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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to William Bernard Crow
Aston Clinton Bucks
July 16 [1944]
Dear Brother and Right Reverend Father in God,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Many thanks for your acct July 12.
Devotion to the Past is usually
I am a little surprised that you
have
What I "don't approve of" is having more organizations with terrific titles than there are members in any one of them. "Holy Willie's Prayer" is one of the better poems of Burns.
I return the revised leaflet with applause.
I am glad to see that you have correctly appreciated the idea of the Mass [Gnostic Mass] to the functions of [illegible] and K.
The Marianites are wrong, as you say. Remember Solomon's reply to the [illegible] who insisted "What real difference is there etc?"—"Madame, I cannot conceive."
A separate sheet for notes on Mizraim etc.
I am 97° (Grand Hierophant) of Memphis, and 90° of Mizraim. I have never seen a single ritual of any one of these grades.
[(illegible), Sharon etc—just Yarker's [John Yarker] flowery way of saying: Build up the whole show afresh from the start.]
The 97° Memphis was "reduced" to 33° by Yarker by arrangement with the 33° Scottish of the Grand Orient of France. But our 20° is their 33°.
He gave me a printed volume of the 4°—33° (1°—3° are Craft Masonry) They are interminable, dull beyond belief, hardly anything worth saving. I took the book out to the Sahara, and read it—I had only one or two other books with me—forwards and backwards for months on end.
They are totally unworkable—who is going to commit to memory all these egregious discourses, in present day conditions?
So I picked out the very sparse plums, and put the whole of Masonry and Super Masonry in the rituals of the O.T.O.
This system is simple. The speeches are short, and specially written so as to make it all easy to memorize. The system is twofold. 0°—P.I. consists of 6 degrees [Incarnation — Birth — Life — Death — Resurrection — Nirvana is a loose way to put it] The other degrees V°—IX° (X° is honorary for a National Grand Master XI° and known only to the X°s) are a progressive comment on II° (Life).
Yarker was delighted, but died even before I had finished the work. We elected Mayer 96 90° 33° to succeed him in England and Papus as 97°. Then Papus died and we had a Spanish centenarian whose name I forget; then it came to Theodor Reuss, who had (in any case) been the brains and energy of the whole push for many years. He had been O.H.O. and Frater Superior of the O.T.O. for a long time, also National Grand Master of Germany; also of Austria when Rudolph Steiner discovered what the secret of the IX° did actually mean, and took flight—also refuge in Jesus! When Reuss died, I succeeded him.
That should make everything clear.
Now then—let me inject about 3 grs Strychnine and swallow a pint of 1878 brandy, and tackle your "Historical Jesus". This is the most learnéd, and the least convincing, of any [illegible] that ever came my way! Your knowledge has every quality of nightmare! It is as if you compressed "Isis Unveiled", "The Golden Bough", and the Encyclopaedia Brittannica for good measure, into one Iron Ration of Erudition!
But make no mistake. Right Reverend Father! It is your own head that is being crushed by this Pelion. We should be so happy with a simple thesis—which, after all, doesn't matter two hoots to anybody alive. But your Old Man of the Sea obsesses you all the time; you have the proof, and so you feel that you must prove it. So you do. And what is the upshot? Well, about 90% of the readers are bewildered, about 85% bored as well, and 99.8% stunned by the sheer weight of it!
In my own case, though my knowledge is as one moulted feather compared to your colossal eagle-plumage, I have felt this, and tried to put as much treacle as might be with the brimstone by a certain lightness of style. It has not wholly succeeded. In despair (at the crying of sensible friends who half believe in me, and wish they could understand more of my mind) I am trying to write a purely colloquial book, with the answers to such simple, such fundamental questions as first occur to people when they begin to think at all.
[E.g. "Do you believe in God?" "What are Angels?" "What happens after death?" "How do I begin to learn Magick?" etc etc]
I must tell them what to study, why they should study it, how they should go to work, and so on. You merely present the bread-seeker with a brick when you throw Apollodonus' views on Counsubstantiation at him. (Now please don't tell me that it wasn't Apollodonus; just the first name that came into my head.) People don't want to be correct about dryness—about details of subjects they have never even heard of.
You and "people not suitable for O.T.O." But all men have to go through the actual experiences of which 0°—P.I. are the symbolic dramatizations; so they all have a right to take those 6 degrees.
Love is the law, love under will.
Fraternally,
Aleister Crowley
Love is the law, love under will.
Fraternally,
666.
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;
have you a planet there? Do send me your 'horror',
[horoscope] in any case: I find them most helpful. Chaldean
figure, I hope; it shows the angular houses at a glance.
in Asc; I should have thought
.
Perhaps 1/2 hr later would do it; can you make sure? It has
occurred to me frequently to tell a native that his figure
is wrong, and what it should be; sure enough, enquiry proved
that I was right. [Example in the last 3 months: the
published figure of
given. I said Rats!
.
He investigated, and it was so.]