Of Will:
"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law."
"Sayest thou (methinks) that there is a great Riddle, since by Reason of much Repression thou hast lost the Knowledge of thine own Nature?
My son, this is not so; for by a peculiar Ordinance of Heaven, and a Disposition occult within his Mind, is every Man protected from this Loss of his own Soul, until and unless he be by Choronzon disintegrated and dispersed beyond power of Will to repair; as when the Conflict within him, rending and burning, hath made his Mind utterly desert, and his Soul Madness.
Give Ear, give Ear attentively; the Will is not lost; though it be buried beneath a life--old midden of Repressions, for it persisteth vital within thee (is it not the true Motion of thine inmost Being?) and for all thy conscious striving cometh forth by Night, and by Stealth in Dream and Phantasy. Now is it naked and brilliant, now is it clothed in rich robes of Symbol and Hieroglyph; but always travelleth it with thee upon thy Path, ready to acquaint thee with thy true Nature, if thou attend unto its Word, its Gesture, or it's Show of Imagery."
Liber ALEPH: ALTERA DE VIA NATURA, Aleister Crowley:
The will itself is not consciously perceived, it is an unconscious inkling that leads one towards the realization of being, or a substrate manifesting a divine intent within the mind. The realization of the will must be sought consciously in doing and evaluating experience, even that which seemed as failures, were put there as torches of divine providence to illuminate the true character of the will. Even though the will is repressed as a result of each man and woman's need for conformity owing to an innate inability to express one's independence unless one is especially fitted karmically to do so, his will is never lost, merely obscured behind the veil of such repression. Therefore since childhood we are taught that this repression leads to security, that in denying Nature we are assisting ourselves by conforming to a reality that has been already prepared for us, we are urged away from adventure and into slavery. Hence the need arises to strengthen the will, symbolized in the tempering and sharpening of the sword that represents the intellect of the magician, a sword, as he is at war against delusion, and false phantoms which he will need to cut away, in order to unveil the truth within the light. Choronzon is the dweller of the Abyss, and although this was written to Frater ACHAD, these verses may still be applicable for candidates of lesser grades, for instance, Choronzon also manifests to the Zelator and threatens the will of the candidate. Although not of the same magnitude, the threat is real, as for the Magister failure leads to insanity and for the lesser initiate it merely culminates in failure to integrate the will with the shadow, although still a mighty task to accomplish for the attainment of the grade.
In the above ACHAD is urged to explore the nature of his being and this is done, by exploring the landscape of his unconscious. Tiphareth may fruitfully be considered as symbolic of the light of consciousness, symbolized by the Magick Lamp to illuminate the darkness of the Temple. The Temple in this analogy is the Soul of the magician hence the intellect is utilized in exploring the aspects of the magician's being lost in obscurity, the parts of being which in Jungian terminology relate to the shadow and its integration becomes the work of a Zelator. Hence the knife is the weapon of the Zelator as symbolic of the intellect and its element being air corresponds to Tiphareth on the Tree of Life and the suit of Swords in the Holy Tarot. The Zelator is working in Yesod, which represents the astral plane, an aspect of the psyche that I like to refer to as the landscape of dreams, or just the unconscious. According to the elements this sphere is related to air, although according to the god's it relates to Artemis , who is the goddess of the moon and the twin sister of Apollo. She is the reflection of her brother and the reasoning for Tiphareth and Yesod's positions on the Tree of Life, Apollo thus relates to the sphere of Beauty and his character is that of the Apollonian in contrast to the Dionysian.
The heterogeneity of the tasks of the grades serve a coherent system meant to become homogeneous parts of a whole unified under will, which in the quote Crowley refers to as the Soul. These heterogenous practices relate to the elemental weapons and gives us the reason for their distinguished characteristics. As a Neophyte the candidate is given Arcanorum which will serve as a functional map for the Great Work, and although it is merely a projection, it serves a teleological purpose for the magicians work. Hence the Neophyte is also tasked to create a Pantacle with a symbol of the universe carved into it, this symbol being nothing less than a representation of the magician's Soul. The Zelator is given two tasks and these relate to the above quote, the first task is yoga, and the second is to practice the meditations in Liber HHH. The aim of the first of these practices is to strengthen the will, which is associated with the intellect and the magical weapon of the grade, and the second is concerned with the unconscious, or as Crowley calls it in the quote "Night". I hope that from this analysis of the vignette it is clear, that in order for freedom to be attained there must be established a creative congruence between Night and Day, a notion found throughout Liber Pyramidos, or in other words one must establish a mutual and conscious dialectic between the intellect and the unconscious. It is the first practice mentioned which in the quote is called the "conscious Striving", in fact this pertains to all the practices, although in this particular case it is yogic meditation meant to strengthen the magician's will that leads to illuminating the shadow for the second task to be achieved. It is via this connection and the magician's exploration of his own being, the "Word", the "Gesture" and its "Show of Imagery", that he may attain to the unity and accomplish the Great Work.
"Love is the law, love under will."