Mary Butts Diary Entry

Saturday, 9 July 1921

Have vow to learn—understand with working thoroughness

I. The ‘Book of the Law.’

II. The Commentary.

III. The Hebrew Alphabet, and the numerical correspondences.

IV. To apply to the elementary study of the Kabala.

V. Asana.

VI. Get out the obscure points of the creed—i.e. ‘one baptism of wisdom wherein we accomplish the miracle of incarnation.’

Of this

I. I know pretty well.

II. Half read.

III. Well away with.

Hashish last night. Worked down to the point where infinite vistas begin, cliffs, faces. I saw one vast resplendent face tilted up to the sky on the Cefalù rock. A brilliant silver light on a male Egyptian head. Then came a state, seen like wheels revolving round on axels, each from its own centre. The succeeding preoccupation of my immediate life passed slowly, each complete in itself, uncalculable, or nearly so, in sequence, without the connecting vitality to explain, arrange, or in any way [illegible].

Each was reduced to a state of fear, and misery, while my sole comment on myself was contempt. I seemed to ‘die down’ through each notion into a state of sheer physical terror, e.g. the idea that I was here at Cefalù, studying magic under Aleister Crowley—flowed past in the details, and I felt ‘this is supernatural, how I need to fear the supernatural.’ I remembered the quality of that fear, and was on the edge of applying it to all that I see and do here. Then I saw what horrors that would open up, if I feared this place, as others fear, and I used to fear the ‘supernatural’. One grinds on explaining, but it is a horror. This one I fear was part of the rim of one wheel. Another brought anguish of mind about Cecil, another a horror of physical sounds. Behind these wheels each with the horror point was a wheel that was all fear. There was another called Trance-of-Sorrow. But the fear of fear was like going over an edge, and I felt that I was suffocating.

(A.C. said next day that I may have been attacked by an astral shape, or be on the verge of remembering my last death, which had been violent—(drowning?)

I clung to Cecil [Cecil Maitland], and a warm [illegible] of life seemed to run between us.

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