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Page 1 of 21996 · PDF PAGE 67
… Crime and insanity, as well as disease and debility, are con stantly seen as the direct result of mismanaging the sexual life, either tactically, strategically, or both. The Book of the Law emphasizes the importance of these con siderations. The act of love must be spontaneous, in absolute free dom. The man must be true to himself. Romeo must not be thrust on Rosaline for family, social, or financial reasons. Desdemona must not be barred from Othello for reasons of race or religion. The homosexual must not blaspheme his nature and commit sp…
1996 · PDF PAGE 39
…eysers of magical effort. The “ninety and nine that safely lay in the shelter of the fold”1 have no organized will at all; and their character, built of their words and deeds, is only a garbage-heap. 1 [Matthew 18:13, paraphrase.] 2 [Luke 17:21, paraphrase.] Remember, also, that, unless you know what your true Will is, you may be devoting the most laudable energies to destroying yourself. Remember that every word and deed is a witness to thought, that therefore your mind must be perfectly organized, its sole duty to interpret circumstances in t…
1996 · PDF PAGE 63
64 The Law is for All 1. The accidents of any act of love, such as its protagonists and their peculiarities of expression on whatever plane, are totally immaterial to the Magical import of the act. Each person is responsible to himself, being a star, to travel in his own orbit, composed of his own elements, to shine with his own light, with the colour proper to his own nature, to revolve and to rush with his own inherent motion, and to maintain his own relation with his own galaxy in its own place in the Universe. His existence is his sole and …
1996 · PDF PAGE 68
…ation of the Will by its fortified frontiers, and, with unanimous enthusiasm, acclaiming the Lordship of the thought which expresses the act. The Will must seal itself upon the substance of the talisman. It must be, in alchemical language, the Sulphur which fixes the Mercury which determines the nature of the Salt. The whole man, from his inmost Godhead to the tip of his tiniest eyelash, must be one engine, cumbered with nothing useless, nothing inharmonious; a thunderbolt from the hand of Jove. It must give itself utterly in the one act of lov…
1996 · PDF PAGE 137
…l elements in equilibrated development. Thus one is to combine the joys of Messalina with those of Saint Teresa and Isolde in one single act. One’s rapture is to include those of Blake, Petrarch, Shelley, and Catullus. Liber Aleph has detailed instruction on numerous points involved in these questions. Why “eight and ninety rules of art”? I am totally unable to suggest a reason satisfactory to myself; but 90 is tzaddi, “The Emperor,” and 8, cheth, “The Charioteer” or Cup-Bearer; the phrase might then conceivably mean “with majesty.” Alterna ti…
1996 · PDF PAGE 65
…imagination like Aubrey Beardsley, the means matter no whit. Bach takes one way, Keats one, Goya one. The end is everything: that by the act, what ever it is, one worships, loves, possesses, and becomes Nuit. 1 [“Seeing stars,” or spintherism, from omi^rip, “sparks.”] 2 [Shakespeare, Macbeth i, 7.] The act of love can no more “trammel up the consequence”1 2 than any other act. As long as you possess the talisman, it must be used from time to time, whether you will or no. If you injure the quality, or diminish the quantity, of that quintessence…
1996 · PDF PAGE 72
…tical care and vigorous research? 1 [Two restauranteurs who founded, respectively, Lapérouse in Paris and the Café Royal in London.] The act of Love, to the bourgeois, is a physical relief like defal cation, and a moral relief from the strain of the drill of decency; a joyous relapse into the brute he has to pretend he despises. It is a drunkenness which drugs his shame of himself, yet leaves him deeper in disgust. It is an unclean gesture, hideous and grotesque. It is not his own act, but forced on him by a giant who holds him helpless; he is…
1996 · PDF PAGE 71
…utely fitted in every way to love each other, are totally debarred from expressing themselves by sheer ignorance of the technique of the act. What Nature declares as the climax of the Mass, the manifestation of God in the flesh, when the flesh is begotten, is so gross, clumsy and brutal that it disappoints and disgusts. They are horribly conscious that something is wrong. They do not know how to amend it. They are ashamed to discuss it. They have neither the experience to guide nor the imagination to experiment. Countless thousands of delicate-…
1996 · PDF PAGE 73
… being the Life of all Matter soever in the Universe. And we have accepted Love as the mode of Motion of the Will to Change. To us every act, as implying Change, is an act of Love. Life is a dance of delight, its rhythm an infinite rapture that never can weary or stale. Our personal pleasure in it is derived not only from our own part in it, but from our conscious apprehension of its total perfections. We study its structure, we expand ourselves as we lose ourselves in understanding it, and so becoming one with it. With the Egyptian initiate we…
1996 · PDF PAGE 53
…ry woman, and every intermediately-sexed individual, shall be absolutely free to interpret and communicate Self by means of any sexual practices soever, whether direct or indirect, rational or symbolic, physiologically, legally, ethically, or religiously approved or no, provided only that all parties to any act are fully aware of all the implications and responsibilities thereof, and heartily agree thereto. Moreover, the Beast 666 adviseth that all children shall be accustomed from infancy to witness every type of sexual act, as also the proces…
1996 · PDF PAGE 55
…ersions perish, just as a coiled spring straightens itself when the external compulsion is removed. They revert to their natural sex-characters, which only in rare cases are other than simple, pure, and refined. More, sex itself ceases to play Principal Boy in the Pantomime of Life. Other interests resume their proper proportions. We may now inquire why the Book is at pains to admit as to love “when” and “where” we will. Few people, surely, have been seriously worried by restrictions of time and place. One can only think of lovers who live with…
1996 · PDF PAGE 160
… of the fall of Because, that he is not there again. Commentary: There is here a perception of the profound law which opposes thought to action. We act, when we act aright, upon the instructive wisdom inherited from the ages. Our ances tors survived because they were able to adapt themselves to their environment; their rivals failed to breed, and so “good” qualities are transmitted, while “bad” are sterile. Thus the race-thought, subconscious, tells a man that he must have a son, cost what it may. Rome was founded on the rape of the Sabine wom…
1996 · PDF PAGE 61
…ceal the soul from the consciousness, and thus create the illusion which the aspirant calls Sorrow, and the uninitiate, Evil. The sexual act, even to the grossest of mankind, is the agent which dissipates the fog of self for one ecstatic moment. It is the instinctive feeling that the physical spasm is symbolic of that mir acle of the Mass, by which the material wafer, composed of the passive elements, earth and water, is transmuted into the sub stance of the Body of God, that makes the wise man dread lest so sublime a sacrament suffer profana…
1996 · PDF PAGE 60
Chapter I i Verse 52 61 Our first consideration only adds to our sense of surprised repugnance. It becomes evident that one type of act is forbidden, with the penalty of falling altogether from the law of liberty to the code of crime; and our amazement and horror only increase as we recognize that this single gesture which is held damnable, is the natural exercise of the most fatidical function of nature, the innocent indulgence of irresistible impulse. We glance back to the previous verse—we examine our charter. We are permitted to take our fi…
1996 · PDF PAGE 41
… brutal than to stunt natural growth or to deform it? What is more absurd than to seek to interpret this holy instinct as a gross animal act, to separate it from the spiritual enthusiasm without which it is so stupid as not even to be satisfactory to the persons concerned? The sexual act is a sacrament of Will. To profane it is the great offence. All true expression of it is lawful; all suppression or dis tortion is contrary to the Law of Liberty. To use legal or financial constraint to compel either abstention or submission, is entirely horri…
1996 · PDF PAGE 64
…ht but love of Her. You have only one cry, of inarticulate ecstasy, the intense spasm, possession of Her, and Death, to Her. You have no act but the priest’s gesture that makes your body Hers. The wafer is the disk of the Sun, the star in Her body. Your blood is spilt from your heart with every beat of your pulse into Her cup. It is the wine of Her life crushed from the grape of your sun-ripened vine. On this wine you are drunk. It washes your corpse that is as the fragment of the Host, broken by you, the Priest, into Her golden chalice. You, K…
1996 · PDF PAGE 16
… central text, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” “Discover your own true will,” is the mean- L40 ing of this; “and then act in harmony with it to the utmost of your powers.” The aim of the Commentary on the Book of the Law is to guide the reader along the path of the discovery of his own true will, in accordance with which, and only in accordance with which, he can rightly think and act. This is why “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” Only by so doing will you be shown your own true thought and life. “Every man a…
1996 · PDF PAGE 74
… the subject openly and impersonally, we must read textbooks, listen to lectures, watch demonstrations, earn our diplomas ere we enter practice. We do not mean what the bourgeois means when we say “the act of love.” To us it is not the gross gesture as of a man in a seizure, a snorting struggle, a senseless spasm, and a sudden revul sion of shame, as it is to him. We have an art of expression; we are trained to interpret the soul and the spirit in terms of the body. We do not deny the existence of the body, or despise it; but we refuse to rega…
1996 · PDF PAGE 62
…odification of the future. In these supremely important verses of The Book of the Law, it becomes clear that Nuit is aware of all these facts, and that she regards them as no less than the combination of the lock of the strong-room of the future. “This” (doctrine) “shall regenerate the world, the little world my sister”. The misunderstanding of sex, the ignorant fear like a fog, the ignorant lust like a miasma, these things have done more to keep back humanity from realization of itself, and from intelligent cooperation with its destiny, than a…
1996 · PDF PAGE 95
… perfectly, and be utterly indifferent to its pressure. These are the virtues which constitute a Master of the Temple. Yet each man must act What he will; for he is energized by his own nature. So long as he works “without lust of result” and does his duty for its own sake, he will know that “the sorrows are but as shadows”. And he himself is “that which remains”; for he can no more be destroyed, or his true Will be thwarted, than Matter diminish or Energy disappear. He is a nec essary unit of the Universe, equal and opposite to the sum total …