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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Rudolph F. Holm
59 Great Ormond Street. W.C.1.
8 July 36
Care Frater
The Book of the Law is not in any way my work, as you are duly informed in the prospectus [for The Equinox of the Gods]. This should be evident to any instructed person on critical examination. It is not inspired. It was dictated, and the only duty of a scribe is to take down accurately what is said. In this particular case, the scribe disagreed heartily with a very great deal of the material. This frequently happens in business offices. But I should not recommend you to listen to the financial opinion of a girl who is transcribing letters of J.P. Morgan at eighteen dollars a week.
You talk about "pure doctrine", but it is not very useful to employ such an expression, unless you state previously to which of the seventy-seven different kinds of Baptist you belong. For only one kind has a pure doctrine, all the others will go straight to hell. You will say, perhaps, that you are not a Baptist but a Toshophist. Do you think that a Mahatma was going to ask H.P.B.'s [Helena Petrovna Blavatsky] opinions, or to monkey with Their messages? Surely the whole theory is that a Mahatma is completely above all ordinary human considerations. You seem to expect them to be images of yourself in rose-coloured glasses. Such a Mahatma is in the nature of a wish-phantasm, and the proof that he is a Mahatma at all is just exactly this: that he outrages your deepest convictions in every single way. For otherwise what is the good of his being a Mahatma.
Naturally you have not studied the Book, and you make statements about it which are simply incorrect. Where does it say that the letter is more important than the spirit? As far as I know the only point of keeping the Manuscript inviolate is that by this means certain proofs of Mahatmaship could be given: "For in it is the word secret, and not only in the English".
It is you that, by ignoring this verse, are attaching importance to the letter, instead of looking for the secret word.
Besides this I feel in your letter a certain atmosphere as of the slave-gods, and their doctrine of emasculation. These cries are not cries in the desert, they are cries of the suburbs.
I do urge you most earnestly to study the Book. You are bound to acknowledge its power. Do not try to match your local prejudices against it. Let it sink in. It is the same error as upsets Bible students who criticise the Bible from their own standpoint, while taking as infallible the book which contains the words: "My ways are not as your ways".
Yours fraternally
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