|
Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Frederic Mellinger
7 May 46
Fili Carissime.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Yours of Apr 22 with photos received, for which thanks very much. Please be consoled. I was not in the least annoyed, it is only that sometimes I think it is a good plan to pretend I am [see Crowley's 10 April 1946 letter to Mellinger]. The photos are on the whole not so bad, but they might have been a good deal better if we had taken more pains with the posing. Next time you come we must look into it more seriously, and I hope that next time may be soon.
I am half way out of my mind and round the corner about OLLA. They promised me the first sheet of 16 pages on Saturday and it has not come. Did I ever think it would? Not seriously, I pretended to think there might be a chance in the hope of getting over the weekend without the complete loss of all my mental faculties, such few of them as may remain.
I am glad you liked 'Forth Beast'—though as you are only half way through you have not got much of the part where I come in. Of course he has got me all wrong in many ways. For instance, the story about the £5 diary; for one thing the cost was only a little over £2, but that doesn't matter much, where he wrote in ignorance was that my action was a magical gesture. As you saw when you were here, I had a whole series, of square red books, year by year the same series, and the Government had prevented the publisher of these diaries from getting them out for the year following. I therefore said to them "But you have to reckon with me. I will have a book which will fit into that series whether you like it or not". Let me say while I am on the subject that it is a general principle of mine that if anything is put up to me as impossible or difficult, it arouses the lion and I find some way to overcome the opposition.
I shall be very glad in any case to have your fuller criticism of Forth Beast when you have read the book carefully through, and where you think there are passages which might be disadvantageous in the eyes of the Agape [Agape Lodge] idiots you might make explanation as outlined above.
I am enclosing in this, by the way, the letter which Karl [Karl Germer] suggested should be written for circularisation among members of the Lodge. You would have to recast it and get their psychology properly worked out. In any case it cannot go as a direct communication from myself.
There is some talk of Frater H.A. [Grady McMurtry] coming over some time this summer. If so it should be very useful for you to meet him. However, he doesn't mention the subject in a short letter that I had from him this morning, so I suppose at present it is more or less a pipe dream.
Love is the law, love under will.
Yours ever.
|