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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Norman Mudd
Nefta
Nov. 1, 1923 e.v.
Care Frater,
93
Your further letter (Oct. 28) with glacier incarnation enclosed. First, I want you to note your extreme inconsistency in policy. You once proposed to wind up the old Aeon gloriously by my physical crucifixion and seemed to consider me a cheap sport for not gushing about it.
Your present views fit mine more closely. See John St. John P. 134 and 3, when I was refused death because I had to rule the earth. I require absolute and unquestioning obedience and the recognition that I possess in my own right everything. It is up to you to make this effective as a matter of organization. I object to going around and dunning my subjects for tribute. I expect everything which I Will to be carried out promptly and efficiently.
III—39 is not easy to carry out partly because interpretation is obscure or ambiguous. Anyhow, Part IV of Book 4 [The Equinox of the Gods] as already written must be taken definitely as a book to say "how thou didst come hither". As to the reproduction, that of course is a matter for the best people available and they should send their best men with camera etc. to me. I do not want to trust the ms. out of my hands anymore. I am prepared to do this immediately—it is up to you to make arrangements. By the time the reproduction is ready I will have the Comment ready; it can then be printed using our one first draft. [illegible] as ordained and I will keep a supply of copies on hand to give to those people "at" whom dine or drink.
I agree with the main theses of your letter on the whole. You have completely misunderstood my policy though it should have been clear from Eq[uino]x III 1 or 2; the supreme and holy king is absolute in my person. But after me the succession is to be guaranteed and also the minor offices even now by training men to rule. They must be freed from fear and greed. My idea is to reestablish the principle of honour as the first condition of authority. Any type of discussion voting and such balls is to be eliminated. I have always made it a cardinal point of my programme to suppress newspapers and magazines. I shall permit the circulation of actual facts without restriction, e.g. the market price of staple products, earthquakes, etc., but their is to be no falsification, [illegible] or manipulation of facts for propagandist purposes. I must free the world from the obsession of hypnotizing scribblers. Generally speaking; nothing is to be published unless it claims either to possess permanent value as in the case of poetry, essays, scientific researches and the like, or to be new necessary to the transaction of affairs. I think there should be some classification of readers, e.g. reports of divorce cases and the like are facts and of profitable study to lawyers, (if I leave any alive, which I doubt) but merely distract and degenerate the public, at large, poisoning and corrupting their minds which might attain great things if properly nourished.
Of course the many shall have no power—they never have had, as Otto Kahn once told me.
My idea of freedom is roughly this: to remove all restriction from all men. I consider newspapers a restriction. The growth of children being stunted by gin I do not allow them to drink it helping their Will by my intelligence. "The people" must be treated as ignorant children. At the same time each one is a star and had the right to assume kingly power demonstrating his fitness for it by undergoing the ordeals.
Your section F—go right ahead. I really cannot see why you should have hesitated to be wholly frank with me. Your first duty is to interpret my will as rendered intelligible by the S.W. [Scarlet Woman] in intellectually comprehensible language.
G. I do not agree that the Hag [The Confessions of Aleister Crowley] should be dropped. You yourself insisted that its publication was my Magical Weapon and we all nearly killed ourselves getting out the first draft. The acceptance of the Hag should be a tithe to kingship. This'd help us sort out the kings. The vindication is only required in order to facilitate the publication and distribution. I should much prefer to issue it privately for selected people. All I lack is the funds. You surely understand that one is always having to do things one does not want in order to make possible what one does. (One does not want to put candles round one's circle to do so is a condition of the evocation.)
H.—I agree with the doubtful exception of y.
J. I have covered myself with silence by getting such rot published about me then nothing will be believed. "She might do her Will at noon-day with a Bull and be a mx [virgin] still.
(Do number your pages)
About D.F. [Diary of a Drug Fiend] I of course know what is meant by the book but imagined that the OK of Collins was adequate guarantee of its perfect respectability, nor was there any attack on it by any responsible organ. It is quite absurd to argue on the assumption that the gutter-press has a monopoly of intelligence and sincerity. It seems to me this knocks the bottom completely out of your argument. If the Telegraph, or Observer had attacked the book, I should have felt and acted otherwise [?].
I don't understand my summoning you to Tunis cutting short your criticism. My only reason for wanting you was that you might continue it in the fullest way.
The truth of the whole business is that you were totally unfit to work with me. You had to be initiated. Hence Alostrael's [Leah Hirsig] stunt of pretending to be in love with you etc. All means were tried to bewilder and baffle you to befool you and shake your loyalty. It was a pretty near thing. You seem now morally prepared to explore your intellectual and philosophical weakness and incompetence. (Sruti) Your mind is childishly fickle, capricious, and piteously dependent. You are a slave to the false logic which persuade you that its limitation are laws. Your thought is a reed shaken by the wind, the wind of a frog's fart. You mistake your lack of simplicity for organic development. You call your dead leaf, blown hither and thither by Equinoxal gales, freedom of movement and sensitiveness to truth. You have as Eddie [Eddie Saayman] says, perhaps the finest intellect now incarnate, and you are for that reason a world's champion foother [?].
Your treatment of the text of The Book of the Law is extremely significant of your intellectual incoherence and inadequacy. Like a Plymouth Brother you quote Verse A without reference to the apparent contradiction of verse B and visa versa, whereas neither A nor B is intelligible without reference to the C. which reconciles them.
A notable symptom of your intellectual atony, if not atrophy, complicated by moral dementia and spiritual hysteria, is your inability to simplify your mind so as to think and act consistently and firmly. These letters themselves contain innumerable examples of incompatible ideas. You appear not to have the art of summing up a situation and eliminating all the rough working as soon as the decision is made. Having decided on a policy one must refuse to serve up the old arguments as hash and reconsider the problem ab ovo. E.g. we decided about the Hag, vindication etc., the entire programme of A.I. [Eddie Saayman] in Oxford, and you now suggest dropping everything on the ground of some obscure scholastic-sewerage about AL.
Now do learn this once and for all. Let us assume that our plans for A.I. were one mass of muddled moon-calfery—none the less it should be carried out with demoniac determination and its bitter lesson learnt. But he who hesitates is lost. No series of stupidities is as fatal as the slightest vacillation. I don't know whether this is in AL or not and I don't care—it is absolute Magick—the very first principle of the "work of the wand". True, I may (willing to beget a new Semiramis) find myself buggering the left nostril of an ant-eater with clap, pox, soft shanker and ulcerating granuloma of the pudenda. but the discovery should not diminish my erection or inhibit my ejaculation.
Do please get this into your [illegible]. Carry things out right or wrong once you have started them without lust of result. The habit of pushing through error to its climax and disaster tires Tyche who says finally "There seems to be no fun in trying to irritate this obstinate ass by punishing his mistakes. I will amuse myself by crowning his most colossal blunder with some irrational success."
You seem to see this yourself when you admit having been inhibited from obviously proper action by worrying 'have I any right—suppose I am wrong etc.'
At this moment I command you to "drop your knavery and get on simply with the appointed programme."
You will at this point continue your criticism in the fullest and most uncompromising manner.
You are there to guide my Will but also to execute it per A.I. and you must not muddle the two functions id est, you are absolutely commanded to criticize me before I announce my Will and after the execution of that Will, but during the process of execution you are absolutely forbidden to make a destructive criticism.
e.g. I want to shave. You tell me that a razor is better than a sharp flint. Right. I say, however, 'I will shave with this flint'. Your business is to see that I get shaved with that flint as well as possible and to point out afterwards that despite all efforts I am ill-shaved and scratched, but during shaving you are not to contemplate my error and make things worse.
93 93/93
The Beast 666
per 31-666-31 [Leah Hirsig]
P.S.
Nov. 1 Of course I have never forgiven you about that letter which you destroyed. That did not insure its contents being kept secret. You might have been compelled to reveal them under torture. The only possible course of action was to have blown your brains out on the spot. Though of course only after having killed off all the clairvoyants and sealed letter readers who might possibly have got an inkling of its nature.
The above illustrates your exaggerated way of dealing with affairs. It is indicative of intellectual or nervous instability. If I write 'Keep secret the matter' I mean no more than use ordinary precautions not to let it be bruited abroad. I should have been careful to say 'destroy the letter' if I had thought such a course advisable. Nothing is more irritating to me than to have to witness such violations of common sense. It is no excuse whatever to confront me with my instructions and prove that they have been literally obeyed. I may not be able to punish you for disobedience but I attack a penalty ever more severe to making an ass of oneself.
To insist on my defining my terms is Simian insolence amounting to lise-majeste. I have absolutely no patience with pedantry of the rationalistic sort. Clodd was bad enough but when that Clodd by dint of being pissed upon dissolves in Mudd, good-night!
666
Nov. 2 (After vision of which I shall write you, if not by this post, the next—31-66-31)
I consider it absolute intellectual dishonesty to describe as a message from the Chiefs the result of one's own cogitation.
No message comprehensible by you in the first instance could possess the slightest claim to be considered as of origin external to yourself.
The ideas expressed by you have been familiar to me and more or less adhered to by me from the beginning. I have failed to find any idea in your letter with which I was not already in agreement, which is worthy of serious consideration.
Coupled with your undue excitement the conclusion is that you were badly obsessed. The leak in you is caused mostly by your overweening vanity. Your intellectual cock-sureness and arrogance is another symptom. Your consciousness of your utter worthlessness of Ruach, your strongest suite, produces an over-under complex. Realizing that your fine intellect gives you no right to a finger in the pie, the wretched arrival makes a desperate snap at recognition by claiming magistrial authority. It is a pathetic demonstration and forms a perfect pendant to the Alostrael show-up. You have to kill that intellect as dead as the vermiform sexual sliminess.
You are extremely lucky to have the chance of smashing us both Nephesch and Ruach so quickly and thoroughly and in such a clean cut manner.
Analyzed reason is raving, feeling examined is firm. You must put your mind in its place as a soulless machine.
I think you should take an oath to refrain from considering AL at all, except on definite instructions from me, of course limiting your thought strictly to answer my questions in the precise sense required by me.
666.
Ethyl [Ether] arrived OK—congratulations and thanks. Will write by next mail vision which concerns you re "your message", letters etc. Refrain from thinking.
Should Murray [Adam Murray], [illegible] or any one show up—if he will his camera or typewriter (portable) or means of getting the, they would be useful here.
Alostrael.
31-666-31
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