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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Gerald Yorke
55 Avenue de Suffren, Paris, VII
December 14th, 1928.
Care Frater:
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Your dinner jacket and black waistcoat have been discovered in the secret chamber where my nineteen wives and goats are seething in their blood. It was very wrong of you to enclose the 100 francs. I am too angry with you to send them back. It was not at all a question of the postage. It was a question of the positive refusal of the Post Office to accept any parcels of any sort for any reason in any way. I am going to get the printed regulations—it's too annoying.
The rest of your letter has thrown us in such confusion that everything has been messed up for to-day. But the Serpent [Israel Regardie] will undulate tomorrow toward the American Express, who will probably be much more genial than the Post Office.
I think it is rather a good sign that you left behind your social uniform to take away the magic robe.
Miss Eaton [Cora Eaton] is too stupid for any words of mine to describe. It is the only thing that she can do to lose her money, to hold it up every time at the exact moment when something can be put over. She cannot possibly tell what is going on here, and I cannot even tell you everything that is going on. I should have to write you thousands of words, and I have not time to do so. I can just indicate a typical case. Yesterday I went down to see the Studio at half past two; at half past three I was seeing someone (who is neither here nor there so to speak) who knows a lot of people who might finance the studio as a magical proposition.
The effect of Miss Eaton's esteemed communication is to jeopardize the whole business. It throws me completely on my beam-ends with regard to getting this magical support. It was already very difficult to get it on account of all sorts of domestic considerations, and really when I have to play more than sixteen games blindfolded I really do get mixed up as to whether the Bishop is on Knight's 5, or the rook on Queen's 8. But Miss Eaton makes me perfectly sick. She has manoeuvered you into granting terms which would cause Mr. Hamish McPherson of Jermyn St. to have a fit of apoplexy. And then she does not carry out the contract at all on the terms agreed. She has done $2,000.00 worth of damage by dribbling up the ball in this absurd fashion, and I should put it plainly to her that if she looses her money, I don't care and you don't care, and it's entirely her own fault. On the terms you offer, I am sure that you can get all the money you want from the first financial agent in Cornhill or Eastcheap or wherever it is. I think you could get money on easier terms on a post-obit. And really these people can't have it both ways. They want to gamble in order to make all kinds of money, and then they want security which would make the Governor of the Bank of England turn pale; then they jockey us in not sending the cash at all. I am so mad about it that I would like to write off Miss Eaton as a bad debt, if I could raise the money elsewhere and tell her to whistle for her $2000.00. It is all she deserves.
Frankly I really do wonder if the time has not come of making a clean sweep of all this business with women. As priestesses of Voodoo they are beyond reproach. But in business—I heave a heavy sigh. In the best cases they do seem to have a sense of honor, but it works in such an eccentric manner that one would be much more at one's ease in dealing with a registered swindler duly accredited by fourteen countries and the League of Nations.
I enclose a not for Pyke, but how to distinguish it from the note I previously wrote and enclosed you, I don't know. I also enclose the other note.
You talk about the trust agreement. But that agreement does not come into operation, as far as I can see, until the papers have been signed and until the capital has been subscribed for. What we really want is a man, with the appurtenances of a man from the beard downwards, preferably with thirteen magnificent streams of oil streaming down that beard, who will write off the whole debt as a liability and start things fair with an adequate amount of capital.
You remark that it would be folly to keep on the flat. But I put it to you, as president of Pop, whether it would not be even more foolish to leave the flat and at the same time to pay the rent for it. It appears that under my agreement with Zipporah we are subject to "tacit reconduction." If you have a dictionary which informs you as to the meaning of this expression, it is a better dictionary than that of the wife of the commissary of police of the 16th arrondisement! However my conversation with her was perfectly friendly and perfectly fair. I ought to have given notice that I was going to leave the apartment on the 5th of December. In consequence of my having failed to do so I was technically liable to renew the lease for three months. She has, however, agreed to accept a notice at one month's date, so that we are liable to pay until the 20th of January.
I may point out that we could not in any case have done otherwise, as in the absence of this $3,000 I have to economize in every possible way, and a move costs money. I am going to sign the agreement with the Red Cross heroine who was gassed by the Germans, provided that she will accept the terms dictated to her by my lawyer, and I think that this should envisage our entry into the studio on the 15th of January. But we could not undertake all the packing and moving and all the rest of it at such short notice, even if Mrs. Moses had preferred to show us out, because the petty expenses of moving would have eaten up all our reserve petty cash.
I quite agree with you about the Bayley-problem. I wrote to him exactly the same thing myself. "Give us a lead" was the general tenor of my remarks.
I also feel that Ogden [C. K. Ogden] will do something sooner or later. That bird is a curious bird! He seems rather a survival of Victorian times. There were lots of people going round London with fifty four packs in their sleeves. For instance, Ogden has seven houses in Cambridge which he bought for some mysterious activities: if I could remember correctly, to house secret societies for the purpose of studying Euripides or something equally formidable. He is therefore just the kind of person that would go head over heels into a scheme in which he was to fail to appear as the Great God from the machine. He likes the sense of secret power. I am extremely pleased to hear of your missionary efforts with General Blakeney, but the only thing which will convince these people is an interview with me. I should say that if this well-meaning but misguided Patriot could go to America to get a document of no importance to anybody, including the recipient, he could venture as far as Paris to confront the Lion in His Lair.
You say you wish you could invoke Thoth again, but why not invoke Thoth? What hinders you from invoking Thoth? There is only one way to invoke Thoth; and that is to invoke him.
I want to thank you for the Abramelin incense, which is going to put everything right. We are going to burn it regularly, and do regular invocations, and that is going to put everything right in a very short time.
I already told you that Sieveking [Lance Sieveking] was certainly one of the Patriot people. I ought to put it on record that I am in agreement with the general aims of this crowd, supposing that they were in a position to execute their fiat without obstruction, metaphysically. Where we disagree is that they take every hollow turnip with a candle for the ghost of Judas Iscariot.
I am not sure whether my attitude to Catholicism is generally understood, especially by Catholics. I have little to criticize in the matter of the Renaissance Popes, for example. I cannot see why they should want to graft a Jewish legend, which is utterly contemptible to every Jew, on to a Pagan system which would be perfectly admirable if it were interpreted in strictly magical terms. My quarrel with the provincial of the Jesuits, who came to see me in St Moritz in 1904, was simply that he wanted me, as a member of the master class, to accept the slave psychology. That we never got any further than that was due to my youth and ignorance. I feel sure that the point behind his insistence was that I could not use a doctrine to dominate the slaves unless I believed it myself. They would find me out. This is evidently justified by the history of the French Revolution, where the nobles accepted Rousseau, mocked at the theory of Kingship, and therefore had no true self-confidence whereby to dominate their serfs. They abdicated spiritually, and were properly guillotined. It is the strength as well as the weakness of these Patriot people that they really imagine every old clothes-dealer to be the secret emissary of Anti-Christ.
This circumstance makes it very difficult to deal with such people. The obvious practical way is simply to fool them; and my talents do not lie in that direction. On the other hand the task of educating them to being genuine patriots with a sane outlook appears exceptionally severe.
I enclose you a letter accrediting you as my agent.
I have no fear about the issue of Marengo.
Millage and Mrs. Page spent a couple of hours here on Tuesday night. They seem to be almost entirely ignorant of what I really stand for. I found them extremely sensible, quite ready to listen to practical political programs, instead of bothering about minor details of the Law, and I think they are very sympathetic. But Mrs. Page had the idea that we could get subscribers [for Magick in Theory and Practice] by whistling a popular tune, which is quite wrong. I enclose my letter to Lecram [printers] on this point. Subscribers have been fooled so often—(they have paid first installments and got left the way Miss Eaton is leaving us,)—that they got fed up. Given a banker's guarantee that we can and will deliver the goods, I have not the slightest doubt that we can get more subscribers than we can easily deal with in less than no time.
I expect that Mrs. Page is Millage's mistress, though she did not say so. Probably for some Freudian reason. I think, that if he can be made to see his way to undertaking an important part in the Work—for instance if he could be accredited as my sole representative in France, or something of that kind; one never knows what these people want, probably because they don't know themselves—he might either walk himself, or make her walk, whichever way the wind blows. 51 Rue Decamps is simply a pied-â-terre. He was living in the Hotel Castile; and has now gone on to St. Raphael, VAR
I wish that $3,000.00 would arrive. I would arrange for Reggie to motor down to see him. I think he is a good sane man and a man of the world. About his magical attainments I am not sure. I think he has been tied up rather too much with mere phenomena.
Love is the law, love under will.
Yours fraternally,
666.
P.S. We have not the bound-up sections of the Memoirs [The Confessions of Aleister Crowley] that were given to Mr. Cape [Jonathan Cape publishers]. Also we have not got the instructions which I wrote for you in Carry for the Geomancy box.[1]
P.P.S. Kasimira [Kasimira Bass] still in the offing. Oh! why, why did you write that fatal letter to [illegible]?
1—[This refers to a Geomancy Box he was trying to market. The geomancy box was first called The Finger of Fate. The needle as of a compass in the centre of a circle. You approach your forefinger nearly to it until your body heat causes the needle to swing round. Withdraw finger and the needle stops, pointing to a number. You look up the number in the pamphlet and the word is your answer. It failed: the delicate balance broke down when the box was moved about—G.J. Yorke.]
Gerald Yorke, Esq., 9, Mansfield Street, London, W. 1.
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