Aleister Crowley Diary Entry

Monday, 29 March 1920

A long miserable night due to Beauty’s [Ninette Shumway] sexual insanities. Nobody ever noticed the colour of a hunchback’s hair or eyes. Give people some big thing to glut their gaze and they’ll look no further. This is the secret of a good disguise.

2.45 p.m. Opus^[1] XVIII. Beauty, p.v.n.^[2] Operation A1. Orgiastic, very prolonged and multiplex. Elixir, very good indeed. Object: Mars [energy] for her ladyship. There was a good deal of mental distraction, owing to foolish hotel servants and the whole work is very interrupted by children etc. Two and two make four? Is the operation of adding to go for nothing? Four is a Thing in Itself, not merely the sum of two and two. ‘Love is the Law’, this adding being creation. But if action and reaction are equal and opposite, something must counterbalance the force which adds. Something loses to make this gain. Then progress is impossible; there is but a cycle of the Play of Our Lady Nuith, as I said in my Liber CXI.

Previous to above, while at dinner, [I thought], ‘Everything is beautiful’. Analysis of not S[ubjectJ and P[redicate]-gorgeous revels!

I heard my constitution talk.

Just after writing ‘Everything is beautiful’, I remembered that all that was a digression from some important discovery. But I forgot what it was. I tried to remember. I saw going around in the (search for word, epic, ode) treasure-house of my brain, the little old man who does my research work. (Is he Simon Iff?) There’s another man, robust and vigorous, chasing him around. (That’s my will picturized?) I talked to that little old man: ‘Here, bustle around and find that lost illumination’ and so on. Thus begins the illusion of double personality. At last I find it. It is a direct observation; ‘The Subconsciousness is conscious of its own immortality.’

I am wondering how these sentences will read. They are put down with an agonizing attempt to be clear, precise, and simple.

1—[Crowley performs a magical sexual operation.]

2—[Per vas nefandum. By the unmentionable vessel, i.e. anal intercourse.]

[78]