Liber Oz - a double take

vel Voluntas Meumque Ius

[A precursor to this, “Transvaluation of Liber Oz,” was originally published in Doomsayers Digest, Vol. 2, No. 4, 2009  e.v.. It was edited and republished in the OTO anthology Words of Power, 2014. I decided to revise it top-to-bottom for publishing here for both clarity and content]

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Liber OZ is a brief text dominated by one syllable words and punchy statements regarding the Rights of Man.  Of the handful of tracts Crowley designed specifically for the purpose of promulgation, it is arguably the most popular. This is largely due to it being read during an OTO initiation, and for OTO initiates if it isn’t read to them then there’s no guarantee they’ll ever come across it. In addition to the task given during that initiation, Crowley encouraged some of the earliest American brethren to go out and distribute this tract to the public. As with all things Crowley it is falling out of style, but Oz stands apart in Crowley’s corpus for how much it is deliberated over. I propose that Oz was written to bewilder and beguile and Crowley was employing a style of writing that was extremely common in the western hermetic tradition, one we can call Esotericism.

The late James Wasserman (1948-2020) explained in his book The Slaves Shall Serve, a title pinched from Oz, that Crowley was moved by American individualism and social contracts such as the Bill of Rights and its British antecedents. Crowley wrote a late-life letter to his follower Karl Germer circa 1945,

By the way, about attracting people to the O.T.O., I still think Liber Oz is the best bet. There is a vile threat to the “rugged American individualism” that actually created the U.S.A. by the bureaucratic crowd who want society to be a convict prison. “Safety first” — there is no “social insecurity,” no fear for the future, no anxiety about what to do next — in Sing Sing. All the totalitarian schemes add up to the same in the end. And the approach is so insidious, the arguments so subtle and irrefutable, the advantages so obvious — that the danger is very real, very imminent, very difficult to bring home to the average citizen, who sees only the immediate gain, and is hoodwinked as to the price that must be paid for it.

While Wasserman’s endearing book pinched its title from Liber Oz, Oz got it from The Book of the Law, the cornerstone of Thelemic literature. In this book there is no mention of individuality, freedom or liberty per se, but there is a mention of rights, or rather right, in Cap 1 v 42, “So with thy all; thou hast no right but to do thy will.” Rights are a legal fiction written into western liberalism’s “social contract” (which incidentally none of us have ever signed) that suggest our governments couldn’t possible infringe upon us unless they really needed to. The parameters of rights were worked out by philosophers for hundreds of years, but especially after the Enlightenment where the west broke from its religious traditions. Continental philosophers such as the German Idealists were keen to defend the freedom and conscience, the will and love, of the individual in beautiful and intelligent volumes, but ultimately it’s all an apology for the intrusion of institutional norms. In The Book of the Law there is no mention of democratic representation or jurisprudence, yet there is much discussion of Will and Love. While the words “president” and “chairman” and "sacred halls of Congress” appear zero times, “King” appears seventeen times and “Lord” nine times. The tone of The Book of the Law is not progressive bureaucratic idealism, it is an old-world tone of power, conquest, and revenge.

In The Book of the Law is also mention of caste, or at least the terms “few” and “chosen” vs “the many.” Deleuze in his Nietzsche and Philosophy describes how German Idealists were fixated with finding categories for people. Apparently “all men are created equal” was not so self-evident to them. Often this sorting was to forgive creative types trespasses for which the common man might judge them. Nietzsche picked up on this and warned that the few must be protected from the many, but this wasn’t concern for the random individual that inspired the drafting of the Bill of Rights. Nietzsche’s concern was for a category of people who, through art, poetry and philosophy, were attempting to herd the rest of society along and cultivate the vine of consciousness into something more resilient in the face of nihilism.

Along with rights, “equality” was a necessary legal fiction for the dogma of humanitarianism. Perhaps the concept was merely a post-hoc apologia for the social contract, or perhaps it was created deliberately as a way of calming the mob, like a biblical prophet saying their miracles are due to the spirit of the lord rather than sorcery. Crowley addresses the masses in Magick Without Tears, Chapter 73, saying:

Well, what tortoise is that elephant based upon?  Why, still obviously, upon the universal sense of individual weakness.  We all want a big bruvver to tell of him! Hence the Gods and the Classes. It’s fear at the base of the whole pyramid of skulls.

How right politicians are to look upon their constituents as cattle! Anyone who has any experience of dealing with any class as such knows the futility of appealing to intelligence, indeed to any other qualities than those of brutes.

And so, whenever we find one Man who has no fear like Ibsen’s Doctor Stockmann or Mark Twain’s Colonol Grainger that strolled out on his balcony with his shotgun to face the mob that had come to lynch him, he can get away with it. “An Enemy of the People” wrote Ibsen, “Ye are against the people, O my chosen!” says The Book of the Law. (AL:II,:25)

Crowley ridiculed his colleague Theodor Reuss in a letter to another brother, Traenker, saying that Reuss had accused “The Book of the Law of communistic tendencies, of which no statement could be more absurd.” In his diaries, Crowley remarks on August 18th, 1943, in the midst of World War II, that “The system of The Book of the Law is aristocratic; I am an aristocrat. A better word for democracy is ochlocracy – the rule of the mob. It all depends whether you want quantity or quality. Are you going to produce sonnets or Sunday newspapers?” Crowley felt that the masses were a threat who required a government of masters, literally an aristocracy. His mandate to “war down the serf” in Antecedents of Thelema reminds one of D. H. Lawrence’s statement regarding the corrosive effect of Christianity in his Apocalypse:

The religion of the strong taught renunciation and love. And the religion of the weak taught Down with the strong and the powerful, and let the poor be glorified. Since there are always more weak people than strong in the world, the second sort of Christianity has triumphed and will triumph. If the weak are not ruled, they will rule, and there’s the end of it. And the rule of the weak is Down with the strong!

Nietzsche warns of this delicate struggle in several places in his Gay Science. He describes a benevolent symbiosis between the few and the many, but advises a special kind of prudence for the few. In §76, The Greatest Danger, he describes this interaction so presciently that it is here quoted in full:

If the majority of men had not always considered the discipline of their minds-their "rationality” - a matter of pride, an obligation, and a virtue, feeling insulted or embarrassed by all fantasies and debaucheries of thought because they saw themselves as friends of "healthy common sense," humanity would have perished long ago.

The greatest danger that always hovered over humanity and still hovers over it is the eruption of madness - which means the eruption of arbitrariness in feeling, seeing, and hearing, the enjoyment of the mind's lack of discipline, the joy in human unreason. Not truth and certainty are the opposite of the world of the madman, but the universality and the universal binding force of a faith; in sum, the non-arbitrary character of judgments. And man's greatest labor so far has been to reach agreement about very many things and to submit to a law of agreement regardless of whether these things are true or false.

This is the discipline of the mind that mankind has received; but the contrary impulses are still so powerful that at bottom we cannot speak of the future of mankind with much confidence. The image of things still shifts and shuffles continually, and perhaps even more so and faster from now on than ever before. Continually, precisely the most select spirits bristle at this universal binding force-the explorers of truth above all. Continually this faith, as everybody's faith, arouses nausea and a new lust in subtler minds; and the slow tempo that is here demanded for all spiritual processes, this imitation of the tortoise. which is here recognized as the norm, would be quite enough to turn artists and thinkers into apostates: It is in these impatient spirits that a veritable delight in madness erupts because madness has such a cheerful tempo.

Thus the virtuous intellects are needed-oh, let me use the most unambiguous word-what is needed is virtuous stupidity, stolid metronomes for the slow spirit, to make sure that the faithful of the great shared faith stay together and continue their dance. It is a first-rate need that commands and demands this. We others are the exception and the danger and we need eternally to be defended. Well, there actually are things to be said in favor of the exception, provided that it never wants to become the rule.

Nietzsche encourages the exceptional people to encourage virtuous stupidity among the bulk of humanity not because it is good life advice for the individual but instead so that the empty ones won’t mistake themselves as unique and crucial components of society and go about pushing their errant hallucinations on others. The net effect of “the many” thinking they are individually exceptional is the “sudden eruption of madness” and social collapse. It is the “first-rate need” of the artist and philosopher to keep the many busy and motivated, neither telling them “don’t look down” nor “look down,” because if they did they’d see how incredibly thin the social fabric is.

In the backdrop of Thelema it is increasingly difficult to square the liberal Bill of Rights interpretation of Liber Oz. Most Thelemites today may scoff at that statement, but most Thelemites haven’t begun to interpret Thelema as a moral superior to the socially ubiquitous dogma of the Enlightenment. There is a way to square Liber Oz with the misanthropy and caste dynamics of The Book of the Law, and that is by reading it as a piece of esoteric literature.

In Gay Science, § 381, “On the question of being understandable” Nietzsche describes a method of strategic communication:

One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood. It is not by any means necessarily an objection to a book when anyone finds it impossible to understand: perhaps that was part of the author's intention, he did not want to be understood by just "anybody.” All the nobler spirits and tastes select their audience when they wish to communicate; and choosing that, one at the same time erects barriers against "the others." All the more subtle laws of any style have their origin at this point: they at the same time keep away, create a distance, forbid "entrance,” understanding, as said above - while they open the ears of those whose ears are related to ours.

And in § 196, “Limits of our hearing:”

One hears only those questions for which one is able to find answers.

Nietzsche did not invent being cryptic, but he was perhaps the first modern to push this ethos. Doing so required a decisive break with the foundational beliefs of the Enlightenment, such as that individuals are discerning and good natured so therefore society will gravitate in a productive direction by empowering the individual no matter how stupid. Philosopher Leo Strauss made a career off discussing this interplay and also off pretending he was anti-Nietzsche despite being deeply indebted to him and would, appropriately, privately wax about him. Leo Strauss builds upon the concept of the esoteric in relation to rational discourse’s inability to inspire ethical thought. Robert Locke, in Leo Strauss, Conservative Mastermind remarks that 

The key Straussian concept is the Straussian text, which is a piece of philosophical writing that is deliberately written so that the average reader will understand it as saying one (“exoteric”) thing but the special few for whom it is intended will grasp its real (“esoteric”) meaning. The reason for this is that philosophy is dangerous. Philosophy calls into question the conventional morality upon which civil order in society depends.

Strauss’ use of the term “esoteric” is an appropriate choice. In his Persecution and the Art of Writing he shows how this technique was used specifically by Qabalists to protect their tradition. [Crowley utilized one specific technique in writing Liber Aleph as a series of letters.] Suspiciously in his On Tyranny he says the technique is so designed to manipulate rulers so they can exercise control over the masses without being in the firing line. Laozi paints a similar picture in his 道德经 or Classic of Ethics, that the 圣人, variously translated as Saint or Sage, must keep the ruling class fascinated and inspirited so that they protect their caste from the indiscretions of the profane. Christ spoke in parables and they did not understand, and then he spoke plainly and they still did not understand (John 16). Socrates spoke of the importance of discretionary education of the masses and the protection of the role of the wise advisor of the aristocracy - oh but he said it openly!

Crowley instructed his followers to greet one another by saying, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” and commented that the perfection of the verse showed in how it would move some but make those of a servile temperament recoil at the thought of being responsible for their own life. J. Daniel Gunther comments that “Do what thou wilt” is less of a statement and more of a challenge, and I move that Liber Oz is a long-form version of that challenge. However, the purpose is not to cruelly convince the many that they are the few, but rather as a mode of recognition between those who have accepted the Law and those that are of a nature that can.

Crowley taught that personal empowerment, liberty, and being right with the world is a product of discovering and doing your will. The challenge of Liber Oz serves as a sorting mechanism, but not just one that puts off the servile. The text itself is didactic and describes methodically the nature of attainment in Crowley’s system. Crowley stated in a letter to Yorke that “The items don’t go easily on the Tree; but I’ve got them down to five sections: moral, bodily, mental, sexual freedom, and the safefuard tyrannicide.” I believe the esoteric didactic interpretation of Oz is that it is a challenge to discover and do your will, and this is broken up in sections that correspond to parts of the initiatory work.

Section 1, the “moral” section, initiates the division between the higher and lower by announcing that “Man has the right to live by his own law.” This law is either the Kantian Moral-Law of the slaves or the “law of the Strong,” depending on the reader’s proclivities. Schlegel initiates Romanticism in response to Kant’s existential dilemma in “Blutenstaub” in the Athenaeum Fragments (1798), Aphorism 3:

If one becomes infatuated with the absolute and simply can’t escape it, then the only way out is to contradict oneself continually and join opposite extremes together. The principle of contradiction is inevitably doomed, and the only remaining choice is either to assume an attitude of suffering or else ennoble necessity by acknowledging the possibility of free action.

For this person braving the romantic adventure of “free action,” the “work” mentioned becomes the Great Work. The play becomes the Play of the Magister. The rest might be realized in relation to VII:4.14-15, “Nor is there any rest, Sweet Heart, save in the cradle of royal Bacchus, the thigh of the most Holy One. There rest, under the canopy of night.”  And finally the “death” mentioned is the mystical death. Section 1 depicts the work of the Outer College.

Section 2, “bodily”, refers to the Eucharistic formula that prospers Knowledge and Conversation. “Eat” and “drink” refer to the bread and the blood, his daily sacrament. Man’s right to dwell is in relation to the prepared place of operation, such as described in grimoires such as Liber VIII or The Book of Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. Man’s right to “move as he will upon the face of the earth” refers to the fifth Power of the Sphinx, Ire, “to go,” spirit, the seal of the attainment.

Moving on, we have what Crowley defined as the “mental” domain in Section 3, which deals with the fruits of the attainment. Thinking, speaking, and writing are products of the communion with the angel - Will, Word and Wand.

The other acts here listed include drawing, etching, painting, moulding, and building. These are all magical or talismanic acts.  In The Book of Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, the Exorcist, having attained Knowledge and Conversation with his Holy Guardian Angel, sets about to conjure Demons from the nether-reaches and extend the benediction he received from on-high down to them. “Building” refers to the inspired Adept working his will in the world through the creation of a temple. “Dress” refers to the adornments of one’s new rank.

While Section 3 addresses coming into communication with one’s Will, Section 4 brings that great Thelemic Freedom of understanding one’s relation to the Great Work. This section was denoted by Crowley as “Freedom of Love,” not only to revel in the love and lust of one’s Angel but also to realize Love as Fraternity, Agape, Ecclesia, and Initiatory Continuity. As a Master, it becomes one’s responsibility to alight upon the world and disseminate one’s Word and Will for its particular end, but also to inspire and instruct others. The Master extends his benediction into Fraternity; be it the Brotherhood of Men or an Order or Institution. This puts the Magician in Section 4 in the position of a Master of the Temple, responsible for tending her Garden and also for extending her own roots in an Order by either corrupting an extant Order or forming her own under the auspices of the Aeon of the Child. J. Daniel Gunther teaches that “Scarlet Woman” refers to a Master of the Temple. She is “loud and adulterous,” and an adulterer is not just a cheater but also can refer to a home-wrecker, as in someone who inserts themselves into an extant relationship or tradition to infuse it with their love.

Section 5, the “safeguard against tyranny,” has some interesting implications. On the one hand, tyranny can be taken as illegitimacy of heirship. “[T]hose who would thwart these rights” is a reference to the modern rulership of the world who reign without crown or royal blood. Man not only has the right but also the responsibility to subvert those extant forms of government and oppressive Old Aeonic institutions. The Master of the Temple, being beyond life and death, has precedence over these, keeping with the Initiatory gradations between the sections. Plato and Aristotle concur that the Tyrant is one who rules without law. In our case, the tyrant is he who is not in step with the Law of Thelema. Nemo must weed her garden, but this also is compassion. The conclusive “slaves shall serve” reinforces this document’s social underpinnings as endorsing the reinstatement of Hierarchy and Thelemic Aristocracy.

This is all to say that Oz describes the process of initiation in the New Aeon and states that your rights, freedom and powers are pinned to this attainment. This recalls an opening citation of Liber Oz, “thou hast no right but to do thy will,” which is to say that your sole right is to discover and then do your will. In the absence of this wherewithal, all is guess-work and nothing should be assumed. Additionally the only person with “rights” would be the person who has attained, and therefore Oz establishes a hierarchy of “right” vs errant persons, making the former the exceptional caste, the “few” who must be considered and protected.

Much of Thelema may seem redundant when Thelema is divorced from its historical context as a reactionary religion purposed to avenge traditional power structures and restore the real hierarchy to society as to the individual aspirant. But in the free-for-all of the modern world there has to be a reckoning. What Nietzsche warned of, “the sudden eruption of madness,” is apparently upon us. This isn’t Junger’s anarch-ism, this is worse than the simple discordance of a violent society; it’s Clausewitz’s Absolute War, Crowley’s vision of the 19th Aethyr:

...this is not a battle between two forces, but a melee in which each warrior fights for himself against all the others. I cannot see one who has even one ally. At least the fortunate, who fall soonest, are those in the chariots. For as soon as they are engaged in fighting, their own charioteers stab them in the back.

Nietzsche explained how we got to this point. In §125 of The Gay Science, “The Madman,” who asks the crowd where he might find God, but answers himself, saying:

We have killed him - you and I. All of us are his murderers... What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us - for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto. 

Nietzsche’s remarks ring true, that the death of God is not to be taken tragically but rather heroically, as an opportunity to advance beyond the same, or at least as an ethical responsibility to assume his authority in maintaining the world. God was not killed intentionally. Nietzsche explains that he was needled to death with our “little knives,” that being our servile reliance on group-think that we call “rationalism.” The cost of this dependence on reason is the atrophy of our muscles for instinct and intuition. And now that god is dead, “There is no god but man,” Oz’s first line that isn’t a verse from The Book of the Law. I believe this is a nod to the Parable of the Madman, and Crowley is presenting the method of redemption following the death of the Christian God. He wrote, “Rights of Man is an historical document.”

Nietzsche warned that something much worse came after God’s death. He remarks in §108 that despite God’s death, “given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. -And we- we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.” The moral worldview of western civilization and much of the world was deeply infected with Christianity, but at least Christianity had its theology, mysteries and deference. The parody that replaced it, so-called Enlightenment humanitarianism, is pure mob mentality, incapable of self-awareness and its lack of mystery and deference makes it much more dangerous.

Much of Thelema and Crowleyana is off-putting to the public, and this includes Liber Oz. Rather than apologize for everything, the current Christian custom adopted by leadership in OTO and vulgar society alike, we should embrace how it distinguishes us or even alienates us from the folks of the old gray land. Liber Oz is not a Bill of Rights for hedonists and libertines, that being the common culture today. It is very much the opposite. Crowley wrote in Ch. 70 of Magick without Tears:

Shameful confession, one of my own Chelas (or so it is rather incredibly reported to me) said recently: “Self-discipline is a form of Restriction.”  (That, you remember, is “The word of Sin …”.)  Of all the utter rubbish!  (Anyhow, he was a “centre of pestilence” for discussing the Book at all.)  About 90 % of Thelema, at a guess, is nothing but self-discipline.   One is only allowed to do anything and everything so as to have more scope for exercising that virtue.

Concentrate on “…thou hast no right but to do thy will.”  The point is that any possible act is to be performed if it is a necessary factor in that Equation of your Will.  Any act that is not such a factor, however harmless, noble, virtuous or what not, is at the best a waste of energy.

Our mystery, the First Paradox of Philosophy, is that discipline is nowise the enemy of freedom. According to Crowley, one’s Freedom is proportional to one’s discipline in observing your own right: Do what thou wilt.

Love is the law, love under will.