Mary Butts Diary Entry

Monday, 11 July 1921

‘Grass’ again last night.

Tried to make it do what I want. Meditation on nature of the position with Cecil [Cecil Maitland]—Actual journey round Salterne. Aerial journey on a Tau.

Tried also Tau when under it to do my ritual of ‘letting go’ (dear C.M. [Cecil Maitland]) with extraordinary success.

(1) I watched every misfit, every suspicion, every reaction instructive or understood in myself, and tried to notice or find the equivalent in him.

I did my ‘letting’ go down into the Salterns room—which started me off on the astral promenade. I stood opposite the ‘face at the window’, and remembered that place lost beyond the door. It was a place forbidden in childhood, which may account for it—but I suddenly saw white and grey through the wood, and understood that here was the magical [illegible] of the house.

I tested my mother’s influence through the house—chiefly in the library—in dining room was surprised to find a pagan boisterousness [illegible] to her. I saw at once it came from the portrait of Louise de Quer[illegible]—that the picture was carrying on the age in which it was painted with incalculable vigour. I also saw the S.W. cavern of the lawn as a place of evocation an evil enchantment about it, or rather something unhappy and comfortless. (My first astral vision was there.)

I got back to C.M. I followed his hostility. I was so restless wondering where I had gone wrong. Undoubted by C.M. [illegible] me as my complex, his idleness and slackness and subservience to his body—cross my love of fine [illegible], possessions and existence, and rubs up my bitterness at my poverty which forces me to do without them, and augments my fear of people to [illegible] poverty delivers me. When I see no help, but an extra burden in him.

How intolerable it is to be in the right. He is in the ‘Apophis’ stage. So am I. I threw it out of myself, so that I’m able to leave him alone and not quarrel, and we had the morning together on a rock, looking at the sea, and when I acted, I invoked Artemis. I saw also something about myself I may be an image of the great work, and those who love me have to comply with my conditions, I have to comply with them myself.

Now C.M.’s had all the fuss of getting me for lover, running away, being personally comforted, and was God has said ‘done’ again.

But I’ve thrown it all out, to work out in his seesaws, and feel infinitely remote and clean.

The astral journey—blue water, a solid lapis-lazuli stuff pouring about the base of a rock, or out of a rock like a basin on a pedestal and splashing round. The rock a yellowish green. Tried ‘rising on the planes’, unsuccessfully. Its Hermes, Thoth, Mercury, [illegible].

Tried astral journey on Aleister’s tincture. Deep violet sea seen from above, a sugar loaf hill at the edge, and a house on it, a round house like a pillar, or a bee-skep. Went in—Fire pouring out over the floor in a yellow-orange shift, something dark beside it. Young man, grey looking, waked in attitude of a ‘teaching faun’ leaning against what must have been a mantle shelf. It was Hermes, but rather less than life-size, plus caduceus. I took the caduceus away. It was made of olive-wood. He came up close beside me and would not answer questions. I could not think of any except about the pain of opposites. There was a rushing, something [illegible]. I had forgotten the picture. He said something about, ‘that has all to do with death,’ and then very [illegible] ‘think about good times we’ve had together, and what fuss we carry on having, and leave that sort of thing’. I was not convinced—he shewed me a round mirror on the floor, which had a bright sky in it—white, with shaking boughs. I could see nothing. Got tired, and came home.

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