What was the ultimate purpose of Crowley's THE BOOK OF THE LAW?
Relax -- I'm not proposing that Aleister Crowley was a member of any conspiracy devoted to ruling the world, and in that capacity wrote The Book of the Law. But there is a question of just what that book was intended to do -- not by Crowley, no, but something or someone that was able to spy out one of many futures for our world . . . and kick us onto it by cultural influence via The Book of the Law.
Embedded in that book are some things that predicted -- implicitly, because in 1904, when that book was written and first distributed, no one alive then had the faintest idea of the technological, philosophical, scientific, and related possibilities that are commonplaces today -- the information age, the computer revolution, and even the seminal, final event of World War II, the use of a nuclear bomb with a plutonium core on Nagasaki, Japan. Consider:
One of the key statements of The Book of the Law, a.k.a. Liber Al vel Legis, a.k.a. Liber Al, is "2 = 0." Now, what did that mean? Thelemic philosophers, including Crowley himself as well as Israel Regardie and numerous others, analyzed it in terms of Taoist cosmology, Manichaeanism, and numerous other philosophical systems. Today, however, anyone at all familiar with modern computers and the mathematics of their functioning looks at that and goes, "Ah-hah -- Boolean algebra!" In Boolean algebra, 1 + 1 = 0 (with 1 to carry, i.e., 10 in base-2 mathematics). Boolean algebra is the foundation of data processing in today's computers.
Then there is the "93 current". That, too, was analyzed down to the quarks by everyone at all familiar with Thelema -- but always in terms of then-current cultural and philosophical terms. But there are sets of order 93 -- sets containing93 distinct elements -- that such analysts were clearly not familiar with.
Consider the Cherokee alphabet, or, rather, syllabary, which contains 93 distinct symbols.
Consider the Periodic Table of the Chemical Elements. Discarding hydrogen, which is not, properly speaking, an element -- it has no neutron, while all heavier atoms do -- helium (Z- or -proton number 2) is the first chemical element, lithium (Z = 3) is the second element, beryllium (Z=4) is the third element, and so on up through plutonium (Z = 94), which is the 93rd element. (There are many elements heavier, i.e., with more protons, than plutonium, but let us recall how plutonium was first introduced to the world at large on August 9, 1945.)
Consider the ASCII character lexicon. Originally this set comprised 94 characters, one of which was the blank(" "). Analogous to zero in mathematics, the blank is highly important in written communications, for it is used to separate words from one another, making it much easier for the reader to read the text in question. Like hydrogen, however, while the blank is a great place-holder, to human eyes (for whom it is meant, for written language means little to computers other than something to store and then print out on a report-form, not to be manipulated mathematically the way numbers are) it isn't a true character in and of itself. It is the 93 characters in that original ASCII lexicographic set that are of interest to the reader -- and they signaled that computers could present us with written communiques as well as they could process mathematically coded data.
All this was embedded in The Book of the Law -- which, by the way, predicted that Crowley would not live to see and understand the ultimate meaning of that book and its contents. While the things listed above surely aren't all that is embedded in The Book of the Law, and don't negate the value of the analyses so many Thelemic scholars have made of the book, they do show that the 20th century was a time of inconceivably powerful revolutions in technology, science, philsophy, mathematics, and a host of other disciplines which have turned just about every major assumption made about the universe we live in on its ear, and left us in a strange new cosmos unlike anything civilized men and women knew in 1904. With that overturning and reworking of our intellectual, emotional, and spiritual universes has come a new framework within which everything must be reinterpreted -- including The Book of the Law.
How could that book have predicted those revolutionary changes in everything so well? Maybe it didn't. Maybe those who read and thought about it influenced others to start thinking in new ways, who in turn influenced still others to start thinking in new ways, who . . . and thereby initiated the creation of a particular future, which is to say our present, out of a huge set of possible futures. That future in turn attempts to analyze the meaning of The Book of the Law -- and necessarily does so in very different ways than thinkers of Crowley's time did. Thus has the very meaning of The Book of the Law changed -- and our world with it.
Was that the inherent purpose behind the writing of that book? If so, whose purpose was it? It couldn't have been Crowley's -- or that of any other of his age. So whose?
Embedded in that book are some things that predicted -- implicitly, because in 1904, when that book was written and first distributed, no one alive then had the faintest idea of the technological, philosophical, scientific, and related possibilities that are commonplaces today -- the information age, the computer revolution, and even the seminal, final event of World War II, the use of a nuclear bomb with a plutonium core on Nagasaki, Japan. Consider:
One of the key statements of The Book of the Law, a.k.a. Liber Al vel Legis, a.k.a. Liber Al, is "2 = 0." Now, what did that mean? Thelemic philosophers, including Crowley himself as well as Israel Regardie and numerous others, analyzed it in terms of Taoist cosmology, Manichaeanism, and numerous other philosophical systems. Today, however, anyone at all familiar with modern computers and the mathematics of their functioning looks at that and goes, "Ah-hah -- Boolean algebra!" In Boolean algebra, 1 + 1 = 0 (with 1 to carry, i.e., 10 in base-2 mathematics). Boolean algebra is the foundation of data processing in today's computers.
Then there is the "93 current". That, too, was analyzed down to the quarks by everyone at all familiar with Thelema -- but always in terms of then-current cultural and philosophical terms. But there are sets of order 93 -- sets containing93 distinct elements -- that such analysts were clearly not familiar with.
Consider the Cherokee alphabet, or, rather, syllabary, which contains 93 distinct symbols.
Consider the Periodic Table of the Chemical Elements. Discarding hydrogen, which is not, properly speaking, an element -- it has no neutron, while all heavier atoms do -- helium (Z- or -proton number 2) is the first chemical element, lithium (Z = 3) is the second element, beryllium (Z=4) is the third element, and so on up through plutonium (Z = 94), which is the 93rd element. (There are many elements heavier, i.e., with more protons, than plutonium, but let us recall how plutonium was first introduced to the world at large on August 9, 1945.)
Consider the ASCII character lexicon. Originally this set comprised 94 characters, one of which was the blank(" "). Analogous to zero in mathematics, the blank is highly important in written communications, for it is used to separate words from one another, making it much easier for the reader to read the text in question. Like hydrogen, however, while the blank is a great place-holder, to human eyes (for whom it is meant, for written language means little to computers other than something to store and then print out on a report-form, not to be manipulated mathematically the way numbers are) it isn't a true character in and of itself. It is the 93 characters in that original ASCII lexicographic set that are of interest to the reader -- and they signaled that computers could present us with written communiques as well as they could process mathematically coded data.
All this was embedded in The Book of the Law -- which, by the way, predicted that Crowley would not live to see and understand the ultimate meaning of that book and its contents. While the things listed above surely aren't all that is embedded in The Book of the Law, and don't negate the value of the analyses so many Thelemic scholars have made of the book, they do show that the 20th century was a time of inconceivably powerful revolutions in technology, science, philsophy, mathematics, and a host of other disciplines which have turned just about every major assumption made about the universe we live in on its ear, and left us in a strange new cosmos unlike anything civilized men and women knew in 1904. With that overturning and reworking of our intellectual, emotional, and spiritual universes has come a new framework within which everything must be reinterpreted -- including The Book of the Law.
How could that book have predicted those revolutionary changes in everything so well? Maybe it didn't. Maybe those who read and thought about it influenced others to start thinking in new ways, who in turn influenced still others to start thinking in new ways, who . . . and thereby initiated the creation of a particular future, which is to say our present, out of a huge set of possible futures. That future in turn attempts to analyze the meaning of The Book of the Law -- and necessarily does so in very different ways than thinkers of Crowley's time did. Thus has the very meaning of The Book of the Law changed -- and our world with it.
Was that the inherent purpose behind the writing of that book? If so, whose purpose was it? It couldn't have been Crowley's -- or that of any other of his age. So whose?