30 November (Nuit) Liber CCXX, 1:46-48
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46. Nothing is a secret key of this law. Sixty-one the Jews call it; I call it eight, eighty, four hundred & eighteen.
47. But they have the half: unite by thine art so that all disappear.
48. My prophet is a fool with his one, one, one; are not they the Ox, and none by the Book? -
Excerpts from old diary entries...
These three verses compose one of the great Qabalistic puzzles of the Book. Such puzzles are subject to more than one solution; and the present one has at least one significant solution besides that on the surface.
But, before getting into that, we should endeavor to read the plain language meaning.
"Nothing is a secret key of this law." The idea of Naught, or Zero, is an important Qabalistic concept to this Book. Due to the introduction of 0=2, the idea of "Unity" no longer means One as it has been previously understood. Indeed, One, as usually understood, does not exist. There is, in fact, Nothing like that. Two dissolves into Zero. One is an egocentric limitation. To understand "Do what thou wilt" and the word Thelema, we must understand Zero.
The Nothing is known in Qabalah as AYN = 61. By permutation of the letters we get ANY, "I, myself." This confirms that this Nothing is the real sense of self, of the ego. Nuit introduces other numerical clues which will be explored.
Verse 47 poses the puzzle which we shall explore. The word "they" is obscure, and its right understanding is the key to the solution. It does not refer to "the Jews."
Crowley is then said to be "a fool with his one, one, one," etc. The Qabalistic meanings of this verse seem so clear that they utterly blind us to the real meaning. On the surface, we note that, in the Tarot, Aleph is The Fool; its value in full is 111 (ALPh); it means "Ox;" and its value in Tarot (i.e., by the "Book of Thoth") is 0 ("none"). Just the kind of thing to spill off of a Qabalist's mind, and certainly it serves to give us The Fool as an enigma whose "solution" is only in the Way of Going. But, first of all, it is not the deepest solution to this numerical puzzle; and, secondly, it obscures the "plain English" meaning.
Thus, AC is told that he is "a fool with his one, one, one." The English construction is the same as if we had said, "All you ever do is eat, eat, eat!" He was obsessed with One, with Unity; and he is being told that the Answer is not to be found there. The Answer is in Naught. (Read AC's Essay on Number in Eqx. I:5, written some years earlier; therein he is initially looking for a path to Unity as a solution to Duality. It comes up over and over.) The simple meaning is, then, "Nothing is a secret key of this law... You're an idiot to be obsessed with the idea of One."
We now turn to a Qabalistic numerical solution.
8 + 80 + 418 = 506, the value of ShVR, the actual Hebrew word for "ox," and the name of the constellation Taurus.
8 + 80 + 418 + 61 = 567. By itself, 567 has no special relevance to our puzzle, for it is not a complete truth. The "they" in vv. 47-48 refers to the 61, 8, 80, & 418 of v. 46. The numbers themselves are the only reasonable antecedents.
If 567 is the half, then the other half is also 567. The whole is thus 567 x 2 = 1,134, which is:
AYN SVPh AVR
(Ayin Sof Or)
the Limitless Light, the Qabalistic Zero, wherein "all disappear."Having the solution, we proceed to v. 48 and are told, as above discussed, that the prophet is "a fool" in his obsession with Unity; for "they" (the numbers added previously) are 506, literally ShVR, "the Ox," and 61, "none" — all "by the Book"!
There are, of course, multiple variant meanings; but I believe this is the main one. Even in the word ShVR is the true Hierophant found in the midst of the Fire and the Sun; and the word itself, being literally Taurus, is Vav and The Hierophant.
The Book of the Law has, therefore, steered us toward the idea of Nothing, and away from "one." It has given us a puzzle to solve, and left a few keys along the way. It has hinted at an entirely new Qabalah.
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Having written and posted the above...
This forum, of course, is not intended to be about analysis and commentary, but to provide structured meditation for bhakti-like devotion to the Holy Guardian Angel. I posted the above to provide my baseline. The root is: Nothing is a [the!] "secret key" of this law.
Thus, I spend today in mindful recollection of my belovéd as Nothing - as that Nothing and cessation into which He and I resolve in the perfection of our intimacy, those moments wherein "all disappear." Para-bhakti being, essentially, continuous recollection, it is to this that I surrender my attention today.
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When I was a kid, just short of my teens I think, I used to "freak" myself out by thinking and visualizing the following. "What if nothing existed, no earth, no me, no people...." Then a weird feeling would come over me and all I would see was black space with maybe some stars in the distance and junk possibly floating (influenced from movies probably). I would be able to maintain it for a very short time (1 second or less) and then then the weird feeling would overwhelm me a bit and I would have to shake it off. I still have no idea why I would even think such things then.
It was much easier to do that "meditation" when I was a kid. Probably less to hold on to, less to occupy my mind, less to worry about. For me, this verse points out to me to again grasp at Nothing and let all else fall away.