"Nebulae: The Word That Promised a Star" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "THE LAW IS FOR ALL: The Authorized Popular Commentary on Liber AL vel Legis sub figura CCXX"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
September 23
Nebulae: The Word That Promised a Star
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New York, the last week of September
1915. Aleister Crowley is three weeks shy of forty and about as far from the
life he'd imagined for himself as a man can get. He's stranded in a neutral
country, writing pro-German propaganda he'll spend the rest of his life
insisting was satire, and broke enough that the rent is a recurring emergency. The Equinox has gone quiet. His
order is scattered across an ocean at war. And on the night the sun crosses
into Libra, he sits down with a married poet from the Adirondacks and asks the
dark for a single word.
The dark gives him one. Nebulae.
Crowley started the practice in 1907,
and it's one of the more quietly elegant things he ever built. At each equinox
he'd obtain a Word and circulate it to every member of the A∴A∴ from Neophyte
upward in good standing. The Word wasn't a slogan or a motto. It was meant to
be a compressed symbol of the six months to follow—a seed-syllable for the
season, handed to the whole order at once so that everyone's work ran through
the same lens until the light turned again. The autumn Word for 1907 was Amphora, and Crowley
promptly used it as the title of a collection of devotional poems to the Virgin
Mary, which tells you something about how literally he took these things when
it suited him. The mechanism varied. Sometimes the Word came by divination,
sometimes by scrying, and increasingly after 1914, through sexual magick with a
partner serving as seer.
The woman sitting across from him had
been born Julia Elizabeth Oliver
on March 10, 1879, in Johnsburg, New York, to a lumberjack father and a
schoolteacher mother. At eighteen she married Matlock Foster, a man of
forty-six, which got her out of the Adirondacks and into a career: fashion
model, stage actress, working journalist, eventually literary editor of the American
Review of Reviews. By 1915 she was thirty-six, well connected, and
restless.
Crowley met her on June 10, 1915,
introduced through her friend Helen Westley. He nicknamed the two women after
Egyptian gods—Foster the Cat, after Pasht, and Westley the Snake, after Apophis—then pursued Foster for a month
before she'd have him, which for Crowley was practically a siege. She took
Hilarion as her mystic name and accepted the office of Scarlet Woman, becoming
the engine behind a sonnet cycle called The Golden Rose and, later, a
presence hovering over Liber Aleph.
What almost never gets said in occult
write-ups is that Jeanne Robert Foster was the better writer in the room, and
was about to prove it. In 1916 she published Neighbors of Yesterday and Wild
Apples—hard, unsentimental Adirondack narrative verse that won her the
friendship of John Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, and the collector
John Quinn. She survives in Crowley's story as a footnote. He survives in hers
as roughly the same.
On September 23, 1915, Foster assisted Crowley in obtaining the Word, and it came back Nebulae. Crowley's account (the one every secondary source quotes) appears in his New Comment to the fifty-fifth verse of the first chapter of Liber AL, where he glosses the Word as “suggestive of the birth of a Star.” However, Crowley's magical diary for this stretch doesn't survive. The record running from roughly mid-March 1915 to mid-June 1916 is lost, if he kept it at all, and his sexual-magical record Rex de Arte Regia carries a gap from June 1915 to February 1916. The equinox working of September 23 falls squarely inside that hole. Which means the famous account isn't a note scribbled the morning after. It's a reconstruction, set down years later, by a man who by then knew exactly how those six months had actually gone. When Crowley returns to the episode in his diary The Urn, the tell sits right there in his own phrasing: the Word meant “the Babe of an Universe—as I now see.”
As I now see. Not as I saw then.
Strip away the retrospective gloss
and the operation's purpose is unambiguous. Crowley wanted a magical child, a
son, by Jeanne Foster. The late-September workings were conception attempts,
and on the evidence of the closing poems of The Golden Rose, he came
away convinced they'd worked. However, she didn't conceive. There's reason to
think she couldn't; Crowley wrote afterward that he hadn't known he was
attempting “a physical impossibility.” Within weeks the affair came apart. He
left on a West Coast tour that October, she followed with her husband in tow,
they parted in California, and by the time he reached New York she'd ended it.
He called her deceitful, dismissed the business as an illusion, and five years
on was still asking himself in writing whether she'd broken his heart.
So, the nebula produced no star. But,
which star was born? The candidates are genuinely interesting, and Crowley
clearly had one in mind. In the summer of 1916, at a cottage near Lake
Pasquaney in New Hampshire, he underwent the experience he'd come to call the “Star
Sponge Vision”: the universe perceived as boundless dark studded with
innumerable points of light, some brighter than others, every one
interconnected. It became a cornerstone of his cosmology, and he referred back
to it in his diaries for the rest of his life. It is, by some distance, the
best-documented star anywhere near the relevant window.
That same New Hampshire retirement is
where he performed the rite by which he claimed the grade of Magus. The lurid
version (baptizing a toad as Jesus of Nazareth and then crucifying it) reaches
us largely through Richard Cavendish, and Thelemic scholars dispute it, so file
it as contested rather than established. What isn't contested is the ambition.
Crowley's diary opens on January 1, 1915 with a heading announcing a colloquy
of one who "is to be a Magus." The goal predates the Word by nine
months. Which makes the
honest reading of Nebulae less mystical and considerably more human.
Crowley asked for a symbol of the coming six months. What came back was a word
for diffuse, unformed matter that hasn't condensed into anything yet. He was
broke, stateless, orderless, childless, and grinding toward a grade he wasn't
certain he'd ever reach. Nebulae isn't a prophecy of a star. It's an
unnervingly accurate description of the man who asked the question.
There's a working principle buried in
all this that outlives its author. A nebula isn't a failed star; it's the
necessary prior condition of one. An oracle that tells you you're formless
isn't insulting you; it's telling you where in the process you actually stand,
which is the single most useful thing a divination can do and the thing we're
least willing to hear. We want forecasts but, what we get, when the method's
any good, is diagnosis. A word obtained at the hinge of the year, held as a lens for six months,
then retired and replaced. Not a resolution and not a goal—a question you agree
to carry until the light changes. Try it this equinox. Take what comes,
especially if what comes is unflattering, and don't rewrite it in March.
As for Hilarion: she published her
books, helped assemble one of the great modern art collections in America,
cared for the Yeats family's patriarch in his last years, moved to Schenectady
in 1932 to work as a social worker, and lived to ninety-one. She died on
September 22, 1970—one day shy of the fifty-fifth anniversary of the night she
helped pull a word out of the dark. The star that came out of that equinox had
been sitting across the table the entire time.
Modern Occultist is proud to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of the master of publicity theater at the center of this story, we're recommending his own defense of the philosophy underlying everything he did, hoaxes included.
THE
LAW IS FOR ALL: The Authorized Popular Commentary on Liber AL vel Legis sub
figura CCXX
Aleister Crowley, edited by Louis Wilkinson and Hymenaeus Beta / New Falcon Publications
If you'd rather check today's story yourself than take anyone's word for it, this is where the “birth of a Star” line actually lives, in Crowley's New Comment to the first chapter of Liber AL. Read it in context. That alone is the argument for owning this book.
The Commentary carries a tangled
publication history worth understanding before you buy, because two very
different books share this title. Crowley spent decades trying to explain The
Book of the Law and rejected draft after draft of his own commentary as
inadequate. He eventually concluded he was too close to the material to judge
it, and handed the editorial job to Louis Wilkinson—his friend, a professional
man of letters who wrote as Louis Marlow, and pointedly a layman in esoteric
matters. That was the right instinct. Wilkinson's brief was to produce
something a literate outsider could actually follow, and he stripped out the
dense qabalistic scaffolding to manage it. The work was completed posthumously
and substantially augmented by Hymenaeus Beta, who added annotations, reading
lists, and indexes.
The competing edition, edited by
Israel Regardie and issued by Falcon Press in 1983 under the identical title,
is less abridged and retains far more of the technical material. Purists argue
about which sits closer to Crowley's intent. The short version: Wilkinson's is
the one Crowley authorized and the one to start with, and Regardie's is the one
to graduate to when the gematria starts calling. What you get is Crowley at his most exposed. He isn't
performing wickedness here. He's a man arguing with a text he insists he didn't
write, changing his mind across decades, sometimes brilliant, sometimes
circling the drain, occasionally ducking the verses that embarrass him. Read
alongside the diaries, it becomes a study in how a prophecy is actually
maintained—not by being right, but by being reread.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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