http://www.thelemapedia.org/index.php/Aleister_Crowley
Good short history
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/crowley/thelema.htm
Soror I.W.E. Martha Kuntzel
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/thelema93 ... 3178?var=1
http://hermetic.com/crowley/magick-with ... wt_48.html
"The Book of the Law takes us back to primitive savagery," you say. Well, where are we?
We're at Guernica, Lidice, Oradour-sur-Glane, Rotterdam and hundreds of other crimes, to say nothing of Concentration-camp, Stalag, and a million lesser horrors and abominations, inconceivable by the most diseased and inflamed Sadistic imagination forty years ago.
You disagree with Aiwass—so do all of us. The trouble is that He can say: "But I'm not arguing; I'm telling you."
Now then let us look a little more deeply (and I hope more clearly) into his Ethics, with our minds undismayed by any human emotion.
Aiwass is of a different Order of Being from ourselves. Consider a gold-refiner. "Analysis shows 20 % of copper in this sample; I'll beat it in a current of oxygen; that will oxidize the copper. Shake it up with sulphuric acid; then we wash away the copper sulphate, and that's that." He does not consider how the copper feels about it; indeed, he doesn't believe that the copper knows about it at all.
Yes, yes, of course; I know that's an extreme case. I only bring it in to sow what could be done as a last resort, if pushed to the wall. Fortunately, we are not so ill situated. You will, I dare say, without my prompting, think of the surgeon and the schoolmaster; but I can go one better. We have in recent history a case almost precisely parallel.
How did I begin this letter? By defining the task of the Author: to announce the Magical Formula of the Aeon of Horus and so on. In other words, to train mankind to the use of a new source of power.
Page Professor Röntgen! Page the Curies!
How many "Martyrs to X-ray dermatitis?" Willing experimenters who knew the risks? Not all of them; lots of patients got burnt in utmost agony of death. How many victims were there of the "radium bomb?" (At Guy's, wasn't it?) It always has to happen, even with well tried tools, and despite utmost precautions. How many workmen's lives did the Forth Bridge cost? You know, I suppose, that a certain number of fatal accidents are always included in the calculations of any project of Public Works.
But a new Magical Formula is on a vastly bigger scale. Cast your mind for a moment back to the last occasion, when Osiris succeeded to Isis. In that great cataclysm not only Empires, but civilizations crashed one after another. Three quarters of the Aeon had elapsed before the wine of that vintage was really drinkable.
I expect as I hope that this time (communication being universally better established, the foundations better laid, and things in general moving quicker) we may be able to enjoy the harvest in very much less time. But hang it all! it's hardly reasonable to expect complete fruition after only 40 years.
What seems to me the most encouraging symptom of all is this: the Book itself, and the system of Magick based thereon, and the bankruptcy of all previous systems (as set forth in Eight Lectures on Yoga, Magick, The Book of Thoth, and other similar works) do furnish us all with a clear, concise practical Method (free from all contamination of the humbug of faith and superstition) whereby any one of us may attain to "the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel," and that the many other Beings of intelligence and power indefinitely more exalted than anything which we recognize as human—and, let us hope, capable of bestowing upon us a modicum of Wisdom adequate to get us out of the quagmire into which the crisis has temporarily plunged us all!
Love is the law, love under will.