ALEISTER CROWLEY & THE YI KING

Matthew Levi Stevens

ALEISTER CROWLEY & THE YI KING
Matthew Levi Stevens

The origins of the Ancient & Venerable Chinese Oracle known variously as the Yi-
jing or Yi King, or I-Ching or Book of Changes are shrouded in the mists of Time,
allegedly attributed to the Ancient Shamans of China some 4,000 years ago.
Developed by the legendary first emperor of China and later by the venerable
philosopher Confucius, it was later evolved into a sophisticated system that has
brought wisdom and guidance to generations both in the East and the West.
As if any introduction is needed, Aleister Crowley was, if nothing else, an explorer
in mind, body, and spirit and a seeker after new sensations, new knowledge, and
new insights. Unlike many of his illustrious literary and Golden Dawn
contemporaries, whose idea of the Mystic East might well have been an opium den-
cum-knocking shop behind a Chinese laundry in Whitechapel, the not inconsiderable
inheritance that the young Crowley received at the age of 21 enabled him to travel and
explore extensively, in the realm of the geographical as much as it did in those of sex,
drugs, and occultism. However, it is beyond the brief of this essay to outline either an
extensive history of the Chinese Oracle, or for that matter yet another biographical
study of the Wickedest Man in the World. What I propose instead is to attempt an
outline of the intersection and overlap between the two.
Quite when and how The Great Beast made the acquaintance of the I-Ching (or Yi
King as was his preferred usage, and the one I will stick to hereafter unless directly
quoting another source) is unsure: despite the almost exhaustive description of his
spiritual studies en route to joining the Golden Dawn given in his Confessions, and
the (some would say libellous) extent of the descriptions of his investiture into that
Order published in The Equinox, nowhere does he make clear when or how he came
into contact with the Oracle. The most likely explanation is that his interest dates from
a visit to San Franciscos China Town in 1900. However, even though his Confessions
enthuses about his visit there, and then goes on to describe in some detail his journey
via Honolulu to Yokohama to Shanghai, to eventually catch up with his former
Golden Dawn-sponsor now turned Buddhist monk Allan Bennett in Ceylon
including much discussion of Buddhism, and his practices of yoga and asana with
Bennett there is still no reference to the Oracle. Then, in 1905-06, he embarked on
his walk across China, an odyssey that that took him from the Burmese border
across the Yunnan Province and ending in Shanghai (all the time attempting to
complete the perilous Abramelin Working that he had unwisely left unfinished after
his start at Boleskine House, overlooking Loch Ness...)
At the end of the following year, December 13th, 1907, Crowley penned Liber
Trigrammaton XXVII, synthesizing the Chinese duality of Yin/Yang (represented
by the solid and broken lines of the Yi King) with the Tao (represented in this system
by a dot), resulting in a series of 27 trigrams for which he wrote brief commentary
texts. (As a measure of Crowleys assessment of the value of this work, he considered
it on a par with the Stanzas of Dzyan the supposed sacred received texts upon
which Blavatskys epic The Secret Doctrine, the cornerstone of her Theosophical
Movement, was a comment.) Indeed, for Crowley the last months of 1907 were a
period of heightened creativity & reception of inspired texts: Oct 30th Liber VII;
Nov 3rd Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente; Nov 25th Liber LXVI Stellae Rubae; Dec
3rd Liber Arcanorum sub figura CCXXXI; Dec 11th & 12th Liber Porta Lucis;
Dec 13th Liber Tau, Liber Trigrammaton XXVII; and then finally that Winter
Liber DCCCXIII vel Ararita: in short, most of the Holy Books of Thelema and all
of them detailing forms of Initiation or Oracle. Later, during his retirement on
Aesopus Island in the Hudson River, New York in 1918 he produced rhyming
versions of the Daodejing (Tao Teh King) and Ge Yuans Qingjingjing (Khing Kang
King); but most of his written material that relates specifically to the Yi King was
produced during his time at Cefalu in the 1920s.
Too few people are aware that Crowley produced his own unique version of the Yi
King, yet he himself believed that one of his greatest achievements was the
identification of the trigrams with the sephiroth of the Qabalistic Tree of Life. Indeed,
in his own surprisingly and perhaps uncharacteristically terse introduction to his
edition, he states:
The Yi King is mathematical and philosophical in form. Its structure is
cognate with that of the Qabalah; the actual apparatus is simple, and five
minutes is sufficient to obtain a fairly detailed answer to any but the most
obscure question.
Until he came up with his own rhymed version, or mnemonic paraphrase, of the
judgments and line texts of the Yi, Crowley would have relied on the nineteenth
century translation made by James Legge, which appeared as part of the Sacred Books
of the East series, and it is from this that Crowley retained the lifelong habit of
referring to the Oracle as the Yi King, or the Yi for short. (Interestingly, Crowleys
personal copy of the book survives, and the notes are often more revealing of the
Beasts thoughts than the more formal commentary: its limitations occasioned not
only Crowleys rhymed version but also notes of exasperation in the margins of his
copy. On the title page, he has amended the authors name to read Wood N Legge!)
There is no doubting Crowleys personal faith in the Yi: looking at the published
editions of his diaries, such as The Magical Record of the Beast 666 (edited by
Symonds & Grant from Crowleys diaries for 1914-1920, and including the sex-
magickal record Rex De Arte Regia), he appears to have consulted it almost daily for
a period of several years. In fact he took a number of crucial decisions in his life based
on his interpretation of the Yis advice, including the situating of his infamous Abbey
of Thelema at Cefalu in Sicily. Indeed, when the local police attempted to evict the
members of the College of the Holy Ghost on orders from Mussolinis Fascist
regime, it was again the Yis Hexagram XVIII, Ku, which was read to mean Cross
the water an uncivilized country; a country in which the family is more important
than the state that lead Crowley to Tunisia, where he was to keep the journals that
were published in as The Magical Diaries of Aleister Crowley (Tunisia 1923) edited
by Stephen Skinner. In October 2007, Crowleys Royal Court Diary for 1928 turned
up at a Bloomsbury Book Auctions sale in New York, and an informant gave me an
interesting description of some of its contents, with particular reference to the Yi King
and its baring on Crowleys often tempestuous love-life:
...A major concern for much of the year was his relationship with Kasimira
Bass. The affair seems to have gone well for the first half of the year, with
many notes of prolonged love-making, of initiating her into various mysteries
of his magick... so that by June he was consulting the Yi about the possibility
of marriage, but in July things deteriorated rapidly and on November 3rd he
writes: Kasimira bolted. The Lord hath given & the Lord hath taken away.
Blessed be the name of the Lord. Then, Nov 8th the name of Marie Therese de
Miramar A creole Cuban-born in Nicaragua to change the luck appears,
and by the 14th Crowley writes of consecrating their partnership and noting
that She has absolutely the right ideas of Magick & knows some Voudoo.
Nov 19th: She is marvellous beyond words, but excites me too much, so that I
cannot prolong..! At the end of the day, neither romance nor passion
influenced the decision: Crowley had to marry de Miramar to get her into the
country, ignoring the Yis warning of May 13th (Hexagram XX, Kwan) a rash
act, huffing to himself I know that! They were married in August 1929, but
separated in 1930.
As the 1930s progressed, Crowley became ever more absorbed with the Yi King: he
sought its advice throughout the Autumn of 1933 about his attempted libel trial over
Nina Hamnets depiction of him in her colourful memoir, Laughing Torso; and
then things got more serious the following year with the publication of Betty Mays
Tiger Woman, in which her lurid account of the time spent at Cefalu portrayed
Crowley as a monstrous degenerate, responsible for the death of her unfortunate
young husband, Raoul Loveday, the whole thing blown up into the Black Magic libel
case. From the start of 1937, Crowley sought diversion by absorbing himself more
and more in the study of the Yi King. It is interesting to think about his meeting with
the young man Lawrence Miles, who would eventually become known as Shri
Gurudev Mahendranath: in his own account, The Londinium Temple Strain (which
can be read online: www.mahendranath.org/londinium.mhtml ) he describes how he
met The Magus at Chancery Lane High Court, after the Nina Hamnett case, and that
they struck up a kind of friendship:
The Mage invited me to visit him in his Jermyn Street flat, and these visits
became more and more numerous. The press which had slandered him at every
opportunity never once expressed any of his ideals or teachings. Thus when I
had opportunities to meet him, he revealed a vast store of knowledge on a
variety of subjects. I not only realized that the much libelled Aleister Crowley
was probably the most far out and advanced thinker at the time, but as well as
being a natural born magician, he possessed a knowledge of both yoga and the
I Ching which was superior to that of any other European. During our
conversations in London, he reached a conclusion and advised me to seek more
knowledge of yoga and the I Ching; these, he felt, would help people to contact
their Guardian Spirit more easily. In relation to higher yoga his judgment was
sound, for meditation is undoubtedly an important key. With the I Ching, the
position still needs understanding, but I do think it may be there...
Another breakthrough with regard to the Yi King, is that according to Perdurabo by
Richard Kaczynski, on June 7th 1937 Crowley recovered his own personal set of
Oracle sticks. Now it was this particular matter of Crowleys I-Ching sticks that had
first aroused my personal interest: I remembered as a youth reading an entry for
January 12th, 1920 in The Magical Record of the Beast 666 in which Crowley had
remarked I had invoked Aiwaz to manipulate the Sticks* but what had intrigued
me the most was the relevant footnote: *The six lines of the hexagrams of the Yi
King. Crowley used six equal strips of tortoise-shell, on one side of which was a
broken line, on the other an unbroken line. It would be some years before I would
read anything more on the subject: in the early 1980s, I was sent a photocopy of an
article entitled On Knowing Aleister Crowley Personally from the (Caliphate)
O.T.O. Newsletter, which for the main part seemed to consist of reminiscences by
Grady McMurtry about being overpaid, oversexed, and over here during WWII,
but did contain the following paragraph that I think warrants quoting in full:
...He was in the progress of taking an oracle from the I Ching. It was the one
time I saw him using his I Ching sticks (which I was able to recover from the
library after the court order decreeing that his library belonged to the O.T.O.
under my conservatorship). They look like this. [There was a sketch in the
original, I think.] The blank side is the male (Yang, energy) side. The divided
side (looks like red nail polish to me) is the female (Yin, receptive) side. By my
ruler they are less than an 8th of an inch in thickness, but slightly more than a
16th thick. They either were mahogany or teak or stained dark to look so... The
way Crowley used them was to shuffle them (with his eyes closed) then take
them one at a time and, holding each one upright with his right forefinger (eyes
still closed), get a signal and lay it down either right or left. First stick down is
the bottom line. You can also get moving lines this way. If one of the sticks
wants to move when you lay it down, just shove it right or left as indicated.
Personally I like this method of taking the Oracle. It gives you a chance for
your Angel to communicate directly through your fingertips.
It is perhaps a sad afterword to this particularly bearing in mind Gradys words
about the court-order decreeing that the O.T.O. and Crowleys library should be
under his conservatorship to read in An Epistle on Aleister Crowleys I-Ching
Sticks by J. Edward Cornelius that:
Grady McMurtry always carried Crowleys I-Ching sticks in a small pouched
[sic] attached to his belt by leather straps. It is with great regret that I learned
that the original sticks were accidentally lost one summer night while Grady
was partying on a beach near San Francisco.
Ah well, as The Master Therion remarked himself in one of his magical journals:
The Lord hath given & the Lord hath taken away.
As a last word on Crowleys Yi sticks, browsing through Kenneth Grants touching
memoir Remembering Aleister Crowley, there is a comment towards the end where
he explains how it was Crowleys practice to send out on the first days of Spring and
Autumn the Word, Oracle, and Omen of the Equinox:
In his earlier years, Crowley obtained the Word with the help of Sexual
Magick. How he received it in his last years, I do not know. The Oracle, on the
other hand, was obtained by opening at random The Book of the Law... The
Omen was derived from the Chinese Book of Changes (Yi King). His method
was to empty his mind and then to manipulate six flat pieces of tortoise-shell,
approximately 1 by 5 in size. As the pieces fell they formed a figure, or
hexagram, which Crowley then accepted as the Omen for the coming six
months. As his diaries show, they were sometimes remarkably accurate.
Crowley was probably the first modern Westerner to actually regularly divine using
the Yi. In my researches for this article, any attempts to try and pin down Crowleys
nearest mystical and magical contemporaries with regard to the Oracle were evasive,
to say the least. In his book Soul Flight, Donald Tyson states - There is little doubt
that members of the Golden Dawn employed the I-Ching hexagrams as astral portals
I presume in much the same way that we know that they made use of the tattvas, but
as he does not indicate which members or when, he is of little real help. A Golden
Dawn website describes the colourful and forceful founder-member Florence Farr as -
Quite adept at the Enochian System and the I-Ching, but it was skrying in the Spirit
Vision that was her forte... but again, without a date or a source this is of little help.
Both Crowley himself and his later student Dr. Israel Regardie could be described as
...members of the Golden Dawn [who] employed the I-Ching hexagrams as astral
portals, but that is by no means the same as saying that they were actually introduced
to the Oracle or such practices by the venerable and Hermetic Order itself. As for the
nearest other fellow traveller, Madame Blavatskys Theosophical Society
coincidentally founded the year of Crowleys birth there seems to be little in her
otherwise encyclopaedic works to suggest an interest in or even an awareness of
anything further Eastern of origin than India or Tibet...
Whether Aleister Crowley was or was not the first contemporary thinker and explorer
of comparative religions and key synthesizers of what he would now doubtless
shudder to think of as the New Age to make use of and explore the I-Ching, he may
well still have a more important place in the history of the Yi here in the West. The
former Wickedest Man in the World was rediscovered by the Hippy generation of
the 1960s, his shaven head scowling down from among the grand and groovy on the
cover of The Beatles LP Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band just as the I-Ching
itself was being rediscovered and the Ancient and Venerable Oracle popularised
amidst the heady atmosphere of incense and peppermints. In the popular
consciousness, or perhaps unconsciousness, that was fuelled by sex n drugs n
rock n roll, that has gone on unwittingly or not to nurture the Occulture of today,
the Great Beasts Do what Thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law probably didnt
seem that different to Do your own thing, man - even if your average drop-out of
drugs, deviancy & diabolism has no more idea now than then of the Divine nature of
that Will that Crowley championed, as much as he fought against it as well all his
life...
Maybe the two arent so different after all, and maybe the Great Cosmic Wheel is
ready for just one more turn as the children of the Children of the Sixties decide its
time to choose just whose Love and Will they want to base their Law on.
May they choose their Oracles with care this time.







Aleister Crowley & The Yi King was originally commissioned by The Atlantis Bookshop, London, for
Crowleymas 2008. It was published in a Limited Edition, along with The Master Therions Liber
CCXVI , and an Introduction, Coins of Ko Yuen, by Thelemic artist Gary Dickinson, along with his
painting of the same name on the cover.
A second strictly limited edition was published 1
st
December 2012 by Wholly Books of Guildford for
Subscribers Only, with accompanying artwork by the authors partner, Emma Doeve.
Love is the Law, Love Under Will.














Bibliography & Reference:

A Magic Life: The Life of Aleister Crowley by Martin BOOTH (2000)
The Secret Doctrine by H.P. BLAVATSKY (1888)
The Essential Golden Dawn by Chic & Sandra Tabatha CICERO (2003)
An Epistle on Aleister Crowleys I-Ching Sticks by J. Edward CORNELIUS (most likely available at
the web-address: www.cornelius93.com/EpistleCrowleysICHING.html )
The Confessions: An Autohagiography by Aleister CROWLEY (1929; revised 1969)
The Equinox edited by Aleister CROWLEY (1909-1913; 1919; 1939; 1944)
The Holy Books of Thelema by Aleister CROWLEY (collected 1983)
Aleister Crowley & The Hidden God by Kenneth GRANT (1973)
Cults of the Shadow by Kenneth GRANT (1975)
The Magical Revival by Kenneth GRANT (1972)
Remembering Aleister Crowley by Kenneth GRANT (1991)
Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley by Richard KACZYNSKI (2002)
The Magical World of Aleister Crowley by Francis KING (1987)
The Londinium Temple Strain by Shri Gurudev MAHENDRANATH (currently available at the web-
address: www.mahendranath.org/londinium.mhtm )
On Knowing Aleister Crowley Personally by Grady McMURTRY (originally published in the O.T.O.
Newsletter, Berkeley, CA; and can currently be read online at:
www.geocities.com/athens/acropolis/1896/knowingac.html )
The Eye in the Triangle by Israel REGARDIE (1970)
The Golden Dawn: A Complete Course In Practical Ceremonial Magic by Israel REGARDIE (1989)
The Magical Diaries of Aleister Crowley (Tunisia 1923) ed. by Stephen SKINNER (2003)
The Great Beast by John SYMONDS (1952)
The Magical Record of The Beast 666 ed. by John SYMONDS & Kenneth GRANT (1972)
Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley by Lawrence SUTIN (2000)
Soul Flight by Donald TYSON (2007)