Concerning “The Comment”
“The Comment” to the Book of the Law contains the following sentences:
The study of this Book is forbidden. It is wise to destroy this copy after the first reading.
Whosoever disregards this does so at his own risk and peril. These are most dire.
Those who discuss the contents of this Book are to be shunned by all, as centres of pestilence.
All questions of the Law are to be decided only by appeal to my writings, each for himself.
which have provided no end of difficulties for commentators on the Book. The traditional interpretation is the the Book itself expressly forbids the reader to either study or discuss the Book, that those who offer commentaries on it are to be shunned, and that everyone must “decide what Thelema is for themselves”.
This view is flawed on a number of levels. From a very basic standpoint, nobody, ever, has any choice other than to “decide what Thelema is for themselves”, commentary or not. Knowledge and insight cannot be transplanted from one brain to another, and even if it could, that knowledge and insight would not be the same without a complete mind transfer and the context that goes along with it. It is not the case that somebody studying the Book in isolation will interpret it for themselves, but somebody studying the Book in conjunction with a commentary will not. The commentary itself would require personal interpretation, and no matter how clearly the commentary was written, the understanding gained by the reader is inevitably going to be different, perhaps significantly, from the understanding possessed by the commentator. So, regardless of the interpretation of the Comment itself, the implication that commentary must be avoided in order to prevent a “pollution” of the reader's own pure interpretation is nonsense.
Secondly, if the Comment actually does mean what it is usually claimed to, then it completely contradicts itself in several places, most obviously in the injunction that “all questions of the Law are to be decided only by appeal to my writings” — how so, if “the study of this Book is forbidden”?
Moreover, the Comment also echoes a number of key phrases from the Book proper, including “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” right at the top. Examine that sentence carefully, noting the conspicuous absence of the words “oh, except for the Law that says the study of this Book is forbidden, of course”. We also have “there is no law beyond Do what thou wilt” at the end, again strangely failing to add “except for the additional law that says the study of this Book is forbidden”. Finally, we have “all questions of the Law are to be decided only by appeal to my writings, each for himself” again. Notice that first word, all questions of the Law, including whether or not the study of this Book is lawful. Suppose we appeal to the writings of Ankh-f-n-khonsu, and decide, each for ourselves, that the study of the Book is lawful? Crowley himself often directly encouraged the study of the Book, most notably in Magick Without Tears, where he advises his correspondent in the very first letter to “make The Book of the Law your constant study”. If we assume that “Ankh-f-n-khonsu” is synonymous with Crowley (which some debate), then an appeal to his writings clearly leads us to this conclusion, and presumably, in this case, we can discard the injunction against it. Furthermore, anybody who disagrees is clearly in direct breach of their own interpretation of the Comment, by attempting to decide for us that our study of the Book is unlawful. So, to anybody who claims that the Comment forbids the study of the Book of the Law I respond that it also permits it, three separate times, and three-to-one wins the day, quite apart from the fact that if it does forbid it, then it also forbids your forbidding, so there.
Not only that, but from a simple reading of the Book itself it is patently clear that it has to be the work of a thoroughly disjointed and muddled mind to suppose that such a restriction, over a Book that delivers a message of the very essence of freedom, can for even a moment be taken seriously. Even if it could be demonstrated that this really was the intention behind the Comment, then I have a simple response: Fuck the Comment. If I want to study or discuss the Book of the Law, then I'll do it, regardless of what the Book says about it, and if anybody doesn't like it, then that's too bad for them; shun me as a centre of pestilence, if you like, see if I care.
So, if the Comment does not mean what the average unthinking Thelemite thinks it means — which, as explained above, it clearly does not — then what does it really mean? Like so much else in the Book, there is no clear-cut and unambiguous answer, but there are at least two interpretations that are at least far more sensible than the self-evidently nonsensical view we have just described.
As to the first of these interpretations, we need to look more closely at the phrase “the study of this Book is forbidden”. We can note that it appears to carefully avoid saying “I, Ankh-f-n-khonsu, forbid you to study this Book”, and this observation leads us to ask a very basic question: forbidden by whom? As we have already mentioned, the Book contains a fundamental message of freedom, and this will be seen as extremely threatening in some circles. Crowley writes in the introduction to the Book itself:
Every new measure of the most democratic and autocratic government is Communistic in essence. It is always restriction. We are all treated as imbecile children. Dora, the Shops Act, the Motoring Laws, Sunday suffocation, the Censorship — they won't trust us to cross the roads at will.
We may not unreasonably wonder whether it is this ubiqitous “they” who are forbidding the study of the Book, and that it is only “wise” to destroy the copy in the same sense that it is “wise” to avoid telling a policeman who has pulled you over that you're not going to voluntarily give him permission to search your car, despite the fact that you are perfectly entitled to give such a refusal. We may further assume that it is this same “they” who are the “all” that those who discuss the Book will be shunned by, since free-thinking and individualism poses a direct threat to their plans for stifling social control. In this sense, the Comment is dripping with irony, and serves as a test to those who make the fundamental mistake of confusing “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” with “Do what the Book of the Law says shall be the whole of the Law”, the latter being a mere substitute of one tyranny for another.
Additionally, we could examine exactly what is implied by the words “study” and “discuss”. “Study” clearly doesn't mean a simple reading and analysis, as otherwise the injunction “all questions of the Law are to be decided only by appeal to my writings” would be rendered impossible. It is possible that by “study” the Comment means “study with a view to determining which acts — most particularly, which acts of others — are lawful”. The question of “what is lawful” is clear enough from the Comment itself — “there is no law beyond Do what thou wilt”. Anybody who studies the Book of the Law and ends up at the conclusion that, for instance, that one is in direct breach of the Law of Thelema if one fails to obtain the Stele of Revealing and to set it in Boleskine House, has clearly not only missed the point but has lost the pencil. If we suppose that to “discuss the contents” is to try to impose such a warped view on everybody else, then we have another very reasonable interpretation, where to “study” the Book means to wilfully search for additional restrictions on top of “Do what thou wilt”, and to “discuss the contents” means to attempt to press everybody else into accepting those restrictions, since both of these things are clearly against the Law of Thelema.
Of course, neither of these interpretations may actually be the case, and we may never know what the real case is, but this need not concern us. All that is important is to recognise that these two interpretations are at least as reasonable as the commonly held one, and that because — unlike that one — they do not require a breach of the Law of Thelema in order to be accepted, then they are actually far, far more reasonable. Once this realisation is achieved, then we can see the commonly-held, narrow-minded and dogmatic interpretation as the abomination that it really is.
