Nuit, the ancient Egyptian Goddess of the Night Sky, has become known to many through the work of occultists, especially the very popular Aleister Crowley, and after him, the orientalist and fantasist Kenneth Grant.
While Crowley versified his ideal of Nuit with some success, in practical terms he reduced her to no more than a ‘formula’ of sexual magick, which he was inclined to do with most things. The basis for the assumption rests on interpreting the language of Crowley’s mediumistically received Book of the Law (Liber AL vel Legis) as vulgar innuendo. Yet this has been taken very seriously by some. Sexual obsession requires little or no effort to achieve and is greatly magnified through abuse of the ‘talisman’, As Crowley and Grant called it, which really means the products of sexual activity. This might seem strange to those unfamiliar with the works and practices of these notorious occultists, but it would not be wrong to call them ‘sex magicians’ given the degree of their obsession, which meant that:
1. They were not initiated into anything in reality, although they claimed to be supreme masters of everything and even managed to get quite a lot of other persons to believe that.
2. They were incapable of transmitting a spiritual influence for the same reason and could not have even known what that is.
In fact, ‘self-hypnotists’ would be more accurate to describe these ‘Thelemic’ sorcerers and their obliging followers, who are quite numerous even today.[1] For example, the word ‘come’ appears five times in the first chapter and eleven times in the whole book in a context where a simpleton might think the modern slang term for sexual orgasm was intended. There are no other terms in the book that could be construed in that way. Indeed, the Book of the Law contains a considerable amount of King James Bible English, which was the preferred style that Crowley wrote in when he was pretending to be a ‘mystic’. Kenneth Grant, never one to be restrained, went so far as to speculate that the last verse of the first chapter, “The Manifestation of Nuit is at an end” actually indicates the ‘end’ of her body, the sexual parts![2]
Kenneth Grant took this notion of Nuit as a formula of sexual magick one step further, reducing Nuit to her appearance or manifestation.[3] Sometimes he referred to Nuit as a mere formula of manifestation, to be applied to sorcerous mechanics of menstrual blood, which both he and Crowley confused with the ‘red tincture’ of alchemy, thus demonstrating they knew nothing of alchemy—even their idea of magick was a profane confabulation of imagined notions and systematised correspondences.
In limiting Nuit to a sort of field of phantasmal projections, Grant asserted the Monad—that Hadit the Serpent of Knowledge (as described in extremely ambiguous terms in the second chapter of Liber AL) is the ‘Sole Self Alone One’. Grant then posited what he called ‘mysticism’ and magick as two opposed ideas. The idea is that the magician partakes of both while believing in ‘neither this nor that’. It declares impossibility through confusion of terms because mysticism is properly something that only concerns those with a religious faith, which would certainly exclude Kenneth Grant. The neither-neither terminology was borrowed from artist Austin Osman Spare, who worked to develop a self-styled cult where willed self-obsession is the means of obtaining desire-wish-fulfilment. Perhaps needless to say, both he and Grant were the sole members of their own versions of the selfish cult![4]
Nuit as ‘Not’ or Pure Negation
Grant and other postmodernist followers of Crowley developed a notion of Nuit as ‘Not’ or Pure Negation. This seems obviously skewed if we consider they wanted to reduce Nuit to a formula for manifestation, which means to show something, make an appearance. In its own way the logic can be convincing if we remember that according to certain Buddhistic notions, the visible world, called maya, is an illusion. Thus Grant and his followers wanted to equate Nuit with Mahadevi Shakti Maya and pretend they were rediscovering a tantric tradition; whereas in fact they were simply inventing a pseudo-tradition based on mechanistic magical manipulation itself derived from confusing metaphysics with profane science. According to what we said earlier,
While insisting that the mind, as with everything else, is nothingness or ‘emptiness’, as with the Shunyavada ‘void’ theory, integral to that path in all its manifestations, Buddhists use this empty notion to deny that anything exists as a higher principle to the mind. Thus, in the denial, they actually affirm the mind as sole reality, even if it is ‘empty’. So according to them, it really is all nothing.[5]
The notion that ‘it really is all nothing’ was powerfully irresistible to Grant and his followers, who being ‘satanists’ in the sense they wanted to invert all traditional symbolism so as to destroy tradition to replace it with counterfeit initiation, had great admiration for anything of a wholly negative nature. The ‘void’ theory of Buddhism was the very thing they wanted to provide doctrinal support for their imagined notions. They thus took it and superimposed it upon Nuit, the only aspect of Crowley’s self-invented cult that conveys real beauty and even spirituality, if we carefully sift through the ravings of Liber AL to find the few authentic fragments of ancient Egyptian lore.
Nuit and her Stars
We may wonder then, who or what is Nuit really? With ancient Egyptian deities we need first to look at the hieroglyphs of their names.
The ‘pot’ determinative (nu) shows the nature of Nuit as the principle of containment. On the cosmic level, she appears as a body of stars. The hieroglyph for ‘sky’ or ‘space’ (djet) is symbolised by the heavens above. Space is analogous with the infinite, but is not in itself infinite; that is to say it is not measureless or eternal but is indefinite on the human scale. Space is not, as Western Buddhists and postmodernists alike have imagined, nothingness, void, emptiness or total absence. Space is filled by the fifth element akasha, which permeates it, though akasha is frequently confused with space.[6]
Nuit, however, is not a symbol of the night sky, which is hardly needed. In the same way, profane commentators (and Egyptologists) imagine that Ra is a ‘symbol of the Sun’, whereas both the Sun and Ra are symbols of the supreme metaphysical Real, which only has words to describe it in Sanskrit, such as Atma (the Self). As we do not have a comparable figure in the so-called Western tradition (really a lost tradition), we must resort to Hinduism or other ancient doctrines to find one. Parvati, for example, the bride of Shiva, is the loving, benevolent deity from which all positive notions of the ‘soul’ have arisen. In Shaivite tantrism she is simply called Shakti (‘power’) and is seen as not in any way separate from Shiva, the supreme principle. She is then the power of the Absolute that produces an appearance, the universe, and all individual beings, but she is not the appearance itself.
Notes
Nuit: for the Egyptian Tarot of Nuit XVII and Aquarius click here (opens new page).
1. For an account of Thelema, including a rare interpretation that actually renders some of the Book of the Law meaningful, see our book Law of Thelema—Hidden Alchemy.
2. There is no space here to go thoroughly into the excesses of Kenneth Grant. See the third part of our book, Thirty-two paths of Wisdom—Key to the Hermetic Qabalah: Commentary on the Shining Paths of the Sepher Yetzirah and the Paths of Evil.
3. Grant developed this idea as early as 1955, when preparing the ground plan for his (fictional) New Isis Lodge. He was consistent in this notion throughout his works. It is best evidenced in his book, Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God [Starfire Publishing Ltd.]
4. While it is true that there were others who joined in with Grant’s game, one can hardly call them members of a ‘cult’, which properly speaking implies a discipline.
5. See ‘Pervasive Influence of Buddhism on Occultism and Neo-Hinduism’ here.
6. The refutation of heterodox schools of thought (i.e. Buddhism) concerning space is given in Siddhāntabindu of Srimat Madhusūdana Sarasvati [University of Mysore 1981].
© Oliver St. John 2026
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