June 10, 1989 e.v. key entry by
 Bill Heidrick, T.G. of O.T.O.   --- needs further proof reading
 (c) O.T.O.   disk 8

 O.T.O.
 P.O.Box 430
 Fairfax, CA  94930
 USA

 (415) 454-5176 ----  Messages only.


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                               87


      However, now that we have been sufficiently surprised and shocked to
 satisfy our feeling of what is due to ourselves, we may as well realize
 that what in Europe is crudely called falsehood is in America a virtue
 without which the structure of society would collapse.  Roughly speaking,
 they are the same size as we are; but their environment is so much more
 huge and hostile that it would crush them out of existence unless they
 persuaded themselves that they were very much bigger than we are.  Our
 total ignorance of American conditions, our failure to understand that
 what we regard as fundamental truths and virtues, may be to them mere
 prejudices, is creating a chasm between the continents into which
 civilization itself is only too likely to fall.
      I was simply too young, ignorant and bigoted to make any impression
 on the United States.  The real work which I accomplished in my five years
 was the unconscious preparation for my real mission, which is not a matter
 of flags and trumpets, but of silent growth in darkness.  This preparation
 was now practically complete.  With the appearance of the cynocephalus my
 journey through the Desert had reached its last stage.  I went on
 struggling for some months to get things done, not understanding that I
 was attempting what was not impossible but undesirable.  But at least my
 impotence was only too evident; and I returned to Europe in December.
 Even at the time, I felt more or less clearly that I had come to a
 definite turning-place in my career.  It is still difficult to interpret
 the next period, if only because, for one thing, it is incomplete, and for
 another, too close to see in proper perspective.  But so far as I
 understand it at all, it seems as if my work were to construct a model of
 a new civilization to replace that which we see before our eyes reeling
 towards catastrophe.
      For the next three years, then, I was to build, as it were, an ark of
 refuge, in which that which was worth saving from the Aeon of the Dying
 God might be in safety while the floods covered the face of the earth; and
 it is really not for me but for history to record and interpret the events
 of my life following my return to England at the end of 1919.  I will only
 say that my main idea had been to found a community on the principles of
" "The Book of the Law", to form an archetype of a new society.  The main
 ethical principle is that each human being has his own definite object in
 life.  He has every right to fulfil this purpose, and none to do anything
 else.  It is the business of the community to help each of its members to
 achieve this aim; in consequence

 {848}





















 all rules should be made, and all questions of policy decided, by the
 application of this principle to the circumstances.  We have thus made a
 clean sweep of all the rough and ready codes of convention which have
 characterized past civilizations.  Such codes, besides doing injustice to
 the individual, fail by being based on arbitrary assumptions which are not
 only false, but insult and damage the moral sense.  Their authority rested
 on definitions of right and wrong which were untenable.  As soon as
 Nietzsche and others demonstrated that fact, they lost their validity.
 The result has been that the new generation, demanding a reason for acting
 with ordinary decency, and refusing to be put off with fables and
 sophistries has drifted into anarchy.  Nothing can save the world but the
 universal acceptance of the Law of Thelema as the sole and sufficient
 basis of conduct.  Its truth is self-evident.  It is as susceptible of the
 strictest mathematical demonstration as any other theorem in biology.  It
 admits that each member of the human race is unique, sovereign and
 responsible only to himself.  In this way it is the logical climax of the
 idea of democracy.  Yet at the same time it is the climax of aristocracy
 by asserting each individual equally to be the centre of the universe.
 When, therefore, it comes to the question of the relations between groups,
 those truths whose utterance has smashed all theories of government lose
 their destructive qualities.  The Law of Thelema does not require the
 individual to behave himself because God set the squire and the parson to
 boss him.  In obeying the law of his country he is fighting for his own
 hand.  Modern social unrest is largely due to misunderstanding of the Law
 of Thelema.  The workman has learnt to covet motor cars and portfolios,
 which he was not born to have.  When he gets them, he becomes still more
 unhappy --- a fish out of water --- and ruins the community into the
 bargain.  Under the Law of Thelema, all false ideals and incongruous
 ambitions will be driven away as delusions.  The first principle of moral
 education will be the biological truth that the health and happiness of a
 cell depends upon the fulfilment of those functions which are natural to
 it.  Intellectual education, which is not education at all, is the basis
 of our present critical position.  It has, so to speak, insisted on each
 cell becoming conscious.  The result has been to make society hyper-
 aesthetic.  Those elements which were satisfying themselves and supporting
 the total organism have been forced to suffer; they have been rendered
 conscious of their apparent inferiority to other elements.  So, what
 between artificial anguish and false ambition for impossible attainments,
 they have become intensely painful to themselves and unable to perform
 their proper function; to their own ruin and that of the state.
      "The Book of the Law" was given to mankind chiefly in order to provide
 it with an impeccable principle of practical politics.  I regard this as
 more important for the moment than its function as a guide in its
 evolution towards conscious godhead.  It is only while writing this
 chapter that I have come to

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 understand the real purport of the book, and it is evident that the Secret
 Chiefs have prevented me from putting in the clutch, as I may say, from
 releasing the enormous energy of the New Aeon, until on the one hand, I
 had become capable of directing that energy wisely, and on the other,
 until civilization had reached the crisis in which my interference would
 save the race from crashing into chaos.
      For three years I have laboured to construct an Abbey of Thelema in
 Sicily on the principles of the Law, so that I might have experience of
 the problems of government.  Those years have taught me how to deal with
 all classes of people of all ages and races.  It had been practically
 proved to me that the intelligent application of the Law of Thelema solves
 all social problems, and that its violation is immediately and
 automatically avenged.  I am now getting ready to write the Comment on "The"
 "Book of the Law" as it bade me do.  I had stupidly supposed this Comment to
 be a scholarly exposition of the Book, an elucidation of its obscurities
 and a demonstration of its praeterhuman origin.  I understand at last that
 this idea is nonsense.  The Comment must be an interpretation of the Book
 intelligible to the simplest minds, and as practical as the Ten
 Commandments.  For the time is at hand when the bankruptcy of all theories
 of religion, all systems of government, will become obvious to all.
 Already we see the corruption of tsarism collapsing in the chaos of
 communism.  We see that communism is utterly unable to put its principles
 into practice, being in fact a desperate despotism which is bound to break
 down even more completely than the system which it replaced, because of
 the internal conflict between its principles and its performances.  We see
 the paralysis of parliamentary government.  In Italy, for instance, those
 very classes who naturally respect the law and the constitution have
 acquiesced in the usurpation of power by the chief of a gang of banditti,
 simply on his promise to put an end to the insecurity of exercising power
 because uninspired by any principle of action sufficiently rigid to
 contend with circumstances.
      It is evident to all serious thinkers that the only hope of saving
 mankind from a catastrophe so complete that the very name of civilization
 will perish is in the appearance of a new religion.
      The Law of Thelema fulfils the necessary conditions.  It is not
 limited by ethnological, social, religious or linguistic barriers.  Its
 metaphysical basis is strictly scientific.  Its principle is single,
 simple and self-evident.  It does not deny human nature or demand
 impossible virtues.  It offers to every individual the fullest
 satisfaction of his true aspirations; and it supplies a justification for
 all types of political systems beyond the criticisms which have undermined
 all previous theories of government.  There is no need for the fraud of
 divine right or the cant of democracy.  The right of the ruler to rule
 depends solely upon the scientific proof if his fitness to do so, and this
 proof is capable

 {850}



















 of confirmation by the evidence of the experience that his measures really
 result in enabling each individual in his jurisdiction to fulfil his own
 peculiar function as freely as possible.
      In many respects, no doubt, the Law of Thelema is revolutionary.  It
 insists on the absolute sovereignty of the individual within the limits of
 his proper function.  And this principle will be resented by all those who
 like to interfere with other people's business.  The battle will rage most
 fiercely around the question of sex.  Hardly any one is willing to allow
 others their freedom on this point.  Sometimes it is a personal matter;
 false vanity makes men try to enslave those whom they desire.  They cannot
 understand "There is no bond that can unite the divided but love: ... ",
 and they outrage others in every way in order to obtain the outward show
 of affection.  It is the most hideous error conceivable, yet nearly all
 men make it, and nine tenths of the misery caused by wrong sexual
 relations is due to this determination to enslave the soul of another.  It
 seems impossible to make men see what to me is obvious; that the only love
 worth having or indeed worthy of the name is the spontaneous sympathy of a
 free soul.  Social conventions which trammel love are either extensions of
 this stupid selfishness, or expressions of the almost universal shame
 which results from false ideas on the subject.  Mankind must learn that
 the sexual instinct is in its true nature ennobling.  The shocking evils
 which we all deplore are principally due to the perversion produced by
 suppressions.  The feeling that it is shameful and the sense of sin cause
 concealment, which is ignoble, and internal conflict which creates
 distortion, neurosis, and ends in explosion.  We deliberately produce an
 abscess, and wonder why it is full of pus, why it hurts, why it bursts in
 stench and corruption.  When other physical appetites are treated in this
 way, we find the same phenomenon.  Persuade a man that hunger is wicked,
 prevent him satisfying it by eating whatever food suits him best, and he
 soon become a crazy and dangerous brute.  Murder, robbery, sedition and
 many meaner crimes come of the suppression of the bodily need for
 nourishment.
      "The Book of the Law" solves the sexual problem completely.  Each
 individual has an absolute right to satisfy his sexual instinct as is
 physiologically proper for him.  The one injunction is to treat all such
 acts as sacraments.  One should not eat as the brutes, but in order to
 enable one to do one's will.  The same applies to sex.  We must use every
 faculty to further the one object of our existence.
      The sexual instinct thus freed from its bonds will no more be liable
 to assume monstrous shapes.  Perversion will become as rare as the freaks
 in a dime museum.
      I have insisted on this because my experience in the Abbey of Thelema
 demonstrated the possibility of emancipating humanity from the obsession.
 At first and in the case of newcomers, the familiar troubles threatened
 our

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 harmony.  But by sticking to the Law, by training ourselves to treat our
 sexual life as a strictly personal matter, we abolished jealousy, intrigue
 and all the other evils usually connected with it.  We eliminated
 quarrels, spitefulness, back-biting and the rest.
      So far so good.  But the gods had a surprise in store for me.  I had
 rather expected that by releasing and encouraging the instinct it would
 loom larger in our lives.  The exact contrary was the case.  In healthy
 people this instinct is not particularly predominant.  The importance of
 the subject, its omnipresence, is due to the constant irritation set up by
 its suppression.  We are always thinking of it, like an Anglo-Indian of
 his liver.  In the abbey we removed the sources of irritation, with the
 result that it slipped back into its proper physiological proportion, into
 serenity and silence.  We almost forgot its existence.  It began to
 surprise us when the sexual symbols which we had exhibited in the abbey,
 so that familiarity might breed forgetfulness, excited strangers.  A man
 who is either stimulated or shocked by an obscene photograph is just as
 much of an invalid as one whose mouth waters at the sight of a cookery
 book.
     Economic relations, again, were solved by the Law.  Whatever funds we
 had --- and we experienced all conditions from absolute want of the barest
 necessities of life to overflowing abundance --- were regarded as means to
 enable each of us equally to do his or her will.  Whatever anyone needed
 in his work was provided without a moment's grudging.  None of us hankered
 after anything unnecessary to our work.  We had found out and fixed in our
 minds that all such possessions, however delightful as new toys, were in
 the long run a nuisance.  Whatever is not ultimately useful is a source of
 distraction and anxiety.  It gets in one's way.  It is like having to live
 with someone whom one does not love.  We thus got rid of that senseless
 envy which embitters life by filling the mind with perverse cravings for
 things neither good nor bad in themselves, things fruitful of pleasure and
 profit to the people to whom they properly belong, but a source of misery
 to oneself, yet desired and hugged by the foolish who have not sense
 enough to see that what the mass of men imagine they want on the evidence
 of newspapers and salesmen may bring to them selves nothing but
 disappointment.
      We accordingly found in the abbey that happiness and peace which
 comes from contentment.  We each had all we wanted; and nobody made
 himself wretched by wanting something belonging to somebody else merely
 because it was in itself beautiful or convenient.  It should be clear to
 the stupidest statesman that the economic problem can be solved on these
 lines, and that any other principles are wasteful as well as irrational.
 The world is bankrupt today chiefly because well-meaning philanthropists
 have tried to make people happy by loading them with what they believe to
 be benefits because they are so to themselves.

 {852}




















      "The mind is improved by reading."  We therefore insist on everyone
 learning to read, with the result that their minds have been unsettled,
 clouded, confused and filled with falsehood by cheap fiction, sensational
 nonsense and deliberately dishonest propaganda.  We praise the dressmakers
 of Paris and the tailors of London till we persuade the poor to deny
 themselves comfort in order to imitate the leaders of fashion.  The
 logical error is essentially this unfitness which violates the Law of
 Thelema.
      In the abbey each of us respected the will of the others as
 absolutely as they respected his.  It was nobody's business to inquire
 what the will of another might be.  And so the total energy of each of us
 was perfectly free to achieve its own end, sure that no one would
 interfere, and that he could count on the moral support of the rest to
 assist him.  He therefore saw that in giving his own support to the abbey
 he was helping himself.  He did not have to be threatened with hell or
 urged to be altruistic.  Society has always been asked to regulate its
 actions either on grounds which everyone knows in his heart to be absurd,
 or on motives which nobody really accepts.  The Law of Thelema avows and
 justifies selfishness; it confirms the inmost conviction of each one of us
 that he is the centre of the cosmos.  Previous prophets have invariably
 tried to dodge this truth as making all social systems impossible.  Now,
 for the first time, we can build practically every variety of social
 structure on this fact.  All laws, customs and co-operative efforts can be
 constructed by the application of this principle for the conditions of
 environment.  And all such structures will be stable, being free from the
 flaw which has been the bane of all previous systems.  The theocracies of
 antiquity broke down as soon as their theory was challenged by science.
 Divine right met with with disaster immediately that its absurdity became
 apparent, so that humanity will never repeat the experiment; despite the
 fact that in many cases the absurd axiom led to the greatest prosperity.
 Social systems founded upon philosophy have failed even more frightfully,
 for the premises of the syllogism were false.  It was always implied that
 man as such possessed various virtues which are in reality only found in a
 few individuals.
      In the New Aeon, each man will be a king, and his relation to the
 state will be determined solely by considerations of what is most to his
 advantage.  The worker will support a strong government as his best
 protection from foreign aggression and seditious disturbance instead of
 thinking it tyrannical.  Everyone, whatever his ambition, will feel that
 he can rely on the whole force of the state to assist him; for all
 ambitions alike will be respected by all, with the single proviso that
 they shall not tend to restrict the equal right of the rest.  No man will
 be ashamed of himself, and so be forced into concealment and hypocrisy
 while at the same time having his idea distorted into monstrous shapes of
 disease by the pressure of public opinion.
      Of course (in practice) many people, perhaps the majority, will not
 accept

 {853}

















 the Law of Thelema.  We found that life in the abbey with its absolute
 freedom was too severe a strain on those who were accustomed to depend on
 others.  The responsibility of being truly themselves was too much for
 them; but sooner or later, without any action on our part, without any
 quarrel or ostensible reason, they found themselves ejected into their
 "previous condition of servitude".  "The Book of the Law" anticipates this:
 "... the slaves shall serve.  ..."  The bulk of humanity, having no true
 will, will find themselves powerless.  It will be for us to rule them
 wisely.  We must secure their happiness and train them for ultimate
 freedom by setting them tasks for which their nature fits them.  In the
 past, the mob without will or mind have been treated without sense or
 scruple; a mistake socially, economically and politically, no less than
 from the humanitarian point of view.  We must remember that each man and
 woman is a star, it is our duty to maintain the order of nature by seeing
 to it that his orbit is correctly calculated.  The revolutions and
 catastrophes with which history is crammed are invariably due to the
 rulers having failed to find fitting functions for the people.  The
 obvious result has been social discontent ending in the refusal of the
 cells to perform their work in the organism.
      So-called education (on which countless millions are squandered with
 the sole result of unsettling and unfitting the vast majority of its
 victims for their work in the world) becomes inexpensive, efficient and
 profitable when the Law of Thelema dictates its principles.  The very work
 means "leading out" of each child the faculties which he naturally
 possesses.  The present system deliberately discourages the development of
 individuality and deforms minds by forcing them to perform functions for
 which they were not designed.  In the abbey, our plan was to watch the
 children to discover in what direction they wanted to develop, having
 given them the greatest possible variety of facts from which to choose.
 We helped them in every way to carry out their choice, but refrained from
 any efforts to persuade them to pursue any line of study, however
 necessary it might seem to ourselves.
      Extending this principle to the world at large, my plan would be to
 classify children in infancy according to the subtle indications afforded
 by their gestures and reactions to various stimuli.  Any child who showed
 a desire to read and write would be given every possible encouragement
 altogether irrespective of social and other considerations.  Similar
 principles would apply to other activities: draughtsmanship, building,
 mechanics and the rest.  He would be made to understand that the
 fulfilment of his ambitions would depend on his willing submission to
 discipline, the conquest of idleness and so on.  But unless and until a
 child showed real discontent with his ignorance on any subject, we should
 not try to enlighten him.  His lessons should be a relief; the
 satisfaction of a real appetite.
      By this plan the resources of the state available for education would
 be

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 concentrated on the development of all really promising children instead
 of being in the first place wasted on stuffing all alike with a smattering
 of knowledge and then leaving them to shift for themselves, probably in
 danger of moral ruin by acquiring a taste for bad fiction and shallow
 sedition, and in the second, of blunting the best minds by penning them
 with the herd.
     The Abbey of Thelema has thus demonstrated practically how to cope
 with the three main problems of our time: sex, economics and education.
 We dealt with a host of minor difficulties.  But the most striking
 phenomenon of all was that the majority of petty worries never appeared at
 all.  It became clear that many such troubles have no real root in the
 facts of life, but are artificial symptoms suggested by the fundamental
 diseases.
      My final interpretation of my five years in America may be summarized
 somewhat as follows.  Firstly, before I was fit to take my place as the
 prophet of the Law of Thelema I must complete my personal initiation into
 the mysteries of the Grade of Magus.
      Secondly, that I might understand the problems which I should later
 on be called upon to settle, it was necessary to bring me into intimate
 personal contact with the very varied conditions of mankind.  Before this
 journey I had not even begun to understand what America meant.  I ignored
 it, disliked it; my only idea of dealing with it was that of an ignorant
 nurse to smack it into propriety.  It had hardly occurred to me to inquire
 why such poetry as that of Keats and myself was not the daily joy of
 Minnesota farmers.  I thought it simply showed their baseness.  I now
 understand that the bonds of brotherhood which make mankind a spiritual
 unity are everywhere identical, though their appearance varies so as to be
 unrecognizable to all but very few initiates.
      I have attained to understanding, I have made my magical model of
 society, and I await the moment when those who have chosen me to carry out
 their colossal conception summon me to stand forth before the world and
 execute their purpose.  At this point, then, I leave my memoirs.  My
 individual life is ended forever.  It was always a mere means of bringing
" "The Book of the Law" to mankind.  No man yet lived whose personal
 adventures were worth wasting a word on.  I feel a sort of shame at
 intruding myself in this way on the public.  And yet this book will not be
 altogether an impudent inanity if it shows how every adventure may serve
 to bring about some achievement of eternal importance.







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                               88


      The last lap!  I sweep into the straight.  The last jump has been
 cleared.  Nothing now between me and the winning post.
      I made a rapid summary of my situation.  The bronchitis and asthma,
 which were the symptoms of the emphyzema exacted by the God of the
 Mountains as the sacrifice due from whoever would approach his altars, had
 become a regular feature of winter.  My obvious course was to dodge it by
 migrating to North Africa.  There was no opposing argument.  England was
 still upside down.  I perceived the futility of any campaign to establish
 the Law there at present.
      My original plan had been to join the Ape of Thoth in Switzerland
 where she was staying with her sister pending my arrival.  But I found
 myself disinclined for some obscure reason to go there.  I wanted to be
 within easy reach of London for the time being, and accordingly wired her
 to join me in Paris, which she did on January 11th, the first anniversary
 of our liaison.  With her was her two-year-old son who appears in "The"
 "Diary of a Drug Fiend" as Dionysus.  We were hoping to "put his nose out of
 joint" in February or March.
      My object in staying near London was as follows.
      When I left for New York, I had confided the administration of the
 O.T.O. to the Grand Treasurer, George Macnie Cowie, VIIIø, Frater Fiat
 Pax, a Neophyte of A.'. A.'..  He was a man of over fifty years, the
 art editor of Nelson's, the publishers of Edinburgh.  He was deaf and
 dumb.  His character was unselfish and noble, his aspiration intense and
 sincere.

          He was a gentleman on whom I built
               An absolute trust.

     During the war, he wrote voluminously to keep me informed of the
affairs of the Order.  I had but one complaint to make of his conduct.  I
asked repeatedly for his accounts as treasurer and he would not send them.
As time passed his letters became increasingly rabid against Germany.
Deprived of adequate verbal communication with others, he trusted the
newspapers and took their frenzy for fact.  I was alarmed at his attitude
and referred him to "The Book of the Law".

     Cap. II,v. 60:   Therefore strike hard & low, and to hell with
                     them, master!
     Cap. III,v. 59:  As brothers fight ye!


{856}



















     "Don't hate the Germans," I urged.  "Love them.  Keep cool in order to
help them in the only way possible; by smashing them up to teach them how
to behave."  He only grew worse.  I warned him at last that such virulent
hatred would end in this going mad.  And my words came true.  His character
changed completely; he began to intrigue against me secretly and even to
rob me, or rather the Order, outright.  I cannot say how far he was abetted
by the solicitors of the Order but they, no less than he, evaded rendering
any account of the property of the Order.  I was ultimately compelled to
appeal to the police.  Under this pressure he sent a balance sheet.  The
cat was out of the bag.  The Order had been systematically defrauded.  Let
me instance only one item.  A sum of five hundred pounds was entered twice.
It was the most barefaced outrage in experience.  The Grand Secretary
General had had the same idea.  A sum of one thousand pounds had been
entrusted to her.  She realized the securities and disappeared into the
unknown.  As to the furniture and other assets, practically all the more
valuable items had been taken out of the warehouse by Cowie and were not to
be found.  Cowie's insanity was made the excuse for endless delays in
settling the various matters.  I found myself almost penniless.  My
available funds scarcely sufficed to postpone starvation for more than a
few weeks.  It was quite impossible to seek legal redress against the
thieves.  I was also foolish enough to hope that Cowie might explain his
actions and restore the property.  (I have not yet succeeded in extracting
the account from the lawyers.)
     I bethought myself of Fontainebleau and took the Ape to Moret.  We
encamped at a charming inn, the Hotel de Bourgoyne, while looking around
for a house where the ape could receive proper care when her crisis
arrived.
     During the Atlantic crossing she had made friends with a proven‡al
girl, born in Paris, who had spent some years in America as nursery
governess to some first-class people; in particular a well-known
ambassador.  She had married and given birth to a son.  Her husband being
killed in an accident, she had gone back to her old work, but sickened and
wearied.  So she had made up her mind to return to Europe.
     It struck me that the Ape ought to have a woman to look after her and
I suggested her writing to this girl to join us.  She brought her boy down
from Paris.  They gave me the shock of my life.  The girl was bloodless,
drooping like a thirsty flower, and she dragged her brat along listlessly,
he as lifeless as she.  His face was ghastly white and his limbs as a damp
rag.  I thrilled to the marrow with pity and made up my mind then and there
to begin my work of saving mankind by bringing these two back to life.
     The new current of courage and confidence was irresistible.  I found a
charming house at 11 bis rue de Neuville, Fontainebleau.  We took it from
February on.  My new patients, who appear in "The Diary of A Drug Fiend" as
Sister Cypris and Hermes, had joined us without any definite agreement as
to

{857}



















the future.  Hermes was in shocking shape.  He whined and wailed
unceasingly like a puppy in pain.  He clung to his mother with pitiful
helplessness and she had no idea beyond spoiling him in every way.  My
personality and moral fortitude soon took effect on Cypris.  I made her
take long walks through the forest with me, the Ape being of course unable
to exert herself beyond mild exercise.  Cypris regained physical health and
strength rapidly with the natural result that her spirits recovered their
tone.  She saw me as her saviour no less than Jairus's daughter must have
seen Jesus and her gratitude soon turned to an ecstasy of romantic love.
It carried her beyond herself.  She was almost ready to kill herself in
despair at the thought of my attachment to the Ape.
     One superb afternoon, sunny and spring-like --- it might have been May
--- we had lunched at the Barbison, the wine went to our heads.  After our
first burst of speed, we sat down in a glade upon a bank of soft green moss
and, without a preface of words, fell into each other's arms.  We walked
home on air and the next few days passed like a pageant of purple pleasure
and passion.
     And then she struck a snag.  She had taken it for granted that my love
for her would make me forget my friendship, cancel my obligations and
abrogate my affection.  She was amazed and angry to find that my attitude
to the Ape had not been altered in any way whatever by my liaison with her.
She supposed the conventional stupidities, cruelties and crimes were laws
of nature; not understanding the Law of Thelema and hankering after
exclusive possession, she fell into a frenzy of mistrust and jealousy.  It
made things worse that I smilingly accepted her tantrums exactly as an
alienist with the outbursts of a maniac.  I refused to quarrel; my
kindness, tenderness, affection and nonchalance were inexpugnable.  She
went from bad to worse during the following months, but I maintained firm
correctness and at last she gave up trying to drag me down to her ignoble
ideal.  In the depths of her despair there grew a glimmer.  She began to
understand that love was not necessarily accompanied by meanness,
falsehood, callousness and selfishness.  Beholding beauty afar off, she
staggered stumblingly up the ragged rocks towards the light, and in the end
cast off the chains of selfish lust and became a free and happy woman, as
she is today.
     "He must teach; but he may make severe the ordeals."  In her case, she
had to suffer indescribably anguish to attain salvation, because her
ignorance and animal appetite had usurped the throne of her soul and
reigned so long unchallenged.  Yet even of this came a marvel.
     Her command of English was imperfect; her spelling and grammar very
defective.  She had read little and that little worthless.  Nor had she any
ambition to learn to write.  I had, of course, insisted on her recording
her experiences in a Magical Diary, and what was my amazement, on reading
the first section, to find it an unsurpassed masterpiece!  This ignorant
untrained

{858}



















nursemaid had analysed herself so deeply and accurately, had dramatized her
tragedy so powerfully, and had expressed her experiences in intense and
emphatic language, eked out by metaphors derived from direct observation,
that this record is more pitilessly truthful than Marie Bashkirtseff at her
best; the stark savagery, the naked cruelty of her passions, is no less
fierce than anything in "Wuthering Heights".  She had plumbed the bottmless
pit of damnation and ravaged the heights of heaven with rage and rapture.
     Some passages in this marvellous manuscript contain expressions which
propriety declares unsuited for publication.  She had no skill in polite
euphemisms and, of course, no idea that her work would ever be read, save
by me.  In fact, she tried to destroy it on my asking to see it and I only
secured it after physical struggle.  We must, I fear, bow in the temple of
Rimmon to the extent of editing such passages, which I hate to do; their
brutal obscenity is an essential element in her character.  Should a tiger
describe his sensations while eating a man, we should lose by amending his
account so as to make it as elegant as that of a city banquet.  I will
either publish it in a country with common sense or edit it in such a way
that the intelligent reader, by the use of a little imagination, will be
able to reconstruct the text.
     (How ridiculous and disgusting this mealy-mouthed morality is!  We
print Mark Twain's schoolboy smut about Sir Walter Raleigh at the court of
Queen Elizabeth --- it circulates under the rose among the most prominent
people in society.  Why balk at a masterpiece, sublime by virtue of its
naked truth, and its spiritual intensity and exaltation, in every way the
greatest work ever yet achieved by a woman?  I say, emphatically, on my
honour that I know of nothing in the whole range of literature which
compares with it for all those qualities which are the root of beauty and
power, and so saying, I am mindful of my exaggerated enthusiasm about my
own achievements in precisely these directions.)
















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                              89


     I go back in time to Fontainebleau.  The winter was superb.  It rained
rarely, and the sun was so strong that even in February we used to picnic
in the forest and snatch an hour's sleep upon the hillside.  Everything
went well.
     Little by little Hermes was weaned from his woes; his wail grew less
continuous; he began to enjoy life as a child should.  I gave him and
Dionysus their first lessons in rock climbing.  In two or three days they
began to find the best way to tackle a crag and to use their muscles to the
best advantage.  The central principle of my teaching is to compel the
pupil to rely on his own resources, and having thus acquired good judgment
and confidence, to develop intelligent initiative.  One must show them how
to choose the best hand holds and foot holds, but not let them acquire the
habit of looking for the teacher to tell them what to do.  They must be
forced to find out for themselves how to meet any possible emergency.  It
is important to give them from the beginning as great a variety of crags as
possible; smooth slabs, rough ridges, narrow chimneys, shallow gullies,
straight faces, some with ample holds that they may select the best from
the abundance; scanty holds to teach them to make the best use of what
scarcely suffices; sound rocks to measure their full strength; smooth faces
to teach them the value of friction, and rotten or loose cliffs to exercise
their judgment as to what strain they may safely put on a hold and to check
a slip when it breaks suddenly away from hand or foot.
     Both boys showed a great capacity for cragmanship, but their qualities
were very dissimilar and gave me any amount of clues to their moral
characters.  The soul is one, and in whatever way it expresses itself its
characteristics are invariable.  Let me watch a boy climbing a cliff, or
playing chess, or building sand castles, or listening to music, and I will
tell you how he will act when he grows up whether to be a statesman, a
soldier, a doctor, a lawyer or an artist.  Hermes would look at the cliff
which I asked him to climb with cool wary wisdom.  He thought out every
step one by one, and when he had made up his mind he would execute his plan
in every detail as he worked it out.  When he had made a mistake of
judgment and found himself obliged to improvise, he was bewildered and
frightened.  At first he used to begin to cry and look round piteously for
his mother.  The unexpected difficulty threw him right out of his sense of
reality.  He lost his head and the old instinct of infancy reappeared.  He
never showed excitement or eagerness to

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climb, and after the victory never exulted in the normal fashion of
children, but he was suffused with the satisfaction of having demonstrated
his ability.
     Hermes had nothing in common with his companion.  To him a rock was
almost like a living thing.  His first reaction was a passionate fear,
which a few successful climbs transmuted into an equally eager enthusiasm.
It suggested the sexual parallel of a boy's shrinking shyness from women
turning into an almost spasmodic lust to conquer them.  He would tackle a
cliff without considering the details, and when he came to a point which
his first impetuous assaults failed to carry, he would call upon his genius
to come to the rescue, and overcome the obstacle tempestuously.  On
reaching the top his triumph was pure ecstasy.  I found it impossible to
get him to use intelligence in choosing his holds.  He defied the laws of
mechanics.  The obviously most suitable projection did not appeal to him.
He made his choice at the bidding of an irrational instinct.
     It is surely plain common sense and not a mystical fancy to foretell
how these two boys will act in the future.  Suppose they enter public life.
Hermes will never be a Mohammed, nor Dionysus a Colbert.  Hermes might
write like J. S. Liliel, paint like Verestchavin, rival Ernest Haeckel in
biology, or play chess like Qarrasch.  Dionysus would rather challenge
comparison with Blake, Dandin, or Bolyai, or Capablanca.  One is genius,
the other talent without a mixture.  And I half believe that these two
young boys and no others were given to me by the gods as pure example of
the two extreme types, so that I might study how best to develop each to
its theoretical optimum.  If indeed it must be that in the first few years
of life, at any rate, all children must be trained alike, the problem may
be stated as the discovery of a method applicable to all.  We must not
stamp down, discourage or deform genius, nor must we try to obtain from
talent qualities beyond his scope.
     Elsewhere I have laid down the fundamental principles of early
education which my experience with these two boys has led me to formulate.
My first practical difficulty was to wean them from self-distrust.  I had
to break up the Oedipus complex.  I had to destroy the false and fatal link
between mother and son.  A child needs a woman to look after him, no doubt,
but we found that his own mother was the worst woman possible.  Whenever
Cypris and Hermes were together the morals of both suffered.  She became
hysterical with phantom anxieties and he collapsed into an invertebrate
jelly quivering with querulous agitation.  I trained the four little by
little to treat each other as equals.  I destroyed the idea of possession.
When a child needed attention, I insisted on a spirit of comradeship almost
manly in tone.  If a wound had to be dressed there must be no slopping over
of sympathy.  The child must not whimper and abdicate his dignity nor the
mother disgrace the dignity of her function as healer.  At first I feared
that habit and convention would be hard to overcome.  But I was surprised
how soon all four found their feet.  This

{861}



















self-respect and respect for others made them disclaim the abject attitude
which they had supposed natural and right, with this unexpected result:
that having got rid of such false ideas as that a child was the property of
its mother, in the same sense as a limb to be controlled and used without
consulting its inclination; and on the child's part, that it need not face
reality but run to its mother for comfort in any trouble, the psychological
root of quarrelling, pestering, lying and cringing was torn up and thrown
on the bonfire of self-apprehension as a sovereign soul.  The boys never
cried, never lied, never made themselves a nuisance and never disobeyed.
We respected their rights, we conformed to the rules of the Abbey as
devised for our protection, and nothing ever happened to create even five
minutes' discord after this understanding had been established, which I may
say roughly as having taken place by the end of 1920, nine months after the
foundation of the abbey.  It was really amusing to contrast the calm
certainty and inevitable ease of the five founders with the awkwardness,
irritability and vacillation of newcomers.
     At the end of February, the Ape had passed through the valley of the
shadow of birth, and our household was gladdened by the addition of a tiny
girl whom we named Ann L‚a in honour of the great mother goddess of summer
and of the Ape herself.  We wanted a pet name and while discussing various
suggestions when walking home from the forest, Hermes suddenly broke in, "I
shall call her Poup‚e."  This was delightfully apt and was adopted on the
spot by acclamation.
     The newcomer fulfilled the dearest wish of my heart.  As a man only
one gift would have seemed more excellent, and yet I dared not give myself
over to gladness, for on the birth of the child I had inquired of the "Yi"
"King" concerning her.  She was symbolized by the 41st Hexagram, called Sun,
which signifies diminution.  My intuition, quickened by meditation upon
this symbol, warned me to beware of getting grained to my love for my
child, or nourishing my human hope upon her.  As ever, the "Yi" made no
error; despite every effort she never took firm hold of life.  She grew
feebler and frailer constantly, and in the second week of October bade us
farewell.
     Weak fool that I am!  I would not accept the warning of the wisdom of
the "Yi".  I set my teeth and swore that she should live.  Her helplessness
only inflamed my love.  I clutched the broken straw of hope more
desperately every day, and when at last the axe fell it was as if my own
neck had been upon the block.  For over a week I could not trust myself to
speak.  I fought my anguish in silence.  The agony of my earlier
bereavement came back with tenfold terror.  I cannot tell why, insane as I
was with grief, I escaped being tempted to revenge myself upon the gods by
betraying their trust and breaking my oath of allegiance.  It was indeed my
most poignant pang to reflect that this was part of the price I had paid
for my success in Magick.  In my original oath I had pledged myself to
pursue the path without withholding the minutest

{862}



















fraction of my earthly assets or permitting human affection to influence my
actions.  By this I debarred myself from using my magical power either to
procure wealth or in the interests of my natural affection, and thus I was
impotent to save the life of my child.
     This almost mortal stroke was followed up instantly by an even more
atrocious thrust, as I shall tell a little later.
     In March, we began to discuss the immediate future.  Various
considerations decided us to send the Ape to England to stay with my aunt
and see to various business details.  Cypris and I and the boys were to
look for a more or less permanent abode.  We consulted the "Yi" with great
care, asking successively whether it would be wise to settle in this place
or that.  The only favourable suggestion was Cefalu.
     We reached there on the last day of March.  I could not doubt that the
gods had guided our steps for finding the hotel so sordid, dirty and
disgusting, I swore I would not spend a second night there.  The gods rose
to the occasion.  A man named Giordano Giosus came round after breakfast
and said he had a villa to let.  Anyone who knows Italy will appreciate the
magnitude of this miracle.  To get the most trifling business through
demands the maximum of good luck at least a month before the first move is
made.
     Giosus took me up the hill and lo!  a villa that might have been made
to order.  It fulfilled all my conditions; from possessing a well of
delicious water to a vast studio opening northwards.  The gods took no
chances.  They meant me to live there and guarded against any possible
perversity on my part by planting two tall Persian nuts close to the house.
They might have been the very same trees as those in the garden of the
Villa Caldarazzo, which, as I have told, I had taken for a token in the
days of Ab-ul-Diz.  I struck a bargain on the spot, sent for the family,
and the furniture with all our belongings were installed the same day.  We
hired a man to market, cook and clean ship; and there we were as much at
home as a mummy in a pyramid, in the loveliest spot of the entire
Mediterranean littoral.
     A week or two later the Ape arrived, and I began to occupy myself with
Magick, poetry and painting on my own account, and on theirs with a
systematic training essential to establish the Law as the ethical basis of
the new social order of which I intended to construct a working model from
such material as the gods might supply.
     My cornerstones represented considerable diversity.  The Ape was
German-Swiss, with long experience of America.  Cypris, French; her son's
father American, while the other boy was half English.  More diverse still
were the four personalities.  To harmonize them should be most instructive.
     I had begun to get them more or less into shape and found out the
nature of the essential obstacles to perfect success by the end of June,
when I went to Tunis to meet a new disciple.

{863}




















     Since 1918, I had been in correspondence with this lady, Jane Wolfe,
of Pennsylvania Dutch stock, about my own age, by profession originally an
actress, but now a star of the screen.  In order to test her courage I had
told her to meet me on the day of the summer solstice at Bou Saƒda.  She
cabled consent and then my heart smote me.  It was rather rough to ask a
woman to take that uncomfortable journey to a place, which at that time of
the year was frequented chiefly by the devil and the more favoured of the
damned for hell on account of the heat.  So I wired and wrote proposing
Tunis instead.  She never received this message.  I stayed a fortnight in
Tunis wondering where she could be.  She sweated in Bou Saƒda equally
perplexed.  In the end she decided to come to Cefalu.  The Ape and I met
her at Palermo and took her to the abbey --- and then the fun began!
     Jane Wolfe was full of fixed ideas about America, of the regular
spreadeagle stuff.  ("Los Angeles is the modern Athens"!!  This actual
phrase is hers.)  The stars and stripes stood for wisdom, virtue and truth;
for spirituality, good manners, progress, civilization --- you know, it
goes on till somebody faints.  Woodrow Wilson was the reincarnation of
Jesus Christ and the Hearst newspapers the standard of literary excellence.
     Her aspiration was utterly pure, unselfish and all-absorbing.  She
disdained to count the cost or to seek reward.  But alas, in her eagerness
she assumed that so long as she ran, it did not much matter which was she
was going.  She had fallen in with a crowd of charlatans of the vulgarest
sort, sheer frauds without knowledge of any one fact about Magick and only
concerned to dupe.  She accordingly claimed to have received messages from
several "Masters on the other side".  She showed me this stuff.  I have
read a lot of rubbish in my life, but nothing in the same street, city,
county, country or continent which would stand a moment's comparison for
sheer asininity.  These "masters" did not even take the trouble to invent
plausible accounts of themselves; e.g., there would be a Persian guide
named Schmidt and her Chinese master who issued instructions which were on
the level of, and quite indistinguishable from, Sunday School exaltation.
Her pet persuasion was that she was to travel eastward for three years and
after some adventure with a "M. Joperal", an Englishman (the well-known
Shropshire or the Essex branch of that typically English tribe), she would
proceed to Japan where her destined soul-mate was waiting to marry her, the
climax being the birth of a Messiah.
     Amid this steaming midden of putrefying manure, I detected rare
posies.  She had got two or three symbols both intelligible and indicative
of initiation.
     During her first few weeks at the abbey, every day was one long
battle.  I hacked through her barbed wire of aggressive axioms.  I forced
her to confess the incongruity of her assertions.  I drilled holes in her
vanity and self-satisfaction.  I dug her critical spirit out of its corner,
and made her clean off

{864}




















the rust, sharpen the edge and the point, and polish the steel till it
shone.  When she saw it, she feared it all the more; but I forced her to
grasp it and use it.  At every stroke she split the skull of one of her
dearest delusions and shrieked as if its destruction were her own.  She
dropped the sword every time my eye was off her, but I always made her pick
it up and do some more damage, till at last she found out that killing
falsehoods, never so smiling and so like her idea of herself, did not hurt
her, but on the contrary freed her, and she also found that the harder she
struck at truth the stronger it stood.  So in the end, she learnt the value
of the critical spirit and made it one of her regular weapons.
     Besides this intellectual trouble she suffered from moral maladies of
a similar sort.  She had always taken for truth any assertion that sounded
impressive and seemed to suit her ideas of right and wrong.  She was
shocked to the limit by our principles and conduct.  She gazed with a
dropped jaw and glassy eyes, wondering how it was that the frightful
catastrophes which were bound to result did not happen.  It was a little
like those crofters at foyers waiting to see the wrath of God consume the
aluminum works that scorned the sabbath.  Was she dreaming?  Were we really
living, loving and laughing, healthy and happy, when, by all rules, we
ought to be shrieking with agony in the madhouse, the gaol or the lock
hospital!  Worse still, she missed all those familiar features to be
observed in even the best of families, petty jealousies, scolding,
quarrelling, bickering, tyranny and the rest.  Can you beat it?  Being a
woman of sense, it soon struck her that there must be some reason for these
strange phenomena, and we took every chance to point out how in any
particular case, whose circumstances would have created trouble in other
communities, the strict application of the Law of Thelema provided a
solution which satisfied all parties.  She observed also in her own case
that for the first time in her life she was really free to do what she
willed.  Her only trouble came from her own attempts to interfere with us
in the interests of some cold-storage convention, whenever she tried to put
forward some opinion or popular principle originally invented to suit
medieval conditions, and so cherished through centuries as a fetish,
despite its irrelevance to reality.
     Let me illustrate this by one case.  In her room was a sketch of a
famous group in the museum of Naples.  It shocked her; blinded her eyes.
She could not see what it was, that is, a symphony of exquisitely
harmonized lines.  The subject obsessed her; whereas we, being trained to
seek truth and beauty in each and every impression, saw the implication of
the sketch as a secondary and quite unimportant quality.  More, granting
the subject to suggest the expression of a passion which might or might not
be sympathetic, we could at least temper our approval or aversion by
reflecting that whatever we personally might feel about it, its right to
existence was absolute, exactly as

{865}




















we acquiesce in the horse, the tiger, the eagle and the snake as equally
essential to the perfection of the universe.  But to her, perception was
paralysed by emotion, and emotion was at the mercy of the idea which
assailed it.  She was incapable of reasoning about the sketch or even of
resisting its influence as being unworthy to occupy her mind.  What she
thought evil was to her so terrible and irresistible that she surrendered
herself to its loathed embrace without an effort, or even the faith in
herself or in God that its empire might end.
     This attitude is, of course, characteristic of that vast class of
moral cowards, whose only remedy for evil is to remove the occasion;
whether it is a glass of cognac, a piqu‚ blue blouse or a dollar left lying
about.  They feel themselves helpless.  Sin must follow temptation.
Righteousness is only possible in the absence of an alternative.  We of
Thelema pursue a policy exactly contrary.  We resist temptations through
the moral strength and the enlightening experience which comes of making a
series of systematic experiments with divers iniquities.  A Few trials soon
teach us that wrongdoing does not pay.  We find also that as soon as the
arbitrary penalties of misconduct, which society adds to the automatic
reaction, are removed, and we do all in our power to mitigate the evil
effects, the sting of the serpent loses its virus.  It is an old saying
that one sin provokes another.  This is only true when the sinner, driven
into a corner by the avengers, tries to escape by some desperate deed.
Thus a boy robs the till to pay for his folly in gambling away his
earnings, and being found out is maddened by the thought of jail, sees red
and kills his employer.  We should rather sterilize sin.
     The sense of shame is cowardly and servile.  It is based on ignorance
that one is a star.  "Conscience makes cowards of us all."  The man who
respects himself will not act unworthily, but if we hammer into his head
from infancy that most of his natural impulses are evil, we enslave his
spirit.  The most natural actions are done furtively.  He lurks and lies.
Brought up to believe that his right is wrong, he will do what he thinks
wrong as easily as what he thinks right.  In this way canned ethics breed
crime.
     Jane Wolfe soon found that we were immune from the effects alleged to
follow various causes.  Erotic pictures did not stimulate us sexually.
Descriptions and illustrations of diseases neither disgusted nor frightened
us.  The girls did not dress against each other.  The new hat of one
aroused no envy in her friend.  The most cutting criticism made no wound.
I would say frankly and even brutally what I thought of this or that trait
in one of the girls, and she would take it in the same spirit as a patient
submits to the surgeon's knife, knowing first, that whatever I said was
inspired by the wish to eliminate error, and secondly that beneath the most
ruthless contempt there was absolute respect as due to a star.  "If he be a
King, thou canst not hurt him."  The instant Jane realized that she was a
sovereign soul, unique and of

{866}



















equal splendour to every other, she was no longer hurt by criticisms of the
complexes which blasphemed her simplicity and which she had been silly
enough to suppose organic functions of her essence.
     So passed the summer.  With autumn came calamity.  I have already told
of my own great sorrow.  The second sword stroke was that her own
inconsolable grief so prostrated the Ape that our hope to retrieve our
great loss dragged its anchor.  The past had perished and now the future
failed us.  An operation was necessary to save her own life.  My faculties
were utterly paralysed.  I stood as if petrified in the studio, while in
the next room the surgeon drew forth the dead from the living.  I shall
never forgive myself.  I can only say that my brain was benumbed.  It was
dead except in one part where slowly revolved a senseless wheel of pain.
Thus, although I had ether in the house, and I was competent to administer
it, it never came into my mind to suggest to the surgeon to use it.
     What really pulled me from the pit was the courage, wisdom,
understanding and divine enlightenment of the Ape herself.  Over and over
again, she smote into my soul that I must understand the way of the gods.
They had sent our Poup‚e for their own ends, and she, having accomplished
her visit, had gone on her way.  One of the principal conclusions to be
drawn from the ruin of our earthly joy was this.  We must not look to the
dead past or gamble with the unformed future; we must live wholly in the
present, wholly absorbed in the Great Work, "For pure will, unassuaged of
purpose, delivered from the lust of result, ..."  Only so could will be
pure and perfect  More grossly, we must understand that being chosen by the
gods to do their work for the world, we must no waste our love on any one
child.  The race of man is our real offspring begotten by my word Thelema
upon her vessel of fulfilment thereof, viz: Love.  We must train up our
child in the way which it should go, foreseeing every danger and providing
a safeguard thereto.
     By her heroic and inspired interpretation heartened, I set my feet
upon my sorrow and used it to make firm my feet.  I went on with my work.
My energy came back, little by little, and I was able after a time to
silence the complain that continually called to my consciousness, but only
in the spring did I fight my way to freedom.  I had gone to Paris, and went
down to Fontainebleau for fresh air and exercise, and also to make a little
Magical Retirement.  As soon as I sat down to look at myself, I was aware
of the old wound.  I knew there was only one way.  I must open it up and
cleanse it thoroughly.  I went out northward.  On my left, as I came to the
city wall, was the hospital where just over a year before, the child was
born.  I strode fiercely forward with clenched teeth.  But at the first
breath of forest air the universal sorrow of nature flooded me and I broke
out into strong sobbing.  I refused to fool myself in any of the familiar
ways.  I faced it open-eyed.  I felt its fullest force in every nerve.  So
having attained the courage to accept it,

{867}




















without resistance or resentment, I conquered it.  I slew the fiend that
had beset me.  From that hour to this I have suffered no more.  When memory
brings it back the sorrow is as a shadow --- the shadow cast by a drifting
cloud upon the sea, powerless to darken it, gone swift and silent as it
came, leaving no mask, and even adding beauty to the sunlit splendour of
the sea by varying its values.








































{868}





















                              90


     My precise motive in going to Paris eludes me.  I seem to have acted
upon general principles.  My visit proved eventful.  Firstly, I met a man
named Sullivan, "a fellow almost damned with a fair wife" named Sylvia.
They had been married some time and she had developed a pain in the old
place.  A friend of hers asked my advice.  I gave it, not suspecting the
object of her solicitude.  The situation suddenly developed by Sylvia and
myself starting trouble.
     Sullivan came of the people.  His brilliant brain had pulled him up to
the position of "mathematical and scientific reviewer" for "The Times" and
the "Athenaeum", besides casual contributions to various papers.  Absorbed in
his work, he had no taste in common with Sylvia bar music, and he had begun
to find it rather a nuisance to have to trail her along at his heels.  He
asked me point-blank to take her off his hands for a time.  As in the case
of Ratan Devi I was glad to oblige.  He could have her back when he liked
by whistling for her.
     The dialogue reverted after this short digression to the subject that
enthralled us --- "The Book of the Law".  I astounded his science by setting
forth the facts of its origin, and the evidence of its contents that the
author possessed the key to several problems insoluble by any intellect
hitherto incarnate.  We talked day and night for a fortnight.  On his part,
he showed me a great many mysteries in "The book of the Law" that I had not
suspected till then.  I may indeed say that more than once he asked me some
questions on a subject of which I was quite ignorant, and that on searching
"The Book of the Law" I discovered a satisfactory reply in a text whose
meaning had escaped me through my ignorance of the subject in question.
     Our conversation was uninterrupted except for the tyranny of sleep and
Sylvia.  She became pregnant, a complication necessitating a further brief
digression.  It was agreed that she should return to Cefalu with me, he to
join us and work out fully the mathematical theories of "The Book of the Law"
as the convenience of his editor permitted.  After Sylvia's confinement, we
would confer more about the proper course of action.  He then went off to
Mentone to bid god-speed to the girl he really loved, a woman writer who
was living with one of his editors so long as her lungs would let her (they
lasted till 1922).  Alas for gods whose wings are clipped by love and their
feet hobbled by habit.  We were to meet Sullivan at Marseilles, sailing for
Palermo with or without him as his editor might permit.  The few days of
absence had wrecked

{869}






















him mentally and morally.  We had no sooner sat down to lunch than he burst
into a torrent of maniacal ejaculations.
     All this was spouted by a whale answering to the name of "I want
Sylvia back".  When his breath failed, and he fell back panting like a mad
dog, I remarked between mouthfuls, "Righto!"  I'll have to get the cabin
changed and take a few of Sylvia's things out of my trunk.  I think there's
nothing else, provided, of course, Sylvia wishes it."  The poor man was
flabbergasted and Sylvia flew into a royal rage.  My contempt for him was
one thing; my indifference to her quite another.  But neither ran any
danger of pride.  They were reduced to shamefaced stammering.  My cheerful
calm daunted them.  Sullivan, selfish and stupid, actually proposed to
hurry back that night to Paris, though Sylvia was obviously fagged out with
the journey of the day before, to say nothing of her having set her heart
on spending a few days enjoying the beauties of the Riviera --- it was her
first escape from England.
     On that point only did I try to influence Sullivan.  He saw that I was
right and grudgingly agreed to give the poor child a few days' enjoyment.
With this exception I concentrated my whole energy on impressing Sullivan
with the supreme importance to science of "The Book of the Law".  I further
offered to prove the efficacy of its formulae by developing him within
three months into a first-rate man.
     I repeated my invariable epitome, "Every man and every woman is a
star."  "You, being a man, are therefore a star.  The soul of a star is
what we call genius.  You are a genius.  This fact is obscured either by
moral complexes which enmesh it, or lack of adequate machinery to express
it in terms of action."  To this universal theorem must be added a rider
suited to any case under consideration.
     To Sullivan I explained, "You already possess a perfected machinery.
Your knowledge is enormously above the average.  You reason clearly and
correctly.  You have a fair command of English.  You lack only the link
between soul and sense.  You admit yourself second-rate and refuse to
believe in the possibility of becoming first-rate, despite my theoretical
demonstration and the testimony of my previous successes.  That despair is,
itself, one complex which inhibits your genius.  Today you have shown me
another.  A mere animal appetite sharpened by a few days of starvation can
wreck your intellect, sweep every decent instinct overboard and make you
treat your word of honour as idle."
     He had then just enough sense to understand me; but the foul fiend
tore him the more terribly at the least effort of his sanity and decency to
asset itself.
     I saw them off by the train, very heavy at heart.  I was sorry for
Sylvia buried alive in a south coast village without a soul to speak to and
no resource in herself but her music.  Yet after all she did not much
matter.  She

{870}




















was one of millions in a similar plight.  Also even if saved, the profit
was mostly personal.  The case of her husband was altogether more serious.
His abject surrender to the brute was a defeat involving a whole world in
the disaster.  I could have made him the evangelist of Thelema; with his
abilities he might have been more important in history than St. Paul.  But
he could never do any great work as long as he was liable to be obsessed by
the body, any more than a motorist could break the record from Land's End
to John o'Groats if he shied and ran off the road every time his eye was
caught by a tree.
     I found the abbey in admirable order.  We had a new member, a boy
named Godwin1, whom I had known in America.  When he first wrote me, he was
in Annapolis, an attendant in the naval hospital.  The boy had amazing
ability, backed by exceptional energy and other moral qualities such as the
Great Work, or indeed any work worth the name, requires.  Out of his scanty
savings he had bought a set of "The Equinox" for a hundred dollars and
several other expensive items.  He grudged his time as little as his cash.
He learnt by heart an astounding number of our sacred books, and when later
on I asked him to compile a dictionary of Sanskrit roots for my use on a
certain research, he went at it with a will and made good.  As against all
this, he was surly, mulish and bitterly rebellious.  He raved against the
injustice of being punished for breaking the regulations of the navy.  I
vainly showed him that when he signed on as he did of his own free will, he
pledged himself to conform with the regulations and that in breaking them
he blasphemed himself.
     Reckless in his ardour for knowledge, he injected himself with forty
grains of cocaine.  He had never tried it before.  All he knew was that
half a grain had been known to cause death.  The record of his experiment
makes interesting reading.  He began by trying to set a piece of glass on
fire by the force of his will.
     The next act was plagiarized from Samson.  He hung on to a pillar
while the Philistines, some half a dozen husky sailor boys, tried to pull
him off.  They finally managed to sit on his head and control his frantic
punches and kicks.  They then got surgeons on the job who pulled him
through.  In a couple of days he was all right again.  His experiment, if
intended to escape notice, failed.  They hauled him before the Lord High-
Muck-Amuck, who told him, with the best respects and wishes of Uncle Sam
for a prosperous passage to perdition, that after a careful consideration
the Navy Department had unanimously decided that they could sweep the seas
clear of the White Ensign without troubling themselves to put him to the
inconvenience of co-operating.  Shaking the pipe-clay of Annapolis from his
person, he favoured New York with a flying visit, dropped in on me, and ---
please could I find him a job?  I did what I could, but before I found him
work, he had got the Lafayette to

{871}


        1  WEH note:  This is C. F. Russel


















try him as a waiter.  I thought he might be of use to my "son" in Detroit
and wrote asking him to find an opening.  He did so and Godwin went off.
     In all he said and did, one peculiarity obtruded itself --- this
violent reaction against any act of authority as such, however reasonable,
however much to his own advantage.  When he noticed the suggestion of
discipline, he became blind with rage.  His mental faculties were simply
snowed under.  Having habitually yielded to this impulse, it became a fixed
form of his mind, so that even between spasms he would brood incessantly
over his wrongs.  I hoped the abbey would break up this complex.  For a
time he improved greatly, but in my absence the Ape, in whose hands I had
left the sole authority, had very ably established a routine, adherence to
which minimized the time necessary to the prosperity of the household, and
thus allowed each mentor the theoretical maximum of leisure for his own
chosen work.  Godwin rebelled.  On two occasions he became, if not
literally insane, at least so lost to self-control as to assault her
murderously.  In both cases, she cowed him by sheer moral superiority as
wild beasts are supposed to shrink from the eye which is fixed fearlessly
upon their fury.  After my return he improved.  I recall only one outbreak.
My experience was the same as the Ape's.  I stood up to him and made him
obey, and he obeyed.
     The occasion is not without interest.  Frater Progradior, 1ø = 10
ø A.'. A.'., and IXø O.T.O., was expected to arrive from New South
Wales to spend some four months seeking initiation under my personal
guidance.  His age was fifty-three and his rank in both Orders such as to
command the utmost respect from junior members.  Apart from this, his age
and the fact of his having come so far should have made Godwin eager to
show him all possible consideration.  The question arose where he should
sleep.  The answer was self-evident.  The only possible arrangement for
many reasons was for Godwin to give up his room temporarily.  We gave
Godwin several opportunities of making the suggestion spontaneously.  The
propriety was as obvious to him as to anyone else.  He sulked in silence.
I was sorry to have to issue an order, a thing I had not done for many
months, but I had to do so.  Godwin refused point-blank.  I pointed out
quite kindly the various considerations which applied.  I might as well
have talked to a turnip, better in fact, for a turnip's eye would not have
got bloodshot, nor the eyes swollen with blood almost to bursting.  He
again refused violently.  It was absurd, he being our guest with no claim
whatever upon us.  I had to say, "Out of your room by six o'clock, or out
of the abbey and you don't come back!"  By six o'clock he was in his new
quarters.
     Alas for these men who cannot be taught the elements of common sense
by any means soever.  Not long afterwards some trivial incident touched the
same spot.  I thought he would be the better for a holiday from the abbey.
He was working so hard that his health began to make me anxious.  He
interpreted

{872}



















my suggestion as a banishment and instead of going, as I proposed, to
Palermo, and putting in a month working up the interest of the people there
about us, he went off to the top of the Rock without any provisions of any
kind.  He had taken an oath not to come down before eight days.  In
subsequent clauses appeared such austerities as this; not to allow water to
touch his face!  It was a rotten thing to do.  Cypris was very fond of him
and she went through agonies watching him pace to and fro on the parched
sun-blistering crags like the possessed of Godara among the tombs.  I
refused to interfere.  He was up there by no will of mine.  Whenever he
chose he could come down and eat and drink, sitting and clothed and in his
right mind.  So Cypris filled a rucksack with food and drink and dragged
herself up those sweltering slopes to the ruined stone hut, where the
crazed creature had made his headquarters.  He refused to speak to her, but
I think she got him to drink some water.  He must indeed have perished for
thirst otherwise.
     I wish I had a copy of his Magical Record of this Retirement.  It was
an incoherent scrawl of furious ravings mostly aimed against the innocent
Jones (Jesus Stansfield Christ was his favourite brickbat) in Chicago.  I
have no idea what excited such animosity.  His magical work was chiefly to
count the loose stones of the floor of his hut, and divine from their
number the most erratic nonsense which seemed to him the sublime arcana of
Grades so exalted that a mere Magus was in comparison one poor pip of a
China orange to all Lombard Street and the City of London to boot.  For a
magical wand, he had picked up a piece of dry stick which he chewed
incessantly under the impression that by so doing he was putting the
affairs of the planet in shape during such moments as he could spare from
adjusting the solar system and showing the gods how to run the universe,
any recalcitrant deity being ruthlessly smacked into repentance.
     Cypris begged me to intervene, urging that he was irresponsible.  She
said she felt sure that he would come down if I wrote to him to do so.  I
consented.  That day after lunch, as I lay half asleep on a couch by the
main door, Godwin rushed in.  His appearance really alarmed me; unshaven,
unwashed, his movements violent and jerky and his eyes rolling wildly, I
should not have mistaken him for the Prince of Wales.  He flung a rucksack
on the floor at my feet and roared out "Aleister Crowley" in a harsh,
angry, uneven growl.  He then went off as suddenly and strangely as he had
come.  When I saw him next he was himself again, merely showing signs of
exhaustion.  He was tired and penitent like a naughty child who has found
forgiveness.  His final fireworks had been dramatically admirable.  He had
gone to the barber's to be shaved.  But no sooner was he thoroughly
lathered than he remembered his oath not to let water touch his face.  He
bolted out of the shop and stamped up the street, the foam from his face
flying in all directions.  He put his head down and charged through
somebody's private estate, vaulted the

{873




















wall at the back and spurted up the slope as if the devil were at his heels
instead of merely in his heart.
     This was the beginning of the end.  Even after he had regained sanity
in most matters, he clung to the conviction that his adventure on the Rock
had initiated him to a Grade far superior to mine.  I should, of course,
have been only too glad if this had happened.  The decaying debris of my
Oedipus complex still stinks, which stink being interpreted may be rendered
in English, "How I wish I had someone to go to, a man like myself, not an
angel, whose humanity would understand and sympathize with my weakness and
weariness, and on whose shoulders I might shift at least a little of the
responsibility which is breaking my back!"
     Poor Godwin tried to smother his shame by piling pride upon it.  His
megalomania grew on him at a frightful pace.  His conscience was crushed
into a pulp and his common sense scattered to the winds.  He suddenly
developed an entirely new defect.  I had always found him truthful.  He now
adopted a policy of deliberate deceitfulness with the greatest subtlety.
It was perfectly imbecile.  He had only to say what he wanted and I should
have done whatever I could to help him, whatever it was.  He, however,
persuaded himself that he must keep his plans dark and the final absurdity
of the whole thing was that I was aware from the beginning exactly what he
intended to do.  Our relations ended, bar occasional correspondence,
towards the end of the year, when he left us to go to Australia avowedly to
help Frater Progradior in establishing the Law.  However, he only stayed a
short time in Sydney and went on to San Francisco, where, free from all
guidance or control, he broke out into a series of spasms of which I do not
know the details, and which are of little interest as being merely casual
symptoms of a state of mind which I had already studied sufficiently.
     I asked myself, "How now?"  Has Thelema failed in this case?  I have
thought this over ruthlessly, but my final judgment is that the Law is not
touched by these events.  It seems to me beyond dispute that any
conceivable code of conduct presumes implicitly that men always act on
certain fundamental principles which they carry out, well or ill, within
wide limits; those limits being exceeded, the man is not a man "within the
meaning of the act" and the Law cease to apply to him.  For instance, we
feel safe in acting on the assumption that a man will not walk into a
blazing house, and we make no law to punish any such action.  We assume
that a man always acts in what he believes to be his own best interest.
The conduct of Godwin was irrational, his motive had no logical link with
his actions.  It is therefore impossible to imagine any formula by which to
judge him.
     So far, so good, but at least I failed to break up the complex which
obsessed him.  That is true, but I blame my inexperience and nowise the
principles on which I proceed.  I am not without excuse.  Let me give one

{874}





















example to illustrate the impossibility of guiding him or even enlightening
his mind.  He was anxious to do certain magical work, which forms part of
the task of a Grade which he had not attained.  In order to devote himself
to this, he proposed to neglect the work prescribed for the Grade which he
actually possessed.  I pointed this out, and after some show of sulks, he
agreed.  A day or so later, in discussing some point of magical theory, I
happened to say, "I want you to understand very thoroughly what this
implies."  He retorted violently, "I'm not an 8ø = 3ø!  To
understand is not a part of the work of my Grade!"  To that he stuck.  It
was useless to argue that the understanding of an 8ø = 3ø has a
technical definition, and that a child of two years old must understand the
alphabet, if it is to be any use to it.  Stupidities of this type were
constantly coming up.
     In matters like chess, he was just as bad as he was about Magick.  He
begged me to teach him the game.  I prescribed a system of study to be
vitalized by daily practice with me over the board.  For some reason which
I never succeeded in grasping, he refused obstinately to follow my advice
in any single point.  When we played he grew steadily worse and when asked
to account for this, he took up the position that nothing was to be gained
by winning.  He was even ass enough to quote "The Book of the Law" about lust
of result.  He could hardly help seeing that unless one played to win,
there was no point in playing at all.  Nothing moved him.  He simply gave
up playing.  The stupidity was really disheartening.  He had a fine natural
ability to judge position and invent combinations.  A little technical
knowledge of the openings, and a systematic study of the end game which he
might have acquired in a year, should have made him a first-class amateur.
My worst weakness is this: I hate to see good material wasted.
     So much for Godwin.  In brilliant contrast stands the figure of Frater
Progradior.
     My success with him is enough to wipe out a dozen failures and more.
He was a Lancashire man of good family which had fallen into undeserved
distress.  As a result he had had to work with his hands from the age of
nine.  He had always been eager and earnest about spiritual affairs.  He
had begun by joining the Theosophical Society, but after seventeen years
found himself unlightened in the slightest.  He had then put in eleven
years with the A.'. A.'., but in the absence of personal guidance his
progress had been slow.  He arrived weary of life, despairing of truth.
     I begin my training as a general rule by prescribing a few preliminary
practices such as are universally beneficial.  In the meantime I watch
quietly for symptoms by which to determine the diagnosis.  He was rather a
hard case.  I was puzzled.  There was clearly something very wrong indeed,
but I could not imagine what.  Of course in my conscious self I am always
stupid, but the Magus who uses me knows his job.

{875}





















     One afternoon we went off bathing with the Ape.  I prattled as we
walked quite pointlessly and just as we reached the edge of the cliff above
the bay I made some casual remark which proved a winning shot.  He stopped
short and gasped; his eyes starting from his head.  I am so stupid, let me
report, that I failed to notice anything special.  I was mildly surprised
to see him dash down the path like a young goat, tear off his clothes, and
sprint into the sea like an alarmed seal.  He never spoke a word till after
the swim and the return to the road.  He then said with a pale face and in
awed accents, "Please tell me again what you said just now?"  "How the
devil should I remember?"  I returned courteously.  He stammeringly
reminded me of the subject, and of course I was able to repeat my remarks,
which were nothing specially striking.  He asked me to discuss the subject
more fully, which I did, after which he relapsed into silence.  Directly he
reached the abbey, he passed into a state of trance which lasted three
whole days without a break.  He then came to me looking like an incarnation
of pure joy and told me what had happened.  Without knowledge of his need I
had unwittingly given him the key to the inmost treasury of his soul.  One
minute facet of truth unveiled from the matrix by the wheel of my word had
let in the light.  In three days he had achieved the critical initiation
which had baffled him for nearly thirty years.  I prescribed a Magical
Retirement so that he might fix in his consciousness that lightning flash
as a permanent arc-lamp.  This proved a success.
     My own joy was boundless.  I was inspired to prepare a perfected
ritual for the attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy
Guardian Angel, and presented him with a copy of the manuscript for use in
his operation.  I entitled it "Liber Samekh".  It is the most powerful and
exalted of all my magical instructions.  I think he was helped not a
little, not only by the ritual itself, but by the feeling that I had
sufficient care for him --- he suffered from humility --- to devote myself
so passionately to making his path plain.
     One result of this Retirement is astounding from the point of view of
the profane.  The Spirit of the Lord descended upon him and opened his eyes
to a a series of visions of a class far more exalted and intense and
intimate than anything he had hitherto experienced.  He was inspired to
write these down during their actual occurrence, and here is the marvel.
His education had been quite elementary.  He could neither spell nor
construct his sentences correctly, nor had he command of any extended
vocabulary.  What, then, was my amazement to perceive in his style an
originality and power of the first order.  It, not less than his subject,
was quite dissimilar from that of John Bunyan, and yet the suggestion of
identity was undeniable.  It was a kinship of soul.
     Parallel with this spiritual attainment, his mental and physical
powers were renewed as the eagle's.  His depression vanished and was
replaced by calm,

{876}




















deep joy, overflowing and manifest to all of us.  He began to take long
solitary walks across the hills and did his twenty miles a day as he had
not done for a quarter of a century.  We felt it as an actual bereavement
when the time came for him to go back to Sydney.










































{877}





















                              91


     Few jewels in my collection of freaks are more precious than Cecil
Maitland.  From his birth, he aroused the liveliest hopes among students of
entomology; for his father, a distinguished Anglican controversialist,
followed Newman and Manning into apostasy.  His projects for attaining the
papacy were, however, thwarted by the unscrupulous action of a charming
lady, who insisted upon dragging him from the very foot of the altar to a
rival sacrament pedlar, who promptly conjoined them in wedlock at the
regular rates.  This escapade did not escape the notice of the Vatican.
The Pope was surprised into the exclamation "Tut", or its Latin equivalent.
He scratched his head and muttered, "Martin Luther!"  After a moment's
reflection he dispatched his chamberlain for bell, book and candle; and
proceeded to the magical operation against this occasion made and provided.
As in the case of the Jackdraw of Rheims, the effect of the curse was to
ruffle the feathers of the audacious follower after the false god Hymen.  A
touch of rheumatism brought matters to a climax.  He rang up Harrods and
ordered a supply of sackcloth and ashes.  Receiving, like Job, visits of
condolence from various righteous friends he besought them to intercede
with the Almighty on his behalf; and as they numbered not a few influential
people, with strings on the College of Cardinals, the Pope was eventually
persuaded to "silence that dreadful bell", return the book to its shelf and
snuff the comminatory candle.  The Rev. Mr Maitland was restored to the
bosom of the Harlot of the Seven Hills; though not to the priesthood; and
on the strict condition that for the future he should regard his wife as
tabu.  Things thus satisfactorily settled, she brought forth a man child
and called his name Cecil James Alexander, rejecting with contumacy the
suggested alternative Caoutchouc.  He grew in stature and in favour of God
and man, so far as research had hitherto been able to determine.  But he
was subject to amiable delusions, one of which took the sinister shape of
"Cacoethes Scribendi".  In the Great War he joined the army and became a real
"capting".  Advised of this fact, the Germans wisely refrained from
entering Edinburgh.  His next step was to become a dipsomaniac and lose his
teeth.  During this period he suffered from hydrophobia and did not wash
for eighteen months.  This romantic situation enflamed the virgin heart of
a large, white, red-haired maggot named Mary Butts, or rather Rodker.
     In the previous spasm she had rushed to the registrar the most
nauseating colopter1 that ever came under my microscope.  It was a
Whitechapel Jew

{878}


        1  WEH Note:  Id est: beetle; insect, louse, crawling thing,
          vermin.


















who proclaimed himself a poet on the strength of a few ungrammatical and
incoherent ramblings, strung together and chopped at irregular intervals
into lines.  He used to hang about studios in the hope of cadging
cigarettes and drinks.  He even got into mine on one occasion, owing to a
defect in the draught excluder.  Luckily the plumbing was perfect.  One tug
on the chain, a gush and a squeal, and I saw him no more.  But somehow he
squirmed out of the sewers and, as I said, obtained the official position,
louse pediculosis, with Mary Butts.  She washed him and dressed him, which
naturally led to disenchantment, and Cecil reigned in his stead.
     In 1922, they were paying the price of their outrage on morality.
They were both in very bad health and very hard-pressed for money.  One of
their favourite amusements was playing at Magick.  Idle and mentally
muddled, they were attracted by all subjects which seemed to require no
orderly thought or steady work.  Nothing is easier than to pick up a few
awe-inspiring terms and stir them into soup.  It is the only way to impress
those even more ignorant.  They therefore came to me.  With my invariable
optimism, I picked out all the promising points and overlooked the faults,
I promised myself that I could easily correct them.  Their wretchedness
kindled my pity and I invited them to spend their summer in the abbey at
Cefalu.  I really believed that a month or two of simple life, free from
temptations and distractions, with the quiet discipline of our regulations,
might put them on the right road.
     They arrived.
     The very next day I got the shock of my life.  I must mention first
that, some time earlier, Maitland had had some sort of job mining or
planting in the East.  On his journey out, his ship was standing off
Colombo pending quarantine inspection.  He was sitting on the rail talking
to a girl.  Suddenly he fell backwards and was pulled into a boat by
Singhalese pedlars who had no consideration for the perfectly justifiable
feelings of the local sharks, or any philosophical care for the welfare of
humanity.
     The told this story to excuse his aversion to water.  It was, however,
of vital important to his health that he should learn to swim.  We went
down to the Caldara alone, took off our clothes and started round the
rocks.  I showed him how to proceed without the slightest need of swimming,
by letting the water take most of his weight, and using his hands to hang
on to the large convenient knobs of rock which abound everywhere.  He
showed the most abject fear, but I supposed that a few minutes would give
him confidence.  On the contrary his terror increased and I had infinite
trouble to get him to come even a couple of hundred yards.  We reached the
breaking point.  He found a ledge, scrambled ashore and shivered.  I gave
up and swam back.  I dressed and smoked.  No sign of Captain Webb.  I
climbed to the top of the cliff, where I could see the whole edge.  There
he was like a cat on hot

{879}




















bricks, with all due apologies to the feline race.  He had chosen to try to
find an overland route, stark naked on sharp rough rocks --- and there
really wasn't a way.  He reached, at last, a cave, which possessed a fairly
broad opening above water, so that I could throw him his sandals.  He had
merely to walk home on a broad flat shelf which would not have asked him to
wade more than waist high.  But he insisted on the most excoriating and
dangerous scramble across slimy crags.  An hour or so later, he finally got
to his clothes.  The unfortunate wretch was bleeding all over.  We then
walked home and he took occasion to thank me for the most unpleasant
afternoon he had ever spent in his life.  Even then I took the remark
lightly.  I could not seriously believe that he had been really in torture.
It is a fixed idea in my mind that any Englishman of good blood enjoys an
adventure, the rougher the better.  But the spirit was not in him.  Of
course, I know that his father's psychology amply accounts for this abject
attitude.  In him the exhaustion of the stock had reached its climax.  I
learned later that he had already attempted suicide.  He had tried to shoot
himself in the heart with a revolver.  One would imagine that it would have
been safe to bet on his doing some damage.  But no!  His pistol was
spiritually his twin.  The bullet thought that it might hurt itself if it
happened to hit a bone, so it skipped nimbly round his ribs and sought
repose from the tribulations of existence in a comfortable cushion.
     I soon discovered the root of his rottenness.  After all, there must
be a star somewhere there behind that bank of trembling fob.  I worked with
a will to save him.  And one of the most pathetic incidents in my memory is
that he came to me one morning with tears on the threshold of his eyes, and
said in a quivering tenor, "I want to live!", grasped my hand, fell on his
knees and broke out sobbing.  I felt that I had won the fight.  The root of
his weakness was that the will-to-live was absent.
     From that moment he began to mend.  Of course, all sorts of suppressed
perversities externalized, and had to be analysed and destroyed.  But I had
great hopes of him when he left the abbey.  Alas! it is easy to cure evil
whose source is error; enlightenment restores righteousness.  The
misdirected energy returns to its proper course.  But weakness is usually
incurable; even the most hopeful cases require the discipline of years to
establish habits whose inertia will protect the will from interference.
     In the case of Maitland, the moment he showed the wish to become
independent, the vanity of Mary Butts was wounded and her jealousy
inflamed.  She might have won the love of a first-rate man, but she
preferred to dull the anguish of the consciousness that she was a weakling,
as she admitted, by keeping in abject dependence upon her a man on whom she
could look down.  She accordingly did all she could to push him back into
the mire of misery and self-contempt; and of course, no sooner was my

{880}






















influence removed, than he sipped back into the stinking slime from which I
had tried to rescue him.
     Less than a year later, I heard that he swallowed a bottle of poison
--- not even a decent poison, such as a self-respecting suicide might be
expected to use.  I forget the precise ingredients.  I think it was some
sort of disinfectant, such as is sold without restriction because
legislatures had failed to imagine anyone asinine or abject enough to make
it a beverage.  The luck still held.  I don't know whether it disinfected
him, but it certainly made him as sick as a sewer.  He pulled through and I
am only sorry not to be able to say, in the present edition, what happened
next.
     I cannot be serious and yet I am honestly sad beyond expression
whenever the man comes up in my mind.  His character was charming as few
other men I ever met.  His talent for writing, though limited by his moral
weakness to trivialities, possessed many admirable qualities.  His
expression was simple and effective, and his fascination undeniable.  It is
hard to have to think of him as fit only for the garbage man.  And yet if
indeed it were possible to build him up sufficiently to make him of
positive value, one would have to ask oneself whether the most optimistic
estimate of success would not have to be weighed against the cost in
patience and perseverance and found wanting.
     The great value of such men as Maitland and Neuburg to me has been to
strengthen my conviction that in the absence of will power, the most
complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless.  Combine in
one man the strength of Hercules, the beauty of Apollo, the grace of
Antinos, the wisdom of Athena, the intelligence of Hermes, and every other
gift of every other god, unless the anatomist is careful to supply a spine
to support the structure, you will have a mollusc and not a man. You must
have a fulcrum, not only to move the world, but to move a feather.
     Besides our regular members we had a short visit from the two sisters
of Cypris, Mimi --- her twin --- and Helen, nearly twenty years her senior.
     Mimi was delighted.  She yearned intensely to throw in her lot with us
for life and yet she was inhibited by subconscious fear.  The chains from
civilization clanked on her ankles and wrists.  She stayed with us for a
fortnight and then went back to her work with the Red Cross in the
devastated districts round Soissons.  But the gods had their rod in the
pickle for her.
     I must explain that members of the abbey bore certain distinguishing
marks.  The official costume for those not entitled to the special robes of
the A.'. A.'. was a vestment of bright blue hanging from neck to ankle
with sleeves widening from shoulder to waist so that on extending the arms
horizontally from the body it suggested the letter Tau.  It was lined with
scarlet and provided with a hood.  When desired the dress was completed by
a golden girdle.  In addition the male members shaved the head with the
exception of a single lock in the center of the forehead.  The women wore

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bobbed hair dyed red or yellow with henna.  In these customs were
symbolized certain spiritual or magical affirmations.  The aureole of the
women was in honour of our father the sun, and the upstanding lock of hair
worn by the men a token of worship to his viceregent in the microcosm.
     One afternoon the women were retouching their hair with henna, and
Mimi took it into her head to tint her own tresses slightly with the same
paste.  The change was barely perceptible to any sane eye, but the moment
she showed up at Soissons the horrible hags in authority pounced on the
child, overwhelmed her with outrageous insults and cast her forth from
their chaste company.  It was an abominable abuse of power, no less than a
foul-minded frenzy and a sadistic injustice.  I wrote congratulating her on
having achieved such a drastic demonstration of the truth of what we had
told her about such people, and reminded her that she would always be
welcome in the abbey.
     But now a strange obsession assailed her.  During her visit I had been
even more absorbed in my work than usual and had hardly exchanged a dozen
words with her.  I had not urged her to undertake the Great Work.  On the
contrary I had been specially careful to maintain an attitude of simple
friendliness.  Yet she found herself the prey of a mingled fear and
fascination.  I was constantly present in her mind.  She desired
passionately to live in the shadow of my personality, yet at the same time
was filled with panic fear of what seemed to her a surrender of her soul.
The obsession grew to insane intensity.  She felt that she was not safe in
France.  She must escape to the ends of the earth.  She would hide herself
in America.  The poor child never guessed that she was trying to elude
herself.  However, she was carried away by her fears and fled to the
States, where she paid the penalty of her panic.  Fate has smitten again
and again, and I hope that suffering will teach her what intelligence
failed to impart.  I shall be very surprised if sooner or later, she does
not find her true will.  For her only foes are ignorance and fear.  Her
heart is whole and honest.
     With Helen the case was very different.  I had met her in Paris early
in '21, taken her to lunch at Lavenue's several times, and introduced her
to some of my friends.  I saw in the first few minutes that her life was
one long pang.  She had nothing to look back upon with pleasure or any hope
for the future.  Her face told the tale.  The skin was dry, wrinkled and
jaundiced; the thin lips were compressed with constant bitterness.  Her
intelligence was sufficient to tell her what was wrong.  She had never
known freedom.  She had been robbed of her soul so that her masters might
have a machine they could trust not to play any trick.  The steam roller of
social injustice had flattened her.  Every drop of her blood had been
drained by sterile servitude to soulless wealth.  Yet she would not accept
the way of escape that we offered so freely.  Her suffering was intensified
by the sight of the carefree happiness which

{882}




















she found in the abbey.  At the time of her visit, we happened to be
particularly short of funds, and it enraged her to see that poverty was
powerless to destroy our happiness or drag love from his throne in our
hearts.  Why couldn't we quarrel and scold like the people she was
accustomed to?  Envy gnawed at her liver and black bile oozed from the
wounds.  She began to hate us with insane intensity and the fiend fattened
on the fact that her malice was impotent to make us unkind to her.
     However, she succeeded at least in making herself impossible.  She
started a campaign of venomous falsehoods, which she knew to be such.  The
Ape and I had planned to go to England before she arrived, but by a series
of accidents we were obliged to postpone the journey.  However, in view of
our plans we had given up the second house, so that when she began to try
to corrupt the children I was obliged to interfere.  I gave her the choice
between retracting some of the more malignant lies, in which I had caught
her out, or pursuing her career of crime in some more favourable
environment within fifteen minutes.  She had no defence.  The witnesses
were unanimous.  Her denials and evasions were nailed to the counter with a
single smack the instant they were out of her mouth.  So out she went, and
we gave a great gasp of relief.  Yet still I felt sorry.  Even such cold
malignity as hers only confirmed me in compassion.  In other circumstances
she might have developed into a human being.  My action surprised her
completely.  I had seemed so easy going and unobservant, so uniformly
considerate and kind.  When that lazy big lion suddenly leapt from his
lair, she suffered the shock of her life.  "I thought there might be
something of the sort," she said, startled out of prudence, "but I didn't
think it would come for a long while."  She had hoped to do irreparable
damage before being found out, and now she learnt, as so many before her
and since, that the big lion sleeps with one eye open.  Baffled and broken,
her only idea was revenge.  She did an amazing thing.  She went to some
consul in Palermo and swore to a long list of lies.  She thought she could
make trouble for us, though even after racking her brains for slanders she
could only think of one thing which might bring us into conflict with the
law.  It was an act of unspeakable vileness.  Success could only mean that
her sister would be utterly ruined, torn from her home and her children,
and either put in prison or thrown upon the world penniless in a foreign
country without resources of any kind.  Having shot the poisoned arrow, she
pursued the Parthian policy of putting as many thousand miles as possible
between herself and her victims.  Before we found out what she had done she
must be safe from pursuit.  It was no part of her scheme to have to
confront us and be cross-examined.
     Of course the whole thing fizzled out.  On the one alleged breach of
the law, we were raided by the Cefalu police, of course without warning.
They did their duty, while, of course, well aware that they had been sent
to look for a

{883}




















mare's nest.  They behaved with charming courtesy and withdrew with many
apologies for their action.  We have heard from time to time of Helen.  She
is back on the treadmill, lonely and loveless, wearily and miserably
dragging her despair through life --- to call it life --- down to death.
Should these words come under her notice, let me assure her that we bear no
ill-will, that she will always be welcome when she learns her lesson: that
love is the only principle which makes life tolerable.
     I gladly leave this wretched episode.  The Ape and I left Cefalu for
Paris early in February and took up, as usual, our abode with our friends
Monsieur and Madame Bourcier, 50 rue Vavin, a few doors below the Boulevard
Montparnasse near the Rotonde.  I cannot let pass this occasion of
expressing my affection and gratitude which these good folks have won.
Their hotel has been my headquarters in Paris for over fifteen years and
from the very beginning they treated me more like a son than a stranger.
When people talk against the French and complain of the difficulty of
getting on with them, I smile only a little at their stupidity, and all the
rest at the memory of the kindness which I have received from the
Bourciers.
     Nor is the case unique.  I confess that now and again, I have met
French people without real politeness or real good feeling.  I will add
that the wealthy and alleged aristocratic classes are sprinkled much too
thinly with individuals for whom I have any use.  I find them selfish and
boring.  The first is the cause of the second, for the secret is that they
lack faith in life; seeking self they have found an inane nullity, and
being bored with themselves they naturally bore other people.  But French
artists, the professional classes and the much abused bourgeois are almost
always delightful.  What's more, you can trust them to do you a good turn
when opportunity occurs.  As to the peasant in the provinces, I find "La"
"Terre" very one-sided.  No doubt thrift often becomes avarice and meanness,
and contact with the soil a hardening and dehumanizing influence.  But if
you know how to take them the right way, you will find them a pretty good
sort.
     I have a theory that English people find the French unsympathetic for
one fundamental reason.  Our neighbours and allies, from the President to
the most primitive toiler, possess one quality which I have analysed at
length elsewhere.  They insist on refusing to fool themselves.  They see no
sense in pretending things are pretty when they are not.  They think it
stupid to dope themselves and an insult to the intelligence of others to
kiss the blarney stone.  The English mind is accordingly shocked.  It is so
fixed in the point of politeness to refuse reality.
     For the first time in my life, Paris disappointed me.  All the old
enchantments had somehow vanished.  I felt that my work lay elsewhere.
London called to me.  It was quite unreasonable. I had no motive for going.
I had no means to go.  Uneasy and undecided I got through the days as best
I could.

{884}



















     I decided to seek a solitude favourable for concentration at Hardelot,
near Boulogne, in a delightful old inn where I had stayed before.  The Ape
of Thoth was in London.  I wired her to meet me at Boulogne.  So far there
was no hitch in the proceedings.  She met me at the train.









































{885}






















                              92


     For some time past the City of London had amused itself by wondering
mildly what could have happened to a dear old friend of theirs named Bevan.
He was the head of several important concerns which, in fact, felt such
dependence upon his gracious and intelligent guidance that they could
hardly get on without him, especially as he had absent-mindedly packed in
his portmanteau all their available assets.  His absence aroused such
anxiety and his speedy return was so desirable, that his friends had
succeeded in interesting even Scotland Yard in the matter.  Sympathetic
friends all over Europe joined the rescue party and the "Daily Mail" lent its
aid by publishing a photograph of the missing millionaire every day, week
after week, and offered a prize of twenty-five thousand francs for
information calculated to reassure the bereaved ones.
     Excuse the digression.  Both I and the Ape of Thoth strolled across
the station to the Hotel Christol ‚ Christol, proposing to dine and sleep,
and go on to Hardelot in the morning.  Tired by the journey we lay down for
an hour and then came down to dinner.  The restaurant opens out of the
hall; to reach it from the staircase one inclines to the right.  I was
slightly surprised to find the whole staff of the hotel, from the manager
to the porter, drawn up in a line between me and both the entrance and the
restaurant.  They all smiled and bowed obsequiously and awkwardly, like so
many marionettes.
      The manager stepped forward, louted him low, and motioned me towards
a passage leading to the left.  I supposed that, it being out of the
season, the regular restaurant was shut and meals served elsewhere.  He
bowed me into a sort of smoking-room and suddenly shut the door behind me.
I found myself, with no little surprise, in the presence of six men,
dressed in black sprinkled about the room.  Only one was seated; and he
jumped up and asked my my name.  I told him.  He asked for my papers.  By
the merest chance I had left my passport, which I usually carry with me, in
the bedroom.  I told him I would go and get it.  Two men sprang to the
door.  My inquisitive friend snapped out, "Apportez-moi le bagage!" which a
couple of his satellites proceeded to do.
     I was, by this time, completely bewildered, but he motioned me to a
chair and sat down, asking various questions, especially about the Ape of
Thoth.  Had she come from London, and why, and so on, which only served to
increase my wonder as to what it could all be about.  From time to time he
consulted a large thin sheet of paper as if to guide him in his queries.
The

{886}





















light fell on it and all of a sudden I saw from the back that its centre
was occupied by a photograph which I instantly recognized.
     "Mais, Monsieur," I said, breaking into laughter, "vous n'imaginez pas
que je suis pour quelque chose dans cette affaire de M. Bevan."  He
retorted instantly, "Mais vous ˆtes M. Bevan!"  I behaved very badly, I
roared with laughter.  Of course he was not put off by any such crude
camouflage.  "But this is absurd," I said, "I am perfectly well known as a
poet and explorer.  I don't know the difference between a joint stock
company and a debenture."  By this time my baggage had been brought.  I
found my passport which was, of course, in perfect order, but as evidence
of identity produced no more effect on his mind that the initials of a
shirt; we argued the matter for nearly an hour.  One of his myrmidons after
another stood at my side to be scrutinized for comparative height and
width.  One man thought my nose good enough to arrest me; another urged
that my mouth cleared me of the crime.  But the chief of police was
tenacious.  He had in his mind his step and the Legion of Honour and the
"Daily Mail's" twenty-five thosand francs.  Almost in despair I pulled out
Guillamod's account of the 1902 expedition and showed him my photograph
with my name printed under it.  "Do you really wish", I said, "to maintain
that I am a defaulting director?"
     I don't know why, but this piece of evidence convinced him that I was
not his man.  He changed his tone, his men filed out, he bowed and
apologized.  I did not mean to be cruel, as no doubt I was.  I told him
that no excuse was necessary.  I had not enjoyed myself so much in five
years.  What could a man want more --- official reception, and the rest?
It was a bitter pill for him but it still is sweet in my mouth.  One
serious reflection only mars the music.  Suppose I had happened to be an
unknown man, unarmed with every possible proof, I might quite well have
been a week or more in jail before establishing my identity.
     I must not leave this subject without a few remarks on the tendency in
recent years of the police to attempt to arrogate themselves a function of
authority altogether beyond a theoretical limit.  Even in England, in 1922,
there were several cases in which magistrates had to rebuke the police for
encroaching upon judicial functions.  In the United States, of course,
conditions are outrageous.  The extreme case is that of Becker.  But apart
altogether from individual iniquity the police claim that they cannot
control crime unless they are empowered to make an inquisition into every
man's private affairs.  They take every opportunity of exceeding their
powers of bluffing and badgering anybody that seems to them objectionable
in total absence of any evidence whatever to establish so much as a "prima"
"facie" case against them.  In England so far we have not reached the stage
of regular frame-ups with deliberate perjury, but there are suspicious
signs of movement in that direction.

{887}





















     Let me quote from my own experience.  As early as 1907, I was warned
by a friend, I cannot say with what truth, that the police were watching
me.  My conscience being clear, I replied, "Good, I shan't be burgled."  In
1910 during "The Rites of Eleusis" in Caxton Hall, to which we purposely
invited a police representative, they had other men in plain clothing
outside the building, apparently hoping that something indictable would
ooze through the brickwork.
     In 1913-14 again, my studio near Onslow Square was a regular
rendezvous for spies.  I was always seeing them in the courtyard, skulking
behind trees as I went to and fro from dinner.  What they had hoped to find
out I cannot imagine.
     In Detroit, months after my return to Europe, they repeatedly raided
poor half-crazed Ryerson's house in search of some evidence of the "Devil
Worshipper's Mystic Love Cult" and of course found nothing; from which they
concluded not my innocence, but that my pact with the devil contained a
clause guaranteeing me against the discovery of my crimes.  If any of those
obstinate asses had possessed sufficient intelligence to study a single
page of my writings, he would have seen at once what ridiculous rubbish
were the accusations made against me by foul-minded and illiterate cheats
whom I had never so much as met.
     While I was in America, the London police not only disgraced
themselves by the brutal raid on poor old Mrs Davies, described in "The Law
Straw", but covered themselves with shame and ridicule by sending to prison
a poor little bookseller who had sold for many years "The Open Court", a
well-known philosophical magazine of the highest character.
     Again they sent round a man to Frank Hollings to frighten him out of
selling "the Equinox", though no complaint had ever been made about it.  Even
my personal friends were haunted by sinister spies who made mysterious
inquiries and uttered oracular hints about the frightful things that might
happen if they happened.  They wrote to my lawyers, and called on them to
inquire my address which they knew perfectly well, and on my complaining to
them about the theft of some of my property, not only refused to take up
the matter, but answered me through the local police of the place where I
lived, saying that I was "well-known" in Scotland Yard.  The fact is
undeniable, but the insinuation cowardly and dirty.
     The latest news from the front is that the special commissary in
Tunis, having asked me to call with regard to an irregularity in my "permis"
"de s‚jour", amplified his remark with the cock-and-bull story intended to
persuade me that I ran the risk of assassination by ferocious Fascisti.  I
asked the British consul to make inquiries and as with Hamlet --- the rest
is silence.
     What interests me is the perverse psychology in this case.  What can
be their object?  I am not annoyed but amused.  But why should they waste
so

{888}




















much energy and public money on watching a man year after year when one
would have thought that the most elementary common sense would have told
them anyhow, after the first few months, that I was no more likely to
infringe the law than the Archbishop of Canterbury?
     I vaguely assume some connection between this puerile policy of
halfhearted pinpricks and the perennial flowering of the fantastic
falsehoods about me.  It suggests that I possess some quality which
attracts the attention of the half-witted so that they cannot leave me
alone.  I have often wished to collect "The Thousand and One Nights of
Nonsense", of which I am the hero.  Seabrook's serial in 1923 is absurdly
incomplete.
     My arrest in mistake for Bevan, whom I resemble about as much and as
little as I do any other featherless biped, is rather typical of the odd
incidents that help to keep me young.  But when people ask me to clear my
character of the aspersions upon it, my mind runs back to that scene in the
smoking-room.  I say to myself, "My dear man, if it took you an hour to
prove to a perfectly sensible Frenchman so simple and clear a case with all
the trumps in your fist, how long would it take to persuade a prejudiced
ignorant public, congenitally incapable of understanding your point of
view, that you are innocent of crimes, the witnesses to which are
unavailable, and whose very nature translates the court into a wonderland
far more weird than anything in the adventures of Alice?"
     My second stay in Paris was short. Everything pointed to my trying my
luck in London.  One of the most amusing results of the wholesale robbery
of my money and effects was that I had no single suit of clothes fit to
wear in London.  I had worn out what I had taken with me to America and had
never had enough spare cash to replenish my wardrobe.
     All the clothes I had left in London had been stolen with this
exception; that in the summer of 1914 I had sent my Highland dress to Scott
Eadie to be overhauled.  I now recalled this fact and wrote to them to send
it to Paris.  I had three kilts, a dress tunic and waistcoat, a tweed coat
and vest and a green military tunic.  "Faute de mieux", I donned the garb of
old Gaul which, if unusual, was dignified, and scrapping together very
nearly ten pounds, I crossed the Channel in the first week of May.
     The first problem was to find rooms.  I was taking tea with my old
friend Gwendolen Otter and asked if anyone knew a suitable place.  The
vague reply was that there were plenty round the King's Road, Chelsea.  I
went off, weary in body and spirit.  I could hardly drag one foot after the
other.  I had alighted at a horrible hotel in Russell Square thronged with
hustling hooligans of the middle classes.  My heart sank at the thought of
going back there.  I wanted to save the fivepenny bus fare.  I came to the
corner of Wellington Square and was suddenly seized with a direct
inspiration to try my luck.  "Try the sacred numbers, especially the Secret
Key of "The Book of the Law" --- 31!"

{889}




















Fagged as I was, I obeyed.  The first number connected with my work was
this very "31" and in the window was a card "Apartments to Let".  A van
stood at the door, which was open.  I went in.  The landlady showed me a
large front room on the first floor, with French windows opening upon a
balcony which overlooked the spirit-soothing oasis of the square; the small
green oblong with its ancient trees.  It was clean and comfortable, the
rent reasonable, and the people of the house sympathetic and intelligent.
The bow drawn at venture had hit the ideal at the first twang of the
string.  The miracle was the more striking that the card had not been in
the window till a few hours before; they had in fact not finished moving
in.
     I must flit back to Paris for a moment to mention that before starting
I had asked the "Yi" for a general symbol of my visit to London.  I had
obtained the hexagram "Shih Ho", whose indications I may thus summarize.
General Comment: It will be advantageous to use legal constraints.
     I took this to mean that my proper course to restore my stolen
property was to take legal action.  The special comment on each of the six
lines indicates the successive events of the period covered by the
question.  My campaign would clearly end disastrously through the enmity of
others.  I resolved not to be deterred by this forecast, since the previous
lines absolved me from blame.  I should make no error.  "Hew to the line,
let the chips fall where they may!"
     In a second hexagram, asking for advice how to conduct myself, I
received one emphatic warning: avoid getting mixed up with unworthy people.
     I now propose to narrate the principal events of my sojourn in England
and show how exactly they confirmed the "Yi King".
     My first objective was obviously to obtain possession of my published
works which had been warehoused with the Chiswick Press.  This press, under
the auspices of Mr Charles T. Jacobi, had no rival, except Constable's, for
excellence of printing.  I had entrusted them with the production of the
majority of my books.  When I left England in 1914, I owed them some three
hundred and fifty pounds; their security was the stock of the approximate
value of twenty thousand pounds.  In 1920 Jacobi wrote to inform me the
firm was changing hands, and although he would remain as a director of the
new company, it was essential that I square the account.  I therefore sent
them three hundred and fifty pounds.  They had authority from me to sell
any copies which might be asked for.
     On my arrival in London the position was that after paying warehouse
charges to date, they owed me a little over ten pounds.  They had written
several times to urge me to remove the stock, alleging lack of space in
their warehouse.  I called and renewed my friendly acquaintance with Jacobi
who agreed to hold the books till the end of May, to give me time to
arrange for their removal.  He furnished me with a complete set of the
books as samples.

{890}




















I had approached Heinemann's with a scheme to dispose of the stock.  They
were to publish every month for a year a small volume of selections,
lyrics, religious verses, essays, stories, plays, etc., with the idea that
the readers would acquire the taste and buy the original editions.
Heinemann's ultimately rejected this proposal --- very reluctantly, and I
believe on account of the violent personal opposition of one of their
staff, a man whom I had never met.  I found a new warehouse in due course
and called to arrange a convenient day to remove the books.
     To my surprise a perfect stranger came into the outer office, a weird
creature of nightmare, long, loose-jointed, shaking and tottering with
palsy, with a head grotesque and ghastly, rocking upon narrow sloping
shoulders that seemed to shrink from its weight.  This fantastic horror
announced itself as the managing director of the new company.  I stated my
business.  To my amazement, he broke out into a spate of unmeaning insults.
He refused point-blank to deliver the books on the ground that Scotland
Yard would be down on him if he did.  I said, "But this is ridiculous.
What has Scotland Yard to do with the matter?  If you really think they are
concerned, ring them up at once.  Ask them!"  He went off saying he would
telephone, and returned in a few minutes saying that they would make
inquiries and let him know in a few days.
     Of course the police had no interest in the matter at all.  But this
goblin still refused delivery.  I could only suppose him a lunatic.  He did
not merely insult me but Mr Jacobi, the best of printers, by far the most
eminent in England, a man who had spent his life in the service of the art
and who had done more for it than any single man since Caxton.
     Warner, for so my lunatic called himself, spoke of Jacobi in terms
that would have been harsh applied to a dishonest office boy.  I wrote to
Jacobi personally.  He replied as I anticipated, but admitted that the
control had passed from his hands.  Warner flew in even a more furious rage
than ever at my having written, and his having replied.  I had known Jacobi
since '98, and our business relationship during the twenty-five years had
been unbroken and uniformly pleasant.  I found my friends scarcely able to
believe the story.  Such conduct as Warner's was incredible.  It was
obvious, however, even to him that some settlement was necessary.  We had a
final interview.  He resorted to all kinds of absurd arguments quite
impertinent to the business on hand and took an attitude in flat
contradiction to that adopted by the firm.  At the last moment, he suddenly
shifted his ground.  A furtive gleam of cunning came into his eyes and he
suggested that it would be all right if I took the books away without his
official knowledge.  It was the first sensible thing he had said.  It was
arranged that he should consult the directors as a matter of form, and then
arrange an hour for the removal over the telephone as it might be
convenient for him to be out of the way at the time.  We parted on this

{891}





















understanding.  But the next morning I got a letter that everything was
off.
     I reflected on the "Yi's" research: "It will be advantageous to use
legal constraints" and went round to my lawyer.  He advised me that they
had no case.  The one technical difficulty which related to some few
volumes could be obviated easily enough.  Correspondence ensued, and
finally he interviewed the solicitors of the firm and came to a
satisfactory arrangement.  Warner was away on his holiday, but the business
would go through directly he returned.  Not at all!  He went back on
everything and defied me to obtain possession.  And there the matter
stands, as far as I know.  I have never been able to collect sufficient
funds to recover my property which constitutes my principal asset.  If
Warner is even partially sane the motive is beyond my wit to imagine.  Can
he possibly hope that I shall drop the matter, and let him get away with
twenty thousand pounds of stolen property?
     To keep a straight story, I have admitted that at Warner's suggestion
two roundabout ways were tried.  I was to make a fictitious sale of the
stock to another man, and he, having taken them away, could transfer them
to me.  When he called he was assailed in the most intemperate language and
the delivery refused.  The second idea was to get my tailor to obtain
judgment against me for the few hundreds I owed him, to be executed by
seizing the stock.  But the sheriff received the same treatment as everyone
else.  Warner started at once to heap insults upon, and hurl defiance at,
the representatives of the law.  What interests me most in all this is the
problem of how such a man ever does any business.  In my own case, part of
my original plan involved the placing of large orders with his firm.  When
a stranger calls to bring him gold he is thrown out.  It beats me
altogether.
     My next important business was to re-establish my connection with
editors.  I called on the "English Review".  Austin Harrison welcomed me as
warmly as ever, and asked me to write the centenary article on Shelley and
some minor work.  I signed the Shelley essay "Prometheus".  I created a
furore in literary London.  They were stupefied.  Who the devil could have
written it?  There were not three men in England anywhere near that class.
It was the best boost the "English Review" had had since Frank Harris and I
had left England.  Mond had withdrawn his support, turning over the "Review",
lock, stock and barrel, gratis, on his attention being called to the fact
that Harrison possessed a letter from Lord Roberts denouncing Mond in such
terms that its publication would have probably been followed by the
wrecking of Mond's house in Lowndes Square, and, as likely as not, a
lynching.  Sir George Lewis called at the office (Harrison boasted to me
that Lewis never went outside his lair for anyone less than a royal duke)
and concluded the deal on the terms stated above on Harrison's giving his
word not to make public the letter.  It went through.  But when Harrison
looked for the lethal letter he failed to find it, and believes that Mond
had arranged for someone

{892}


















to pay an unauthorized visit to his sanctum and extract it.  This
hypothesis involves the assumption that Mond harboured doubts as to the
value of Harrison's word of honour, which is too painful to think of.
     Deprived of financial support, and of the guidance of Frank Harris and
myself, he was left to plough his lonely furrow and a crooked furrow it
was.  The "English Review" lost interest for the educated classes whose taste
it was designed to please.  The circulation sagged lower every month.  Its
dullness became devastating.  Harrison's own work is always amazing and
sometimes first-rate.  But other contributors fell off.  They got tired of
being asked to write at nominal rates, and at that to have to extract the
cheque with a Big Bertha corkscrew.  He paid me five pounds for my Shelley
essay.  Subsequent articles were even less adequately remunerated.  And it
was not only a task which Jove would have thrown up to get paid at all, but
after prolonged humiliating haggling over the price, the ultimate cheque
was more annoying than agreeable.  He would argue for an hour that he had
said pounds and not gunieas.  I put up with the pest because it amused me.
I can hardly explain why I enjoy watching such contemptible wrigglings.  I
suppose it is the same sort of fascination as makes one stop to watch a
street squabble between two prostitutes.
     A further unpleasantness was that he always wanted to mutilate what I
wrote by removing the strongest passages or reshaping them so that my style
was spoilt entirely and diluted with his journalistic commonplaces and
clich‚s.  I made the best of a bad job.  My reply to Rabbi Joel Blau, "The
Jewish Problem Re-Stated", for example, seemed to me so important that any
sacrifice was worth making.  I doubt my wisdom.  His emendations reduced a
masterpiece of reasoning and eloquence to a comparatively unremarkable
pleading, and it fell almost flat.
     My real plan was to put persistent pressure upon Harrison.  I thought
that in time my moral superiority and intelligence would convert him to a
course by adopting which thoroughly and enthusiastically, the stone might
be rolled away from the sephlchre, and the "English Review" regain its
preeminence as the only organ in England with a soul of its own.  In fact,
so long as I stayed in London I made a good deal of headway.  But the
moment the cat was away, the mice began to play.  I ran over to France for
a fortnight in August, and when I got back he had broken his word on every
point.  My return restored order, but on leaving for Sicily, it was the
same story.  He had promised to publish something of mine every month and
send me not less than eight pounds every time the first came round.  He did
not even send me the ten pounds he had promised when we parted, knowing
well that I counted on him for this to stand between me and actual
starvation.
     I could have born with his treatment of myself, but he used me to
injure

{893}





















others.  In our early conversations he had argued with perfect justice that
the English market for the "English Review" was hopeless, at least for a long
time, and that therefore the only chance of restoring solvency was to push
it in America.  It was obvious that I could do this with success.  He
agreed to my plan, and I wrote accordingly to several of my friends, first-
class writers, far better than any in England --- bar Conrad and Hardy ---
asking them to contribute.  They one and all wrote charmingly and
enthusiastically, and sent a number of admirable stories.  They further
promised to use their influence --- in two cases enormous --- they being
editors of periodicals whose combined circulation must be in the millions,
to introduce the "English Review" to the American public.  The scheme
prospered beyond my greatest expectation.  H. L. Mencken himself came to
see us, and he formulated a plan of action which would have certainly
succeeded and put Harrison's circulation up to thirty thousand at the
lowest estimate within a few months.
     But this was not all.  Hearing that my friend Otto Kahn, the famous
financier and the admirably judicious appreciator of fine creative work,
was in England, I asked him to lunch with me to meet Harrison.  His agenda
was full, but he proposed to call at the office.  We talked matters over
some two hours, and laid down the outlines of a scheme, the success of
which was that a chronic invalid magazine called the "Forum" should be bought
and amalgamated with the "English Review".  We were to publish two editions,
I to be in charge of the English Review in New York.  The bulk of the
contents was to be identical, but a proportion to cover matters of local
interest in the respective countries.  Otto Kahn, while not pledging
himself definitely to finance the proposal, gave us to understand that he
would not be unwilling to support it.
     The sequel is really too stupid.  We discussed the details of the
scheme and wrote to Mr Kahn accordingly.  But when Harrison showed me the
draft of his letter I could hardly believe my eyes.  He wanted six thousand
pounds for the paper which everyone knew was being literally hawked about
London on the chance of finding a fool to pay two thirds that amount, and
besides he to be guaranteed two thousand pounds a year for three years.
And on top of all he was to have an interest in the company.  I didn't tell
him that Otto Kahn was not in the market to buy gold bricks and that
nothing would disgust him so thoroughly as so obvious an attempt to pull
his leg.  I knew that moderation and --- well, hang it, common honesty
would determine Kahn to do his utmost for us.  To him twelve thousand
pounds is of course a microscopic object, but he would resent any attempt
to take advantage of that fact as strongly and rightly as a diner in a Soho
gargote objects to mistakes in his bill.  I was furious at the abuse of my
introduction, but I kept my temper, put things as pleasantly as I could,
and begged Harrison to moderate his grab.  His conscience convicted him.
He put up the feeblest arguments I ever

{894}




















heard in my life about the great value of the property which he constantly
declared a thankless burden and a financial loss.  I knew it was hopeless,
and of course Kahn wrote back briefly that he had inquired and found that
the "Forum" was not for sale.  We had discussed that point.  It made little
difference, but it saved Kahn from having to say what he thought about the
try on.
     Having enthusiastically accepted my plan about pushing the paper in
America by publishing the work of their best men and a series of essays by
myself to introduce them to English readers, a line of attack quite
independent of the more wide-read big proposal, he suddenly broke away.
"What would happen to the English market?" he wailed.  "What do they care
about American writers?"
     "My dear man," I replied, "the whole point of the game is that you
have told me again and again that the English market is hopeless.  Whatever
you do you cannot win out in England.  And even if the American campaign
does diminish your sale by a few hundred copies, what's that as against the
splendid chance of building up a circulation in the States?"  But he
wouldn't see it.  He dropped the whole thing.
     I made one other suggestion --- to try to get readers among occult
students.  I arranged a scheme of co-operation with the "Occult Review".
Ralph Shirley was enthusiastic and willing to help in every possible way.
But Harrison never liked the scheme.  His ignorance of the importance of
the occult public was not merely complete, but invulnerable to all
information.  I gave him the figures.  I proved that for one person who
cared for poetry, there were at least a thousand whose only form of reading
was spiritualism, theosophy, psychical research, Magick, Yoga, mysticism,
Christian Science, and its congeners, occult freemasonry, etc., etc., "ad"
"libitum".  He flatly refused to admit the facts.  I begged him to try it
out, if only by asking a few dozen strangers what they themselves cared to
read.  His very secretaries rose up against him and confirmed my statement.
It was useless.  His own objection to the occult was so strong, that he
deliberately shut his eyes to the facts; even the vogue of Conan Doyle's
senile dementia did not move him.  And that is the end of that.
     I have not seen the "English Review" this year.  I can only suppose that
it has dropped back after the spurt of last summer into its regular ditch-
water dullness, if indeed it has not passed away altogether by that kind of
passing away which leaves nothing whatever behind.
     My third string was to publish new books.  Sullivan had suggested my
trying Grant Richards, firstly with a plan for marketing the existing
stock, and secondly with a proposal to write my memoirs.  He promised to
put in a good word for me as he knew Grant Richards well and was
influential as being a man of sound business and literary judgment.  I
therefore called

{895}





















and made my proposals.  But after some consideration, Grant Richards could
not see his way to accept my terms.  I think we were both reluctant to
part; and one night I was inspired to try him with a third artificial
minnow.  I would write a shocker on the subject which was catering to the
hysteria and pururience of the sex-crazed public: the drug traffic
insanity.  It provided a much needed variation from the "white slave"
traffic.  I proposed as a title "the Diary of a Drug Fiend" and sketched out
a synopsis of its contents on a sheet of notepaper.  This was mostly bluff.
I had not really any clear idea of my story.  I took this round to Grant
Richards, who said it was not in his line.  I asked him to suggest a likely
firm.  He said Hutchinson or Collins.  Neither name meant anything to me.
I gave Collins the first chance simply because he was on my way home.
     Invited to interview the responsible man, I found myself wondering who
he was --- I had surely met him before.  He shared my feeling and was the
first to discover the source.  Over fifteen years earlier he had been on
the staff of a paper called "What's On" belonging to my old acquaintance
Robert Haslam and at one time edited by poor crazy Dartnell.
     The gods had certainly started a new drama.  The accident of this man,
J. D. Beresford his name is, being the literary advisor of Collins probably
made all the difference to the fate of the book.  The synopsis was accepted
enthusiastically and I obtained the pledges of money and advances, as per
the "Yi" forecast, to the extend of a sixty-pound advance and a contract on
much better terms than a new author could have hoped.
     I contracted to deliver the manuscript within a month.  My idea was to
rush the book through as a suitable for holiday reading.  I wired to Paris
for the Ape, who hurried over.  We sat down at once to work.  She takes my
dictation in long hand, and it was therefore some "stunt" to have written
the 121,000 words in 27 days, 12 3/4 hours.  Mrs Marshall, the best typist
I ever employed --- she had worked for me off and on since '98 --- could
hardly believe her eyes as one stack of manuscript came tumbling on the top
of another.  It gave me a chance to boost the Law of Thelema.  I was able
to show how the application of the principles increases efficiency as the
profane deem impossible.
     Beresford was delighted with the manuscript and in high hopes of
making a big hit.  Unfortunately, my plan for publishing the book in August
was not adopted.  For various reasons they kept it hanging about till
November.  This annoyed me greatly.  I expected its publication to arouse a
tempest in the teapot around which the old women of criticism nod and talk
scandal.  I wanted to be on the spot when the fur began to fly, so as to
give as good as I got.  However, the gods have their own ideas.
     I now put forward my scheme for publishing my memoirs --- my
autohagiography I playfully called it --- before Collins.  Beresford knew
Sullivan

{896}





















well, another lucky coincidence; and when I sent him a fairly full
synopsis, they accepted my proposals gladly.  I took a short holiday in
Paris, chiefly to give the Ape a good time at the seaside, and on my return
settled down to dictation.










































{897}





















                              93


     Another thread is now woven into my destiny.  Before the war, one of
my best men in the O.T.O. was a man named Hammond.  He was an engraver of
astonishing skill and had been very useful in preparing plates for the
diplomas of the Order.  He was enthusiastic about its principle and
advanced rapidly from the IVø to which he had been affiliated from Royal
Arch of old-fashioned masonry, to the very exalted rank of Grand Inquisitor
Commander.  I liked Hammond personally so well that I even asked him to
spend a week with me in Paris and see life, which till then had meant to
him only the narrow and sordid circle of lower middle class English in
parts of London barely distinguishable form slums.  He beheld the heavens
opened.  Overflowed with gratitude and adoration, he acquired the sort of
affection for me that a dog has for its master.
     Alas! this dog had the mange!  supposedly as the result of vaccination
in childhood with an impure preparation, he suffered the tortures of
psoriasis.  The irritation was perpetual.  He had tried every known
treatment and received from none more than temporary relief.  (I think it
throws light on my character that ever since I met him, I have never
forgotten, whenever I met anyone likely to be able to suggest some new
remedy, to ask him about it.)
     Hammond had executed the work entrusted to him by the Order with
rapidity and excellence beyond praise.  I gave him a new job of the utmost
importance.  I had written a short treatise on the central secret of the
O.T.O. for members of the IXø, and proposed to issue this embossed in the
style of headings on notepaper and illustrated with numerous symbolic
designs.  Hammond was to cut the dies for the text, a really tremendous
job.  The reward was of course commensurate.  It implied his initiation to
the IXø, which otherwise might have cost him years of effort.  But now
appeared a strange defect in the man's character.  After preparing nearly
one third of the dies he broke off.  I was out of London.  Letters and
telegrams sometimes elicited no reply; sometimes he wrote explaining his
failure and promising immediate amendment; but I could not keep him up to
the mark even when I got back; and I could not be angry with him if only
because of his disease which seemed to me as the excuse for his conduct.
Nor did I want to wound such affectionate enthusiasm.  In his devotion, he
had even called his latest son after me, Aleister Crowley.  I left London,
leaving him to complete the work as best he could.

{898}























     I wrote several times from America, but failed to get any reply.  On
my return I tried to find him, but without success.  It became vitally
important to re-establish relations as Cowie claimed that the missing
property of the Order was in his charge.  I tried all sorts of plans, but
without result.  One day, however, as the Ape and I were taking a short cut
through Soho, she insisted on inquiring at one of his old addresses.  I
objected to waste time on a certain failure.  But she insisted and went
round.  Incredibly enough we found him.  He was enraptured.  We had tea and
dinner together, and then went home with him to his house in Highbury.  He
had some of the missing assets and had kept them faithfully with all
possible care.  I was overjoyed to find that my trust had not been
misplaced in at least one instance.  I rewarded his loyalty by conferring
upon him the IXø O.T.O.  The prize should have been infinitely precious,
for it put in his hands an almost certain cure for his lifelong affliction.
We held numerous conferences and concerted plans for re-establishing the
Order in London, the old Lodge having suspended its labours in consequence
of the ridiculous raid described in "the Last Straw".  For greater
convenience, it was decided that the Ape and I should rent from him the top
floor of his house, which we did on my return from the Continent.
     But now a new ordeal was prepared for me.  Despite her quality, the
Ape of Thoth began to show the effects of her long strain, anxiety and
suffering.  I called in a doctor who suspected the beginnings of phthisis,
complicated with nervous weakness so serious that practically all her
reflexes were abolished.  The girl's courage is so infernally sublime that
she performs miracles of camouflage to prevent me discovering her condition
lest my anxiety should distract me from my work.  But at last the cat was
out of the bag.  It was imperative that she should return to Cefalu at once
and regain her health by freedom from work and anxiety, fresh air, fresh
food, easy exercise and medical care.  It was easy to prescribe this cure
but its execution was another matter.  I spent the next week chasing round
London trying every expedient to collect sufficient cash for her journey
and the living expenses of the next few weeks.  I pawned every object of
value and extracted every penny I could from everyone I knew.  Finally I
succeeded and off she went to Sicily.  She picked up at once.  A month
later, she was almost herself again, though of course she needed a long
period of care to replace the vital capacity which she had spent in the
service of the Great Work.
     I, too, was very far from well.  My desperate situation, my anxiety
about the welfare of those for whom I had made myself responsible,
unremitting overwork and the eternal disappointments were beginning to
break me down.  At this moment a letter was forwarded to me from Cefalu
addressed to me by Betty Dartnell.  Her crazy husband had taken her and his
daughter to British Columbia, I think about 1913.  The new conditions had
transformed

{899}




















her.  When I saw her in Victoria in 1915, the flabby sensual debauched rake
had become clean, muscular, trim, bright-eyed and self-controlled.  I
begged her to break entirely with her maniac who had steadily drifted into
crazier courses.  She was within an ace of cutting the painter, but could
not quite bring herself to take an irrevocable step.  I had only an hour
with her.  If I could have stayed a week in Victoria I might have rescued
her.  Soon after they drifted to Los Angeles, where Dartnell got into the
movie job and took to writing scenarios.  In that crowd of debauched
degenerates, his own insanity was not so fatal as in more sober
surroundings.  He took to writing me voluminous letters raving about some
cinema star or other whom "god designs for his soul mate!  And what was he
to do?  Was he to yield to unchaste impulse?"  Page after page, he poured
out the most violent megalomania.  I wrote back the obvious advice; to act
sensibly without imagining that the solar system would go to smash on
account of his sexual explosions.  At last even Los Angeles found him a
nuisance.
     Lydia Yonska had taken pity on him at a time when he was desperately
in need of money.  He had shown his gratitude by pestering her with his
unwelcome attentions, even climbing into her house at night through an open
window and scaring her half out of her wits with frantic protestations and
threats.  She found herself obliged to protect herself.  Dartnell wrote me
a long letter abusing her.  He said that she was a vampire and had tried to
seduce him, and on his refusal had begun to persecute him.  She had been
deputed by the devil to destroy men's souls, and God had appointed him to
avenge her victims by killing her when opportunity offered.
     It happened that Madame Yonska was in New York when this letter
reached me.  I had, in fact, met her a few days before, and painted her
portrait, one of my best pictures, by the way.  I thought I would warn her
and showed her his scrawl.  She told me of course the true facts as
narrated above.
     Since that time, the winter of 1918-19.  I had heard no more of him
directly.  But Jane Wolfe had seen a good deal of them in Los Angeles.
They had separated finally.  (They were always doing that, but always the
madman had come back and started some new scrap.)
     Sheila, his child by his first wife, now in her teens, had shown the
taint of his insanity by developing incurable kleptomania.  Having
inherited also her father's cleverness and cunning, her thefts had escaped
detection for a long while, with the natural result that innocent people
were always suffering from her misdeeds.  Even when found out, she
succeeded as often as not in putting her crimes on to others.  No one would
accept the responsibility of looking after her.  She had returned with her
parents to England.  Betty and she lived in a big house in Cleveland
Gardens.  Dartnell had buried himself in Devonshire, turning up only when
some demoniac impulse to

{900}




















make mischief seized him.  Since 1920 Betty had written to Jane for help
and advice.  Her sexual obsessions had begun to turn into religious
channels as so often happens to women on reaching the forties.  Jane begged
her to come to Cefalu and develop her spiritual and moral self beyond reach
of the constant temptation of London to drown her aspiration in drink and
debauchery.  Betty knew in her heart that her only salvation lay in some
such decision.  But her almost complete lack of self-control prevented her
from taking the plunge.
     Such were the conditions when she wrote direct to me, begging me to
take her in hand and save her from the stinking mire in which she felt
herself slowly being sucked down.
     I took this letter as a sign.  It was surely strange that I should be
in London still.  The delays which had annoyed and puzzled me became
comprehensible.  I went round to Cleveland Gardens.  Betty was out.
Sheila, whom I had not seen since she was a baby, gave me tea.  She
fascinated and horrified me.  I had never seen a girl so perfectly evil.
She had not trace of heart.  Such callous cynicism would have been
abominable in a rake of sixty.  A sinister malice lurked in her most causal
remarks.  Her deceitfulness was overpoweringly evident in her looks, no
less than her words.  Her eyes gleamed with ghastly glee.  It suggested
that she imagined herself as a sort of scourge to inflict obscene suffering
upon anyone she might meet.  I waited some time hoping Betty would return.
She did not and it was arranged for me to come to tea the next day.
     I found her in a curious state.  She had lost most of the
wholesomeness and health which she had enjoyed when I last saw her.  She
knew she was going downhill and in danger of stumbling and pitching over
the cliffs in the dark.  She clung to spiritual aspirations as her only
hope and told me her experiences.  They resembled Jane's for the most part,
but certain incidents were indubitably evidential of genuine communication
with intelligences of a very high order of initiation.  Her trouble was
that she lacked the means of discrimination between the most contemptible
drivel and the most exalted truth.
     She begged me to stay in her house till I left for Cefalu, urging that
I was ill and in need of loving care.  She overcame my hesitation by
emphasizing her need of a strong hand to guide and help her.  Finally I
consented.  I was well aware that she was precisely one of those wrong
people against mixing with whom the "Yi" had so earnestly warned me.  I went
with my eyes open, saying to myself, "Whatever mischief may come of this,
it is none the less my duty to save this woman's soul.  I will keep my
oath, come what may!"
     At first things went well beyond my highest hope.  I showed her how to
invoke the gods, and to banish evil and malignant entities that had
hitherto

{901}





















deceived her by impersonating them.  The very first experiment succeeded.
She brought back information of great value.  Its truth and the exalted
nature of the being who uttered it was guaranteed by internal evidence of
the strictest accuracy.  Shortly after this the sun entered the sign of
Libra.  I chose her to assist me in obtaining the word of the autumnal
equinox.  She made good.  The word was given by her as "THIGHS", to which
she assigned the number 542 and the meaning "Light, Eyes, Flame and Will".
     I wrote this in Hebrew: Teth + Ayin + Shin + 93, which might be
pronounced Thighs.  Teth is the letter of Leo, the House of the Sun, and
therefore a hieroglyph of Light.  Ayin means an eye.  Shin is the letter of
fire or flame; while 93 signifies Thelema --- Will.  Further 542 is a
number which I had long sought to interpret as being the arithmetical mean
between 418 (the Magical Formula of the New Aeon) and 666, my own cipher.
I had never succeeded in finding a word to express this idea of the
unification of my own nature with that of my dynamic structure.  It must
surely strike the most sceptical mind as remarkable that an untrained
woman, wholly ignorant of Cabbalistic formulae, should obtain words,
letters and numbers, so accurately interwoven, so complete an hieroglyph of
an idea which defied my skill to analyse.  As is my custom I sought in the
Holy Books and in the "Yi King" for an interpretation of the word in terms of
the events of the ensuing six months.  I will mention one or two signal
examples of the trustworthiness of such divination.
     1. The hexagram which defined the scope of the work of the Order was
"Kieh" meaning "Regulations".  In the first three months I am described as
unable to organize the affairs of the Order. But in the last three, a
sudden change takes place.  A way is found of establishing the proper
system.
     Now, until the winter solstice the chaos grew more confused than ever.
A few days later a man suddenly came forward precisely fitted to undertake
the organization required.  I say suddenly, for he had steadfastly resisted
the Secret Chiefs for years.  His soul was torn by an earthquake and he
broke with his past ruthlessly, devoting himself wholly to the Great Work
from that hour henceforth.
     The work of the abbey was described by the 51st hexagram "Kan".  The
first month indicates anxiety mingled with cheerful intercourse with
friends.  Till the last week in October I was worried indeed, but meeting
many pleasant people and enjoying agreeable conversation with them.
     Line two indicates peril which makes one abandon one's immediate
business and go to an exalted place.  The affairs which he dropped will be
taken up again without effort on his part.  This describes my last month in
England, which brought about a new crisis in my affairs.  I dropped them
and went to the high house of Cefalu.  After a time the abandoned business
was resumed.

{902}





















     Line three.  To Christmas.  Startling events occur.  This corresponds
to the attacks on the abbey in the Sunday papers and "John Bull".
     Line four.  The abbey is supinely sinking in the mud.  We were unable
to do anything to improve our position and our activity was hampered by
illness.
     Line five.  All ways in peril and assailed by startling events; there
is a coming and going, which hints at the gathering storm of persecution,
the constant assaults of ill-health, and the irregularity of the work, or
perhaps even the death of Raoul Loveday is implied by the word going.
     Line six.  Startling events continue causing breathless dismay and
anxious watchfulness.  In this one might read the renewal of the newspaper
attacks on the abbey and the discouragement and worry produced by events.
     My own fortune was described by the 9th hexagram "Hsiao Khu".
     The first line.  "Returning and pursuing his own course."  Fulfilled
by my lectures and new disciples in London.
     Two.  "Returning", i.e. to Cefalu.
     Three.  Various symbols of a check to progress and sudden opposition.
As happened on publication of "the Drug Fiend".
     Four.  Shows sincerity averting murderous attacks.  My attitude put an
end to the libels.
     Five.  My sincerity attracts sympathy and help.  This was fulfilled by
the adhesion of several new disciples.
     Six.  "The rain has fallen and progress checked."  Raoul's death put a
stop to my regular work.
     Even the symbols for subordinate members of the Order forecast
accurately their fortunes.  For instance, Hammond had the 32nd hexagram,
whose symbolism is that of a ram attempting more than he can do, becoming
entangled with the obstacles, and finally being paralyzed.
     The description is marvellously accurate.  He made fierce quick
attempts to achieve his ends.  They were baffled.  He dashed himself
against a wall, was enmeshed in the intrigues of my enemies, and found
himself in the end neither able to go forward to victory, nor to extricate
himself from the circumstances.  He had committed himself to my interests
irrevocably.









{903}
























                              94


     In the following month, Betty arranged two lectures on the Law of
Thelema in her house and brought a number of friends to seek my assistance.
     One such introduction proved pregnant with fate.  A brilliant boy,
just down from Oxford, where he had distinguished himself by his
attainments in history, had long wished to meet me.  For over two years, he
had studied my magical writings with the utmost enthusiasm and
intelligence.  His character was extraordinary.  He possessed every
qualification for becoming a Magician of the first rank.  I designed him
from the first interview to be my magical heir.  He possessed, of course,
the defects of these qualities.
     His daring had made him reckless, and his insight contemptuous of
phenomena.  He had thus been notorious at Oxford as the leader of madcap
escapades, in one of which, escaping from the proctors, he had taken a leap
in the dark and landed on a spike which transfixed his thigh.  He lay
between life and death for some months and was still weak from the effects
of the loss of blood.  Even worse, perceiving the splendour of his soul, he
refused to be daunted by its sheath, which led him to commit the fatal
folly of marrying a girl whom he had met in a sordid and filthy drinking
den in Soho, called the Harlequin, which was frequented by self-styled
artists and their female parasites.  One of these went by the name of Betty
May.  Born in a slum in the East End, she had become an artist's model of
the most vicious kind.  She had been married and divorced, remarried and
widowed by the war.  In her childhood an accident had damaged her brain
permanently so that its functions were discontinuous, and she had not
mended matters by taking to cocaine at the age of about twenty.  After some
years of addiction, she found herself using a quarter of an ounce or more
daily.  She suddenly took fright and cured herself by switching over, first
to injections of morphia, and then to plain alcohol.  She made no secret of
this, and I admired her immensely for her frankness about it and her superb
courage in curing herself.  She was a charming child, tender and simple of
soul.
     Yet with all that, Raoul should not have married her.  It meant the
sterilization of the genius of success in life.  Already the evil effects
were manifest.  His university career was closed.  The friends who might
have helped him refused to succour a man who had deliberately cut himself
off from decency.  The mere fact of marriage, had his wife been a duke's
daughter, disqualified him for most of the positions which otherwise might
have been open.  His parents were poor, self-made and at that only on the
fringe of the middle

{904}




















classes.  They could not help out.  He had struggled along by getting odd
articles into various papers.  He and Betty lived in one filthy room in
Fitzroy Street, a foul, frowsty, verminous den, stinking of the miasma of
that great class who scrape through the years by dint of furtive cunning in
dubious avocations.  They were living from hand to mouth, with disaster
eternally looming ahead, and the whisper of hope more faint and feeble as
each effort ended in failure.
     Again, I thought I saw the design of the gods.  This was the man I had
needed for the last ten years, a man with every gift that a Magus might
need, and already prepared for initiation by practically complete
knowledge, not only of the elements but of the essence of Magick.
     I wasted no time.  I urged him to join me and work with me until his
initiation was complete.  My proposal not only fulfilled the holiest hope
of his soul, but solved his material problem.  In the abbey he would be
able to make himself a career as a writer as he could not hope to do in the
loathsome surroundings of slum life in London.  His health, too, demanded
urgently a complete change.  He had already been ill at frequent intervals.
During October the foulness of Fitzroy Street fastened its foetid fangs on
his throat.  Both he and Betty escaped death by a hairbreadth.  It decided
him to accept my offer which I had renewed in a long letter written from
Rome.  I was equally anxious to rescue him for the verminous vagabonds,
squalid and obscene, who constituted the court of Queen Betty.  He had
taken me to the Harlequin one night.  In a corner was his wife, three parts
drunk, on the knees of a dirty-faced loafer, pawed by a swarm of lewd hogs,
breathless with lust.  She gave herself greedily to their gross and bestial
fingerings and was singing in an exquisite voice, which might have put her
among brinces, an interminable smutty song, with a ribald chorus in which
they all joined, hoarse and harsh from drink and disease.  The beauty and
charm of the girl, the pure music of her notes, emphasized the contrast
with the incarnated filth that swarmed over her.  I expected an explosion.
In Raoul's place, I should have fallen like a thunderbolt on the swine and
driven them into the street, taken my wife straight home, washed her and
thrashed her, and told her that if it happened again I was through.  But
he, poor innocent lad, took it all as a matter of course.
     I am not a prude, as I hope this book may prove.  But passion is one
thing and dirt another.  In my letter from Rome, I wrote the naked truth
--- that an Oxford man should look after his wife and that if he mixed with
such creatures infection was inevitable.  I think my straight speaking
opened his eyes.  He collected the necessary cash and came to the abbey.
Betty had done her best to hold him in London.  Her only idea of life was
this wallowing in the hog trough nuzzled by the snouts of the swine of
Soho.
     The success of Betty Dartnell in her spiritual work increased her
enthusiasm

{905}




















at first, and I was still so young in experience that it surprised me one
day, when she came into my room full of rubbishy rigmarole purporting to
come from some angel.  "Have you learnt nothing in all this time?"  said I.
It was all no good.  The verbose pomposity and extravagant promises of the
false meant more to her than the calm wisdom of the true.  Having fallen on
one plane the others were sympathetically affected.  Next day she was
hopelessly drunk, broke her evening appointment to work with me and went to
the Harlequin.  She brought home half a dozen drunken wastrels and their
female friends with a supply of whisky.  They drank themselves into a
stupor and slept all over the house like so many swine.  The debauch
produced the usual reaction.  Betty Dartnell repented and promised never to
do it again.  But she would not do the one thing that would have saved her,
cut that crowd once and for all.  She found excuses for them.  She
persuaded herself that it was her duty to rescue them, which, of course,
only meant that subconsciously she craved the oblivion of the mire.
     Needless to say, I did not repeat the warning.  I concentrated on my
work, ready to welcome her back to comradeship whenever she chose.  But she
began to see me as a skeleton at the banquet.  I was an avatar of her
conscience.  She accordingly did what people who are determined to follow
the primrose path always do with conscience.  She avoided me when she could
and insulted me when she couldn't, with the ultimate aim of eliminating me
entirely.  In this, of course, Sheila abetted her eagerly.
     It had been understood that Betty Dartnell was to come with me to
Cefalu as soon as the necessary arrangements could be made.  The proposal
was advantageous to her in every way.  Spiritual progress, moral
reconstruction, physical welfare and economic freedom.  She was to come
provisionally for three months and then consider further plans.  In these
circumstances, I felt free to borrow twenty pounds from her.  For this I
gave her my note due at the end of October on the understanding that,
should I be unable through any misfortune to repay her, it should be
regarded as an advance on her dues to the abbey.  Only a few days later
came her relapse and from that time she did all in her power to prevent my
bringing off any of my business deals.  It was, therefore, entirely her own
fault that I could not meet the note on the date it fell due.  I explained
the position and she had a generous movement of real regret that her moral
collapse had injured me as well as herself.  She promised amendment and
said that she would come to Cefalu as soon as possible, the twenty pounds
being put to her credit.  Yet the next day she was again attacked by
hysteria.  Sheila took advantage of her half-crazed condition to get her to
spend the entire weekend with some friends in the country while she got rid
of me.
     I had observed this unhappy child with great care, in the hope of
finding some remedy for her paranoia.  I felt little hope.  The mischief
was rooted

{906}




















in her essence.  She stole right and left both from me and others in the
house.  It was never possible to prove guilt.  The evidence amounted merely
to this: that she was known to be a thief and only she had the opportunity
in most of the cases.  The insane element was manifest; she stole for
stealing's sake.  She stole things that she could not have sold for
sixpence.  I suspect that part of her complex was that she enjoyed the
annoyance caused by the theft.
    Betty once out of the way, Sheila told me a string of the most stupid
lies I ever heard, each absurd and incompatible with known facts in itself,
and in contradiction with the rest of her remarks.  She then proceeded to
lock up all the rooms and hide all the keys on ridiculous pretexts so that
I could not get at various articles to pack them.  I decided, of course, to
go elsewhere at the earliest opportunity, and had only stayed at first to
satisfy myself that I had done all I possibly could to save Betty from the
frightful abyss for which she was heading, and after she had gone, in order
to study the psychology of poor Sheila.  I saw Betty twice more before
leaving London.  She had begun to realize what a fool she had been and
promised on her honour to join us a month later.  We parted in perfect
amity but my influence being removed Sheila's plans for destroying her
stepmother, body and soul, proceeded gaily.  She made her drunk and got in
a man from one of the Sunday papers for an interview.  Betty was worked up
to indignation against me.  She twisted all my sayings and doings into
evil, and those which involved her co-operation were garbled.  Most of her
statements were barefaced falsehoods and the rest falsifications of fact.
When this filth was published she saw for a moment how vilely she had been
induced to act, and wrote to me expressing the bitterest remorse; but at
the same time pleading that they had reported her falsely.  I begged her to
make amends in the only possible way; by coming forward publicly and
testifying under oath to the falsehood of the allegations.  Alas, poor
Betty!  It has been the curse of her life that she cannot act decisively.
     Sheila had still one more chance to steal from me and she took it.
She knew where I had sent my property to be warehoused, and guessing that I
had left in London such things as were useless in Sicily, rang up the
warehouseman, announced herself as Mrs Crowley, and told them to send to
her the goods they where holding to my order.
     It does not say much for the regulations of the firm that this
transparent trick succeeded.  They had strict instructions to hold the
goods to my order or Hammond's, and it was certainly a shock to find that
they would part with property entrusted to their safekeeping on the
unsupported statement of an unknown person that she was my wife.
     I must now retrace my steps to the summer.  Austin Harrison has a
house in Seaford where he lives with his wife, a charming lady whom he had

{907}






















successfully removed from the protection of her previous husband.  He
worked the scheme with extraordinary ability.  A man of his prominence in
London might expect the fullest details in every newspaper of a divorce
case in which he was co-respondent.  But he managed the matter so craftily
that only a few of his intimate friends even got wind of the game.
     When in London, he had his rooms in the house of a man named Robinson
Smith, a retired concert agent with a wife apparently selected in order to
prevent him imagining that life is nothing but music.  I met him at Seaford
one day after playing golf with Harrison.  Nothing much transpired but
later in London, he suddenly appeared in the character of a brother adept.
His attainments were considerable, though his knowledge was unsystematic
and his judgment correspondingly unbalanced.  But his genius and his
enthusiasm warmed the cockles of my heart.  His idea of helping humanity
was through social simplification and economic readjustment, with
corresponding rectifications in other directions.  He allowed his
inspiration too much liberty.  It being late in life when he devoted
himself exclusively to the Great Work, he had not learned that Pegasus
should be ridden on the curb when riding out with friends who bestrode
spavined hacks.  Harrison constantly hinted he was insane.  This he was
not.  But I thought that his friend and his wife were conspiring to put him
into an asylum; in fact I was definitely warned by the Secret Chiefs of his
danger, and wrote in veiled language, in view of his mail being tampered
with, to put him on his guard.
     To his kindness I owed it that I was able to leave London at all.  He
paid me a month in advance for his proposed visit to Cefalu at Christmas.
     At his house in Gordon Square occurred a most amusing incident, the
climax of a whole series.  It started thus.  H. L. Mencken had written me
to expect his visit on a certain date.  We had corresponded a good deal
while I was in America.  But he lived in Baltimore and I managed to miss
meeting him.  On the day expected I saw in a paper a notice that he had
arrived, and went at once to the office of the "English Review" expecting him
to call.  No word had arrived so we thought we would hunt him up, and
assuming he would be staying at the Savoy, telephoned.  "Mr Mencken is at
lunch.  Please hold on!"  Presently he came to the 'phone.
     I welcomed him warmly after telling him who I was and made the usual
kind inquiries.  Yes, he had had a pleasant voyage.  Thank you, his health
was excellent.  Well, of course he was very busy.  He couldn't possibly
dine that night, but wouldn't we call at the hotel about it?  We would and
we did.  He would be disengaged in five minutes.  Would we please wait?
     It was the day of Northcliffe's funeral and Harrison got into
communication with some friend who had been among the mourners.  While thus
engaged, Mencken appeared.  I greeted him with enthusiasm though not

{908}






















a little surprised at his appearance.  I did not expect to see such a
giant, so robust and hearty, so rubicund.  It was not my idea at all of
what the keenest critic in the United States should look like.  However, we
strolled off to the smoking-room.  Harrison would join us in a few minutes.
The conversation became fluent and friendly.  He ordered the best brandy
and the biggest cigars.  But, somehow I could not help feeling that his
reaction to my remarks was peculiar.  Could I possibly have offended him
somehow?  Impossible; he was friendliness itself!  Then why did he fail to
catch fire at my suggestions, or even appreciate the cordial compliments
with which I interspersed my remarks.
     He, on his side, seemed embarrassed.  But we had talked quite ten
minutes before he said, "You will excuse me, I'm sure; but I don't
understand what you mean by that last observation."  This was absurd.  It
was some perfectly simple straightforward comment on his last book.  I
began to suspect him of pulling my leg in some supersubtle system invented
since my return to Europe.  "Are you sure?" he said ... and then stopped.
"I am not sure of anything," I retorted, "that's just where a critic of
your ability comes in to guide our wanderings."  He apologetically answered
that nothing was further from his mind than to criticize anything I said.
He agreed entirely; but what he wanted to know was -- well, to put it
plainly, who I was, and why I had asked to see him?  "But you're Mencken!"
I gasped.  "I certainly am," he admitted.  "Well," said I, "I'm Aleister
Crowley."  He bowed deeply.  "I don't doubt it for a second, but as I have
not had the pleasure of hearing your name till now --- "I saw a great
light.  "Heaven help me for a fool," I cried.  "You can't be my Mencken at
all!"  Explanations took place.  He was a business man from South Africa.
At this moment Harrison strolled up and we all enjoyed the joke over more
brandy and still bigger cigars.
     When the real Mencken turned up, the tale of the conversation wagged
out the message --- Jane Burr.  This lady had recently arrived in London
and created a silly-season scandal by walking about in knickerbockers.  On
this frail foundation, she had erected a superstructure of sexual ethics
which bored the educated, excited the suppressed, and scandalized the
orthodox.  That night she was to be the lioness at a reception at Robinson
Smith's.  I said, "What rot this sensation stunt business is.  I'll bring a
girl who wears knickerbockers for their convenience in playing Thelema and
climbing rocks in Sicily.  This Miss Burr will look like a model of Madame
Tussaud's beside the original."
     I did not know that Jane Burr was to be escorted by Mencken himself,
and he told her what I had said.  The Ape in her flowered black suit and
stockings, wearing the silver and scarlet Star of the Temple, arrived with
me and Harrison.  Some took her to be Jane Burr, but all were spontaneous
in admiration.  Her success was due to her having the secret of wearing
clothes,

{909}




















oblivious of their existence.  She had been acclaimed the Queen of the
Evening when Jane Burr arrived.  She had realized that she stood no chance
against the real thing, put her principles in cold storage and donned her
best evening dress.  She did her best to oust her rival, but the failure
was grotesque.  And the worst of the whole thing was that the affair got
into the papers.  Her recantation had ruined her chance of being taken
seriously.
     The incidents of my London campaign have constrained me to a somewhat
zigzag course.  But I think this completes the account.  I need add only a
brief epitome of my successes.
     Besides "The Diary of a Drug Fiend" and my autohagiography I had
contracted with Collins for the publication of "Simon Iff".  By this they
pledged themselves to pay me an advance equivalent to the subscription
sales of "The Drug Fiend".  They promised to let me have this before November
9th.  I had also sold to Ralph Shirley the rights of my translation of
Eliphas L‚vi's "La Clef des Grands MystŠres" in volume form, and he had paid
me the advance due.  The position was that on leaving London I had about
twenty pounds on hand after paying my fare and allowing for bare
subsistence on the pledged word of Collins, Hammond and Austin Harrison.
     All three failed me!  If I have survived, it is that the gods have
some further use for me.  My own efforts break down every time, and that in
circumstances such that the improbability of their doing so is enormous.
The one miracle matches the other.  If I were even tempted to doubt that my
career is planned in every detail by my spiritual superiors with the
precision of a chess player whose pieces are powerless to move except at
his command, incidents of this surprising kind would bring me back with a
jerk to a sense of reality.


















{910}






















                              95


     I broke the journey at Rome.  All through northern Italy we had been
held up by bandits of Fascisti, who had occupied the railway stations.  It
was the day of the coup d'‚tat.  For sometime I had interested myself in
Fascismo which I regarded with entire sympathy even excluding its
illegitimacy on the ground that constitutional authority had become to all
intents and purposes a dead letter.  I was delighted with the common sense
of its programme and was especially pleased by its attitude towards the
Church.  It was proposed to use forcible means to prevent the Vatican
employing the influence of the priests to attain political ends.  I was
also convinced of the importance of the movement and of its almost
immediate success.  I did my utmost to persuade Austin Harrison of the
soundness of my judgment.  He pooh-poohed the whole thing and only after
interminable argument did I persuade him to let me write an article on the
situation.  He ultimately agreed, and I hunted all round London for a
representative of Fascismo from whom I could obtain documentary material
for my article.
     (The sequel is characteristic of Austin Harrison.  He printed an
article written not by me but by one of the men I had discovered, and he
never paid me a penny for my work, which had kept me busy most of the time
for a week.)
     The Fascisti patrolling the railway were delightful.  They had all the
picturesqueness of opera brigands.  They were armed with a most
miscellaneous assortment of weapons.  They had the irregular discipline of
banditti, which of course they, in fact, were.
     My English friends had anticipated the success of the movement to
follow naturally upon the forthcoming election.  Mussolini would not accept
power, they told me, even if it were offered.  He had too much sense.  I
was consequently amazed to hear of the coup d'‚tat.  Rome was wild with
enthusiasm.  The Fascisti swarmed all over the city.  I thought their
behaviour admirable.  They policed the towns and suppressed any attempted
breach of the peace with the utmost efficiency; but for all that my first
doubts disturbed my pleasure in the victory.  I thought Mussolini was
acting rashly in overthrowing the constitutions.  Not only was a reaction
certain to follow, as always when success is not the final flowering of
regular growth, but I foresaw that Mussolini would be obliged to play
politics just as fatally as his predecessors in order to survive the first
few crises of his government.
     My apprehension has proved only too true.  Almost at once, he had to

{911}





















sell his soul to the Vatican in whom a real statesman would have recognized
his most dangerous foe.  Like the devil, Rome takes care that its part,
however fair it seems on the surface, really involves the giving of nothing
and the again of all.  During the winter I heard nothing from the outer
world, but when I went to Naples in April I found that my worst
anticipations had been exceeded.  The price of power had proved exorbitant.
Mussolini was bankrupt.  He had been compelled to purchase papal support by
attempting to re-establish the darkest hour of the Dark Ages.  Superstition
and priestcraft were the real masters.  It could not endure.  A country
cannot wipe out the evolution of a thousand years without becoming an
op‚rabouffe absurdity.  I began immediately to write epigrams against
Mussolini, and every fresh act of farcical folly and blustering braggadocio
furnished me with fresh facts for the fires of my wrath.  My own personal
experience of this farcical despotism, though characteristically
ridiculous, did not increase my indignation or contempt.  There was no lack
of much better material.
     I spent three days in Rome, observing the course of events.
Everything passed off quietly, so I wandered on to Cefalu.  My troubles
began almost at once owing to the three men I had trusted breaking their
word a above narrated.  In all other ways, things were in fine shape.  I
settled down to dictate these memoirs with my usual energy.  The Ape and
Jane took turns to take down my story and to type it out.  On November 26th
further help arrived.  With great kindness Robinson Smith had lent Raoul
enough money to take the journey.  Both he and Betty were still suffering
from the remains of septic sore throats and general cachexy, but within a
month they both recovered their health.
     At first Betty moped.  She craved the excitement of being mauled about
in boozing dens by tipsy vagabonds.  But the clean living and atmosphere of
love and happiness gradually weaned her from this artificial appetite.  She
became a gay and careless child finding pleasure in every detail of
everyday life.  She went about singing.  On increasingly rare occasions she
would suddenly relapse into her old self and feel wretched for a few hours.
I expected this, of course, and watched for the first symptoms.  It was
easy enough to comfort her.  Unfortunately, she was not a wholly sane
individual.  The lesion in her brain gave rise to symptoms difficult to
control.  The complete disassociation of her consciousness may be
illustrated by such incidents as the following.
     One of her fixed ideas was that she was a miracle of modesty.  She
used to confide in one or another of us that she had never allowed anyone,
not even her husband, to see her naked.  This seemed strange in view of her
career as a model, and one day she brought out a fat package of photographs
of herself in the nude.  But this was in no sense a confession that she had
been

{912}





















telling us lies.  She maintained quite sincerely with the photographs under
her eyes that no one had ever seen her naked.  This incident is typical of
her.  Almost in the same breath, she would say that she had never known
happiness till she came to the abbey, and that she had been uniformly
wretched since her arrival.  She would boast of her superiority to sex, and
continue by complaining that her husband absorbed in his work was starving
her.  She would proceed to claim great credit for being faithful to him,
but we found out that she was carrying on any number of intrigues with the
young bloods of Cefalu.
     Raoul, on his part, amply justified my faith in his future.  A few
weeks' work enabled him to fill the gaps in his knowledge of Magick and to
unify its elements.  He showed an understanding of the subject which was
almost enough to satisfy the requirements of the Grade 8ø = 3ø.  I
admitted him as a probationer in the Order on the day of the solstice, and
he took the name A V D.  I advised him to repress any ambitions to pass
quickly to higher Grades and to concentrate on thoroughness.  With
admirable good sense, he agreed.  As evidence of his amazing genius for
Magick, let me mention that I showed him a thesis which had been sent me by
a member of the Order in support of his application for admission to the
Grade 7ø = 4ø, the highest of the Second Order, implying complete
knowledge of all matters magical, and command of all powers.  Frater A V D
wrote a criticism of this thesis to which I could find no error of any
kind.  There are not alive a dozen men today who could do as well.
     In practical Magick, he showed promise of the same order, though, of
course, not having previously attempted any work of the kind, he had much
to learn.  Nevertheless, he progressed with astonishing rapidity.  Within a
fortnight, he was able to perform the Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram
sufficiently well to produce unmistakable modulations of the Astral Light.
He acquired the faculty of visions in astonishing perfection from the very
first.  The usual preliminary practice on unimportant explorations was
unnecessary.  In January I gave him a talisman symbolizing the alchemical
mystery of V.I.T.R.I.O.L  He travelled straight through to the
corresponding plane of the Astral, and entered into relation at once with
an intelligence who gave his name Neral, who demonstrated his authenticity
and authority in the approved manner by means of letters and numbers, but
also by straightforward statements which had no meaning for Raoul but which
I recognized as correct expositions.








{913}






















                              96


     To turn to other matters.  At the end of November I received a
telegram from Hammond which I took as a sort of Joke.  He said:

     English press states you are guilty of sending girls on streets in
     Palermo or Naples and that you served prison sentence in America for
     procuration tone(?) "ans" (answer) "per imperative pire" (wire
     immediately).
                                     (Signed) HAMMOND.

      I replied "Allegations utterly absurd."  My only annoyance was having
to pay for the telegram.  Presently copies of the Sunday papers for
November 28th arrived.  I read them with tireless amusement.  I had read in
my time a great deal of utter balderdash, but nothing quite so
comprehensively ridiculous.  It gave me the greatest joy to notice that
practically every single detail was false.  There was, for instance, a
description of the abbey, without a single failure to misstate the facts.
If a thing was white, they called it red, if square, circular, if stone,
brick; and so for everything.
     I saw no reason for taking any action.  I was content to enjoy the
absurdity and profit by the publicity.  Unfortunately the sense of humour
is rare in England.  My friends wanted me to prosecute the paper for
criminal libel, which was all very well, except that I had not enough money
to get to Naples, much less London, to say nothing of the costs of an
action against a corporation backed by millions and the influence of its
coroneted proprietor.  Five thousand pounds would not have given me a dog's
chance.  Incidentally, there was internal evidence in the article that they
had not taken the risk of printing it without making sure that I was not in
a position to prosecute.
     In earlier chapters, I have given my views with regard to libel
actions in general; I should refuse to fight in any circumstances for the
simple reason that I cannot waste my time on anything of the kind.  I must
maintain my concentration upon creative work.  There is a further
objection, mixing oneself up with people of alien mentalities.
     The only misfortune in the matter was that my publishers reflected
that doing as they did a large business in bibles and similar pious
publications they could not profit by the publicity as their clear duty was
to do.  They professed all sympathy with my position, but insisted on some
sort of vindication before proceeding to carry out their contracts.  I find
their attitude inexcusable.  They live in a country which boasts of
sportsmanship and fair play as

{914}



















their copyright, but refuse to apply their principles, to say nothing of
elementary justice, to cases which involve the suspicion of sexual
irregularity.  The accusation is sufficient.  Even a successful public
defence does not clear the character of the person attacked.  It is
notorious that most exculpations of this sort are the result of compromise
or the payment of blackmail and it is known universally assumed that
everyone is guilty of the offences of which they know themselves at least
potentially capable and whose commission is a function of opportunity and
moral courage.  The sense of sin assures the English that all men alike are
inevitably transgressors.
     What struck us as the best joke in the whole article was the
description of the abbey as a focus of all possible vices.  We were all
drug fiends devoting ourselves uninterruptedly to indulgence in all
conceivable sexual abominations.  Our morality compared favourably with
that of the strictest puritan.  The only irregularity that had ever
occurred at any time was intercourse between unmarried people, which is,
after all, universal in good society, and in our case was untainted by any
objectionable features apart from the question of formality.  I fail to
understand why it should be considered excusable to seduce a woman and
leave her to shift for herself, while if one receives her as a permanent
friend and cares for her well-being long after the liaison had lapsed one
should be considered a scoundrel.  The idea seems to be that it is immoral
to prevent love resulting in every kind of ill-will and misfortune.  O
fools and blind, not content with inventing a sin, you insist on the fears
and pains which haunt the nightmares of superstitious slaves.
     By this particular period, our conduct was so moral by the strictest
standards that it would not be matched by any community of equal numbers in
the world.  We were all working so hard, to say nothing of having so little
to eat, that we had neither time nor need to think of sex at all.  The one
exception was Betty and her actions did not affect the abbey.  She had to
go outside for sympathy in such affairs.
     Two events of far-reaching influence upon the course of events
occurred about the New Year.  I received a long cable from my old friend
Bill Seabrook asking me for photographs and other material to assist him in
composing a serial on the subject of myself, opinions and adventures.  He
hoped to syndicate this widely throughout America by means of simultaneous
publication in a large number of Sunday papers.  The plan prospered.  He
was naturally hampered by having to consider his public.  The most trivial
and commonplace incident must be cooked up with all possible spice of
sensationalism.  When the facts fail they must be filled up with fiction,
and where they obstructed his wild career, they must be distorted into
fantastic form.  He did his work well on the whole.  He was as fair as his
circumstances permitted and in my judgment the ultimate effect of his hotel
polish mixed fact and fable will be to familiarize the American public with
my name and interest

{915}



















them in my career sufficiently to induce the few intelligent individuals
who have read it to inquire independently into the facts of the case.  The
strong point of my position is that there is nothing in my life of which I
need be ashamed.  Inquiry must inevitably result in clearing my character,
and any person whose attitude is worth a moment's consideration should
experience a reaction of indignation and disgust.   The stench of the
cesspool of calumny will offend his nostrils and he will insist on
restoring equilibrium by long reviving inhalations of the perfume of my
personality.
     The other event was that a seed which had long slept in darkness
suddenly shot up into the light.  My proposal that Sullivan should devote
his mathematical abilities to demonstrating the sublimity of the origin of
"The Book of the Law" having failed, I bethought me of Norman Mudd.  Since
the skirmish at Cambridge, he had sunk below the horizon, having emigrated
to the most barbarous and benighted realms of perdition; he had in fact
become lecturer in applied mathematics at Grey University College,
Bloemfontein.  All these years, his conscience had never ceased to accuse
him in respect of his conduct at Cambridge.  He thought of it as the "great
betrayal".
     For my part, I find every excuse for him.  He was hardly more than a
boy, without resources, friends or influence.  Against him were arrayed the
entrenched forces of authority.  Their power was arbitrary and extended for
all practical purposes to life and death!  Stripped of his scholarship and
expelled from the university at the most critical moment of his career, he
would have found himself almost as desperately situated as a tramp with a
bad record thrown out of work on to the Embankment.  Yet so conscious of
their guilt were his oppressors that they feared to face the consequences
of any such action and they therefore assailed him in various underhand
ways; even trying to induce his father to put pressure upon him by
appealing to his filial instincts and begging him not to destroy the hope
of his family.
     I cannot blame him for pretending to yield and proceeding as before to
defy them by his actions.  None the less, the Lords of Initiation exacted
the penalty of surrender.  Shame dogged him by day and haunted him by
night; in 1919, he could not stand it any longer and went to England to
find me.  Having heard I was in America, no one knew exactly where, he
crossed the Atlantic and ultimately discovered Frater Achad who admitted
him as a probationer of the Order with the motto "Omnia Pro Veritate".  It
seems strange that he missed finding me.  Once again I perceived the design
of the gods.  The time was not ripe.
     He wrote me a letter which I answered at once, but I failed to elicit
further communication.  However, when Sullivan broke down at the first
ordeal, I said to myself, "Why, of course, Norman Mudd is the man for the
job."  I wrote immediately, asking him to work with me on the demonstration
indicated above.  He did not answer.  Thinking my letter might have failed

{916}



















to reach him, I wrote again sometime later with similar fortune.  About
Christmas 1922, his problem reached a crisis.  His obstinate resistance
collapsed.  He opened and read my letters, which he had put aside till
then, being instinctively aware that if he read them he would be unable to
withstand the call of his own soul to be true to himself and take the
consequence.  His way became suddenly clear.  He was on this earth with one
object and one object only; he must devote his energies exclusively to the
welfare of mankind; in other words, to establishing the Law of Thelema.  He
cabled and wrote, putting himself entirely at my disposal.  I accepted and
told him to come straight to Cefalu and work with me.  He did so, arriving
on April 20th, and has since that time been exclusively occupied in
collaboration in the Great Work.
     These encouragements where balanced by fresh tribulations.  The
enemies of mankind, seeing that despite everything my work was nearing
manifest success, redoubled their malice.
     Both Raoul and I began to have attacks of rather inexplicable illness
which increased in frequency and severity, until we were both almost
continuously ill.  My trouble was a strange fever --- Mediterranean fever,
I finally concluded.  The temperature never reached any great height, but
quinine had no effect.  The local doctor diagnosed it as an infection of
the liver and spleen, but confessed that he had no idea of what could have
caused it.  I grew steadily worse and at one time, for a few days, my
condition caused some alarm.  Not until early in April was I well enough to
walk.  But on the thirteenth I felt fit enough to go to Naples with the
idea of convalescing in favourable circumstances, and buying a few things
which the imminent arrival of Frater O. P. V. made requisite.
     Raoul was less unlucky.  How could the gods help loving him, who in so
many ways partook of their pure nature.  At first he suffered mostly from a
recurrence of malaria of many years' standing.  The attacks were hard to
throw off, owning to his accident at Oxford already described.  Various
complications ensued.  We called in the doctor at the first sign of any
symptoms with which we were not familiar and able to deal.  For some time
he got neither better nor worse, but the, without warning, developed acute
infectious enteritis.  The doctor, summoned in all haste, did what he
could, but his answer told me at a glance that he expected a fatal issue.
I wrote out a telegram informing his parents so that they might come if
they thought fit.  Betty offered to take it to the office, but instead of
returning, collapsed hysterically in the street before sending it off.  It
was a common trick of hers to excite sympathy, attract notice or annoy her
husband if he happened to say or do anything which she disliked.  In her
absence, Raoul developed paralysis of the heart and died at once without
fear or pain.  It was as if a man, tired of staying indoors, had gone out
for a walk.  At the first appearance of

{917}





















symptoms which alarmed me as to the immediate issue, I dressed myself, ill
as I was, and hurried to bring the doctor.  Alostrael, being already ready
to go out, had gone on ahead.  But even in those few minutes matters had
gone so far that I felt sure he was already dead.  It was all so quiet that
certainly on the point was hardly possible.  When we returned with the
doctor and Betty, all doubt was at an end.
     The usual arrangements were made and on the following day I conducted
the burial service according to the ritual of the Order; improvised and
simple as the ceremony was, its dignity and sublimity were not unworthy of
our brother.  My duty done, I surrendered to my own bodily assailants.  I
had probably done myself harm, both by going into Cefalu and by presiding
at the obsequies.  Till then I had been able to get out of bed and crawl
about for an hour or two every day.  It was many weeks before I managed to
leave my bed even to walk on somebody's shoulder to another mattress and
drink in the early spring sunlight.
     Except for Betty, whose ideas of nursing were restricted to an
alternation of lamentation, savage abuse of a patient, petulant complaints
about his selfishness in not looking after her instead of her looking after
him, and attempts to obtain restitutions of conjugal rights, Raoul had been
tended with all possible care.  In fact, during the absence of Betty, owing
to circumstances to be described shortly, he picked up surprisingly and I
feel pretty sure that if she had not come back he would be alive today.
The Ape and Jane Wolfe are the best nurses I ever struck.  They do
everything just right.  I never had to ask for anything I wanted, they had
foreseen the need and supplied it in advance.  They never showed the
faintest sign of fatigue and anxiety, which they must have felt.  The
doctor spared no pains to study my complaint, but he confessed frankly that
it puzzled him.  It was common enough, he said, in Sicily; one could not
say what caused the mischief or what its nature really was, and there was
certainly no definite cure.  All one could do was to treat the symptoms
empirically.  So I think he should not receive more than ten to fifteen per
cent. of the blame attached to my survival; the balance must be borne as
best they can by my nurses, and in the background, Sister Cypris,
invisible, but indefatigable in seeing that nothing went wrong.
     I must now explain the incident which let to Betty's temporary absence
from the abbey from the Sunday evening before the Friday of her husband's
death, till the following day.  It is an absolute rule of the abbey not to
attack people behind their backs.  Betty had taken a frantic dislike to
Sister Cypris and pestered us with complaints, not of anything definite
that she did, but on general grounds.  I happened to hear an outburst of
this sort and put my foot down at once.  I told Betty that we all agreed
with her on many points, but it was none of our business.  "If you must
abuse anyone, do it to their faces as you see us all do every day, and no
ill feeling comes of it."

{918}




















     Betty said, "But she's breaking the rules of the abbey."
     I replied, "Quite true, we've been getting slack.  We'll start right
now to be stricter."
     Now one of the most important rules is that no newspaper is allowed,
unless it bears directly on some point of the work.  The reason, of course,
is that having a library of first-class books we should not spoil our
appetites by eating between meals, especially the dirt of the streets.  It
chanced that the very next day a bundle of rubbish was sent to Raoul.  Here
was the very chance to be strict.  Betty was reminded that newspapers were
forbidden; she flew into a fury --- she would leave the abbey instantly
unless allowed to read them.  I agreed.  She was free to stay or to go but
while she was there the rules were the rules, and she was the only person
who had objected to them being relaxed.  She flew into a fury even more
furious.  Heedless of Raoul's pitiful appeals to control herself, she flung
a glass at my head and attacked me like a maniac.  I tried to soothe her
and abate her violence.  Poor Raoul, weak as he was, got up and held her
and begged her to be quiet.  At last she calmed down, but the room was a
wreck.  It was imperative to move Raoul to proper surroundings and prevent
his being disturbed and neglected by the tantrums of the termagant.  We
carried him into my own room and made him comfortable.  Betty continued to
conduct the concert in the absence of an audience, so she finally announced
her intention to go.  Both Raoul and Alostrael begged her to be sensible,
but off she went to the hotel where she was at once consoled by a series of
admirers.  She wrote a string of lies to the British consul in Palermo, but
the next morning came up to the abbey on receipt of a note from Raoul,
saying that he hoped she would return and behave decently, but if not, to
send for her effects and go back to London for good.  I offered to pay her
fare if necessary.  She came back on condition of promising amendment,
writing to the consul to ignore her letter as mere hysteria and admitting
the entire falsehood of its contents.  This letter was countersigned by
Raoul.  She also singed a statement of the whole episode drawn up by us and
signed.  She justified our faith in her better nature and gave us no
further trouble as long as she remained with us.
     After Raoul's death, she came to me for comfort and I am glad to think
that I helped her through the worst.  It was arranged for her to return to
England.  Raoul's parents cabled and wrote, asking us to take various
steps, and pledging themselves to repayment.  It is hard to believe that
any human beings should act as they did; repudiating all liabilities.  They
wouldn't pay to have their son decently buried --- not they.
     Every day Betty seemed to grow fonder of us all.  We told her, of
course, that she was welcome to stay if she chose, and it seems hard to
design a reason for her decision to leave.  But on her arrival in England
trouble began.

{919}





















The reporters of the gutter press got after her, made her drunk and
prompted her to give them a sensation story which was on long series of
falsehoods.  The rabble resumed their chorus of calumny.  They completely
lost touch with reason.  Each fresh article was crazier than the last.  I
was accused of the most fantastic crimes up to cannibalism.  Their
principal liar was poor Dartnell, but he was ably assisted by some Dutch
interpreter whose name I had never heard.  He pretended to know me well. In
one article, he let himself go about my cynical audacity in returning to
London.  He had seen me in Holborn, a decrept derelict, hardly able to
walk.  This was fine!  My only difficulty in believing everything he said
was that at the time of my visit to London I was lying ill at Cefalu.
     In due course, Frater O. P. V. arrived at the abbey and on his heels
two Oxford men: Pinney and Bosanquet.  We put them up for three nights.
They were flabbergasted to find us perfectly normal decent people.  They
were keen rock climbers.  I was too ill to join them, but I dragged myself
to the foot of the crags and showed them the two problems which I had not
carred to attempt without a trustworthy companion.  These were the outside
way up the Cavern Pitch in Deep Gill and the Deep Gill pillar.  They
succeeded in climbing both, to my great joy.  The morning after their
arrival, I was summoned to the police, who showed me an order from the
Minister of the Interior expelling me from Italy.  No reason was given, no
accusation made.  The policy of backstairs intrigue and foul strokes,
whenever they felt sure that I could not defend myself or hit back  was
still the order of the day.  The commissary of Police was staggered by the
smiling calm with which I received this stab in the back.  I did not even
protest or ask for the reason of the outrage.  I courteously requested a
week's grace to arrange my affairs, which he, with equal politeness,
granted.  He tried one dirty police trick.  These people seemed unable to
help themselves.  He tried to persuade me that the order included the whole
community.
     The injustice and tyranny of this order excited the utmost sympathy
and indignation in our guests, who promised to do all they could to secure
fair treatment.  My behaviour in this ordeal aroused their admiration.  It
became abundantly manifest that my conscience was clear.  Such calm
courage, not only on my part, but on that of the others, who were really
much more deeply injured than I was myself, showed that we possessed the
secret of sailing triumphantly above the clouds of circumstances in the
pure air of freedom in the sunlight of happiness.
     I left O. P. V. in full charge of the business of the abbey.  Despite
my world fortitude, I was near a physical breakdown, and at Palermo seemed
so ill that the Ape decided to accompany me to Tunis.  We reached our City
of Refuge on May 2nd and I knew that the spirit of liberty still lived and
laughed under the banner of France.

{920}





















     During the first weeks of my illness, I had hung on grimly to the
preparation of these memoirs, but the weak flesh had overcome the willing
spirit from the time of Raoul's death to the end of March.  We now tackled
it with renewed energy and, for the sake of fresh air and quiet, left the
city for La Marsa, where we stayed at Au Souffle du Zephir working day and
night, so far as my health permitted, for nearly two months, when O. P. V.
joined me, while Alostrael returned to Cefalu for a rest.  I had once more
worked her beyond her strength.
     We were joined shortly afterwards by Eddie Saayman, an old pupil of
Frater O. P. V.'s in Bloemfontein, and now a mathematical scholar at New
College, Oxford, one of the most brilliant students in the university.  He
became interested in the mathematical theorems of "The Book of the Law",
which he thought, no less than myself and O. P. V., capable of
revolutionizing mathematical ideas and marking a new epoch in that science.
We agreed that to demonstrate this would prove that the author of "The Book"
"of the Law" was an intelligence beyond any hitherto known.  He therefore
decided to write a thesis on this subject for a fellowship of his college.
     Early in August, I returned to the city for a little Magical
Retirement of about a fortnight, at the conclusion of which Alostrael
rejoined us in Tunis where I dictate these actual words.
     I must now give a short summary of my personal spiritual work during
the three years of my residence in Cefalu.  The hopelessness of getting
anything published operated to discourage me from producing formally
perfect work.  I wrote a considerable number of poems and short stories,
but found myself horribly hampered by the overwhelming abundance of
creative ideas.  I need a staff of at least a dozen colleagues and
secretaries to keep up with my work, and all the time there is the
subconscious worry about the possibility of carrying on.
     Since 1909, it has become constantly more difficult to keep afloat.
The gods have taught me to trust them absolutely to provide me with
everything I really need for my work, as opposed to my own ideas on the
subject.  Ye despite this long experience of being saved from smash at the
critical moment, almost always through some channel which I had no reason
to expect, I have not succeeded in entirely dismissing doubt from my mind
on these constantly recurring occasions when there were no funds in hand
and no rational expectation of receiving any.  That is, of course, when the
current of creative energy is checked so that my mind, temporarily
exhausted, becomes the prey of apprehension.  Yet even so I find myself
better able, as every year passes, to set my heel on the serpent of worry.
Only in moments of complete mental and spiritual collapse from the
overstrain of prolonged effort does my faith falter for a few hours.
Perhaps the gods intend to insist on my acquiring the power to triumph,
even at such moments, over adversity.  The serpent's

{921}





















fangs will fix themselves in my heel if it share the vulnerability of the
heel of Achilles.  It is not enough to dip the Magus in the Styx, he must
be thrown in left to sink or swim.
     In one way or another, for all that, I achieved an enormous amount of
work in the three years.  But my most important labours have been
definitely magical.  I practically re-wrote the third part of "Book Four".  I
showed the manuscripts to Soror Rhodon (Mary Butts) and asked her to
criticize it thoroughly.  I am extremely grateful to her for her help,
especially in indicating a large number of subjects which I had no
discussed.  At her suggestion, I wrote essay upon essay to cover every
phase of the subject.  The result has been the expansion of the manuscript
into a vast volume, a complete treatise upon the theory and practice of
Magick, without any omissions.  I further added appendices, the first
giving an account of the system of initiation of the A.'. A.'..  Next
comes a curriculum of the classics of Magick and mysticism.  Thirdly, I
illustrate the text of the treatise by giving actual example of ritual.
Fourthly, I propose to reprint the more important books of instruction of
the A.'. A.'. from "The Equinox"; and finally, I crown the work by "Liber"
"Samekh", the operation of the Sacred Magick of the Attainment of the
Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, as proved effective
in my own experience, and confirmed by that of Frater Progradior for whose
benefit I set it forth in writing.
     More important still, I applied the formula of "The Book of the Law" to
the solution of the classical antinomies of philosophy.  I resolved such
triads as being, not-being and becoming into a unity.  I identified free
will with destiny.  I proved that action was impotent and non-action
omnipotent.  As I went on, new problems constantly presented themselves,
and each one in its turn yielded to the Law of Thelema.  I wrote all these
theorems in my Magical Record.  I was greatly assisted in all this work by
the constant study of the work of Einstein, Whitehead, Russell, Eddington
and Henri Poincar‚, whom Sullivan had recommended to me.  They seemed to be
on the very brink of discovering those truths which "The Book of the Law"
concealed and revealed.  Their passages directed my attention to "The Book"
"of the Law".  Obscure passages in the text became clear when interpreted as
solving the problem of modern higher mathematics.
     From this huge mass of work I extracted the quintessence and
transferred it to my New Comment upon "The Book of the Law".  This is now an
extensive work, and I have not yet succeeded in making a systematic study
of the technical Cabbalistic proofs of those based on the facts of
experience which demonstrate that Aiwass is an intelligence of an order
altogether superior to that of man.  The proof of his existence is
therefore the proof of the postulate of all religion, that such beings
actually exist, and that communication

{922}





















with them is a practical possibility.  Thus, apart from the stupendous
value of "The Book of the Law" itself, it opens up a path of progress to
mankind which should eventually enable the race to strike off the fetters
of mortality and transcend the limitations of its entanglement with earth.
     I continued my researches in many other lines of Magick, from the
preparation of a new edition of "Liber 777" with an elaborate explanation of
each column and a further analysis of the "Yi King", to such matters as the
critical observation of success in the Operation of the IXø O.T.O.
     I have written a very full comment on "The Book of the Heart Girt with"
"a Serpent", which as I proceeded manifested innumerable mysteries of
transcendent importance which I had till then never suspected to inform the
text.
     I also began an examination of "the Golden Verses of Pythagoras".  I was
struck by the fact that it was incumbent on disciples to commit them to
memory and repeat them daily.  From this I deduced that the somewhat
shallow meaning of their injunctions concealed the heart of the initiated
doctrine.  This speculation was confirmed by research.  For instance, the
phrase "Honour the gods" which "needs no ghost come from the grave to tell
us" is proper, conceals a magical injunction of the first importance.
"Tima" honour etymologically means "Estimate" or "calculate".  The
instruction thus is to make a scientific investigation of the formulae of
the various gods, i.e., to discover the laws which express their energies,
exactly as in physics to honour gravitation is senseless, but we may
increase our control of nature by inquiry into its nature and action.  The
more I studied these verses, the more tremendous seemed their import and
should I succeed in completing my translation and commentary, the long lost
secret of Pythagoras should be brought to light and Greek philosophy assume
an aspect hitherto hidden which must revolutionize our ideas of the ancient
wisdom.
     The true significance of the Atus of Tahuti, or Tarot Trumps, also
awaits full understanding.  I have satisfied myself that these twenty-two
cards compose a complete system of hieroglyphs representing the total
energies of the universe.  In the case of some cards, I have succeeded in
restoring the original form and giving a complete account of their meaning.
Others, however, I understand imperfectly, and of some few I have at
present obtained no more than a general idea.
     It is heartbreaking to have to write on this matter, "So much to do,
so little done."  I am overwhelmed by the multiplicity of urgent work.  I
need the co-operation of a whole cohort of specialists and my helplessness
lies heavy on my heart, yet the word which I uttered at my first
initiation, "Perdurabo", still echoes in eternity.  What may befall I know
not, and I have almost ceased to care.  It is enough that I should press
towards the mark of my high calling, secure in the magical virtue of my
oath, "I shall endure unto the End."

                             -oOo-

WEH note:  Crowley's writing ends here, but the following later writing by
Jane Wolfe is of interest in that it relates to the events of this final
chapter:

    "A villifying report of what took place at the time of the death of
Raoul Loveday, at the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu, having come to my
attention, leads me to write a brief account of that unhappy event, as I
was not only there during Raoul's brief sojourn at the Abbey, but I took
care of him on his deathbed.
     "He arrived in Cefalu from London late in November, or early December,
1922, pale and aenemic, and had just recovered from a rather severe septic
throat.






     "The weather at the time was sunshiny and warm.  Raoul basked in this
sunshine, spent much time out of doors, and soon showed signs of
improvement.
     "By January he was taking long walks, and one one of these occasions,
being thirsty, drank water from a small stream which was 'polutted', and
was therefore taboo.  No one round about touched this water, and Raoul had
been cautioned about it, but forgot it, no doubt, at the time of his
thirst.
     "A diarrhea set in, which after 10 or 12 days, became suddenly acute
on the day of his death, causing a sloughing off of the mucous membrances
of the intestines.
     "During this period he had been under medical care, but without avail.
     "That ceremonies of a sensational or ridiculous character were
performed during the passing, is a part of the desire of some people to
defile whatever they touch.
     "As a matter of fact, no ceremonies of any nature took place during
his illness, or at the time of his death.

                      (signed) Jane Wolfe