The Law is for All

Introduction 15 There is doubtless a further key to be found which will in the end elucidate the whole Book and make manifest the extremely elaborate nature of its pattern.1 1 [The source and authorship of this quotation is unknown.] 2 [Later termed the “Old Commentary”; published in The Equinox 1(7) (1912), pp. 387^00a.] 3 [Described by Crowley as the “New Commentary.”] The Book of the Law, however, is not only for mathematicians and mystics. In some one phrase or other of the Book there is a direct message for every human being. The best way for the layman to approach this Book is to regard it as a letter written directly to himself. Even though he may not be able to understand some parts of the letter, he is sure to find other parts that are unmistakably addressed, in an intimately personal sense, to him. It is because the thought expressed in this Book of the Law was sometimes not easily intelligible to the transmitter that he wrote a Commentary upon it.1 2 He wished to explain, so far as he could, the messages that he had received. After some lapse of time he wrote a second Commentary,3 which superseded the first; so I have not included the first in this volume. And there is a good deal of the second Commentary that I have not included. Sometimes the understanding of the Commentary involves mathematical or philosophical or scientific or magical knowledge such as the gen­ eral reader cannot be assumed to possess; and this edition of the Commentary on the Book of the Law is for the general reader. It is intended as a Primer; it is for the layman. I am a layman myself, as regards special knowledge of the kind that I have just indi­ cated, so in one way my task has been simplified. I have gone on the principle of omitting from the Commentary anything that I cannot myself understand. I have not, however, left out a single word of The Book of the Law itself; following the strict and, without doubt, the right injunction that this should not be done. My scribe [...] shall not in one letter change this book; but lest there be folly, he shall comment thereupon [...] The Law itself must, therefore, stand wholly as it was transmitted; every sentence of it is integrated with every other; 1:36