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Aleister Crowley Diary Entry [Reincarnation Memory Diary] Thursday, 8 August 1918
9.50 P.M. I got back to infancy, birth, and the prenatal stage. The moment of birth was peculiarly vivid. Next I found myself as Eliphas Levi, dying, and then went through quite a number of scenes in this life, mostly unimportant, though I remember several episodes with my wife. (I can't remember her name, though Crowley knows it well—Freudian forgetfulness, evidently) and the scenes of my taking various orders in Catholicism. I remember a little country church with a square tower, very well, and a lot of broad dusty roads, I think in the South of France. The name 'Arles' recurs constantly; I don't know how or why. I also remember that childhood, a very keen sense of social inferiority. (Footnote: Hence the Fourier period, I suppose) Also, how, whatever was wrong, the Emperor would soon put it right. (I was born in 1806, wasn't I?) Any how, that was in the subconscious, and this is why I made such an ass of myself as to see France restored by Napoleon III plus the Church. Hence too, my dread of Russia, because of 1812. I recall too a long walk I took when I was 17 or so, in open country, North France, somewhere, I think, and my aspirations culminating in a Magical Oath. I remember an Initiation, too, but very dimly. Bulwer Lytton I recall very clearly; there was a fundamental antagonism partly racial, partly social, and partly because I regarded him as frivolous. I remember the old lady mentioned in the Necromancy Chapter of my Ritual et Dogme; she was a countess or something similar, and a veritable hag of Satan, the kind of lady who would poison people out of petty spite. She was in actual fact a murderous. I don't seem to remember much about Vintras; what I do get very vividly—in patches—is my dealings with the Illuminati. There was a tall arm, very thin, very dark, clean shaven, stern with a cruel smile, who was one of their chiefs in Paris; He was a man of 'infamous character', and very skillful in Magick. He had much to do with fathering the De Guita-Huysmans crowd. He initiated me in a ceremony rather like the Elu des neuf, where one has to kill a traitor. It was done properly; one could not suspect that it was a formality. This was the case with all the grades of his Rite.
I am a little doubtful about childhood; but there is a picture of a cobbler's shop-cottage, with a bench outside where my father sat at work; I remember the curé, a kind grave type, severe but kindly, who used to make pleasantries with me as he passed. There was also an old woman who gave me sweetmeats, wrapped in olive-leaves or so I fancy. (P.S. Vine-leaves?)
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