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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Karl Germer
Ivy Cottage, Knockholt, Kent.
Dec. 17th, 1929.
Care Frater:
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Your letter of the 12th instant is most wrongheaded. It is very good that I can reply to you immediately about such matters. When a person is N. B. U. and L. B. O., the only thing is O. S. J. The Serpent [Israel Regardie] will interpret in a post script. It is not a question of confidence. It is a question of discipline. If a person does not do what I want, I either knock him into compliance, or get rid of him. I wish you would believe this 100%. It would be good for yourself and bad for false calculations.
Your remarks about the inferiority complex are all quite wrong. The Coué business is a completely false analogy. For in most cases, even a trifling ailment like cancer takes no notice of the injunctions even of generals and cabinet ministers. It is bad magick to do Coué, for one thing, because you are attempting to influence a condition by means which have nothing at all to do with it. With regard to the minds of man, the condition is quite different because they are plastic and accessible to all sorts of influences, perhaps more to the false than to the true. If you don't believe what I say, ask the Captain of Copernig. You were quite right to print "Directeur" on your cards. It does impress the ignorant mob. I have done similar things myself. It is necessary to dominate. If you call yourself something big, of a character which cannot easily be investigated, you will get a great deal of consideration. You will be both surprised and disgusted that the civility of men and their moral cowardice, exactly as I am when you yourself display these qualities.
I don't think it will do you any good to get up in the morning saying "I feel myself more and more important" because your good sense will tell you that this is a lie. You then would be ashamed of telling a lie, and your stupidity in thinking that such a method could serve you, with the obvious result that you would become less and less important. But as far as living in a fictitious world is concerned, we all do that, and it is very largely up to us to choose the world we live in. Every social or political climber is more or less aware of this fact. They deliberately exclude people who can be of no use to them. You should do the same. But though people very often get on by truckling on to others, the result is that they are not respected and they have no real merit, and their position is really entirely a false one. Take Ivor Back, the great society surgeon, whose method has been purely to blow his own trumpet and make his way through drawing rooms. He is a genial fellow and tells excellent stories, but his colleagues regard him as a joke. On the other hand, if you want a sirloin of Duchess for Christmas, there is no better purveyor.
All this business of lying is ultimately very stupid. Nothing can be done much better in the long run than to tell people the truth. I think incidentally, that it is kinder than to let them wake up slowly to disillusion.
I am sending today the second volume of the Memoirs [The Confessions of Aleister Crowley].
About this syndicate business, I am enclosing you some proposed papers. You don't seem to have grasped the fact that it is proposed to pay off Cora [Cora Eaton] out of the capital. Cora had better do the same to you, go 50-50 on whatever the pair of you have, and let her return to the greatest, noblest, brightest and most beautiful country in the world—where I heard yesterday, business conditions, except for the very few men who are rich enough to weather the storm, are terrible. As the comic strip eloquently puts it "the worst is yet to come." There if you like is an example of a fool's paradise. They only got away with their bluff so long because the country happened to be full of untapped natural resources, and because the organization of business was good enough to allow them to make use of them. But when the crash does come in the States, it will be the biggest thing yet. Any financial stringency which couches the bosses, any weakening of confidence in the Federal Government, and the old inter-state jealousies will all break out and flash into fiercer flame, the more inextinguishable because the elements have been smouldering too long.
Love is the law, love under will.
Yours fraternally,
P.S. The Qabalistic hieroglyphics employed by 666 in his letter may be thus interpreted. N. B. U. and L. B. O. means No bloody gas and less bloody ornament. O. S. J. = other side of the Jordan, as it is written.
Potiphar's wife with Joseph had strife, When he was in Egypt a-boardin'. She took it in her hand and could not make it stand So she plugged it to the other side of the Jordan.
358. [Israel Regardie]
P.S. II. Kann nicht is incapable, can do nothing, or incompetent.
666.
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