Origins & history

While in Cairo with his wife Rose in April 1904, Crowley reported receiving the three chapters of The Book of the Law over three successive days from a discarnate intelligence named Aiwass, dictating in English. Crowley described himself as the scribe of the text rather than its author. He spent the next two decades reluctantly working out the implications of what the book demanded of him.

Crowley elaborated the system through his journal The Equinox (1909–1919, with later supplements), the Liber Aleph letters to his magical son Charles Stansfeld Jones, and the practical magical papers of the A∶A∶ (the order he founded with George Cecil Jones in 1907). After his admission to and reorganisation of the Ordo Templi Orientis, Thelema became the explicit religious framework of that order as well.