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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Gerald Yorke
Aston Clinton Bucks
Sept 11 [1944]
Dear Gerald
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
It was a great pleasure to get your letter—and no scolding either!
I agree with you that the book [The Book of Thoth] puts the coping-stone on my Qabalah; it seems quite complete, and I certainly don't feel like doing any more. It may well be that my work in the future will be political in the main; I have a letter drafted to Vansittart. How well I remember your advice to "join the Nazis and come up with Hitler"! But I fear that I should hardly have got through all those purges. No: I was glad to leave his career in the hands of Soror I.W.E. [Martha Küntzel]. Shows you doesn't it, the dangers of getting initiated half-way? At the same time, even if he had understood Thelema properly, the only weapon to his hand was Versailles. The world was not quite ripe for an international movement towards the revival of true Aristocracy. That, by the way, has been my deepest idea all my life. I began about 14 with a "poem" to Rosebery. Verse I ends
"And now, my lord, in medias res: Get rid of all your red Rad. fleas!"
I went on in Konx Om Pax with Thien Tao; hardly a word I would alter to-day, though I don't think that a ritual initiation is of necessity the proper beginning of education. Read it again if you've forgotten it and let me know what you think. Most seriously I see no hope for the world at all unless we can get the reins in the hands of the cavaliers. The Old School Tie has such very swearing colours; the snobbery, stupidity, prejudice—etc, I could go on for a page—put all the best people off it as a system. This throws many of the best men on to the left wing. One thinks of Mirabeau and Lafayette. It's all appallingly difficult. One can't start off-hand what must be the growth of decades—even centuries. But a return to a modified patriarchal-feudal system is the obvious gambit. We must first of all have a sound physical stock to pick out rulers from.
I don't know why your letter should have started this hare—probably because my mind is boiling over with it.
About the price of the book. Sorry of course, but it cost over £5 to produce. When the 200 are gone, or nearly, I might ask a publisher to issue a popular edition. It is easy to do by photography. Then the paper can be machine-made and the binding buckram—say 4/- instead of 27/6. We are trying to do this in the U.S.A. already.
Glad you've been having a good time in camp. [illegible] is my chief regret for age and asthma.
Tell me more about St Raphael. Off-hand, I ask first: are these people going anywhere?
I have had a very good summer, bar weather. Now I'm faced with problems: No. 1, I have to get back, I moved lots of stuff out here and some of it stays until V2 has come and gone.
Hope you have a good time at F'hampton—love to Angela and the offspring.
Love is the law, love under will.
Yours ever,
A.C.
P.S. The 80s—? for the period when we all thought that Consols would never go below par? Tell me!
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