|
Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Jane Wolfe
The Ridge, Hastings, Sussex.
23rd March. 1945 e.v.
Dear Jane,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
I have your letter of February 24th with enclosures, and the latter need no particular notice. But in the letter itself you seem to go completely cuckoo! What do you mean by 'Smith [Wilfred Talbot Smith] wants to make a stand on the Mass [Gnostic Mass]'? Who, or what, is Smith? He is not a member of the Order; he has been expelled very long ago. But if he were a member of the Order, with a superb record, and my particular white-haired boy on top of it, he would still be quite unthinkable as Priest. I was shocked almost out of my senses when I got those photographs. Regina [Regina Kahl], of course, looked fine; but Smith and the lanky lop-sided person (Jacoby?) who appeared in the photograph with him was simply grotesque. They looked like scarecrows in night-gowns. They didn't know how to hold themselves or their weapons, and they didn't know how to wear robes.
I was absolutely amazed that you should have allowed anything of the sort to pass. I was relying on your experience of stage and screen to produce e Mass properly, and why you did not do so is still a complete mystery to me. I have written to you before about this; I have told you that the Mass must be up to Hollywood standards as to their production. It is no wonder that it failed to attract people. Just consider how Aimée McPherson went to work—Compare the photographs of Spencer Lewis in robe, which Clymer [R. Swinburne Clymer] published in that enormous volume, with those taken after he had been in California for some years and got dolled up properly by some expert. They actually succeeded in making him a very fair imitation of an ancient Egyptian by cutting his beard in the right shape, and so on.
Whoever you have for Priest he must do at least sixty per cent as well as the average film-ster. The same applies to the Priestess, the others are not so difficult, as long as they do not actually jar with the principals. But why do I have to write all this to you who know a billion times as much about the subject as I do. That's that!
Now then, you put up to me a problem which requires a new "Judgment of Solomon." You ask what is Helen's [Helen Parsons] standing. In my last letter to her I told her that I had no doubt that so clever a young woman must have found a way of dodging the plain instructions of Liber 132. I shall continue to assume that she has, and will continue this letter on that assumption. Legally the baby is I suppose, Jack's [Jack Parsons] legitimate child; he would be by English Law.
You write as if it were a great discovery that Smith's reactions "are rather extraordinary" to you. But in almost every letter I have written to any of you in the past years or more I have kept on shouting that Smith was nothing but a parasite. He has spent his whole life attacking the problem of how to get money without working for it, and he has shrunk from no baseness, no [illegible], in the pursuit of this ambition.
Have I got to explain to everybody all over again, that from the point of view of the Order, and of every member of it, Smith is dead? The decision is irrevocable. He has himself acquiesced in it by accepting Liber 132, and attempting to carry out the operation therein indicated.
As you well know from old times in Cefalù, I think it practically always a mistake for a Mother to be in charge of her own child. There is a good deal about this in one of the Letters of the Series [from Magick Without Tears] called 'Mother Love'. By far the best thing would be for a Sister of the Order to adopt the baby and perhaps exchange for it a child of her own.
It is of course impossible for me to understand how any woman who respects herself can have anything to do with so abject a creature as Smith. I cannot tell you what Helen's point of view may be about it; but if she intends to stick to Smith, I think that she ought to be suspended from the Order while that condition remains.
In any case I think it of paramount importance, that Smith either with or without Helen, should move to as remote a State as is practicable. I think we might reasonably and humanly adopt the familiar attitude of the old-established English family with the Black Sheep. He should be a 'remittance man". The Order might allow him as one who, although disowned, has been a member, some adequate means to keep him from actual starvation, but not sufficient to relieve him of the necessity of working for his living. And this remittance should be conditional on his not entering the territory of the State of California, or communicating in any way with any member of the Lodge. I suggest $10.00 a week.
You need not worry too much about him; thanks to the increase in population, there are now between two and three suckers born every minute. And if he were in East Oshkosh or Montana Butte or Titusville, he would very soon find some fool of a woman to support him at the price of a little flattery and occasional jiggery pokery.
Having thus spoken, King Solomon retired to his harem.
Love is the law, love under will.
Fraternally,
[eleven-fold cross] Baphomet O.H.O.
|