Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to William Seabrook

[DRAFT]

May 31 / 24 e.v.

[Draft letter dictated by Crowley to Leah Hirsig]

Dear Bill

Yours of May 12 arrived last night. I have been drying ever since. I cannot even stick to my pride and make up my mind to out do you in generosity. I can only accept you have as it is said trust to be worthy of it.

You must understand about the two letters unlike myself.

1. The villain of the piece is a [illegible] lawyer named Voorhes[?] whom I met at the C. de la Rue playing chess. He is [illegible] with the Paris Herald. He assured me that you must have made at least $24000 out of the Serial "probably much more".

2. Just about this time I was struck down; Operation, nervous prostration etc. etc. I lay for weeks more than half delirious and more than three parts starving. My only attendant [Norman Mudd] who was most devoted but not cut out for a sick nurse. One morning (March 6), as I found out later, he had turned away an emissary of help from London on the ground that I was too ill to see any one yet the same P.M. he told me brutally of the dire straights of [illegible]. I became as near insane as makes no difference. I wrote the craziest appeals to almost perfect strangers. It was in this same such state that I wrote my first violent letter to you.

3. The next day I pawned my last few valuable items and raised enough cash to send Mudd to England to induce my usurping Trustee to pay me some of the [illegible] from my settlement. I lay [illegible] for 18 days abed alone eating—only occasionally—eggs, biscuits and the like, such as I could induce the hotel keeper to supply (He had been an excellent good friend for 15 years and now quite suddenly turned almost crazy and treated my abominably.) Mudd ultimately borrowed enough from friends to send for Leah Hirsig to nurse me. She arrived on March 29 and she pulled me through. We starved together till May 1 when we were thrown out into the streets though I was still almost too ill to walk.

You will understand that the imagined $24000 which you were blowing on diamond-studded handcuffs rather preyed on my mind. There was also the dreadful feeling of not knowing what was happening at Cefalu. News was wisely kept from me.

4. The Trustee continued his games. His intention is probably to drive me to suicide or to starve me to death. It is a very sensitive story and I am going to send you the full facts with the earnest request that you will write it up, get it published and supply me with say 20 copies.

5. Mudd at last (May 20) succeeded in raising enough (from I don't know where) to let me convalesce at Chelles. S. et. M. where I now write. I am practically well again this through long starvation, strain and illness have left their mark. I cannot do creative work except in patches.

6. Apart from the 24000 though, I knew you lived [illegible] I suppose that in emergency you could dig up a few hundred dollars at least from the hole in the ground or borrow it from friends. And I quite honestly suppose that your words "Success and more [illegible] etc." implied that you would send me a share of the loot at least, from [illegible] cuttings or hearing of the serial as published in numerous diverse districts.

7. I must admit that I have always felt a certain lack in you, [illegible]. You have seemed to me to fail to realize what I write you.

(This is common to most men. Our last year has shown again and again that people simply fail to understand what one writes, e.g. Mudd would write his oldest friend "absolutely peculiar for God's sake wire me at least a fiver to get something to eat". This would be interpreted as meaning he was a bit short of cash and couldn't buy the three Spring suits he had intended. As a fact, he went about for just over a year in an old pair of white duck trousers splashed liberally with ink, a coat borrowed from a former pupil, and [illegible] and old evening overcoat of mine.)

On several occasions you have failed me on matters quite trifling to you though vital to me. e.g. you never saw or rang up Guy Holt about S.I. You rarely bothered to answer urgent questions, I never suspected ill will but only lack of imagination or more than a little slackness. I am glad my crazy letters helped to wake you up! Let us keep awake and we shall live happy ever after.

The trouble [illegible] me with peculiar brain[?] because in my five years in America you and Kate [Kate Seabrook] were the only people that I ever got to love with the deepest part of me. I thought you both felt much the same. This brought out my sensitivity which is abnormal anyhow to the limit. e.g. Someone once told me that I had abused your hospitality in Georgia by staying too long and generally misbehaving. The thought that that might have been so is one of the bitterest that ever entered my mind. I have comforted myself for years on a phrase in one of your letters to the effect that you would have left the farm in boredom and disgust long before you did had not I brought a little fun into your life there.

Please file for future reference this abnormality of mine, this [illegible] love and sensitiveness. Observe what follows.

10. I now see that my whole sickness, starvation, etc. has been in the nature of an mutation[?]. I needed it to get certain experience of the world and also to dig down deeper into myself than I had ever done. The first bombshell of discovery was that I have always been in love with Kate. My attitude to her was the motive of every single [illegible] of mine of import, since I met her at the Liberal Club. Dirty [illegible] saw the truth from the first and all her actions, her violent liaison with me and subsequent furious reaction were both due to plain jealousy.

This love has not 1 in 10000 of sexual component. It is plain calf-love. It prevented me acting normally to her despite desperate efforts to play the game. It is a love without desire of any sort, the kind that occasionally induces men to profane marriage to a woman as a purely symbolic offering.

I think of her as a sister and am reminded of Egypt. The fact that she worked out the problem of the H. S. Capt. sealed the impression. It was and is too unearthly to allow me to say or do any of the [illegible] things about it. The relation belongs to a sphere of consciousness quite unfamiliar to me and I never suspected the fact until this sudden outburst of delirious discovery last February.

I have no idea whether you or she have ever had any idea of the truth. One of the most curious points about it all is that I feel that something which is somehow stupendously important is involved, that some huge mistake involving a real damnation extending over innumerable lives either may have been made or is still to [illegible] or avoid. It is the only occasion in my life with which I have ever felt anything like fear of doing some irreparable wrong.

You will understand of course how this strange [illegible] State has interfered with all possible types of human relationships.

[A portion of the letter is missing]

start. Any fool can make a paradise if only angels are to dwell there.

12. What of this for a practical plan? Tell an editor simply this: that the Cefalu experience has succeeded, that we can abolish most human evil without revolting legislation. Ask for a commission to write up the facts seriously. Come over and get them from Leah and myself. Your report, published in a serious organ, should bring along a capitalist to enable us to buy an island where we could Thelemize on a large scale. Note that at any moment civilization may smash completely and want to establish a refuge, library, art gallery etc. so that the best bits of the Old Aeon may escape destruction. Further, we should establish a model for the new Civilization of Horus.

13. Here is the essence of my intense love for you with its compliment of furious anger should you seem to act ignobly and of weary paternal yearning when you seem to be wasting your youth on work worthy of you. You must fulfill yourself as a star. You must do the work of which you came to perform. Sloth and disgust with things as they are have made you acquiesce in living a life which you despise. You have got to break away. With Kate at your side and me in the offing you have no excuse. You have tried several times with both your books and you're weary of effort and slip back. Don't neglect their appeal. Youth is passing. You are preparing for yourself an unspeakable hell by failing to acquire the inveterate habit of doing your best work only. If you knew what I had suffered since I got to Paris! My physical state helps me immeasurably to realize the truth about myself, I examined every quality and to each question the answer was that I was utterly unworthy of having been chosen as the Prophet of the new Aeon. The agony was almost insupportable. I had no excuse for living, the future was an abyss of ever increasing infirmity. I was unable to imagine any condition which would make life seem moderately tolerable. Yet to die would have been to start all over again with the memory of my failure to dishearten me and moreover, I was constantly in trances in which I lived though centuries in a few minutes by the clock. My death bed could only have been an eternity of hell, quite literally, to say nothing of possible post mortem adventures! Again, I wandered for Aeons with strange regions of the most appalling character. The conditions of human thought were all abolished. I knew that consciousness does not depend upon the brain.

I finally realized that I was actually being re-born. I am a new incarnation having merely escaped physical re-birth and retained a full memory of my previous life. I must lead my new life. I have gone through all the experiences of birth, (expulsion from Hotel that had sheltered me) infancy (including loss of control of reflexes!) and now, every day marks some gain of strength. It is exactly as if I had somehow managed to concentrate symbolically the events of years into as many days.

My diaries for this past four months are amazing, mostly quite insane. I must break off here having many other letters to write.

I have opened my heart very fully to you as to one who has, in certain ways, almost the rest right.

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