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Correspondence from Charles Stansfeld Jones to Gerald Yorke & Others
21 April 1948
THE TEACHING OF THE "NEW AEON"
For the curse of this grade is that He must speak Truth, that the Falsehood thereof may enslave the souls of men.
The Master Therion, 9º=2o has since the year 1916 made claim to be a Magus of the Order known as the A∴A∴, and, as such, he must be considered to by under the "curse of his grade", as above defined in a quotation from one of the official text-books of that Order. We may therefore justly expect that whatsoever of apparent Truth there may appear to be in his later writings is of a nature calculated to enslave the souls of men.
Right Knowledge is that which is suited to the intelligence of those to whom it is imparted: but a sudden impartation of some of the higher truths—or of the Supreme Truth itself—to minds unprepared to receive them, is an error worse than the dissemination of falsehood itself, for it tends to "eat men up with blindness".
It was not until after his attainment of this Grade of Magus that Therion began to "popularize" the teachings of Liber Legis, the so-called Book of the Law of the New Aeon. He prefaced this action by circulating a pamphlet entitled The Message of the Master Therion, the original of which contained the following statements: "Now therefore must he of necessity take of the Curse of his Grade, and preach his Law to men . . . Now it is said of the Magus that in the beginning doth he speak the truth, and send forth Illusion and Falsehood to enslave the soul. If so, let it not be his fault; let him make clear the meaning of his Law", etc.—but even this slight warning was deleted when the pamphlet was first published in The International and later included in The Equinox Volume III, Number I, under the title Liber II.
The malignancy of this attempt to enslave the souls of men by means of the deceptive slogan "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law" is all the greater in view of the fact that the earlier teachings of the A∴A∴ deliberately discounted the value of the human reason, the illative faculty of the soul; thus so far as possible denying to students who were being prepared to receive Liber Legis the means to unmask its illusory nature, and in fact to the attainment of Truth of any kind—of Truth which makes man free. This withholding of the sole means to the knowledge of Truth, followed by many statements in the guise of "Truth" calculated not to enlighten but rather to enslave the souls of men unprepared to receive them, is a course of action worthy of "The Great Beast", were it not that the "Beast" himself had been made the dupe of his own system" by the malignant Intelligence who transmitted to him Liber Legis in 1904. The "Beast" may be considered as his own worst enemy, but Aiwass is quite evidently the enemy of mankind, and should be recognized as such, if this new system, deliberately calculated to bring about the self-destruction of the human race, is to be rightly evaluated. One of the subtleties in the process whereby it was hoped to enslave mankind under the appearance of giving men their freedom, was the "dictation" of Liber Legis at a suitable "cosmic time" (when the old aeon was running out, rather than the true New Age coming in) in such terms that although the scribe (A. Crowley) could not understand them at the time, and even revolted against them for some years, he should afterwards become so enslaved by the very writing itself, because it "showed evidences" of some sort of praeter-human authorship, that it appeared to him necessary, at all costs, even the disruption of his own plans for a properly ordered system of Scientific Illuminism, to sponsor and publish it "in the cause of science".
The next subtlety is in the personification of two "infinities" under the names Nuit and Hadit, and of a "god" called Ra-Hoor-Khuit to represent the manifested universe as a result of their union. This threw a veil over the old nature forces by making the "gods" appear to speak, and thus giving to some of the lower aspects of Nature an entirely false value, while excluding from the scheme of things any real and Infinite God whatsoever.
The so-called Goddess Nuit is, when understood at her true value, the Aetherial Realm of Nature, the lowest plane of the universe, without trace of consciousness, and characterized chiefly by Space, masquerading as Infinity and the Queen of Heaven. Space is not Infinite, but is one of the indefinites, and is merely indefinite. The true Infinite is the Plenum of all Perfections; this false and self-contradictory "infinite" is void.
Hadit is perhaps representative of the primal motion in Nature, masquerading as the Lord and Giver of Life and the complement of Nuit. He is said to be the Infinitely small, and thus a second Infinite, the "unexpected". In reality he represents the finite human soul, which is unextended; but there are many such souls and multiplicity in the true Infinite is absurd and unthinkable.
Ra-Hoor-Khuit, the child of the false union of the human soul and the void, is really the Zeitgeist—the Time-spirit, as opposed to the Spirit of Eternal Truth—that which perpetually denies, and is falsity itself, masquerading as the Lord of the Universe—God.
The joke upon humanity, if such it may be called, is that "Nuit" (by means of the "voice" and "personality" given her by Aiwass and 666) sugar-coats the process of dissolution by crying unto men: "Come unto me!" Thus luring them, not to the Highest, as might be expected, but to the lowest and most negative realm of the universe, the brink of the Black Abyss.
"Hadit", on the other hand, masquerading as the Lord and Giver of Life (the knowledge of which is admittedly death) supplies the negative ideas that will, if accepted and acted upon, aid the soul in this process of self-destruction and final dissolution.
"Ra-Hoor-Khuit", in the Abyss, awaits the victims of this process with his promised Vengeance, which, in the meanwhile, is threatened against all those "dogs" of Reason who might turn towards the real Truth or think of exposing the illusion and error of this "New Aeon" system.
"It's a mad world, my masters", but who would have thought it would have come to this!
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