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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to George Sylvester Viereck
59 Great Ormand Street, London W.C.1. HOLborn 5005.
July 31, 1936.
My dear Viereck,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
I am really sorry that your time was so short, and that there were so many people present, as I wanted to go into the question of the Book of the Law very thoroughly. It is a great mistake to associate the book with anything like what is usually called "Occultism".
The main point is to reflect that everything is going to smash all over the world for lack of a universally accepted principle as a basis of conduct and government. When the time comes to reconstruct, it will be quite impracticable to ask the infinitely varied creeds, theories, and prejudices to cooperate on the basis of any one of their formulae. To say nothing of those who, like ourselves, are sceptical of all dogma. Nor will it be possible for the shattered units to re-build on their own old lines, on a system of water-tight compartments.
It seems to me that the Law of Thelema is a sort of Riemann-Christoffel tensor, infinitely adaptable to all conditions, and independent of all errors in the factual terms to which it may be applied.
Now let me come to brass tacks about your visit to Germany. One of my colleagues informed me a couple of months ago that the Fuehrer was looking for a philosophical basis for Nazi principles. There is a semi-secret society in this country, calling itself "The English Mystery", the moving spirit in which is a man named Walter Sanderson. I do not fully understand the tenets of this body, but it seems to be a romantic mixture of aristocratic and Faschist ideas. They look apparently to Anthony M. Ludovici, Nietzsche and Gobineau for authority. Anyhow, I am told that Hitler asked Sanderson to come and see him in Germany. But I do not suppose that anything came or is likely to come of it, because, though right-thinking people might agree with much of their ideals, there is no schema of axioms, postulates and theorems to serve as a universal standard; and, still less, any method of demonstrating to wrong-thinking people the errors of their ways. Some of my adherents in Germany are apparently trying to approach the Fuehrer with a view to putting the Book of the Law in its proper position as the Bible of the New Aeon.
I expect that you will be in close touch with the Chancellor and his immediate officers, and I should be very grateful to you if you would put the matter tentatively before them.
Incidentally, I should be very glad to clear up my own position with the Gestapo, who apparently believe all the rubbish written about me in papers like the "Judenkenner", "Detective", and the Hearst papers in their less philosophical moments.
They ought to know better, because the years that I lived in Berlin not only was I quite undisturbed by the police, but constantly useful to them in controlling the activities of various foreign communists with whom I was in close touch. Of course, the Gestapo is not the Alexanderplatz, but they might at least have looked up the records in their files.
Of course, anyone who is at the head of an International Secret Order is suspect, but my Order in not international in that sense at all. It deals only with the individual training of people, and even at that is little more than an examining body. The members are not encouraged to know each other, and there is no organisation whatever in the ordinary sense of the word. As against this, Hitler himself says emphatically in 'Mein Kampf' that the world needs a new religion, that he himself is not a religious teacher, but that when the proper man appears he will be welcome.
I am sorry to bother you with this long letter, but I think that it may well lead to something of importance for all men.
Love is the law, love under will.
Yours ever,
Aleister Crowley.
P.S. If you are in Leipzig, you might call on Fraulein Martha Küntzel 4 Tefestrasse (0.5) a most venerable and learned old lady who knows me and my work better than anyone alive.
A.C.
May I have your Berlin address. Would send horoscope.
A.C.
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