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A MASTER OF THE TEMPLE

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A Master of the Temple

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ii + 308 + 132 (Supplement) + viii Advertisements.

Priced at $6.66.

Commonly known as the “Blue” Equinox. 
Has a portrait of Aleister Crowley by Leon Engers Kennedy as a frontispiece.

Title page is printed in black and red.

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Comments by
Aleister
Crowley:

     I am thus in a position to do for the contending sects of freemasonry what the Alexandrians did for those of paganism. Unfortunately, the men who asked me to undertake this task are either dead or too old to take active measures and so far there is no one to replace them. Worse, the general coarsening of manners which always follows a great war has embittered the rival jurisdictions and deprived freemasonry altogether of those elements of high-minded enthusiasms with regard to the great problems of society which still stirred even its most degenerate sections half a century ago, when Hargrave Jennings, Godfrey Higgins, Gerald Massey, Kenneth MacKenzie, John Yarker, Theodor Reuss, Wynn Westcott and others were still seeking truth in its traditions and endeavouring to erect a temple of Concord in which men of all creeds and races might worship in amity.
     I attempted to make the appeal of the new system universal by combining it with a practical system of fraternal intercourse and mutual benefit. I formulated a scheme of insurance against all the accidents of life; the details are given in the Official Instructions and Essays published in The Equinox, vol. III, no. I; and to set the example I transferred the whole of my property to trustees for the Order.
     — The Confessions of Aleister Crowley.  New York, NY.  Hill and Wang, 1969.  Page 707.

______________________________
 

     We found almost at once a splendid studio on the south side of Washington Square, a long and lofty room with three wide windows, looking out across the tree tops to the opening of Fifth Avenue.
     From this point of vantage the ensuing months appeared tolerable. I was occupied in defeating the dishonest intrigues of the people in Detroit who had sent emissaries to approach me in the winter. I was persuaded to put the publication of The Equinox, vol. III, No. 1 into the hands of those latter, and they immediately began to try to evade fulfilling the terms of the contract. I spent the summer in a tent beyond Montauk at the extremity of Long Island.
     — The Confessions of Aleister Crowley.  New York, NY.  Hill and Wang, 1969.  Page 793.

______________________________
 

     I stumbled on through the Desert somehow. Even today I hardly understand the object of the ordeals of this journey. At the beginning of the next Chokmah day I found myself on the edge of the oasis which I was to make my home. I had identified myself with the god of my Grade of Magus, Tahuti, the Lord of the Word, and I was invested accordingly with the attributes proper to him. The last of the officers in my initiation was the Ape of Thoth. This creature translates into action his thought or, in other words, is the instrument through which his idea assumes sensible form. This Ape became my permanent companion. At this moment, she is beside me in a bathing house at Marsa Plage near Tunis, writing these words.
     Tahuti being the Lord of Speech, I published number 1 of volume III of The Equinox on March 21st, 1919. I arranged for it to contain something like a complete programme of my proposed Operation to initiate, emancipate and relieve mankind.
     The first item is a “Hymn to Pan”, which I believe to be the most powerful enchantment ever written. Next, after explaining the general idea of my work, I issued a curriculum, classifying the books whose study should give a complete intellectual knowledge of all subjects which bear on the Great Work.
     The book of The Sandal presents a lyrical interpretation of the Law of Thelema. This is followed by the first installment of “The Magical Record of my Son”, Frater O.I.V.V.I.O., to show how in actual practice a fairly normal man came to attain to be a Master of the Temple. Every pertinent detail of his career from the start is clearly set forth.
     The latter half of the volume is devoted to explaining the principles of the O.T.O. showing how men and women may work in groups publicly, and giving outlines of a social system free from the disastrous defects of our present civilization. I republished the Ritual of the Gnostic Mass in this section. The supplement consists of Blavatsky’s Voice in the Silence with a very full commentary. My purpose was to bring back Theosophists to the true principles of their founder; principles which have been shamefully abandoned by her successors—to the utter ruin of the society, either as a nursery for adepts or as a civilizing influence in barbaric Christiandom.
     — The Confessions of Aleister Crowley.  New York, NY.  Hill and Wang, 1969.  Pages 841-842.

     Here under the copyright, and one suspects from the hand, of Aleister Crowley, adept in the occult, exponent of the ancient art of Magick, famous some years ago as proclaimer of the Independence of the Irish Republic from a rowboat off the Statue of Liberty, and more recently as the apostle of the benzene jag, is the latest handbook prepared by delvers into the esoteric for the entertainment of those who ask to know.  “The rule of the A. A., or Great White Brotherhood, is to alternate five years of silence with five years of speech,” we learn from the introduction; so step up, brothers; in the current lustrum you’ll have a new volume every six months to tell you all that has been learned by and from Hermes Trismegistus, Simon Magus, Gilles de Retz, Count Dracula, and other Masters of the Black Art, and all it costs you is 666 cents, the Number of the Beast.  It is only fair to say, however, that the art here portrayed is not very black; never much darker than mouse color.

     An adequate review of a volume so diversified is as impossible as a review of the British Museum.  It starts with a portrait of the most occult of all the occult, the innermost of all the Inwards — the Master Therion, otherwise known as To Mega Therion, which is to say The Big Brute, and it ends with a page about the late Dr. Arthur Waite and the Man from Egypt.  The Big Brute is not very formidable looking:  he sits half way and half way out of a scarlet kimono before a blasé of yellow light, contemplating something firmly clutched between thumb and finger which seems most plausibly to be a hair from a head fast growing bald.  More impressive is the next colored plate — a painting “symbolical of the New Aeon,” and entitled “May Morn,” which would have shocked the stodgy artistic conservatism of Gustave Moreau.

     In a “Hymn to Pan” early in the book the author confesses that:

          “I rave and I rape and I rip and I rend

          Everlasting, world without end.”

     After this warlike introduction it is a little alarming to find that the motto of the Truly Inner is “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”  “No matter whether I am writing to my lady of my butcher,” says The Big Brute, “I always begin with these eleven words.  Why, how else should I begin?”  The Master evidently trusts his butcher, to say nothing of his lady.  There is a good deal about the Law of Thelema, and a list of books of instruction which include, among several hundred more advanced works, such exoteric volumes as Jame’s Varieties of Religious Experience, Frazer’s Golden Bough, the essays of Hume and Huxley, Apuleius and Petronius, cited as “valuable for those who have wit to understand them”; Alice in Wonderland, which is “valuable to those who understand the Qabalah”; Macbeth, Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, by WQ. Shakespeare, “interesting for traditions treated,” and a work on the cactus which ought to sell well this Summer, since it tells how to get jingled by chewing mescal buttons.

  —The New York Times Book Review, 23 November 1919.

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