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Correspondence from Norman Mudd to Jane Wolfe
[circa September 1925]
It has been (and still is) impossible to write anything about the position here. Just another brand of Chaos, quite inexplicable unless you are in it. I'm a hog for not having written you, all the same. The fact is that we have been on the point several times of asking you to join us, betting on the possibility of things going well here. There's heaps to do and you could be enormously helpful, but we are and have been liable all along to be paralysed by inability to carryon the household. Astrid [Dorothy Olsen] sails for U.S.A. tomorrow. 666 will get away at the first chance, probably in a few days. Leah [Leah Hirsig] is still here but cannot, of course, do much. Things have come to look less and less promising during the last month and I doubt if there is any real chance of starting a headquarters here. Of course, the unexpected may happen. It's a question of funds, of course, as usual. The best thing you can do is to spend as little money as you can on anything but keeping yourself as fit as you can get. Save it up, and be ready to come at about a week's notice; or, at least, as soon as possible after getting a call, We won't bring you here on a fool's errand.
Sorry V. L. [Adam Murray] seems so flat and hope something will come along. If he could get rid of that cursed sense of grievance something would come along. At present there is nothing in active furtherance of the Work that he can do in London, and necessarily, therefore, his aim should be to carryon without our support. It's not a question of right or justice, but a matter of military necessity. It's very difficult to estimate his problem, largely because he won't write. I suppose he is disgruntled, and thinks we are playing him for a sucker. The trouble is that until one has mastered this temptation to feel aggrieved, betrayed, duped, and so on, one cannot be of any use in the present phase of the Work——— one is clean outside it. For until Beast gets the Comment, and things begin to go miraculously right, every project is (I think) bound to fail, by all ordinary and external tests; and those who have had the high privilege of partaking in the project are infallibly left flat and with a heart-breaking mess to clear up, while Beast goes off to pastures new. It's exactly as if Beast was vampirising us and playing us all for suckers, often indirectly, by making us drain and exhaust each other. Those who cannot understand that this is high magick—a training in the mystery of the Master of the Temple, who must pour out every drop of his blood into the Cup of Babalon—must either go on loving and trusting blindly, or else fall away. The fact is that Beast does us the honour of treating us, in this matter of self-forgetting service, as if we were Masters of the Temple. From the nature of the case there can be no possible proof, at the time, that Beast is not merely betraying and vampirising us in the most vulgar and selfish manner—as outsiders contemptuously suppose. Just so the Exempt Adept can have no possible proof or evidence, until he has come through the Abyss, that the act of his Angel in forsaking him at the critical moment, is not absolute and total betrayal. (Because, of course, that betrayal unto destruction of him' is absolute. That 'he' has got to be annihilated; and unless It elects to become a Black Brother it must die in every agony of love and trust betrayed—if it have not been previously trained, by many ordeals, to die gladly, thinking only of the accomplishment of the impersonal Common Work.
In one sense, of course, Beast can be perfectly careless as to whether or how seriously he betrays us, since these self-conscious personalities (which are wounded-and grieved thereby) have no right to live; and because Beast is incapable of betraying our real interests, those of our true Wills. It isn't really that the fact of betrayal is illusory. It is that to a Thelemite betrayal is an illusory idea, and leads to an illusionary view of the Beast - i.e., a 'demon Crowley', a monstrous vampire. But, if you take her cup unwillingly, Babalon seems a monstrous vampire too.
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