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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Unknown Correspondent
Bankers Trust Company, 3-5 Place Vendôme, Paris.
March 2, 1927.
Care Frater,
Glad to have your of the 25th ult. I think I am beginning to understand the case fairly well.
From one cause or another, you have never been able to relax properly. You are in a state of continual tension. I think that an important part of the adoption of the religious life is that the man throws overboard the Jonah of his social responsibilities. In the ensuing condition of complete relief he is able to go to work.
This applies, of course, to any system of going out of the world. Naturally if such a step is taken in a fit of ill temper or impatience, or under the strain of some particular worry, the relief is not permanent. That I imagine is why religious orders insist on a period of probation, to be sure that the postulant has a real vocation.
It is certainly a great pity that you did not run away to sea. Generally speaking, doctrines never operate conversions. It is a radical change of environment which is necessary. What I said about an affair with a few bar-maids, etc., still holds good, but it is not a practical scheme, for the simple reason that you are really tied up economically. I therefore find myself compelled to echo the late Horace Greeley, 'Go west, young man! Go west!' If you could get a job more or less equivalent to your present job, in America you would find yourself enormously more free. Of course, you would have to leave the family at home for a year or two. For in New York you would meet an immense variety of people of all races and classes. You would get away from the obsession of the monotonous fixed idea of English routine, and you could lead a more or less adventurous life—which is, of course, what you really need to allow yourself to expand—without absolutely destroying your economic position.
I must say that I find it practically impossible to deal with the ordinary Englishman, even if he happens to be a rich man. He is caught in the inevitable web of the 'Code of Good Form', which is really just as oppressive for a Duke as for a dustman—in some ways even more so. The time is past when Lord Randolph Churchill could say in public that the highest and lowest classes in England were united by their cheerful immorality—or words to that effect. Yet I remember those time perfectly well myself. The only enslaved class was the bourgeois. But now, thanks principally to the newspapers, everybody (bar a few rare individual cases) has been forced to become bourgeois. With the result that a man of free spirit has to chose between exile and insurrection. That is the real meaning of the Communist movement. The economic theories of Marx, which are quite impracticable, have no importance; but one finds the best born and the richest people in the country making common cause with the rebel element. They realise perfectly well that their own material advantages will disappear in the revolution, and they shrug their shoulders and say, 'Well, we can't help that. Anything is better than the present stagnation of smug responsibility!'
Once you get these ideas into your head you should be able to think out for yourself a course of practical action.
I do wish, however, that you would manage to find enough time and money to come over to Paris for a few days, just to give you an idea of the possibilities of freedom so that you would have a conscious ideal for which to strive instead of a merely negative anguish of oppression. It is for that same reason that Adepts have often given to their more serious students doses of hashish, in order to prove to them that the bonds of Time and Space which they had supposed inexorable could very easily be broken. One such experience encourages the aspirant far more than any idealistic description of the 'Happy land far, far away' and the 'Friend for little children beyond the bright blue sky', and all that, which they learned before they were 20, is all lies and tommy rot, unless they have some actual spiritual experience strong enough to withstand all the assaults of the sceptical cynicism which is drummed into them by daily life, they will.
It is hard to ask a man to take a drastic decision of a revolutionary character unless he is certain without error that the object for which he is aiming is at least possible of attainment and not a mere wish-phantasm.
Love is the law, love under will.
Fraternally yours,
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