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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Wilfred T. Smith
[Undated: postmarked 3 November 1943.]
Illiterate incarnation of what God who knows?
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
You maintain your adherence to the principals of the Order—but it is those principals that you betray. [Of course you mean principles; but treachery is not among them.]
I should be more nearly moved to tears by “very dear Aleister” if your every act was not calculated to damage both me and the Work to the—rather meager—extend of your power.
You were “kicked out ignominiously” as Mr. Schneider [Max Schneider] accurately phrases it, on numerous grounds, years ago. My first duty to the Order was to keep it in being. When you ceased to perform the Mass, there was no further reason for you. But it was desirable to avoid dissension and scandal, so sentence was suspended until some one was found who (as was hoped) could assume the office which you had degraded and forfeited.
Apart from all else, your sexual acrobatics tended to give the Order the reputation of being that slimy abomination, a “love cult.” Already in 1915, in Vancouver, all I knew of you was that you were running a mother and her daughter in double harness. Since then, one scandal followed another.
Your attempts to seduce newly-initiated women by telling them that you were now in a position to order them to sleep with you were acts of despicable blackguardism. What grosser violation of the Law of Thelema can one imagine? Not to mention that by English law you might if successful have been found guilty of rape, and I should have heartily approved a sentence of penal servitude.
It is not Germer’s [Karl Germer] wise and temperate letters, but your own erotomaniac antics, that have (very naturally) made the F.B.I. wonder what is going on. It is fortunate that in him I had a man of impeccable conduct, a man of integrity and dignity, to make manifest the serious and upright principles on which our Work is based.
Notwithstanding, I fully appreciate the higher side of your nature, your devotion to the principles of the Order, so far as you understand them; and I am deeply touched by your attitude toward me personally. I now class you as “one of the believing Jinn.”
You had a “way out”—a way UP, too!—offered you in Liber 132. By adherence, you could have become the greatest spiritual or magical force in—well, perhaps in the world, for who knows? But you listened to flattery (curious how avid of praise Gods always seem to be!), and took the road to Limbo, to the oblivion of Stansfeld Jones [Charles Stansfeld Jones].
Even now, should you understand the love in this letter, you might repair most of the mischief done to the Work, and “make good.”
Love is the law, love under will.
Salutations to your divine self!
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