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Aleister Crowley Diary Entry Friday, 18 June 1920
Give symbol for arrival of [?] [I Ching Hexagram] XXXIII. This looks a little awkward: but note verse 3 of the comment.
Is a-k [?] sincere in this matter? [I Ching Hexagram] XXXVIII, the Weak Beam. Yes, but very diffident.
What course shall I take? [I Ching Hexagram] XV, Humility. I note that there must be something rotten about beautiful scenery because it appeals to nearly everybody. But then, a further reflection: it appeals to me. To that extent I am a herd-man. Yet-does it appeal in the same way? Yes, on the purely physical plane, more or less; I am 'normal'. But I add a superstructure which means nothing to the herd. I excuse, then, even justify, scenery as possessing attractions so catholic. Better that than the exclusive appeal of a Yoga? No, merely different. The Eye has a particular sublimation to show; it is a more advanced statement of truth, specialized.
Oscar Wilde aroused the curiosity and respect of mankind by communicating the obvious in a hushed whisper, and secured its affection by labelling his remnants 'extra special' and marking them down to 'One Eleven Three'!
3.25 p.m. Opus[1] II, BSHN [Ninette Shumway] and Ethel [Ether]. Operation, very prolonged (2 – 2 ˝ hrs.). Otherwise quite unremarkable save for the elaborate detail of comprehension of the situation and the problems to which it gives rise. Elixir not remarkable. Object: Juventatem.
Query: What's this Juventus? Iuv-entus equals Jove-quality? Yes: jerme and deus are kin; it's the IAO or IU-God of Spring. There are really only three letters; gutturals, dentals, labials; for palatals are considered as modified gutturals, and linguals as modified dentals. M is counted as a labial; so the 4th class of letters is Vowels.
Thus, then, we attribute the Quarters, AD or AR or AT or AS dental in the South; AB or AP or AM or AN in the West (Father and Mother), IAO and C in the East, AK in the North. Our Pantacle might have lip, tooth and throat, with tongue to modify them, and breath to give them impulse.
Taking 'tenuis' as the type, we get K-T-P as the course of breath: taking 'media' we get G-D-B; taking 'spiritus', we get H-S-F. Lips and throat suggest mother; tongue and teeth, father; reasons obvious enough; and breath is behind these, their common impulse; while the 'Son' is the 'Word'.
All Gods are diverse names of Breath, of course, as every body asserts, and few—oh, few!—understand. But why the attributions? What, to be brutal, is the real and necessary connection between the teeth and the South? Of course Shin equals Fire equals tooth, but the South is the cold dark quarter of Wombats and Emus: it's all relative, and even relatively and arbitrarily so. South isn't an absolute direction at all, but refers merely to the Earth's axis. How then define this A 'Dental God', for whom I suggest the name 'Odonton', (tooth-existence-Odous, Odonton, and Onton.) How proclaim AD? It is because we cannot force a hardness and cutting or piercing power with teeth that we 'attribute' them to the quarter which to Northerners represents the Sun's strongest hour; absurdly, again, since it's merely the earth's presentation to his rays that makes the apparent modification in His Light and Heat.
It's fearfully hard to return to acquiescence in a 'true relation of phenomena', when one has destroyed the illusion of the absolute value of even one term.
It seems as if I were confronted with the task of deriving a new expression of the universe, with no base but Necessity. I need a new substance of Thought, a new instrument of Thought, and a new Law of Condition of Thought. All my analysis, or nearly all, hitherto, has been but explanation or elucidation of relations; leading no whit to any truth, or mode of truth, any more than if I define an archdeacon as a man who exercises archidiaconal functions, write x as mx over m, or announce the Parallel Postulate. Bolyai's discovery that Euclid was only a set of coherent conventions removes the last straw from the clutch of the Truth-seeker drowning in the Sea of Shams. More, I see Truth itself, the idea of it, as a thing necessarily relative. Again, yet once again, 'What is Truth?' The very fact that I aspire to it is an explosive element in its nature; for what am I but a chance tangle of wreckage, flotsam upon the sunless shoreless sea of ignorance.
And yet I feel, beyond all power of my analysis to dissipate, that I am simple, absolute, eternal, and that Truth is inherent in my nature; that this Truth is not a coherence or conformity, or even in any way connected with fact. It appears to me as a Principle, no doubt, stigmatic of Reality, but not only I feel it is within an absolute Ego, which is quite independent of my own relative and mutable Ego. I have been writing the expression of this absolute Ego; but 'my speech betrayeth me'; Truth's dispersed and distorted in the process. (That's why Rationalism is so shallow; every man feels instinctively that it is 'true as far as it goes', but as incomplete as if one defined Woman as 'a word of five letters'.)
Now, this secret certainty which has defied analysis, so far, is a great nuisance, in a way. It offers the aristocratic criticism-and I know that to be valid 'Dualism' is no stone to throw at me: in the illusion of extension, hierarchy is as likely a structure as another. We do actually see mountains, more often than mire; trees, not only slime; men, not merely protoplasm. There is no answer to the fact; it may be 'unjust', 'absurd', 'unnatural', but it's the case. Obviously I may argue thus: 'You have just discovered this deeper Ego; you have not had time to understand it; it imposes itself upon you by its majesty, just as at first your Samadhi towered over your consciousness, seemed to strip Truth not only to flesh, but to bone, and marrow of bone. 'You didn't know what hit you.' 'You will progress; you will find out the causes, the conditions of what now seems uncaused and unconditional.' But this new-what can I call it?—does really lie behind a metaphysical Aegis. I know that I can't define this Ego or its nature; there's something that compels me to call its soul a soul of Truth, although I see quite clearly that this word Truth has no meaning, NO possibility of meaning.
This is irrational, and I admit it to be so; but then, just because (because, still!) it's that, reason cannot touch it, reason cannot even destroy it. One can imagine any syllogism being overthrown, say by analysis 'of either premiss, or by reduction of S, M, or P to Zero. But one cannot attack the statement 'X is Y' without defining X and Y. If 'twere supported, one could undermine it, knock away its struts; but an interior certainty, so long as it does not waver, does not crave aid from illusions, 'facts', and the like, and so abdicate its throne of immortality, so long as it does not debauch its virginity by smiling on the knave Reason, and deceive itself by thinking its mirrored image in Thought's lake to be itself, so long it is immune. That I have proved the image an illusion is no attack on it; my face changes as the curves of mirrors, as the degrees and hues of light, as the myriad conditions, in short, wherewith the phenomenon of its appearance is accompanied; but, for all I know, my face may be unalterable in itself. In fact, I feel something of this; for, sick or well, shaved or unshaved, at noon or twilight, in rippling water as in polished crystal, I always recognize it as my face. The Ego that perceives it is mysteriously the same, how so it own the change that clothes it and reclothes it; the face perceived is the same, also, though I know it for naught but an apparition, and a most mutable one at that! I am compelled to declare that 'my face' is an Absolute Existence, apart from any phenomena soever. Your banker will tell you very much this story about your 'hand of write'; its character persists in all conditions, and this character is something more than the sum of its symptoms or stigmata, although it seems to be made of those elements, and no more. It's not a dead thing; it's not a 'material' thing; it manifested, it can be known, but exists no less in its potential and latent or unmanifested state. The heat in water at 0° C is no less heat, because it has changed the state of some ice at 0° C, than if it had warmed a blizzard. Nor is my face the less my face if I don't see it, or don't recognize it; it is an Absolute Idea, with full power of Nature to exist, ready to manifest whenever the conditions of perception are fulfilled. This would be true had it never manifested; so that all combinations are possible, and they are all 'real', quite independent of whether they have ever been or become known. No conditions of any kind affect this ultimate kind of Truth. The 'momentary accident' of me with my senses, my mirror, and my face, being juxtaposed so that I say 'I see my face' is an absolute Existence like anything else, and is so whether it 'actually occurs' or no.
Now, there is no limit to the number of such Absolute Existences, because, for one thing, the fact of any combination is itself a new Existence; more, our postulation of Infinity, though it be all irrational and meaningless, is still a postulation and so a reality. It is vain to urge that no manipulation of finites can produce an infinite; for infinite only means indefinitely great, and we are considering the Universe as a Progression with a positive integer for 'd' or 'f', with 'n' infinite because the act of proceeding from 'a' to 'a + d' creates new series involving all possible relations, real or imaginary, between the two terms. Coincidence in identity of two terms would not cancel one of them, but create a fresh series starting with 'b' defined as 'the identity of "a" and "a"'.
I ask whether this cloud of considerations can help me to answer the question which snarled at me a few days back: 'What does the word "Who" mean?' I could only evade the issue by quite stupefying chloroform of grammar: 'who' refers to a human or super-human person or persons theoretically capable at some time of thinking 'I' or 'We', thus excluding ants but including idiots, Gods, and dead men. This being so, it obviously doesn't matter any more whether one is a 'who' or a 'which'. Consider my late 'result' of appreciating the 'Absolute Ego of Truth' (whatever that means) that was hiding behind me. This occurrence of this relation of the Absolute and relative Egos is itself an Existence, which is not a 'person', though it includes any whole experience.
The One beyond change, whether it really exist or no, is beyond change; and the other is a constantly fleeting fact, whether it too be an Absolute Existence of sorts or no. There is no reason for a Will to change or not to change, since the infinite sum of all such Existences is Fact and Truth, even if they are merely possible, nay, even if they are impossible. (This is the Nature of the Body of Nuith!) But though there be no reason for a Will, Will exists as an Absolute, beyond reason; and one cannot destroy it or deny it, any more than one can anything else, save as this Destruction or Denial is itself an Absolute. Everything is thus constantly both Yes and No, and Not-Being as positive as Being. The whole puzzle works out to Nought equals Infinity. We do not even have to balance Positive and Negative, for each is its opposite just as much as it is itself. The 'pairs of opposites' are actually destroyed by perception of their identity, not by a mere manipulation, and they exist equally as pairs; and their existence and non-existence in either mode is an identity as well as a contradiction. All this seems to get rid of all considerations whatsoever, and thus silences the Word at last.
8.30 p.m. Have played two sets of Football Fives, and had a bath. [Swami] Vivekananda says (I think in his Raja Yoga) that if you think of a finite space, you become immediately conscious of an infinite Space beyond it. This is absurd; on the contrary, you have set a bound to any more-existing infinity. (The two are of course equal, the pressure on the bounding line being of necessity the same on both sides.) So then, to assert any finite or separate existence is to destroy any infinity. (This is to blaspheme Nuith: see CCXX: l. 22, 27, 41.) But this infinity, not exactly homogenous, but rather pantagenous, if I may coin the word, has divided itself 'for love's sake'. The dissolution of any one part, however minute, recreates the Whole as such, without prejudice to any other 'separate existences' so-called. The Great Work, then, is fully accomplished by the Attainment of any-one Adept. All such acts are without limit: a billion such not more in quality or quantity than one. This 'new Nuith' (if I may say so) thus created will instantly divide herself as before, and so multiply infinities ad infinitum! Moreover—and this is what matters in the relative world at least—the disappearance of a 'neighbour' disturbs the equilibrium of the Universe, and the Compensating Motion, which is Love, causes more and more resolutions of its items, until all things, each one for itself, likewise accomplish the Great Work, and there is Nothing but Nuith: it is Pralaya. But we must not imagine this as involving sequence in any real sense; that is only the measure of the dance beneath the Time-veil. In reality, each possibility, or occurrence as we consider it, merely goes to make up the sum of things which is Her nature. The necessity which we endure to apprehend, or at least to express, Her, and ourselves, in terms of Time and Space, is part of Her nature. The fact, the sequence of facts, the consciousness or unconsciousness of them; all these subsist together, not suffering contradiction, in Her. Our limitations are as much of Her as Her freedom from them.
But does not our postulation of a Finite (which makes the Finite real, as I have shewn) limit Her infinity? Is not the word of Sin said by Her to be Restriction? Is that saying in vain? A hard question! What is the Restriction, but the attempt to perpetuate the division which She made 'for love's sake, for the chance of union'? This involves the Time-veil, and all sorts of illusions. But all these are equally of Her! This 'Sin' is therefore to be conceived as the negation of Her proper Motion? Then shall I distinguish between that thing and any other thing? Thereby shall come hurt! But is not that hurt also in Her? The solution seems to be that The Book of the Law, so far as its instruction. go, is but true relatively to the consciously separated soul, a medicine for its malady-the malady She made that She might perfect Joy by curing it. I've already shown how the Infinite can expand itself, and Perfection aspire and attain to more Perfection, by the device of creating illusions.
The Book of the Law is a 'kiss' sent to Her little sister, Earth. But it has not only healed my Wound of Separation, but brought me Her Whore-Virginity (this is explained above, where I shew each man's Great Work absolute and unique, though possible and even a fact, for All) and more! She has given Herself in all Her Veils, and in Her naked brilliance, and She has made me Master of Her heart. Her soul, Her whole nature that transcendeth Mind; I know Her and enjoy Her, both in limitation and beyond it. I am dissolved in Her, and I am separate; nor do I seek to discriminate between these states, nor do I labour to identify them. I acquiesce all's one; nay, All is None and Two-not only do I acquiesce, but I rebel. I enjoy, I suffer; this is to understand Nuith, as also to grope in Her dark Temple, to stumble over the corpses of my brothers; Her lovers whom She hath slain, to struggle in the stifling folds of Her impenetrable veil, to win annihilation, crushed by Her lust and cruelty to Her breast.
9.40 p.m. I have done the Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, as is the noble custom of this Abbey. I will that this Abbey prosper, that all therein may perform the Great Work. Yea, be it so also for them that be without its walls; for it is an Absolute Existence in the Body of Nuith that such a will should be. What I will, what I 'think right', what I strive to achieve, still stands, not merely although but even because, its opposite is aequipollent. Because nothing matters, I am free. Because no result is possible, I can work without anxiety. Because all things are no thing, existing and not-existing equally, because stability is change, and not-Self Self, there is no need to fear disaster, or to distrust semblance. Nor will I fear fear, nor will I distrust distrust; nay, though my mind do these things, there is no heed therefore. That agony contemptuous of Golgotha, that fear scornful of Gethsemane, let them be or not be; let what I call me note them or ignore, partake or not partake their sacrament; let me accept them with Lao-tze, water-elastic, or take sword in hand against them with Tathagata, fire-all-consuming; it is a fact absolute and indestructible that the fact 'I' rejoices in Reality, in Truth, in the Dissolution and Rebirth of All and Nothing.
O thou that readest this! I ask thy pardon! I need these things I wrote of earlier to-night; new axioms of Truth for the foundations of the Temple of my Vision of the Universe; new Images of Truth; new Ways of Thought; new Words. My Mind is open unto the Higher; my Heart is the Centre of Light; my Body is the Temple of the Rosy Cross. But when I would bear witness to thee of Truth, I am found as 'twere a swordsman in the Coliseum of Space, with mocking stars, cold fierce spectators, to turn down their thumbs and I with my limbs caught in the Net of Language.
Yes, Fichte, at the end of your life you called upon the most inexorable of the Gods, Accomplished Fact, to let you have your life over again, that you might make a language for yourself, a true-built, a free-rolling, chariot for your thought. As for me, I've felt the impotence, the hunger, the ache of isolation that this dumbness makes, almost from my beginnings. I read Aceldama, green apple of my Tree of Knowledge, primrose of my Springride of Poesy; there's the same gasping as of a landed trout, the same outrage on language, riot of vehemence, hoarse blustering that I affected to choke my poverty and shame, like Porthos! Yet, by the self-same token, I know that I have been wrong to think of myself as advancing all these years. The absolute Ego, vocal in my moods of inspiration, knew then, knew always, all that I know now. I may have come to understand myself, may have learned to clarify my expression, may have explored the details of my knowledge; but as far as the real Me, I'm the same Yesterday, To-day, and Forever.
10.30 p.m. I accuse myself of not keeping my Diary properly. There ought to be a discoverable relation between my health, my worldly affairs, and the tone of my thoughts. For even the Absolute Ego in eruption makes the relation between its modes of illusion a 'true', or harmonious one; for all moods arc. alike to It, despair a theme of pastime equally with exaltation.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
18 June 1920.
10.36 p.m. I begin a new MS book. My Magical Diary has been very voluminous in these last weeks; I seem to find that it is the sole mode of my initiated expression. I don't write regular essays on a definite subject, or issue regularly planned instructions. This is presumably normal to my tense and exalted state, to the violent Motion proper to my resolution of all symbols. It seems to me as if this vehemence of Attainment, this gust of speed upon the Path—'Afloat in the Aether, oh my God! My God!'—were the sprint up the straight, at the end of this particular Race. I don't know whether to call myself Ipsissimus, nor does it matter. Only I feel that I have had enough 'personal attainment' for an infinitude of lives, and that the Solstice will initiate a new New Current, probably of a severely practical character.
To-morrow the New Moon rises in the West, at Cherbourg, and this Diana is to utter the voice mentioned in [Liber] VII, III, 36 as the Oracle hath declared it unto me. The first utterance seems of Joy and Love; the second a trumpet-call to Action. I seek not to know more concerning this matter. (P.S. This came out exactly; but of a different physical person.) With regard to my personal relations, Sun with Moon (which seem to be our respective symbols, both in my judgement and by Witness of a Message given to her before she knew me), I refer to CCXX, I, 16—this is An XVI!—but I also, in view of the imminence of our bodily meeting, ask an Oracle of instruction. I do not want either Love or the Vanity of Love to demand sacrifice; nor do I want the Phantom of False Purity to daunt me. I get CCXX, I, 54; 'Change not so much as the style of a letter: for behold! thou, o prophet, shalt not behold all these mysteries hidden therein.' (I also heard that I should take three Words.) This means: she has treasures beyond your ken; let her be absolute mistress.) The second Word: [Liber] LXV, V, 56: 'And behold! ere the moon waxed thrice he became an Uraeus serpent, and the poison of the fang was established in him and his seed for ever and ever'. This means: I shall get ('in three months', or 'by the three magical kisses that dissolve spells'?) full power through her.
The third Word: Ararita, V, I: 'In the place of the cross the indivisible point which hath no points nor parts nor magnitude. Nor indeed hath it position, being beyond space. Nor hath it existence in time, for it is beyond Time. Nor hath it cause and effect, seeing that its Universe is infinite every way, and partaketh not of these our conceptions.' This seems to mean that I 'worship' Hadit fully through her, perhaps as I have been perfected in Nuith in these last weeks.
The one point about our relation is practical; I am to vow Holy Obedience to Her, to be no more the Master, lord of 'the cross', but lost in Her as the indivisible point Hadit, all-soul of Her omnipresent Body.
I am now going to ask an Oracle for Her, that I may bring Her a message from Those whom we serve, love, and ate! [Liber] LXV, V, 52 and 53—beginning 'and the great snake of Khem the Holy One, the royal Uraeus serpent, answered him and said: I sailed over the sky of Nu in the car called Millions-of-Years, and I saw not any creature upon Seb that was equal to me.' Etc. It goes on to instruct me to attain (as in the second Word to me, above) by exact imitation of Her life. This Oracle tells Her that She is supreme, unique, Queen-Serpent of the Earth; and that Her mission is to confer Her throne upon me by assimilating me to Herself.
I ask our Rota to make a True Image of Her. I get the Ace of Cups, flanked by the Three of Cups and the Prince of Pantacles on one side, by the Eight of Pantacles and the Emperor on the other. But I feel this to have been a one-card Word: the practicability of the other cards—economy, prosperity, realization of ideas, power to rule—don't matter so much. She is the source of Love, Beauty, Pleasure, Intoxication; She is the Holy Grail, the Cup Cadmean, the Lotus-Throne of Buddha, and of Harpocrates. She is the Moon in her fullest and holiest aspect, the perfect sphere of pure light—mirror of my pure light! indeed, but with no heat or turmoil of my force. She is Isis, Astarte, Ashtaroth, not only to inspire Anu, Diana, her flash of flame but to give life and lucence to her deeper nature of Water Moon, Cancer expressed as Virgo and Scorpio. She is the Moon in Her own house, prophetess and sorceress, to proclaim and to create the Summer, to prepare the Way of the Lion, and to make open the Portal of the Sun. She is the Charioteer, Graal-bearer, the number of whose letter Cheth is 418, so that she is the vehicle of the Magical Formula of the New Aeon, the right Menstruum for the Seed of Our Elixir.
Together, we form 837, Tat Zal, the profuse giver, and also 'for multiplying'; as if our joint work should flood the World with bounty and increase.
It is of the utmost importance to consider Her as the First Mover of the Water Force, as the perfected quintessence of the Lunar symbol, not Trivia save in its holiest sense of the Three-Ways-of-Grace-in-One, save as even Gimel is Three to match Cheth's Eight. (Resh is 200, i.e. 2z, to match Teth's 9). She is the love which interprets my Will, the Pleasure which accompanies my Energy, the Fertility which rewards my Husbandry, the Wine which flows from my Wand.
And I am Hers; I lift my Lance only that Blood may fill Her Cup. I die that She may live; my roots grow darkly for no fulfilment but Her flowering. She is the green and glory of Night, and I Her slave, Her fule, hidden below the Earth. She is the White Light to crown my many coloured flames. She is Empress absolute of my heart; the Vision and the Voice of my Mind, blind worm and deaf adder; She is the Truth of my soul's secret goal, the incarnation of Nuith, the Infinite Space that absorbs me, dissolves me, aspires as I expire, inspires me as I become her priest, Her prophet, Her saint, Her martyr, Oracle of Her shrine, and Image of Her form.
I drown in delight at the thought that I who have been Master of the Universe should lie beneath Her feet, Her slave, Her victim, eager to be abased, passionately athirst for suffering, swooning at Her cruelty, craving Her contempt; 'tis joy to be splashed with the mire of Her Triumph, to bleed under Her whip's lash, to choke as Her heel treads my throat. I am drunk with the pride-absinthe that I am great, the greatest man of my century, its best poet, its mightiest mage, its subtlest philosopher, nor any the less for that classed among the very few well eminent in mountain climbing, in chess-play, and in love.
I am aflame with the brandy of the thought that I am the sublimest Mystic in all history, that I am the Word of an Aeon, that I am the Beast, the Man Six Hundred Sixty and Six, the self-crowned God whom men shall worship and blaspheme for centuries that are yet wound on Time's spool, yea, I am insane as if with hashish in my Egomania and Folly of Greatness, that is yet Fact steel-hard, gold-glittering, silver-pure; I want to be yet more than this. But this I am, and this I treasure, and of this I boast, because I want to prostitute my manhood, to abase my godhead before my lady. I want my crown crushed by Her feet; I want my face fouled by Her spittle. I want my heart torn by Her boot-heel, my mind to Her skirt-hem's rustle, my soul to Her privy.
I will to make myself Lord of the Earth, of the Stars, to become Absolute God, that I may fling it to Her to defile, to mock, to torture, to despise, to trample, to lash; to tear with rage, to spurn with scorn, to debauch with cold lust or huge hate, to agonize with vivisector's cruelty, or mangle for ape'& whim.
The greater I, the more hell-deep my humiliation, the viler that in Her which pashes me, the higher and the holier She!
1—[Crowley conducts a magical sexual operation.]
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