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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Charles Stansfeld Jones
Collegium ad Spiritum Sanctum, Cefalů, Sicily.
January 9, 1923.
My beloved son,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
"Q.B.L." arrived this morning. I have, of course, not had time to go into it thoroughly, but I thought I would write this to give you my first impression.
In the first place, I notice too many misprints, at least one very serious misspelling, Sagittarius with two gs, and thirdly, a very bad fault, samely, the use of capital letters for the sake of emphasis. This is always a sign of great weakness; it shows lack of confidence in one's prose. Apart from these small matters, the book seems to me entirely admirable. I should like to thank you for mentioning the two knights on one horse; they will get on better if they decide to go on the same journey.
More persons than one have tried consistently to make mischief between us. I was really led to believe that "Q.B.L." would turn out to be something in the nature of an attack on the general principles with which I am identified. In your turn, you have been induced to suspect that I am giving the Law a black eye by my personal conduct. I hope that my previous letter will have cleared up this point, and the arrival of your book clears up that. Let us remember in future that any a parent divergence between us is pretty sure to be a device of the slave-gods.
It seems that you are ignorant of a good deal of the work I have done in recent years; e.g. the last sentence of the third paragraph on page 42—and, in fact, the whole paragraph. You can evidently never have received my work on The Fool. He is not only Parsival, but Harpocrates, Bacchus Diphuss, Zeus, Arrbenothenus, etc. When he grows up he becomes Pan. If you had known this (about yourself!) you would not have been tempted to degrade Aleph to the place of Tau.
From what I can see of the Appendix generally, it appears to have some very interesting ideas, but I think it is rather a case of rushing into print. The best ideas are none the worse for being allowed to mellow. The real interest of the Appendix is that it illustrates your rough working, and if we let it go as that instead of making a dogmatic revolution, it is impossible to take any objection to it. I think you have failed to recognize that Athbash is no better and no worse a Temurah than any of the other systems. What I dislike about your proposed reversal of the serpent, and did dislike about your proposed rearrangement of the Sephira is that such things merely upset a meaningless convention. It is therefore the blow of the sword in the water. There is no point in proving that Sunday ought really to be Saturday because humanity has missed a day since the day of creation, unless there is a day of creation' and as we know there isn't, it is much better to support the conventional calendar. I think you could have brought out all the truths of your Appendix without upsetting language.
However, I will go into it more thoroughly in the next few days, and let you have a full criticism. In the meanwhile, let me congratulate you very heartily in a general sense on the book.
Love is the law, love under will.
Your affectionate Sire,
The Beast 666.
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