I demur here regarding Allah, who in the first Sura given to Mohammed said how he made man from clots of blood (Sura 96 in the Qur’an), but agree with the rest. Yahweh is a very odd God indeed, especially when matched up against the bearded old dude on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Some of William Blake’s depictions capture him more clearly, but then Blake was hardly your typical Anglican, or even Catholic.
What has struck me on this re-reading of the book is how much the Thelemic Lord of the Aeon, Ra Hoor Khuit, is like Yahweh. While deriving from one of the Egyptian Horus gods (there were two dozen or more), Ra-Hoor-Khuit, with Hoor-Paar-Kraat, his Holy Ghost-like silent partner, is, in his own words, “a god of War and of Vengeance.” Not long after that verse, he is commanding (III: 11): “Trample down the Heathen; be upon them, o warrior, I will give you of their flesh to eat!”
Now, the Book of the Law being a Qabalistic text, these statements have to be taken symbolically, with all the nuances and levels the term ‘symbol’ evokes. But there is undeniably a certain retro element present in this third chapter. The deity who drowned Pharaoh’s conjoined armed forces, brought down the battlements of Jericho, and let David finish off Goliath with a single round from his sling, is not far in spirit from the hawk-headed mystical Lord.
I’m also struck by the fact that while the paired Ra-Hoor-Khuit and Hoor-Paar-Kraat (termed Heru-Ra-Ha in their conjoined form) is the primary object of reverence in Thelema, it is perhaps the least popular among the deities of the Book of the Law’s pantheon. As a concept, it presents no great problem, since the active and passive aspects embrace a wide ground: we have a hero figure and also a mystical silence. But while I see a lot of cool Horus images in Thelemic homes, I rarely hear much affection or reverence spoken of them. I can’t make this a blanket statement, knowing one or two people who strongly revere this god, but the appeal of Ra Hoor Khuit is problematic; some people simply capitulate to the cruder militaristic side, and embrace a stripped down survivalist pseudo-spirituality that does nothing for me.
Red-tailed hawks live in the large park near my home, and it’s not uncommon to see one coasting by on thermals, looking perhaps for baby squirrels or birds to eat. Birds of prey like these have a marvellous design, streamlined and gracile, and they make wonderful spiritual symbols. I have never seen them in pairs or groups: they are loners except when they are raising chicks.
That is part of their appeal in Thelemic Qabalah, where the acceptance of a very individual nature or destiny is a crucial part of the work. They are also creatures of the wild, not part of the urban scene the way sparrows or pigeons or raccoons are in this part of the world. They don’t come down amongst us. Always, they seek the high places, just as Yahweh preferred his mountains, Sinai and Zion.
There are a number of prophetic statements or opinions that emerge from the Book of the Law and the various interpretations Crowley and others have produced. It is a given, from Ra-Hoor-Khuit’s own remarks in the text, that a new Aeon began at the giving of the Book. It is also not an overnight switch to move from the old Aeon to the new, but rather the work of centuries. The turmoil of our present times is specifically seen as fulfilling the terms of the change, which is predicted as violent.
I do wonder, as we stumble our way into this unknown new world, how we will deal with the god of the mountain. Increasingly, the world’s peoples congregate in cities of a size that has never existed before. As a child, I was amazed to learn a couple of them had populations of ten million: today, there are a dozen twice that size, and greater Toronto, where I live, is hardly exceptional at four million-plus.
To encounter his personal god-self, Crowley trekked across southern China on horseback, having failed the experiment some years earlier in the Scottish Highlands. To attain to the profounder condition of liberated Mastery, he performed a cumulative series of invocations while crossing the Algerian desert. Whether as Yahweh or Horus, the divine Power is nearly always found in the places where humanity en masse is absent, and not in the cities. We can find the sacred in ourselves and in each other living as a part of large communities. But to locate that which Bloom refers to by his frequently reiterated term, the uncanniness of Yahweh, (or whichever god we prefer) we still need to leave the city. That can be done to some extent in meditation and ceremonial, but not perhaps in a definitive form. As Bloom points out, the Yahweh who showed up at Yom Kippur in his Holy of Holies in Jerusalem was not the untamed god who previously inhabited the wilderness and the mountaintops.
Crowley, however wilted his Christian ideals when he received the Book (he professed Buddhism at the time), found himself rebelling at the almost-Yahweh of Ra-Hoor-Khuit, and spent many years coming to terms with what he had been given. Hence his various sojourns in various wildernesses, however much he enjoyed the fleshpots of England and Europe, as he grew in understanding.
There are still many places on earth that, while closer than we would like to the big cities, still retain their element of wildness. Rough terrain is still the sworn foe of indoor plumbing and the other necessities of a modern residence. We will continue to need and seek these retreats from the grey masses of our fellow humans in order to encounter the god within, the Yahweh of the emerging Aeon.
And those who do so will, like the prophets of old, continue to bring this Fire back into the cities for those who need to be kindled by a revitalised Torah.