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Aleister Crowley Diary Entry Saturday, 1 May 1920
All right at the Sabbath;[1] woke very tired. The Dawn Meditation was done 'properly'—and I feel sure that B.S.H.N. [Ninette Shumway] has a quality tonic and beneficial, especially if Diana presides.
Idea for a picture: wave breaking against a rock. Another—Skye hills, dark green foreground, strong sky, gorse bush.
I don't want to get away from representation so far as Matisse, still less Picasso. I don't think the victim should have to worry about what the picture is. He should simply admire the new point of view and the decoration, perhaps even the idea. (I don't mean any intellectual idea; God keep us all from Bastian-Lepage and Luke Fildes.) He doesn't get puzzled by a curved mirror; he is frankly amused by the effect.
1.30 p.m. One should not paint 'Nature' at all; one should paint the Will. Thus my Wave towers over the headland as no wave ever did; but I wish it did, so I paint it doing so. In other animals we call it protective mimicry; in man, respectability.
Puritanism is spiritual murder. Got to this through picture of the systematic extermination of all other animals, as compared to the now-and-then round-ups of the sportsman. Thus Puritans would destroy all foxes; they are the supreme enemies of Nature.
A good day painting, if not quite so violent as yesterday. The Wave, though, is splendid; I might be a great Chinese artist. I wasn't trying for that, either.
8.50 p.m. Opus[2] VII, B.S.H.N., p.v.n.[3] Opus excellent though brief. Elixir exceptionally good in all ways. Object: to have K: 666: 666: B.S.H.N.
It has occurred to me that the 'Fathers of the Church' may have been unduly discredited. They were thinking men, after all; and the very fact of their total submersion in dogma made their religion the mere form of their thoughts, turning it into a convention as silly but as negligible as the nymph and goat herd convention of Theocritus and Longinus, down to Milton and Verlaine. P.S. The painters painted their mistresses and mignons, labelling them the Madonna or Jesus or John the Baptist, with tongue far in cheek. So the Fathers wrote all sorts of jolly stuff and called it theology.
1—[There are many references in Crowley's writings to his attendance at the Sabbath, the assembly of witches, especially that occurring on Walpurgis Night, 30 April, at which time, it is said, all the powers of evil foregather and discuss the havoc they have wrought in the world the past year and make plans for future forays.] 2—[Crowley performs a magical sexual operation.] 3—[Per vas nefandum. By the unmentionable vessel, i.e. anal intercourse.]
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