Not the easiest book about the Kabbalah, or better said “Qabalah” since it is the Crowley version. This book has three parts. First part is a collection of Qabalistic writings from Crowley’s “Equinox” magazine. Then you get the rather famous “Liber 777” and the last part is the “Sepher Sephiroth”.
The first part mostly deals with the Qabalistic wordgame “gematria” and is sometimes very detailed, sometimes not so detailed, but most of all pretty vague and difficult. I suppose that when you dig into it this could be a starter for your own gematrical experiments, but I know a better introduction than Crowley’s, even in the Crowley tradition (see “Chicken Qabalah” review).
Then we get the famous “Liber 777”. This was originally also more of a book. It contains writings about symbolism in different traditions and religions, but this is rather short. Then we get a lot of tables of correspondences which are undoubtely usefull for a practical magic(k)ian, but personally I don’t see too much in all this. The lengthy explanations are sometimes helpfull, sometimes not. The tables are sometimes nice, but often not really. They do show Crowley’s rather wide knowlegde of different traditions and religions and it all reminds a bit of H.P. Blavatsky, rather chaotic and a lot of information.
The third part is to me by far the most helpfull part of the book. The “Sepher Sephiroth” is a long list with words in Hebrew catagorised after number-value. So you get the most important words with the value 1, 2, 3, etc. This is of course very convenient when you want to experiment a bit with gematria. You have a word, find out the number value and you can easily look up a word with the same value without having to combine letters and search your dictionary if there is a word with these letters.
So, the books are combined and completed by Israel Regardi, which sometimes makes the layout not too wonderfull (Regardi’s few words in a normal font, Crowley’s text too small), but it can also be helpfull to try to understand Crowley’s chaotic style of writing.
Overall not a good introduction to the Kabbalah or even the Qabalah. Essential for Crowley-followers and eventually also for the more experienced Kabbalist I guess. But especially the “Sepher Sephiroth” makes this book a must-buy for anyone who wants to take gematria to a more practical level.