Correspondence from Karl Germer to Gerald Yorke

23 April 1948

Dear Yorke:

I happen to have an occasion to get this letter typed by Jane Wolfe, so I will avail myself of the opportunity and write you a few things which have been on my mind. Let me start with enclosing my copy of my letter to Achad [Charles Stansfeld Jones] which I mailed yesterday after receiving reams of communications and letters from him. Even today there was some more. I am unable to cope with this as I have more important things to attend to, but the enclosed letter gives the essence of my reactions.

I would really like to have a serious talk with you. This being impossible I'll do my best in writing. I must say that Achad's verbosity leaves me cold after being at first bowled over and bewildered. He's revealing himself more and more. I do not like your speaking of "healing the breach". There is no 'breach'. What I had suspected for many years is growing into a firm conviction. It is that Achad has sunk deeper and deeper into obsession and morbid delusion. It has become a state beyond repair. I would not like you to think that I am writing this out of spite. I contacted the Work in 1924 by reading and translating Crowley's work at the same time that I read and translated the majority of Achad's books published up to that time. They were easier to understand then and I valued them accordingly highly.

Some of his letters and documents reveal his complete ignorance of many passages of The Book of the Law, and that he has remained stagnant for twenty-five years in the accumulation of new light. I ascribe this deepening delusion to A.C.'s lack of the sense of Time in those years. He did not understand Liber Legis then, especially not chapter III which is the most dangerous. He was eagerly looking for promises. He affixed onto Achad all the hopes and wishes of a frustrate, which he was in the sense of what he had expected. So here cam Achad and he was only too eager to see in him, and welcome and hail him as, the long awaited saviour. Alas! Another 20 or more years, and awful bitterness, had to be passed through to teach his quick, brilliant, and impatient mind to learn some sense of Time, of Patience, and to realise that Liber AL, 220, was written on planes deeper than a book written to last a couple of hundred years. His real break with certain of his earlier practices came in 1925 when a certain particular serious experience gave him the understanding to write or obtain the Comment. This has been a real caesura. Achad, not growing with the times, with the growing understanding of A.C. from year to year, stayed more or less where A.C. was at the time Achad knew him, say in 1919. But the following years in A.C.'s life, especially the year 1924 and later, were of prime importance in a fundamental change of A.C.'s attitude to Time, life in general, relation to other human beings, etc. If I tell you that a wealth of new light has been obtained in the last twenty or so years, this is not mere talk or hearsay on my part. It is positive knowledge, and I can tell you that I, to some extent, was instrumental in obtaining it.

You are probably well aware of how certain delusions were brought about in the souls of people who lived too closely with A.C. and produced insanity of the soul in some. A.C. himself was, in my opinion, much to blame for this. He often thought he understood certain passages in AL, 220, thought they referred to certain situations and persons, conveyed this meaning to them, and this began to rot their souls if they could not remain immune. I know quite a number of such cases personally. I am fairly sure that you remained free from this contagion despite the many impacts that bore upon you in those years tat you were close to A.C.

Maybe this is what Achad calls the influence of the Magician or Magus which has "now been removed". The trouble is that Achad is a particularly pathetic case in point. He has been proclaimed as A.C.'s "child", as "the one who was to establish Thelema", as "Bacchus Diphues", etc. To these Achad added by his own manufacture the idea that he was to be "He who understands at last", the . . . "of the Lovely Star", "mightier than all the kings of the earth". And other prophetic passages in AL, 220, LXV, VII, and certain poetry of A.C.'s.

I wish you would realise the connection and gravity of the cases, as well as the subtlety with which unfortified and impure souls are led astray by these books into the wilderness and corruption of the soul. The reading of the many pages of communications received from Achad in the last ten weeks has moved me very deeply. I was quite willing to re-open relations with him on a brotherly and friendly basis. However, the more I read of his material, the clearer I see that he is doomed. Or, to speak in A.C.'s language, that he has been for thirty years in the jaws of Choronzon, only retaining strength from what he thought were and are genuine "illuminations". I hope you will not think that I am hypocritical when I say that I am sad about this. Every human being, man or woman, that has worked so hard to attain to a certain understanding, is a great loss to humanity as a whole, though I can quite see that in a vaster plan, necessity rules. However, there is nothing that I can do about it.

I am fully aware that my above passages about my personal knowledge of meanings in The Book of the Law, and not disclosing them, smack of the mystery monger variety. It is part of the very essence—so it seems to me—of a book of this type that much must be set up to protect their sense, and that they can ultimately only be "obtained" by some sort of grace, and therefore only by people who have proved to be worthy. This is a language which I dislike intensely, but I cannot find another, simpler way to express my thought.

I do not expect Achad to answer my last note to him very joyfully, yet I would like to have a copy of his Liber 31 because you say it sheds light on the understanding of The Book of the Law. All I know about it is from conversations I have had with A.C. before 1937 and by a correspondence in later years. If I remember his discoveries well enough then I can assure you that his key was incomplete. I will write him a few lines asking him to send me a copy.

Let this be all on the subject which I wanted to get off my mind. When I am back in New York next week I will have more leisure to go more fully into your other letters.

Sincerely yours,

[added in holograph]

P.S. Some notes on Symonds [John Symonds] not to name Leah [Leah Hirsig] as the S.[carlet] W.[oman] as she was only one of them and failed. That nobody I know knows anything about the mystery of the S.W. etc.

Also, that there were 2 houses—Villas—at Cefalù, that I lived there in 1926 for 3 months. That Jane promised to write her reminiscences of Cefalù.

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