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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Norman Mudd
Collegium ad Spiritum Sanctum, Cefalù, Sicily
Mar. 16, 1923 e.v.
Care Frater,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
I had better begin by giving you a general idea of the position here, and of recent events.
On my return from America, Xmas 1919, I found that practically the whole of the property of the Order and my own personal property had been stolen by the Grand Treasurer General [George MacNie Cowie] and, the Grand Secretary General. They had stripped me of my very underclothing! Further, a Settlement that I had made had lost one of its Trustees by death, and the other had become my bitter enemy for no reason at all. I found it also impossible to get any of my writing accepted.
I was thus entirely penniless. Much of the stolen property could no doubt be recovered by legal action; but that requires money. The Gods, however, provided supplies from time to time, so that I was able to pay £350 which was due to the printers [Chiswick Press] who had the whole stock of my books in warehouse. When however I came to take delivery, the firm had changed hands; and the new Boss was a crook and a crank, and refused to hand them over! They are worth from £15000 to £20000; and our first business must be to compel him to deliver them. I will give full details of all these matters when we meet.
We were thus living from hand to mouth all through 1920-21. Then I was able to sell a reversion for a small sum. It enabled me to go to England; and no more. This was in May 1922. I reached London with less than £10 and the only clothes I had were some Highland clothes which had been left in Storage with Scott Adie, and thus escaped the Grand Treasurer General. I managed to get along by pawning my watch etc. until I got some money from the English Review for various articles, and an advance of £60 on the Diary of a Drug Fiend. Later I got a further advance on my Autohagiography [The Confessions of Aleister Crowley], which is a tremendous business and still unfinished. I wrote the Drug Fiend in a month, took a short holiday (bar writing odd essays), and settled down to the 'Hag' then Leah [Leah Hirsig] fell ill, and had to come out here at once.
I returned here early in November 1922. Various people in London promised to send me money on various accounts; and they all went back on their word. We therefore had to live all winter as best we could on credit.
There was an Oxford boy named Loveday [Raoul Loveday] who had given two years of work to studying the Equinox etc. He had been long anxious to meet me, which he did about a fortnight before I left England. He had been trapped into marrying a half-crazy whore [Betty May], who had been twice married and once divorced previously. I wrote to him from Rome to join me. He wanted to study and practice Magick with me and was to help me with my work. I have an immense amount of unpublished Manuscripts, some ready for the press, some in need of editing—and we were also going to start a regular propaganda for the Abbey [Abbey of Thelema] here.
He had a great capacity for Magick; and we soon had a terrific current in full swing. The enemy started to attack us with furious malignancy. I fell ill early in January with mixed maladies, chiefly emphysema, asthma and bronchitis. He also got ill a little later. It began with a recurrence of malaria, which he had acquired in his childhood (he was born in Burma). All this time the weather was incredibly bad. We hardly saw the sun for weeks together. We have practically no arrangements for heating the house, which is situated on the side of a hill and becomes damp in wet weather. He was entirely confined to bed towards the end of the month; and I only got up to visit him every day and see what I could do for him. But his fever turned to intestinal trouble, and on February 15 to acute infective enteritis. On the 16th, paralysis of the heart finished him. I got up to perform the funeral service at the graveside the following day, and then took to my bed for good. I found I had myself malarial fever, a recurrence doubtless caused by my extreme general weakness. It took a curious form; the temperature stayed near 102° with hardly any variation day or night. It took no notice of quinine or Dover's Powder for a long while; but ultimately I got it to behave more rationally, the temperature rising to 104° and going down below normal after sweats. But I was so ill that they decided to call in the doctor on their own account. I lay, in fact, between life and death for a long time, and only turned the corner a week or do ago. The weather continued very bad, though occasional sunshine broke up the monotony of rain. (This weather is quite unprecedented in Sicily). To-day is the first day that I have been able to get out. It is a perfect day, and I am sitting in the sunshine; frightfully weak but feeling comparatively well, though I need a great deal of care, and shall do so for some time. This makes it difficult for me to arrange out meeting.
One of us went to Palermo yesterday, and tried to get information as to how I could join you at or near Gibraltar. I thought there was a boat direct; but in Palermo nobody knows anything about anything. It is the most ghastly town on the planet. I am however pretty sure at a pinch of being able to get to Tangiers by crossing to Tunis and taking either a coasting steamer or the train. It is out of the question for me to reach Madeira; and in point of fact, my plans must depend to some extent on whether you cable a further remittance and the amount of that remittance. I have had to send Soror Estai [Jane Wolfe] to London to represent me there for reasons explained below. We have also had to pay up some arrears of debt, and make various purchases necessary for your visit. We have been living without the most primitive necessities (to say nothing of comforts) of even the most savage life. There is at present only about £50 left of the £250; and there are still numerous expenses which have not yet been defrayed. However, I do not see why I should not manage a fortnight in Tangiers; that period should be enough for us to formulate our plans thoroughly. There is an enormous amount which you must know, and which we must discuss, before you can do much in England without putting your foot in it. Your letter to Frater Achad [Charles Stansfeld Jones] probably did about as much harm as any conceivable letter could do! I will explain why in person.
I must now explain the complication. The publication of the Drug Fiend let loose all the Comma Bacilli in England. John Bull and the Sunday Express started a most furious attack on my personal character entirely regardless, as usual, of truth. They actually published such ridiculous statements as that I had been in prison in America, and that I sent the women of the Abbey to walk the streets of Palermo and Naples! The death of Loveday (Frater AUD) started them all over again. His widow thought she would make a little fortune by selling his memory and honour—she did in fact get a £10 note, I understand. She told them the most extraordinary farrage of lies that ir was possible to concoct. They even suggest that he was murdered, and want an investigation. I wish to goodness we could get one; but even if they do, it will be hard to get the results published. Soror Estai found that she could not get the newspapers to print our side of the story for the simple reason that there is nothing sensational about it!
It is really an extraordinary position; but one can see the subtle manoeuvers of the Gods. Just before he fell ill, Frater AUD had a vision in which he met an Adept who prophesied that we were to go through "purgings" which obviously refers to his death and my illness; which has made a great spiritual difference to me. This was to be followed by the "fire of persecution", which is now in full swing; and then there is to be "a stream flowing into the sea from the West to the East of which the sands are of gold." There is evidently a symbol of calm irresistible force, fertility, and prosperity. This may be expected about 8 months from the present time. In the meanwhile, it is up to us to endure.
I hope the above will give you a fair idea of the general situation. What we have to do is release and realize our assets (we must have some kind of income to live on, and some capital if we are to make a forward move.); to prepare our propaganda, edit our manuscripts, and arrange for their publication; most important of all as far as you are concerned, to prepare the Qabalistic section of the Comment of the Book of the Law.
It would be a mistake to look on this programme from a purely human point of view, for that would lead to a mere non possumus. The Gods have this matter in hand, and all we have to do is to provide the channels for them to fill with energy. In other words, if we do our part of the work with industry, intelligence, and confidence, they will provide those resources which we cannot.
I want you to calm your mind with the utmost resolution. For example when I said I wanted to do your horoscope, I didn't mean you to send a long excited cable about it—a post card would have done just as well. You must take things more easily—and trust the Gods. Nothing annoys them so much as uncontrolled enthusiasm. You have to learn to work "without lust of result". Trying to force the situation is always fatal. I am not sure that I did not make a mistake in cabling you not to communicate magically with other people. My excuse is that I could see from what was going on here that the enemy was very much on the job, and the easiest way to divert you from carrying out our plans was through other people in the Order. It is of course entirely contrary to the strict rule of the A∴A∴ for you to know so much as the existence of other members of the Order except your Neophyte. In this case, however, I am your real Neophyte; because your Probationership (spiritually, though not officially) dates from Cambridge.
Our plans then. You leave the "Edinburgh Castle" at Gibraltar. I may write a subsequent letter to you c/o the Union Castle Line; in fact, I am likely to do so. If I am well enough and rich enough to travel I shall be at Tangiers or thereabouts, and will give you the address of my hotel. If anything prevents me getting to Tangiers, I might be able to get half way—say to Hammam Meskoutine. It is essential that I should take some kind of a convalescing cure, as my illness has left me shockingly weak, and I am only too liable to relapse unless I build myself up thoroughly. But if I cannot leave Cefalù for any cause, you must make your way here somehow or other from Gibraltar. I am assuming that you will reach Gibraltar about Apr. 10 or 11, and will try to be in the vicinity a day or so before that date.
I am convinced that the future of the world depends largely on the successful carrying out of this programme. My illness and the attacks in the press have coincided so neatly with your illumination and release that I cannot think it a matter of chance. By the way, I was astounded to hear of your accident. In the Paris Working (Jan. & Feb. 1914) a prophesy was made that my work would be supported by the devotion of four men, each of whom suffered from some physical defect. It at once struck me that your accident had to happen to qualify you as one of the four.
Expect then, further instructions by telegram or letter at Gibraltar; and act accordingly. Don't try to cable me from Madeira as I shall probably have left Cefalù, and the people here may not know where to find me at the moment.
Love is the law, love under will,
Yours fraternally, with all benedictions,
The Beast 666.
ΛΟΓΟC ΑΙΩΝΟC Θελγμχ
P.S. I am looking forward most eagerly to seeing you and giving you full information about all these matters. It is impossible to do very much by letter. There are all sorts of chances of misunderstanding. I should mention two important points which I forgot to put in my last. They concern money and reputation. I fear I gave you too gloomy a picture.
Frater Achad has a unique collection of my Mss., first and rare editions, etc., value $17,000. This ought to be saleable to some bibliophile considering the immense and unhoped-for publicity which the Sunday Express and John Bull are generously showering me. He has also a stock of Equxs. [Equinoxes] and other books which I have never been able to get him to catalogue, but which must be worth from £10,000 to £20,000. These should be easy to sell if properly handled. We ought to be able to get some enterprising American publisher to take them over and push them for us. Achad has already, as you know, a publisher interested in his own presentation of the Doctrines and Methods of the Order.
As a counterblast to the absurd attacks on me, my old (New York and Georgia) friend, Wm. B Seabrook [William Seabrook], who has a high position with the Hearst papers, is writing a long serial (10 to 15 installments, he says) about me and my Work and the Abbey, and so on. He is to put all the lies about me into it as hearsay, while drawing my character from his personal knowledge of me. He did me the honour to say that he knew more good about me than about any other man he has ever known. (It is significant of the absolute balls-achingness of modern conditions of publication that the story has been held up so far for lack of photographs of women. I hope I have now rectified the omission). (The minds of the people have been so dulled by compulsory "education" and the cheap press that they have become incapable of reading at all, except the captions of such erudite stimuli as pictures. The Cinema is one symptom; the Daily Mirror another. Both mean that nobody who caters for amusements dares ask people to use their minds.) This serial ought to do us a great deal of good. It should make a market for our publications, old and new, and might induce some lecture agent to offer me a tour in America next winter. (Humanly speaking, I do not see how I can live through another winter in Cefalù. I seem to be ill all the time, "from Solstice stubborn to Equinox"!) This winter has been the worst; but last winter was bad enough, though I get away to Paris in February; and so was the winter before that, when also I was able to take refuge in La Ville Lumidre. Possibly the introduction of a fire-place and draught-excluders might make the Abbey habitable for me; but at the best it is a great strain. For one thing, there is no proper light to read by; and my eyes suffer accordingly. My mind is so active that I am compelled to work all the time, in whatever conditions. This winter, though ill in bed and actually gasping for breath, I insisted on dictating the "Hag" from four to six hours a day when I could force myself to do so, which I did, bar 3 or 4 days. By the way, I have just heard that Ananda Metteya [Allan Bennett] is dead. I wonder if this is part of the general attack on the Order, which seems to have been set in motion all along the line and on every plane. My knowledge of its strength and malignancy account for my anxiety about you—as the Verdun of our line. But no doubt the Gods have been giving us two the necessary protection, so that the attack has been more or less wasted on people less important to Their immediate purposes. Of course, the return of the current is bound to be very deadly for the assailants. Remember to allow no feeling of anger or indignation to enter your heart or mind. These people are as innocent as panic-stricken sheep, overwhelmed by formless fear of an Unknown which is only the more terrible because they cannot define it. I have found it very hard to refrain from the natural reaction against such abominably vile falsehoods, not about me—damn Me!—but about innocent and noble people who are quite defenceless, and have been dragged into the mess merely for their fine aspirations and perceptions, honour, and loyalty; but I have got to the point of smiling indifference. I trust the Gods to see to it that my friends shall not suffer. Help me in my attitude by concentrating on the hope that the upshot of all this will be to enlighten the minds and hearts of these unfortunate wretches. The Gods are evidently preparing the way for us to introduce the Law to the minds of thinkers and seekers in a much more extended way than would have been possible otherwise, even had we had £10,000 to spend in advertising.
666.
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