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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to David Curwen
Aston Clinton, Bucks.
November 2nd, 1944
Dear Mr. Curwen:
Thank you very much for your long letter of October 23rd. Today is the first that I have had to answer it. I will now take it up paragraph by paragraph.
The Beast. I feel it is the Great Wild Beast, see the Book of Revelation. It adds up both in Hebrew and Greek to 666, and implies that I am the Ambassador of the Sun to this planet.
I am very glad indeed that you are now quite happy in your mind about me and that we are on, I hope, really friendly terms.
About the meaning of numbers. You have, I suppose, Equinox Vol. I., No. 8, there is a Qabalistic dictionary as a subsequent, and in Vol. I, No. 5 is an account of Gematria and how to calculate thereby.
Your version of 56 is rather interesting, but it does not say anywhere that you are to divide 56 in two equal parts. I take it as dividing 6 x 50 which gives .012, and that is very interesting as being a mathematical hieroglyph of our theory of the Universe. (In my new book I have dealt very fully with this theory.) The subject of getting anything printed is extremely distasteful to me because I cannot get anything done, not even a further supply of those lettercards of which I think I sent you one.
About the O.H.M. Thank you very much for sending me the extract. The first thing that strikes any reader is the vulgarity. There is a sort of cheapness about the whole production. They are evidently trying to imitate dignified announcements of a similar kind. But they are hampered by their lower middle, middle-class suburban bringing-up.
The next point is really too funny. When one goes about to engage any type of labour one's first question is what are the qualifications of the applicant. This is of course particularly the case when it is a question of teaching. The idea of an anonymous teacher is enough to make a cat laugh. What guarantee has one got that these people know anything of the subject at all?
I also thought it was a little blatant to start cadging for money in the very first document.
I do well understand what you say about the service of God and Mammon, and that business of the family is enough to make things almost impossible. Again in a series of letters which I am writing there is one which deals with that. If you were to go to an Eastern teacher and talk about your family he would explode, and even in the Gospels that one of the varied persons who have patched together to make the figure that they will call Jesus, is an Eastern Yogi. Note how absolute are the commands on these points. He would not even allow the disciple who wanted to join to go and bury his father first of all. And on more than one occasion you get: "He that loveth his father and mother more than me can in no way become my disciple." He goes on over and over again saying the same thing and it is perfectly correct that he should do so. I believe with Kipling that any sort of career is bound to be hampered by the existence of a wife, and occult study is certainly more exacting than a military career.
I quite understand that you merely overlooked what I had said about the attributions of the trumps, so now we can talk quite intelligibly.
As to Astrology, I have my own system. I don't go in for all those minute calculations which are very probably based on quite large errors with regard to the hour of birth, and in any case tend to confuse the intuitive mind. You get to a state where you can't see the wood for the trees, and besides that there are so many ways of calculating that you can always find something in one of the figures that you put out which will support any given conclusion. What’s more you can also find conditions in some other figures which would flatly contradict the first one. I use the figure of the Nativity almost alone. I have used the progressed figure but of late years I have tended more and more to neglect it. My method must be satisfactory because everyone whose horoscope I investigate tells me that I am essentially accurate, and I do it by making the simplest possible analysis of the Genethliacal figure and turning on my magical tap. I am naturally regarded as a lazy and ignorant amateur by all those professional astrologers and they hate me like the devil because I am always right and they are always wrong.
I think that you should get a very fair working knowledge of astrology in a very simple way. You should learn how to put up a figure, of course, and then read through one of the textbooks to get the hang of the thing. After that you get Barley's little books, A Thousand and One Nativities and More Nativities, and set up a figure of the figures, the figures of people in history when you feel that you know fairly well. Then compare them. Take half a dozen people, for instance, with Saturn in the Tenth House. You will notice that in every case they are shot up like a rocket from nothing to the very highest eminence and go down with every kind of a crash. Then you can practice by looking at people that you know and talking to them for half an hour about Shakespeare and the musical clocks and making up your mind as to what is their rising sign. Afterwards you check up by getting their data. You can make this very convincing by making sure first of all that they can answer one question without answering another which they have not been asked. Then you say, "Tell me either the day and month of your birth or the hour." If they give you the day and month you ought to be able to calculate the hour with an error of perhaps an hour either way; if they give you the hour you ought to get the birth-date right within about a fortnight either way. When you find that you have got the rising sign right, say five times in itself, the odds against you being parallel to it, you should have complete confidence both in yourself and in astrologer as a science.
I don't wish to brag, but as far as I am aware no astrologer so far who has written on the subject has assigned all sorts of qualities to Neptune when present in a certain sign. It has not occurred to anyone, although, for instance Lyndoe. He says that you possess the following qualities: "Delicate mental ability amounting almost to genius. Literary and oratorical ability. Mechanical dexterity. Fanciful temperament. Quickness of perception. Breadth of vision. Inspiration. Inability to concentrate. Peevishness. Neuroticism. Morbidity. Chaotic imagination. Cunning." How lovely. What a fine fellow you are and what a bad fellow! But it has never struck one of them that exactly the same is true of every human being that was born within the period of about seventeen years when Neptune was passing through Gemini. Neptune refers to the Zeitgeist, not to the individual.
I will set up your figure in the course of the next week and let you know what comes of it.
I suppose the great mystery about the date of your birth is that you were mixed up with the time in Russia.
The warnings in my books are intended to put off the unworthy. People especially if trained by Toshophists are always afraid of their own shadows. Once more into the breach, dear friends" had better be your motto, the instruction for astral journeys are perfectly clear and simple, and rising on the planes is only a development which you can do perfectly well by yourself.
Your idea about taking part in a magical ceremony is not really so easy. In order to be allowed to take part you would have to be trained to a quite considerable extent and this you ought to do yourself. You have all the instructions there, start your own temple, make your own Invocation, and see what happens.
The remark about your conviction was of course a joke.
What you say about your visions is very encouraging, except that you apparently queered your own pitch by checking yourself. At the same time I think you should do your best to follow the instructions for going on the astral given in the Equinox, Magick [Magick in Theory and Practice], and elsewhere; let nothing deter you to be sure to verify your results and be sure to record them.
I think this should be enough for you to go on with so I will conclude with my blessing.
Yours sincerely,
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