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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Gerald Yorke
5 Avenue de Suffren, Paris, VII
January 19th, 1929.
Care Frater:
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Mr. Deibler has a weak heart and cannot walk up the stairs, so they let him stay in his apartment. For the same reason, my execution has been postponed until he is feeling stronger.
I got the little man at the Service des Estrangers in a very good mood. He seemed to be beginning to understand my jokes. He as good as admitted that Hunt [Carl de Vidal Hunt] was at the bottom of the whole thing, seizing with avidity upon the copy of the blackmailing letter to you, with which I furnished him.
Church [Crowley's lawyer] thinks (but is not quite sure, as it requires further consideration) that we can get after Hunt in both civil and criminal courts on the strength of that letter to you. There is further a plan which I have had in mind now for several years, but have not had the means of working. This is to send round some mild person to a dozen or so of the people who know about my crimes, and get them to tell him the horrible truth. Then suddenly turn round and serve the whole lot with writs.
I am asking you very seriously to consider this policy. It is very true that we want no scandal. But then I don't think it can be any worse than it is, since it results in the complete inhibition of all our activities. If, on the other hand, we blow the whole thing up in court, we shall be able to expose the atrocious foolishness and malice of these people, and get the whole of the public in sympathy with us.
I personally think that Hunt may have unwittingly put the whole game in our hands. It is quite probable that the police will send down a man to interview him, and when they find out that all he has to say is blather, it will be a very strong point in our favour.
I hope that you will be able to spend Monday in Paris. It would be a very good thing if you could go down to the Prefecture with me and Aumont [Gerard Aumont], and clear the whole thing up as far as they are concerned. The only weak point in my case is my contre-espionage articles during the War. But by a special dispensation of Providence, though I must admit I was as mad as hell about what I considered to be the stupidity of the British propaganda, and was sincerely anxious about the whole conduct of affairs in England, from the nonsense about "business as usual," upwards and onwards, you cannot find a single word in all those articles which is derogatory to France. I have always thought and said that France behaved splendidly throughout the whole war, and was very badly treated indeed after the victory.
So from the point of view of spilling the beans in France, I think we have nothing to fear. Again, the people here judge cases fairly on the facts. They are not prejudiced by insinuations that a man has once so far forgotten himself to copulate with a woman to whom he was not married.
We have a very valuable witness in Aumont. I am not sure whether he told you of his adventures with the police in Tunis. I once gave him a little tea-party at the Tunisia Palace Hotel, and somebody brought him along as interested in literature. Within a few hours, the police called upon him, and asked him if he knew who he had been having tea with, because it was a man who had strangled three women in Sicily. Aumont persevered in seeing me on frequent occasions, and presently the police, who had spent thousands of francs in having me watched at night and day, came round with tears in their eyes and asked him whether he would not please explain why this monster of iniquity did not seem to be committing any crimes. So the whole matter was cleared up, and we all got quite friendly. Aumont, moreover, with his journalistic connections, is just the man to make the most of this business in this country. It will help him enormously in his career if he is the man who knocks this house of cards to pieces. I have always said that what we want is another Dreyfuss case, and I really think that the moment has arrived for us to get one.
I am sure you cannot but agree that if a splash of this sort coincides with the publication of "Magick" [Magick in Theory and Practice] there will be no limit to the demand for the book.
Of course I am not going to do anything about until I confer with you. But I want you to think over the policy very seriously.
I will discuss the money question when you arrive. But I cannot admit that we have "disagreed fundamentally on the subject of entertaining". An hundred francs per week would cover any costs of that kind. The only question is that of being able to do obviously necessary things at once.
For instance, I hardly feel justified in giving the formal to Lecram [Paris printers] until I have seen you. I cannot begin to estimate what the prospectus and its distribution will cost, and that is the first expenditure. I am not sure, also, whether I should not simply send, say, a hundred copies to Germer [Karl Germer] and Evans [Montgomery Evans], and have them arrange for the thing to be printed in America and broadcast.
I am also uncertain about the terms of the covering letter to book sellers. I thought of offering 50% discount on all orders of over ten copies, with say 33-1/3% for smaller orders. I feel that we need expert advice. In any case, I think it all had better wait until you arrive. We must come to a definite agreement about all these points at once. But I do beg of you to put it out of your mind that I am doing, or am wanting to do, anything in the way of extravagance.
I will give you one example. With Paris telephones the way they are, and with clocks going at the rate they do, I think it would save money if we had an office boy, which we could get for 300 or 400 francs a month, to call our numbers for us and run errands. It is not merely the time that Regardie [Israel Regardie] and myself lose in doing these unnecessary jobs, it is the general disturbance in our work.
However, it is quite clear that we have got to get in a whole lot more capital in one way or another, and I am going to concentrate on that, in any time that is free from attending to Lecram.
Miss Küntzel [Martha Küntzel] has discovered one German and two Latin translations of Pythagoras in the University of Leipzig. She has copied out a long Latin preface from which I gather that in 1677—in an edition of the minor Greek poets by a Cambridge man, named Winterton (she gave me his Christian name as Radulphus, which I suppose means Ralph), there is a translation of Pythagoras. It might be worthwhile looking this up; if this Winterton published his book in 1677, he is probably still the Master of some College. I enclose her letter and preface, from which you will be able to use your notorious judgment as to what to do next.
Love is the law, love under will.
Yours fraternally,
666.
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