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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Frank Bennett
COLLEGIUM SPIRITUM SANCTUM Cefalu, Sicily
Mar. 23, 1923. e.v.
Dear Ahah,
93
Thank you so much for the fiver—we needed it very badly. Your little contributions always seem to turn up when they are most wanted. It would however, be highly desirable to carry out your original plan. I suggest that you should persuade the Brethren to combine to put aside a small sum weekly, regarding this contribution as the first charge on their incomes. In this way you could send us a regular monthly remittance. What we need so bitterly is an income, however small, on which we can count absolutely. As it is, we have to use credit all the time; and that means paying very much more than we should have to if we could pay cash, or even promise to pay on a given date. This contribution from Australia would be put to the credit of the Branch, and in due course you would be able to send a man (or woman) here for personal training. It would thus be a sort of investment or insurance, similar to what people make with the object of taking a holiday at some future date. You could stimulate the Brethren by promising the visit to Cefalu to the one who collected most "new chums," or made the greatest advances in intellectual knowledge of Magick, etc. I would set an examination Paper and judge the competition. You must really use the conventional methods by which people are worked up to enthusiasm. You see it done every day over politics, Charity Bazaars, the most feeble footling things in the world. It's absurd that you shouldn't be able to beat them at their own game.
Mrs. Rabinowitz,[1] as she does a society column in the newspaper, must know all the ropes, and ought to be able to sweep Sydney. All you have to do is to find a popular "slogan", and snout it till nobody can hear anything else.
About the "Hag" [Confessions of Aleister Crowley]—of course I shall mention you and your work. You are really very important to me in ways that you have no idea of yourself. You represent a type and class of man which is, in my opinion, more important to the race than any other except the absolute brute stock—the earth cultivating mammal.* If I only had 100,000 like you, as I may have sooner than any one thinks, I should have no difficulties of the kind I have at present. Your last paragraph is fine—it is a great joy to me, as I lie on my sick bed, to receive such a message of enthusiasm and determined Youth.
Love is the law, love under will.
Yours fraternally,
THE BEAST 666.
P.S. A set of books signed is no good unless there is a history attached to the signing of each one in turn. Sir, you are an ass!! You want to reduce the value of my signature to that of a rubber stamp! Can't you see that the value of personal intercourse is that it is personal? As soon as you multiply an unique glory, you make it common and banal. Sir, you are an ass!! You have got more than one volume of mine signed and inscribed by me with some appropriate remark, such as to give life to the moment of presentation. More still, you have a book, Liber Samekh, actually written by me with the express purpose of helping you to attain the object of your Magickal Retirement when you were here. You possess this incomparably priceless treasure, this masterpiece of Magick, and prose, created specially for your use and behoof; a manuscript unparalleled in the History of the World, a personal tribute to yourself from the One Master, a sublime and colossal monument, more enduring than granite, and inscribed by my own hand with your name. And you propose to cheapen this "Pearl beyond all price", to diminish the majesty of this world's Wonder, by putting it in a row with a set of other volumes without historical significance, without personal implication, without claim to the notice of any intelligent person—supreme and superb treasure as each would be in less august surroundings. Sir, you are an ass!!!
666
*That is (of course) barring the Flower & Fruit—the Artist or Creative Genius on whom depends the Progress of the race.
1—This was Estelle Rabinowitz, wife of Bennett's friend Nathan Rabinowitz (Norman Robb).
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