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Aleister Crowley Diary Entry Friday, 30 April 1920
The Dawn Meditation.
Do I think that Lewis Carrol meant to put all that Qabalah into The Hunting of the Snark? At first sight the question is utterly absurd. But his Red King's Dream episode in Alice is a quite conscious parallel to the Butterfly Dream incident in the life of Kwangtze, and we know, from a Tangled Tale, that his mathematics led him to very deep metaphysics. But we have no evidence that he knew any Qabalah at all, in our specialized (or technical or dogmatic) sense. Fortunately we know the origin of the Snark. He got in dream the line 'For the Snark was a Boojam, you see' and built up the whole poem on that. This line was then a 'mountain-top', and from it his subconscious was able to trace out the pattern. There are conscious Elements in the poem, no doubt; in other words, the 'universe' is caused by the interference of his conscious mind. This poem being then certainly inspirational, is it even improbable that its dictator should be able to talk the same language as the dictator of my poems? And would not Carroll's mathematically-trained conscious mind have been able to read all sorts of theorems—perhaps even Fermat's last! in some poem of mine which is apparently 'nonsense' about love or war?
It is clear, at last, that no man has any longer the right to affirm or deny anything about his own work. The Freudian simply smiles, and says: 'But how should you know what you mean, you poor fish?'
I've had a wonderful day's painting. Touched up some pictures, lashed out at a big new White Picture, pilgrims in the mountains going to a coral and jade pagoda. Also a new oval portrait of Beauty [Ninette Shumway] as the 'Brown Girl'. I discovered some of the beauties of Alizarin Orange.
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