Aleister Crowley’s family had been members of the Plymouth Brethren, a community of worshipers whose Christian doctrine derived from the world of John Nelson Darby (1800 CE– 1882 CE). Like many 19th Century Christians, notably the American Baptist William Miller (1782 CE – 1849 CE), Darby felt that the time of Great Revelation was at hand. Unlike Miller, who had calculated the End of Days only to find himself and his followers still living, Darby created several End Times doctrines situating himself and his followers just before the End, a pre-Millennial period.
Darby’s most significant contribution to Christian thought, and to the thought of Aleister Crowley, was a doctrine of Dispensationalism. Echoing Joachim de Fiore, Darby proposed that the Divine interacted with the faithful through a series of Progressive Revelations. There had been a Revelation for the Israelites, a Revelation for the Christian Church, and there was now a new Revelation at hand in the time before the Millennium. As the faithful developed, so too did God develop his Revelations, allowing for a new and more perfect understanding of his Scriptures.
Darby’s other significant contribution, which has endured throughout American Protestantism, is the concept of the Rapture.
The Plymouth Brethren that Crowley had been born to felt that they were God’s special chosen in this time before the End of Time. By practicing a rigid but primitive form of Christianity, they prepared themselves as God’s Chosen for this final Dispensation. As such, talk of the Apocalypse was every day in Crowley’s childhood. He claimed that his mother would liken him to the First Beast of Revelation in Chapter 13 of that book, the “Beast from the Sea.”
In 1904 CE, Crowley and his new wife Rose were in Egypt. On their initial honeymoon, the two would spend a night in the Great Pyramid where Crowley, in a moment of playfulness, would use the Golden Dawn “Bornless Rite” as part of a Horus-themed Working to entertain her. Based on the PGM “Stele of Jeu,” this rite is a Gnostic Rite of Ascension meant to transform the magician into a Divine Figure who could engage in magic. In April of that same year, they were again in Egypt when Rose would enter into trance states, telling Crowley, “They are waiting for you.”
Crowley dismissed these episodes at first and then began pressing her in the hopes of proving this all to be silliness. To his surprise, she identified the Egyptian God Horus as being the one who was waiting, and Crowley claimed she described the figure to match the Golden Dawn’s ideas of Horus’ associations. He would take her to the Cairo Museum to point out who the message was from. She identified the seated divine figure on the Stele of Ankh-ef-en-Khonsu I, a representation of Ra-Horakhty, “Ra-Horus of the Two Horizons.” What struck Crowley all the more was the Museum number for this piece: 666, the Number of the Beast from the Sea in Revelation.
He decided to pay attention. Rose told him to go into a room for one hour over the course of the three days and to write down whatever he heard. The result was the Book of the Law.
Providing a complete account of the reception of the Book of the Law is outside the scope of this series. Crowley’s account of it can be found in The Equinox of the Gods and in the compilation of his commentaries on the text published as The Law is for All. A text transcript can be read here, while photographs of the original manuscript can be seen here.
What is interesting about the Book of the Law for this discussion is not so much what is in it but what is “missing” from it. Nowhere within the text is there any discussion of the notion of Aeons, nor is any “Aeon of Horus” ever mentioned. Even in the 1912 published Commentary on the Book of the Law by Crowley, no mention of an “Aeon of Horus” or “Aeons” appears. In the span of publication of The Equinox Volume I, from 1909 to 1913, there is only one use of The phrase “Aeon of Horus” in the commentary on The Vision and the Voice in Vol 1 no. 5, dated 1911. The word “Aeon” does appear in some of the poetry published during this time, over as a sense of time duration or in the sense of “eternity,” with possible Farr-derived Gnostic implication. There is also a mention of Ra Hoor Khuit, Crowley’s variant on Ra-Horakhty, as “Lord of the Aeon” in the account of the “Evocation of Bartzabel” in issue volume 1 no. 9.
The doctrine of the Aeon of Horus as “The New Aeon” would not appear in Crowley’s published works until 1919 CE, with the publication of Vol. III no. 1, aka “The Blue Equinox.” Previously, the notion only appeared in the letters that would eventually be published as Liber Aleph. Written in 1918, if the edited and printed versions are to be believed, the notion of Aeons appears to have coalesced in Crowley’s thinking by this time. It appears in the discussion of the Magus as “Logos Aionos,” starting around letter 68. Crowley explicitly states the notion of the Aeon of Horus as being ruled by Horus the Younger in letter 85.
In its fully wrought form, Crowley’s Doctrine of the Aeons has a remarkably Darbyite quality to it. Humanity had gone through a progressive series of dispensational revelations. The first of these known Crowley identified as “The Aeon of Isis,” ruled by mother-goddesses and humans as infantile adorers. The next dispensation, “The Aeon of Osiris,” was ruled by Dying Gods and “Salvation by Proxy” models. Now we were witnessing a new dispensation, with Crowley as its Prophet, which Crowley identified as “The Aeon of Horus (the Younger).”
Setemheb 