On Discarnate Beings:

 

On Discarnate Beings:

“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”

DE FORMULA TOTA:

“Here then is the Schedule for all the Operations of Magick. First, thou shalt discover thy true Will, as I have already taught thee, and that Bud thereof which is the Purpose of this Operation.

Next, formulate this Bud-Will as a Person, seeking or constructing it, and naming it according to thine Holy Qabalah, and its infallible Rule of Truth. Third, purify and consecrate this Person, concentrating upon him and against all else. This Preparation shall continue in all thy daily Life. Mark well, make ready a new Child immediately after every Birth. Fourth, make an especial and direct Invocation at thy Mass, before the Introit, formulating a visible Image of this Child, and offering the Right of Incarnation. Fifth, perform the Mass, not omitting the Epiklesis, and let there be a Golden Wedding Ring at the Marriage of thy Lion with thine Eagle. Sixth, at the Consumption of the Eucharist accept this Child, losing thy Consciousness in him, until he be well assimilated with thee. Now then do this continuously, for by Repetition cometh forth both Strength and Skill, and the Effect is cumulative, if thou allow no Time to dissipate itself.”

Aleister Crowley: Liber ALEPH

The practice of magick and the path of initiation is a path of becoming, which is marked by three steps or initiations in every magickal career. The first is birth and symbolized by the Neophyte grade, the last is called Crossing the Abyss and the grade is called the Babe of the Abyss, that if successful the Adept attains the grade of Master of the Temple. We know from Charles Stansfield Jones’ career that he experienced at least the above two, but the quote is referring to Knowledge and Conversation being the central attainment in the practice of Thelemic magick, and perhaps the most relevant to what Thelema sets out to accomplish. From reading the vignette it seems that Crowley is telling Achad about a method for maintaining Knowledge and Conversation, an attainment pertaining to the A.’.A.’. that is marked by two distinct parts of the same grade and these are the Adept Without and the Adept Within and symbolizes the initiation of entering into the College of the Rosy Cross. It is at the entrance of the grade called the Veil of Paroketh that the aspirant stands as Asar-un-nefer, which means that he has completed perfecting himself by completing the Outer Order grades and is called the Formula of Pentagrammaton and symbolized by the Christ as indicated in the name Yod-Heh-Shin-Vau-Heh, he is thus a perfect reflection of the Demiurge--the God-Man and a name which qabalistically corresponds to the ineffable name, Yod-Heh-Vau-Heh. The number of the grade is 65 and represents union between the five and the six pointed stars, and via the Abramelin ritual the aspirant is attempting to raise his consciousness thus piercing the Veil of Paroketh for the union between the Microcosm and the Macrocosm to occur, which in Hindu thought is the equivalent of Atman losing self-awareness and realizing itself as Brahman. This exposes the nature of Being to self, or in other words, he realizes himself as the all within the all, or plainly, he is a god.

The True Will is the awareness of a substratum of consciousness which corresponds to the Logos in Nature and it is by harmonizing the magician’s will, which Crowley calls the Bud-Will with the Logos that the Great Work is accomplished. The Adeptus Without attains knowledge of his True Will, although it is only after harmony has been attained that he becomes an Adeptus Within, ergo the distinction is made between the two in the above quote. The quote corresponds to maintaining Knowledge and Conversation, and not the attainment as such, but indicates the work performed by an Adeptus Within, as having already harmonized his ego at the centre of the Ruach and is in the process of reflecting his Genius into the Astral Triad. In other words, the quote is referring to maintaining balance and power in the continual development of the will during the Adept’s becoming, signifying an evolutionary process that is the performance of the Great Work, or injunctions given to the Adept directly by his Angel. The injunctions are referring to the Bud-Will that serves the Adept as guidance, and Crowley is saying that these must be observed, presumably for the remainder of the magician’s career, that is to say, for the rest of his life, if he is to drain every drop of his Blood into the Cup of Babalon and attain immortality by accomplishing the Great Work. For example; if the Adept is a sculptor who usually works in a clay medium, but one day decides to create a sculpture using a hammer and chisel, it means that he was guided towards this impulse by his True Will and is what is meant by his Angel’s injunction, thus the magician’s passion changes in light of his Angel’s influence. As people we change every day, these changes are usually so minute that they are consciously imperceptible, but on an unconscious level the transformation is immediate, so that the more aware one is of the nature of his or her True Will, the more clearly these changes are perceived, and once such an awareness is generated it becomes the responsibility of a magician to harness and cultivate such impetus in accordance with his will and is what the invocation is meant to accomplish.

The impulse which is symbolized in the above by the sculptor picking up a hammer and chisel is what I will be referring to in the following as the small will, what Crowley means by the Bud-Will as being distinct from the big will or the True Will, the latter emphasizing the nature of the Great Work. Crowley describes working with the small will in two distinct ways, first he says that it must be made into a “Person” and secondly, he describes it as a “Child” and the magician is supposed to produce a new “Child” immediately after giving birth to the preceding one. Henceforth, Crowley says to qabalistically formulate a word to represent the elements of a hammer and a chisel used in the art of sculpting as pertaining to the above example, which I assume is separate from the name of the “Person” that accordingly may be given to the magician at the invocation ceremony by the "Person" himself, thus the formula reflects the elements of the aspect of art that it supposes. The image of the person I suspect, must create itself organically as knowledge of his character increases imbuing the object of admiration into a figure of recognizably distinguished characteristics. Of course, since all of this is dealing with the unconscious, obtaining knowledge of the subject will serve as a type of skrying practice enlivening the creative faculty, and the invocation accordingly must be performed in the Body of Light, such as the invocation of one's Holy Guardian Angel. The “Person” will serve as the object of the magicians admiration and devotion, that to which he must dedicate himself, thereby flooding his consciousness with the nature of his small will, this process is not dissimilar to invoking a god and the magician will have to by saturating his life with the elements of the small will, harmonize with it completely, and this is what is meant by turning the “Bud-Will” into a “Person”, who will become an ‘image of an image’ with which the magician will unite during the course of the ritual until he has completely assimilated all the elements thereof. It is called the small will as distinct for the reason that it merely serves to form part as a compliment of the Adept’s work, whether he is sculpting with clay or using a hammer and a chisel is immaterial, as in the end, his Great Work--the Summum Bonum will be understood as the work of a Great Sculptor, and immortalized as that which pertained to his True Will in its entirety.

It will be seen then, that the quote is dealing with preternatural contact and clearly distinguishes the Hero from the Daemon, the Hero thus being the “Person” or the embodiment of the small will and the object of invocation for the Adept Within. This preternatural being, it may be noted, pertains to tradition in a concentrated way and is uniquely congruent with the will of the Adept, for whom in order to become an Adept Without he had to devote himself entirely to the corresponding tradition and as an Adept Within he has become a proponent thereof making preternatural contact a necessary part of the work of his grade. Hence, he is to unite through constant observation the Lion and the White Eagle that are associated with Chokmah and Binah and the logic behind Crowley’s use of the procreative terminology in the above vignette, the union which is symbolically represented by the Golden Wedding Ring at the Mass, and is the formula of “Love under Will”. The Lion symbolizes the ‘essential masculine’ and the Will as represented by the Logos--the Father in the sphere of Chokmah on the Tree of Life, and in the Holy Tarot this sphere corresponds to Wands, Fire and passion, whereas the opposing sphere is associated with the Mother, and this ‘essential feminine’ nature indicates all the characteristics that are associated with this archetype symbolized by Cups and Water, however in context of the quote, she is particularly attributed to Love and devotion. These two sephiroth are united within the path of Daleth wherein a child is conceived, the womb in this case, is in the position of Da-ath and instead of the way we usually understand the false sephira’s place on the Tree of Life, in this case it is congruent with man’s fall from grace as marking the ontology of human experience, although for the invocation the magician represents all of these elements and the “Child” symbolizes the offspring of inspiration that results from union between the “Person” and the magician as pertaining to the small will.

“Love is the law, love under will.”