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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Louis Umfreville Wilkinson
24 Apr. 46.
Care Frater
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
P.T.A.A. [Per Terram Ad Astra—Wilkinson's magical motto] at last I am able to answer yours of the 16th.
I quite agree with all that you say about advertising, but all you have done in your argument is to prove that it is impossible to do it right, whereas in practice we know that it is not. The old way is the best: to keep on hammering. But this costs money!
I disagree only on one point, I think that length does matter. Any suggestion of triviality is going to take all the weight out of the Essay; and people look first of all to that quality of length. A little bookseller was down here over Easter and I noticed that he was always talking on those lines. Some book of Faber's for instance, he said they had made it a four guinea item, and in discussing OLLA it was always a question of how many pages are there when it was a matter of discussing the price which one should ask for it.
I think that in particular you must spread yourself rather thickly over the text of my Commentary; otherwise people will get the impression that the Commentary is of too little importance, I see that it is a matter of very fine steering, and of course I have to depend a great deal on your experience. I forgot to mention in my other letter my reaction to what you say about "The Detonator"—I now feel that you are quite right—it won't do. We must think up something else. Back to the question of advertising policy. What you can do is always to make the advertisement angle of secondary importance; you cannot go wrong if you stick to verifiable fact.
It is a dreadful pity that you do not know just a little about mathematics; there should certainly be a section of the Essay devoted to the evidence that the Author of the book is in possession of knowledge and power beyond anything with which we are familiar, and you could wind up saying, after giving a few examples of such proof, "an accumulation of such incidents overcame my resistance to the original thesis that there are intelligences as well as powers, not directly accessible to any of the senses. In the last hundred years innumerable such forms of energy have been discovered, and the text of this book convinces me that in certain rare circumstances communication between human beings and such intelligences is possible." The question as to whether they are incarnate or discarnate is totally irrelevant. I am quite certain that this is the line which you must take. You want first of all to excite the interest of serious investigators, and then show ourselves as prepared to sustain investigation of the facts alleged. But it must always be matter of fact, never of rhetoric.
Love is the law, love under will.
Yours fraternally
666
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