Confessions of Aleister Crowley

397 Equinox on proper business lines. Negotiations were still in progress when I left London towards the end of 1909 for Algeria. What was my amazement on my return to find that he had persuaded the people in charge that he had authority to act for me. They explained that he had come round and argued that he was going to be a director of the proposed company and therefore had power to conduct the business. The youth indubitably possessed the virtue of doing nothing by halves. He forged my name to endorse cheques payable to me, cashed them and enjoyed the proceeds. I gasped. I liked the man and had no quarrel with him, but I could not exactly pretend not to notice incidents of this kind. I tackled him about it. He played the innocent and really he was fundamentally such a half-witted creature that I could not be angry. Unfortunately, there was something worse --- a matter that touched my honour. He had advertised Liber 777 and stated as an inducement to purchasers that less than one hundred copies remained for sale. That was a lie and I could not brook the association of my name with the shadow of a false pretence. But the mischief was done. The only way out was to make the statement true, which was done by his purchasing the number of copies necessary to reduce my stock to ninety. He refused to understand my objections to his pastime of testing the intelligence of bank clerks in the matter of judging whether his imitation of my endorsement would pass muster. He indignantly withdrew from the proposed company and I saw him no more. Not till long after did I discover that all this time while he was living on my bounty he had indefatigably intrigued against me. For insidious cunning he was unrivalled. He had insinuated a thousand malignant falsehoods about me, to the ears of my closest friends without their even suspecting his intention to injure me. In this way he had alienated several of my nearest and {634} dearest colleagues and his culminating triumph was that he succeeded in leading Fuller by the nose through a tortuous channel of dark devices to the gulf of a complete rupture. Fuller had begun to behave in a totally unintelligible way. It was all so subtle that I could not put my finger on a single incident. It was a mere instinct that something was wrong. The climax came after Jones vs The Looking Glass. Fuller had urged me to take action myself. When the verdict justified my judgment. Fuller hinted that he could not afford to be openly associated with The Equinox. He also tried to interfere with my conduct of the magazine and made it a condition of his continuing with The Temple of Solomon the King that I should surrender my control. I saw that he had a swelled head and determined to show him that he was not indispensable. I quietly dropped the subject and wrote the section in number five myself. Hoping this demonstration had reduced the inflammation I resumed the discussion and we had practically come to an agreement when to my breathless amazement he fired pointblank at my head a document in which he agreed to continue his co-operation on condition that I refrain from mentioning his name in public or private under penalty of paying him a hundred pounds for each such offence. I sat down and poured in a broadside at close quarters. "My dear man," I said in effect, "do recover your sense of proportion, to say nothing of your sense of humour. Your contribution, indeed! I can do in two days what takes you six months, and my real reason for ever printing your work at all is my friendship for you. I wanted to give you a leg up the literary ladder. I have taken endless pain to teach you the first principles of writing. When I met you, you were not so much as a fifth-rate journalist, and now you can write quite good prose with no more than my blue pencil through two out of every three adjectives, and five out of every six commas. Another three years with me and I will make you a master, but please don't think that either I or the Work depend on you, any more than J.P.Morgan depends on his favourite clerk." To return, however, to the rituals. These seven were really seven acts of one play, for their order was necessary. The plot, briefly summarized, is this: