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Samuel Aiwaz Jacobs
Born: 12 February 1890 in Širābād, Persia. Died: 16 September 1971 in Yonkers, New York.
Samuel Aiwaz Jacobs, Persian-Assyrian by birth, was an American printer, typographer, and compiler who founded the Golden Eagle Press in the 1920s in Mount Vernon, New York. Jacobs became the typesetter and press agent of E.E. Cummings, and also designed books for Covici Friede, New Directions, Oxford University Press, and Dutton. He also designed two original typefaces and was an authority on metaphysical verse. He produced many books for his own and other presses, including a fine edition of Chaucer. His work during the 1920s and 1930s placed Polytype Press and, later, Golden Eagle Press among elite modernist limited-edition printing establishments. Over those years, the American Institute of Graphic Arts selected a dozen of Jacobs’s books among its annual Fifty Books of the Year. Glenway Wescott’s Natives of Rock (1925) was one such book, the Covici-Friede edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1930) was another. Jacobs was clearly influenced by libertarian notions similar to those of Aleister Crowley, as shown in the following quotation:
In particular, Jacobs’s standing in the trade reflected his work on behalf of prominent modernist poets and writers, groundbreaking Greenwich Village literary figures such as Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, Gorham Munson, and Eugene O’Neill. A long collaboration with the poet E.E. Cummings became the most important of those relationships. Beginning with Cummings’s first book of poems, Tulips and Chimneys (1923), Jacobs designed and printed all of Cummings’s poetry. He was Cummings’s “personal printer.” In books ranging from Cummings’s is 5 (1926) to No Thanks (1935) Jacobs established a fresh, new American page design. Jacobs’s use of san serif type, an asymmetric page, and white space complemented Cummings’s visual poetic radicalism. The Jacobs-Cummings collaboration significantly defined typographic as well as literary modernism.
Jacobs is remembered today as an early pioneer of the research into a universal script. Jacobs’s fascination with alphabets eerily echoes Aiwaz’s references to the mysteries of the letters and the words in the Book of the Law. His papers are catalogued in the Philip Kaplan Collection of S.A. Jacobs (1950-1958) at the Southern Illinois University Special Collections Research Centre. His papers also reveal an interest in acoustics and in Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahai Faith.
In 1918, Crowley was working in New York City as the editor of a popular magazine, The International, owned by German businessman George Sylvester Viereck. At the same time, he was performing a series of magical rites, The Amalantrah Working, with his “scarlet woman,” Roddie Minor. These operations consisted of interviews with a praeterhuman intelligence that called itself Amalantrah, through the mediumship of Roddie. These deeply obscure interviews seemed to continue themes and symbols that had at first appeared during a previous series of operations, The Ab-ul-Diz Working, conducted eight years before, with a different woman, the secretary of Isadora Duncan, Mary d'Este-Sturges, in a rented villa in Italy. These efforts to contact praeterhuman intelligences were doubtless influenced by the Cairo Working. The working with Mary with an entity that called itself Ab-ul-Diz resulted in the writing of Book 4 Part I & Part II, Crowley’s celebrated classic.
During the evening of Sunday, 24 February at 9:30 p.m. Crowley was trying to get the Hebrew spelling of the Greek ΘΗΡΙΟΝ. Crowley wanted a phonetic equivalent transliteration that added up to 666. The answer that Amanlantrah gave was wrong, but seemed to imply or allude to a simpler answer that eluded Crowley. Crowley claims that he could not find a suitable transliteration, even though the solution is only two steps removed from a direct literal rendering of the Greek letters. What is even more surprising is that on the following Tuesday Crowley found a letter at his office from a reader of The International. The letter was not addressed to Crowley himself, but to Viereck, the owner of The International, who had put the letter, received on Monday, on Crowley’s desk for reply. The letter, which survives in the Warburg collection in London, was essentially a fan letter and the writer a fan of the magazine and a reader of Crowley’s. He had read Crowley’s article in which he had stated that the Hebrew spelling of ΘΗΡΙΟΝ was unknown. The writer had tried his hand at the puzzle and, not surprisingly, had found the solution in the letters תריונ. Crowley was already intrigued when he read the Americanized signature of the writer: Samuel Aiwaz Jacobs (Shmuel [Samuel] bar Aiwaz bie Yackou de Sherabad). Then he noticed the date of the letter. It was 24 February 1918, the exact date of the interview with Amalantrah in which he had tried to obtain the Hebrew spelling.
Crowley wrote to Mr. Jacobs and asked him for the Hebrew spelling of Aiwaz. Jacob’s reply, עיוז, struck him to the core. The letters added up to 93, the number of Thelema, the key number of the Book of the Law!
The exact extent of Crowley’s subsequent communication with Samuel Aiwaz Jacobs is uncertain. Jacobs, an expert in metaphysical verse, had clearly read Crowley with deep attention. In 1918 America, it was surely unusual in the extreme, if not unknown, for anyone to write positively about the Antichrist! In fact, after Crowley left New York City his book, Equinox Vol. III, No. 1, created a scandal in which Crowley’s publisher was accused of being a satanist. Jacobs subsequently corresponded with Charles Stansfeld Jones, Crowley’s American representative, in August 1918, but there is no evidence he joined either the O.T.O. or the A∴A∴ At some point Jacobs shared with Crowley his theory that Aiwaz was the proper name of the god of the Yezidis (in a 1929 interview Jacobs himself identified the name “Aiwaz” with Satan). Based on the scholarship of the time, it was believed that the Yezidis, a Kurdish people located in northern Iraq, worshipped a primitive form of Satan. This became the basis of Crowley’s subsequent identification of Aiwaz with Satan in Magick in Theory and Practice, especially in “Liber Samekh” in the Appendix, which in turn he identified with the Egyptian god Set, the enemy of Horus (the conflict between Horus and Set is, mystically interpreted, two sides of the same coin). Jacobs and Crowley believed that Yezidism, as the religion of the Yezidis is called, combines traditional Sumerian beliefs with Islamic Sufi heresies (an unpopular theory today). According to Yezidi belief, Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel, is the chief of seven Angels that are set over the world by God. His other name is Shaitan or Shaytan. The Yezidi belief system is reminiscent of the Gnostic Nag Hammadi scriptures. Like the Gnostic Sethians, the Yezidis identify the disobedience of Satan as an enlightened act. The Yezidis follow the Quran, which states that Satan was cast down by God for refusing to submit to man. Like some Sufis, the Yezidis believe that God’s command was a test, and only Iblis understood this. In fact, God was testing the angel’s love of him. Iblis was willing to disobey God and endure hell itself rather than give up his love of God and submission to the Highest. Thus, Iblis is the true Muslim.
For his part, Crowley referred to Jacobs as a “Brother.” This has been taken to mean that Crowley recognized Jacobs as a Brother of the Great White Brotherhood, i.e., a Secret Chief, in which case Crowley’s statement in The Equinox of the Gods that he has seen Aiwaz and other Secret Chiefs in person may refer to Jacobs, although there is no evidence that the two ever actually met. Jacobs may also have been a fellow Freemason. Crowley came to identify Aiwaz as an Ipsissimus of the Great White Brotherhood, and the Secret Chief that is responsible for the initiation of the Earth during the current cycle of the New Eon. |
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