Correspondence [DRAFT] from Aleister Crowley to John Jameson

[Undated: circa December 1938]

My dear John

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

This is a business letter. When I say business, I mean business. When you said to me yesterday: "Do not buy St Paul's" that was not business. If, when the January sales come on, I can pick up St Paul's for four eleven three including a live Dean, I shall plank down my two half bill, and not even wait to pick up my farthing change. That's business.

You will remember that when we discussed these matters in Cornwall, we did whatever we could to avoid any difficulties of a material order; this, of course, is a separate matter, and I shall deal with the magical affairs in a separate letter. I have a chill and shall postpone the writing thereof until Monday. This is a business letter.

I have always been in a little doubt about your actual position. Sometimes you talk as if you had merely stopped for a short chat on your way to the workhouse; but your actions are always those of the man that broke the bank at Monte Carlo. In the last 2 1/2 months, you have done practically no work of the really important kind, and even less of the business kind. Even with regard to your profession, you do not give people the idea that you are an actor, but that you are a young man about town who consorts with actors. I do not care what your profession is, but whatever it is, you have to work at it.

On my birthday night you gave, according to the independent testimony of four people, a very mechanical reading of the Hymn to Pan; even I, prejudiced as I naturally am in your favour, was bound to recognize that the performance might have been improved. You were much better the night we read things to Peggy [Peggy Wetton]. But I could improve you 100% in a fortnight's hard work. What did I do about it? I got up in the middle of the night, and stuck the stage directions into the only available copy of 'Magick' [Magick in Theory and Practice]. But you would never show sufficient interest in the matter to attempt to recite the poem on the lines indicated, and this although you were so extremely keen to produce great effects by a recitation at midnight in appropriate surroundings. Perhaps you were thinking: "Well, after all, Pan must have been a kid once upon a time!"

I am myself a very friendly kind of bloke, and I never frown upon gambollings, but then you must not complain that life is very hard. You cannot combine frolic and fuss.

I will now recall to your mind the strictly business side of our arrangement. As far as the big money is concerned, the assets at present—as far as I know—are entirely on my side. The main objectives of our campaign are—

(1) The establishment of the Law [of Thelema].

(2) The AMORC. This requires getting hold of an organization which rightly belongs to us, and means £80,000 a year, which could be used with great propriety in the running of the business on a basis of strict honesty. We need £2000 to bring this off.

(3) Amrita, of which you remember the details, no doubt, since you invested £100 in the same.

(4) The O.T.O. This requires a good deal of building up, but on the other hand, we have excellent material at our disposal if only it is correctly exploited.

(5) Mortaldello and The Three Wishes together with other assets running into four figures at least, such as the Confessions [The Confessions of Aleister Crowley].

(6) The Tarot [The Book of Thoth]—now quite advanced to getting contract stage.

The orchard has many apples, though one cannot tell which tree will ripen first.

Now the condition on which I accepted my responsibility to you was that I should have the benefit of your close daily co-operation. It was essential to have a house that was a house, and not merely a sub-bohemian pied-à-terre. You left me in charge of this part of the work and I accomplished it; I may even boast that I am almost on the verge of getting the house reasonably clean; but there is still a great deal to be done. The question of the outside has to be considered, and though, of course, nothing can be done for a month or two, this decoration should be in the forefront of the programme. As regards the inside of the house, we have at least got a remarkable room and a table of no mean reputation. But far too much of my time has been taken from more important matters by having to look after everything myself.

But there has been no co-operation from you; it seems as if you had intentionally avoided making use of the facilities; it seems as if you had intentionally avoided putting your shoulder to the wheel in any way except the one way which you thoroughly understand, which is a very useful way provided that your resources are without limit; but even so, there is no constructive value in it. If you want to chase any given hare, it is all very well to put up £100,000, but unless the money is used with intelligence and will, it is really so much money thrown into the water.

It is this point of will on which I wish to dwell. On the surface you appear to be a puffball drifting about with every breath of air. I know that this is not so, because when challenged, if I may use the expression, you invariably react to the deeper and truer elements of your nature. This, I may say, is the exact contrary to normal experience; generally speaking, one makes an error of judgement if one expects a man to react according to his essential character. He may seem exceedingly serious and protest greatly, and go through all the motions; but whenever it comes to the test, you find that he is really swayed by the immediate urgency of his situation; he acts without foresight, without any true plan. I should not waste ten minutes on you if I did not realize perfectly well that you are exactly the opposite of this; but for all that, you superficial actions are so extensive that the truth has very little power to manifest in anything except emergencies. It is not good enough to be always there, as you are, when the crises arrives; it is not being fair to yourself. You are risking catastrophe in the case of an emergency which is beyond your power to cope with. You ought to act in such a way that emergency does not emerge.

To give you an exact instance; I was relying very much on you to fill up the only too evident gaps in my social armour in such a way that we should have had results from the Amrita part of the work, which should have been very good discipline, for one thing, for both of us, and for another, would have put the arrangement on an immediately paying basis.

I am a little hampered in my discourse by the fact that I do not really know the situation; if it is anything like what you describe in your gloomier spasms, it is almost incredible that anyone could be so reckless. If it is not so, then why pretend that it is so? It is no sense to explain this as the normal reaction of the way wary wealthy, because the question does not arise. That would be simply stupid; bad psychology and bad manners. You are much too intelligent to dally for a moment with such nonsense.

At the same time, I think you have been very lacking in consideration for me, because all this time I have been feeling a very deep responsibility towards you. I feel that I have not been making good. But my answer to that is that I should have been making good if you had carried out to the utmost of your power the original conditions of our agreement. You have some knowledge of the way things have been in the past, and always the trouble has come from under-capitalisation, lack or organisation, and coherent plan. If we are to do anything at all, it has got to be done on a business basis with a business plan. Now, if you are going to do that, everybody concerned has got to be reliable; one has got to be able to bank upon his putting the last ounce of his back into the oar.

I am absurdly deficient in the ability to whip up my pack; I cannot get my numerous assistants to make a thorough and simultaneous effort; as soon as I pay a moment's attention to A, B C and D are all over the field.

I am now getting through the mess to the constructive stage; we need an organising genius (this is not intended to be a description of yourself) to put things in order. We have the material; it is only a question of getting the people together. In the present position, that is rather a function of our mobility. Your mobility is magnificent. It consists of flying off at a moment's notice to the ends of the world at the tail of a wild goose, which would come and eat out of your hand if you only sat down and let it, instead of scaring the bird and sending it squawking and fluttering all over, the two hemispheres. But what I mean is that we ought to be able to put our paws and claws very firmly on quite a few people, which is done by dropping in on them and saying: "Here, you do this, you do that" and so on. I understood from our Cornwall conferences that you would start on this programme immediately you returned from Europe. (I had hoped that this adventure or misadventure would have taught you something.)

You have, I firmly believe, an interior concentration, but you are fighting against it so hard that your exterior or practical concentration does not exist. You have a thistledown fixation, which sounds rather an oxymoron.

Now to the practical elements of the situation. On consideration I think that the best bet financially is the AMORC. Please be careful to respect my confidence on this point which follows. Louis Wilkinson and Frieda Harris are quite agreeable to come out to the States with me in August, where we have Mencken [H.L. Mencken] and Elmer Gertz, and a number of other quite important people waiting to push us along. We shall probably need an energetic business woman, of mature age and repulsive appearance, with utterly loathsome manners suitable to the American public, to complete the party. This, I think, is our most reasonable objective if we are to put the Great Work on Easy Street.

You do not see exactly how you can co-operate. I do not think you have any idea of doing anything useful except writing cheques, which is extremely useful, but very bad business. What you want to do is to make money, not to spend it; that is what we are here for. That is why the Creative Breath first informed the System of Ten Thousand Worlds, and this is a business letter.

I have left you pretty severely alone; I just gave you one little jog as a kind of hint that you were letting me down, and the vaccination did not take. I suggested to you very quietly that you should drop in on Mr Arthur Day at Luton and say "How do you do? Wonderful weather we are having". You did not see why; you thought I was such a fool that I would say a thing like that without any particular meaning. But I could not explain to you every detail of my thoughts about Mr Day since I met him 15 months or so ago; and unless you had been able to follow my thoughts, you could not see why I thought it would be rather a pleasant thing for you to look in on him at Luton. You must understand the artist; he has just about finished his picture; he puts in a little dab of paint somewhere; the little dab of paint means very little in analysis, and it means nothing at all by itself; but the artist puts it there, in spite of its individual unimportance, it is just the one thing necessary to make perfect his picture.

Let us imagine the case of a beautiful woman. You paint her, and paint her and paint her, and still there is something missing. You find in the inspiration of some sublime moment that what she needs is a mole or wart or a patch; you stick it in in the right place; it spoils the conventional beauty no doubt, but what was dull becomes sublime, what was dead comes to life. And so, if you are working with an artist, and you would not be working with me at all unless you had the illusion that I was an artist, then you should consent to be the irrational dab (this has nothing to do with the fried dabs at Brighton, which are not worth eating) and then stand back and watch the effect.

This is my constant trouble; people always want me to explain the details of my strategy, and that is quite impossible because it would take me a life-time to do it. If you ask a chess player: "Why do you open with pawn to queen four?", if he is an ordinary amateur he will reply "Well, the books say that it is a safe way of beginning." If you ask a master, he would have to write a book to tell you, and finish up by saying "Well, that is that"—with the subsequent reflection "I do not think I will play Pawn to Queen's fourth; I will play Knight to King's Bishop third".

I want you to read this letter carefully; I should prefer it if you would go along to some unfrequented crevasse and read it several times. I wish you would try and understand it, which is probably more than I can ever do myself, and answer it in the spirit in which it is written.

The upshot of the whole business is:

(1) The King's government must be carried on.

(2) The best bet at the moment seems to be the AMORC.

If you are prepared to devote yourself passionately to getting this plan over, over it will go. I may seem to be a little grouseful, but I shall never forget that yours is the 49th Hexagram which is called Ko. You have certainly operated many great changes already, and perhaps I am quite wrong to think that you could have done any more by acting more sensibly. For the Norns knit strange patterns.

Love is the law, love under will.

P.S. This is a business letter.

P.P.S. Peggy [Wetton] seems to have resigned herself to her sad fate and is content to wait until Saturday the 7th Jan. She has apparently got a job bringing in £8 to her a week. I do rather regret the three months; we might have been about £500 richer than we are. Please remember cheque for K.M. for Wednesday next.

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