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Subject: VHMaroney: Who Was Aiwass?
Date: 27 Mar 1999 02:12:12 -0800
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[from thelema93-l@hollyfeld.org: VH Maroney <vh@maroney.org>]

>I am inclined to believe that Aiwass is as
>much Crowley as Choronzon, irrelevant of his later claims to have met him
>in NY, and that he turned out to be an Iraqi  who made his living printing
>US citizenship pamphlets in Arabic, and solved several of the Cabalistic
>puzzles to the BOTL writing letters to the editor to the International.

I am not familiar with any claims by Crowley that this man, Samuel bar 
Aiwaz bie Yackou de Sherabad ("Magick", 1994 ed., p. 499), was the Aiwass 
of Cairo who dictated the Book of the Law. Where does Crowley identify 
the winning contestant in pin-the-666-on-the-beast as his HGA?

>As Crowley once is said to have answered when asked who was really the
>author of the Book of the Law?  "Why of course I WAS."  

Could I please have a reference for this? I'd like to see the context. 
These questions of authorship are very interesting.

It is possible Crowley consciously wrote the book himself. In an 
unpublished draft of the Collected Works referenced by HB in "Magick" (p. 
xliv) Crowley writes that he came into possession of the manuscript in 
1906, a significant dating anomaly that throws the Cairo account into 
question. This date also appears on the title page of the manuscript 
itself, the original handwritten version of the note for the Collected 
Works. Apparently the 1904 date does not appear in the Collected Works 
typescript -- perhaps one of our Austin residents could check on this at 
Ransom? -- so it seems reasonable to assume that the date of "April 8, 9, 
10, 1904" that also appears on the title page was added later than the 
note on the 1906 date. In 1909 Crowley (rather unconvincingly) added a 
note to the title page that his coming into possession of the ms. in 1906 
only meant he had not yet become its master. If so, he was willing to 
give a very misleading account when he wrote this on the title page and 
considered putting it into his Collected Works: "This MS (which came into 
my posession in July 1906) is a highly interesting example of genuine 
automatic writing." He would later say that it was not automatic writing 
and that it came into his possession in 1904.

To make any sense of this account, we have to grant that he was willing 
to mislead the reader as to the origins of the book at least once. Given 
that, we might wonder why we should prefer the later "Cairo revelation in 
1904" account to the earlier "automatic writing in 1906" account.

There was only one other witness to the Cairo working, and I don't know 
that she ever corroborated his account. He for his part did everything in 
his power to try to discredit her, perhaps in a kind of pre-emptive 
strike, or perhaps simply because he was being obnoxious (as was his 
wont).

Do we have evidence that the book existed before 1906?

--
VH Maroney vh@maroney.org    http://www.maroney.org
"The world is made possible, in part, by murk."
EOF