Liber Astarte vel Berylli (Liber CLXXV)

Liber Astarte vel Berylli, numbered CLXXV, sets out Crowley's method of union with a chosen deity through devotion. Published as a Class B instruction in The Equinox I.7 (1912), it contains paragraphs 0–49 and moves from the choice of a deity and the preparation of a shrine to the interpretation and dangers of the resulting experience. Its central concern is the transformation of attention, affection and daily conduct into one sustained devotion.¹⁾

The title does not require every practitioner to worship Astarte. The text addresses devotion to a particular deity selected by the aspirant, and draws examples from several religious traditions. Its repeated address to the Philosophus places the instruction within the A∴A∴ curriculum.

The opening asks for a deity suited to the aspirant's highest nature and regards gods associated with love as particularly suitable. It also insists upon an appropriate symbolic vocabulary: Christian and Egyptian forms should retain their distinctive character even where Crowley treats their divine objects as corresponding. At the same time, the ceremony should acknowledge something beyond the chosen form.²⁾

This creates a deliberate tension. Devotion must become particular and wholehearted, while the deity is still understood as a limited expression of a greater reality. The warning returns near the end, where Crowley identifies exclusive religious certainty as a possible misinterpretation of a powerful experience.

Later paragraphs complicate the initial guidance by suggesting that a deity remote from the devotee's ordinary nature may lead to a more demanding and significant union. The text presents this through analogies, including chemical combination, rather than as a demonstrated experimental law. It leaves a balance to be struck between aspiration and discretion.³⁾

The heart is identified as the principal place of devotion, with the external shrine representing it. Images, ornaments, incense, music and other features are arranged in relation to the deity. 777 supplies correspondences, but individual understanding and invention remain important. The material environment is intended to keep returning the worshipper to the object of devotion.⁴⁾

Paragraph 6 gives the invocation seven successive relationships:

The sequence widens the emotional vocabulary of devotion. It does not reduce worship to petition or fear: familiarity, trust and love become increasingly prominent. The surrounding ceremony also includes humble work such as preparing and tending the space, so that the relationship is expressed through conduct as well as elevated language.

Paragraphs 15–18 explicitly address people occupied by everyday affairs. Simple objects can serve as consecrated symbols, and the invocation can be concentrated into an inward practice. Even when a fully furnished shrine is available, the outward ceremony is to be internalised.⁵⁾

Eating, sleeping, reading and working become examples of acts whose purpose is related to devotion. The point is not that daily life disappears, but that its activities acquire a common intention. Crowley treats this integration as central to the method rather than as a concession for people unable to afford ceremonial equipment.

The conclusion also says that ordinary human relationships should continue. Other people are to benefit from the work rather than be abandoned for it. This is an important qualification to the text's otherwise intense language of absorption in a single divine object.⁶⁾

The instructions draw upon The Holy Books of Thelema, stories of human and divine love, imagined dialogue and continuous prayer. Stories supply different qualities—such as tenderness, loyalty or intensity—that the devotee is to recognise and bring into relation. Ceremony, meditation and dedicated action are treated as mutually supporting aspects of one work.⁷⁾

Crowley distinguishes the deliberate arrangement of the practices from the feeling they are intended to awaken. Paragraph 30 expresses the relationship through an image:

Yet as a man, rubbing two dry sticks together for long, suddenly found a spark, so also from time to time will true Love leap unasked into thy meditation.

— Aleister Crowley, Liber Astarte vel Berylli.⁸⁾

Rubbing the sticks represents sustained preparation; the spark represents an event that arrives without a direct command. Mechanical repetition and spontaneous feeling therefore have different roles in the same manual. The quotations here follow the later Magick in Theory and Practice appendix, while the article’s other references identify the earlier Equinox printing.

The text also describes silence and dryness, periods in which familiar expressions of devotion cease to feel alive. Its demand for persistence can be severe. These passages belong to Crowley's account of devotional discipline; they should not be treated as a clinical explanation of distress or as a reason to disregard health concerns.

Paragraphs 31–33 distinguish an idea from the material image that represents it. Some people, Crowley suggests, can attend to an abstraction directly; others require an image. The danger is to confuse the symbol with what it expresses.⁹⁾

The same caution applies to correspondences. Two things can resemble one another in a specified relation without becoming identical in every respect. Crowley uses the example of offspring: a divine child and an animal's young can share a structural relationship without being interchangeable objects. Claims of underlying unity do not abolish distinctions in ordinary reasoning.

Love must likewise remain balanced. The example of Othello illustrates how one component, jealousy, can overpower tenderness. The method aims at an integrated affection, not the unlimited amplification of whichever emotion happens to be strongest. This makes Liber Librae a useful companion to the devotional text.

The manual's language of sacrifice is not consistent enough to summarise as simply literal or simply metaphorical. It rejects purposeless self-torture, says bodily health should not be impaired, and strongly condemns mutilation. Elsewhere it invokes punitive discipline and permits dangerous symbolism. A historical account needs to preserve these tensions without turning them into instructions for injury.¹⁰⁾

Its more general distinction is between giving something for the beloved's sake and inflicting suffering that serves only the devotee's preoccupation with himself. That distinction helps explain its criticism of some forms of mortification, even though other passages remain severe.

The intended union is discussed as samādhi, a transformation of the relation between subject and object. Yet the manual warns that the memory of such an experience may harden into the claim that one's chosen deity is the only valid god. Belief is described as an instrument used during the work.¹¹⁾

Paragraph 48 makes one final distinction explicit: this invocation is not to be confused with that of the Holy Guardian Angel. This preserves a distinction between the chosen devotional operation and the particular invocation directed towards that attainment.

Paragraph 43 makes the limit of this particular attainment explicit:

Therefore, after Success, let him not delight overmuch in his Deity, but rather busy himself with his other work, not permitting that which is but a step to become a goal.

— Aleister Crowley, Liber Astarte vel Berylli.¹²⁾

The devotional operation has a place within a larger curriculum. Its intensity is not a reason to identify one successful practice with completion of the whole Great Work.

Brandy Williams contributes Loving Babalon in this short Speech in the Silence recording. It offers an example of contemporary Thelemic devotional expression to place beside Liber Astarte's general discussion of love directed towards a chosen deity. The contribution concerns Babalon; it is not a performance of Liber Astarte's complete programme and does not make Babalon the required object of that instruction.

Loving Babalon by Brandy Williams — Speech in the Silence Podcast; 4:43. Watch on YouTube.