THE ROLE OF RITUAL IN THE UFO MYSTERY

IN the previous volume, Secret Cipher of The UFOnauts, we presented evidence that the UFOnauts themselves, along with certain terrestrial allies, have been communicating for centuries using several secret ciphers.

It would not be within the appropriate scope of this work to go into a detailed description of the transcription of The Book of The Law, but a brief background description is certainly necessary.

In the Spring of 1904 the already controversial occultist Aleister Crowley was on an extended honeymoon with his wife Rose in Cairo, Egypt. Following some foreshadowing events, Crowley was moved to take dictation from a “præterhuman intelligence” identifying itself as “Aiwass” for one hour each day from Noon to 1:00 PM for three consecutive days, April 8th, 9th and 10th.

During this hour, Aiwass, a more or less visible presence behind Crowley, dictated a chapter a day for what was to become Liber AL vel Legis or The Book of the Law. The Book is described as a Holy Book of the New Aeon, or New Age, then just arriving. It is, as a text, vivid, compelling, shocking and altogether unique. It can be read through in a single sitting.

It is not our task here to discuss further the merit of the Book itself. Other English language “trance channeled” materials were coming forth during the same period; The Cosmic Philosophy of Max Theon and his wife Alma Ware appeared during this same period, being also of North African origin. Oahspe appeared in New York a few years earlier. But, whatever else it is, the Aiwass book was and is quite unique.

Here we should confine ourselves to a single peculiarity of the Book. Several passages therein imply strongly that a hidden cipher or key existed within the text, which, it predicts, Crowley himself would never discover.

Despite this, at one point Crowley seems to have tried anyway. Of interest is a single page of the handwritten original manuscript, numbered page 16 of the third chapter. In addition to the hastily written text, which suggests the taking of dictation by one somewhat unused to secretarial functions, is a curious diagonal line running roughly from the upper left to lower right of the page, and a sort of cross, or plus sign (+) enclosed within a circle.

The text, cross and line all seem to have been written with the same pen at the same time, and both cross and line are specifically mentioned in the text itself. (“Then this line drawn is a key: then this circle squared in its failure is a key also.”)
1. Aiwass was not Crowley’s only contact. There is considerable discussion in UFOlogy of LAM, the being Crowley sketched that so closely resembled later UFO-related beings described in modern close encounter cases. His encounter, in 1896, with two “little men” in the Swiss Alps was mentioned in Jacques Vallee’s Passport to Magonia catalogue of close encounter cases. Crowley’s “magical mountain” - Mt. Mealfuorvonie near Loch Ness in Scotland - is said to be a UFOnaut base.


However, in addition there is a grid superimposed over the entire page, consisting of seven vertical and nine horizontal lines.

The top row has a series of letters, a through h, and, except for the upper left hand square, a series of numbers, 2 through 10 appear on the extreme left of the page. This grid was superimposed at a later date with another writing instrument. The page number, 16, in the upper right square, was added on yet a third occasion.

It is very easy to conclude that Crowley - though the text itself suggests he would not succeed in finding “the key of it all” - apparently attempted to do so, with no success.

The Book predicts that “one cometh after him” who would succeed. This is generally conceded to refer to Crowley’s student C.S. Jones, who did indeed uncover a key to the text some years later. The cipher or ‘code’ implied by the key was recorded by Jones in his magical diary for October 31st, 1918. A careful reading of this footnote reveals that the letters A, L and W, in some sequence, form the first three letters of a cipher.

Since the number Eleven is more than hinted at in The Book of the Law itself as a ‘key’ it theoretically is easy enough to note that, in standard alphabetical sequence, there are eleven spaces between A and L, and another eleven between L and W.

But many decades were to pass before a group in England calling itself the OAA, and its American counterpart, QBLH, were to complete the sequence and “obtain the order and value of the English Alphabet” as called for in The Book of the Law itself.

“This key we have been considering,” says an article in Thelema in 1980, “can be understood from either of two courses. 11 is the number of Magick, and when we number every 11th letter of the Alphabet, we arrive with ALW…P.”

The article, signed “D.P. AL” goes on to explain the other method, using the grid in the original manuscript described above.

“…when we complete all of the squares with the Alphabet, and carefully consider that the diagonal line is a Key herein, we shall again find the “order and value.’’

How this is done is described in an article from the same period by Carol Smith, writing in the British journal New Equinox.

“There are letters along the top of the page, and it would seem to be obvious to continue with the alphabet in the manner indicated, but the clue is in the numbers down the side. A is written instead of 1 which suggests that B is 2, C 3 and so on. Fill in all the squares on the grid in this manner, repeating the alphabet when one gets to Z.

To proceed to the next step the instruction is written on the page, for those who have eyes to see. ‘Then this line drawn is a key.’ The line is a diagonal across the square one gets the order of the English alphabet to be used in the English Qaballa. Whichever diagonal is read the order of the letters is obtained. There is only one order which can be obtained and all 26 letters appear in this order.”

Once the Order and value were obtained, it was discovered that a comparison of the numerical value of many mystifying words and phrases were explained in a meaningful way by finding words and values in the ‘code book’ itself, The Book of the Law, but also in other sacred texts from the same body of materials, termed “Class A” documents by Crowley.

The discovery was made by Jim Lees in 1976, and others including Carol Smith and Jake Stratton-Kent contributed to early experiments with the Cipher.

During the 1980s one initiate now known as Soror Ishtaria, an active member and now Outer Head of the QBLH, developed a computer program, Lexicon, which enables the researcher to quickly obtain the value of any word or phrase and compare that value to numerical values in The Book of the Law or, in theory, any text using standard English letters whatsoever.

Furthermore, Soror Ishtaria, by examining the cipher as a 26 pointed star (one point for each standard letter), discovered, with mainframe computer assistance, that by varying the “cycle” (the cycle we have discussed here is 11; that is, there are 11 spaces between each letter in order of value), without repeating any letter twice, one could obtain many alternate ciphers, each yielding, like the first, interesting and evidential results.

For some years this system remained the exclusive “open secret” of a small circle of occultists. When the present writer encountered the system, I quickly realized that this cipher was discovered in a manuscript said to be dictated by a præterhuman, perhaps Ultraterrestrial intelligence, calling itself “Aiwass”.

Did the system, I wondered, shed any light on UFO related contact cases?

Indeed it did, and this relationship formed the core of my earlier book, Secret Cipher of The UFOnauts. Contact names such as “Ashtar” and “Aura Rhanes” and “Orthon” were shown in a completely new light. Furthermore, certain cases contained what appeared to be intentionally “coded” or encrypted messages which, when intercepted, predicted future similar cases, or the future course of the same case.

But, unavoidably, I also took a look backwards, before The Book of the Law, and discovered that similar ‘coded messages’ were contained in, for example, the names of ‘control entities’ in classical trance mediumship, and in the purported names of Secret Chiefs or Mahatmas in Theosophy and occultism. This meant that the ‘code’ first revealed in a public manner in The Book of the Law did not originate in 1904 with the Book itself.

When I began to investigate the secret words and legends in Rosicrucian and Masonic lore, and in occult rituals, I discovered that this code had been in use for some time, and had been preceded by other codes following the same rules for deciphering (otherwise called Qabala, Kaballah or Caballa) used in the Cipher of the New Aeon.

The truth became unavoidable: Ultraterrestrials and human Adepts had long been communicating in a code which we were now cracking, and all previous bets about the nature of the history of our planet itself were now on hold.