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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Unknown Correspondent
Bankers Trust Company, 3-5 Place Vendôme, Paris.
January 6, 1927.
Care Frater,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
I was very glad to receive your letter of January 2nd. I am really exceedingly grateful to you: you raise a point which must be a serious handicap to you. I shall try to write this letter so as to cover the whole theory, and thus serve as a statement of general principle for the Aeon of Horus.
You need not bother about the people of India who cover their mouths for fear of swallowing an insect, and who strain their water with the same idea. There are numerous stories about this in the Hindu and Buddhist classics. I recall, in particular, the case of the blind Arahat who walked on the terrace and trampled to death many million ants. The Buddha explained the whole thing by a long and ridiculous story about a previous incarnation, how it was that he was blind, and consequently capable of having such dreadful accidents. But all this is to be wiped out of our minds as superstition and misunderstanding of the nature of life.
We have a right to eat animals, because it is the kindest thing that we can do for them. Thus, and only thus, can we enable them to fulfil their ambition by building up their tissue into that of a higher organism (that is, if any one supposes that any justification is necessary).
You say you have an inhibition. The answer is:
Your say this is caused by a fear. The answer is—
Also:
Soror Estai [Jane Wolfe] makes a remark on the above which induces me to explain that the word 'fear' is used in two different senses. If I wish to cross the road I "fear" that I shall be run over. If I did not I should be simply a fool. But I cross the road despite that fear, taking what I consider to be the necessary precautions. As it is written, "By courage conquering fear shall ye approach me."
With regard to your concrete example of the man stealing a book for a great purpose. I am inclined to answer paradoxically, that he would not get the power if he did make reparation. To do so would be to admit the consciousness of guilt; that is, of having violated his own True Will. (Even though he were mistaken on the point.)
The case against theft, murder, etc., is given in Liber Aleph, where it is shown that all such acts are really crimes against oneself. It is thus just to take away from a man the physical life which he has taken from another. In the case of theft, it is absurd to imprison him. He should simply be deprived of the right to possess property, since he does not respect property until he learns sense. This has been tried on children, and is very effective.
But, generally speaking, all ideas of moral right and wrong have got to be eliminated. Follow your own True Will and take the consequences of the act that this involves. Any errors that you make thus become indiscretions. There is no reason for being ashamed of them, except as one is ashamed of clumsiness in any work one is doing. All moral sense (in the conventional use of the word) is ignorance either inherited or acquired. In point of fact, you have no right to judge of an act, because you have not the means of estimating its issue. Consider the poem of Thomas Parnell "The Angel".
It being established that no one is wise enough to judge any act in detail, we get to the question of general courses of conduct. For instance, suppose a man whose True Will is to be a great engineer. He decides to build a Forth bride, or what not. He knows perfectly well that in the course of building the bridge a considerable number of lives will be lost. Is he to abandon his intention on account of that? It is scruples of this kind which prevent mean people from doing anything at all.
Now go back to what I said above about eating animals. The principle holds. Take my own case. I wish to benefit the human race by raising it to the jurisdiction of the Law of Thelema. It is evident that I who would not willingly injure the smallest animal, must contemplate with complete indifference the destruction of millions of human beings in the course of the operation. All I can do is to minimize the damage by inviting mankind to submit themselves, immediately and without question, to obey the dictates of my wisdom; and as far as they do not do this, I am not responsible for their misadventures. And it is certainly going to be much worse for them, insofar as they do not do that.
You have only got to cast your eye over the history of the last 22 years to observe what senseless catastrophes have overtaken practically every great nation on the planet through their attempts to blunder through to the Law, instead of putting themselves under my enlightened guidance.
The moral for yourself should now be an obvious conclusion from these premises. You have got to put everything that you have or are into the work of establishing the Law of Thelema. You should not waste a moment in avoiding the smashes that will naturally occur in consequence of the stupidity of children playing 'Last-Across'; and still less in trying to pick up the remains.
There is always this complete satisfaction about the problem: that Nature is exactly just in the scientific and not the moral sense of the word. (Consider the fundamental Laws of Chemistry.) Whatever you do is, therefore, perfectly compensated in one way or another. But there is a difference, if only a temporary one, between taking a lump of marble and carving it into a statue of Hermes, and taking that statue of Hermes and burning it for lime. The only question of morality arises by consideration of the True Will. Do we want the statue, or do we need the lime more? And this is a question that can only be resolved by a consideration which one can only solve imperfectly, because one is inevitably ignorant of the totality of the circumstances, not only for the present but for the future; and here one must simply rely upon one's own judgment as one has nothing else to guide one. What people call morality is in fact no more than a rough and ready statement of what the Law of Probabilities, a question of averages based on experience, indicates as best on general grounds. And this is mostly for the benefit of people who never really think at all about what is right or wrong, who have not the capacity for such thought, and whose actual bewilderment is such that unless they had some such guide, they would be perfectly incapable of action of any kind for fear of doing the wrong thing. Or, dismissing this fear, to blunder along after the [illegible] of their desire of the moment: as many still do.
But if you will read the history of all the great men of the planet you will notice that none of them have been bound by morality of any sort. When it has seemed that they were so bound it was merely that the conditions of the problem were such that they thought it expedient to comply with the conventions of the mob by cloaking their intentions under a mask of conventional morality. One has only to think of the propaganda on both sides during the War. One needs scarcely add that appeals to the Tribal Deity in each case were simply emotional outbursts due principally to the consciousness that their attempts to reason that they were right had broken down.
Love is the law, love under will.
Fraternally yours,
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