Rose's role in the Book of the Law?
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Someone just told me that Rose went into trance and dictated the Book of the Law to Crowley. I was under the impression that she was not in the room at all, that Crowley heard the voice of Aiwass himself.
Now I am confused.
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@AliceKnewI said
"Someone just told me that Rose went into trance and dictated the Book of the Law to Crowley. I was under the impression that she was not in the room at all, that Crowley heard the voice of Aiwass himself.
Now I am confused."
That doesn't match Crowley's report at any point. This rumor pops up every now and then, and it seems to come from two places.
First, there was an earlier event, months before, when the Crowleys spent the night in the Great Pyramid. Crowley did an invocation, and Rose evidently went into trance at that point or, at the very least, began seeing the things he summoned.
Second, the rest seems to be somebody's interpretation of what they think must have happened (typically somebody that has resistance to believing the Aiwass report of how it happened).
Your understanding (stated above) matches Crowley's actual report. Nobody else was in the room. On that he was quite explicit.
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I was going to comment on this earlier but figured (correctly) that Jim would have something to say to surpass what would have been my vague recollections. The following comes from Lawrence Sutin's biography of Crowley called "Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley". I post it in hopes that maybe it adds something of use to the discussion. Jim or someone else will know better than I would where any of Crowley's quotes from the Sutin excerpt come from.
"Thus it was, on April 8, 9, and 10, 1904, the three chapters of the Book of the Law were written down by Crowley. The method was as follows: Crowley would enter the temple a minute early, so as to seat himself--with a Swan fountain pen and an ample supply of typewriter paper--so as to be ready precisely at noontime. He was alone; Ouarda no longer served as a mediumistic intermediary. Now it was Crowley who would hear the voice of Aiwass. He described this voice as "a rich tenor or baritone" of "deep timbre, musical and expressive, its tones solemn, voluptuous, tender, fierce, or aught else as suited the moods of the message." Aiwass spoke without accent--it sounded to Crowley like a pure "English-in-itself."
Crowley, seated at a writing table which faced a southern wall, never spoke aloud during the sessions and never actually saw Aiwass. He heard the voice coming from behind him, seeming from a corner of the room. And yet Crowley experienced, during the three days, a vivid "visualization" of Aiwass within his own "imagination." In this visualization, Aiwass possessed "a body of 'fine matter,' or astral matter, transparent as a veil of gauze or a cloud of incense-smoke. He seemed to be a tall, dark man in his thirties, well-knit, active and strong, with the face of a savage king, and eyes veiled lest their gaze should destroy what they saw." The clothing of Aiwass vaguely suggested Assyrian or Persian, as opposed to Arab, dress. In sum, Crowley--at this time--took Aiwass to be an "astral" being or "angel" of an order such as he had encountered before in his magical practice."
- Lawrence Sutin, "Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley", cap. 4, pp. 122-123
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- Lawrence Sutin, "Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley", cap. 4, pp. 122-123
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Thank you for your replies. That guy was so insistent!
I have another question. In the handwritten transcript of the Book of the Law, Chapter 1, page 19, the phrase 'The Five Pointed Star, with a Circle in the Middle, & the circle is Red.' is written in Rose's handwriting. How did she know to correct that?
Thank you
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Psychic. She filled in several lacunae. It is either said or implied (I forget which) that Aiwass communicated directly to her in her office of 667.
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Thank you, Jim.
I need to re-read the whole thing.Do you think that her later problems with alcohol had to do with not being able to handle her psychic abilities?
So sad. -
@AliceKnewI said
"Do you think that her later problems with alcohol had to do with not being able to handle her psychic abilities?"
Yes. To the extent we can accept AC's accessment, she was always (my paraphrase) a leisure-minded lush, and their marriage left her exceedingly bored. Booze was her best friend after a while, and probably a good friend earlier. One would expect that undisciplined wide-open psychic abilities (impressive and no training) would amplify this a great deal. (For an easy comparison, consider the life story of Alison Dubois, the real person behind the character in the Medium TV show.)
Rose was born in Paddington, England July 23, 1874, hour unknown. Her Sun is in Cancer, exactly square Neptune. Her Moon is either in the last degrees of Libra or (as I suspect) the earliest degrees of Scorpio. She was highly sensitive, responsive, with fierce passions and no evident goal other than to satisfy them.