Tenses in Thelemic statements
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I know it is supposedly "folly" to discuss Liber AL so perhaps I shouldn't expect a response however the following occurred to me and I was wondering if anyone had any of their own interpretations to add:
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"Do what thou wilt SHALL BE the whole of the Law" (bold mine) - implies future tense.
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"Love IS the Law, Love under will" (bold mine) - implies present tense.
It occurred to me that this might be a formula of initiation (or "evolution") in the sense that the aspirant who still seeks her/his True Will might look upon Love as the guiding principle for his/her actions until such time as the True Will is known. Of course the same would apply socially to various "group minds" as well as possibly being a formula for the Equinox.
Of course this is a rather straightforward and simplistic interpretation that lacks particular depth and I'm sure there is a lot more to these beautiful statements than this simple observation but it did seem significant to me at this particular time.
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Despite what your high school English teacher told you, "shall" does not always (or even usually) imply future tense. It implies obligation, the force of law. This is from the Oxford English Dictionary's rather lengthy entry for "shall":
"5. In commands or instructions. a. (a) In the second person, equivalent to an imperative."
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Exactly. Consider Article I, Sect. 1 of the U.S. Constitution: "All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress..." It still shall be thus vested, even though it has been thus vested for two centuries. (And so forth, with dozens of similar examples in the same document.)
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hmmm.....thanks for the insights. My initial interpretation of these statements was always in terms of present tense...perhaps I'm now reading too much into them.
I should really get a decent Dictionary.
From "the Free dictionary":
The traditional rules for using shall and will prescribe a highly complicated pattern of use in which the meanings of the forms change according to the person of the subject. In the first person, shall is used to indicate simple futurity: I shall (not will) have to buy another ticket. In the second and third persons, the same sense of futurity is expressed by will: The comet will (not shall) return in 87 years. You will (not shall) probably encounter some heavy seas when you round the point. The use of will in the first person and of shall in the second and third may express determination, promise, obligation, or permission, depending on the context.