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Liber XXXII · Thelema

Liber XXXII · Thelema · Chapter IV: Thelemic Doctrine

The Aeon of Horus: Thelema's New Age and the Theory of Aeons

The Aeon of Horus in Thelema: Crowley's theory of the Aeons of Isis, Osiris and Horus, the Equinox of the Gods of 1904, and the later Aeon of Maat.

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The Aeon of Horus is the new age of human history that, according to Aleister Crowley, began in 1904 with the reception of The Book of the Law in Cairo. Crowley taught that history passes through great spiritual eras, each named after an Egyptian deity: an Aeon of Isis, the mother, an Aeon of Osiris, the dying father, and now the Aeon of Horus, the "crowned and conquering child". Each age has its own magical formula and its own "Word"; the formula of the new Aeon is the law of Thelema.

The Equinox of the Gods, 1904§

The doctrine of the Aeons grew out of the events in Cairo in the spring of 1904. On the equinox of 20–21 March, Crowley performed an invocation of Horus at the prompting of his wife Rose, whose role is described in Rose Edith Kelly. A few weeks later, on 8–10 April, he wrote down the three chapters of The Book of the Law. The book announced that a new age had begun and that its ruler was Ra-Hoor-Khuit, a form of Horus taken from the Stele of Revealing.

Crowley called this transition the Equinox of the Gods, the title he later gave to his account of the reception (1936). The image is astronomical: just as the sun crosses the equator at the equinox and the seasons turn, so the spiritual "sun" of humanity had passed from one god to another. Crowley dated the Thelemic calendar from 1904, and Thelemites still number years from that point, beginning each year at the spring equinox and counting in cycles of twenty-two years written as a pair of Roman numerals.

Isis, Osiris and Horus: The Three Aeons§

Crowley set the new age within a scheme of three successive Aeons, each named after a member of the Egyptian divine family of Isis, Osiris and their son Horus. For the Egyptian background see Ancient Egyptian Religion.

  • The Aeon of Isis was the age of the mother. Crowley associated it with a prehistoric or early historical period in which the divine was understood through the fertility of nature and the earth, life was thought to flow from woman alone, and religion was centred on the goddess.
  • The Aeon of Osiris was the age of the father. Its spiritual pattern was the death and resurrection of a god, and its religions emphasised sacrifice, sin, suffering and salvation after death. Crowley counted Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism among the religions of this age, which he dated loosely to the last two and a half millennia.
  • The Aeon of Horus is the age of the child. Its keynote is growth rather than death: the individual is understood not as a fallen soul awaiting redemption but as a star with its own course, and the central religious task is to discover and do one's True Will.

Crowley did not tie the Aeons to the astrological ages of roughly 2,150 years used in later talk of an "Age of Aquarius", although popular writers sometimes conflate the two. He suggested that each Aeon lasts about two thousand years but did not treat the figure as exact.

Formulas of the Aeons: The Dying God and the Crowned Child§

In Crowley's magical theory, each Aeon has a characteristic formula, a pattern by which spiritual transformation is achieved. The Golden Dawn had taught the formula IAO, read as Isis, Apophis, Osiris: nature, destruction and resurrection, the cycle of the dying and reviving god. Crowley drew on the comparative study of myth then current, especially James George Frazer's The Golden Bough, which traced the motif of the slain and resurrected god across many religions.

Crowley argued that this formula, appropriate to the Aeon of Osiris, reflected a mistaken belief that the sun dies each night. In fact, he observed, the sun never dies; it is the earth that turns. The new Aeon therefore replaced the formula of death and resurrection with one of continuous growth, symbolised by the child and summed up in the word Abrahadabra, which The Book of the Law names as the reward of Ra-Hoor-Khuit. Crowley discussed these formulae at length in Magick in Theory and Practice. The daily solar adorations of Liber Resh, which salute the sun at its four stations, express the same idea.

The Child Horus: Ra-Hoor-Khuit and Hoor-paar-kraat§

The Horus of the new Aeon is a double god. Ra-Hoor-Khuit is his active, outward form: a warrior lord, enthroned and martial, who speaks the third chapter of The Book of the Law. Hoor-paar-kraat, the Greek Harpocrates, is his passive, inward form: the silent child with a finger to his lips, a symbol of the hidden self. Crowley called their union Heru-ra-ha.

The imagery appears throughout Thelemic art and ritual. In the Thoth tarot, the traditional trump Judgement, which showed the dead rising at the Last Trump, was renamed The Aeon and painted with the sky goddess Nuit, the winged globe of Hadit and the twin figures of Horus, adapted from the Stele of Revealing. The relationship between Horus and the other two speakers of The Book of the Law is explained in Nuit, Hadit and Ra-Hoor-Khuit.

Prophecy, War and the Character of the New Aeon§

Crowley believed that the birth of a new age would be violent, as the old order resisted it. The third chapter of The Book of the Law is full of martial imagery, and Crowley interpreted the World Wars and the political upheavals of the twentieth century as the birth pangs of the Aeon of Horus. He also saw signs of the new age in changing attitudes to sexuality, the emancipation of women, the decline of traditional religious authority and the growing value placed on individual freedom.

Critics, including some sympathetic scholars, have noted that this reading of history is selective and that the harsh rhetoric of the third chapter sits uneasily with modern values. Thelemites themselves differ: some treat the martial passages as descriptions of inner spiritual struggle, others as prophecy of historical events. The idea of a "child" age has also been read psychologically, as a description of a humanity growing out of dependence on parental gods and taking responsibility for itself. The doctrinal framework is set out in Thelemic Doctrine.

Later Readings: The Aeon of Maat and Comparisons§

The theory of Aeons invited further revision. Crowley's student Charles Stansfeld Jones (Frater Achad) announced in 1948 that the Aeon of Maat, named after the Egyptian goddess of truth and cosmic order, had begun, a claim most Thelemites rejected. From the mid-1970s the American writer Nema, later working with a small group called the Horus-Maat Lodge, proposed instead that a current of Maat was already active alongside the Aeon of Horus. The Typhonian writings of Kenneth Grant also discussed Maat, and some currents of Typhonian Thelema speak of a "double current" of Horus and Maat.

Historians have compared Crowley's scheme with older theories of sacred history. The twelfth-century abbot Joachim of Fiore divided history into the ages of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, a pattern that influenced many later millenarian movements. Nineteenth-century writers on comparative religion and the occult, from Gerald Massey to theosophists, also proposed sequences of spiritual ages. Crowley's Aeons belong to this tradition of modern esoteric historiography, which uses a periodisation of the past to announce a new revelation, and they anticipated the broader New Age expectation of a coming spiritual era.

Frequently asked questions§

What is the Aeon of Horus?§

It is the spiritual age that Crowley believed began in 1904 with The Book of the Law. It follows the Aeons of Isis and Osiris and is characterised by individual will and self-realisation, symbolised by the child god Horus.

When did the Aeon of Horus begin?§

Thelemites date it to 1904, specifically to the spring equinox of that year and the dictation of The Book of the Law on 8–10 April. The Thelemic calendar counts years from 1904.

What came before the Aeon of Horus?§

According to Crowley, the Aeon of Isis, the age of the mother, and then the Aeon of Osiris, the age of the father and of religions centred on sacrifice and the dying god.

What is the Aeon of Maat?§

It is a proposed future or parallel age named after the Egyptian goddess of truth, announced by Frater Achad in 1948 and developed by later writers such as Nema. Most Thelemites hold that the Aeon of Horus is still in progress.

Sources and further reading§