Liber AL vel Legis (The Book of the Law)

The account Aleister Crowley gave, and kept giving for forty years, is specific. He and his wife Rose Kelly were in Cairo; she began to make statements he had not expected, identifying a stele in the Boulaq museum and naming Horus; and on three successive days, 8, 9 and 10 April 1904, between noon and one o'clock, he sat and wrote at dictation from a voice he identified as Aiwass, whom he described as a praeterhuman intelligence and, in some later formulations, as his own Holy Guardian Angel. He maintained that he was the scribe and not the author, and that he had disliked the book on receiving it. Historians of esotericism report that claim as his; it is not a claim this atlas can adjudicate, and the book's status in Thelema does not depend on anyone outside Thelema accepting it.

The text is in three chapters of 220 verses, spoken by three voices: Nuit, infinite space; Hadit, the infinitely contracted point; and Ra-Hoor-Khuit, the crowned and conquering child. Its most quoted lines are the two halves of the Law, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law" and "Love is the law, love under will", together with "Every man and every woman is a star". The word Abrahadabra, which Crowley treated as the formula of the new aeon and of the union of microcosm and macrocosm, stands at the head of the third chapter.

"Do what thou wilt" is routinely misread as licence, and Thelemites routinely correct the reading. Thelema is Greek for will, and the doctrine is that each person has a True Will, a single proper course, and that the work of a life is to discover and follow it rather than to do as one pleases. On that reading the Law is demanding rather than permissive, and the second half, love under will, is a constraint, not an indulgence. Whether the text bears that reading throughout is a fair question, and it is asked most sharply about the third chapter.

That chapter is violent. It speaks of war, of compassion as the vice of kings, of trampling down the wretched and the weak, and it names its enemies. Thelemic exegesis has read these passages as symbolic, as addressed to the internal enemies of the will, or as belonging to the aeon's character rather than to a programme of conduct; critics have read them as meaning what they say. Crowley himself, who forbade the alteration of so much as a letter of the book, could not smooth them out either. The book's own appended Comment goes further: it forbids the book's own study and any discussion of its contents outright, with every question of the Law to be decided only by appeal to Crowley's own writings. An atlas entry that quoted only "every man and every woman is a star" and stopped there would be misdescribing the text.

The book's influence is real and extends well past organised Thelema. It shaped the A.A. and Crowley's reorganised Ordo Templi Orientis, and through them a great deal of twentieth-century Western occultism, Wicca's early formulations included. The atlas holds this work twice, here and among its esoteric texts, in the same way it holds the Tao Te Ching and the I Ching in both places.