23 March 1923 - Aleister Crowley to Norman Robb

Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Norman Robb

COLLEGIUM AD SPIRITUM SANCTUM

Cefalu, Sicily

Dear Sir,

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

I am in receipt of your document of Jan. 28. Please figure to yourself that my eyes are not what they were. I like to read letters but I like them typed, and those long lines of yours are terribly hard to follow. This is especially important, as I like to read over a letter two or three times at least before answering it, and yours has been a great strain on a sick man.

Part 3 of Book 4 [Magick in Theory and Practice] should have made it clear that Magick is by no means footling nonsense, but that, on the contrary, it is necessarily the mechanism of all phenomena.

I am glad you liked the Book Reviews. Some people used to buy The Equinox for these alone; it proves the possession of an excellent sense of humour to enjoy them.

You are quite right in saying that the stories in The Equinox serve to link the theory of Magick with actual events. "The Magick Glasses" less so than most of the others, for Harris [Frank Harris] began with a postulate of praeternatural powers. In the "Ordeal of Ida Pendragon," for example, no such demand is made on the reader; there is nothing in the story which might not happen in the most ordinary way.

I am glad you like Berashith and Eleusis—the former (written in the Spring of 1901) helped me very much to interpret the cosmology of the Book of the Law, while the latter gives many practical hints which should be very valuable, either to a beginner in Magick, or a highly advanced student. The Sword of Song should serve to clear the mind of rubbish and give at least a hint of the Way out of the mess. Do not forget, however, that I wrote it long before I was 30, also before the Book of the Law had come to put the Keys of all the gates in my hands.

I am sorry you have not got an adequate grip of poetry, for without ecstasy there is no ultimate truth, and it is difficult to convey ecstasy without the aid of music. Let me beg you to get by heart my "Hymn to Pan" (The Equinox, III, 1) and my invocation to Hecate (Book 3 of Orpheus). If you use them ceremonially, you will find that they possess actual power in themselves. I think you will readily understand that this depends on the Form. Once you get the hand of a few things, the secret will be in your power once and for all. Need I say that the converse holds? The slightest defect in poetry either in inspiration or technique, that is to say, the truth or beauty of it, destroys its virtue more completely than would happen in the case of prose. For this reason, poetry is the supreme test of the value of a creative artist. Either he succeeds or he fails. In prose, there are too many degrees between the two; in poetry none. My poetry, incidentally, is far more austere than appears at first sight. The average reader misses the meaning, being carried away by the rush of the rhythm. If you will study a poem of mine as seriously as you would a dialogue of Plato, you will find innumerable allusions which you never suspected on the first reading because you are obliged to stop and think, which destroys the magical impression. This quality in my work sets me entirely apart from all other poets of my time. You must go on reading and enquiring, until every phrase is familiar and clear. If you then put the poem aside; when you next take it up you will be able to read it properly for the first time. I know that I am demanding a great deal from a generation in a hurry, which finds the theatre too much like hard work, and drowses through the cinema.

With the books you have borrowed from M.H. Frater Progadior [Frank Bennett] you should obtain very comprehensive knowledge of my mind. The more you study them, the more fully you will understand the scope of my thought.

I am glad you found Q.B.L. helped you with 777. I do not care for the Appendix; but the main book is excellent. I wonder, though, that you have not read the very complete explanation of the Qabalah in The Equinox, I, 5 (The Temple of Solomon the King).

I am very glad you have written to me at last. It is very strange, but it happens constantly that people put off writing to me for years. Your letter explains you very admirably. I feel that I shall be able to help you considerably in many ways.

You analyse delightfully the psychology of your attitude towards my work. It is true that I handle English as few have ever done. My vocabulary is enormous; and my understanding of so many subjects and instinctive perception of their necessary interrelation has never been equaled. But the effect is to make me obscure to nearly everybody; and I am surprised and pleased that you consider me as lucid. Fearless I know I am: but courage, remember, is the first injunction laid upon the candidate for initiation. I have now much experience of how to guide people to their True Will. The 'Postures' and 'gibberish' are now perfectly explicable on rational grounds. Further, I am able to handle such technique with strictly scientific accuracy. I can show you that one practice is more suitable than another for you, and prove irrefutably why such should be the case. (I cannot read Hebrew Script). You should learn to make the characters clearly and beautifully. There is a significance in the shape of each letter. It is, in fact, a true sigil of a definite individual endowed with qualities indicated by its correspondences, as given in 777. It is by my thorough and accurate understanding of such details that I have been able to discover the underlying identity of systems which seem superficially incompatible; also to deduce all sorts of unknown ideas which experiment has shewn to be correct, from the qualities of the Known.

As to Liber Berashith, that is rather an advanced practice. I have not made it clear—it was not fully clear to myself until I wrote Part 3 of Book 4 how vitally important it is for the student to go through the sheer drill, apparently objectless, of Asana, development of the Astral Body, and so on. It is only possible to begin the Great Work, properly speaking, when you have acquired these faculties as completely as breathing, so that you can do them unconsciously (in fact, [tend]) to do them, so that it is an effort to stop rather than to go on). You do not have to climb Mount Cook—I wrote about mountaineering naturally, being myself a mountaineer; but all I want to inculcate is that every part of the body and mind should be trained to act automatically, without ever making a mistake or requiring a single moment's conscious attention!

You talk about earning a living, but I cannot earn mine! I could no more make £4-10-0 a week than I could clear an 8 foot bar. My qualities are useless to commerce in every day matters. I could save the country 10 million a year or increase the revenue by three times that amount; but how is the world to find that out? I have to rake in odd sums of money by what is really, to my mind, a sort of swindle. The publishers would never have accepted my Drug Fiend [The Diary of a Drug Fiend] if they had realized that it was plain self-advertisement on the one hand, and propaganda for the Law of Thelema on the other. Of course they make their profit; the public is pleased, but they sell the book on what are really false pretences. It is not the sensational drivel it is obliged to pretend to be; it is one of the most serious and important books ever published.

I hope you will make a success of the clothing business. You will find, in fact, that the Law is really a principle which underlies all human relations. It only needs to be applied intelligently to any given problem to furnish a complete solution. Consider what I have said in the Tao Teh King about the labour problem. Get your mind going similarly about your business problems. "Do what thou wilt" should show you how to make an advertisement stand out and overshadow all rivals. Remember that each letter, each word has a character of its own; a Will of its own. See to it that each has full play, and also does not thwart the other letters. That is the difference between a clearly conceived, phrased, and displayed advertisement, and a redundant, dull, confused one. This is just a hint; with your brains you ought to be able to make it fertile and build up a little fortune in short order.

It doesn't follow, however, as you suggest, that business capacity is an indication of ability to attain Initiation. For instance, sometimes deliberate mediocrity, compromise, falsehood and dissipation of thought help a man to earn a living. It is only the biggest business which can be run on the principles of the A∴A∴

I note your age and domestic calamity. It is very hard indeed for people who are seriously married or in love (worse) to concentrate, as they should, on things of the spirit. Yet here again, the Law offers a solution. You must make every gesture of life significant in the Great Work.

I am very interested to hear that your wife is a writer. If she is sympathetic with our work, she might be able to help us tremendously. What about a series of articles on me personally; my poetical works; my explorations and adventures; my study of Eastern religions from within (afoot from Morocco in the West and the Sahara to Central Asiatic Buddhism in the North through many types of Hinduism to Canonical Buddhism in Ceylon and Burmah to the South, and my walk across China to learn the principles of the Yi King and Lao-Tze and the peculiar Buddhism of Japan, also its Shinto in the East) Then there is my experiment of an Abbey here. M.H. Frater Progradior can supply the facts about me personally, and give some account of the working of my methods on himself and others as he saw them. The life here is also well enough described in the [Diary of a] Drug Fiend, where too a sample of my theories and methods is set forth. There should be plenty of photographs in [the] Equinox etc, to illustrate, but I could supply others.

This is suggested to me partly by the fact that England is at present hysterical with horror at my abominations. I am called 'The King of Depravity,' 'A Wizard of Wickedness,' and so on, and accused of theft, treason, sexual perversion, addiction to drugs, swindling, white-slavery, and murder! Columns and pages of weeklies are packed with this insensate drivel, and we cannot get anyone to publish our side of the case, because there is nothing sensational about it! All that we can say is that we are quiet, sensible people, very busy with our work—and who wants to read that this place is in reality a sort of stick-in-the-mud Sunday School?

There is therefore a great deal of curiosity about me at the moment. In addition, a friend of mine has got a long serial about me and my doings^[1] accepted by a big paper in New York; so the moment seems propitious for any popular account of the matter. A story of this kind might easily make a tremendous hit. After all, there is a lot of sensational stuff in the real facts of my life. If we could get something of this kind published, it would make Frater Progradior's work a certain success right off.

An account of your life in a condensed form should of course be the opening of your Magickal Record which you ought to begin to write at once. This is a fact of the utmost importance. But in writing up your past it should be your main object to show how you came to be writing it at all; how, in fact, you find yourself brought to the point of taking up Magick seriously; for what you have to do is to calculate your orbit. For this purpose you must show what other celestial bodies have attracted you, in what direction, and in what measure.

With regard to books. I am sorry to say that I have none available. The stock in London is being held up by a thief, and I cannot get any at all. You can get practically all of them from Sir C.S. Jones [Charles Stansfeld Jones], Box 141, Chicago, Ill., U.S.A., but I don't expect he would let them go without the good red gold. Surely, your best plan is to save up till you have the price, and then write to him which you want. Please don't misunderstand this—there is no question of lack of confidence—I simply have not got a set available. You get busy writing that account of us—either yourself or by your wife—and with the least bit of luck, you should be able to buy the 17,000 dollars collection of Mss, First Editions, etc, which Jones has in Chicago.

I hope to hear from you again shortly, especially that you have got my publicity going strong and that you have started seriously to practice the elements of Magick and Yoga. You seem to me to have the chief qualities requisite already pretty well developed; and if you don't try to run before you can walk, but stick like a man to acquiring the elements of the business, you should do very well.

Love is the law, love under will.

Yours fraternally,

The Beast 666

1—This was the narrative by W. B. Seabrook that was serialized in a number of newspapers owned by the Hearst conglomerate in 1923.

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