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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Arnold Krum-Heller
66 Redcliffe Gardens.
28 December 1936
Dear Great Master.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
I have not been able to answer your letter of December 18th before, as I have been moving into a new flat [at 66 Redcliffe Gardens, Earl's Court London, S.W.10.]. I had to have more space and comfort to do the work I am now started on. Of this work I will send you particulars in due course. Spencer Louis [H. Spencer Lewis] was never a disciple, either of Reuss [Theodor Reuss] or myself in any sense of the term. He had been knocking about for years trying to run or fake Rosicrucian Order. He cast about everywhere for authority and when I first me him in New York in 1918 E.V., he was showing a charter supposed to be from the French Rosicrucians in Toulouse. He devoted so much time to the conquest of the innermost secrets of nature that he had not been able to spend any to learn French. Now even in New York there are a few people who know French and this ridiculous forgery made him a general laughing stock so that he withdrew it.
Now in the last 2 or 3 years of his life Peregrinus Reuss was sick, impoverished and desperate. He was anxious at any cost to find people to carry on his work. He, accordingly, handed out honorary diplomas up to the 95th degree and sometimes very foolishly the 96th. That is how people like Spencer Lewis and Tränker [Heinrich Tränker] get their standing. It is particularly stupid because Reuss had got into great trouble through Yarker's [John Yarker] giving the 95th degree to Wedgwood [James Ingall Wedgwood].
You need not however be worried about Spencer Lewis. The one thing I heard last summer was that he had had a paralytic stroke in which case I suppose his family, whom he had trained in thievery, will try to carry on. But these people never make anything but a hash of it. Because to do anything at all original one must have a touch of genius and this is very much more true when the business happens to be purely fraudulent. There are no principles to which people can rally, no literature to which to appeal.
It is amusing to notice that my own personal seal is on the documents quoted by Lewis as his authority and the words Ordo templi orientis' are sprawled all over the document. In the course of a long correspondence which I will send you copies when I have had the time to get them made, it became abundantly clear that either he had no authority at all or he had mine. If he had none he can be prosecuted, if he had mine he must account for the 900,000 dollars odd which he had amassed in the last few years.
Unfortunately my people in California, although most devoted and intelligent, are not precisely men of the world and do not understand how to handle big affairs. It is imperative that I should go over there and put the screws on Spencer Lewis. That is largely a question of finance. We should have to put at least £500 aside for the purpose of the journey. As soon as I got to California there would be no difficulties, because over there nobody bothers about champerty. One could get a first class firm to go into it on a 50/50 basis and Lewis, who is constantly afraid of persecution would settle on our terms.
I hope you will consider very carefully the ways and means of accomplishing this. It might be a very good thing for you to take over the work in California. I think Europe is going to be very difficult for some time to come.
Love is the law, love under will.
Yours in the bonds of the Order.
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