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Mary Butts Diary Entry circa February 1925
Note.
Five years ago I first became anxious to make a study of phenomena I felt were not explicable by understood physical laws—I date the conscious wish from my first acquaintance with Cecil Maitland, though previously I had studied ‘occultism’ and found it stirring, but unsatisfactory, a maze of blind alleys. I made various attempts, scrying, automatic writing, read up spiritualism, mystery cults, some neoplatonism and to no conclusion. Crowley, if anything, would have convinced me there was nothing in it. After five years, and lately I have not interested myself so much, realize that I have observed, all my life, a series of phenomena, not all subjective not technically related to the problems but which I now believe to be part of a series though the connection between them is not clear. They are inconclusive as yet, only observations and the observations may be incorrectly given, but it is impossible to realize them without emotion for I know now that they are the cardinal events of my life.
The stage I have arrived at is to connect these events with each other and to arrive at a theory for them. I have no doubt of them (as I might have doubted if I had seen an ‘angel’ in the blue glass ball) and my realisation has come slowly like a growth in nature, not an attempt to pry.
Relate these, and describe the relation and the result will be an account of another order of life, an extension, not contradiction of this.
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