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AL I:1 - Had! The manifestation of Nuit.
Had! is the first breath. H the beginning, A the breath (Air), and D is creation & love (Venus). By this breath, as the Taoist 'Tao' and the Hindu Purusha and Norse Ymir divided themselves up/were sacrificed, the 'world' is created by the unity being divided into duality. Nuit may only be known through her manifestations.
AL I:2 - The unveiling of the company of heaven.
This unveiling is the 'apocalypse,' the perception of Unity where all beings are seen to be 'the company of heaven.' This pronouncement underlies the message of the Book that will follow.
AL I:3 - Every man and every woman is a star.
In antiquity, heaven was understood to be the skies with the motions of the celestial bodies being perfect. We now know that Earth is in Heaven, and Heaven is understood by the manifestations of Earth. Just as the company of the ancient heaven were the stars, we have unveiled before us this new symbolic perspective: every man and every woman is a star and is therefore part of this company of heaven. This means also, every man and every woman has the potential for attaining to this consciousness of being a star - that is understanding the Self as the Monad... and it is an affirmation that every man and every woman is a manifestation of this Monad, created to know & love & enjoy Itself. (Transitive verbs are misleading; all things are the various modifications of a unified Subject in itself, and therefore as a whole it is never modified. Only when this unified Subject is divided, when 'things' and 'categories' arise and their bounds are felt as reality, do 'modifications' and 'change' seem to be apparent. All 'objects' are part of the unified Subject; the deed, the doer of the deed, and the situation which makes the deed possible are all parts of the unified Subject. The many change and pass, the One remains.)
After contemplating, I add this conception - Every man and every woman is a star, an aggregate or ganglion of force, and are naturally parts, the company, of the Whole of heaven. Again, it may also refer to the part's potential for abolishing its false selfhood in its immersion in the unified Subject.
AL I:4 - Every number is infinite; there is no difference.
Every number is some construing of the infinite. 2 is the number of the 1 expressed as 2, divided into yin & yang, up & down. 3 is the number of the 1 expressed as 3. 4 is 1 expressed in a four-fold manner, etc. etc. "Differences" are contrivances, and the apparent separation between "things" they point out is a fiction (but untruth doesn't rule out utility). Even the number '1' is a silly contrivance which means to our thinking a Unity, but One has the opposing idea of 'Many' and/or 'not-One' therefore some people take solace in 'Naught'/0. All of these are masks of the infinite.
AL I:5 - Help me, o warrior lord of Thebes, in my unveiling before the Children of men!
The asking of help is really a command to rise up and awaken to the truth of Unity, to assume an active role in the process. Further, an intermediary is necessary for the expression of Unity to the many; that is, a body which has the means of materially communicating the dialectics of thought through language.
AL I:6 - Be thou Hadit, my secret centre, my heart & my tongue!
We are to assume the role of Hadit, the secret center of the Infinite, and a mode of its expression ('my tongue').
AL I:7 - Behold! it is revealed by Aiwass the minister of Hoor-paar-kraat.
We are made to expect a doctrine. Aiwass:Hoor-paar-kraat :: Mercury:Sun :: Tahuti:Ra-hoor. That is, Aiwass is the communicatory, active medium for the propagation of the Message of Hoor, the Silent Self, the Crowned & Conquering Child of Horus, the powerful Unity.
AL I:8 - The Khabs is in the Khu, not the Khu in the Khabs.
This verse depends on an interpretation of 'is in.' I take the meaning to be 'is inside,' 'is concealed within/beyond,' 'is that which transcends.' This is the common spatial metaphor of the outside as exoteric & false as a sort of crust or mask, and the inside as the esoteric & true essence.
The Khabs is the Starry Nature concealed within Man - that is, his knowledge of himself as truly the Silent Self, the unified Subject. The Khu is the entire cosmos as it is 'known' to man, i.e. through the representations of his nervous system. This includes all interior (emotions, thoughts, imagination, memory) and exterior (surroundings, the world, the universe) things. This is essentially the Jnana Yoga doctrine of the unreality of impermanent, constituent things - also the Buddhist teaching of anicca and anatta which are intrinsically bound up in one another. The only 'real' thing, is the Unity which is beyond change because it contains all change in Itself.
AL I:9 - Worship then the Khabs, and behold my light shed over you!
We are then to penetrate beyond the veils of duality and worship (identify with) the Khabs... the inner 'light' of unity. "Light" is a common metaphor that can most likely be found in any religious text, especially when describing an encounter with god or some religious experience. This is the light that is beyond our notions of light & dark, but we ascribe the name light to it for various reasons (e.g. it disperses the darkness of ignorance, it has energy like the heat of light, etc.) It is by the worship of this 'inmost essence,' the 'quintessence' of the four elements, the Unity that transcends the impermanent constituents, that we come to know ourselves as Ourself.
AL I:10 - Let my servants be few & secret: they shall rule the many & the known.
A law of nature as well as a command to the ordering of society & the psyche. We are to order our psyche & society according to a few dominant principles, which will influence and guide the many. The psyche is still 'servant' to the Self.
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