The content of this book was dictated to the well-known occultist Aleister Crowley by an entity called Aiwass between 12 noon and 1 pm on three successive days, April 8, 9 and 10, 1904.
The language of this book can be a little complicated to understand in today’s mind. The text is written in an imperative tone, the entity channeled by Master Therion is authoritative in his words, which emanate the tone of a narcissist.
The reading is fast, as there are not many pages and, personally, I could not stop to look for second meanings either. Anything said between the lines was difficult to grasp as the style of writing was hard to follow, the concepts were hidden among a lot of talk, and although I feel an attraction to the figure of A. Crowley and his Tarot cards, which I use regularly with very good results, this book has left me quite cold.
Talking to my good friend JD, https://www.cunningasfolk.com/, while driving one day, he pointed out to me that most authors who were born and raised in the Victorian era needed to justify their claims with channelled entities, pointing to a mysterious origin to validate the information they published. I personally believe this could be a bit dangerous in the sense that channelings work in two directions. What a man with the need for social validation can “sell” to achieve his goal is sometimes too much.
The feeling I get when I reread some of the pages is somewhat peculiar. I don’t feel that I am before a divine treatise but before the words of a being inflated with ego, with a somewhat psychopathic mind and lacking in empathy. Whoever this entity was made claims that the author used throughout his career to validate any kind of publication, they were the basis of the faith or tradition he created. His words and his life make me think that this entity may not have been the most benevolent, and that it made a dent in the author’s psyche, possessing it for the rest of his life. As if when they made contact Aiwass left a seed in Crowley’s psyche that was playing with his own mind for the rest of his incarnation in exchange for giving him knowledge, skills and guidance.
Honestly I have read the Book of Thoth and used his Tarot Deck, the man had intuition when it came to finding correspondences, to delve into the meaning of symbols and was cultured; Of course his magical level was high and he must have achieved many spiritual goals (astral projection, activation of energy bodies of light…) but this book also makes me think that something damaged his mind, and that, as a mutant virus ate him, it can be seen in the book how the psychopathic tone is growing, how the mind of the channeler was largely invaded by this primitive force and that it grew quite large.
If you like him as a figure I recommend you to read it, after all it is the basis of the context that he built in his work and in Thelema. From the whole book I will save one sentence that when I read it really resonated completely in my whole psyche.
30.If Will stops and cries Why, invoking Because , then Will stops & does nought.
31. If Power asks why, then is power weakness
