Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Charles Stansfeld Jones

 

     

 

 

COLLEGIUM ad SPIRITUM SANCTUM,

Cefalù, Sicily.

 

 

May 20, 1921.

 

 

My beloved son:

 

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law!

 

Yours of Apr. 13 received. The 141 business is very strange indeed. Alostrael [Leah Hirsig] got it in a vision long before Equinox and wrote to ask me about it—and now it simply snows 141 everywhere.

     

Last night I did a IX° for Light on the Path, and got at once a sort of Master-Key to our diverse locks.

     

AL spelt fully is (37 x 3) + (37 x 2), so that 93 ≡ 555. We can write 666 as ALALALA and 777 as LAL-LAL-LAL. 141 is AIH which is Tao-Yang-Yin.

     

But to-day came the practical Light; I am to write in the Name of the Abbey, and will do so when I have answered your letter in detail.

     

I am extremely pleased about your lectures. I don't know whether you had already received my paternal grouse about treating the Law as a political lever. The only objection I can make is to the ankh. We ought to have our peculiar device, the mark of the Beast. I have worked for years to find a make and I have settled on the following: It consists of two circles, touching internally, with the centre of the smaller of the two marked as a point. This gives the Greek letters S T. Our third form of 31. It gives the sun and moon conjoined, and is also a foreshortened phallus. The only thing I have not settled is the ratio of the radii. This must be such that the proportion is good aesthetically and it must also conceal our sacred numbers. I may be inspired to work at this to-night: if so, I will enclose the design. (I have added two other circles, and am all [illegible] up.)

     

Tell me if the Open Court is still running. If so, call on them, and say that I was a friend and colleague of the late Paul Carus. They might very well publish some of my more serious (conventionally speaking) Magical, Mystical, or Philosophical Essays. I mean things like Time, Science and Buddhism, and The Psychology of Hashish. They might also possibly undertake Book IV [Part I & Part II]. It appears to me of cardinal importance that our publications should be in the hands of regular business people. You have neither the time nor the temperament to sell books, especially without organization. If Ryerson [Albert W. Ryerson] had not been such a crazy crook and Lodge such a treacherous foe, we should have had the country in our pocket two years ago. But no doubt, the Gods have their own ideas.

     

I had a letter from Mudd [Norman Mudd], saying plainly that he knew from the first moment he met me that it was his destiny to be my disciple. I wrote in reply, but it is too early yet to have heard from him again.

     

Mudd is exactly the type of man we need. He is a serious person with education. That reminds me that I am going to return to the old story. If you are going to be taken seriously in Chicago, you must absolutely keep Rubina [Rubina Stansfeld Jones] out of the public view. She comes as a shock to everybody of the kind you want to associate with and they judge you by her. This is altogether apart from her habit of making mischief; it is altogether apart from the bad impression she makes on strangers. The average serious man doesn't want a woman of any kind anywhere around when he is talking business. That would apply if she were Egeria and St. Theresa and the Duchess of Devonshire in one. I know you think it is your Magical task to initiate her, but surely that can be done without associating her with your public life. Statesmen don't bring their wives to Cabinet Councils, nor do Archbishops put them in the pulpit. People like to think of the teacher as a being uncontaminated by a woman. And they are right to do so. You ought to be a word, and nothing else. That you are a man is a misfortune. Don't make it worse by introducing a woman. I know this is rather like Satan rebuking sin, but though many women have helped me, I have, generally speaking, kept them out of the limelight. When I have not done so, trouble has invariably arisen. I must earnestly advise you to arrange for Rubina to take a job which would keep her out of mischief to some extent, and not to introduce her to people interested in Occultism, or even to be present at your lectures and classes. You will find, incidentally, that such a course of action will make your personal relations with her far more pleasant. A great deal of domestic unhappiness, of the petty kind, is caused by the profanation of the marriage relation by intimacy. I implore you not to think that these remarks are inspired by any personal feeling. But I have had to deplore, again and again. The ruin of men's usefulness, by habitual association with their wives.

     

I had some pictures on sale in the English Tea Room in Palermo. They were admired by a painter named Capt. Townshend, who discovered the perpetrator to be myself. He proved to be an intimate friend of Fuller's [J.F.C. Fuller] who is now a Colonel employed in the War Office. I want you to write to him and tell him something about your attainment and induce him to come back to the Great Work. Townshend told me much about him. He described him as a great man wasted. Starting where he did he ought to have been more than a Colonel by now. He lived at the Langham for a year, warmly greeted by hosts of friends, who unanimously cut his wife. She was whoring round the hotel. I want you to get my point of view about this. Nothing can be more admirable than to have your wife waving her cunt wildly in the air, provided that you make an asset of it. If you introduce her to a man, do it in these words:

     

"This is my wife—if you want to fuck her, go ahead."

     

It is a plank in our campaign. Then it is up to the man to approve or not. But if he takes you to be merely a careless husband, it is a black mark against you. Fuller is pitted. Fuller is trying to do two incompatible things. He is trying to be respectable and free at the same time. He doesn't advertise Gretel's cunt—he tries to ignore it, which is impossible, because of its size and odour. He left me partly through her intrigues, partly because he was afraid that my reputation would damage his career. He has met the nemesis of the half-hearted. Gretel choked his career; and on top of that, his mental superiority made him disliked and envied in the army. All his good qualities injured him. If he had stuck to me, neck or nothing, Gretel wouldn't have mattered, except that, like Rubina, she made mischief, and his brains would have made him a leader because they wouldn't have been hampered by routine. If he had chucked both me and Gretel, he might have been where Haig is.

     

You are still a young man, and you have a new chance in a new city. I urge you earnestly not to compromise it. Keep Rubina in the background; use her as a secret agent if you like, but don't let people generally know that she exists. Your reserved authority is your greatest asset, and the comic relief of Rubina spoils your every scene.

     

I now turn to the question of the Abbey [Abbey of Thelema]. We are in a desperate financial crisis, and I am at my wit's end. It is maddening to think that $30 a week will cover all expenses, and that it is as impossible to earn it here as if it were $3000. It is extraordinary how every circumstance conspires to keep us in this stupid condition, and it is really very bad for me, for years now, I have been enduring this martyrdom of being unable to give to the world what has been given to me for that purpose. It is  destroying my power of producing good work. I used to write for my own pleasure and vanity. I cannot do so any longer. I am utterly bound up in my Oath. I cannot work except for others, writing is merely onanism. Why should I tell myself what I happen to know? I nee to be kept up to the mark by the feeling that I am pledged to put the last ounce of my power into making my production perfect. I understand my position as an ordeal, but I cannot yet see the issue. All I can say is that I want you to do your utmost to get out publications undertaken by professional people. You know I don't want money out of it. I've never known such perfection of happiness as since I have been living in this primitive place where we get meat about twice a week, and I sleep on the floor. But I am being slowly worn down by this horrible feeling of impotence to do my work for the world.

     

Now, the Abbey is a sort of solution. It has been an unqualified success from the moral and Magical standpoints. We have met every kind of problem, and knocked it sideways. We have attracted a great deal of interest wherever the tale has been told. Now it seems to me that you can do a great deal to help us by means of the slip which you have had printed. Whenever people come to you for instruction, you can tell them, if they are in a position to dispense with city life, that in spite of my exalted grade, I can accept people in this Abbey if they are prepared to comply with the conditions. It is understood, of course, that they come when they like, and go when they like, and the conditions are stated more or less accurately in the Manifestos. I should like you to realize that if we had a regular income of $1500 per year, perhaps we'd better say $2000, we should immediately be in a position to devote ourselves to active work of a kind that would bring in large sums of money at frequent intervals. But it is impossible to carry on creative work when one is always being brought up with a shock over some ridiculous question of a few dollars. And again, it is useless to conceive ideas for financing the Great Work when one is not in touch with the people who could realize them. For example, I have a plan for developing this town as a tourist centre. It is so good and so profitable that I believe I could find the money in Chicago within forty-eight hours if I had half a dozen introductions. I am like a man with a trunk full of diamonds on the top of Chogo Ri.

     

I am sending you a prospectus of part of the scheme with photographs. You may happen to meet a man to whom it would appeal. In the meanwhile you can talk about our Abbey. It might possibly pay to make a little mystery of the situation. If you could get half a dozen people here to contribute $25 a week apiece, for which sum they could live very much better than in America, and have the training thrown in, we should at once be in a position to do our own publishing. One way or another, the publication is both the means and the end. Every new publication helps to sell the old ones as you know very well, but nothing is so bad as cessation of activity.

     

I feel that we are on the brink of some great change in our fortunes. I am writing this letter with more hope than I have had for a long time past.

 

Love is the law, love under will.

 

Thy sire,

 

The Beast 666.

 

Please look up Maurice Browne.[1] He had to close his theatre when the war broke out. He had accepted "The Saviour" of which you have a copy. He may be on his feet again now and you might be able to get him to produce it.

 

666.

 

 

1—[In 1912, theatrical director, dramatist and actor Maurice Browne (1881-1955) and his wife, Ellen van Volkenberg (known as the actress Nelly Van) founded The Little Theatre, which soon became famous for its experimental plays.]

 

 

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