veils the divine truth of his message, the architecture of his actual life reveals it. Because just as prophesied, underneath his disguise as a beggar he would find himself crowned with the highest attainment of mystics: Connecting the deep past to the present and ensuring the rebirth of the primordially old into the new.

During his training in the Golden Dawn he had taken onboard MacGregor Mathers’ translation of an ancient Greco-Egyptian exorcism that he called the Preliminary Invocation. According to Mathers, in Ancient Egyptian magic it was necessary to first identify with the highest divinity before evoking, commanding and binding lower spirits and the Preliminary Invocation was to precede any magical working. All through his life Crowley would stick to this and it was the supreme deity in the Preliminary Invocation that he would always turn to. He would call this deity ‘the Bornless one’. Other names like ‘the Headless one’ were also used but in his time there was no certainty. Chapman brings us up to date with present day Egyptology and it turns out that ‘the Headless one’ is the protagonist of The Book of the Solar-Osirian Unity which describes the Sun God Re’s night-time journey through the land of the dead before being reborn each morning. He is Re-Horakhty, supreme deity of the Eastern horizon, headless because his head is the Sun itself. 

When Rose as his oracle leads Crowley to the ‘Stele of Revealing’ in the Cairo Museum he is presented with a depiction of a dead priest in the underworld facing judgement from Re-Horakhty. The essence of the Egyptian mysteries is how one survives the afterlife judgement of the weighing of the human heart, passes through the second death and becomes a god, making the Sun come up again, a star in the body of Nuit. When Crowley receives The Book of the Law he is identified with the dead priest Ankh-ef-en-Khonsu, facing judgement. He is instructed to take what he is told and give the message to his people. He may not like it or understand it but his sacred duty is to deliver the book without changing a letter. In the modern world this is a madness but in the Ancient world this is how societies would be healed and laws established, how the course of an entire people would be determined. By being in a semi-trance receiving messages from the beyond, the newly wed Aleister becomes a prophet in a long line of prophets, bringing the Ancient past into the present. Chapman is doing that for us as well of course, even if the past is not that ancient and he is not in a semi-trance by the sounds of it.

The Law is given and we – the dead – are to make the choice to either join the Sun god in waking the dead, or to face annihilation. We are to shine the light on what is damned and what is divine and to make the choice without pitying the dammed. The difference between those who will realise themselves as stars in the body of Nuit and those who will see the light of their souls blotted out is the courage to trust the promise of the divine and to die consciously. If we can’t do this and rather stick to rationalisations as to why death is real and the promise of the divine can’t be true – weigh down our hearts with self-serving appeals to pity and compassion so we can exalt the appearance of death over life itself – we remain unconscious. We are free to choose but the warnings and consequences are spelt out in gruesome detail.

Too gruesome for Crowley to want to have anything to do with it. The manuscript disappears in the bottom of a drawer and he forgets all about it.

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For two years he manages to stave off the daunting prospect of accepting the role he was given when he falls forty feet over a cliff with his pony and survives. There was no rational explanation for this miracle and it made him realise that he had to have faith in the existence of something that he very much doubted: A spiritual being that was looking after him. He was indeed who The Book of the Law claimed he was: ‘the chosen priest and apostle of infinite space’ and as a prophet he had come to teach mankind: ‘The Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel’.

To be in shape for this he picks up the Abramelin working again, in a loose kind of of way but not without mentally performing the Preliminary Invocation every day. The interesting thing is that he had been doing that already before and during his reception of The Book of the Law. A divine messenger had turned up to guide him to Horus and granted him his wish for True Wisdom and Holy Magic even without having done the Abramelin working properly yet. This is where Chapman brings home the bacon. Since it wasn’t known at the time that Re-Horakhty is a face of the deity he had been invoking on a daily basis for years under the name Ra-Hoor-Khuit, Crowley could not have consciously understood how the messenger had actually been activated. What this means is that Ancient magic is real and not only does it work, but it is capable of working you, with or without your understanding. The unconscious eruption of The Book was a demonstration of an inescapable magic he had naively agreed to serve. And the terrible fate promised, the awful content of the book, was now his personal responsibility to fulfill. He had aspired to be a member of the Inner Church and it had gotten serious. He would have to play a major role in the School of the Prophets.

As he proceeded with the Abramelin operation he referred to his angel as Augoeides (self-shining one) and the main thing was to ‘invoke often’ but because of the scholarship of the day he had no idea that Augoeides and Aiwass, the messenger of The Book of the Law, were one and the same. It keeps him in doubt about the book for a long time. There are periods that he sees Aiwass as his Angel but it is not until the 1920s that he consciously accepts this. He could only get behind the book as a result of reaching the same level of consciousness as the one from which it originated.

To realise the star or god that resides within a human being, requires unconditional faith in the book’s promise of what lies on the other side of death. The star is both a guardian and a divine messenger and seeking its knowledge and conversation is how we participate in this realisation.

This means giving up everything that cannot pass through death and to bring this teaching to mankind, Crowley would need to unfold its content consciously in his own life, from beginning to end and see it as a demonstration of a divine reality. 

To be able to do the job he is given, he sets up his bi-annual publication The Equinox: The Review of Scientific Illuminism and in its course of existence makes many attempts to bring the book to the public in a proper light. He only manages to do this to his own satisfaction in 1936 after the court case on black magic had brought his bi-sexuality out in the open which had completely destroyed his reputation and there was nothing left to lose. 

The only thing left was the realisation that his life had been fulfilling just about each and every prophesy of his ruin in The Book of the Law. By passing through the ordeals he had reached the consciousness to see the book in all its splendor and in the Equinox of the Gods in 1936 he finally nailed his commentary.

The prophet was now free to be just human. At the end of the trial a young woman turns up with whom he has a non-magical child for who he is somewhat of an occasional father and she will still care for him when he is on his death bed.

Besides the struggle with The Book, he had been able to produce plenty of great writing, in particular The Book of Wisdom or Folly which set me on the course of my Crowley obsession back in 1975 without even reading it. In the last decade of his life he produces the cabalistic masterpiece Little Essays Towards Truth, the unmatched Eight Lectures on Yoga and The Book of Thoth which brings a genius insight to the Tarot with a superb concoction of all the esoteric knowledge at the time. He was also working on a compilation of an exchange of letters with some students as an accessible book that would explain everything, Magick without Tears, but it didn’t get published until after his passing. According to Chapman this publication has room for improvement and since it answers questions that Crowley had always dodged until then – like was Aiwass a separate entity or speaking from his subconscious? – Alan has produced a new edition with added material in a way that makes it possible for the reader to better experience Crowley both as a human being and a teacher.

Unfortunately the O.T.O. who owns the copyright of Magick without Tears is standing in its way, a cynical proof that once the Spirit of Wisdom which inspires the Hidden Church is institutionalised, it disappears and goes elsewhere. Thankfully She pops back up in this brilliant essay that was to be an introduction to Chapman’s new edition. She now lives on his website barbarouswords.com for all of us to enjoy. Thanks Alan!

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