Aleister Crowley’s channelled work, Liber AL vel Legis, or Book of the Law (1904), is riddled, literally, with number and word puzzles that challenge the reader to comprehend. I had a crack at one of the two most famous ones a few months back. That was from Chapter III. This time I’m having a go at the one from Chapter II. It’s in verse 76. Let’s take a look…
76. 4 6 3 8 A B K 2 4 A L G M O R 3 Y X 24 89 R P S T O V A L. What meaneth this, o prophet? Thou knowest not; nor shalt thou know ever. There cometh one to follow thee: he shall expound it. But remember, o chosen one, to be me; to follow the love of Nu in the star-lit heaven; to look forth upon men, to tell them this glad word.
If you scout around online, you will find literally hundreds of proposed solutions to this riddle. Some are adamant that they have the solution, others more reticent. Many seem to base their answers around the Spheres of the Tree of Life. However, the thing that intrigued me personally was an apparent clue in the preceeding verse…
75. Aye! listen to the numbers & the words:
Why should this entity be urging us to “listen” to the numbers and, possibly, the words? One answer I came up with was that the sound of the numbers was perhaps important. Consequently, I wrote out the numbers in English and began to analyse the puzzle like that. This is what it looks like…
Four, six, three, eight, A B K two, four A L G M O R three Y X twenty-four, eighty-nine R P S T O V A L.
I stuck that string into the Gematria Calculator at GemCon and hit “All Ciphers.” Out of some 70 or so different ciphers, what jumped out at me was “Agrippa Ordinal” which gave a value of 888 – the number of the Greek name for Jesus.
This looked interesting. So I tried something else. One of the possible clues that has been uncovered, over the years that people have been trying crack the meaning of this verse, relates to the letter “x” there in the middle and the idea that it might be a times sign – for multiplication. So what I did was to take the part of the riddle before the x and multiply it by the part after. Using Agrippa Ordinal this looked like…
475 x 392 = 186,200
Even though it is many decades since I did physics in school, still this number jumped out at me. It’s almost exactly the speed of light in miles per second.
Being into weird numerological stuff but also of a sceptical nature, I decided to look more into this “Agrippa Cipher,” as I couldn’t discern a reason why some channelled entity, working out of Crowley’s hotel room in Cairo in 1904 might choose to use it to hide some important message. This is what it looks like…
As you can see, it’s really just a Latin alphabet ordinal cipher with the three remaining letters of the English alphabet – j, v and w – tagged on at the end. This seemed promising as I figured perhaps some communicating entity could conceivably have used it, perhaps if it had been active back in Elizabethan times!
Could there be a clue to its use in the odd phrase “Thou knowest not; nor shalt thou know ever” ? It all felt a bit loose. The references to the “following the love of Nu in the star-lit heaven” seemed promising, relating to light. But the line about telling “them this glad word,” not so much.
Before finishing, I took a look at the verse that comes two after…
78. Lift up thyself! for there is none like unto thee among men or among Gods! Lift up thyself, o my prophet, thy stature shall surpass the stars. They shall worship thy name, foursquare, mystic, wonderful, the number of the man; and the name of thy house 418.
Given the context, it seemed to me to perhaps be referring to the various sheaths of the soul, referred to in Kabbalah as, from outermost in, as Nephesh, Ruach, Neshamah, Chaiah and Yechidah. Trapped in the outer two sheaths, it is impossible to believe that one might also be the Lord of Creation. The phrase “thy house 418” intrigued me as, earlier in the text, there’s a line “for from no expected house cometh that child” (LIber AL I:56) – to my mind a clear reference to the idea of virgin birth and its alchemical understanding. But the only thing I could come up with for 418 in this context was the word “Had,” which Liber AL begins with, and is a contraction of Hadit, as Nu is a contraction of Nuit. HAD in English numerology is 814.
In closing, it all looked like something worth writing up, but not really something that possesses that killer tag that destroys all doubt in the human mind.
I hope that you’ve enjoyed this piece of writing.
Devaraj Sandberg, Vicuña, Chile, August 2024