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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Gerald Yorke
Aston Clinton Bucks
July 11 [1944]
Dear Gerald
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Do not be surprised at this follow up on top of my previous long letter. There is no coup de fusil!
But a few small areas in your last two letters seem to need mopping-up.
You have acquired the art—I expect with intention—of digging very deeply into me. You touch on crucial matters with a sure finger. Nobody else does this; it is of great value for me.
1. Death. You seem to think that any allusion to my own demise is in the nature of a dirty trick! But an M.T. [Magister Templi] has to do this when making plans; and so (after all) does every one when making a will or taking out insurance. But in my case the matter is one of quite unusual importance because the fact that I am alive holds up a great [illegible].
2. Suspicion. I want to 'plug' these remarks, because this is a vice which grows on a man terribly with age. I record two very notable cases;
A, a rich man; B a crook. At 22 A was proud of knowing all the tricks and baffling would-be earbiters. At 52, having extended these principles to every one he knew, even when they were 5 times as rich as he was, he had been dropped by all his friends.
B at 24 was a high-class international crook; so were nearly all his friends. But at 50 he was so fixed in the habit of thinking that they were all 'double-crossing' him, that he simply couldn't bear any of them any more!
So far as I know, you deal with this matter rather well, on the whole; but beware of Old Time! The cure is of course absolute frankness, and no delay for brooding. (See O.T.O. Oath of 3rd degree)
The most extravagant and most tragic form of this is sexual jealousy. Once it starts, no action too innocent to escape. What hell comes of it! Othello was a very mild case.
3. Liber AL. This book is the crux. No man sees more clearly than I do how fantastic is this theory of Secret Masters who run the planet. But I can't deny the evidence. The wars 9 months after publication—you were on the job this last time!—are not flukes—and that is the smallest item. No conviction of mine goes deeper, and is the more evidential because my common sense is in wild revolt. But it is so; that's all.
Obviously Chap III takes us right back to primitive savagery. But—wasn't that unthinkable in 1904, and isn't it with us to-day?
"Mercy let be off," and so on. Well, if you want to plant a piece of land with a new seed, you must destroy weeds, vermin and parasites. (The garlic taste in the butter—See Tess of the D'Urbervilles Chap XXII). In this case these weeds etc may be things and people we love and reverence most dearly—it may be ourselves! Who cares? Certainly not the farmer.
I presume that you have read "The lost horizon" (Both you and I in different ways have a strong touch of 'Conway'). Consider old Perrault's point-of-view: Aiwass is as far above P. as he above the average 'paka sahib'. All our strongest beliefs and ways of thought and likes and dislikes are nothing in His eyes.
So I take what I can from the Book—and that scrap was enough to revolutionize and to illuminate my life, to solve all my problems, and to guide infallibly my course. For the rest, I merely strive to understand; also, to acquire that new, that infinitely lofty and remote, point of view. In this I have been sufficiently successful to convince me that such divergence as remains is due to my own imperfection of initiation.
There! You have dug out of me a clear and simple statement, helping my own mind immensely in the process. I hope you will keep this letter; one day it may be a valuable witness.
I add only that I think this: if you had my experience or its equivalent, as you might very well have done, and may yet do, your point of view would differ from mine only in insignificant, personality-engendered, details.
Love is the law, love under will.
Yours.
A.C. 666, old uncle Tom Cobley and all!
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