|
Mary Butts Diary Entry Thursday, 4 August 1921
Read more [of] Crowley’s biographica mystica [Magick in Theory and Practice]
Hebrew letters.
Asana, etc.
Astral journey.
New story.
The new story is to have no mystic vibration of any kind. It can have an abstract pattern derived from the varieties of meditation.
Part of the trouble here is a complex about complexes. Where all our complexes, i.e., our artificial inhibitions are cleared up, certain things will remain good and bad, and pleasant and unpleasant.
This is not realised, yet the silly people imply it all to him [Aleister Crowley]—when it suits them. It is right to promulgate the law. It is wrong to criticise it—if you do, you have a complex.
C.M. [Cecil Maitland] said last night—they are making a sacrifice of personality not to [illegible] but to personality. He said that it makes A.[leister] C.[rowley] tragic because he is a kind, wise, honourable gentleman crucified by his utter belief in his own teaching—Now we both think, that, the actual Book of the Law was in a large proportion dictates by a state of his sub-consciousness—which is a dust-bin of refuse—The comment, the product of his conscious mind is quite another thing.
But A.C. seems another martyr to a belief in inspiration uncorrected by mind.
In the Book of the Law I see him caught out again—by a complex. There are interesting [illegible] in it, and profoundly true ones, and vile things and silly [illegible], and A.C. believes it his painful duty not to alter a letter, and men say that occultism has no martyrs, and the great Work remains the great Work, and the great enigma.
Astral journey on Pantacle in Equinox Vol. 3, No. 1.
Very difficult to pass, had to climb [illegible]-bank above the backyard at Salterne to get it behind me. I had to have it all made in spiky wood to put behind my back.
Conventional views of Cefalù.
Then I was looking across a dark—(‘wine-dark.’) sea. And the [illegible] was not held under water. Saw that the contained something. Saw something, a kind of corridor in it. I could not describe—(mysterious, magical, silver grey.)
Walked across to the sun, and insisted on going in—Could not get in. Pushed in backwards. It was quite clear what was there, but it kept changing to various conventional rooms to put me off. I explored partly by touch, It was a round grey room with stone walls, like being inside a ball. There was a plain stone altar. A woman sat on a stone on one side of it. She wore a purple robe, and she had a monstrous object on her knees. The head—a kind of Titan’s with slimy black curls was towards me. A kind of [illegible]. He was dead and a monster and reddish about the body—There was a window in the place anyhow—that shewed the sea at night, with the full moon making a silver track on it.
Then purple—great waves of it in various shades, over my eyes—Endless landscapes of dark purple-black woodlands—near the sea.
Then I saw a tower, surrounded by white flames—or whisps of bright vapour, moving about. It was a real magic—but a thing one would conjure up from one’s mind and stock-in-trade. It wandered about the moor.
Then stone steps crowned with a pillar or cross, against a purple sky.
Then, in a house, a purple [illegible] with an upright white creature sitting under it.
Much less fatigue than usual.
A.C. Lecture on the Tatwas.
But they have various order. This is the natural one. (and best for me.) They come through the body. There is the hour of Akasa or the evening hush.
Akasa is mixed up with the breathing. Left nostril for repose, right for energy. Each can be combined with each making 25.
(I’m not impressed with ideas of Frater V.I.O. [Charles Stansfeld Jones] from his pentacle, but then I saw only a fraction of what was there to see.)
|
