The Law is for All

160 The Law is for All m:10 Faith’s lamp sputters, and Hope’s cloak is threadbare, gropes, heavily leaning on the staff of Love, blinking and droning along—and suddenly sees Him! I did the sum over, this time with my pen like a panther. Too good to be true! I added my figures; yes, 718 past denial. I checked my value of Stèle; 52, and no error. Then only I let myself yield to the storm of delight and wonder that rushed up from the Hand of Him that is throned in the Abyss of my Being; and I wrote in my Magical Record the Triumph for which I have warred for over seventeen years 718 XTHAH 666 NO FITTER NAME COULD BE FOUND, THAT WAS SURE... And then came a flash to confirm me, to chase the last cloud of criticism: the actual name of the Stèle, its ordinary name, the only name it ever had until it was called the “stélé of revealing”, in The Book of the Law itself, “its name” in the Catalogue of the Museum at Bülâq, was just this: “Stèle 666.” I have described this discovery at length because I wish to emphasize its importance. Most of the numbers and words openly mentioned in The Book of the Law which conceal Secret Matters were already at that time possessed of a certain significance for me. Some uncon­ scious cooperation of my mind might be alleged as the determi­ nant factor in the choice of those numbers, their subsequent interconnections, and so on explained by the commentators’ inge­ nuity, and the confirmation of independent facts by coincidence. Similarly, the hidden numbers such as 3.141593, 395,1 31, 93, may be ascribed to the commentators, and denied to the intention of the text; at least, by that class of Pharisee which strains at the Butterfly of the Soul, preferring to swallow any hippopotamus if it be slimed thickly enough with the miasmal swamp-mire of materialism. 1 [The numeration of Liber Legis in a Greek transcription of the Latin (Aiftep Ae-ytq), as well as the sum of© and Q'ilbx [alhim], where © = 00 = 309; D'nbx = 86; 309 + 86 = 395. See also Book Four, Part IV (The Equinox of the Gods), ch. 7, §3.]