“To present the Universe to thee in the form of thy Plan”:

On Predestination, and Experience as the Purpose of Life, in Aleister Crowley’s

Views on Will and Reincarnation

Gordan Djurdjevic

[A paper presented at the 2023 Occulture Conference in Berlin, Germany.

This is a preliminary and unedited text of a work in progress. Please do not quote without seeking a
written permission from the author.]

Contrary to what may appear to be the case, Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), who as the founder of the
new religious movement of Thelema both promulgated and lived by the motto “Do what thou wilt
shall be the whole of the Law,”1 was neither a proponent of nor a believer in free will – at least not in
the ordinary sense of the phrase. One of his most intriguing propositions, pertinent to the subject, was
that our life was preordained by us prior to our current embodiment and that, consequently, the
freedom of will consists in the total acceptance of our fate. This view presupposes the concept of post-
mortem existence predicated upon the eternity of the soul, as well as an acceptance of the idea of
reincarnation. In what follows, my intention is to interrogate four main issues related to the ideological
positions outlined above. One of them concerns the notion of death’s complementarity, or even
identity, with life. Another issue relates to Crowley’s understanding of the mechanism of reincarnation,
where he suggests that the personal2 volition lies at the root of the process. The third issue is about
the equation ‘free will equals destiny’ and its implications. And finally, intrinsically inseparable from
the other topics already mentioned, the reasons for the soul’s embodiment imply theological
underpinnings, and they could be expressed as: the purpose of incarnation is experience, by which
process the subject (in the vocabulary of Thelema, Hadit) comes to know its own possibilities through
its relations to and responses to the manifest nature (Nuit) 3 as an embodied being (Horus as a

1 Liber AL vel Legis [The Book of the Law, subsequently cited as AL], I: 40 (when quoting AL, Roman numerals refer to
Chapters, and Arabic numerals to verses of the book).
2 I need to qualify the adjective ‘personal,’ here and throughout, as referring to one’s essential self, or, in the vocabulary

of Thelema, Hadit.
3 “Hadit possesses the power to know, Nuit that of being known” (Commentary on AL II: 4 in Aleister Crowley, The

Law is for All: The Authorized Popular Commentary on Liber AL vel Legis sub figura CCXX The Book of the Law, eds. Louis
Wilkinson and Hymenaeus Beta [Tempe, AZ: New Falcon Publications, 1996], 89). Similarly, “Hadit is hidden in Nuit,
and knows Her, She being an object of knowledge; but He is not knowable, for He is merely that part of Her which She
formulates in order that She may be known” (ibid). It may appear contradictory that Crowley ascribed the principle of
self-knowledge, or self-discovery, as the motivating factor behind incarnation as a human being to both Nuit and Hadit.
For example, Commentary on AL II: 1 argues: “The Soul [Hadit] interprets the Universe [Nuit]; and the Universe veils
the Soul. Nature [Nuit] understands Herself by becoming self-conscious in Her units [Hadits]; and the Consciousness
‘Crowned and Conquering Child’). 4 As a result, the whole life is understood as a ‘sacrament,’ a
‘eucharist,’ or a ‘dance of ecstasy.’ A discussion of these points, which often mutually overlap and
cannot be always treated separately, will provide the substance of this paper.
Let me start these explorations with some poetry. In 1946, a year before he passed away, while
staying at his “last resort,” a boarding house known as Netherwood in Hastings, England, Crowley
composed a poem entitled “Thanatos Basileos,” meaning “The Death of the King,” included in what
happened to be his last book published during his lifetime, Olla: An Anthology of Sixty Year of Songs. The
content of this short poem resonates, implicitly or explicitly, with the subject matter under
investigation, and it bears quoting at length:

THANATOS BASILEOS

The Serpent dips his head beneath the sea

His mother, source of all his energy
Eternal, thence to draw the strength he needs
On earth to do indomitable deeds
Once more; and they, who saw but understood
Naught of his nature of beatitude
Were awed: they murmured with abated breath;
Alas the Master; so he sinks in death.
But whoso knows the mystery of man
Sees life and death as curves of one same plan.

Netherwood, The Ridge, Hastings. 19465

Keeping in mind the subject of present endeavors, it should be apparent that all the four issues
mentioned earlier as the topics for exploration are discernible in this poem composed towards the end
of Crowley’s rich life: he maintained the complementarity of life and death (“as curves of one same
plan”), suggested that the energy associated with life, i.e. the soul, was eternal,6 and implied the fact
of reincarnation (the serpent dips his head for a while in order to draw strength to do “indomitable
deeds once more”), while the alternations of life and death are seen as part of “one same plan.” Finally,

[Hadit] loses its sense of separateness by dissolution in Her” (ibid, 87). Compare and contrast this with the quotes from
“Liber Samekh” (further discussed below): “the object of Incarnation is to obtain articulate apprehension of the soul
[Hadit] by measuring its reactions to its relations with other incarnated Beings, and to observe theirs with each other”
(Aleister Crowley et al, Magick: Liber ABA: Book Four, 2nd revised ed., ed. Hymenaeus Beta [San Francisco, CA and
Newbury Port, MA: Weiser Books, 1997], 524). I propose that the contradiction is resolved if we understand that Nuit
and Hadit are phenomenologically distinct but ontologically the same. “Our central Truth – beyond other philosophies
– is that these two infinities [i.e. Nuit and Hadit] cannot exist apart” (Commentary on AL I: 1, in Crowley, Law is for All,
23).
4 “We may then take it that this Solar-Phallic Heru-ra-ha [i.e. Horus] is Each Man Himself. … Each man’s ‘Child’-

consciousness is a Star in the Cosmos of the Sun, as the Sun is a Star in the Cosmos of Nuit” (ibid, 168).
5 Aleister Crowley, Olla: An Anthology of Sixty Years of Song (London: O.T.O., 1946), 119.
6 Hadit is “represented by a globe of fire, representing eternal energy” on the Tarot card “The Aeon” (Aleister Crowley,

The Book of Thoth: A Short Essay on the Tarot of the Egyptians [London: O.T.O., 1946], 115).

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the nature of the Master, who willingly undergoes the phases of life and death, is one of beatitude.
Leaving aside more elaborate interpretation of the numerous symbolic references contained in the
poem, I will simply take it as a convenient point of departure in order to explore the topics relevant
to the present task at hand.
Let me commence with the notion of the complementarity between life and death, which
Crowley occasionally extends to the point of arguing the identity between the two. First of all, one
may reasonably ask: when did he formulate this position originally? What is the source for this
postulation? Assuming that there is no clear-cut answer to this question, I would still suggest that the
complementarity of opposites, including life and death, emerged as an article of faith subsequent to
the series of magical operations conducted by Crowley and his disciple and lover Victor Neuburg
(1883-1940) in the Algerian parts of the Sahara Desert in November and December of 1909. These
were chronicled in the book called The Vision and the Voice, and their substance concerns the
explorations of the 30 Æthyrs originally mentioned in the work of the Elizabethan scholar-magus
John Dee (1527-1608) and his assistant, the skryer Edward Kelley (1555-1598). As a result of these
magical operations, Crowley claimed to have ‘crossed the Abyss,’ which among other things implied
a transcendence of the rational and discursive thinking rooted in dichotomies and the ability to
embrace paradox as a key to reality. In the 5th Æthyr, explored on December 13th, 1909, Crowley is
told in a vision that “herein all the symbols are interchangeable, for each one containeth in itself its
own opposite. And this is the great Mystery of the Supernals that are beyond the Abyss. For below
the Abyss, contradiction is division; but above the Abyss, contradiction is Unity. And there could be
nothing true except by virtue of the contradiction that is contained in itself.”7
The insight into the correlation between life and death, as one of the most important set of
binary opposites, is consequently prominent in Crowley’s writings in general and is, for example,
already strongly present in an early work, the 1913 publication The Book of Lies, where we find
statements such as: “To beget is to die; to die is to beget,”8 or “Death is the veil of Life, and Life of
Death; for both are Gods,”9 or, most explicitly “Life and Death [are] but two phases of One State.”10
In the comments to his “Liber Trigrammaton,” written in the 1920s, he similarly refers to the
“vibration which includes Life and Death as complementary Curves.”11 The same general idea is
reaffirmed in the late work, The Book of Thoth, published in 1944. Discussing the XIII Arcanum of the

7 Aleister Crowley et al The Vision and the Voice with a Commentary and Other Papers (York Beach, ME: 1998), 205.
8 “The Sabbath of the Goat,” in Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies (Boston, MA and York Beach, ME: Weiser Books,
1981 [1913]), 12.
9 “Mulberry Tops,” in ibid, 96.
10 “Venus of Milo,” in ibid, 80.
11 Aleister Crowley, Magical and Philosophical Commentaries on The Book of the Law, eds. John Symonds and Kenneth Grant

(Montreal: 93 Publishing, 1974), 222. Note the choice of the word ‘curve,’ which reappears in the same meaning in the
“Thanatos Basileos.”

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Tarot, “Death,” Crowley writes: “The serpent is sacred, Lord of Life and Death, and its method of
progression suggests the rhythmical undulation of those twin phases of life which we call respectively
life and death.”12 Similarly, the poetic summary of the meaning of this Tarot card contains the
following pertinent statement, which connects it closely to the main image of the “Thanatos Basileos”:
“Death is the apex of one curve of the snake Life.”13 And finally, to add just one more example, “The
Atu: Mnemonics” section in The Book of Thoth, summarizes the card “Death” with these lines: “Eagle,
and Snake, and Scorpion! The Dance / Of Death whirls Life from Trance to Trance to Trance.”14
As will become apparent from subsequent quotations, this correlation between life and death is
predicated upon the fact that the soul, or Hadit, is eternal.
The most interesting statement in the “Thanatos Basileos” poem, arguably, lies in its final
word: “plan,” and I would now like to focus on its implications in this particular context. The idea
conveyed goes beyond the mere acknowledgment of the process of reincarnation alluded to in the
poem, since it suggests that “the Master” – another iteration of the theme of the King mentioned in
the title – undergoes the experiences of life and death in a deliberate manner. Put simply, the argument
put forward is that our life was planned; and not only that: it also implies that we have planned it
ourselves. Taken at face value and out of context, this may appear as nothing more than a poetic
fancy – a literary conceit. It may also appear as a mere coincidence that the same word “plan” was
used by Crowley in another poem that expresses the same general idea – the proposition that the
experiential and phenomenal circumstances of one’s incarnation are presented to a person in the form
of one’s own design. The poem I am referring to is the final one of twenty-two short compositions
originally published in The Heart of the Master15 under the heading of “The Two and Twenty Secret
Instructions of the Master,” and subsequently republished in The Book of Thoth16 as part of the section
entitled “General Characters of the Trumps as they appear in use.” The poem is associated with the
Arcanum XXI, “The Universe,” and it goes, in part, like this:

“Treat time and all conditions of Event as

Servants of thy Will, appointed to present the
Universe to thee in the form of thy Plan.”17

12 Crowley, Book of Thoth, 100.

13 Ibid, 258.
14 Ibid, 220.
15 Written in 1925; published in 1938.
16 Published in 1944.
17 Crowley, The Heart of the Master and Other Papers (Tempe, AZ: New Falcon Publications, 1992 [1938]), 93; reprinted in

idem, Book of Thoth, 260.

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Given the importance and originality of the above idea, it will be opportune to provide an overview
of Crowley’s writings that suggest our current life is a result of the deliberate decision on our part by
citing and commenting on pertinent passages in a chronological order (to the extent that is either
possible or convenient). As it will hopefully emerge as an obvious fact, he maintained this position, in
various iterations, consistently and robustly, whether expressed in major theoretical works or in
private letters to his disciples, in poetry, prose, and in fiction. It will also and hopefully become obvious
that the core of the issue concerns the question of the relationship between destiny and free will. The
subject of will is, needless to say, central to Crowley’s doctrine of Thelema, which word itself means
“will” in Greek. While The Book of the Law, the foundational document of Thelema (1904) specifically
mentions “pure will” (AL I: 44), Crowley for the most part operated with the concept of True Will.
While there is a strong tendency, including deliberate obfuscation, to (mis)interpret the fundamental
maxim of Thelema, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” as an expression of
licentiousness, Crowley argued, vehemently one might say, that the opposite is true: this statement
does not mean “do what you like” but instead demands finding one’s true will and living in strict
accordance with it: “thou hast no right but to do thy will” (AL I: 42). Crowley considered “Do what
thou wilt” as “the most sublimely austere ethical precept ever uttered, despite its apparent license.”18
The problem of the exact relationship between free will, true will, and destiny is paramount for the
present discussion and its solution, as already indicated, could be expressed in the following
proposition: freedom of the will consists in recognizing one’s destiny as one’s true will. The practical
outcome concomitant to this realization amounts to a Nietzschean precept of amor fati: the embrace
and acceptance of one’s fate as one’s purpose in life – the difference between the English mystic and
the German philosopher lies in the fact that Crowley emphasizes that personal agency is the root
cause of the shape of one’s destiny. Since the full extent of this argument inextricably implies the issue
of reincarnation, I will treat it simultaneously with the interrogation of the subject of the free will and
destiny. I will now substantiate these remarks with a discussion of selected quotations from Crowley’s
works.
Crowley’s earliest references to the subject of reincarnation were influenced by the Buddhist
doctrinal teachings that he was exposed to, aside from the access to literary sources, through a
friendship with his mentor and former Golden Dawn colleague, Allan Bennett (1872-1923). Crowley’s
gradual distancing from Buddhism influenced also his views on this particular topic. The first major
work in which he proposes personal agency as a deciding factor in the process of rebirth is expressed
in the canon of “The Gnostic Mass” (Liber XV), composed in Moscow in 1913. This text, which
represents “the central ceremony of [O.T.O.’s] public and private celebration, corresponding to the

18 Crowley, Liber ABA, 510.

5
Mass of the Roman Catholic Church,”19 contains, inter alia, a section of eleven Collects, the final one
of which, entitled “The End,” proclaims as follows:

Unto them from whose eyes the veil of life hath fallen may there be granted the
accomplishment of their true Wills; whether they will absorption in the Infinite,
or to be united with their chosen and preferred, or to be in contemplation, or to
be at peace, or to achieve the labour and heroism of incarnation on this planet or
another, or in any Star, or aught else, unto them may there be granted the
accomplishment of their wills; yea, the accomplishment of their wills.20

The difference between the view expressed in the above excerpt from The Gnostic Mass and the
traditional Buddhist – and Hindu – views lies in the fact that according to the position of the
traditional Asian religions, it is the force of one’s previous actions, one’s past karma, that determines
the current conditions of embodiment. Crowley does not fully reject the theory of karma but he
modifies it in such a way that allows him to introduce the concept of volition into the workings of the
process of reincarnation. While the importance of will is obviously paramount in Crowley’s overall
philosophy, to suggest that “the labour and heroism of incarnation” is tantamount to “the
accomplishment of [people’s] wills,” perhaps counterintuitively, simultaneously brings into
correlation the issue of the relationship between free will and fate. Crowley’s solution to the problem
of the nature of their relationship equates the two, one’s will and one’s fate. One of the most explicit
expositions of this idea is given in the following quotation from Liber Aleph, a book written in New
York City in 1918 as a series of letters to Crowley’s ‘magical son,’ Charles Stansfeld Jones (1886-1950);
significantly, the pertinent chapter is entitled “De Harmonia Voluntatis et Parcarum,” i.e. “On the
Harmony of Will and Fate,” and it argues that:

This is the evident and final Solvent of the Knot Philosophical concerning Fate and Freewill,
that it is thine own Self, omniscient and omnipotent, sublime in Eternity, that first didst order
the Course of thine own Orbit, so that that which befalleth thee by Fate is indeed a necessary
Effect of thine own Will.21

There are three major points annunciated in the quote, which otherwise, it bears emphasizing,
consists of one sentence only. First, one’s own Self (or, in Thelemic parlance, Hadit) is “omniscient
and omnipotent” and sublime in Eternity. This is reminiscent of another statement from The Gnostic
Mass, as found in the section that lays out the creed of the Gnostic Catholic Church of the OTO, and

19 Aleister Crowley, The Confessions: An Autohagiography, eds. John Symonds and Kenneth Grant (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1979 [1929]), 714.
20 Aleister Crowley, “Liber XV O.T.O. Ecclesiæ Gnosticæ Catholicæ Canon Missæ,” in idem, Liber ABA, 592.
21 Aleister Crowley, “De Harmonia Voluntatis et Parcarum” (“On the Harmony of Will and Fate”), in idem, Liber Aleph:

The Book of Wisdom or Folly ed. Hymenaeus Beta (York Beach, ME: Weiser Books, 1991), 142.

6
in which it is professed: “And I confess my life one, individual, and eternal that was, and is, and is to
come.”22 Another point to note in the quote from Liber Aleph is that the Self orders the ‘course’ of
‘one’s orbit,’ which is a declaration rather similar to the employment of the word “plan” discussed
previously in a similar context. Finally, the state of affairs described in the quote dictates the
conclusion that what happens to us in the form of our destiny or fate is “a necessary Effect of [our]
own Will.”
The same point of view is expressed in a poem that opens the programmatic text “One Star
in Sight,” written in 1922, in which the full overview of the system of the A.˙. A.˙. – another esoteric
organization that Crowley was deeply involved in -- is described in detail. Two stanzas from the poem
are relevant here and they go like this:

All souls eternally exist,

Each individual, ultimate,
Perfect—each makes itself a mist
Of mind and flesh to celebrate
With some twin mask their tender tryst
Insatiate.
Some drunkards, doting on the dream,
Despair that it should die, mistake
Themselves for their own shadow-scheme.
One star can summon them to wake
To self; star-souls serene that gleam
On life’s calm lake.23

Here, eternity is again attributed to the souls as well as the perfection, which, it needs to be emphasized,
is not reserved for some exceptional cases but is in fact assigned to all. The souls are again described
as engaged in a deliberate activity of entering into the embodied existence by making “a mist of mind
and flesh.” It is to be noted that the souls are not bound to reincarnation by the force of anything
comparable to the idea of impersonal karma operating mechanically, nor are they entering the
material universe as a form of punishment, quite the contrary. The soul incarnates in order “to
celebrate with some twin mask their tender tryst.” Let me pause here for a moment to restate and
reinforce this particular idea with several appropriate quotes from Crowley’s writings. In his Confessions,
published in 1929, he describes the II° of the O.T.O. as being concerned with the “eucharist of life.”
In his New Comment to AL II: 9, written at Cefalù in the early 1920s, he writes that “we understand
the Truth of Things, how all is a dance of Ecstasy.”24 Finally, to provide just one more illustration of
this idea, there is a mention in Liber Aleph of what Crowley designates as the “Great Oath” and which

22 Crowley, “Liber XV,” in idem, Liber ABA, 585.

23 Aleister Crowley, “One Star in Sight,” in idem, Liber ABA, 486.
24 Crowley’s position resembles some Hindu theories, which consider that the universe is a play (līlā) of gods.

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refers to “incarnating without Remission because of Delight in the Cosmic Sacrament.”25 I will interrogate
theological implications of this deliberate intent to incarnate for the purpose of the celebration of the
“tender tryst,” the enjoyment of the “eucharist of life,” or partaking in the “cosmic sacrament,” in
my concluding remarks.

The proposal that it is one’s own ‘omniscient, omnipotent, and eternal’ self who deliberately
decides to incarnate through a self-ordained design that manifests as personal fate or destiny is also a
subject of a discussion of the process of the incarnation of souls in Chapter XVI of Crowley’s novel
Moonchild, published in 1929 but written during his sojourn in the United States during WWI.26 The
entry of the souls into the embodiment is conducted under the leadership of the lunar goddess Artemis
(who Crowley typically pairs with the god Pan), and the process is described as heroic – another
reference to the ‘heroism of incarnation’ mentioned in The Gnostic Mass. The passage describes how
each soul “offered itself to itself, like Odin, when nine windy nights he hung in space, his own spear
thrust into his side” (223), while the heroic aspect of the deed is underlined by a suggestion that “each
act of incarnation is a crucifixion” (224). It is further explained that truly human souls “had long since
made themselves perfect, true images of the cosmos, by accepting the formula of Love and Death;
they had made the great sacrifice again and again; they were veterans of the spiritual world-war, and
asked nothing better than to go back to the trenches” (230).27

The personal agency – and by “person” I mean one’s essential self – involved in the act of
creating causal factors that manifest as one’s destiny is explicitly annunciated in Crowley’s
“Introduction” to the 1938 publication of The Book of the Law, where he argues: “Every event, including
death, is only one more accretion to our experience, freely willed by ourselves from the beginning and therefore
also predestined.”28 In a letter to his disciple Karl Germer, written on March 26, 1943, he again conveys
this important point quite explicitly: “A similar problem arises in regard to the philosophical question
of destiny and True Will. The Thelemic solution is that although every action of ours is determined
by previous conditions, yet the particular series with which we are concerned was originally dictated
by ourselves, I will not say from eternity but in eternity.”29 In a letter to Anne Macky, written on
November 19, 1943, he again similarly insists that “Every experience is a necessary step, and in accord
with one’s True Will, for it is oneself and not another that originally determined the conditions of this

25 Crowley, “De Adeptis R.C. Eschatologia” (“An Eschatology of the Adepts R.C.”), in idem, Liber Aleph, 193. Emphasis
added.
26 See Aleister Crowley, Moonchild: A Prologue (London: Mandrake Press, 1929), 223-32.
27 Note the implication of the bodhisattva ideal in the statement.
28 Crowley, “Introduction,” in The Book of the Law (London: O.T.O., 1938), 16-17; emphasis added.
29 Yorke Collection, letter 628; emphasis in the original.

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life.”30 The same position is reinstated in Crowley’s last major work, Magick Without Tears (published
posthumously): “One is most rigidly bound by the causal chain that has dragged one to where one is;
but it is one’s own self that has forged the links.”31

At this point, one may be expected to ask: if our current embodiment is a result of our own
“plan,” if we have “forged the links” that bind us to the contingencies of our everyday predicament,
if it is ourselves and “not another that originally determined the conditions of this life,” why are then
most if not all of us unaware of this state of affairs, of this “plan?” Some sort of Platonic amnesia has
obviously entered into the process of incarnating into this phenomenal universe within the confines
of our individual minds and bodies as an inescapable condition of the event. To my knowledge,
Crowley does not provide a fully constructed explanatory theory of this aspect of things, but he does
offer some helpful assertions, clues, and allusions. For example, in his “Liber Samekh,” a ritual
specifically composed for the purpose of invocation of one’s Holy Guardian Angel, written at Cefalù
in 1922, he brings up the subject and declares that “the object of Incarnation is to obtain articulate
apprehension of the soul by measuring its reactions to its relations with other incarnated Beings, and
to observe theirs with each other.”32 However, the conditions of incarnation presuppose appropriate
restrictions, as explained in the following segment: “a soul implants itself in sense hoodwinked body
and reason-fettered mind, makes them aware of their Inmate, and thus to partake of its own
consciousness of the Light.” 33 Crowley seems to suggest that the soul intentionally hides for the
purpose – and joy – of self-(re)discovery. Another proposal can be found in Magick Without Tears,
written in the 1940s, where he explains that, as far as the adherents of Thelema are concerned, “our
aim is that our Nothing, ideally perfect as it is in itself, should enjoy itself through realizing itself in the fulfillment
of all possibilities. All such phenomena or ‘point-events’ are equally ‘illusion’; Nothing is always Nothing;
but the projection of Nothing on this screen of the phenomenal does not only explain, but constitutes, the Universe.”34
The previous two examples suggest that on the one hand, the restrictions concomitant to the
condition of embodiment imply that the souls indwell (as ‘inmates’) the imperfect body and mind,
while on the other hand, the illusory nature of the phenomena is likened to an experiential field unto
which the soul projects itself for the purpose of enjoying its possibilities. A chapter in Liber Aleph entitled
“An Allegory of Chess” compares the nature of existence in the phenomenal universe to a game in

30 Qtd. in Tobias Churton, Aleister Crowley in England (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2022), 250-51; emphasis in the

original.
31 Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears (Hampton, NJ: Thelema Publishing, 1954), xxiv. Emphasis added.
32 Crowley, “Liber Samekh,” in idem, Liber ABA, 524.
33 Ibid. Note that the metaphorical language of this passage, which describes the soul’s restrictions conditioned upon

embodiment – body hoodwinked by senses and mind fettered by the reason – resembles the condition of a candidate in
the ceremony of initiation, which they enter literally hoodwinked (or blindfolded) and fettered by ropes.
34 Crowley, Magick Without Tears, 11. Emphases added.

9
which the restrictions, in other words the rules, are actually the factors that provide the enjoyment of
the play. Crowley argues:

Thus unto [the person] this Game is as it were an Illusion. But insofar as he entereth into the
Game he abideth by the Rules thereof, though they be artificial and in no wise proper to his
Nature; for in this Restriction is all this Pleasure. Therefore, though he hath All-Power to move
the Pieces at his own Will, he doth it not, enduring Loss, Indignity, and Defeat rather than
destroy that Artifice of Illusion. Think then that thou hast thyself created this Shadow-world
the Universe, and that it pleasureth thee to watch or to actuate its Play according to the Law that
thou hast made, which yet bindeth thee not save only by Virtue of thine own Will to do thine own
Pleasure therein.35

In the final instance, and by way of conclusion, the theological foundation for the position that the
experience of reincarnation is both a source of pleasure and a learning opportunity for self-discovery
lies in the nature of the two main Thelemic deities, Nuit and Hadit. In simplified terms, Nuit
represents all the infinite possibilities of existence, while Hadit is an essential core of every human
being whose main prerogative is the ability to be conscious (of Nuit).36 Crowley compares them, inter
alia, to Śiva and Śakti, emphasizing their complementarity, which is often described in erotic
metaphors. Their interaction constitutes the universe that a person is conscious of: “The Universe is
a Puppet-Play for the amusement of Nuit and Hadit in their Nuptials; a very Midsummer Night’s
Dream.” 37 A “child” of the “marriage” of Nuit and Hadit is referred to as the ‘Crowned and
Conquering Child,” which is essentially each one of us while embodied in the phenomenal universe.38
And “the whole Universe, and all that in it is, what is it but the infinite playground of the Crowed and
Conquering Child, of the insatiable, the innocent, the ever-rejoicing Heir of Space and Eternity”?
As we have seen illustrated in many instances by relevant quotations, this ‘playground,’ this
“Puppet-Play,” this “Game of Chess” with its restrictions that constitute the rules of the game to be
enjoyed is preordained and ‘planned’ by each of us “in eternity,” so that what manifests to us in the
shape of our lives must indeed be acknowledged as “the identification of Fate with Freewill.”39 But,
and this is crucial, what constitutes an universe for each one of us is equivalent with the extent of our
consciousness: “The ‘Universe’ includes all possible phenomena of which [a person] can be aware.”40
It then follows that, if the purpose behind the soul’s, or Hadit’s, intention to incarnate is so that it
“should enjoy itself through realizing itself in the fulfillment of all possibilities,” this can be rephrased

35 Crowley, “Allegoria de Caissa” (“An Allegory of Chess”), in idem, Liber Aleph, 60.
36 Crowley also defines Hadit, the ‘mate’ of Nuit, as “the ubiquitous point-of-view, the only philosophically tenable
conception of Reality” (Book of Thoth, 115).
37 Crowley, Commentary on AL II: 9 in idem, Law is for All, 95. This is similar to some Hindu theories that suggest the

universe is a playground for the sport of the god(s).

38 Alternatively, the Crowned and Conquering Child is referred to as Horus. “As a result of the marriage of [Nuit and

Hadit], the child Horus is born” (Crowley, Book of Thoth, 115).

39 Crowley, “Notes for an Astral Atlas,” in idem, Liber ABA, 510.
40 Crowley, “Liber Samekh,” in idem, Liber ABA, 529.

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as: the purpose of Hadit is to incarnate so it can became aware of some of the infinite aspects of Nuit.41
This can further be expressed as: the purpose behind incarnation is, ultimately, experience: “This
then is reality: direct experience.”42 And since the experience presupposes consciousness or awareness
of it, it may be argued that Crowley is relatively close to those philosophical positions who privilege
pure consciousness as the ultimate reality and ground of existence. His specific position differs in this
regard: according to the Thelemic doctrine based on The Book of the Law, the pure consciousness, Hadit,
cannot know itself except by way of learning its characteristics through the contact with (or the
knowledge of) Nuit. And so, in the end, we can posit that the purpose of reincarnating over and over
again is, ultimately, as far as Hadit is concerned, “to follow the love of Nu in star-lit heaven” (AL II:
76) and, for each one of us as an embodied being, “To do [our] pleasure on the earth / Among the
legions of the living.”43

41 This also constitutes a form of self-knowledge because it implies that through these experiences Hadit learns its own
forms and capabilities of awareness.
42 Aleister Crowley, Eight Lectures on Yoga (Tempe, AZ: New Falcon Publications, 1991 [1939]), 112.
43 Crowley, “The Mass of the Phoenix,” in idem, Book of Lies, 99.

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