Let's not forget Crowley's sense of humour. The question I posed a couple of pages (and years) back, "Has Crowley poured the castor oil of confusion into the tea-urn of the Tarot?" alluded to the trick he played as a boy on the visiting Plymouth Brethren, where the meek guests were too timid to complain about the tea's awful taste. There were numerous other wicked pranks and cunning stunts, such as: the complaint to the Vigilance Society about the conspicuous evidence of prostitution in Foyers (conspicuous by its absence, you fools!); authorship of Alexandria: A Birthday Ode by Ophelia Cox; the hunting of the haggis at Boleskine; the acrostic in Hail Mary, which spelt out The Virgin Mary I Desire But Arseholes Set My Prick On Fire; the lesbian poetry of Amphora which was unwittingly put out by a Catholic publisher; the abstraction of the brass butterfly covering the genitalia of Epstein's statue on Wilde's grave; his faked suicide in Portugal, and no doubt many another jape.
Crowley says he spent "nearly twenty years" trying to solve the riddle of I:57, which indicates the solution came before April 1924. His diaries leading up to this date show his increasingly dismal view of the work of Charles Stansfeld Jones, who he facetiously refers to on 23 May 1923 as "Jesus Stansfeld Christ", and "the Great One, the Illuminated One", and of whom he seeks an oracle, asking "What shall be my attitude to Achad; is any open action on my part necessary (either directly or through Alostrael or O.P.V.)and if so, what?"
30 May sees possibly the first manifestation of the 4/17 switch, where Crowley is adding together the numbers of various pairs of Trumps, seeking to reach XXXI. He refers to XVII plus XIV (= XXXI) as "SH" or "HS", which indicates he has attributed XVII, The Star to He rather than the traditional Tzaddi.
On 24 July Crowley formulated a plan to "deal with" Jones, that his position as Magister Templi needed to be challenged in the occult publications of the time.
9 August sees Crowley's first acknowledgement of "absurd new attribution proposed for the Paths", and he again sought an oracle.
The "absurd new attribution proposed for the Paths" refers to Jones' book QBL. In the appendix to this book, Jones partly outlines his reversed Paths for the Tree of Life. To illustrate, in the Golden Dawn system, Path 11 (between Kether and Chokmah, refers to 0, The Fool, whereas in Jones' system it refers to XXI, The Universe. Path 12 is similarly I, The Magician, against Jones' Last Judgement. Path 13 is II, The Priestess against XIX, The Sun. Path 14 is III, The Empress against XVIII, The Moon.
Now for the interesting bit. **Path 15, in the Golden Dawn, is IV, The Emperor, but in Jones' revised attributions it is XVII, The Star. Similarly, Path 28 in the Golden Dawn is The Star, but Jones' world it is The Emperor.
**
This is interesting because, given that Crowley rejects Jones' proposed new paths as "absurd", he is at the same time adopting one of Jones' attributions by swapping The Star and The Emperor!
In Book 4, Crowley states "One who ought to have known better tried to improve the Tree of Life by turning the Serpent of Wisdom upside down! Yet he could not even make his scheme symmetrical; his little remaining good sense revolted at the supreme attrocities. Yet he succeeded in reducing the whole Magical Alphabet to nonsense, and shewing that he had never understood its real meaning. The absurdity of any such disturbance of the arrangement of the Paths is evident to any sober student from such examples as the following. Binah, the Supernal Understanding, is connected with Tiphareth, the Human Consciousness, by Zain, Gemini, the Oracles of the Gods, or the Intuition. That is, the attribution represents a psychological fact: to replace it by "The Devil" is either humour or plain idiocy. Again, the card "Fortitude", Leo, balances Majesty and Mercy with Strength and Severity: what sense is there in putting "Death", the Scorpion, in its stead? There are twenty other mistakes in the new wonderful illumined-from-on-high attribution; the student can therefore be sure of twenty more laughs if he cares to study it."
The point is, if there are twenty more laughs, this would necessarily include Crowley's own 4/17 swap!
On 4 September Crowley reports he has "worked hard on Atus, etc getting a very complete simplified classification of the images". The results are seen on 7 September; however, he seems to waver -the letter E (He) as listed as XVII or IV
Sometime after May 1923, Norman Mudd took down "Dictation and Discussion" from Crowley. Here Crowley unambiguously adopts the 4/17 change: "Tiphareth gets from Chokmah by path of He, feminine Nuit-Star corresponds to sign of Aquarius, the water bearer. Aquarius is an airy sign, the Kerub of Man. Hence its relation to humanitarianism. How does the True Will convey its orders to the consciousness? By Aquarius and no other."
But at the same time, he seems to baulk at the idea: "How does Netzach affect Hod influence Yesod? Through Tzaddi - Emperor - Aries, i.e. the wish phantasm imposes itself on the image through the illusion of divine right. It is very arbitrary."
Crowley left Tunis 3 October 1923 and by this time, or perhaps a little later, the concept of 4/17 was in place. Yet he refrained from instructing his followers to make any corresponding alterations, and made no changes to the unpublished 777 Revised. The Heart of the Master, written from late 1924 to early 1925 makes no mention of it.
The first allusion is in in Magick in Theory and Practice, where there is a description of the letter H in the word ALHIM: "And then, in the centre of all, broods Spirit, which combines the mildness of the Lamb with the horns of the Ram, and is the letter of Bacchus or "Christ."
There is a note: "The letter He is the formula of Nuit, which makes possible the process described in the previous notes. But it is not permissible here to explain fully the exact matter or manner of this adjustment. I have preferred the exoteric attributions, which are sufficiently informative for the beginner."
I contend that the reason Crowley refers to 4/17 but refrains from explaining it is because it would only raise more questions, as evidenced by this very forum all these years later where, with all due respect, it remains a mystery.
The Equinox of the Gods makes no mention of any change in the Tarot attributions; however, there are several passages in the last eight pages of Chapter VII where he goes into some detail as to the standard of scriptural interpretation, or exegesis, that he intends to adopt with regard to The Book of the Law. Inasmuch as the reasoning behind 4/17 involves exegesis, these passages serve as a preliminary to understanding Crowley's approach to interpreting I:57.
In these eight pages Crowley makes several references to the occurrence of the word "not" in Liber Al, but any discussion of I:57 is conspicuous - by its absence!
In May 1938 Lady Frieda Harris became a student of Crowley's. Quite early in the piece she had this to say regarding the mystery of Tzaddi:
"Dear Aleister....Also, I don't feel you have made it clear about Tzaddi - the Emperor. Can't you have a diagram? I have been reading your book to Ann Christie in the evenings and although she is very interested, she could not understand your book, and I'm not sure I did in the end. It will be a point about which there will be the most argument. Is there any reason for the two loops except secrecy? Surely! And if not, why not undo the loop, and is the Emperor to be numbered 17 or 4 or 17 or IV, ditto the Star, also Strength XI and Justice VIII. I expect I have got it all wrong, but if I have you must make it clearer....I think we could have 4 and 17 on a swivel to twist round. Quite amusing also the Sun could have the Zodiac pushed round."
Incidentally, it appears Lady Harris drew the famous diagram in the Book of Thoth, for she states in a later letter: "I have a diagram of the Twist in the Zodiac. Would you like me to make a conventional diagram of your rough?" To which Crowley responded "Yes, please, make a conventional diagram."
Eight Lectures on Yoga, 1939, carries a Tree of Life diagram which shows - unsupported by any explanatory text - Aquarius on the 15th Path and Aries on the 28th. There is a passage in the lecture on Yama that may well refer to the issue at hand: "But now let me begin to unleash my indignation. My job - the establishment of the Law of Thelema - is a most discouraging job. It is the rarest thing to find anyone who has any ideas at all on the subject of liberty. Because the Law of Thelema is the law of liberty, everybody's particular hair stands on end like the quills of the fretful porpentine; they scream like an uprooted mandrake, and flee in terror from the accursed spot. Because: the exercise of liberty means that you have to think for yourself, and the natural inertia of mankind wants religion and ethics ready-made. However ridiculous or shameful a theory or practice is, they would rather comply than examine it. Sometimes it is hook-swinging or Sati; sometimes consubstantiation or supra-lapsarianism; they do not mind what they are brought up in, as long as they are well brought up. They do not want to be bothered about it."
In 1942 the Harris paintings were exhibited with an accompanying booklet. Curiously, Crowley refers to "the perpetration of a hoax transparent and nausient" in connection with the exhibition in the self-authored "An Open Letter to Aleister Crowley from the Society of Hidden Masters."
Crowley's replied to himself, to "most strenuously deny participation in the hoax."
If you are still reading this, open up your Book of Thoth and re-examine it in light of the foregoing. There is too much to mention here and it's getting on for dawn. However, I will bring your attention to the following passage (bearing in mind Crowley's view that he was the reincarnation of Eliphas Lev):.
"In the middle of the nineteenth century there arose a very great Qabalist and scholar, who still annoys dull people by his habit of diverting himself at their expense by making fools of them posthumously....Eliphas Levi was a philosopher and an artist, besides being a supreme literary stylist and a practical joker of the variety called "Pince sans rire"...."
In the Law is For All, 1946, Crowley continues, poker-faced to the end: "I see no harm in revealing the mystery of Tzaddi to "the wise"; others will hardly understand my explanations..."
In conclusion, I would contend the "Double Loop in the Zodiac" is Crowley's last laugh -- a blind, as my previous post stated. It is somewhat similar to Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes -- non-existent clothing which the Emperor wore in order that he might distinguish the wise from the foolish.
Let the indignation begin!