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Correspondence from David Curwen to Aleister Crowley
7a Melcombe Street Baker Street, London NW1
Mar. 29th, 1947
Care Frater 666,
Love is the law, love under will. In spite of this, there being no will to do so in me, I write in reply to your letter, for which I thank you. In the same manner, I left Freemasonry twenty years ago, and although friends have used every persuasion on me to rejoin, yet the inclination was not there, and I have not yet rejoined.
It is not out of disregard for you that I have not replied to your letter, but rather because I feel there is nothing useful to say.
For the first time in thirty years I feel that now indeed I have no further interest in occult things. I feel I have come to a dead end. I want nothing from it, and it gives me nothing. I seem to have gone through the whole gamut of known occult knowledge, without learning anything useful. Perhaps this is an overstatement. I really mean I know a good deal but I am no better off than those ignorant of the same. My life is set in a commercial world to get out of which I have ever struggled, but owing to the million and one orders and restrictions by which we are all beset, I am more deeply enmeshed than ever. In the occult life, I have given up and now I drift. I want nothing. Unbeknown to all the relations and friends around me. I just watch life, going on.
Why shouldn't I subscribe to Olla? I just wanted to see what it was all about, and the price was very moderate. You made it easy by sending me a form and all I had to do was to put in the money and send it, and hey, presto, the book arrived. Frankly most of the poetry, as poetry, is quite good, but the subject matter of most of the stuff, sex and women, I am not really interested in today. All that business I left behind me years ago. So the book is on the shelf along with the others. What more is there to say? The Qabbala is a very incomplete science and gets you nowhere. Materially, the Taro [The Book of Thoth] is the most useful book that you have written, I mean for divination purposes, and even this is fire to play with.
We are all built differently, and you and I are poles asunder in outlook. Let us remain friends and leave it at that.
I thank you for your kind invitation to lunch. Maybe one day you will come to London, and we shall meet again, but for the present,
I send you my best wishes.
Yours sincerely,
David Curwen
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