|
Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to David Curwen
The Ridge, Hastings
16. 10. 45
Dear Brother Curwen:
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Your letters of October 10 and 12 to hand. Your philosophical remarks on the hidden serpent are very instructive. I entirely agree.
I am sorry to say that I find no copy of Liber Aleph at my disposal. I am having copies specially made and it will expedite the process considerable if you would shoot along the tenner.
I am looking out a selection of Letters and will send you copies as soon as they are complete; probably one or two of these will have to be retyped: "be patient with me, and I will pay thee all" as the Good Book says.
I never had the Tao Teh King published. I am having some copies retyped in California and will send you along one when they arrive. Remind me in about three months.
What you say about my intelligibility is dependant on the personal equation. Some people find no difficulty at all with any of my stuff; others find everything clear except the Qabalistic bits, or the astrological bits, or whatever it may be, but what you must understand is that any writer of any merit and importance is in the same difficulty from the nature of the case. The fact that he is issuing original work implies that those who read him must study him seriously and in many cases that study may demand preliminary study, perhaps of a totally different kind. Read Bertrand Russell's Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy. You will find page after page completely unintelligible, and it is no question of any difficulty in his style; it is simply you have no idea what he is talking about, because you are not an expert in higher mathematics. I could show you a page in that book which would certainly take any human being three or four years of study of a totally disconnected subject before a single sentence would become intelligible.
Your own writings are not always lucid to me. You say "the Shakti and the kalpas—the meaning of kalpas to me has always been a measure of time.
You have misunderstood me a little on the subject of alcohol. I did not mean to suggest that it was the basis for the Elixir; I simply introduced it as an example pertinent to my argument. When you get my Letter on Talismans you will see that practically all Magical work depends upon suffusing the menstrum with the current of the Will, which is purely non-material in the ordinary sense of the word.
Alcohol should be prepared as a purely natural product by purely natural means. For instance you should not use an artificial fire for the distillation, but the concentrated heat of the Sun's rays. Having got this substance perfectly pure in the material sense, it must then be cleansed astrally by banishing from it any impurities in its nature which have been impressed upon it by the accident of its environment during the course of is development.
Having thus obtained a perfectly neutral menstrum you proceed to charge it with Will-power which can be of any kind you like in accordance with your particular purpose in making the experiment.
The same principle applies to our Elixir. You must also reflect that all our chemical preparations were in a certain sense living substances, for instance, Gold—the metal that we know—is a corrupt excrement of the real Gold which is described as vegetable. It has the faculty of growth and self-multiplication, and so on.
Try to see that the idea has always been [that] you must have a growing substance, and one growing in the direction that you wish it to grow.
Love is the law, love under will.
Yours fraternally,
David Curwen, Esq. 7a Melcombe Street Baker Street, NW1
|