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The Incoming of The Aeon of Maat
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September 29, 2020
Extracts from the publisher's website:
"Soon after the death of Aleister Crowley in December 1947, the well-known collector and archivist Gerald Yorke wrote to Charles Stansfeld Jones asking for a copy of the latter’s Liber 31, the record of Jones’s discovery of AL as the Key to The Book of the Law, an enigmatic text of three short chapters transmitted to Crowley in 1904 by a praeter-human Intelligence, Aiwass. This initiated a correspondence between Yorke and Jones which continued until the death of Jones in 1950. Because Jones had come to see Yorke as an archivist, much of this voluminous and fascinating correspondence deals with historical matters in the relationship between Jones and Crowley. Crowley had willed his papers to be sent to his successor, Karl Germer, in New York. To ensure that an archive of at least some of the papers remained in England, Kenneth Grant and Gerald Yorke making typed copies of what seems to them the most important diaries and other documents prior to the dispatch of the originals to Germer. At the same time, John Symonds was writing a biography of Crowley, Referred to in this correspondence under the working title of The Life and eventually published in 1951 as The Great Beast.
On 2nd April 1948, Jones announced the incoming of the Aeon of Maat, and from this time onwards the correspondence includes material documenting the unfolding of the new Aeon which Jones had detected, and exploring its ramifications and implications”.
(end of extracts)
The contents of this book are exactly as you might expect from its title and the synopsis given above. The letters are presented chronologically, usefully annotated and indexed. The volume also has an excellent introduction to both Jones and an equally interesting collection of illustrations and photos.
So what are we to make of the contents?
I am not a magician, much as I have time for some occult theories and practices and identify with some of Crowley’s maxims, such as “every man and every woman is a star”, although Crowley the man was something of a horror.
I also have a lot of time for Stansfeld Jones and consider Liber 31 to be one of the great texts of occultism. The general consensus was for a long time that Jones lost the plot later in his magical career partly having taken the ‘Oath of The Abyss’ too early. This a very serious magickal undertaking, part of which is to “interpret every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with my soul”. Elements of Jones’s subsequent writings (which he penned under the name Frater Achad) are also seen as ‘suspect’ by some in occult circles (a major one being his inversion of the qabalistic ‘Tree of Life’ upside down) and Crowley thought that he was in the midst of an ordeal and hoped that he might “pull-through”. On reading this book I must confess it seems, sadly, that had not done so prior to Crowley's death but the latter's death did to open some of the floodgates for him which expresses itself in the letters.
Firstly the sheer quantity and intensity of the writing are extreme. A two week period from 16th -30th April fills sixty(!) pages of quite close text, mostly Jones’s, and almost often written at times as if in a stream of consciousness. How did he find the time (and the strength) to write so much? What is going on? And why?
One can sense this frustration from both Yorke and Germer as the missives kept pouring in. Admittedly both have another agenda, wishing to acquire various papers from the Jones archive (including Liber XXXI), and Germer especially is largely uninterested in Jones personal magickal work. Yorke is, at first, more sympathetic, but as the letters keep arriving this changes to irritation. He is largely unimpressed by Jones’s use of gematria, which he regards as a bit suspect (‘numbers can be made to mean anything’ is the gist of one of Yorke's letters) and almost incredulous that Jones would use an article in Time magazine to prove a part of his ‘revelations’ because “time will tell”. He repeatedly asks Jones to (in so many words) STOP and write a coherent summation of what he is experiencing backed by his magickal diaries and other proofs such as a ‘word’ to show the process- “show your workings” as they used to say at school. Jones does not really comply but to be fair, he is undergoing something (whatever that is) that he possibly cannot stop (even if he wanted to) so as to write Yorke a nice tidy essay, but if the workings include the daily papers then we might have a problem as if I were mad I dare say that even I could use the national newspapers to ‘Telegraph’ me a confirmation of something or ‘Express’ a course of action. Let us not even go into the territory of a Holy ‘Guardian’ Angel. Suspect workings out indeed!
So if Jones is not announcing an incoming Aeon, what is going on?
I have already said I am not an occultist, and neither am I a psychologist, but let’s try this.
You have done your best for your father (Crowley) and made him proud of you (given him ‘Liber XXXI’). You try to carry on the good work but your father disapproves (turning the ‘tree of life’ upside down as Jones did in ‘Q.B. L.’) and then accuses you (falsely as it turned out) of robbing him. (Crowley had thought that Jones had stolen a crate of his books and manuscripts. Actually a storage company had mislaid the box - it finally surfaced in 1958). You try to make it up but that old money/book issue just won't go away (Crowley won’t let it go), and now your dad is dead.
Then some of the ‘family’ (Yorke and Germer who were, at differing times members of Crowley’s Order) track you down. They offer some sort of reconciliation with the Current, think that what you had previously done in the past is important and what to hear what you have to say. It's like a whole new Aeon! You can tell them the TRUTH about what has happened (Jones relates he missing books often and at length) and maybe get some sort of JUSTICE. And you have the numbers (gematria) to prove it. You don’t want to broadcast this to the world (Jones did not want to be Crowley's successor), you just want Truth and Justice and you want it acknowledged by the ‘family’. Time (one might say) has told.
Ok, I am being somewhat facetious here, so let us look at it in a perhaps more kindly light.
As above, so below. Perhaps we could interpret Jones outpourings as part of his own inner quest and having spent many years floundering in the Abyss the death of Crowley (an extremely powerful personality in life and on the inner planes) allowed him to perhaps begin to gain some perspective on his situation and this outpouring was part of its manifestation. I would like to think that poor Jones did find a bit of reconciliation within himself. He died in February 1952 under four years from his announcement so we cannot know- at least from this book. But “As above, so below” cuts both ways of course; how do we square this circle?
We (ie Joe Public) might think of Aeons as linear, like geological time periods, in when Crowley wrote of the succession of Aeons (at least earlier in his magickal career he later implied it was linear - oh dear…) this is not so clear cut for “Following him [Horus] will arise the Equinox of Ma, the Goddess of Justice, it may be a hundred or ten thousand years from now; for the Computation of Time is not here as There”. Some have interpreted this as “outside” time as we understand it and, in the world of physics, there is now the concept of a “block Universe’ where past present and future co-exist so that in principle there could be two Aeons running at both the same and yet different times (I think that's right, but I am also no physicist). The cynic in me thinks that this could be interpreted as some sort of occult “get out of jail free” card or perhaps having your (Aeonic) cake and eating it.
Be that as it may, but using the “as above so below” principle doesn’t that also means that we could, in theory, be ‘running’ various versions of ourselves at the time as well? Don’t we all have destructive thoughts and wish to overturn wrongs and prejudices? Don’t we all aspire to truth and Justice? Justice is after all symbolised by her ‘blindness’ and scales.
But who’s (or what) Truth? How do we know? Who’s or what Justice. Who (or what) is on the receiving end. If Jones heralded a New Aeon it does seem a mite overshadowed by the old Aeon at present for most of us. But we could play the “get out of Aeon free” card- MAAT has always been running somewhere or other with its implication that it could have been running prior to 1948.
Perhaps someone might do some experimental test work with Jone’s given data and see what happens. Based on my limited understanding of this book I don’t think it worth bothering with Jones’s data but at least we have it and Starfire are to be applauded for making it so. Good luck! “Success is your proof”, as they say in the trade.
"Soon after the death of Aleister Crowley in December 1947, the well-known collector and archivist Gerald Yorke wrote to Charles Stansfeld Jones asking for a copy of the latter’s Liber 31, the record of Jones’s discovery of AL as the Key to The Book of the Law, an enigmatic text of three short chapters transmitted to Crowley in 1904 by a praeter-human Intelligence, Aiwass. This initiated a correspondence between Yorke and Jones which continued until the death of Jones in 1950. Because Jones had come to see Yorke as an archivist, much of this voluminous and fascinating correspondence deals with historical matters in the relationship between Jones and Crowley. Crowley had willed his papers to be sent to his successor, Karl Germer, in New York. To ensure that an archive of at least some of the papers remained in England, Kenneth Grant and Gerald Yorke making typed copies of what seems to them the most important diaries and other documents prior to the dispatch of the originals to Germer. At the same time, John Symonds was writing a biography of Crowley, Referred to in this correspondence under the working title of The Life and eventually published in 1951 as The Great Beast.
On 2nd April 1948, Jones announced the incoming of the Aeon of Maat, and from this time onwards the correspondence includes material documenting the unfolding of the new Aeon which Jones had detected, and exploring its ramifications and implications”.
(end of extracts)
The contents of this book are exactly as you might expect from its title and the synopsis given above. The letters are presented chronologically, usefully annotated and indexed. The volume also has an excellent introduction to both Jones and an equally interesting collection of illustrations and photos.
So what are we to make of the contents?
I am not a magician, much as I have time for some occult theories and practices and identify with some of Crowley’s maxims, such as “every man and every woman is a star”, although Crowley the man was something of a horror.
I also have a lot of time for Stansfeld Jones and consider Liber 31 to be one of the great texts of occultism. The general consensus was for a long time that Jones lost the plot later in his magical career partly having taken the ‘Oath of The Abyss’ too early. This a very serious magickal undertaking, part of which is to “interpret every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with my soul”. Elements of Jones’s subsequent writings (which he penned under the name Frater Achad) are also seen as ‘suspect’ by some in occult circles (a major one being his inversion of the qabalistic ‘Tree of Life’ upside down) and Crowley thought that he was in the midst of an ordeal and hoped that he might “pull-through”. On reading this book I must confess it seems, sadly, that had not done so prior to Crowley's death but the latter's death did to open some of the floodgates for him which expresses itself in the letters.
Firstly the sheer quantity and intensity of the writing are extreme. A two week period from 16th -30th April fills sixty(!) pages of quite close text, mostly Jones’s, and almost often written at times as if in a stream of consciousness. How did he find the time (and the strength) to write so much? What is going on? And why?
One can sense this frustration from both Yorke and Germer as the missives kept pouring in. Admittedly both have another agenda, wishing to acquire various papers from the Jones archive (including Liber XXXI), and Germer especially is largely uninterested in Jones personal magickal work. Yorke is, at first, more sympathetic, but as the letters keep arriving this changes to irritation. He is largely unimpressed by Jones’s use of gematria, which he regards as a bit suspect (‘numbers can be made to mean anything’ is the gist of one of Yorke's letters) and almost incredulous that Jones would use an article in Time magazine to prove a part of his ‘revelations’ because “time will tell”. He repeatedly asks Jones to (in so many words) STOP and write a coherent summation of what he is experiencing backed by his magickal diaries and other proofs such as a ‘word’ to show the process- “show your workings” as they used to say at school. Jones does not really comply but to be fair, he is undergoing something (whatever that is) that he possibly cannot stop (even if he wanted to) so as to write Yorke a nice tidy essay, but if the workings include the daily papers then we might have a problem as if I were mad I dare say that even I could use the national newspapers to ‘Telegraph’ me a confirmation of something or ‘Express’ a course of action. Let us not even go into the territory of a Holy ‘Guardian’ Angel. Suspect workings out indeed!
So if Jones is not announcing an incoming Aeon, what is going on?
I have already said I am not an occultist, and neither am I a psychologist, but let’s try this.
You have done your best for your father (Crowley) and made him proud of you (given him ‘Liber XXXI’). You try to carry on the good work but your father disapproves (turning the ‘tree of life’ upside down as Jones did in ‘Q.B. L.’) and then accuses you (falsely as it turned out) of robbing him. (Crowley had thought that Jones had stolen a crate of his books and manuscripts. Actually a storage company had mislaid the box - it finally surfaced in 1958). You try to make it up but that old money/book issue just won't go away (Crowley won’t let it go), and now your dad is dead.
Then some of the ‘family’ (Yorke and Germer who were, at differing times members of Crowley’s Order) track you down. They offer some sort of reconciliation with the Current, think that what you had previously done in the past is important and what to hear what you have to say. It's like a whole new Aeon! You can tell them the TRUTH about what has happened (Jones relates he missing books often and at length) and maybe get some sort of JUSTICE. And you have the numbers (gematria) to prove it. You don’t want to broadcast this to the world (Jones did not want to be Crowley's successor), you just want Truth and Justice and you want it acknowledged by the ‘family’. Time (one might say) has told.
Ok, I am being somewhat facetious here, so let us look at it in a perhaps more kindly light.
As above, so below. Perhaps we could interpret Jones outpourings as part of his own inner quest and having spent many years floundering in the Abyss the death of Crowley (an extremely powerful personality in life and on the inner planes) allowed him to perhaps begin to gain some perspective on his situation and this outpouring was part of its manifestation. I would like to think that poor Jones did find a bit of reconciliation within himself. He died in February 1952 under four years from his announcement so we cannot know- at least from this book. But “As above, so below” cuts both ways of course; how do we square this circle?
We (ie Joe Public) might think of Aeons as linear, like geological time periods, in when Crowley wrote of the succession of Aeons (at least earlier in his magickal career he later implied it was linear - oh dear…) this is not so clear cut for “Following him [Horus] will arise the Equinox of Ma, the Goddess of Justice, it may be a hundred or ten thousand years from now; for the Computation of Time is not here as There”. Some have interpreted this as “outside” time as we understand it and, in the world of physics, there is now the concept of a “block Universe’ where past present and future co-exist so that in principle there could be two Aeons running at both the same and yet different times (I think that's right, but I am also no physicist). The cynic in me thinks that this could be interpreted as some sort of occult “get out of jail free” card or perhaps having your (Aeonic) cake and eating it.
Be that as it may, but using the “as above so below” principle doesn’t that also means that we could, in theory, be ‘running’ various versions of ourselves at the time as well? Don’t we all have destructive thoughts and wish to overturn wrongs and prejudices? Don’t we all aspire to truth and Justice? Justice is after all symbolised by her ‘blindness’ and scales.
But who’s (or what) Truth? How do we know? Who’s or what Justice. Who (or what) is on the receiving end. If Jones heralded a New Aeon it does seem a mite overshadowed by the old Aeon at present for most of us. But we could play the “get out of Aeon free” card- MAAT has always been running somewhere or other with its implication that it could have been running prior to 1948.
Perhaps someone might do some experimental test work with Jone’s given data and see what happens. Based on my limited understanding of this book I don’t think it worth bothering with Jones’s data but at least we have it and Starfire are to be applauded for making it so. Good luck! “Success is your proof”, as they say in the trade.
February 1, 2022
Applause to the publisher and editors for putting this out as it's a big historic document. It also paints a good picture of where achads head was in later years. I feel like he (achad) gets pretty long winded and goes on and on as others have said. In a rather short period of time.
February 4, 2021
This book is a crucial addition to the library of any Thelemic magician or scholar of Aleister Crowley and his followers. Charles Stansfeld Jones (Frater Achad) was Crowley's acknowledged 'magical son' and wrote LIBER 31 which revealed crucial information that unveiled keys to the meaning of THE BOOK OF THE LAW. Though the two men later fell out, Achad continued as a lifelong Thelemite. His correspondence gathered here, primarily to Gerald Yorke, Crowley's principle disciple in later life, reveals much about Achad's beliefs about the incoming of the Aeon of Maat, the Goddess of Truth and Justice, which Crowley had foreseen as following the Aeon of Horus. Staley and Barham have done an admirable job of annotating the letters to elucidate obscure references. Highly recommended for serious Thelemites and enthusiasts of Achad's writings.
September 7, 2020
There are some holes in their reasoning.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews