Confessions of Aleister Crowley

236 {394} 1. WEH Note: Ra-Heru-Khuti-Ba-Hadit is the particular Egyptian deity said to rule the 2nd Decan of Aries, in 1904, from 1st April to 10th April. position by the old methods and did a long Tarot divination which proved perfectly futile. March 23rd to April 7th. I made inquiries about the stele and had the inscriptions translated into French by the assistant curator at Boulak. I made poetic paraphrases of them. Ouarda now told me to enter the room, where all this work had been done, exactly at noon on April 8th, 9th and 10th, and write down what I heard, rising exactly at one o'clock. This is did. In these three hours were written the three chapters of The Book of the Law. The above statement is as succinct as I can make it. By April 8th, I had been convinced of the reality of the communication and obeyed my wife's arbitrary instructions with a certain confidence. I retained my sceptical attitude none the less. THE CLAIM OF THE BOOK OF THE LAW IN RESPECT OF RELIGION. The importance of religion to humanity is paramount. The reason is that all men perceive more of less the "First Noble Truth" --- that everything is sorrow; and religion claims to console them by an authoritative denial of this truth or by promising compensations in other states of existence. This claim implies the possibility of knowledge derived from sources other than the unaided investigation of nature through the senses and the intellect. It postulates, therefore, the existence of one or more praeter-human intelligences, able and willing to communicate, through the medium of certain chosen man, to mankind a truth or truths which could not otherwise be known. Religion is justified in demanding faith, since the evidence of the senses and the mind cannot confirm its statements. The evidence from prophecy and miracle is valid only in so far as it goes to the credit of the man through whom the communication is made. It establishes that he is in possession of knowledge and power different, not only in degree but in kind, from those enjoyed by the rest of man kind. The history of mankind teems with religious teachers. These may be divided into three classes. 1. Such men as Moses an Mohammed state simply that they have received a direct communication from God. They buttress their authority by divers methods, chiefly threats and promises guaranteed by thaumaturgy; they resent the criticism of reason. 2. Such men as Blake and Boehme claimed to have entered into direct communication with discarnate intelligence which may be considered as personal, creative, omnipotent, unique, identical with themselves or otherwise. Its authority depends on "the interior certainty" of the seer. 3. Such teachers as Lao-Tzu, the Buddha and the highest Gnana-yogis announce that they have attained to superior wisdom, understanding, knowledge and power, but make no pretence of imposing their views on {395} mankind. They remain essentially sceptics. They base their precepts on their own personal experience, saying, in effect, that they have found that the performance of certain acts and the abstention from others created conditions favourable to the attainment of the state which has emancipated them. The wiser they are, the less dogmatic. Such men indeed formulate their transcendental conception of the cosmos more or less clearly; they may explain evil as illusion, etc., but the heart of their theory is that the problem of sorrow has been wrongly stated, owing to the superficial or incomplete data presented by normal human experience through the senses, and that it is possible for men, but virtue of some special training (from Asana to Ceremonial Magick), to develop in themselves a faculty superior to reason and immune from intellectual criticism, by the exercise of which the original problem of suffering is satisfactorily solved. The Book of the Law claims to comply with the conditions necessary to satisfy all three types of inquirer.