Yes H.P. Lovecraft dreamed of his dark amorous gods, Aleister Crowley saw them personally. Such is the case of Aiwass, an angel who, according to Crowley, dictated to him the controversial Book of the Law (Liber Al vel Legis) on April 8, 9 and 10, 1904.
Aleister Crowley mentions that first he heard a scary voice that said, in impeccable English:
He then determined that the name corresponded to the Egyptian Har-par-khered, or, in its Greek version, to Harpocrates, who in the extravagant conception of Aleister Crowley would be none other than Horus, the central deity of his cosmogony.
Aiwass introduced himself as a supernatural voice that floated over Aleister Crowley's desk in Cairo, Egypt. Then he moved to his left shoulder and began to dictate from a corner of the room. Its modulation was confused, indeterminate, changing, as the occultist briefly stated in his personal diary:
(of deep timbre, musical and expressive, its tones solemn, voluptuous, tender, fierce or aught else as suited to the moods of the message, Not bass, perhaps a rich tenor or baritone).
Then he composed a drawing of Aiwass quite finished, where it is revealed composed of a fine material, translucent, high; of delicate features. Whenever asked to detail Aiwass's face, Aleister Crowley said that his face was that of a savage king (Savage King), whatever he understood as king or savage.
But Aiwass has nothing to do with the notion of "angel" that any of us could elaborate. The angel of Aleister Crowley is different to all, even to the fallen angels. Overcome by the emotion of believing himself "contacted" by a superior intelligence, Crowley hailed:
The existence of religion presupposes the certainty of some disembodied intelligence, call it God or anything else. And this is exactly what no religion has been able to demonstrate scientifically ... The immense superiority of this particular intelligence, Aiwass, to any other with which humanity has been in conscious communication is revealed not only by the character of the book itself , but by the fact of its absolute understanding of the evidence necessary to demonstrate its own existence and the conditions that govern it.
Later, Aleister Crowley surmises that Aiwass, perhaps, is just a minuscule manifestation of a heavenly power, and identifies him with his own guardian angel or guardian angel.
The interesting thing is that any explanation that falls on Aiwass, be it a vulgar guardian angel, a spirit, or Crowley's own unconscious, his appearance is truly amazing. One of his biographers, Israel Regardie, estimates that it does not matter if Aiwass is an angel or Crowley's unconscious. Both possibilities are, in every rule, supernatural.
Other scholars, such as Sarah Vale or Joshua Gunn, estimate that Aiwass's narrative style is too similar to Aleister Crowley's to be a foreign entity. The most probable and, I repeat, equally amazing, is that Aiwass is Crowley's subjective idealization of his own personality. This often happens at a minuscule level, almost spurious, where we imagine ourselves full of virtues and amazing intellectual qualities. The curious thing is that idealization here takes on a physical form, a voice, a name, and a doctrine.
Moreover, the cabalistic coincidences of the name Aiwass reveal a strong unconscious component in their materializations. For example, typographer Samuel A. Jacobs, who did not know Aleister Crowley personally, wrote him a letter mentioning that his own name, in Hebrew, was written: Shmuel Bar AIWAZ bie Yackou. Intrigued, Crowley asked him how he would write "Aiwass" in Hebrew, to which Jacobs replied polemically: "OIVZ". When doing numbers, Crowley, perplexed, surely jumped from his chair when estimating that this formula equals the number 93, a figure that coincides with the central number of Thelema, the doctrine dictated by Aiwass himself.
The voice and the silhouette of Aiwass were diluted like a dream that we did not finish waking up. Aleister Crowley, who was in fact a remarkable poet, chose the path of analysis and esoteric rationalism to explain the enigmatic mechanisms of his own psyche, perhaps connected with "sensitivities" of a higher order. Other men, perhaps more sensible, connected their terrifying visions with the noblest vehicle we possess to express that which has no positive expression: art. Such is the case of the extravagant visions of William Blake or the gelatinous phantasmagoria of H.P. Lovecraft.
It is worth clarifying that the medium does not modify the end. In other words, it does not matter if we poetize about our visions or candidly consign them as concrete facts, in the end, the stellar winds and gigantic forms that emerge and collapse behind the worlds end up annihilating anyone who dares to observe them directly.
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