All This And A Book by Cath Thompson; ’Numbering the Letters of the Alphabet’ revisited

In the mid-to-late1970s English Thelemic magician Jim Lees, together with the group he’d gathered around him, started having interesting synchronicities around Crowley’s Liber Al. Particularly the verses that seemed to foretell the discovery of a Qabalah which used the English alphabet. I learned of this work via Ray Sherwin, who was sufficiently impressed with their discoveries to hand over to them the running of his Thelemic magazine The New Equinox. (I never really understood why this transaction happened, because Lees’ group immediately changed the mag’s name to British Journal of Magick. But I guess just having the ‘Equinox’ brand was important.) 

They used that imprint to publish their numerological findings, and I tried out their ‘English Qabalah’ on my own magical word-hoard. For anyone who has never developed a fascination with gematria, let me say that it’s astonishingly moreish, once you get the taste for it - the patterns that emerge have a quality of instant gratification, always with more left to experience. And like other stimulating addictions, it can drive you crazy. Briefly, (for more details see my Lamp of Thoth article ‘The Carthorse, the Orchestra and the God of Silence’, republished in Primordial Chaos), it starts by reordering the English alphabet by starting in the usual place but then jumping 11 letters ahead each time, so the sequence becomes A, L, W, H and so on. These are then attributed to the numbers 1-26. 

This is of course not the only Thelemic English Qabalah. For just one other example, Alan Chapman got results with a very different scheme. It was hard for me to believe there was anything special about the Lees A:.A:. group gematria - except for the fact that they also claimed, convincingly, to have solved two other Liber Al puzzles - the riddle of the ALGMOR string in Ch2, v76 and the line plunging down the page in Ch3 v47. 

At the time I got interested in this work in 1981 I was working with Phoenix Light Lodge, an adventurous group of magicians exploring a range of systems including Qabalah, I Ching astral doorways and the Enochian System. I introduced the ‘English QBL’ to our group; Marion and I realised that the 11-spaces alphabetical jump was one of 12 possible jump-sequences, generating 12 possible gematria, of which their ‘Qabalah of Al’ is one.

As far as I’m aware, no overview of their adventures actually made it into print until over three decades later, when this book came out in 2018. Written by one of the original group members, Cath Thompson, it’s an account of the vividly synchronistic world she found herself living in. She describes it as a personal memoir of ‘Initiation into the Mysteries’, and, with a grandiosity that shows how strong the feel of this work still is for its participants, ‘the most significant evolutionary breakthrough in occult history.’ 

Well, exactly; such proclamations are deeply off-putting for most people, me included. 

But they certainly were onto something; and no way was anyone else in the Thelemic world was doing anything near as exciting. They were living in one of those beautiful storms of synchronicity, with the added sense in their case that they experienced their researches into Al as guided. And the relevant Al output was incredible: the line mentioned in 3:47 really does seem to have been indicating Jim Lees’s actual house! Just stop and imagine the buzz that would give you!  

But I’d never have felt that buzz, because I wasn’t there. And I wouldn’t have been; such groups are self-selecting; I don’t think it could ever have been my thing, that belief in capital-T Truth. 

So what is initiation, in this sense? Thompson writes of being guided through synchronicities, studying, producing magical artworks and having insights and visions into the nature of reality. That phrase so beloved of students of Tradition, ‘Unverified Personal Gnosis’, comes to mind. A UPG, at worst, is when someone has a vision that tells them that, say, the Elder Futhark rune row should start with Ehwaz rather than Fehu. Such a vision is perfectly fine as long as you accept that it’s a truth for you, and for this moment in time. If you claim that it’s got wider validity than that, indeed that other people need to work this way too, to the extent that you go and publish a book about it, like Ralph Blum did about the runes, then you are almost certainly peddling bullshit. 

That’s an obvious example; there are lots of penumbras and grey areas in this issue. What about when your immediate community endorses your gnosis? Once five or six people agree, it becomes much more real. The proof of the validity of the system/s the group is working is, in this case, the Lees A:.A:. initiation itself. The group’s working of the system is a collective working, but each individual realises, in the classic sense of ‘enlightenment’, their own higher truth. The author is writing very much as a mystic rather than as a sorcerer. 

The mashups of gematria revelations Thompson cites are for those who have realised some truth in that sense. She writes: ‘life is eternal and death is just a change of scenery. These are realities as plain as the nose on your face…’ 

Er no. Maybe? Such insights come under ‘you had to have been there’, for me.  

Also, some things will only make sense to other people who’ve dived into the same mysteries in a similar way. Their solution to the ALGMOR mystery, an expanded Qabalistic Tree of Life, strikes me as nearly as obscure as the original mystery. The only way these obscure connections could make any sense is if the reader is guided by higher consciousness, of some kind. Without that, they seem pretty arbitrary. Jm Lees frames their attitude to the work as follows: ‘…it is not possible to judge it; it is alive, and it creates dialogue with the student.’ In Liber Al, Nuit promises ‘certainty, not faith’; the real-life synchronicities around their work must have delivered that. 

This kind of flow of ecstatic rightness can produce the kind of arrogance that comes from taking yourself rather too seriously. In Chaos International #5 Phil Hine reviewed BJM. He was setting the page up when he dropped in to tell me how his computer screen had filled up with the numeral 3. We joked about 333 and Choronzon, and he made light of it in his review. One of the Lees group wrote to CI care of the editor, who by then was Ian Read, addressing him as ‘arseholes’. With no further such outbursts, and making allowances for the raging ecstasy these people found themselves in, one may well forgive. 

The actual incidents in the book make for a good story. The ‘nude witches captured in woods with cannabis’ headlines, and their elegant and generous donation of a tea and coffee machine to the police station where they’d been taken: not sure I’d have felt so generous, but it’s very classy. And there’s a lovely crafting level to it all - casting bronze talismans at dawn with their own casting gear. Their feasts sound terrific; Ray Sherwin was impressed by how glorious those events were.

And who else did anything much with Thelema as a magical current? The OTO is a church-like social club, with all the community and comfort that suggests, and appears to seek only to preserve everything unchanged, not do anything creatively interesting. It astonishes me that no-one really tried to work out what the wonky line and the ‘nonsense’ string in Liber Al were all about. 

They officially ended the group in February 1986 with a ritual at Stonehenge, with the blessing of English Heritage. Thompson continued her own initiatory work under Lees’ guidance, doing standard Thelemic practice. 

It sounds like the English Qaballa stuff was eventually all in the past. Well, you can’t sustain that level of ecstasy indefinitely, can you? I really regret not talking to Jake Stratton-Kent about the English Qabalah while he was alive; to ask him how that ecstasy he took so seriously in 1980 had played out decades later. I’d love to know how he ended up feeling about it after all these years. For instance, that certainty that produces faith: Does it wear off, for some?

Jim Lees and his team may have extracted the biggest mysteries and their solutions from Liber Al. And they cannot be entirely wrong about those two mysteries, because of the degree to which everything fits, between this channeled 1904 text and around ten people and their adventures eight decades later.

So yes, these people experienced a peculiar and protracted gnosis in which it appeared that their lives were being scripted, or at least directed, by… cosmic Other/s. An entity (or entities) going under the name of Aiwass. Which rather begs the question: to what extent can you trust Aiwass to provide you with guidance in your spiritual life? The most famous English magician ever, John Dee, trafficked with Angels who wanted to kill everyone on the planet except for 144,000 chosen ones. Which illustrates that whatever these cosmic entities are, they may not have the best interests of humankind in their hearts. Or, most likely to me, they may be avatars of Trickster: they pose us riddles; we may, in some remote probability, solve those riddles. Then we have had an extraordinary experience, vouchsafed to very few of our species, even magicians. 

What do they do for us, these cosmic Others? Lees' group were taught by a cosmic Other; did It do more than demonstrate the reality of its own existence, under certain specific conditions? Did it really initiate them or were their attainments off their own bats, results of their own understandings of the weirdness that happened to them?

In the end, you have to ask: What was the point of all that? On my version of the Lionel Snell Four Arrows model of culture, this is much closer to Religion than it is to Magic. But then again most Thelema strikes me like that. 

Awe, certainly; one of the driving forces behind my relentless explorations of practical magic, aka sorcery, aka results magic is to make manifest the connection between will and experience. To show that our little human minds are that much bigger than we thought. To show to myself that my love for Goddess is reciprocated, in numerous small ways; a dialogue, that’s sorcery.  To what extent is that different from doing magic to show to yourself that you're in contact with capricious ultraterrestrials? 

I’d strongly recommend this book to all Thelemites, to anyone who’s ever got immersed in gematria and to anyone who puzzles about what it means to contact non-human intelligences.