by Frater Serpentis

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Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Aleister Crowley’s Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente (Liber LXV), classified as a “Holy Book of Thelema,” participates in a long tradition of mystical-erotic literature whose biblical exemplar is the Song of Songs. While the Song has been understood for millennia by Jewish and Christian exegetes as an allegory of the soul’s union with the divine, Liber LXV reworks that structure into a distinctly Thelemic articulation of the aspirant’s encounter with Adonai, the Holy Guardian Angel (HGA), culminating in unity between Adept and Angel.

This essay argues that Liber LXV is a deliberate reinscription of the Song of Songs tradition: it imitates the Song’s voice, diction, imagery, and erotic-theological modality, but subverts its monotheistic frame through serpent mysticism, syncretic polytheism, and a metaphysics of Zero central to Thelema. The analysis proceeds by tracing Crowley’s rhetorical affinities with biblical style, mapping thematic clusters of allusion, and explaining how Liber LXV transposes the lover-beloved dialectic into a symbolic structure that dissolves the duality that grounds the biblical text. The result is a scripture that is recognizably in dialogue with the Song of Songs yet inverted, expanded, and re-theorized according to the Law of Thelema.

A Holy Book in a Biblical Key

In the A∴A∴ system, Liber LXV is presented as a text “inspired” and placed in Class A, not to be altered by the hand of any editor. Its declared subject is the aspirant’s encounter, conversation, and ultimate union with Adonai, the divine and mysterious being known as the Holy Guardian Angel. The book’s lyrical structure, its alternation of voices, and its saturated, eroticized metaphors of longing, loss, consummation, and identification have long made it the closest analogue within the Thelemic corpus to the biblical Song of Songs.

This resemblance is not incidental. The Song of Songs is the classical scriptural expression of mystico-erotic union, and its imagery has been mined by centuries of Jewish and Christian mystics who read the dialogue of Bride and Bridegroom as a symbolic description of the soul’s longing for God. Crowley enters that tradition not by repudiating its form but by rewriting its grammar and metaphysics. Liber LXV borrows the Song’s structure of alternating speakers, its repetitive, parallel-lined poetic diction, and its sacral erotic vocabulary. Yet its theological gesture moves beyond the allegorical reading typical of the Jacob’s Ladder of mystical exegesis. Instead of God and soul as lover and beloved, Crowley offers aspirant and Angel. Instead of the persistent duality of Bride and Bridegroom, he culminates in the declaration “I am Thyself” (III:36) and “I am Thou” (V:23–25).

Thus, Liber LXV becomes an experiment in scriptural inversion: the Song of Songs rewritten from the standpoint of the New Aeon.

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Song-of-Songs Style and the Mimetic Strategy of Crowley’s Scripture

Crowley’s stylistic choices in Liber LXV intentionally evoke biblical poetics. The text repeatedly deploys the rhetorical forms characteristic of the Song of Songs and the broader Hebrew Bible: the exclamatory “Behold!”, the oath-like “Verily and Amen!”, the direct address “O my beloved,” and the escalation of parallel cola (“Thou hast…” followed by “Thou hast…”). This stylistic imitation forms the substrate of recognition that marks Liber LXV as a scripture operating in a biblical register.

The intimate dialogue that structures the Song of Songs is echoed in the oscillation of voices throughout Liber LXV. The aspirant speaks to Adonai, Adonai responds. The narrative interjections comment upon the scene (“The scribe was wroth thereat” [I:41]), and a third, inner voice sometimes breaks through. This polyphony mirrors the multiple voices scholars attribute to the Song: the voice of the woman, the voice of the man, and the choral “daughters of Jerusalem.” The Song’s shifting immediacy (the changing between who is speaking to whom) finds a new echo in Crowley’s mutating vantage between aspirant, Angel, and scribe.

The erotic texture of this diction is essential. The Song of Songs opens with the cry, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,” and Liber LXV answers with echoes:

“let me listen to the echo of your kisses” (V:1)

“my darling, my serpent that twinest Thee about this heart” (II:52)

“Crush out the blood of me, as a grape upon the tongue” (II:54).

Desire is the medium of revelation. Longing, absence, trembling, mutual searching, and overwhelming union function not merely as metaphors but as the very mode of mystical experience. Crowley reuses the Song’s technique of eroticizing the divine encounter in order to render the HGA relationship experientially grounded and embodied.

The Shared Imaginal Universe: Wine, Gardens, Perfume, and the Nocturnal Quest

Where the structural and rhetorical correspondences establish the groundwork, the imaginal correspondences provide the sustained intertextual spine linking the two texts. In both works, wine forms the central erotic-sacramental symbol. The Song of Songs declares, “Thy love is better than wine” and invites the lovers to “drink abundantly.” In Liber LXV, wine saturates the climactic scenes:

“The grape fell ripe and rich into his mouth” (I:58)

“The foam of the grape is like the storm upon the sea” (I:60)

“There is no wine like unto this wine” (V:63).

Here wine becomes a sacrament of divine intoxication, a symbol not merely of passion but of the dissolution of the self into the ecstasy of embrace with Adonai in “Thy bridal chamber” (LXV IV:31). The biblical and Thelemic uses of wine thus converge in their shared equation of intoxication with divine union while diverging in metaphysics: biblical wine binds Israel and YHWH; Thelemic wine annihilates the boundary between aspirant and Angel.

Garden imagery forms a second major cluster. The Song describes the bride as a “garden enclosed” filled with spices, fruits, flowing waters, and exotic fragrances. Crowley’s text similarly develops an elaborate mythopoesis of gardens, orchards, grasses, and incense in LXV:

“O honey boy! Bring me Thy cool limbs hither! Let us sit awhile in the orchard, until the sun go down! Let us feast on the cool grass! Bring wine, ye slaves, that the cheeks of my boy may flush red. In the garden of immortal kisses, O thou brilliant One, shine forth! Make Thy mouth an opium-poppy…” (IV:8-9)

There is also the repeated motifs of musk, ambergris, and floral blossoms throughout chapters II–IV of Liber LXV.

These gardens are not mere metaphors: they are the mystical spaces where the aspirant meets the Angel: they are the interior symbolic spaces that mirror the Song’s secret, enclosed garden of love. Both gardens are erotic topographies, spaces of vegetal eroticism, growth, and fertility where the human and the divine converge.

The motif of the night-search is equally shared. In Song of Songs 3:1–4, the bride seeks her beloved “by night on my bed,” wanders the city, and finds him after intense longing. Liber LXV reframes this mystical quest when it describes the aspirant seeking Adonai in frantic overreaching (“Thou wast long seeking Me; thou didst run forward so fast that I was unable to come up with thee,” I:25) and then, in Chapter II, realizing in stillness that the Beloved had been present from the beginning (“I waited patiently, and Thou wast with me from the beginning,” II:60). The nocturnal imagery such as dancing all night in Book II, the secret watch of the night in I:23, or the longing that pervades the scribe’s exhaustion all revisit the Song’s central dynamic of the beloved’s elusive presence.

Even the Song’s honey and milk imagery finds transformation. The bridegroom praises his beloved, “Honey and milk are under thy tongue.” Crowley’s cosmologized equivalent is “the milk of the stars,” which “the Woman… jetteth out… from her paps” (V:65). What was an intimate sweetness in the Song becomes, in Liber LXV, a cosmic outpouring of Nuit, a sign of erotic nourishment universalized.

The Theological Subversion: From Yahweh to Adonai, From Covenant to the HGA

While the intertextual resonances are unmistakable, Liber LXV is not simply derivative. At its heart lies a profound theological transformation, one that rewrites the Song’s divine-human relationship according to the metaphysics of Thelema. Instead of a covenantal relationship between YHWH and Israel or Christ and the Church, Crowley structures the erotic exchange around the aspirant and Adonai as Holy Guardian Angel. The Angel is not merely an external deity to which we make prayers but united with the deepest, truest self, “the secret center,” the inmost identity of the aspirant. Thus, every moment of desire in Liber LXV becomes reflexive: the lover is seeking its own truth; the beloved is the aspirant’s own highest nature. The Song’s dualities become the symbolic scaffolding for a union that is fundamentally self-recognition.

This shift is not subtle. Passages such as “I am Thyself, O my Maker, my Master, my Mate!” (III:36) and “I am thou, and the Pillar is ’stablished in the void” (V:23–25) enact a metaphysical culmination impossible within biblical monotheism. Whereas the Song presupposes the ontological distinction between God and human (the very distinction that makes allegory possible), Liber LXV specifically dissolves this difference in a radical non-dualism. Adonai, the Angel, is the aspirant, and the aspirant is Adonai. The language of marriage and consummation, in both texts, serves as metaphor for union, but Crowley pushes beyond the metaphor into metaphysics. The union is not symbolic but actual: a collapse into Zero, the void of Nuit and the infinitesimal point of Hadit, realized within the consciousness of the Adept.

This non-dualism also explains the presence of syncretic deities throughout Liber LXV. The Song’s strict monotheistic frame is replaced with Osiris, Asi, Asar, Hathor, Apep, Sebek, Pan, Bacchus, and others. These are not competing divinities but archetypal expressions of cosmic forces, all subordinate to the Angelic revelation. The polytheistic register serves to situate the text not within the narrative of Israel but within the universal myth-language of the Aeon of Horus. The Angel is the keystone that integrates and transcends these mythic forms.

The Serpent as Bridegroom and the Inversion of Biblical Symbolism

Nowhere is Crowley’s subversion more striking than in the figure of the serpent. The Song of Songs does not feature serpentine imagery, and the broader Bible generally casts the serpent as a tempter, deceiver, or satanic adversary. Yet in Liber LXV, the serpent is frequently and intimately identified with the divine lover:

“Rise, O my snake!” (I:1)

“I the Serpent clasp Thee” (IV:1)

“the little asp of death” (IV:27).

To love the serpent is to embrace the innermost divine essence.

This reversal is symbolic. By rehabilitating the serpent which is traditionally the “other” of biblical purity, Crowley both overturns the moral assumptions of the Judeo-Christian tradition and affirms a Thelemic cosmology in which all opposites are united in Zero. The serpent is not the denial of the divine but the divine in its most ecstatic, electric form. The Song’s Bridegroom is dignified, royal, and perfumed. Crowley’s beloved is coiled, sinuous, venomous, and radiant. By bringing the serpent into the bridal chamber, Crowley undoes the theological boundary that underwrites the biblical text, affirming a universe in which taboo, inversion, and transgression become vehicles of spiritual attainment.

Here Crowley departs from the allegorical discipline of traditional Song-of-Songs commentary. Medieval interpreters stress spiritual purity, virginity, and nuptial imagery whose sensuality is sublimated. Crowley instead amplifies the sensuality until it becomes magical and transformative.

Union Beyond the Song: Thelema’s Non-Dual Fulfillment

If the Song of Songs provides the grammar of erotic mysticism, Liber LXV provides its esoteric resolution. The biblical text ends not with metaphysical non-duality but with mutual belonging: “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.” Crowley advances past mutuality into identity. Over and over, Liber LXV declares the collapse of the two lovers into one consciousness:

“Thou art beyond the day and the night; I am Thyself, O my Maker, my Master, my Mate!” (III:36)

“I am thou… and the Pillar is ’stablished in the void.” (V:23–25)

“For I have found Thee alike in the Me and the Thee; there is no difference…” (III:65)

The Song’s dynamic is cyclical… longing, seeking, finding, losing, finding again… Crowley uses this cycle as an initiatory arc that culminates in irreversible awakening. Thhe lover calls across the night for their Beloved, but at the end all longing resolves into a recognition that the beloved was always the Self, and the Self is always the Angel.

In theological terms, Liber LXV takes the Hermetic reading of the Song (Bride and Bridegroom as higher and lower selves) to its terminus: the disappearance of the distinction altogether. In Thelemic terms, this is the realization of True Will as the radiance of the Star, the divine spark that is not separate from the universal divine.

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Conclusion: A Scripture of the New Aeon

Liber LXV is not a pastiche of biblical imagery, nor a parody, nor merely a mystical poem that happens to share themes with the Song of Songs. It is a deliberate work of scriptural rewriting that uses the canonical erotic mysticism of the Song as the scaffolding upon which the metaphysics of Thelema is constructed. Crowley adopts the Song’s love-dialogue structure, its ritualized garden landscapes, its nocturnal searches, its language of wine, perfume, kisses, and longing. He adopts even the prophetic tone and cadences of biblical diction.

Yet each adopted structure is destabilized and reinterpreted. The divine Bridegroom becomes the serpent, symbol of forbidden knowledge… the bride becomes the aspirant… Israel becomes the Star… the covenant becomes the Knowledge and Conversation… the garden becomes the space of initiation and magical transformation… the mutual love becomes unity… and the God of the Song becomes the Angel who reveals that “I am Thou.”

Thus Liber LXV stands as a theological inversion of the ancient text. It is recognizable in shape, but unrecognizable in its content. It participates in the long lineage of mystical exegesis of the Song of Songs while simultaneously declaring that the era of allegory grounded in duality is over. If the biblical Song describes the longing between lover and beloved, Liber LXV declares the discovery of their identity. If the biblical lovers embrace, Crowley’s lovers annihilate into one flame.

In this way, Liber LXV becomes not merely a commentary on the Song of Songs but its successor in the New Aeon: the serpent-bridegroom scripture of Thelema, rewriting the most erotic book of the Bible into a revelation of the deepest unity of the Star and its Angel.

In the end, the great lesson of Liber LXV’s transformation of the Song of Songs is that the longing we imagine as a distant cry across the night is the echo of our own deepest nature calling us home. The Beloved whom we chase through gardens of desire, through darkness and dawn, through the labyrinth of striving and surrender, is the radiant core already burning within us. Crowley’s vision invites the aspirant to step beyond the trembling threshold of separation and recognize that the divine lover is encircled around the inmost flame of one’s own being. To read Liber LXV through the lens of the Song is to witness the ancient language of yearning fulfilled at last. And in that realization, the soul discovers not an ending, but the beginning of its true freedom, true wisdom, and perfect happiness.

Love is the law, love under will.