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Aleister Crowley Diary Entry [Reincarnation Memory Diary] Monday, 7 July 1919
8.40 P.M. The cat is out of the bag at last! I was Alexander VI. Strange, across all these years it is my greatest pride that I was the first lover of Lucrezia. I remember a thousand details of this intrigue. Well, the mystery is: where did I go wrong ? and it's a mere technicality: I had taken oaths to the Romish Church. Heedlessly, not realizing them as bonds to my full action. So when I came to my senses and tried to establish Paganism, there was Division. The people were with me, much preferring Venus to Mopish Mary; but the Theologians were too narrow-minded to agree. They took the Fathers of the Church seriously. This, by the way, explains Levi's [Eliphas Levi] flirtation with Rome, and my own position to-day as regards popularity. I have at last learnt the lesson that Siegfried learnt, to make a new sword. It also explains my peculiar feeling toward the actual city of Rome, my intense scorn of the Canaille that swam in it, my passion for familiar palaces and ruins, and my loathing of it as the place of failure. (Also, it explains my feeling of being at home in Saint Peter's.) My death was a dreadful surprise to me; it hurt my pride. I think some little while elapsed before I got courage to re-incarnate. I seem to have been a 2º=9o in this incarnation; I was stopped from initiation through not aspiring. I was crazy with lust to have power to free mankind; and too ignorant to use the subtler ways. I remember little of my early life, merely self-will, passion, cruelty, ambition. I remember the girl who seduced me when I was a boy, a Junoesque, fiery matron "with great smooth, marbly limbs." I was of more than Satanic pride, masculine—one reason why I failed: Failed, do I say? I had much to do with the Renaissance. But I was so ignorant that I felt I had failed. This is one reason why A.C. has never cared for Renaissance things. It's curious my being Alexander VI—my name and my number too! I had been speculating rationally about people like Pietro Aretino and Leonardo da Vinci.
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