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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Norman Mudd
[13 June 1923]
Tell Ninette [Ninette Shumway] that I love her very dearly and enjoyed her letter immensely. I am a very sick man, practically incapable of work, except for short periods, so will not write.
'Jesus' was the Great Black Magician who prevented the formula IAO.
I am seeing things (mostly thanks to you) in a totally different light. I have kept on acting rationally. Fatal error!
You will grow out of your weaknesses if you stick to your work. I am certainly not going to encourage them by calling your attention to them. It is your vanity which speaks. You want me to pay more attention to you and the only excuse you can think up is to ask to be whipped. Trust me to kill that bugger Mudd. I permit you to describe the 'persistently troublesome weaknesses' of which you write. They are illusions. You will feel rather a fool when you try to put them down in black and white. I shall probably not criticize them, which would flatter and stimulate them, but I hope to be able to show you that they are virtues essential to your G.W. [Great Work].
I refuse to believe that failure is possible. My endless errors are themselves part of the plan of the Chiefs.
I have always been temperate and cautious till quite recently. I now find myself thrown into a spiritual state unfamiliar and terrible by the simple process of stopping Heroin for a short time. I get dissociation both of personality and ideas such as I never had even in the Abyss. Several fundamental ideas peculiar to AC have been ruthlessly annihilated in the last week. My point of view has been revolutionized. Also, I have ceased to struggle against death or insanity. To-day I took the oath following:
I, the Beast 666, swear that I will abandon my human Reason if it be the Will of Them that called me, that Hadit burning in my heart shall make secure and swift my pen for the writing of the Comment.
The Beast 666
In one Working two or three days ago, I asked, 'What is the Sacrament?' and learnt that it was always consummated in darkness. I, then, as O.H.O. [Outer Head of the Order] of the O.T.O. ordered the Pageant of the Graal to pass before me. I got the Vision of Pan and after some hours of complete insanity, got fed up and postponed the rest of the show. (I had to throw away the Shew Stone and use the Silver Star, which is myself as 666—11 points, black, silver-rimmed scarlet centre gold-rimmed, Arabic Cheth in gold. The interpretation of this symbol will clear up many mysteries. I had this star made during the Cairo Working ad hoc. It was Alostrael [Leah Hirsig] who identified it as the Star of the A∴A∴. I have always instinctively hated and feared it, have never used it, yet somehow it has followed me about all these years.)
You will see from the above that I am deliberately throwing over all rational ideas soever. I am planning an absolutely demented G.M.R. [Great Magical Retirement] in perfect faith accepting quite calmly the terrors involved for me personally and the abandonment of my entire programme of—well, really, all my life.
I quite agree that my career for all these 19 years has been a brilliant failure; a classic example of the results of a magical blunder. Mail me a copy of Raoul's [Raoul Loveday] Vision. I agree with you that it is important. His G.W. in this incarnation must have been to guide me at the critical moment; this vision being his only contribution, it must be priceless. The moment his Work was done he went out like a match, having lighted my cigar.
My MS should be put in the hands of Lytton Strachey and he should re-write it completely. To me it seems amorphous, clumsy, without design or sense of proportion; a mere chaos of facts, and it should be a masterpiece of art like Harris's [Frank Harris] Wilde.
Leah [Hirsig] is slowly improving but inclined to collapse. My own recovery is messed up by the considerations set forth above. If you think I ought to retain my reason in the ordinary sense of the word, you and Fuller [J.F.C. Fuller] should grip me firmly by the testicles and pull me through.
It is exactly the blunder that I have made these 19 years. I refused to act by CCXX. I took all the reasonable measures I could to secure the success of my works. That is what has smashed my career. Might it then not be the final disastrous mistake to get myself back to normality as every reasonable element in my mind urges. At no time have I feared to risk insanity or death for the sake of the Work but there is still this feeling that part of my proof is to be a fine healthy old boy so as to escape the reproach of the ungodly.
Here is a point where your 'love' is wanted. I can trust you because you once wrote that it doesn't matter a fart whether I lived or died.
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