The compiler of The Book of Black Magic and of Pacts [A.E. Waite] is not only the most ponderously platitudinous and priggishly prosaic of pretentiously pompous pork butchers of the language, but the most voluminously voluble. I cannot dig over the dreary deserts of his drivel in search of the passage which made me write to him. But it was an oracular obscurity which hinted that he knew of a Hidden Church withdrawn from the world in whose sanctuaries were preserved the true mysteries of initiation. This was one better than the Celtic Church; I immediately asked him for an introduction. He replied kindly and intelligibly, suggesting that I should read The Cloud upon the Sanctuary by Councillor von Eckartshausen. With this book I retired to Wastdale Head for the Easter vacation of 1898.
Aleister Crowley, Confessions, Ch 14
[During Easter 1898] I was absorbed in The Cloud upon the Sanctuary, reading it again and again without being put off by the pharisaical, priggish and pithecanthropoid notes of its translator, Madame de Steiger. I appealed with the whole force of my will to the adepts of the Hidden Church to prepare me as postulant for their august company. As will be seen later, acts of will, performed by the proper person, never fall to the ground, impossible as it is (at present) to understand by what means the energy is transmitted.Ibid, Ch 14
I caught up with him [Julian Baker] some ten miles below Zermatt. I told him of my search for the Secret Sanctuary of the Saints and convinced him of my desperate earnestness. He hinted that he knew of an Assembly which might be that for which I was looking. He spoke of a Sacrament where the elements were four instead of two. This meant nothing to me; but I felt that I was on the right track. I got him to promise to meet me in London. He added, ‘I will introduce you to a man who is much more of a Magician than I am.’
To sum the matter in brief, he kept his word. The Secret Assembly materialized as the ‘Hermetic Order of the G∴ D∴,’ and the Magician as one George Cecil Jones.
Ibid, Ch 19
This encounter with the ideas of a Hidden Church and a prisca philosophia did not only motivate Crowley in his youth. It informed his life’s work.
When Crowley sat down ten years later to write “An Account of A.·.A.·. sub figura XXXIII”—the first article in the first number of the first volume of The Equinox—he merely edited Steiger’s translation of Chapter 2 of “The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary”. Apart from redacting long passages glorifying the patriarchs and the Christian Church, the following substitutions occur from Eckhartshausen’s version to Crowley’s:
church → Order
Interior Sanctuary or Church → Axle of the R.O.T.A
regeneration of humanity → evolution of humanity
God → L.V.X. or masters
Jesus Christ → V.V.V.V.V.
service → revel