Confessions of Aleister Crowley

482 My other climbing friends, with hardly an exception, came to me and warned me to "have nothing to do with that scoundrel Eckenstein". "Who is he anyhow? A dirty East End Jew." (I quote Mr Morley Roberts, the cobbler of trashy novelettes, who said this to me at Zermatt.) Furthermore, Eckenstein had done something in India so bad that nobody could even guess what it was! But that Unspeakable Infamy was the real reason of his quitting the Conway expedition in 1892, and it was generally supposed that the murder of several natives, in cold blood, was one of the less unmentionable ingredients. That was rather a hard test of comradeship, I think. But I knew my Eckenstein and I disdained to make investigations. I went on climbing with him as if the pompous humbugs of the English Alpine Club had never spoken. By paying guides to haul one over rocks like luggage, one can get a reputation --- in England --- as a hardy mountaineer. The envious snarls of such craven impostors did not disturb me. Yet there was something in it, too! There was enough for Eckenstein to be arrested in India by a "superior person" whose Christian names were George Nathaniel. I never knew the truth of the business; and Eckenstein always {760} 1. This paper was first drafted in March 1920 e.v. I revised it finally in January 1922 e.v. in the interval Eckenstein had died. I prefer to leave the passages which relate to him as they stand. His death adds grief to my thoughts of him; nothing can add to the love I have always had for him, or the honour in which I have always held him. protested that he did not know it himself. It didn't matter much then; it doesn't matter at all now. But I want to recall to Eckenstein that I stood pat! I did not ask him to vindicate himself. I do not empanel a jury of jackals to try a lion. I do not believe that Eckenstein was in full possession of his senses when he signed that silly letter. POSTSCRIPTUM: New Year, 1922; two years less two months since I wrote this paper. I "got it off my chest"; next day I had relapsed into my normal indifference to human imbecility. I never so much as troubled to revise it until yesterday. Then I rescued it from its dusty pigeon-hole simply because I heard from my representative in London that my supposed pro-Germanism was a bar to the recognition of my work in England. I care nothing for public opinion. I care nothing for fame or success. I am perfectly happy in my retirement. The full leisure to work, the freedom from all interruption, the absence of temptations to distraction: Cefalu realizes my idea of heaven. But I am pledged to give my life to the establishment of the Law of Thelema: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." So, if the operations on behalf of that Law are being tampered by the insensate belief that I ever was, am, or ever could be, disloyal to my country, which I love with an unreasoning passion, altogether beyond the interference of my intellectual opinions, I am willing to make this public statement as to what I did in the war, and why I did it. My attitude is unaltered by time. I still think the English pot as black as the German kettle, and I am still willing to die in defence of the pot. Mine is the loyalty of Bill Sikes' dog; you can't make me believe that my master is an injured innocent; and the fact that he starves and beats me doesn't alter the fact that I am his dog, and I love him. Let the publication of this paper make clear my integrity! Let the British public come to honour me for my stubborn endurance of the shameful martyrdom, still cruel and still dear. {761}