The Law is for All

8 The Law is for All on both sides of the Atlantic that is of enduring interest in itself.1 He was a member of the Powys circle — virtually a member of the family — and his wife Frances Gregg was a member of the Phila­ delphia Imagist group of poets that included Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and Ezra Pound. 1 For his memoirs see Louis Marlow, Seven Friends (London: Richards, 1953; republished Thame: Mandrake, 1994). See also Oliver Wilkin­ son and Christopher Wilkinson, eds., The Love Letters of John Cow­ per Powys to Frances Gregg, vol. 1 (London: Cecil Woolf, 1994). 2 Although many of the more obscure name references have been anno­ tated by the present editor, and translations generally given of foreign language phrases, a reader’s guide and a small classical dictionary will be useful references for some readers. By Wilkinson’s own account, he and Crowley rarely discussed Magick, but they shared a deep-seated impatience with sexual hypocrisy, and a willingness to openly defy society’s strictures. Wilkinson’s own views are lucidly set out in his introduction to this edition, and they help explain why Crowley made him a member of the ix° of Ordo Templi Orientis, the degree synony­ mous with sexual magick; honorary or not, it was fully deserved. Wilkinson was a fair and perceptive critic of his friend’s work. The following assessment shows at once why Crowley chose Wilkinson as his editor, and explains the problems encountered in editing the present book: He has no “vulgar sense”; having written for so long out of the ken of the general reader, he has forgotten that the gen­ eral reader is not a specialist. The result is that, even in his lighter work, there are often certain references and words which the general reader would find unintelligible and there­ fore disconcerting; references and words that might irritate him and “put his back up” because they would make him feel ignorant, exciting that famous “inferiority complex.” “Oh!” says Crowley, “but he can always look it out in a dictionary.” What a revealing remark! If you write only for people who habitually use dictionaries, your sales can never be very large. But Crowley does not seem to realize this. He has the scholar’s mind; and can no more imagine a reader without a dictionary at his elbow than he can imagine him without a shirt to his back.1 2 In planning a popular edition of a very important, but, as it stands, very difficult philosophical book