;header This is file 220a3-4.r1 To fight is the right and duty of every male,as of every woman to rejoice in his strength and to honour and perpetuate it by her love. My primary objection to Christianity is `gentle Jesus, meek and mild,' the pacifist, the conscientious objector, the Tolstoyan, the `passive resister.' When the Kaiser fled, and the Germans surrendered their fleet, they abandoned Nietzshes for Jesus. Rodjestvensky and Gervera took their fleets out to certain destruction. The Irish Revolutionists of Easter Week, 1916, fought and died like men; and they have established a tradition. `Jesus' himself, in the legend, `set his face as a flint to go to Jerusalem,' with the foreknowledge of his fate. But Christians have not emphasized that heroism since the Crusades. The sloppy sentimental Jesus of the Sunday-school is the only survivor; and the War killed him, thank Ares! When the Nonconformist Christian churches, especially in America, found the doctrine of Eternal Punishment no longer tenable, they knocked the bottom out of their religion. There was nothing to fight for. So they degenerated into tame social Centres, so that Theosophy with its Black Brothers, Mrs. Eddy with her Mental Arsenic Experts, the T.K. with his Hypnotists and Jesuits, and Billy Sunday with his Hell Fire, made people's flesh creep once more, and got both credit and cash. The Book of the Law flings forth no theological fulminations; but we have quarrels enough on our hands. We have to fight for Freedom against oppressors, religious, social, or industrial; and we are utterly opposed to compromise. Every fight is to be a fight to the finish; each one of us for himself, to do his own will; and all of us for all, to establish the Law of Liberty. We do not want ``peofessional soldiers,'' hired bravos sworn to have no souls of their own. They ``dare not fight'' for how should a man dare to fight unless his cause be a love mightier than his love of life? Therefore they ``play'' they have sold themselves; their Will is no more theirs; life is no longer a serious thing to them; therefore they wander wastrel in clubs and boudoirs and greenrooms; bridge, billiards, polo, pettie coats puff out their emptiness; scratched for the Great RACE of Life, they watch the Derby instead. Brave such may be; they may well be (in a sense) classed with the rat; but brainless and idle they must be, who have no goal beyond the grave, where, at the best, chance flings fast-withering flowers of false and garish glory. They serve to defend things vital to their country; they are the skull that keeps the brain from harm? Oh foolish brain! Wet thou not wiser to defend thyself, rather than trust to brittle bone that hinders thee from growth? Let every man bear arms, swift to resent oppression, generous and ardent to draw sword in any cause, if justice or freedom summon him! ``All fools despise.'' In this last phrase the word ``fools'' is evidently not to be taken in its deeper mystical sense, the context plainly bearing reference to ordinary life. But the ``fool'' is still as described in the Tarot Trump. He is an epicene creature, soft and sottish, with an imbecile laugh and a pretty taste in fancy waistcoats. He lacks virility, like the ox which is the meaning of the letter Aleph which describes the Trump, and his value is Zero, its number. He is air, formless and incapable of resistance, carrier of sounds which mean nothing to it, swept up into destructive rages of senseless violence from its idleness, incalculably moved by every pressure or pull. One-fifth is the fuel of fire, the corruption of rust; the rest is inert, the soul of explosives, with a trace of that stifling and suffocating gas which is yet food for vegetable, as it is poison to animal, life. We have here a picture of the average man, of a fool. He has no will of his own, is all things to all men, is void, a repeater of words of whose sense he knows nought, a drifter, both idle and violent, compact partly of fierce passions that burn up both himself and the other, but mostly of inert and characterless nonentity, with a little heaviness, dullness, and stupefaction for his only positive qualities. Such are the `fools' whom we despise. The man of Thelema is vertebrate, organized, purposeful, steady, self-controlled, virile; he uses the air as the food of his blood; so also, were he deprived of fools he could no live. We need our atmosphere, after all; it is only when the fools become violent madmen that we need our cloak of silence to wrap us, and our staff to stay us as we ascend our mountain-ridge; and it is only if we go down into the darkness of mines to dig us treasure of earth that we need fear to choke on their poisonous breath. 58. ``The keen:'' these are the men whose Will is as a sword sharp and straight, tempered and ground and polished its flawless steel; with a Wrist and an Eye behind it. ``The proud:'' these are the men whose nature is kingly, the men who `can.' They know themselves born rulers, whether their halidom be Art, or Science, or aught else soever. ``The lofty:'' these are the men who, being themselves high-hearted, endure not any baseness. 59. Fight! Fight like gentlemen, without malice, because fighting is the best game in the world, and love the second best! Don't slander your enemy, as the newspapers would have you do; just kill him, and then bury him with honour. don't keep crying `Foul' like a fifth-rate pugilist, Don't boast! Don't squeal! If you're down, get up and hit him again! Fights of that sort make fast friends. Ther is perhaps a magical second-meaning in this verse, a reference to the Ritual of which we find hints in the legend of Cain and Abel, Esau and Jacob, Set and Osiris, et cetera. The ``Elder Brother'' within us, the Silent Self, must slay the younger brother, the conscious self, and he must be raised again incorruptible. 60. There are of course lesser laws than this, details, particular cases, of the Law. But the whole of the Law is Do what thou wilt, and there is no law beyond it. This subject is treated fully in Liber CXI Aleph, and the student should refer thereto. Far better, let him assume this Law to be the Universal Key to every problem of Life, and then apply it to one particular case after another. As he comes by degrees to understand it, he will be astounded at the simplification of the most obscure questions which it furnishes. Thus he will assimilate the Law, and make it the norm of his conscious being; this by itself will suffice to initiate him, to dissolve his complexes, to unveil himself to himself; and so shall he attain the Knowledge and Conversation of his Holy Guardian Angel. I have myself practiced constantly to prove the Law by many and divers modes in many and divers spheres of thought, until it has become absolutely fixed in me, so much so that it appears an ``identical equation,'' axiomatic indeed, and yet not a platitude, but a very sword of Truth to sunder every knot at a touch. As the practical ethics of the Law, I have formulated in words of one syllable my declaration of the RIGHTS OF MAN Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. There is no god but Man. Man has the right to live by his own Law. Man has the right to live in the way that he wills to do. Man has the right to dwell where he wills to dwell. Man has the right to move as he will on the face of the Earth. Man has the right to eat what he will. Man has the right to drink what he will. Man has the right to think as he will Man has the right to speak as he will Man has the right to write as he will. Man has the right to mould as he will. Man has the right to paint as he will.'ql Man has the right to carve as he will. Man has the right to work as he will. Man has the right to rest as he will Man has the right to love as he will, when, where and whom he will. Man has the right to die when and how he will.ql Man has the right to kill those who would thwart these rights. This statement must not be regarded as individualism run wild. Its harmony with statecraft is demonstrated in the Chapters of Liber Aleph already quoted -- see comment on Chapter II verse 72. Modern thought, even that of the shallowest, is compelled by AIWAZ to confirm His Law, without knowing what it is about. For instance: ``God's wind from nowhere which is called the Will; and is man's only excuse upon this earth,'' was written by so trivial a Fat Man as Gilbert Keith Chesterton in ``The Flying Inn.'' 61. Note that Heru-Ra-Ha is not merely a particular form of Ra, but the God enthroned in Ra's seat. That is, His Kingdom on earth is temporary, as explained in verse 34. And he is here conceived as the Hierophant, ``lightening the girders of the soul,'' that is, bringing man to initiation. These ``girders'' imply the skeletal structure on which the soul is supported, the conditions of its incarnation. Man is the heir of ages of evolutionary experience, on certain lines, so that he is organized on formulae which have determined the type of his development. Of some such formulae we are conscious, but not of all. Thus it is true for all men -- empirically -- that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points; some savages may not know this consciously, but they base their actions on that knowledge. Now we cannot doubt that consciousness has developed elsewhere than in man; only a blind megalomaniac or a Christian divine could suppose our infinitesimal mote of a planet the sole habitat of Mind, especially as our minds are, at best, totally incompetent to comprehend Nature. It is also unlikely that our Earth's physical conditions of temperature, atmosphere, density and so on, which some still regard as essential to Life, are found frequently; we are only one of nine planets ourselves, and it is absurd to deny that life exists on the others, or in the Sun himself, just because the conditions of our own life are absent elsewhere. Such Life and Mind may therefore be utterly different to anything we know of; the `girders' of their souls in other spheres may be other than ours. The above argument is a case of a ``girder'' we are bound mentally by our race-experience of the environment in which our own lives flourish. A pioneer choosing a camp must look for wood, water, perhaps shelter, perhaps game. In another planet he might not need any of these. The `girders' which deternmine the `form' of our souls are therefor limitations to our thought, as well as supports. In the same way, rails help a train to run easily, but confine it to a definite direction. The `laws' of Nature and Thought, Mathematics, Logic, and so on, are ``girders'' of this sort. Our race-inherited conceptions of space prevented men, until quite recent years, from conceiving a non-Euclidean geometry, or the existence of a fourth Dimension. The initiate soon becomes aware of the un-truth of many of these limiting laws of his mind; he has to identify Being with not-Being, to perceive Matter as continuous and homogeneous, and so for many another Truth, apprehended directly by pure perception, and consequently not to be refuted by syllogistic methods. The Laws of Logic are thus discovered to be superficial, and their scope only partial. (It is significant in this connexion that such advanced thinkers as the Hon. Bertrand Russell have found themselves obliged to refer mathematical laws to Logic; it seems to have escaped them that the Laws of Logic are no more than the statement of the limitations of their own intelligence. I quote The Book of Lies, KE . ME: ``CHINESE MUSIC. ``Explain this happening!'' ``It must have a `natural' cause.'' ) ``It must have a `supernatural' cause.'') Let these two asses be set to grind corn. May, might,must, should, probably, may be, we may safely assume, ought, it is hardly questionable, almost certainly -- poor hacks! let them be turned out to grass! Proof is only possible in mathematics, and mathematics is only a matter of arbitrary conventions. And yet doubt is a good servant but a bad master; a perfect mistress, but a nagging wife. ``White is white'' is the lash of the overseer; ``white is black'' is the watchword of the slave. The Master takes no heed. The chinese cannot help thinking that the octave has 5 notes. The more necessary anything appears to my mind, the more certain it is that I only assert a limitation. I slept with Faith, and found a corpse in my arms on awaking; I drank and danced all night with Doubt, and found her a virgin in the morning.'') Now then consider the man whose soul has thoroughly explored its structure, is actively conscious of its `girders' of axiom. He must find that they confine him like prison bars, when he would gain the freedom of the initiate. In this verse therefore doth the God ``enthroned in RA's seat'' declare that his Word lightens (or removes) the oppression of these `girders of the soul.' The study of this chapter is accordingly a sould preparatory course for whosoever will become Initiate. See also the six verses following this; the word increases in value as the reader advances on the Path, just as a Rembrandt is a ``pretty picture'' to the peasant, a `fine work of art'' to the educated man, but to the lover of Beauty a sublime masterpiece, the greater as he grows himself in greatness. 62. This seems to indicate the means to be used in freeing the soul from its `girders'. We have seen that Ra-Hoor-Khuit is in one sense the Silent Self in a man, a Name of his Khabs, not so impersonal as Hadit, but the first and least untrue formulation of the Ego. We are to reverse this self in us, then ,not to suppress it and subordinate it. Nor are we to evade it, but to come to it. This is done ``through tribulation of ordeal''. This tribulation is that experienced in the process called Psychoanalysis, now that official science has adopted -- so far as its inferior intelligence permits -- the methods of the magus. But the `ordeal' is `bliss'; the solution of each complex by `tribulation' -- note the etymological significance of the word! -- is the spasm of joy which is the physiological and psychological accompaniment of any relief from strain and congestion. 63. The Fool is also the Great Fool, Bacchus Diphues, Harpocrates, the Dwarf-Self, the Holy Guardian Angel, and so forth. ``He understandeth it not'', that is, he understandeth that it is NOT, LA, 31. But the above is only the secondary or hieroglyphic magical meaning. The plain English still discusses the technique of initiation. The `fool', is one such as described in my note on verse 57. The vain, soft, frivolous, idle, mutable sot will make nothing either of this Book, or of my comment thereon. But this fool is the child Harpocrates, the ``Babe in the Egg'', the innocent not yet born, in silence awaiting his hour to come forth into light. He is then the uninitiated man, and he has four ordeals to pass before he is made perfect. These ordeals are now to be described. 64. The ``Tree of Life'' in the Qabalah represents ten spheres arranged in three pillars, the central one of these containing four, and the others three each. These spheres are attributed to certain numbers, planets, metals, and many other groups of things; indeed all things may be referred to one or other of them. (See Book 4 Part III and Liber 777). The four ordeals now to be described represent the ascent of the aspirant from the tenth and lowest of these spheres, which refers to the Earth, unregenerate and confused, in which the aspirant is born. He riseth in the first ordeal to the sphere called the Foundation, numbered 9, and containing, among other ideas, those of the generative organs, Air, the Moon, and Silver. Its secret Truth is that Stability is identical with Change; of this we are reminded by the fact that any multiple of 9 has 9 for the sum of its digits. The initiate will now perceive that the sum of the motions of his mind is zero, while, below their moon-like phases and their Air-like divinations, the sex-consciousness abides untouched, the true Foundation of the Temple of his body, the Root of the Tree of Life that grows from Earth to Heaven. This Book is now to him ``as silver.'' He sees it pure, white and shining, the mirror of his own being that this ordeal has purged of its complexes. To reach this sphere he has had to pass through a path of darkness where the Four Elements seem to him to be the Universe entire. For how should he know that they are no more that the last of the 22 segments of the Snake that is twined on the Tree? Assailed by gross phantoms of matter, unreal and unintelligible, his ordeal is of terror and darkness. He may pass only by favour of his own silent God, extended and exalted within him by virtue of his conscious act in affronting the ordeal. 65. The next sphere reached by the aspirant is named Beauty, numbered 6, and referred to the hear, to the Sun, and to Gold. Here he is called an ``Adept''. The secret Truth in this place is that God is Man, symbolized by the Hexagram, (in which two triangles are interlaced). In the last sphere he learnt that his Body was the Temple of the Rosy Cross, that is, that it was given him as a place wherein to perform the Magical Work of uniting the oppositions in his Nature. Here he is taught that his Heart is the Centre of Light. It is not dark, mysterious, hollow, obscure even to himself, but his soul is to dwell there, radiating Light on the six spheres which surround it; these represent the various powers of his mind. This Book now appears to him as Gold; it is the perfect metal, the symbol of the Sun itself. He sees God everywhere therein. To this sphere hath the aspirant come by the Path called Temperance, shot as an arrow from a Rainbow. He hath beheld the Light, but only in division. Nor had he won to this sphere except by Temperance, under which name we mask the art of pouring freely forth the whole of our Life, to the last spilth of our blood, yet losing never the least drop thereof. 66. Now once again the adept aspires and comes to the sphere called the Crown numbered 1, referred ;to the God Ra-Hoor-Khuit himself in man, to the Beginning of Whirling Motions, and the First Mode of Matter. (See Liber 777, the Equinox, and Book 4 for these attributions.) Its secret Truth is that Earth is Heaven as Heaven is Earth, and shows the aspirant to himself as being a star. All that seemed to him reality is not even to be deemed illusion, but all one light infusing star and star. The Many, each of them, are the One; each individual, no twain alike, yet all identical; this he knows and is, for now the Word hath lightened his soul's girders. (The logic of the Ruach -- the normal intellect -- is transcended in Spiritual Experience. It is, evidently, impossible to ``explain'' how this can be.) In the Number 6 he saw God interlocked with man, two trinities made one; but here he knows that there was never but one. Thus now this Book is `stones of precious water'; its Light is not the borrowed light of gold, but is shed through the Book itself, clearsparkling, flashed from its facets. Each phrase is a diamond; each is diverse, yet all identical. In each the one Light laughs! Now to this sphere came he by the Path called the High Priestess; She is his Silent Self, virgin beyond all veils, made free to teach him, by virtue of this third ordeal wherein, passing through the abyss, he has stripped from him every rag of falsehood, his last complexes, even his phantasy that he called `I'. And so he knows at last now the soiled harlot's dress was mere disguise; naked in Moonlight shines the maiden Body!