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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Jack Parsons
London, S.W. 1.
19th Oct., 1943 e.v.
My dear Jack,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
I have your letter of September 14th which purports to tender your resignation, but official letters require official phrasing. It is just as well that your letter should be off the record, as also this reply.
Between the lines of your letter I read a very sincere regret at the turn circumstances have taken and an undercurrent of loyalty and enthusiasm. I am going therefore to write to you as an elder brother and true friend. I want you to read this letter very carefully and in no case be offended by any remarks that may on the surface seem antagonistic. There has been a very great deal of misunderstanding in the past and I think that this is impossible to avoid as I don't know any of your crowd personally, except Jane [Jane Wolfe] and Smith [Wilfred Talbot Smith] to the extent of three or four interviews, at all of which other persons were present.
I am now going to answer your letter point by point:
(1) I think it is very right of you and it encourages me, that you should feel that you need some personal development to hold down your job, but this I think is mostly a matter of youth and inexperience. You were put in this very difficult position in the hope that you would be able to ease things along until everything was properly smoothed out.
(2) I don't think the wholesale condemnation of a body is of much use to anyone. It is the reason, however, that you were asked to undertake the leadership in California. I thought of the Chinese Gordon who knocked together from a rabble of beggars and brigands the smartest army in China. I had sincerely hoped that you would be able to achieve a similar miracle.
(3) I naturally agree with you, but there again it was for you to put an end to this nonsense. Personal affairs and prejudices should never have been allowed to interfere with the Work. I repeat—the responsibility is yours.
Consider for a moment what happens with conscription; a crowd are thrown together without a moment's consideration of their qualities, personal affinities, personal antipathies, but in course of time discipline pushes all these aside and you have no longer an ill-assorted crowd, but a regiment.
(4) I know nothing of this statement. It may have been based on a misunderstanding or misrepresentation, on whose part I cannot say.
(b) I very strongly disapprove of your description of Phyllis Seckler as an indigent cook. I know nothing of her financial status, and I have never been submitted to her cooking, but from my personal knowledge she is an admirable psychologist and an extremely clever artist. The information that she has supplied has been more illuminating than the total of what I have had from other sources. Really, Jack, you must not write insultingly of Members of the Order. You should try to get the best out of people, but the statement that you have been working on behalf of Smith is certainly true. You keep on at it.
(c) Smith was ignominiously kicked out—in Max's [Max Schneider] accurate phrase, for malfeasance in office and larceny, but I wished to get rid of him without disruption. As soon as you appeared capable of replacing him, he was replaced.
(d) My letter to McMurtry [Grady McMurtry] was based only on the documents to which I had access, as must obviously always be the case. You don't say that McMurtry's statement was inaccurate on any point, and taking this to be so, I still think that both he and yourself treated the girl without proper respect. She appears to have been little more than a toy. I don't understand why you speak of my criticism of Smith; I don't remember that he came into that particular affair at all.
(e) I have never met Max, but have been in correspondence with him for a great number of years. He appears to me as transparently sincere and straightforward and the impression which he has apparently made on you is to me amazing. I don't know what right he had to issue orders at all—I understood from Karl [Karl Germer] that you were the sole authority. I have a letter from Sara [Sara Northrup] in which she is almost insanely bitter against Max. I don't know why she describes him as senile; I should have thought that he was very much the reverse.
(5) You don't understand Karl in the least; you are not in a position to understand him. I was working with him and studying him intimately and intensely since 1925. It took me ten years to understand his unique greatness. He may be ineffective and impracticable in some respects. His point of view is so astonishingly different from that of almost anybody else in the world that this is bound to be the case. I made him my sole representative in the U.S.A. as being the one person whom I know intimately, that I can trust, but even today there are difficulties between us. In a letter received last week he has totally misunderstood the purport of various communications that I made to him. He thought that I was urging him to take certain measures when all I was doing was to make a list of the facts in connection with publications and similar matters.
I wish you could understand what it is to be months in a concentration camp; to begin with there is a certain amount of permanent damage to his health from the tortures to which he was there subjected and on top of everything he had this long internment following the collapse of Belgium and France; and even now he is in the position of the utmost difficulty and responsibility. When you say 'hysterical' you make me laugh. After he had escaped from the concentration camp, he was capable of discussing the situation in Germany with absolute detachment. Of course, he was, and always has been, a bitter opponent of Hitler and the Nazis, but he was able to discuss their principles, their influence upon Germany and upon the world in the temper of a philosopher of another country living five hundred years later. If you don't understand the extraordinary greatness of such a character, I am very sorry for you. No doubt in his letters he shews signs of the nervous strain to which he is being subjected, but such of his correspondence with Max as I have read appeared to me remarkably sane, temperate, and wise.
I think you should try to put yourself more than you do in the position of other people before you judge them. I cannot imagine why anyone outside should take any interest in his correspondence with you and others in California. There is certainly no reference whatever to any political matters and so far as we do pay attention to them we are whole-heartedly with the Allied Nations. Why more use is not made of my patriotic songs I cannot understand.
Incidentally, you might try to put yourself in my situation. You blame me for selecting Karl. There was nobody else to chose from. Apparently you didn't get on very well with Karl when you saw him in New York, and I can very readily understand this although he says, no doubt most sincerely, that he and his wife laid themselves out to be particularly nice to you. But in this respect Karl is extraordinarily difficult; after all these years I don't in the least know how to take him. If I suggest sitting down to a game of chess he is quite likely to feel himself ill-used. His thought is so pure, so concentrated, so that he is liable to regard almost any remark as a malicious interference. You have to make allowance for this. Of course, at other times hi is quite a normal, good fellow, but you never know. This, however, is merely a technical question; the first point in any man is his integrity and I have never known any human being in the same street as he is in this respect.
(6) I understand the mundane aspect of Smith perfectly and you never can. You are not an Englishman and you don't know the class from which Smith comes. Of that class he is a very unfortunate specimen. However, his status is determined once and for all by Liber 132; nothing else explains the reactions to him.
With regard to bungling; you are not in a position to judge; for one thing anything I do is done with an eye on centuries to come. The immediate results of any action are no test of it from my point of view. On has to consider principles in long perspective. Another point is that as often as not I have no choice of action. If I had 600 odd people to chose from as has the Prime Minister, the problem of forming a cabinet of, say, 20 men is rather different from the case of having only five people to fill 20 chairs.
I don't know what you mean by pompous; I suppose you get this from my writings, but if you mean my literary writings, I suspect that you don't understand their inner meaning in many cases. If you read the suspected passage carefully, you will probably find that there is a little laugh somewhere. I wish therefore that you would realize that my universe is very much larger than yours. To begin with, in the matter of time. I have had over 50 years of what I may call conscious existence—you only 10 or thereabouts. You don't know what a difference it makes to have travelled to every part of the world, or nearly every part. You might be described as veldtfremd; there is no proper English equivalent to this—'provincial' is not quite right, but it is the same idea. Some time ago I thought of writing a book on internationally famous people with whom I had been intimate. The number ran to over 80. Am I wrong to suppose that you never met such people.
Take another point: have you visited the greater part of the monuments of antiquity; have you seen the majority of the great paintings and sculptures? Have you discussed all sorts of intimate matters with natives of every civilized quarter of the globe? Perhaps more than any of the above in importance, have you made you way alone in parts of the earth never before trodden by any human foot—perhaps in hostile and nearly always inhospitable country? You may think it pompous of me to mention these matters, but the fact is that they don't matter unless you think they don't matter.
The point that I am trying to get you to realize is that any statement or action of mine is enormously modified by my having had these experiences.
Your next paragraph indicates even more clearly that I was right in what I have just said. You have not in the least understood a great deal of what I have written.
Do you know that I cannot bear to go into the British Museum because I am completely overwhelmed by the wealth of every kind which is for ever inaccessible to me. Even if I were the most learned person in the world, I could not possibly grasp one-tenth of 1%; no, not one-hundredth part, of what there is to be known, to be studied, to be enjoyed. It gives me no satisfaction to think that I know, shall we say, 500% more than some other man. There is no difference between myself and the most ignorant person alive, for I am always bound to compare my personal marks, so to speak, with the possible total. I am infuriated, not merely by my own ignorance but by the inexorable fact that anybody, whatever his attainments, must be.
Like all young people, you are just a bit cocksure. You should learn humility in the same sense that I have learned it, or rather it has been kicked into me. Roughly speaking, the greater admiration you have for people, the greater your own nature. It shews that you have the power of picking out the best. I don't like at all what you say about witch-craft. All this black magic stuff is 75% nonsense and the rest plain dirt. There is not even any point to it.
I quite understand what you say about playing a game with Sara, but it is a little risky to play in the power-house. When you make contact with the Law of Thelema, you take hold of a high tension metal with a principle which has already revolutionized the world to an extent which hardly any one appreciates. You mustn't think it is to be picked up and thrown down at will.
You return to the subject of Max and Jean [Jean Phillips]. I must say that I always regarded Max as a most serious person, and it appears from other parts of your letter that you think so yourself, but at the moment he is going through an experience to which you may one day attain if you are strong enough, healthy enough and lucky enough. Without having undergone that experience, you cannot possibly understand it or make allowance for it. Everyone goes a little bit off the handle at this particular moment in his career.
With regard to the conclusion of your letter, let me say that I appreciate it very fully indeed. I hope that you will think over very carefully and make up your mind to continue to bear the great responsibility and deserve the great honour which is yours.
Love is the law, love under will.
Yours fraternally,
A.C.
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