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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Gerald Yorke
55 Avenue de Suffren, Paris, VII
January 18th, 1929.
Care Frater:
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Your letter of the 15th. I have already explained to you about the cheque business. A cheque in France is something sacrosanct. It is not a mere request to a bank to pay money. The situation is something like it is with the contrat, as against contract, which I explained to you the other day. The general principle is that all strictly legal business in France is so complicated and tied up with mediaeval ideas that in practice one always finds a way to make private arrangements which are not strictly legal. I cannot understand the Bank telling you that they are transferring £20 to my account on Monday. This morning, Friday, I have an acknowledgement from the bank of ten pounds.
Lecram's [Paris printers] full name and business address is as follows:
The Lecram Press, 26, Rue d'Hautpoul, Paris.
I cannot possibly tell you how much the whole of Lecram's bill [for printing Magick in Theory and Practice] will come to. He cannot tell himself. There are some items which he cannot even estimate upon. There are others which are not even decided. In any case it is quite impossible to treat the capital in the hard and fast way which you propose. There is not enough of it, and what we have to do is find some more somewhere. As I said before, we are in the middle of a battle, and we cannot possibly tell from one moment to another how we may to have to use the money in a given emergency.
Talking of emergencies, I am now at leisure to give details of my scribbled postscript to yesterday's letter. I think Mr. Hunt [Carl de Vidal Hunt] has been skunk enough to carry out his childish threat. The only doubt is that it seems a little too stupid even for Hunt. I don't mean the thing in itself, but the way it was done. My respect for Aumont's [Gerard Aumont] intelligence constantly rises.
Anyway, the facts are these. Some man from the Prefecture of Police blew in yesterday afternoon, about half an hour after the first volume of the "Magick" [Magick in Theory and Practice] manuscript had been taken to Mr. Cope [Stuart R. Cope of the Lecram Press]. (Regardie [Israel Regardie] thought this a very queer coincidence, and I must say that with one thing and another, it does look as though the whole magical attack is being directed against the appearance of this book. We have got to set our teeth, and go all out and get first past the post.) He planted himself very positively in a chair, I then asked him if he would not be good enough to give himself the trouble of taking a seat. This remark seemed to recall him a little to a sense of his unfortunate position.
He began by asking all sorts of disconnected questions about Regardie, the main pretext being that Regardie has not yet obtained his carte d'identité. But there was something sinister in his way of putting these questions, and I realized from the first that he had something back of his mind. The upshot is that we have all got to get new cartes d'identité. He then started cross-examining me about all sorts of silly stories. "Why was I called the King of Depravity?" And "Did I take drugs?" and what about my having been expelled from America? He cross-examined me very closely about my whereabouts for the past year. So I gave him the day and hour, every time I changed my hotel, and he began to get tired of this, and felt he was rather up against it, and stopped keeping his magical record. He asked a lot of other questions totally disconnected, evidently based on the totality of these nonsensical rumours. He even wanted to learn the Holy Qabalah, but I pointed out that it required seven years of uninterrupted study to begin to know anything about it. He said "People come to consult you, and what do you advise them to do?" I said it depended on the question I was asked, but that my sheet-anchor was common sense, and that in any case I should advise no one to do anything contrary to the law (which I honestly respect as far as it will allow me to do so).
Under this treatment he became polite and even genial. There were moments when he so far forgot himself as to seem amused. But the main psychological phenomenon in his mind was bewilderment. He said to me frankly "for the first time in my life, I don't understand at all what is being said to me". I said that is very natural. I have been spending over 50 years trying to make myself clear, but nobody seems to benefit seriously by my endeavours. It puzzled him that I did not take money for consultations, and that I did not tell fortunes, and so on, and so on. I think he went away in a perfectly good frame of mind. But he said that he had to make a report on the subject, and would I see him again on Saturday morning, when I go for the carte d'identité. So that is where the matter rests.
At the same time I have thought it best to try to see Church [Crowley's lawyer] this afternoon, and get him to come with me to the Prefecture tomorrow morning. Unless thrown into the Bastille, or guillotined on the spot, I will endeavour to communicate to you the results of this further conference as soon as it is over.
I don't think that anything serious will come of this, but nevertheless one must not neglect any precautions. As you say, this is the moment when we do not want any scandal.
Love is the law, love under will.
Yours fraternally,
666.
P.S. Please bring with you the original of Hunt's [Carl de Vidal Hunt] blackmail letter.
Gerald Yorke, Esq., 9 Mansfield Street, London, W. 1.
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