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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Charles Stansfeld Jones
Motel Transatlantique, Tunis
Dec. 28 1923. e.v.
My beloved son
93
By a sort of young miracle I received a letter addressed to me in a name which I am not using at a hotel where I am not staying, in a town thru which I am passing rapidly. It bears your signature or a clever imitation of it. please write to me as indicated by Frater O.P.V. [Norman Mudd], as otherwise I am not likely to get the letter. the work I am doing now makes it impossible for me to give you a permanent address. If you wish the communication to be private use an interior envelope marked "for 666 Personal". I cannot always sign letters. For example a letter containing the series of letters I-n-t-e-g-r-a-l-i-t-y, I-m-p-a-r-t-a-t-i-o-n and other Qabalistic mysteries reached me (contrary to instructions) during a G.M.R. [Great Magical Retirement] in the heart of the Sahara Desert, so that I was not in a position to mail a reply.
This last letter thus strangely received was mailed in Chicago and is dated from your postal address on Dec. 12. It is signed in what purports to be your writing but the contents of the letter if I have at all understood them, which I cannot be sure I have, as they contain a succession of letters i-n-o-r-d-in-a-t-i-o-n which means nothing to me or to any of the people whom I have consulted on the subject, indicates it to be the work of a semi-demented megalomaniac. He is probably too much eaten up with self-conceit to realize how ridiculous he is, or to see the dishonesty involved in an absurd claim which he makes "that I automatically admitted the Grade of 10º=1o to" ——— you of all people!
The paragraph in which he offers this jest is so full of tangled grammar and errors of fact and ignorance of the regulation of the Order that it is hard to judge it. It is the sort of stuff that I get from Genesthai [C. F. Russell] but I doubt whether he can have perpetrated it as he refers to you as "One" with a capital letter instead of as Jesus Stansfeld Christ, his regular name for you. In case you should come across the writer of this rigmarole, please set him right on the following matters.
My Grade of Magus was of course conferred upon me when I was chosen to utter the Word of the New Aeon. It may seem puzzling that I have not been going about ever since plaintively arguing with my superiors in the Order that I was a Magus. Strange as it may seem I preferred to work out every grade in the utmost detail.
(You of course know well that the arbitrary assumption of 8º=3o by virtue of the special regulation which permits it, in no way absolves the M.T. [Magister Templi] from his task in fulfilling the conditions in the intermediate grades and he would indeed be an ass who should state publicly that he was a M.T. while imperfect in the inferior degrees.)
The Word of the Law is Thelema. This Word I received from Aiwass in the Book of the Law, which contains internal evidence that Aiwass is entitled to the Grade of 10º=1o. It is true, by the way, that there is a certain intimate connection between what the writer of the letter calls my higher self and Aiwass, but this does not clash with the vitally important fact that He is an independent Intelligence whether incarnate or no. I look to him and to Him alone for my instructions tho' these are not always given directly but through certain of His colleagues in the Order whose grades vary. I have on occasion received them through an Exempt Adept. The Word AL exists in the Book of the Law, you did not "produce" it and I did not receive it from you. It was pointed out to me by you.
The writer asserts that I have proclaimed AL to be the Key of the Work but this is not the case.
So far as I attach any meaning to the phrase "the Key of the Work" the Word would be Abrahadabra, a Word which I "produced " myself by a train of Qabalistic reasoning in Mexico City in 1900 e.v. That I produced the Word and Aiwass "accepted" it gives me claim to be superior to Aiwass. On the contrary, I am profoundly honoured that he deigned to confirm my research by adapting it in the Book of the Law. See Chap. I Verse 20, where it is called The Key of the Rituals. Here Aiwass (or Nuit) claims to have given me that word. This is not incompatible with my own ignorant and egoistic idea that I had produced it by my own wonderful cleverness.
The Word AL is one of the three combinations which make up the number of the Word of the Law. It is nowhere indicated in the Book that the discoverer of "the key of it all (One of four keys, incidentally) is entitled to any grade soever, as such.
(Note that the following verse III—48—speaks of "the holier place", that is holier than "this mystery of the letters". From this it is clear that Kether which is the Holy of Holies, is beyond the discover as such.)
The writer of the letter concludes with an attempt to bully me, which seems to indicate that his personal acquaintance with me is of the slightest. The whole letter is full of veiled threats and divine vengeance unless I admit that you are a 10º=1o. I wish you were a 10º=1o and even Russell couldn't make you one, and I am really sorry for the poor devil, whoever he may be. I only hope that he has not been rash enough to claim the Grade of 8º=3o as well as that of 10º=1o though if he should have done so his lucubration would require no further explanation. As it is written "Search, ∴, if there be yet one drop of blood that is not gathered into the cup of Babylon the Beautiful, for in that little pile of dust, if there could be one drop of blood, it should be utterly corrupt; it should breed scorpions and vipers and the cat of slime."
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