The account Aleister Crowley gave, and kept giving for forty years, is specific. He and his wife Rose Kelly were in Cairo; she began to make statements he had not expected, identifying a stele in the Boulaq museum and naming Horus; and on three successive days, 8, 9 and 10 April 1904, between noon and one o'clock, he sat and wrote at dictation from a voice he identified as Aiwass, whom he described as a praeterhuman intelligence and, in some later formulations, as his own Holy Guardian Angel. He maintained that he was the scribe and not the author, and that he had disliked the book on receiving it. Historians of esotericism report that claim as his; it is not a claim this atlas can adjudicate, and the book's status in Thelema does not depend on anyone outside Thelema accepting it.
The text is in three chapters of 220 verses, spoken by three voices: Nuit, infinite space; Hadit, the infinitely contracted point; and Ra-Hoor-Khuit, the crowned and conquering child. Its most quoted lines are the two halves of the Law, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law" and "Love is the law, love under will", together with "Every man and every woman is a star". The word Abrahadabra, which Crowley treated as the formula of the new aeon and of the union of microcosm and macrocosm, stands at the head of the third chapter.