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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Frieda Harris
The Gardens
Dec 17. [1940]
Dear Frieda,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Yours of Dec. 17.
The Yi was your own choice from several. I approved highly, because it is the key to the kind of painting after which you were groping when I first met you.
By hard and soft rimes, I meant (wrongly, no doubt) this: hard end in consonantal sounds, as 'dog' and 'frog'. Also double rimes, as 'highway' and 'by-way'; soft in vowel sounds as 'doe' and roe'. Thus, the rime tells you the hexagram.
The first line is the base:
You are doing divination when you ask me a question. Divination is NOT getting an answer mechanically from "Napoleon's Dream Book". It is a method of rendering the mind lucid, "opened unto the Higher".
I am personally successful in Astrology because I don't do the elaborate calculations that are usual. I put up a simple figure, and let my mind move over it, until light comes.
Divination is an Art like painting. You must raise the mind from Ruach to Neschamah. See Little Essays Toward Truth, No. 1 and study the Map. You must master, not obey, the 'rules'. Van Gogh is just as 'classic' as Greco. But deliberately to break or to ignore the rules in order to be 'original' is mere laziness and incompetence and impudence; it always leads to disaster. You have been led far astray by the bounce of these humbugs.
Your only way forward and upward (with the late Ramsay McDonald) is to liberate your mind from its chains. The Ruach is a closely-knit machine. There are three ways of escape: the path of Gimel, the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel: the path of Hè, mysticism: and the path of Zayin, Inspiration or Divination. Ruach hates it all! "The carnal mind is Enmity against God". Cross out 'carnal': the intellect is far worse.
If you are to make a new mark in Art, you need a new mind, a mind enlightened from the Supernal Triad. Divination is the best way for you: that is why your Ruach hates it so much. You do it in some things, notably when you contemplate a Cock, saying: What is thy message to me, O Lord of my backyard? For I would transmit it, by means of thy painted image, to the world of men". For the Aspirant, there must be Nothing, however mean, insignificant, vile, and loathsome, that is not the Voice of the Most High, music and beauty to the Neschamah. Then, not before, your Ruach may construct (by means of its machinery) a mortal intellectual image of the Truth you have won.
Therefore; I want you to study the Yi, not as it happens to have been interpreted by King Wu and the Duke of Chao; to wring from it by the sweat of your brow its inmost meaning in terms of the Absolute.
You must practice constantly. When your eye is caught by a scrap of paper on the road, a cloud in the sky, a dewdrop on a leaf, anything, stop and wonder: "All these ages have I travelled, and the worlds have rolled on, to achieve this climax: what is this Message to me?" Do this very constantly and earnestly, very lovingly, and one day, probably when you are in the depths of dryness, the answer will come.
Love is the law, love under will.
F∴[raterna]ly,
666.
P.S. On Dec 28 there came to me a possible solution of the very mysterious puzzle of the Yi, which has so far baffled me altogether. (The 'musical' solution in the MS table is not unique. M' and F' are followed by F plus M / : why not (just as well) by F plus M; or, as would seem natural, by a simple decline of one step in one of M or F, e.g. M plus F)
I chanced to see in H.G. Wells "The Fate of Homo Sapiens" Chap 18 "Shintoism", the Japanese account of the Beginnings of this world. M = Isanaga F = Isanami. Their union produces Sun Moon and Fire-or pretty nearly, just as one Hindu system.
Should there be some very ancient Chinese tradition to the same effect (as is probable, the Jap having got all his culture from China) it might well account for the first result of the union of
We could assume that King Wu accepted this tradition , and based his account of the course of the change (i.e. the will-plan) of this upon it. Can you find out for me?
A.C.
I am really very anxious that I do not hear from you.
A.C.
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