Confessions of Aleister Crowley

580 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.