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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Max Schneider
10 Hanover Square.
19 Mar 42
My dear Max.
Jane [Jane Wolfe] writes me that you told Leffingwell [Roy Leffingwell] last December that you could not hold any students. Now, let us have a look-see: why?
The answer is plain enough: look at your old magical diaries! They are the most conscientiously meticulous documents on which my gaze has ever been privileged to alight; but I had doubts, even at the time, whether any publisher of 'Westerns' or 'Thrillers' would have seen a fortune in publishing them as a serial.
The word 'student' condemns your strategy. We live in a time of insane excitement; we count the day lost when less than 50,000 harmless people have met with death in its most horrible forms, and even that is rather homely fare; plentiful sauce of rape, torture, and cold-blooded murders on the largest scale must be poured over the dish to make it truly piquant, and send us to bed, patting our stomachs, with the reflection that life need not be dull and monotonous, after all. What use is it to go to wild-eyed youths, whose jaws drip foam with the hunger to join personally in these pastimes, and pep them up, youths who are permanently drunk with the lust of blood, of action-action-action—even more action! and ask them to practice Asana, to learn to quiet the mind, to kill out the emotions?
What you must do is to enflame them with the romance of the Order and its Work, with the Marvel-Story of the "Cairo-Working" as told in The Equinox of the Gods, instill the idea of the New Aeon, the coming of the Crowned and Conquering Child, the birth of Freedom as outlined in Liber Oz (LXXVII) the plan of the Master Therion to bring about the revolution by the 4 wars started months after the 4 publications of Liber AL, and the need for each one of them to go forth and smite and establish the Law. You have got to imbue them with the fanatical, berserk, amok, Airman, Commando spirit. You have got to work them up to be heroes and martyrs, each man himself a leader, yet able to devote himself to conjoint disciplined action. You have got to make each man and woman feel himself (or herself) an individual Godhead, of supreme importance not only intrinsically but to the whole world.
"Pioneers, o Pioneers".
666
P.S. Note the vehemence. of the spirit of Liber AL; even its calmest passages throb with fierce energy. You must capture this savage, elemental rapture and communicate it to every one that you meet.'
666
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