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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Frieda Harris
57, Petersham Road, Richmond, Surrey.
19th December, 1939.
Dear Frieda,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
Benediction arrived this morning arrived from Father Jackson. I am very happy and grateful.
I was going to send you a classic of purity, but I have not yet been able to get the special copy that I had intended for you. I have been terrifically worried. I have not had a word from Germer [Karl Germer] since his letter of November 30th, and this is very unusual. Normally, I hear at least once, more often twice a week. This has meant continuous anxiety and frustration.
My characteristic idiocy has just been giving another demonstration. I have been wondering for a week why it hurt to carry coal upstairs, and it only dawned upon me last night that it was lumbago, so I then turned on the infra-red and it was all right in half an hour. This is a very strange thing about me; something goes wrong, which is perfectly familiar, and I know the remedy quite well, and I am simply unable to put two and two together. I don't know why that is. A very queer psychological kink.
Now your letters received yesterday. Your paragraph 1. Yes, please make a conventional diagram.
Your paragraph 2. I cannot accept your terminology for either of the unsatisfactory instruments occasionally employed for keeping papers together. I have acted however, on the indications afforded by your sketches. Freud would deduce a great deal from your preference.
Your paragraph 3. Thanks very much about Hylton.
Your paragraph 4. The word “divide” has for many years been years been used by myself in preference to what is no doubt the correct expression “devide”. I know of course that division can be done in this lop-sided fashion, but I do not like the spoiling of the winged globe in any case, an even more serious objection is that you are making particularly shadowy the one thing that should, by rights, be the most clear.
Your paragraph 5. You can't get out of it like that. I believe the basis of the feeling is that there should be a special prerogative to understand spiritual matters, a feeling of heirship. The fact remains that you do not employ such arrogant impertinence with regard to such subjects as logic and mathematics. Bertrand Russell is certainly a thousand times more difficult than ever I am, but you understand him better because you accept the postulate, that subjects like these must be worked at, as with me you are annoyed.
My experience of satisfied women is that they do greet the dawn with a smirk; if not the dawn, any time up to five o'clock in the afternoon, and only when it wears off does one have to start all over again.
I have long foreseen the “Alice in Wonderland” conclusion of our labours, but that if you remember was the signal for the awakening to the beauty of life.
I got the photographs with great joy. I do not remember the colours of the Three of Swords, but the centre of the rose should be deep crimson, and the veins of the petals black and very wavy. Ten of Cups. This is admirable, but I can't tell much about the background; it ought to look menacing. There is something very sinister about this card. It suggests the morbid hunger which springs from surfeit. The craving of a drug addict is the idea. At the same time, of course, it is this final agony of descent into illusion which renders necessary the completion of the circle by awakening the Eld of the All-Father.
These notes on Justice, or as we have preferred to call her 'Adjustment'. Please note this title. In reading through my description of the card, I noticed a correction to be made, Phalax should be Phallic. There are several mistakes in spelling and punctuation, but no doubt you can put these right by your own ingenium. I suppose I was in a very bad temper when I made my criticism, but I do feel strongly that the plumes of Maat are too insignificant, and the Dove and Raven look simply stuck on; nor do I think that the tessellated pavement is quite right. The general criticism is that the card is a little too cold; Liber is the sign of autumn, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, close-bosomed friend of the maturing sun. In your card you have got the idea of balance static, whereas it ought to be dynamic. Nature is not the grocer weighing out a pound of sugar; it is the compensation of complicated rhythms. I should like you to feel that every adjustment was a grande passion; compensation should be a festival, not a clerk smugly pleased that his accounts are correct. It seems to me that this doctrine is very important as a commentary on the text “Existence is pure joy”, and I feel sure that the connection of Venus and Saturn with the sign is significant in this respect. The compensation is surely the awakening of the Eld of the All-Father, the constant reproduction of the original purity from the last stage of illusion. (Compare what I said above about the number Ten).
What an extraordinary thing to say! To retain one card may be different from all the other cards. The great difficulty of this whole work is to make a completely harmonious pack; that is why I wrote so strongly about the private Private View.
Your feeling about having no forms and faces is merely symptomatic of modern soul-sickness. It is lack of confidence in one's creative powers. It is the root of homo-sexuality as understood in this country and of all these crazy movements, the Neo-Thomists, and the Buchmanites and the Dadaists and the Surrealists. Picasso took it far enough; he tried to paint a chair which could not be any particular chair, and must therefore have no colour and no form, but as every chair, in order to be a chair, must have a support for the human frame, he did a horizontal line. But this is metaphysics and not art; all these half-sexed, half-witted people, sicklied o'er with the pale caste of thought, I cannot believe that any of them will ever command either the Exeter, the Ajax or the Achilles, and any man who is not potentially capable of doing that, is not a man at all; he may be some kind of pudding, and I hold no brief against puddings, but all these people who resent simplicity resent manhood, they weave their own onanistic web of nastiness; these are the shells cast off from the Tree of Life, these are the larvae of abomination. It has been your evil fortune to have far too much to do with such people without a proper clinical training, such as would have enabled you to diagnose their malady; they have small orts of cleverness without any breadth of vision or balance, without the sense of space, of nature, of fresh air. Their fiddling little ingenuities appeal to you rather as a chess problem or a jigsaw puzzle appeals to some of us in moments of idleness, but you did not have the psychological and pathological knowledge to keep you from making the fatal false step over the precipice of common sense; you have taken these abortive insects seriously. It is perfectly true in one sense to say that the only thing to be done is to fill up some stupid official paper correctly, but that is only true within the universe of discord of that paper, and the belief in thee artificial ingenuities is liable to become a nightmare, and that is when you do have to say “It's nothing but a pack of cards.”
The whole world as I see it is at present lost in constipations of this kind; the real needs of humanity are what they have always been, food, shelter, love and freedom. That, roughly speaking, is the general true will of the species, and all devices, which are not subservient to this will, are errors.
To return to 'Adjustment'; those birds bother me very much. I don't think they belong. I think they come from Noah's Ark. It would be better to simplify this card by leaving them out altogether. I feel sure that when you get the Venus and Saturn dancing motive firmly in your mind, you will produce a lady whom you will like better.
I must emphasise that this fear of faces is an appalling symptom of cowardice. It is surely a natural instinct to connect expression with moral ideas, and it is moral ideas, or more correctly magical ideas, that you are out to illustrate. It did not matter so much in this particular card because of the tradition of Justice being blind, but on the other hand, the masking of the face suggests deceit which is the absolute opposite of the intention of the card; it was the familiars of the Inquisition, it was the Vehngericht that administered what they called Justice, hooded. Impartiality is a lovely idea, but it doesn't get you very far; if the impartial person may be impersonated by a demon of malignant darkness.
I will now try to do you something about Mohammed.
Love is the law, love under will.
Yours fraternally,
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