In the Hermetic Tradition, as in the Zoharic Qabalah, the initiate perceives the harmonies and correspondences that govern the inner and outer worlds. By their mastery he perfects his soul and ascends mystically in the hierarchy of creation to rule over Nature. At the turn of the last century, this doctrine was epitomized in an English magical fraternity, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where Aleister Crowley received his early magical training.
    Aleister Crowley's Magick derives from these sources, with a forward-looking modernity imparted by the prophetic text The Book of the Law, the source of the Law of Thelema: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." As foreseen by Giordano Bruno centuries before the dawn of the New Aeon, Thelema is a theurgy rooted in antiquity but compatible with scientific progress. Its esoterism is global, embracing Yoga, Buddhism, Qabalah, Sufism, Taoism and other non-European religious disciplines. Thelema is not alone in giving philosophical voice to the universal truths all relgious systems possess. But it speaks from ther standpoint of a truly Western spirituality that is only now emerging from the darkness of the centuries of Christian suppression.
    Crowley had another precursor in the Renaissance encyclopedist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who transformed Western magic by wedding Neoplatonism's Hermetic "doctrine of correspondences" to the Hebrew Qabalah. Both men were profoundly influenced by the Chaldean Oracles, a collection of precepts attributed to Zoroaster collated by the Byzantine philosopher Michael Psellus in the eleventh century EV. Crowley considered Little Essays Toward Truth to be a "species of Commentary thereupon."
    The present volume was first published privately by Ordo Templi Orientis in 1938 EV. For this second revised edition, an index has been added, together with a bibliography that includes works cited and suggested readings.
    Had Aleister Crowley been invited to give Harvard's Norton Lectures, he might well have delivered these essays. They are perhaps the finest examples in the English language of the expository power of theoretical Qabalah.