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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Gerald Yorke
55 Avenue de Suffren, Paris, VII
December 25th, 1928.
Care Frater:
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Yours of the 20th. I am so glad that you are so depressed. Your letter has encouraged me beyond measure.
Hunt's [Carl de Vidal Hunt] original letter was, I suppose, pure bluff. His recent letter to you is obviously his poor attempt to climb down without losing too much face. As I said before, the best thing we can do is forget him. But since you ask about his psychology, his first letter was simply that of a person rendered desperate by stress of circumstances. He is not the representative of all those newspapers on his notepaper. He is just a person whom no one will trust, who relies for his living upon the luck of placing articles. He has tried every form of absurd falsehood, and his imagination is beginning to fail him. It is the nemesis of falsehood. I read through, pretty carefully, his letter to you. The main idea was to try to frighten you, and it was a psychological error to close it with that colossal impudence.
My marginal note was not intended to affirm that any given manuscripts have not been seized.[1] (You write ceased, but I suppose you mean seized.) It is, in fact, probable that duplicates of the diaries were in these cases, but I don't care in the least about that. What I meant by my note was that these particular manuscripts had not been destroyed. These exist, and I think it will be a reasonable precaution to have them re-typed and put away in different places for security.
I am delighted with your report about the Customs. It is deliciously characteristic that they should preserve just those portions which they suppose to be obscene, and destroy the rest. What other portion could they understand?
You say that the Attorney-General prosecuted. But what I want to know is whom did he prosecute? I wrote to the police—whether Inspector Collins or Inspector Goddard, I am not quite sure—offering to come to England on condition that I was prosecuted, and asking them to preserve the contents of the twelve cases as material for my prosecution. This challenge remained unanswered.
Please do not minimize these documents. They are clinical observations of the first importance. It has always seemed to me to be an important part of my job to cure the world of the plague of sex, and it should be obvious to nearly everybody that the first thing to do is to explore the psychology and pathology of the subject in the most complete manner possible. (I don't make any considerable contribution to medical science, if I write that "cancer is a troublesome disease" and that "applications of lanoline often fail to cure it.")
Kraft-Ebbing, Freud and others have done valuable work in the observation of behaviourism on one side, and of subconscious psychology on the other. But what I have done is to analyze every detail, and to bring up every impulse into the region of rational consciousness.
If, for example, Mr. Robinson, the Churchwarden at Little-Footling-on-Sea, without the slightest warning rapes his grand-daughter, what it concerns us to know is what the mind of Mr. Robinson was during the whole process of his conversion from a man whose principal pride in life is to pass around a velvet bag, to the atrocious madman who commits this crime.
I claim to have made a serious contribution to this problem. There is no sense in saying, "well, these things do occur" and blaming the devil. We want to know why they occur, and not only on vague empirical motives, like the general iniquity of human nature, and the fantastic forms which insanity takes. We want to know, and follow the process step by step.
The whole blaa about obscenity is an attempt to cover up the facts. No one in his senses wants unpleasant happenings, and the chief reason is that the aetiology is not understood.
I find that in practice when I make some perfectly simple remark, or statement of plain fact about this matter, I provoke either a frown or a leer. In either case, it means that I have uncovered something in my hearer which he wishes to keep concealed. I remember trying you out in the Luxembourg Garden by using the word "cunt." You would not have been shocked if I had said "finger-nail" (I refer to my poem in the Equinox—"Sorites".)
A surgeon had no such troubles. He may have to operate on a woman's brain or her uterus; but his sole preoccupation is with the anatomy of the part. He is neither excited nor horrified. He has completely forgotten the fact that the generative organs possess the reproduction function, and we have got to get the world back to that state before any clean-mindedness can obtain.
Your remarks about Capri take us back to the Faerie Queen of the late Edmund Spencer. I went to Capri with Leah Hirsig, the afternoon of September 18th, 1920 e.v. We put up at the Hotel Tiberio. The following morning we went round the island in a boat to see all sorts of grottoes, which were all very boring and Leah was horribly sea-sick. That afternoon we returned to Naples. It was the most tourist thing I ever tried in my life, and it is really quite remarkable to think that I made all those enemies! We did not even speak to any people, other than the waiters and boatmen etc. It really makes me cry to hear "such bloody nonsense," if I may quote the pregnant phrase of Mr. George Bernard Shaw.
You rather surprise me in talking of the Sunday Express backed by the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail has, so far as I know, kept very sensibly out of the whole business. It has never printed anything disparaging about me. And then you go on again about Capri. Really, I begin to believe in the story of the bicycle pump and twins that the "Duchess" gave to the Prince of Wales. It may sound reasonable to you, but I can hardly read such stuff without wondering whether I have not myself lost my mind
I have grave doubts whether the authorities could bring any such evidence as you suppose in any real or imaginary prosecution. We have not yet got that far.
As you will have seen from my last letter, my idea is (of course) to get 'Magick' [Magick in Theory and Practice] printed and distributed in Paris. It never occurred to me that you should handle the distribution. Apart from any personal question, you have not got any of the machinery required.
I don't think you will hear much more from Jix[2] a few months from now.
I think the Daily Mail is quite right in supposing that the flappers are in revolt, and I should not be in the least surprised to see Mr. Cook Minister of Occult Agriculture, or something similar. With D.O.R.A. on the one hand and the entire corruption of the police on the other, England is morally riding for a fall. The people who are going to be hit are evidently the people who are not all to blame. England will go the way of Russia unless something serious is done about it. What makes me apprehensive is the complete blindness of all these people about the actual situation. They are frightened. They are too frightened to analyze conditions. Giving Christmas puddings to starving miners is not going to stave off any revolution that I ever heard of.
What annoys me is that if I am to become Home Secretary I shall have to stand as a Socialist, whereas I am not merely a Conservative, but a Tory, as nearly as possible like the first Duke of Wellington.
It would be a good plan for that 60 pounds to arrive without delay. It would leave the $3,000 from America perfectly clear.
It is absurd to be depressed. Athanasius Contra Mundum. But it was the world that lost out.
I have not received any sections of diary from you.
The Geomancy Box[3] will be ready to go to the professional model-maker within the next 48 hours.
Love is the law, love under will.
Yours fraternally,
666.
P.S. I find it very difficult to reconcile the Fabre D'Olivet translation [of the Golden Verses of Pythagoras] with the Greek, and I cannot find anywhere in the book the edition which he used. I have been all round Paris to more than a dozen shops which specialize in classical books to try to get a critical edition; entirely without success. It seems to me that it ought to exist in that little library bound in paper wrappers of pale Indian red. I think it is Bohn, but I am not sure, which is supposed to give one all the classical Greek which survives. I have asked Galignani's to report on this over a fortnight ago. But Galignani is a great magician, if silence is the only test.
By the way, Foulsham sent me ephemerides for 1853 and 1884 and I wanted those of 1875 and 1876. I also want one for next year. These people are really impossible.
666.
1—This refers to cases brought by Mudd [Norman Mudd] to England from Cefalú. The whole shipment was seized by the Customs as containing indecent material (G.J. Yorke)] 2—[Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, 1st Viscount Brentford.] 3—[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.]
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