@he atlas itch said
"a radical reassessment of the present"
Lest anyone think I am giving my own interpretation to the Cairo Working, Crowley’s comments on Atu XVI The Tower (or War) and Atu XX The Aeon (or Last Judgement) confirm this Egyptian reading. His words indicate the mind-staggering revelation he received in 1904.
The traditional reading of The Tower is catastrophe, ruins or a radical change in long-held understanding:
The picture shows the destruction of existing material by fire. It may be taken as the preface to Atu XX, the Last Judgement, i.e., the Coming of the New Aeon.
The opening of the Eye of Horus/Shiva destroys the Old Aeon universe:
*Shiva is represented as dancing upon the bodies of his devotees. To understand this is not easy for most western minds. Briefly, the doctrine is that the ultimate reality (which is Perfection) is Nothingness. Hence all manifestations, however glorious, however delightful, are stains. To obtain perfection, all existing things must be annihilated. The destruction of the garrison may therefore be taken to mean their emancipation from the prison of organized life, which was confining them. It was their unwisdom to cling to it…
This Trump is not the only card in the Pack, nor are the “will to live” and the “will to die” incompatible. This becomes clear as soon as life and death are understood (see Atu XIII) to be phases of a single manifestation of energy. *
It’s interesting that Crowley considered the identification to matter and the annihilation of it, leading to emancipation from prison, to be nothing less than a War.
He writes on Atu XX The Aeon:
*The old card was called The Angel: or, The Last Judgement. It represented an Angel or Messenger blowing a trumpet, attached to which was a flag, bearing the symbol of the Aeon of Osiris. Below him the graves were opening up, the dead rising up…The card therefore represented the destruction of the world by Fire. This was accomplished in the year of the vulgar era 1904, when the fiery god Horus took the place of the airy god Osiris in the East as Hierophant (see Atu V).
*