Crowley ends The Vision and the Voice with LIL: a starry veil, a child, and Horus turn the first name in the 1912 table into a Thelemic finale.
- Aethyr number
- 1 of 30
- Earthly-part positions
- 1–3
- Crowley’s 1911 chapter
- Printed pp. 166–172
Dee’s Liber Scientiae supplies the earlier manuscript setting. The Equinox I:8 (1912) supplies the spelling and number used here. Crowley’s Vision and the Voice, printed in 1911, supplies the later narrative described below.
LIL as first Aethyr
The 1912 Equinox table numbers LIL first. If the ninety-one earthly parts are grouped according to Whitby’s account of the Liber Scientiae, the first three ordinal part positions fall under LIL. The British Library catalogue places that earlier Dee book in Sloane MS 3191. The textual framework gives no guarantee that the later vision’s symbolism was present in Dee’s manuscript.
LIL also appears as the substitutable name in the Aethyr Call. LIL takes the same Aethyr Call used for the other twenty-nine names; it does not possess a separate long invocation.
Sources: The Equinox I:8 (1912), p. 125 ↗ · Whitby, John Dee’s Actions with Spirits, vol. 1, pp. 141–142 ↗ · British Library, Sloane MS 3191 catalogue ↗
LIL governor names: ordinals 1–3
The Equinox I:7 (1912) groups three names under LIL on printed page 239. These are the spellings in that later table; the comparison labels below identify only forms that differ in a modern Great Table reconstruction.
- 1 OCCODONSame spelling in the 2010 comparison appendix
- 2 PASCOMBSame spelling in the 2010 comparison appendix
- 3 VALGARSSame spelling in the 2010 comparison appendix
The starry veil and child in 1911
Crowley’s printed chapter begins with a dark blue, star-filled veil and a winged sun. The seer describes stillness before the veil opens and a child appears amid ranks of archangels. Later the child’s speech accumulates paired opposites (light and night, speech and silence, war and peace) before the text identifies the figure as Horus. The winged sun, divine child, and paired opposites belong to Crowley’s 1909 vision report, not to Dee’s Aethyr list.
A note in the printed edition comments on delays and speech that was inaudible or did not occur. The publication itself acknowledges gaps between experience, dictation, and printed paragraph in that note. The chapter closes with a Biskra location and a December 19, 1909 date line.
Sources: The Equinox I:5 supplement (1911), printed pp. 166–172 ↗
What LIL does and does not mean across sources
The final Horus identification has a particular place in Crowley’s Thelemic theology. It is not an etymology of the three letters LIL and should not be presented as a statement by Dee or Kelley. The name and its place in a complex system of parts and Calls belong to the older source; the twentieth-century visionary reading belongs to the 1911 publication.
Reading LIL alongside TEX shows the difference between ordinal order and a later author’s narrative order. LIL begins the former; TEX begins the printed journey, which ends with LIL. Neither fact requires assigning unsourced fixed personality traits to all thirty Aethyrs.
Sources: The Equinox I:5 supplement (1911), printed pp. 166–172 ↗ · The Equinox I:8 (1912), p. 125 ↗
Source editions and locators
- The Equinox I:8 (1912), p. 125 ↗
- Whitby, John Dee’s Actions with Spirits, vol. 1, pp. 141–142 ↗
- British Library, Sloane MS 3191 catalogue ↗
- The Equinox I:5 supplement (1911), printed pp. 166–172 ↗
The 1911 link opens a scan of the original supplement. Its PDF viewer page is two higher than the printed page number. The 1912 issue link is a modern reconstruction.