On April 8, 1904, Aleister Crowley received The Book of the Law from his
wife Rose, who entered a trance state during their honeymoon to the
Great Pyramid. In proclaiming this book to the world, with its core
Rabelaisian principle of "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law", Crowley
believed he was ushering in a new world-age of the child, following
earlier matristic and patristic periods.
Though Crowley
took much amusement in calling himself "The Beast 666", and in implying
he was the reincarnation of Eliphas Levi (see May 31), he was not a
Satanist as is often claimed. But his messianic pretensions ran deep. At
the end of his life - destitute in an English boarding house in
on-again, off-again heroin addiction - Crowley claimed he had
transcended the bonds of humanity and become a god.
