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Correspondence from George MacNie Cowie to Aleister Crowley
14 Glenisla Gardens, Edinburgh.
[Undated: circa January 1918]
Care Frater.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Same here. Yours re debenture. Most emphatically NO. Everything has limits, and if you want me ever willingly to lift a finger for yourself personally again and unless you want me to believe that friendship and sacrifice (of more than money) are merely things to be made fun of, you will send the apology that ought naturally to accompany such a letter.
I can only put the charitable conclusion on it that you thought it would be a good way to get money without exposing me to the certain disaster that would follow sending any. But it's too ridiculous to have done this on the exact date you thought the other dog would be trotting along with a nice juicy bone, and you wanted to have a bust with it. That is what it amounts to. In a week Aesop has ceased to be my Vade Mecum. His imagination pales before yours.
This is not a Lodge or other matter, it's between man and man, That security which fortunately I could not sell when I tried to 2 or 3 years ago, now seems my last plank in deep waters and you calmly try to annex it. Not sleeping in a bed seems to come rather expensive! Take to regular habits again. Now with all the good will in the world I could not go to the attorney (there is only one channel) with this story. And if I did, I'd certainly not be helped to gull myself further—no, it's impossible. There are private and family matters of my own which are a fresh drain on my already reduced income as I've told you and am driven to rub into you, which deprives me of the right to fool away any more capital, when I am well aware you are under no real necessity for it. The time has come whether I will or no, to make a firm stand, and over and above that I'm not going to bring trouble and worse on all the B[lessed] b[rethren] here, and every one connected with me merely to gratify your appetite for what you DESPISE.
It's manifest that you are not doing your own duty, you are enjoined not to worry about money, and to do things with business way. There's been no sign to speak of, of business way and simply disgusting worry about money.
I am a B.S. I suppose? (Same to you and many of them!) But all the shock and disappointment and horror of the last year have been perhaps worth while if they happen to have awakened at last my own Will and that is not to be a mean cuss. (Send on the meningitis).
It was a poor and dastardly revenge to make me fall on my back on a snow covered slide and injure my humourous. As I've lost faith in yours, I had better label the accusation as JOKE. This is my revenge. It's an extra cold January and for the first time this house has suffered from burst water pipes.
It's a bad impasse about the books, I had a legal opinion, and was told they'd certainly never been allowed to leave the country, what with the many declarations etc to be filled up.
By the way, send me, please your authorised rendering into French of the two formulae "Do etc".
Love is the law, love under will.
Fraternally.
Geo. M. Cowie.
P.S. It is well for me that I am far enough on to be untroubled by doubts as to the genuineness of the basis of the Knowledge of the Order, or as to your eventual success. But your present line is so calculated to retard and wreck things, as indeed you have partially done, that it has even come into my head as conceivable that you may have taken on the O.T.O. in order to bust it up from within as in the case of the G.D. [Golden Dawn]. If things are to go in a serious and "business" way there must be a Grand Council of some sort of the higher members in order to protect things. Your letter to me, if produced would rouse awkward questions as to your rights, as affecting the general interest. Windram [James Windram], for instance, is no soft mark and would not stand this sort of thing. When he wrote last he complained bitterly of the absence of anything like business organization. It's not for me to reproach you, as, if anything, I possess even less business faculty. I may do very well when there's really no money and no figuring required. But when success comes (it doesn't seem in the hurry you've so often predicted) and there really are figures to be dealt with, then I do a bunk towards a G[reater] M[agical] R[etirement] in the wilds of Kamcchatka or anywhere———mind that!
By the way, I've picked up "by accident" a wrinkle or two. In the absence of instruments it's convenient to be able to construct at a pinch, and instantly a regular hexagon, pentagon, etc. There are methods by which this can be done I find, with faultless accuracy by simple folds in a piece of paper. Do you know the method? I assume so, but can send details. I was familiar with the evolution of the cube from the Latin cross, but did not know that a Greek cross can be divided into 4 pieces and rearranged as a square. The cuts, curiously, form a swastika. There are other points which taken altogether suggest a Paper of Qabalistic importance. It's no new reflection, of course, that geometry reveals the existence of laws, which even in the absence of matter and a Universe are as self existent and immutable as the Self-Existent-One. Immutable as the law that if you systematically live by lies, the victim at last takes everything you say as the contrary, and even if you merely send the information that you are not made of we will not pursue the subject, but I score one.
I have also discovered that to my kind of mind there's no better subject of concentration than the abstract point produced by the intersection of say two imaginary arcs of circles. The other factor required in an Immutable Will. It has been a temptation of late, to chuck everything in despair, and forego the result of the long labours of years. But fortunately the impulse to med[itate] is so strong as to be independent of volition, and is indeed a torture when time and peace are lacking. Do what you will is all very well, but I neglected to develop a WILL, and I'm doing that now (as you may have noticed!)
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