|
Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Henry Ford
Seniat el Kiton, rue Massicault, La Marsa, Tunis
April 4, 1926.
Mr. Henry Ford,
Sir:
Most men are sensible of, and occupied with, the welfare and progress of themselves, their families, their cities, or their countries; and they devote their energies to the advancement of these interests at the expense of these which they regard as alien.
But in every age and clime there have been a very few who have had at heart the sorrows of mankind as a whole, without distinction of persons or classes; and to the greatest among such men have been due all, without exception, of the real gains which the race has won from Nature.
We may balance the advantages against the losses which accrue from the activities of an ambitious man, like Napoleon, a civic hero, like Pericles, or a patriot, like Washington; but the real benefactors of mankind are men like Aristotle and Newton, Gautama Buddha and Pasteur, the inventors of the printing press and the automobile, the scope of whose work is as universal as their motives are, in the best cases, impersonal.
For many centuries men capable of this degree of greatness, that they are able to consider the problems of human suffering and attainment with the benevolent detachment of a deity, have been secretly organized to watch over the well-being of their fellows, and to lend mutual aid in the Great Work of directing and assisting Mankind to achieve its sacred Destiny. Quietly and informally, yet strongly with the strength of their noble passion, they have fought against tyranny and obscurantism, they have brought light into the dark places of the Earth, they have made sure the way of genius, and they have maintained that Silence which is at once their safeguard against oppression and the first condition of their vigilance.
These men, possessors of a moral energy which endows them with powers that to the ordinary mind often appear miraculous, employ their faculties independently and without ostentation whenever this course is possible. But there occur from time to time certain crises in the affairs of men which compel them to act in concert, and to select and send forth one of their number to put publicly forward such portions of their secret doctrine as will enable men to solve the current problem which baffles them, and to triumph over the dangers which beset them round.
Two and twenty years ago, such a situation reached its climax. It was already evident to the Watchers that all the sanctions which had served humanity for guidance had lost their compelling force. The fear of hell no longer restrained any but the most ignorant serfs; the attempt to replace religious threats and promises by moral obligations had taken hold of a few minds of the highest class, and, even so, its assumptions had been shewn to be arbitrary and absurd by Ibsen and Nietsche. Souls weary of the search for Truth were falling back exhausted either upon the categorical assertions of fixed faiths like Romanism, or were abandoning themselves to the cynical materialism of the irreligious Jew.
Mankind was faced with the choice, often subconscious but none the less critical, between abject mental and moral submission to a system of despotic falsehoods, and an anarchy deprived alike of purpose and of principle, swayed only by the motive of immediate and superficial advantage. The inmost trust of the soul is Nobility; its deepest instinctive revolt against the dishonour of surrender either to superstition or to scepticism. The best minds of every country were united in the bonds of despair.
The Watchers in the Silence understood that the time had come for them to take action. They foresaw that men, left guideless and incapable of wisdom, would plunge into the madness of the World War, and all its consequences of aimless unrest. They saw that the one way to save the race from such red ruin as has overwhelmed the civilisations of the past was to send forth a Man with a Message. He must proclaim a positive Law by which to measure human conduct; and this Law must not depend for its authority on abstract theories, on doubtful legends, or on any external foundations whatever: if must prove its own claim to compel obedience by its own inherent righteousness and inevitability, and it must be equally cogent for every individual man and woman in the world.
Such a law must evidently be most simple and universal, yet capable of being applied in detail to all possible problems by the normal canon of reason.
It would seem to have been desirable that this law should be proclaimed by a man free from the imperfections of mankind: but the Watchers thought not so. To them it appeared wiser that the Messenger should, however great his qualifications in some respects, be in others the most ordinary of human beings, a partaker of every defect of his fellows. It was then a Man unfitted in almost every possible way to be a leader whom they chose to bear the Message. That the Master Therion, as he is called, should be nothing in himself is no criticism of the perfection of his Law, but rather the guarantee of its virtue, that it is the Law for all, and not for rare superior intelligence.
And of the perfection of this Law, of its supreme efficacy to form an unshakeable foundation for all future morality, those only can doubt who have failed to examine it with that patient and impartial thoroughness which Nature demands of every man that would explore her secrets, and wrest from her treasuries the pearl of Truth.
For this Law is, in essence:
Do What thou wilt.
There are upon this earth ignoble hearts, slaves who demand to be driven, and tyrants who desire to dominate: such fear this Law, and oppose it with malignant falsehoods. Their readiest weapon is to pretend to misunderstand it: to misquote it as "Do what you please".
No lie could be more stupid or more sinister. For the Law
Do What thou wilt.
is a Law austere beyond any yet given to Man. It leaves no room for idle or wanton conduct: it has no lenience for laxity or whim.
We read in the Book of the Law, given to the Master Therion to instruct him:
"There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt. Do that and no other shall say nay."
"Thou hast no right but to do thy will."
There is a class of sincere and intelligent critics, men who accept the law
Do What thou wilt.
as being self-evidently righteous, as being just to call, and binding upon all. It is they say—rightly so, the Law of Fitness. For the True Will of a Man is the Resultant of all the Forces that compose his Nature; and it is clear as any other simplest theorem of Dynamics that for a man to seek to deviate from his true Path is to neglect certain elements in his Equation, to leave unsatisfied some of the Energies which impinge upon him, and so to induce Error in his Ways; for what he has sought to ignore will press upon him secretly, will force him to waver, will redress the balance by unsuspected violences.
This Law
Do What thou wilt.
is thus, they say to the Master Therion, in theory perfect: to contradict it is to be absurd. But its very axiomatic truth, its very universality and cogency, are just the grounds of our distrust of its value in practice. For men must always have subconsciously assumed this Law; how then should it serve them in this crisis?
To this caveat the answer leaps from History. The Errors of Mankind have almost uniformly sprung from the pursuit of false Ideals, born of irrational beliefs, and fathered by Ignorance and Self-Distrust. Aware of their own sorry state, men have grasped wildly at every straw of philosophy, have swallowed every glittering bait of falsehood. They have sought to be not what they are, but what they have been persuaded they ought to be, or what they think it would be fine to be: as, in the fable, the Frog, on hearing of the Ox, blew himself out in emulation till he burst.
Ay, cries the critic, there is truth in that, so far as it goes: but that is not so far. Granted that man should seek perfection in his own true Nature, that "Know Thyself" is indeed the first of his duties, that his True Will is the expression in action of the Word of the purpose of God, or Nature, constructed him just as he is, and not in any other way, in order to fulfil—granted all this, your Law
Do What thou wilt.
frankly accepted as the Canon of the highest Wisdom and as the Rule of Life, there still remains the urgent practical question "How shall he know his Will? And even he know it, how fulfil it?"
The Master Therion understands the difficulty—alas, only too well! What are more common to the race of Man than Ignorance and Impotence? He, knowing his True Will, knows also with what shock of struggle through how many years of research he won that knowledge. And, furthermore, he knows with bitterness intense how powerless he has been even to carry on the Work, much less to bring it to success.
So, for this final question of these friendly critics, he ventures to address himself to you, sir, in the hope that you may find it your True Will to help him to the answer—for the sake of that immanent Spirit of Man, most holy, most concealed, which awaits the Saviour to strike off the fetters from its limbs, the Sun-ray to disperse the clouds which brood, black, charged with thunder, over his mind.
The Master Therion, as a man, is but a poet, a dreamer; he can devise, but he cannot execute. His makes his appeal to you, as to a captain of men, an organizer forceful and precise, an employer capable and humane, an expert in efficiency, and a genius for translating Idea into the language of Reality.
You, sir, whether you are aware of it or not, possess most notable the faculty of true imagination in the scientific sense of the word. You saw the possibilities of social development which must follow those of the rapid travel of individuals, and of the transport of their merchandise, independent of established routine. You saw the conditions which would make this dream economically possible, and you set to work to realise them.
Sir, you succeeded; I offer you a greater dream.
Behold, you have made men free to travel swiftly and surely where they will. And you have done this by abating the conflict between unnecessarily contending wills. You have bought peace to many millions by making each man independent of time and space, in a small sphere of his many activities, and in the degree of the present possibilities of science.
I ask you now to do for his spirit what you have done for his body.
The greatest curse of your great country is the obsession of the lust of riches. Wealth is too commonly regarded as a goal, not as a means; or if as a means, then only to pander pleasure, vanity, or unjust power. It is as if a man should spend his strength wear out his life, to buy a motor-car; and having it, do nothing more than gloat on its possession, insist on the whole world admiring him for it, use it to crush pedestrians, and the like, instead of using it for spiritual ends, to take delight in the beauty of Nature, to joy in keen fresh air, to travel to fresh fields of knowledge, to scale new heights of Wisdom.
What is the cause of the deep spiritual dissent that mars the marvellous material welfare of your people of the great United States? What but this, that having attained the means of enjoyment and advancement, they know no purpose worthy of their endeavour?
They know not their True Wills.
Look back upon the Middle Ages! Ignorance, poverty, dirt, disease; oppression, superstition and disorder. Yet, in their myriad ills, what beauty, what attainment! Each worker a profound craftsman; in his leisure, rapt in music; his faith a living light, his love an eternal romance. His mind was not debauched by newspapers, with their incessant glorification of riches, crime and fashion, their ghoulish clamour for war, their scandal-mongering as of barren hags, and their muck-raking as of unwholesome schoolboys. What was the secret of their essential happiness? This, that each man respected himself, believed in himself, sought to discover and develop in himself the deepest and the highest qualities of his own nature. He did not wish to be as rich as this duke, or richer than that bishop; but only, to be rich enough to carry out the purpose in life for which he believed himself ordained.
To-day such souls are rare indeed; men chase foul phantoms decked in glittering gauds by the spell-binders of hallucination. How sordid the scramble of even the honest worker! Yet, hateful consequence, his prosperity breeds parasites. We have two classes whose existence threatens the very structure of society: the crook whose sole gospel is "Get rich quick", and the robber and murderer whose morbid mind finds Romance, elsewhere denied him, in criminal violence. So powerful have these vermin become in the last few years, so bold has impunity made them, that they dare openly defy the laws of the republic, corrupt the Legislature itself, and prey upon society by force of arms in open daylight. Another step and they will threaten civil war.
Economic pressure is destroying the ideal of the family; and the craze for pleasure is eating away both the health of the individual and mortgaging the future of the state.
What other remedy but this, the Law of Thelema?
Do What thou wilt.
is the sole possible answer to these suicidal aberrations of the moral sense, the one constructive policy that can unite self-interest with self-righteousness. The world weariness of this generation is principally due to the standardization of just those things whose use and delight lies in variety: building, cooking, clothing, custom, opinion, and the like: so that the wealth-burdened mules of the so-called prosperous classes, their glazed eyes starting from their bedizened harness, travel frantically to the ends of the earth in search of the picturesque, which flees before them as it is pulled down to make more room for the conventional Pullman, the banality of mechanical monotony of the Jazz-band, and the soul-stupefying banality of the cosmopolitan Hotel; while the indignant seek excitement in the phantasmagoria of the Sunday Newspaper and the Cinema, or risk the penitentiary or the gallows in the maniacal attempt to stimulate the nervous system that has been dulled by the poor-house routine of respectability.
Deprived, incapable, or ignorant of the very nature of aspiration, the starved soul turns to things forbidden; foul books and plays, poisonous drinks, vaudeville cults, brutalizing drugs—come death, come madness, come disgrace, but let us get away from daily life, and the enforced pursuit of aims which are not ours!
Then, oh the spirits too dull, too prudent, or too cowardly to know what they lack, or to seek to escape from their invisible prisons! The ribbon-clerk who would be happy as a cowboy, the slaughter whose quality fits him to be a traitor, the stenographer who could only find herself as a milliner, the athlete penned in a counting-house, or the born engineer strangling in a waiter's livery of mock gentility—how deeply all these suffer in silence from their often unsuspected malady, in silence broken only by the stifled moan, the moan that, multiplied by countless millions, is dully heard as the deep discontent of the republic!
All these, no less than their more articulate fellows, await the word of deliverance, the word of the Law
Do What thou wilt.
Will you bring freedom to their souls, restore to them the meaning of the Life that they have lost!
Let every man and woman learn to see life as a sacred trust, a well-designed machine for a particular purpose independent of all praise and blame, one whose fulfilment is the only, as the most admirable, reward, with abundance of joy!
For the mode whereby this noble revolution may be brought to pass? The details I must leave to your genius, your experience. But the main plan is evident enough. We must apply our modern science to the problem. We need first of all to summon a council of the acutest brains of the world, of biologists, historians, economists. . . .
They must devise a scheme for measuring a man, for penetrating his inmost nature no less than for estimating the effect of his environment.
They must be able to help him to discover the work for which he really best fitted, the work which will satisfy his spiritual as well as material needs.
They must be able to advise him how to develop his powers in this direction, how to discipline himself and to steel himself against hostile forces so as to defend his Will from internal and external hindrances.
They must train experts to be able to judge men rapidly and surely, so as to assign them their place in the social organisation.
They must help every man to discover in himself that insatiable Spirit, independent of Space, Time and the prejudices of other men, which is the mark of genius; so that his purpose is a deathless flame to consume in him all perishable ambitions.
They must show him that true freedom which neither tolerates the domination of alien ideals; nor seeks to impose the arbitrary predilections of the individual upon the community.
Little by little, as they acquire experience, they will be able to establish experimental districts where the Law
Do What thou wilt.
shall be the sole and sufficient guarantee of the righteousness and prosperity spiritual, moral and physical, of the inhabitants. The success of such experiments will create a world-wide demand for the establishment of the Law.
The final form of the work will be a system of Education in which each child will receive the individual attention necessary to the full development of its peculiar genius, instead of consisting, as now, of an attempt to produce a standardized product on a pattern as impossible as it is ultimately undesirable.
But it is useless to adumbrate even the outlines of a plan so fertile in amazing possibilities, I have written enough—in my enthusiasm, perhaps too much to shew alike the desperate need of taking resolutely in hand the sickness of society, and the superb prospects of achievement latent in studying and applying the Law
Do What thou wilt.
Will you be the man to give true freedom to every spirit that breathes, to create in every human heart the heaven of its inmost Will, and to declare to every mind the one way to attain it?
Aleister Crowley.
|