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Aleister Crowley Diary Entry Sunday, 2 May 1920
1.50 p.m. I woke a few minutes ago in absolute horror, every nerve taut as a whip to the point of positive pain, my mind blank but almost insane with nameless apprehension. The nearest thing I can give for analogy is Poe's Buried Alive. Baudelaire [Charles Baudelaire] has some similar effort to describe it—or am I thinking of Eliphas Levi's etouffement by Asmodeus?
Well, this has happened several times; and (I think) each time before I have been able to master myself and get the obvious glass of water. I have heard something fall or break, apparently in the kitchen. This is without doubt, question, suspicion or other mental wobble, the cat. I think that I became sensible of the unauthorized presence in the house of a stranger. There was also an element of étouffement, for I had a bad day, with varied excitements and the night is very warm-our first really warm night. One tends to get 'way under' (as Hansi says) because of snipers in the shape of mosquitoes.
But for all that, I feel as if there was something doing in the psychic line. Leah [Leah Hirsig] and I have both had hallucinations, e.g. last night she thought I was outside the house, in her room, in the kitchen, all within a few minutes. (I was actually in bed, but out on the astral at the Sabbath.[1] Incidentally, she dreamt that I was preparing some magical ceremony.) I have left her and gone on talking to her, thinking that she had followed me. Then several times I have heard sharp clear raps, sometimes a cadence, sometimes single. I have also heard human footsteps, noises of people moving about, when there was no cause. (The woodwork has just creaked, and that isn't at all like a rap.)
'It's a good picture if the eyes follow you about all over the room': most criticism of painting is still at that stage. The fact is that all criticism is rubbish, from the 'degradation of objects in the second plane' to the 'incomparable mâitrise of the master'. A picture's like a woman; there is no canon of beauty, either she gives you an enthusiasm or she doesn't, and the special pleading of a critic is as superfluous and vain as the commendations of her wares by a procuress. At a distance, yes; but face to face, there's one simple and infallible test. Well, if I say infallible, I mean for the moment; for one has moods about women, and (why not?) for poems and pictures. It isn't always one's day for Keats. Nothing is always good for all; and it may be that nothing is always bad for all. There's hope, then, for my pictures!
Ah, general experience is that they say something, even the earliest and worst, they repel or fascinate; but nobody walks right by them. And they grow more wanton by familiarity, as the best women do.
9.30 p.m. Back from a glorious moonlight climb up the Rock, with Leah. Let me consider what painting I have done in this calendar month at this house. Oval I. Rock and Garden (bad to ill; paint over). Oval 2. 'Beauty'red hair and green face. Oval 3. 'Beauty'-big head (unfinished). Panel 4. Girl with dogs and geraniums and olive. Small 5. Street in Marseilles. Ditto 6. The Lion-hunt. Ditto 7. The Wave. Ditto 8. The Couloir (unfinished). Big 9. The Lesbians (abandoned). Ditto 10. The Tourists. Ditto 11. The Pagoda of Coral and Jade (unfinished). Other details, beginnings or endings. Drawings, only 3 good enough to put on the wall. But I'm getting more particular; I've O.S.J.'ed all but five of the Fontainebleau lot, and have destroyed several of the new ones.
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.]
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