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Mary Butts Diary Entry Tuesday, 19 April 1921
I had seen on the night of the last entry what may have been Bernard Walke’s sitting room, and John leaning against the mantle-shelf explaining his wrongs to two or more people. Cecil [Cecil Maitland] saw a white room with beams, John [John Rodker] writing play at a table . . . gave the plot of the play.
This must be looked up—it would be good evidence.
A few days ago we began to discuss what we really wanted ‘in magic.’
I. I want to study and enjoy, and to enter if I can the fairy world, the mythological world, and the world of the good ghost story.
II. I want by various mystical practices and studies to produce my true nature, and enlarge my perceptions.
III. I don’t only want to find my true will. I want to do it. So I want to learn how to form a magical link between myself and the phenomena I am interested in. I want power.
IV. I want to fins out what is the essence of religion, study the various ideas of God under their images.
V. I want to make this world into material for the art of writing.
VI. I want to observe the pairs of opposites, remembering that which is below is as that which is above. From this I wish to formulate clearly, the hitherto incommunicable idea of a third perception. This is a perception of the nature of the universe as yet unknown to man, except by intuitions which cannot be retained, and by symbols whose meaning cannot be retained also. I want to fix it in man’s mind.
VII. I want to write a book not about an early theocracy and fall of man (the most respected occultists fail here [e.g.] Stanislas de Guaita] but a book written about this subject, historically, under terms of human fallibility without deification of Pythagorus or the writers of the Kabala. A book with no balls about secrets, or sneers at the uninitiated. A book to shew the relation of art to magic, and shew the artist as the true, because the oblique, adept.
Isn’t one page of [W.B. Yeats'] Per Amica worth every Equinox considered as the thing in itself?
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