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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Charles Stansfeld Jones
Collegium ad Spiritum Sanctum, Cefalů, Sicily.
July 19, 1921.
My beloved son,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Yours of June 30 has somewhat alarmed me. The circular is appalling. You must not think I'm interfering with your work if I insist on removing the misunderstanding which would certainly arise in many minds from its wording.
I shall be very glad to have your Comment to eke out mine. There is nothing in your first three verses to which I can object, but I have decided to transfer all Qabalistic stuff to an appendix. I want the Comment proper to appeal to the man on the street.
Your AUM essay is puzzling. The "styles of letters" are changes and I must say it looks to me as if you had a bad dose of Folir des Grandeurs. C.[harles] S.[tansfeld] J.[ones] is not Horus. You seem to be mixing up mystical truths with material. I have often explained that personal attainments do not entitle one to corresponding grades in the Order. You talk sometimes as if you were the speaker in CCXX. I am not your prophet, you are one of the things which I prophesied. You have a terribly bad trick of neglecting context in your Qabalah. You mustn't jumble different books together, and make a Welsh stew to celebrate your birthday.
I am really in terrible apprehension about you, lest there should have been one drop of blood poured into the cup of Our Lady. The danger of taking the Oath is that the minutest atom of individuality would be released by the initiation from the limitations which keep other men sane. You seem to be under the impression that you are the whole cheese with of course a polite recognition of the services rendered you by your father in begetting you. It doesn't matter to me a scrap any more whether you are the child or not. You may be Horus and all the rest of the Pantheon in one. What does anyone care? I don't even mind that your going insane would make my work appear a failure. I have learnt at last to work without Lust of result. Even my personal affection for you will survive. You will find the fixed Mercury is the straight waistcoat, and the womb of Nuit is the walls of your padded cell, and you will be just as right there as anywhere else. The whole thing doesn't matter at all. Everything is equally Will and equally Necessity, so don't let anything I say worry you unless it be Will and Necessity that you should be worried.
However, it is Will and Necessity for me to keep my personal honour intact with regard to my Work and I act accordingly.
It may be helpful to you if I mention that in certain recent experiences I found a most dangerous tendency to a megalomania similar to your own: but I had the sense to laugh at myself, and I am feeling better, thank you. I am a quite ordinary man on a very so-so planet. These things are actually Nuit (and the rest of it) without any question of transmutation; and my position as The Beast is a quite limited office in a particular order of things with definite human functions. You are the one and the absolute God, and so is everybody else. Why worry? Why assert yourself? Why proclaim these interesting facts about Jones when they are true of everybody? You are not the Crowned and Conquering Child who exists in us all—you are the "child of my bowels" and my bowels will rejoice when you get out of the childish notion that the earth was made for you to play with. At present you only benefit my bowels by making them work overtime.
Love is the law, love under will.
Thy sire,
The Beast 666.
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