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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Charles Stansfeld Jones
c/o Dennes & Co. 22 Chancery Lane, W.C.2.
July 22, 1936.
Dear Tantalos Leucocephalus,
Yours of July 11th. We are hoping that Liber AL will be ready by the end of August. I am not very clear in my mind about my first meeting with Spencer Lewis. I am not sure indeed that it was not through you. It is quite certain however, that he had no connection with me before that meeting in New York.
I am assuming that you have had access to "Not under the Rosy Cross," a scurrilous attack by Swinburne Clymer, a pamphlet of 128 pages with a number of reproductions of various documents. The attack on Lewis is based very largely on the statement that his authority derived from me. But Lewis is trying to dodge this, although the only document produced by him is an honourary Diploma from Peregrinus [Theodor Reuss]. The O.H.O. did not inform me that he had issued this. It is not in any sense a warrant or charter. He makes him "Honorary member of the Sovereign Sanctuary for Switzerland, Germany and Austria," and "to represent our Sovereign Sanctuary in supreme council of the A.M.O.R.C. at San Francisco". He is thus honorary 95˚, not 96˚. Such a document does not imply that he has ever undergone any initiation of any kind. Peregrinus attached to this document my own seal. The date is 1921, July. It is just one of those documents which Peregrinus flung about to anybody and everybody, when he felt himself to be dying, and was looking for people to carry on at any price. You will notice in particular that the date of this Honorary Diploma is some three years subsequent to our meeting with him.
I have been very careful in my correspondence with him. When Clymer's book reached me I wrote a letter sympathizing with him on August 19, 1935, addressing him as "Dear Imperator" i.e. of A.M.O.R.C. Spencer replied on Sept. 13, a friendly letter, but going out of his way to disclaim any connection with me. This was amusing in view of that Diploma. I also put Max Schneider P.O. Box 2282, Hollywood, Cal., on to the job of making contacts over there. There ensued a somewhat illuminous correspondence, in which I pointed out that unless he had authority from me he had no authority from anyone. He was clearly ignorant of the workings of Memphis. His first letter is signed H. Spencer Lewis 95˚ 97˚!! I think he is too ignorant to understand any of our documents, even when he uses them in his swindles. He constantly uses French and Latin without knowing the elements of the grammar of either language.
The only practical point is this. I believe that he could be forced by legal action in California to hand over his ill-gotten property to the O.T.O. when we could take measures to reimburse his dupes by replacing his humbug by facts, and the pick of his people might serve as a nucleus of the establishment of an honest organization.
I am now trying to get to California as soon as Liber A.L. is published. It is principally a matter of money. At the present moment all my resources have been stretched to the utmost to pay printers and lithographers.
You may be glad to hear that the early degrees of the Order are being worked very successfully in Los Angeles, and that the Gnostic Mass has been performed every week by Wilfred Smith [Wilfred Talbot Smith] and his associates for several years past.
I think that you were, and I suppose are, in possession of the rituals of the Order up to the 6°. I should be very grateful to you if you would let me have copies of these, or at any rate of such as you actually possess.
In the event of my arranging to go to California, I will inform you at once, and we should be able to arrange a meeting.
I hope you are well in health and every other way, as I myself am, except that the Thames valley is a little obnoxious to my Bronchial Tubes.
Love is the law, love under will.
Yours in the Bonds of the Order,
[eleven-fold Cross] O.H.O.
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