Welcome everyone and happy new year! This is the first episode of 2021, and as such I’ve decided to try something different! A couple of you fine folks, including I believe one of my patrons, the fantastic Kemetic artist Setken, expressed interest in me divulging more of the story of Egyptian stele 666 and the founding of one of the first Egyptian revival religious movements of the modern era, the Temple, or Church of Thelema. So I’m pleased to say that’s the story I’ll be exploring today. This is a new format that I’m experimenting with – I’m hoping to do more, though I’ve found they take substantially longer to write and record these than hosting interviews! (So ...expect more interviews!) 

Crowley is a figure who looms large in my youth – in my earliest explorations of magic, and in particular Egyptian magic, he’s the figure that most folk pointed me towards. Back then (early 90s) there was no real Internet to speak of, so knowledge was traded through conversation ('conversations' were like podcasts, but not recorded for upload) and books. It was a very different, somewhat piecemeal approach to discovering a new subject, where generally the effort outweighed the rewards – through my various readings in paganism, ceremonial magick and Egyptian esoterica, I stumbled upon the Book of the Law and Thelema, and took an interest in both, though I was never a member or practitioner thereof. This episode is kind of a summation of things I learned back then, and I hope you find it as fascinating as I do.

This is the story of how the so-called wickedest man in the world started a movement, some consider a religion, in the early 20th century  - it was based on ancient Egyptian gods and a book dictated by a holy spirit, or so it was claimed. It was a book that would confound readers for decades, inspire volumes of study despite strict guidance against such practice, and even, some claim, predicted a century of war, which would be proven correct by the two biggest conflicts the world had ever seen. This is the story of Aleister Crowley, stele 666, an Egyptian priest called Ankh af na Khonsu, and the Aeon of Horus.

This is the story of The Book of The Law.

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