Morton House,
                                                The Mall,
                                                Chiswick

                                                May 10th, 1939

       Dear Aleister,

           Your secretary forgot to send the letter you wrote to me & she 
       has rung me up to read it to me. I am, also, sorry that I have to 
       write plainly to you, because I enjoy our friendship & your 
       instruction very much, but it is entirely spoilt by your attempts 
       to use me as your bank & financial adviser. I have frequently told 
       you that I have nothing, but a weekly allowance, & that out of it I 
       have given you all I can spare. 
           If you are expecting the Tarot to be a means of getting money, 
       or my position as useful for pushing it--I am sorry I am not the 
       right vehicle for such an enterprise as I intend to remain 
       anonymous when the cards are shown as I dislike any notoriety. 
           Your books are wonderful but you must not expect the reading or 
       money making world to buy them as they don't want to think & ...

       [remainder missing, possibly not copied from collection]








                                                Monday, Sept. 18th [1939]

       Dear Aleister,

           Will you go to Le Chatier Sarve in St James Street and ask them 
       if they can mount my drawings in the same way as the ones you have 
       as a sample. If it would not bother you perhaps you could take one 
       with you. Also please ask the price. I have thought of Green & 
       Stone but they haven't any good assistants now & can't be trusted. 
       There was a very good man on the left going down Pelham Street, 
       small shop with a few frames hanging up & if he still exists he did 
       some fine framing & mounting for Nick & was not too dear, but I 
       don't remember his name. The Rowley Gallery in Church Street, 
       Notting Hill Gate can do the work but they are fussy & very 
       opinionated. I am particularly anxious to get the drawings covered 
       with a non inflammable talc of which the departed assistant at 
       Gates had the name. I wonder if you could extort from Blow-Bubbles 
       what it was called.
           I do not find the names of the Cards in the Index you have sent 
       at all illuminating in fact it took me hours to sort which was 
       which. They are much too flamboyant, & I prefer the old names don't 
       you. I hate all those rushing words & feel I've alighted in 
       Taliesom. What am I to print in the surrounds, because I won't do 
       them wrong, it is very hard work.
           I have done the 10 of Swords & promptly Russia takes up arms. 
       Where are we going! You haven't sent me the notes on the Fool. Did 
       you no-tice. 
           Have you seen that all the Sephiroths in the Index are spelled 
       wrong, at least nearly all--an awful bother if they get printed 
       like that. Also I don't feel you have made it clear about Tzaddi--
       The Emperor. Can't you have a diagram? I have been reading your 
       book to Ann Christie in the evenings & altho she is very interested 
       she could not understand your book and I am not sure I did in the 
       end. It will be a point about which there will be the most argument. 
       Is there any reason for the 2 loops except secrecy? Surely! & if not 
       why not undo the loop & is the Emperor to be numbered 17 or IV or 4 
       or 17 ditto Star also Strength XI and Justice VIII. I expect I have 
       still got it all wrong but if I have, you must be clearer because I 
       am only just below sub-normal intelligence. A bientot

                                   Frieda Harris

       [P.S.] I can't go & see Fox owing to petrol ban, neither can he 
       come & see me & who is Miss ?Beddulph anyhow & where is she. I will 
       try & make you a beautiful diagram if you could make a rough

       [manuscript diagram]

       & I think we could have 4 & 17 on a swivel to twist 'round. Quite 
       amusing also the Sun could have the Zodiac pushed round.








                                        Rolling Stone Orchard
                                        Chipping Campden
                                        Glos

                                        Nov. 3rd, 1939

       Dear Aleister,

           The picture did not arrive because my friends at Woolstaplers 
       Hall were away & the house shut up & you know I have never lived 
       there, & when your letters don't arrive it is because they are away 
       & there is no one to take in letters. It would be much better to 
       write to the above address. The picture has arrived safely now. I 
       have written to Michael Juste. Steptoe must have finished more 
       photographs as he sent me the account.
           I think I have found someone to continue stretching the pictures 
       & mounting them at Leamington & am going to see him on Sunday I 
       hope. There is a lot of work to be done on those mounts. 
           I think it would be a good plan if you could arrange to come 
       here one day next week & see the Swords. I have a superstitious 
       horror of bringing them all unbalanced to London.
           As it is, we are driven mad with soldiers here & if I don't get 
       on with the Pantacles this will be a garrisson town (I know that is 
       incorrectly spelt but I have no dictionary & the longer I look at 
       it the more peculiar it looks).
           I find the pub "The Noel Arms" is quite nice. Would next 
       Tuesday suit you. There is a good train from Paddington 1.45 
       arriving Chipping Campden 4.24 & a station bus to bring you from 
       the station. You might like to stay Wednesday & return Thursday as 
       they tell me, the rooms are not available at the week-end. Please 
       let me know at once if this is possible for you--I shall hope you 
       will come as my guest. I will send ticket if I can.
           I only hope the Swords are alright for I can't do them again.
           I have followed your instructions with meticulous care.
           About yr curtains. The ones at Whiteleys are much too small. 
       Those windows are enormous. If you need them Mr Blanche tells me 
       she has seen some blankets which will look alright. I have used 
       them here instead of curtains & find them most cozy & look quite 
       nice. I do not want to buy curtains for that flat as I want to give 
       it up. 
           I am doing the King of Pantacles. I didn't like what I had 
       done. Someone has lent me a genuine flail--it is like this

       [manuscript drawing of flail]

       a lovely instrument of solid wood. Most difficult to manage.
           Why don't you like my egg question. Is it because you don't 
       know the answer? I think it is interesting because the living egg 
       must be charged with, let us call it, electric current to make it 
       move. To me it is a magical feat. I thought it would be to you. 
       There is no trick and it is the country people's method of testing 
       eggs here.

                                        Yours ever

                                        F. H.









       Dear Aleister Mohammed,

           Princess & Child doing well.
           I will try to answer your letter clearly.
           
           I. I have a diagram of the Twist of the Zodiac. Would you like 
       me to make a conventional diagram of your rough?

           II. Would you send your notes with a paper fastener {drawing] 
       not a clip [drawing] as the thing comes undone & I can't put the 
       papers in right order & get eyestrain?

           III. Alright about Hylton, have attended to it.

           IV. I sent that heading of the border as I was not certain it 
       was right. I am not sure what to do. I shall have to try again. Of 
       course I can devide Wands & Disks so that they look dqually & I 
       don't want a crowd of printing at the bottom but I will try out 
       what you suggest. "More work for the undertaker" says I.

           V. In reference to your books--I suppose you know that most of 
       them would be easier for a Beginner written in Sanscrit & that 
       anyone reading them would go off their heads. Therefore the Wise 
       ("like myself") take them in snappy bits & only when they are 
       feeling strong. Also they are very exciting & I can't live on hot 
       curry tho you can--I can't even remember what I meant by that Nanny 
       Nanny [?]. I'm glad I was unintelligible, such a change round for 
       you, & anyhow I don't care for just look at the stucco work you 
       have planned out for me--"Push the Cups deeper! Twist the whole 
       card round" Oh! but these things are all on 1 plane &, unless I 
       start applique or sculpture, it can't be begun. 
           
           However I knew we should have to do something, & as far as the 
       paper, the texture, the design, will endure I will do as you say. I 
       will also do a new Justice, damn her. Do you think there was ever 
       "a woman satisfied"? With what a smirk she would greet the dawn. 
       But, all the same, I want to finish all the experimental work 
       first, tho Mercury is yelling to re-enter the Womb & Incarnate with 
       his Companions. I mean to plod thro the Pantacles & the Universe, & 
       by that time, you'll be able to alter all the Cards & have them in 
       & out of costly frames & we will finish like Alice through the 
       Looking Glass by having the whole pack on our heads. Goodnight.
                         

                                             F. H.









                                        57, Petersham Road,
                                        Richmond, Surrey.

                                        19th December, 1939.

       Dear Frieda,

           Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
           
           Benediction arrived this morning arrived from Father Jackson. I 
       am very happy and grateful.
           I was going to send you a classic of purity, but I have not yet 
       been able to get the special copy that I had intended for you. I have 
       been terrifically worried. I have not had a word from Germer since 
       his letter of November 30th, and this is very unusual. Normally, I 
       hear at least once, more often twice a week. This has meant 
       continuous anxiety and frustration.
           My characteristic idiocy has just been giving another 
       demonstration. I have been wondering for a week why it hurt to 
       carry coal upstairs, and it only dawned upon me last night that it 
       was lumbago, so I then turned on the infra-red and it was all right 
       in half an hour. This is a very strange thing about me; something 
       goes wrong, which is perfectly familiar, and I know the remedy 
       quite well, and I am simply unable to put two and two together. I 
       don't know why that is. A very queer psychological kink.
           Now your letters received yesterday. Your paragraph 1. Yes, 
       please make a conventional diagram.
           Your paragraph 2. I cannot accept your terminology for either 
       of the unsatisfactory instruments occasionally employed for keeping 
       papers together. I have acted however, on the indications afforded 
       by your sketches. Freud would deduce a great deal from your 
       preference.
           Your paragraph 3. Thanks very much about Hylton.
           Your paragraph 4. The word "divide" has for many years been 
       years been used by myself in preference to what is no doubt the 
       correct expression "devide". I know of course that division can be 
       done in this lop-sided fashion, but I do not like the spoiling of 
       the winged globe in any case, an an even more serious objection is 
       that you are making particularly shadowy the one thing that should, 
       by rights, be the most clear.
           Your paragraph 5. You can't get out of it like that. I believe 
       the basis of the feeling is that there should be a special 
       prerogative to understand spiritual matters, a feeling of 
       heirship. The fact remains that you do not employ such arrogant 
       impertinence with regard to such subjects as logic and mathematics. 
       Bertrand Russell is certainly a thousand times more difficult than 
       ever I am, but you understand him better because you accept the 
       postulate, that subjects like these must be worked at, as with me 
       you are annoyed.
           My experience of satisfied women is that they do greet the dawn 
       with a smirk; if not the dawn, any time up to five o'clock in the 
       afternoon, and only when it wears off does one have to start all 
       over again.
           I have long foreseen the "Alice in Wonderland" conclusion of 
       our labours, but that if you remember was the signal for the 
       awakening to the beauty of life.
           I got the photographs with great joy. I do not remember the 
       colours of the Three of Swords, but the centre of the rose should 
       be deep crimson, and the veins of the petals black and very wavy. 
       Ten of Cups. This is admirable, but I can't tell much about the 
       background; it ought to look menacing. There is something very 
       sinister about this card. It suggests the morbid hunger which 
       springs from surfeit. The craving of a drug addict is the idea. At 
       the same time, of course, it is this final agony of descent into 
       illusion which renders necessary the completion of the circle by 
       awakening the Eld of the All-Father.
           These notes on Justice, or as we have preferred to call her 
       'Adjustment'. Please note this title. In reading through my 
       description of the card, I noticed a correction to be made, Phalax 
       should be Phallic. There are several mistakes in spelling and 
       punctuation, but no doubt you can put these right by your own 
       ingenium. I suppose I was in a very bad temper when I made my 
       criticism, but I do feel strongly that the plumes of Maat are too 
       insignificant, and the Dove and Raven look simply stuck on; nor do 
       I think that the tessellated pavement is quite right. The general 
       criticism is that the card is a little too cold; Liber is the sign 
       of autumn, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, close-bosomed 
       friend of the maturing sun. In your card you have got the idea of 
       balance static, whereas it ought to be dynamic. Nature is not the 
       grocer weighing out a pound of sugar; it is the compensation of 
       complicated rhythms. I should like you to feel that every 
       adjustment was a grande passion; compensation should be a festival, 
       not a clerk smugly pleased that his accounts are correct. It seems 
       to me that this doctrine is very important as a commentary on the 
       text "Existence is pure joy", and I feel sure that the connection 
       of Venus and Saturn with the sign is significant in this respect. 
       The compensation is surely the awakening of the Eld of the All-
       Father, the constant reproduction of the original purity from the 
       last stage of illusion. (Compare what I said above about the number 
       Ten).
           What an extraordinary thing to say! To retain one card may be 
       different from all the other cards. The great difficulty of this 
       whole work is to make a completely harmonious pack; that is why I 
       wrote so strongly about the private Private View.
           Your feeling about having no forms and faces is merely 
       symptomatic of modern soul-sickness. It is lack of confidence in 
       one's creative powers. It is the root of homo-sexuality as 
       understood in this country and of all these crazy movements, the 
       Neo-Thomists, and the Buchmanites and the Dadaists and the 
       Surrealists. Picasso took it far enough; he tried to paint a chair 
       which could not be any particular chair, and must therefore have no 
       colour and no form, but as every chair, in order to be a chair, 
       must have a support for the human frame, he did a horizontal line. 
       But this is metaphysics and not art; all these half-sexed, half-
       witted people, sicklied o'er with the pale caste of thought, I 
       cannot believe that any of them will ever command either the 
       Exeter, the Ajax or the Achilles, and any man who is not 
       potentially capable of doing that, is not a man at all; he may be 
       some kind of pudding, and I hold no brief against puddings, but all 
       these people who resent simplicity resent manhood, they weave their 
       own onanistic web of nastiness; these are the shells cast off from 
       the Tree of Life, these are the larvea of abomination. It has been 
       your evil fortune to have far too much to do with such people 
       without a proper clinical training, such as would have enabled you 
       to diagnose their malady; they have small orts of cleverness 
       without any breadth of vision or balance, without the sense of 
       space, of nature, of fresh air. Their fiddling little ingenuities 
       appeal to you rather as a chess problem or a jig-saw puzzle appeals 
       to some of us in moments of idleness, but you did not have the 
       psychological and pathological knowledge to keep you from making 
       the fatal false step over the precipice of common sense; you have 
       taken these abortive insects seriously. It is perfectly true in one 
       sense to say that the only thing to be done is to fill up some 
       stupid official paper correctly, but that is only true within the 
       universe of discord of that paper, and the belief in thee 
       artificial ingenuities is liable to become a nightmare, and that is 
       when you do have to say "It's nothing but a pack of cards."
           The whole world as I see it is at present lost in constipations 
       of this kind; the real needs of humanity are what they have always 
       been, food, shelter, love and freedom. That, roughly speaking, is 
       the general true will of the species, and all devices, which are 
       not subservient to this will, are errors.
           To return to `Adjustment'; those birds bother me very much. I 
       don't think they belong. I think they come from Noah's Ark. It 
       would be better to simplify this card by leaving them out 
       altogether. I feel sure that when you get the Venus and Saturn 
       dancing motive firmly in your mind, you will produce a lady whom 
       you will like better.
           I must emphasise that this fear of faces is an appalling 
       symptom of cowardice. It is surely a natural instinct to connect 
       expression with moral ideas, and it is moral ideas, or more 
       correctly magical ideas, that you are out to illustrate. It did not 
       matter so much in this particular card because of the tradition of 
       Justice being blind, but on the other hand, the masking of the face 
       suggests deceit which is the absolute opposite of the intention of 
       the card; it was the familiars of the Inquisition, it was the 
       Vehngericht that administered what they called Justice, hooded. 
       Impartiality is a lovely idea, but it doesn't get you very far; if 
       the impartial person may be impersonated by a demon of malignant 
       darkness.
           I will now try to do you something about Mohammed.

           Love is the law, love under will,

                                        Yours fraternally,

                                        [Aleister Crowley]