Aeon (Thelema)

The first Aeon, of Isis, was maternal. The female aspect of the Godhead was revered due to a mostly matriarchal society and the idea that "Mother Earth" nourished, clothed and housed man closed in the womb of Matrix. It was characterized by pagan worship of the Mother and Nature. In his Equinox of the Gods Crowley describes this period as "simple, quiet, easy, and pleasant; the material ignores the spiritual."[4]

Lon Milo DuQuette remarked that this aeon was "the Age of the Great Goddess", and that it had originated in prehistory, reaching its zenith at "approximately 2400 B.C." Continuing with this idea, he remarked that this period was when "the cult of the Great Goddess" was truly universal. She was worshipped by countless cultures under myriad names and forms. It would also be a mistake for us to conclude that the magical formula of this period manifested exclusively through the worship of any particular anthropomorphic female deity. For, like every aeon, the magical formula of the Aeon of Isis was founded upon mankind's interpretation of the 'perceived facts' of nature, and our Isian-age progenitors perceived nature as a continuous process of spontaneous growth."[5]

The classical and medieval Aeon of Osiris is considered to be dominated by the paternal principle and the formula of the Dying God. This Aeon was characterized by that of self-sacrifice and submission to the Father God while man spoke of his father and mother. Crowley says of this Aeon in his Heart of the Master:

Formula of Osiris, whose word is IAO; so that men worshiped Man, thinking him subject to Death, and his victory dependent upon Resurrection. Even so conceived they of the Sun as slain and reborn with every day, and every year.

Crowley also says of the Aeon of Osiris in Equinox of the Gods:

The second [Aeon] is of suffering and death: the spiritual strives to ignore the material. Christianity and all cognate religions worship death, glorify suffering, deify corpses.

The modern Aeon of Horus is portrayed as a time of self-realization as well as a growing interest in all things spiritual, and is considered to be dominated by the principle of the child. The Word of its Law is Thelema (will), which is complemented by Agape (love), and its formula is Abrahadabra. Individuality and finding the individual's True Will are the dominant aspects; its formula is that of growth, in consciousness and love, toward self-realization. Concerning the Aeon of Horus, Crowley wrote:

... the crowned and conquering child, who dieth not, nor is reborn, but goeth radiant ever upon His Way. Even so goeth the Sun: for as it is now known that night is but the shadow of the Earth, so Death is but the shadow of the Body, that veileth his Light from its bearer. (Heart of the Master)

And also, in his Little Essays Toward Truth:

The Aeon of Horus is here: and its first flower may well be this: that, freed of the obsession of the doom of the Ego in Death, and of the limitation of the Mind by Reason, the best men again set out with eager eyes upon the Path of the Wise, the mountain track of the goat, and then the untrodden Ridge, that leads to the ice-gleaming pinnacles of Mastery![6]

Lon Milo DuQuette commented on the connection that the Aeon of Horus had to the Age of Aquarius when he stated that "Yes, [the Aeon of Horus] is coincidental to what astrologers and songwriters call the Age of Aquarius and what millions of others refer to simply as the New Age. But it would be a mistake to view this new aeon simply as another tick on a great cosmic clock. The Age of Aquarius, profoundly significant as it is, is only one aspect of a far greater new spiritual age."[3]

Sometimes Crowley compared the Word of Horus with other formulas, whose reigns appear to overlap with the Aeon of Osiris and/or Isis. From his The Confessions of Aleister Crowley:

There are many magical teachers but in recorded history we have scarcely had a dozen Magi in the technical sense of the word. They may be recognized by the fact that their message may be formulated as a single word, which word must be such that it overturns all existing beliefs and codes. We may take as instances the Word of Buddha-Anatta (absence of an atman or soul), which laid its axe to the root of Hindu cosmology, theology and psychology, and incidentally knocked away the foundation of the caste system; and indeed of all accepted morality. Mohammed, again, with the single word Allah, did the same thing with polytheisms, patently pagan or camouflaged as Christian, of his period.

Similarly, Aiwass, uttering the word Thelema (with all its implications), destroys completely the formula of the Dying God. Thelema implies not merely a new religion, but a new cosmology, a new philosophy, a new ethics. It co-ordinates the disconnected discoveries of science, from physics to psychology, into a coherent and consistent system.[7]

Aleister Crowley believed that the Aeon of Ma'at will succeed the present one.[2] According to one of Crowley's early students, Charles Stansfeld Jones (a.k.a. Frater Achad), the Aeon of Ma'at has already arrived or overlaps the present Aeon of Horus.[8]

Crowley wrote:

I may now point out that the reign of the crowned and Conquering Child is limited in time by The Book of the Law itself. We learn that Horus will be in his turn succeeded by Thmaist, the Double-Wanded One; she who shall bring the candidates to full initiation, and though we know little of her peculiar characteristics, we know at least that her name is justice.[9]

• Bogdan, Henrik (2012). "Envisioning the Birth of a New Aeon: Dispensationalism and Millenarianism in the Thelemic Tradition". In Bogdan, Henrik; Starr, Martin P. (eds.). Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 89–106. ISBN 978-0-19-986309-9. OCLC 820009842.
• Crowley, Aleister (1969). The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. Hill and Wang. ISBN 0-80903-591-X.
• Crowley, Aleister (1974). The Equinox of the Gods. New York: Gordon Press. ISBN 978-0879681579.
• Crowley, Aleister (1996). "Mastery". Little Essays Toward Truth. Tempe, AZ: New Falcon Publishing. ISBN 978-1561840007.
• DuQuette, Lon Milo (2003). The Magick of Aleister Crowley: A Handbook of Rituals of Thelema. San Francisco and Newburyport: Weiser. ISBN 1578632994.
• Nema (1995). Maat Magic: a Guide to Self-Initiation. York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser. ISBN 0-87728-827-5.