Liber AL and the Zeitgeist
When Liber AL vel Legis, the Book of the Law, was received by Aleister Crowley in the Spring of 1904 c.e., human awareness was about to be advanced in a number of significant ways. The Book of the Law was taken down as dictation, from the spiritual intelligence named Aiwass, less than four months after the first recorded powered flight by the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The following year, both Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein published pivotal papers in their fields of study. These four events, spanning late 1903 through 1905, would lead to profound changes in the way human beings regard themselves and the world in which they live. The full effects of these changes have yet to be realised a hundred years after their inception. In the case of Liber AL vel Legis, we have barely scratched the surface.
Lowell Thomas
In 1919, showed motion-picture scenes of T. E. Lawrence charging with Bedouin horseback riders, as photographed by cameraman Harry Chase, with a hand crank movie camera, from a biplane flying just overhead. Thomas's audiences experienced a bird's eye view for the first time in their lives. This compelling scene made the viewers feel almost as if they were flying, themselves. Thomas became wealthy and famous from touring the travelogue With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia, due in no small measure to the aerial scenes
In 1972, the crew of Apollo 17 took an iconic that showed the black starlit sky framing the entire planet Earth from 29,000 kilometers away. Another famous photo of Earth had been taken from orbit about the Moon during the pioneering mission in late 1968. It showed over the Moon's desolate cratered horizon. These photos provided perspectives more compelling than any representations of planet Earth that had appeared before. They led people to reflect that this planet is the only home we have. The images of Earth framed in the vastness of space sparked intense public interest in ecology and the environment. It is no coincidence that the first was held in 1970, as photos from NASA's moon program had recently enjoyed wide circulation.
Taking to the sky gave humanity a new perspective on our planet, our home in the universe.
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein published three seminal papers on physics in 1905. The second paper, on what became known as the Special Theory of Relativity, introduced his famous equation E=mc2. In 1907, he put forth the Principal of Equivalence which says, essentially, that the force of gravity is indistinguishable from the force of acceleration. This lead to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Predictions that the presence of mass curves space/time, derived from that theory, were proven in 1919.
Crowley often referred to Sir Arthur Eddington who introduced Einstein's general relativity to the English speaking world in his 1919 article . "I was greatly assisted in all this work [] by the constant study of the work of Einstein, Whitehead, Russel, Eddington and Henri Pointcaré, whom Sullivan had recommended to me. They seemed to be on the very brink of discovering those truths which concealed and revealed." – The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, page 922.
With the detonation of the first atomic bomb, at New Mexico's Alamogordo Gunnery and Bombing Range on the morning of 16 July 1945, and the subsequent destruction of Hiroshima on 6 August and Nagasaki on 9 August by atomic weapons, the whole world came to know about Professor Einstein's famous equation. Within a few years, mankind had engineered the ability, as Winston Churchill put it, to make the rubble bounce.
Edwin Hubble
It should be noted that before the 1925 announcement of Edwin Hubble's discovery of other galaxies, astronomers believed that the Milky Way was, itself, the entire universe. We now know that there are hundreds of billions of in the universe, some containing of stars.
Science has given us not only a new perspective on the nature of the material universe, but also new tools to change the world for good or ill. Liber 75 vel Luciferi, in verse 31, says that our world has been "ailing with the turmoil of pubescence."
