Aleister Crowley Diary Entry

Sunday, 23 May 1920

Alostrael [Leah Hirsig] seems quite bad; I'm beginning to think of dysentery.

Notes on the use of Cocaine. It seems quite pointless to take it unless one is already excited about something, when its anaesthetic action prevents fatigue from checking the cause of the excitement. Any direct action it may have wears off very quickly; and though like a criminal idiot I have no measured and recorded doses, I am pretty sure that I have increased them in all ways, viz. size of dose, frequency of repetition, and so total amount used in any one experiment.

Further, as to fatigue, I found the other night that the fatigue was merely masked to my consciousness; Leah told me that my sentences came very slowly, with long pauses. True, I was tired out when I began, and thirteen hours dictation without rest or food is a strain. But she said I was slow from the start. The moral is that if the drug is any use at all, which I am willing to hear argued, it should only be taken when already 'going strong'. I feel sure that the action is strictly anaesthetic, not tonic, stimulant, or narcotic. I took a good deal, probably over a gramme, on Friday; a very small 'hair of the dog' yesterday; and today have been keeping at it pretty steadily, while drinking Marsala, nearly a whole bottle, since about 2.00 p.m. It's now 6.1 5 p.m. I've had about a gramme and I feel nothing but a sort of nervousness. I will go on. This is rather against my inclination, for I have a sort of despair as to its usefulness, and a trace perhaps of fear. On the other hand, there is a sort of dull physical hunger for more. That I have noticed before, it is a hunger which seems completely satisfied by a definite dose.

There is also the question whether the drug does not destroy almost at once the capital in the brain or nerves which makes its original effect so marvellous; if that was so, it would be indeed a terrible poison. Suppose, for example, there were originally n grains of a substance C_xH_yO_zN_p in the brain, which had not the faculty of repairing its losses, and that that substance combined with Cocaine specifically to produce the great energy observed. Obviously, to use the drug even once would be a sort of suicide, partial at least. Against this theory, fortunately, there are cases of people using the drug moderately all their lives, without acquiring the habit, or apparently suffering in any way. I suppose personal idiosyncrasy counts for much here as in the case of other drugs.

I feel no conscious tendency to form a habit with Cocaine, far from it! I'm not even weak enough to wish I'd never heard of the beastly stuff. But I feel rationally the possibility of a physical craving beginning to assert itself.

Let me ask philosophically: what is a 'craving'? It is quite different from a desire, which is active. It is a feeling of want. Now, there is no difference between normal craving such as hunger and thirst, and abnormal cravings, save this, that the economy which demands the satisfaction of a want is in the one case possessed of a long evolutionary history, and self-sufficient in a 'natural' curve of growth, reproduction, and so on, while in the other this economy is an artificial thing. The 'drug fiend' is the result of an attempt of men to progress on lines which have not been prepared by centuries of variation and selection. I cannot doubt that he is momentarily at least an advance on the normal man; and I think he does it, as a magician would say, by 'invoking one of his "spirits" '. He concentrates upon, and calls forth, certain sections of his brain, while he quiets the rest. Now I think that morphine and cannabis directly excite certain points, leaving others placid and normal, though perhaps exhausting them to feed his flame. But cocaine merely lulls any part of the mind not in use. I note that now I have got interested in writing these remarks, all my nervousness has left me. I am the 'super-normal being' who writes poetry etc. Cocaine, then, permits a merely normal use of the desired part of the body (for, 'poetry' is normal to me) by anaesthetizing those other points which would otherwise complain of pain or starvation. My original idea (in New Orleans) of exciting the mind by morphine and then steadying it by cocaine was quite scientific. My present trouble is that the old stimuli, ambition, desire of fame, pity for humanity, and so on, have almost ceased to move me, owing principally to society's neglect of me and my own increasing contempt for it. One asks oneself why Swift wrote of the Yahoos; did he hope to hurt them? It seems stupid, somehow.

As Tom Taylor^[1] wrote, the modern attempt to enlighten the vulgar by 'education' has merely disturbed the order of Nature, and, as he foresaw, ended in anarchy. Some really educated people are still trying desperately to fool the people, who are rapidly learning all the tricks; but I think the best and wisest will leave the world as I have done. I cannot confute a socialist who knows political economy so much better than I do; and I can't persuade him that he is like an insane person with one bit of his mind clear and logical indeed, but developed out of all proportion.

Of old, the generality of men desired only things of which there were enough for all, such as wives, children, food, flowers, music, and various pleasures. Today, the Press has insanely tried to make all men desire things which demand the slavery of other men for their enjoyment, and so are in their very nature inaccessible to all. The Press has done this in order to make men work harder to get money, of course in vain, since money becomes valueless as soon as it is more or less evenly divided. For this phantom men have given up their true wealth, which was attainable by wholesome and moderate labour, health, happiness, and the incalculable spiritual treasures which Burns at his plough, and Boehme at his last, could not only share with the Westminsters and the Rothschilds, but create for the endowment of mankind at no material cost or waste soever.

Society has had bad masters, who, wishing to increase their material wealth and luxury, tried every means to force men to slave for them, instead of being independent units. Also, profoundly conscious of the contempt in which they and their riches were held by poets and artists, mystics, scholars, and even by the merely well-born, they used the power of their money to destroy the esteem in which men held wit, art, breeding, and so forth. They did this even at the cost of diminishing their own true happiness, for of old the rich gained much from the service of genius. They have only endured one type of 'superior man', for their envy has made them wish to destroy poets and scholars and so forth altogether; that man is the man of applied science. Him they still tolerate, even encourage, as his work aids them directly to pile up still more money. They have cut their own throats in more ways than one. Firstly, they, and especially their families, have become bored with life. They want new worlds to conquer, yet they have cut themselves off from the worlds infinite in scope, where conquest is an endless and increasing joy. Extravagance itself cannot tell them how to spend their money to their own advantage or that of others, for they have exiled just those brains that could have helped them.

Again, by making the goal of ambition a thing so obvious and vulgar that the basest can apprehend and pursue it, they have created a competition against themselves of just those people who, incapable of higher pursuits, will rush blindly upon them, armed with their own grossness, avarice, and envy, and outnumbering them by thousands to one. This danger they have recognized too late; to meet it, they have made oppressive laws, multiplied taxes, created a Praetorian Guard of police, and at last plunged the world into war. It was a logical but a fatal folly. They made men soldiers to bring them under laws yet more rigorous than before, and to kill as many competitors in the race for wealth as possible. But some survived, and these men, trained to arms, aware of the power of discipline and organization and become contemptuous of death, demanded their share of the Spoils. There was less labour to go round; its price increased. Yet there was less wealth produced and its price rose in sympathy. Depreciation of the purchasing power of money was universal; everybody was poorer in everything but the bits of paper which the various governments had issued, as the Chinese hoped to propitiate evil spirits by casting worthless shreds of tissue in the air!

No, the poets in their time were no poorer; and the rich men may still gnash their teeth and howl with envy when they see us; for our treasure is infinite, and, free to all who can enjoy it, is accessible to none who cannot.

But what will the rich men do next? The survivors of their armies have for the most part got on to the game. Social revolutions have occurred over a great part of the earth, and elsewhere have only been postponed because the dearth of labour has, by raising its price, temporarily obscured, for the less acute minds, the hard fact that there is less wealth than ever to go round. But the rich themselves, hard hit by the depreciation of securities and the lack of luxuries are intensely apprehensive of the awakening of the stupid avarice of the mob. Men who would once have thought themselves princes if they could have a cottage and a vineyard of their own at fifty, have been dazzled by newspaper accounts of men become millionaires at twenty-five. The sane, natural worthy ambition has been replaced by insane greed and envy. Even those who could still be content with reasonable comfort see it farther away than ever, and observe also that their immemorable liberties and pleasures are under ban. They want the rich man's place, arbitrarily and at once, and, aware of his unscrupulous methods, see no reason why they should not oppose force to fraud. Strikes, revolutions, expropriations are in order. The rich may try another war; the poor may refuse to become cannon-fodder. Also, another war could only make bad worse; I think that even the rich see that.

The truth is that the prosperity of industrialism depended wholly upon accident. After Waterloo, the nineteenth century was on the whole a period of peace. The means of producing wealth was simplified faster than the growing complexity of civilization demanded. The economic blood showed a rising opsonic index. That has stopped. We can no longer devise means to overcome temporarily our crises as we have done hitherto. We have no reserves of capital, either in brain or bone to 'draw on. Adjustments ask too much. Observe my knife; 'tis dull? A stone mends that. But my typewriter? I must take it at great cost and trouble to Palermo; and then they probably make a mess of the job. A little more annoyance, and I shall scrap it and go back to a quill from the first goose I meet! I think that this is a good analogy of what will happen to civilization. The machinery will break down beyond repair, and only the simple will survive. What exact means the stupidity of the rich will devise to precipitate this event does not seem to matter much. The only alternative is a new religion or a new cult of art; and that isn't likely; the people have been too hopelessly debauched by Christianity and newspapers.

Whenever the proportion of townsfolk to countryfolk grows too large, the nation is smashed. We can only postpone the crash by our 'scientific' schemes of organization.

11.00 p.m. Having written all this out, I am in the same nervous or depressed state as before I started; very reluctant to take more anything. Can't go to bed, having to watch by Leah, and don't feel like any kind of work or pleasure.

11.15 p.m. The completeness of my Attainment [of the Grade of Magus] is a burden. It seems as if there could be nothing more in life, unless a course of Action, e.g. a Martyrdom, or an Academy. But that which pushed me is no longer there; I am in Balance. Even the 'Going' of a Magus seems like inaction.

No action without Will, evidently; I suppose that I happen to be in a Zero phase at the moment, but that therein, as proven elsewhere, is the seed of the other phase.

Why should noise-making accompany pain? If the psychology is not quite shallow (call forth aid, etc.) it's deep beyond my plumb.

1—[Tom Taylor (1817-80), dramatist, Professor of English, University College, London, Editor of Punch (1874-80). His best known play is The Ticket-of-Leave Man, 1863.]

[78]