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Aleister Crowley Diary Entry Wednesday, 16 July 1919
On July 16 at 8:40 p.m. Crowley realized that he had been Pope Alexander VI (1431-1503), the debauched Renaissance pope born Roderic Borgia. "Crowley" took pride in the fact that he was the first lover of Lucrezia Borgia, recalling a thousand details of the intrigue. He took oaths to the Romish Church without realizing they would inhibit his intentions, resulting in "Division" when he finally realized he wanted to reinstitute paganism. He reckoned the masses were with him, preferring Venus to "Mopish Mary," but theologians were "too narrow-minded to agree," taking, as they did, the fathers of the church seriously. He felt this all explained later incarnation Levi's [Eliphas Levi] "flirtation" with Rome before he abandoned Catholic ministry for magic. He felt that these experiences explained why he had at last decided to follow Siegfried and not to mend the broken sword but to melt it down and forge a new one from the elements. As Alexander VI (his middle name and number, he observed), he had been ignorant enough to think that he had altogether failed, and explained why "A.C." had never taken to Renaissance things. On July 16 he got a brief glimpse of "the Magician" who finally worked up to the flower that was, in retrospect, Alexander VI. He then had a sense that he was in the mid-seventeenth century a "lord of the Sabbath"—presumably referring to the spirit of the witch cults that induced such hysterical persecution in that period.
He then "got into" a former life as page to the last grand master of the Knights Templar, Jacobus Burgundus Molensis, who was roasted alive in Paris in 1314. As page, he was initiated into the Eastern-occidental mysteries of the temple, making great progress, only to be murdered foully by emissaries of jealous French king Phillipe le Bel, who brought ruin on the Order. The page's name was something like Hugo de Larens. He had an Arabic nickname, and it was fury at the killing of de Molay that led to his incarnating as a magician who made a great and terrible oath against Christianity, "which I have still not worked off. Nor will I while the accursed thing still poisons the air of our sweet Mother Earth."
This magician was born in an Eastern Templar preceptory "far hidden in Asia." Crowley saw the birthplace as a crag fortress with a cultivated garden beyond which rose wasted hills then great mountains. Was it called El Latifu or El Azizu? he wondered. Templars at this site were apparently tremendous magicians. Even his birth as Baal Zakar was an act of magick: the Templars share in the great mystical oath of vengeance against the powers that destroyed the temple. Crowley's trance led him to believe that his incarnation as the pope was Baal Zakar's effort to rule the world by intellect and to express the revolt against the destroyers of the temple "in the physical." This failed, Crowley believed, "because there was not enough initiation to back up my Magick."
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