Magick Without Tears Chapter 4. The Qabalah: The Best Training for Memory
Author: Aleister Crowley Publisher: St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications. Publish Date: 1954 Review Date: Status:💥
Annotations
48❗️
Now you must learn Qabalah. Learn this Alphabet of Magick. You must take it on trust, as a child does his own alphabet. No one has ever found out why the order of the letters is what it is. Probably there isn’t any answer
48
But our Magical Alphabet is primarily not letters, but figures, not sounds but mathematical ideas. Sir Humphrey Davy, coming out of his famous illumination (with some help from Nitrous Oxide he got in) exclaimed: The Universe is composed solely of ideas. We, analyzing this a little, say: The Universe is a mathematical expression.
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Sir James Jeans might have said this, only his banker advised him to cash in on God. The simplest form of this expression is 0=2, elsewhere expounded at great length. This 2 might itself be expressed in an indefinitely great number of ways. Every prime number, including some not in the series of “natural numbers,” is an individual. The other numbers with perhaps a few exceptions (e.g. 418) are composed of their primes
48❗️
Each of these ideas may be explained, investigated, understood, by means very various. Firstly, the Hebrew, Greek and Arabic numbers are also letters. Then, each of these letters is further described by one of the (arbitrarily composed) “elements of Nature”; the Four (or Five) Elements, the Seven (or Ten) Planets, and the Twelve Signs of the Zodiac
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All these are arranged in a geometrical design composed of ten “Sephiroth” (numbers) and twenty-two “Paths” joining them; this is called the Tree of Life
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Every idea soever can be, and should be, attributed to one or more of these primary symbols; thus green, in different shades, is a quality or function of Venus, the Earth, the Sea, Libra, and others. So also abstract ideas; dishonesty means “an afflicted Mercury,” generosity a good, though not always strong, Jupiter; and so on.
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The Tree of Life has got to be learnt by heart; you must know it backwards, forwards, sideways, and upside down; it must become the automatic background of all your thinking. You must keep on hanging everything that comes your way upon its proper bough.
49❗️
At first, of course, all this is dreadfully confusing; but persist, and a time will come when all the odd bits fit into the jig-saw, and you behold-with what adoring wonder!-the marvellous beauty and symmetry of the Qabalistic system. And then-what a weapon you will have forged! What power to analyze, to order, to manipulate your thinking!
49
The Book of the Law itself insists upon the fact that it contains a Qabalah which was beyond me at the time of its dictation, is beyond me now, and always will be beyond me in this incarnation. Let me direct your spiritual attention at AL .I: 54; I: 56; II: 54-55; II: 76; III: 47
51❗️
Notariqon, the accursed art of making words out of initials, like (in profane life) Wren and Gestapo and their horrid brood, or to Temurah, the art of altering the position of the letters in a word, a sort of cipher