Aleister Crowley Diary Entry

Tuesday, 22 June 1920

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Today I leave for Tunis.

2.00 p.m. I do, more or less, by the [steamship] Citta di Tripoli. I have never seen quite such disgraceful management of embarkation. A free fight on the gangway! Percy's solar stuff [cocaine] came.

I have 6234 lire and 2230 plus 300 francs. Must send 3129 francs to Bourcier.

3.20 p.m. This noble leviathan, supposed to have started at 1.00 shows no sign of wanting to be off.

3.50 p.m. Zeus! We're starting!

Note Panormus [Palermo] sacred to Venus. Tunis—old Carthage—to Water, and to Luna, too, because of the Purple Sacrament.

5.25 p.m. I have been creating 'The Sin of Adam Gregg'. (I) The Father's death-bed. 'Son not christened till elder brother died. Gregg equals   Lilith Adam Eve. The Knave equals Nova Aedes;3 old one hurt in Claudius' time. The hearth: heir lets fire die; way to Vault. The pedigree: 'were guardians'—Patriarch's lives: really tribal records. Genesis true. Adam was a particular man; the first man who 'knew' and wrote: hence 'good and evil' added to unconscious 'life'. Know = GN = genus, genius, etc. Genesis, gnosis, etc. Gregg, from Roy, (Ruadh still red in Gaelic) only means the red one, Royal robes red, from Ra, the red sun. Rouge, rosso, too! So R's the solar or red letter, and you're 'son of the sun'. Also, Adam, red man, from Adamah, red earth, containing Dam, red blood. Books, scrolls, tablets, bricks, bones—all clear back to Sumer. The 'fall'. An actual fruit, as hashish and other drugs act on mind, pure chemistry, so there's one which stops begetting and gives knowledge. Adam No 1 got this from Eve, and so lost the Paradise of 'innocence' or automatic life; and we his race perpetuate the 'curse'. The fruit's in the mammoth's thigh, lots of it; none of us have dared eat, save one (Renaissance-became king and was slain) though we don't know what the curse is, save that there's some huge power in it, some lever on man's destiny. But if you dare, at least get an heir first.

Part 2: So he gets Lilith and Eve, has children, eats, works up a stress where he feels he must know something at all costs.

Part 3: The result. All knowledge, its frightfulness. Lilith's demon brood! Is there a possibility of redemption? His one ignorance. He goes to Genesis—the woman's seed-what can that mean? (He won't seek to know his own future—the mere thought gives him a glimpse of a gallows, and he shuts it out.) His eldest son grows up, murders his second son, and bolts. His third son is born with the mark of a rope on his neck. He takes this as an oracle, allows a sleuth to fix him with the murder of 'Abel', hanged, and this saves his race. 'Seth' christened Adam grows up innocent to inherit the glory of the race redeemed: but with the Scar! —I doubt all this last part!

6.45 p.m. Can Cain be the guttural, Abel the labial, Seth the dental? Seth is Set, of course; Sun, Seed, South, SU, Soul, the begetter of the true race. Cain's a scarred god, and a Wanderer; Abel a slain god: Wotan and Odin? Abel equals Balder?? Are they the 3 Fathers, one Going, one Dying, one Begetting? Mind, Body and Soul? Air, Water, and Fire? Throat is of Air, Lips of Water, Teeth of Fire, surely.

I don't seem to trace or place this guttural God well, as I do the F-B-P god, and the S-D-T one. Is it because he was outlawed? Adonis, At-ys, As-ar, AD-onai, correlate; and with Zeus, Shu, Ashur, could work into 'Jesus': did not the K-lot butt in, and insist on 'Christ'?

7.00 p.m. Bo, that last part of the novel's right. As I wrote years back, 'the love of knowledge is the hate of life'. The price is crucifixion. Knowledge is the poison of Life; the only antidote, non-action.

8.00 p.m. Among Christians today, as once among those citizens whose pieties, oil surface and stone heart, filed sharp the rowels of the spurs with which Petroni us scarred the flanks of his Pegasus, there are more Gods than men, though they've but one poor God! He is one? Yes, one only: because their individualities have scared them; they don't dare even to dream; they've made him one, a sort of soup, stale, rotten, and rancid seeking disguise under the common cloak of insipidity. My God were dangerous; he might fight your God; let's have a mob—God, motley, a rag-doll with no features. We've lost our own images in uniforms, gas masks! We've silenced our souls with clamour of crowd-psychology. This One-God is a shapeless bogey, shadow and strife of unwashed masses; none the less terrible for that to those who fear him!

All Gods are protective phantasies born of the sense of inferiority, either to Nature's power or that of other men; Freud showed this well enough. They are for use, too, like the Bearskin and the war-whoop; they make me more confident, and may frighten the other man. They are the Big Brother to whom the boy threatens to complain when he is kicked or has his marbles taken. They are in their maker's image, because man can't create, but only combine, exaggerate, and so on. The Christian God is a mob-God, because they are a mob, even their leaders living in terror of the Vote. The older Gods were more distinct, more manly, less unknowable, more accountable for their actions; so we may hope to trace their pedigree.

I can't see why the sound D, or the mechanism of uttering it suggests the father-idea of AD, Adad, and other D-gods. Is 'daddy' traditional, or somehow onomatopoeic like mam-mam for mother? But the quick up-and-down movement of the lower jaw produces the T, whence we can see why Tau is the phallus, and AT-gods men. More, why they should be erect and dying gods is obvious. They need not be father, if they date from days when it was not known that men begat.

As to the S-gods, Ish, a man, is their father. For S is the serpent-hiss, the sharp breath, teeth bared yet clenched, which is the natural token of alarm, hate, defiance, natural to a man who meets his fellow—aberration from legitimate monkeyhood. By it he recognizes his brother, and named him accordingly, when need was. (Later, when alarm had died, we have still 'Sh!'—Hush!—not a call for Silence, which it breaks, but a claim on the attention of other men.) In S is this idea of fear and anger, also of air, because of the breath's quickening rush. 'Storm' combines these ideas: so the first S-gods were storm-gods. Later, this breath, air moving in man, might be known for a proof that he lived; then this breath-letter, S, might come to mean 'life'. For instance, God breathes on Adam to make him a 'living soul'; and Elisha raises a boy to life by breathing on him. The Ruach Elohim, again, is a breath that broods on Chaos. At last we 'find a Holy Ghost begetting by dint of breath. And was not Maut the Mother-Vulture impregnated by the Wind? Perhaps, too, the hiss of the rain which fertilized earth, as even a savage must observe in tropical lands where the result is so swift, may have helped him to the convention that S should mean Life. This rain comes from the air which he breathes, though from beyond him; it seems then to him natural to make Zeus or Shu rain-gods and life-gods as well as air-gods, storm-gods, names for the fierce, the fearful anger which at first only meant 'an enemy'-his fellow-man!

How should this 'air' come to mean 'mind'? Hardly, I think, though I once thought and wrote it, because air wanders as nothing else but mind does. Did man's vanity lure him to link the ideas of breath and thought? The Wheel comes in just here, RU (which is also the hollow, the hole, the mother) giving us Ruh, Ruach, air, wind, breath, mind, as Spiro gives Spirit-a word still so democratic that it may be Methylated as well as Holy. Is this from the idea of the Heavens as a Wheel? Surely not; they thought of Earth as fiat, and Heaven as a roof to it, with pillars, blue cows and the like. Not all of them: Egypt pictured Nuit as curved on Seb, with Shu to part them. They had good astronomers, too, in Chaldea, India, China, who may have known more than they chose to say, yet hinted the truth by connecting circles with air. The Vayu-Tatwa, symbol of air, is a blue circle. Zoroaster said God had a spiral force. Perhaps even the whirling symbol the Swastika, was meant to combine the phallic cross of life with the circle of the Mother, of Air, of Mind; to declare Life the male part of GN, and Knowledge, the female part.

But did the common speech depend on wise men's speculations? Why not? Those who first spoke must have taken a long lead, and suddenly, of those who stuck to grunts and gestures. Such men would own a royal secret, a key of power; they would guard it; they would complicate it deliberately with ciphers, establish hierarchies, impose laws. They would no longer be limited by necessity to represent real relations between sound and sense; they could and would agree on arbitrary symbols. To-day, for instance, I myself might tell a friend: We don't want A to overhear our talk of B; we'll baffle eavesdropping by calling him C. I should make a point moreover, of choosing C such that it has no possible mind-connection with B; I wouldn't call Mr Hunter, Mr Fisher, or Mr Houghton, or Mr Punter, or Mr Retouch; I'd call him something which wouldn't suggest him by similarity of meaning or initial, or rime or anagram. Nay more, I'd choose a real name, the name of someone else known to A; and I would mislead A further by putting in things about C which would mean nothing in the conversation.

The priests of old did this, I'm sure, when they saw people beginning to catch on.

Again, I've been talking and had an uninitiate butt in, proud to prove that he understood, I've pandered to his pride, I led him on, flattered him, invented a whole comedy for him, with my brother priest playing up nobly—the game's great! It's hard to keep a secret by silence; a glance or a gesture may betray it; but if one makes the intruder silly drunk on the Swiss Champagne of Pride, chloroforms him with a vow-of-secrecy—soaked-napkin-lambskin will serve, so Masons say!—and bates his itch of curiosity with cocained plaster, may be a coloured ribbon, or stops his wisdom tooth that aches, with a gold filling, say a medal or badge, one's safe. Rebuff the hungry man, he'll press you; but you can give him a stone for bread if you call it The Stone of the Wise; he'll swallow it, and thank you. It's a good joke; but more, it's legitimate to withhold opium from a squalling baby, though it would ease the immediate pain. It's right to misdirect a murderer in pursuit of his victim. It's right to camouflage one's supply trains, or to cruise with a squadron of papier-mache warships. (It's not fair to do it by abuse of the Red Cross, though). It's right to deny a man knowledge, even by the means, of deceit outlined above, when he has got the scope and balance in his mind to apprehend it truly. 'What is the Elixir?' a man asks me, to take a practical illustration. (1) I say that I don't know: he doesn't believe me; the lie's vain. (2) I say that he is not ready for the knowledge, but that in time, etc. That's the truth, the truth that cost Hiram-Abif his life. He may be wise and patient, but I'm taking a chance; and though he should not murder me, he may seek elsewhere, and surprise the secret out of due season. My truth has but one chance in three to serve my turn. (3) I say that the Elixir is DEF, it being in fact ABC. He goes off happy and harmless. Does he waste the time that he gives to preparing DEF? No, certainly; he may happen on GHI, the Stone Itself! At least, his work on DEF will help to fit him later on to make ABC without danger, when the time's ripe to tell him the truth, and he to receive it. There's more truth in my lie than had I blurted out the facts; for he, not understanding A, not able to purify B properly, not fit to control C, and in his pride presumptuous, in his zeal rash, in his ardour blind, certain to bedevil the combination, will destroy himself and will discredit the process. My truth would have been a lie to him.

But may not I make answer in elaborate detail? Suppose I say that the Elixir is ABC, but that he is certain to deceive himself, to injure himself if he accept the fact at its face value; that he must first know many things apparently impertinent, and do yet more things that must seem to him mere dissipations. Suppose I cite my own experience in the matter, and draw analogies from the sailor's need of astronomy, when his plain business is with water, or from soldier's duty to be drilled in gestures and in postures utterly unwarlike, to obey commands that were never yet given in battle. Shall I tell him how we flog boys into knowledge that they understand nor then nor after; nay, nor remember? How we teach girls 'accomplishments', well knowing that they will live only to breed, to cook, to sew, to wash, to scrub, to sweep, to rule the world?

What will he say? Admit our methods he must do, though he disallow wisdom in us. But I much fear that my plain statement of the goal will spur his lust to blind his judgement. He'll be jealous of me, and so think me jealous of him, like the Master Builder was of his pupil. He'll rush in—I know: I did it myself!

I've tried this method all the time, so far. This is the goal, I've said, and this the road; but you've no eyes for the one, and no wings for the other. I'll teach you to look lidless on the sun, to soar and dive; but, fledgling that you are, go easy!

Some want to be eagles by short cuts. They pout, leave me, and fall to bird's-nesting schoolboys, the quack Rosicrucians, the sleek Yogis. Some think they are eagles already, mimic my gestures, dye their fluffiness to match my plumes. They fall from the first twig they drop to, if—as is rare—their conceit fools them into risking it! Some are enraged with me, because truth frightens them. They chatter of the misdeeds of the wicked eagle; flying's a crime, and the sun obscure, for no right-minded bird to look on. These die of the gapes in their fouled nest, in the dark. Some are too rash—but a broken wing may be mended, and wisdom bloom in the window-box of a hospital. Some over-timid—well, the test comes, sooner or later, and our time's our own. But these birds make the others nervous, and they're inclined to take the infection of the plague-stricken ones, in a mild form. How few that learn the lesson of Dagger and Cord, neither to rush nor to hang back! How few that understand technique, its sheer necessity as a machine, its utter incapacity to be more! A Beethoven born deaf and dumb? A Damrosch to lead Heaven's choirs? We're all Beethovens, when Truth's clear, it's true; so our sole necessary work is to acquire technique and our one damning danger to let that technique seem of any value in itself, as if a piano should be more than firewood, save as most passive slave to Paderewski.

I'll train you to do your will, if you will; that's a routine. I'll not direct your will, I'll not inspire it. I'll free it; I'll not urge it. The toil of perfecting command of an instrument often chokes genius—Browning notes that, nor once nor twice. I can't help that; your capital of energy, time, or whatnot, was too small to start with. I may suspect that? Shall I deter you? Not while I think that your life's work is banked, stands to your credit for a new venture. But shall I lure you on as men do children? How could I understand, for example, what a poet's fame is, when I was ten, or twenty? The truth about it, as I now see it? I wouldn't have believed it, even if I had understood; or if I had, I had surely turned my talents to dig drains!

No: boys must be told that honesty, obedience, truthfulness, industry and all the rest of it lead to the Summit of Felicity; and you must show him that Summit, marked in plain figures,—'Mayor', 'Colonel', 'Bishop', each with his special convict suit of grotesque comfortless cloth, his chains—significant for once!-and other trammels, none but spells one sort of slavery or another, from hours that must be 'kept' to etiquette that must be observed and morals that must be simulated. There's your boy's City of God, and he crowned King! He's wretched, like as not, torn by anxiety, worn out, hating his fetters; and Life's wind cuts through the rags of his frayed vanity. He knows-unless too basely stupid—what his prize is worth; he mutters 'Whom the gods love die young', through his false teeth.

May he console himself for a moment, just now when he is Cynosure, Example, Model, Gold Medallist, Spoon-Bait for the minnows in the Brook of Learning? May not he smile once genuinely if grimly, to see the gudgeon gape, taking his tinsel for the gold sheen of scales? May not he share the calm of the decoy-duck brave with paint? Or gloat, the slave's most loathsome pleasure, over the wild elephants he lures to the stockage? Ay, and smile hellishly he may, for the second time, when he reflects at what price he bought this Doctor's-Robe-of-Nessus, these epaulets that would tire Atlas, this red-hot mitre, this Woolsack stuffed with poisonous thorns. The toast-proposer at the banquet, the schoolmaster at term's end, the journalist, the politician, the financier, all find phrases for his praise, and all the phrases vary less than so many forged bank-notes. His honesty, his truthfulness, his industry, tum-tum, tum-tum, tum-tum, runs the dull sing-song.

And all the while he knows that his pasteboard crown, his glass gems, his stage money, were not paid for so easily; he sold his soul for them. His honesty? He was ten years a grocer! His industry? A drunken scholar wrote those brilliant sermons. His truthfulness? His career hinged on a lie sworn in court. His learning? One thing he learnt, the way his mother made quilts from high-coloured bits of rag. His courage? Fear God, yes, but no man? He's Admiral of the Fleet today, with forty years' servility to thank, and his one victory-the Nelson touch-due to his stupidity in misplacing the enemy's fleet and so running into it by mistake. The foe's surprise and his tars' valour determining the event which made him a world's hero. His honour? In his college he was a snob; he pandered to the vices of the influential, and shared them, filling a very library of notebooks with the detailed record.

These were the tragedies that crowned him otherwise than Sophocles. These were his theses for Doctors' degree in the school called Humane Letters. Of these he carpeted the steps of his pulpit, and with their covers fashioned himself a mitre. He was a decent chap, too, as a boy; he can't forget it; age revives those memories. He wanted to go straight; he wanted to be something real. He read the Classics, poetry, Malory, Pascal, books like Richard Feverel and Sartor Resartus for the honest love of it. He valued pictures and knew good from bad, better than dealers did, as time took pains to prove. He rode to hounds, one of the best; and loved a cousin of his like Swinburne's. Tannhäuser and Thomas' Tristan and a Perfect Knight from Tennyson; all three in one! He forgave the treachery of a friend, that nigh cost him his career; and he confessed to an act which would almost certainly involve his expulsion, after a man he hated had been found guilty of it, and the case closed. Yes, he had been pure, keen, intelligent, high-minded, able, energetic; and suddenly he found himself slave to most filthy vices, a liar, a spy, a traitor, a blackmailer; he shed his learning as a dog shakes water from its back; he worked no more than the lazzaroni of Naples: he changed college ale for fumes of opium; he hunted men instead of forces; he bartered muscle for fat, nerve's word and act for its cream and passion, brain's memory for oblivion, will for whim, judgement for cunning; and all the while, like some foul oil, sucked up by capillary attraction, he oozed towards a mitre.

He has it; he may count the jewels. False diamonds numberless, his friends, flatterers, and parasites. Rubies, the blood of suicides that floated him; sapphires, the melancholy madness of his victims, and of those that loved them; emeralds, the jealousies and envies that still make him fear; pearls, row on row, the tears he rung from women; tourmalines, for his treacheries; cat's eyes, for lusts and cunning and deceit and cruelty of him. Then there's the iron band about his brow, the menace of revenge slowfoot and only just not sure, so that its quarry may bear the agony of his faint hope. There's the cleft crown, as though he knew his triumph shorn asunder, his will's tower struck in two, and empty air where he meant its pinnacle. Each half's like a fool's cap; he knows his body a bad joke, and a cruel one; his soul an obscene joke, and an insane one. And crosses over all! He has a leg that won't heal; he has a stricture, gall-stones, fistula; the other day was his first round, without gloves or Queensberry rules, against that unbeaten welter-weight Angina Pectoris; digestion went long since, but the doctors won't say Cancer, they must watch the case a bit.

He has no friend, no love, no soul to touch him. He can't imagine pleasure any more. He has applied the Cult of the Clean Plate to his long table d'hote of vices: glutted, flatulent, nauseated, what could tempt him? At thirty-two, he was cured of the morphia habit; that is, the exquisite part of him that thrilled at the drug's Judas-kiss to inconceivable symphonies of pleasure and pain, gave calm ineffably serene and wise, craving unspeakably agonizing and insane, was simply killed in him like a tooth killed with arsenic, save that the loss of it felt as a dull chronic ache.

He had lost faith in love when he had prostituted its manhood and blasphemed its godhead, in trading on it and in jeering it for vice, as do English, most of them. It's a mask of coarseness on a thin-skinned face, a blustering bray lest ear should catch mouse-squeals, whitewash for hollow sepulchres whose epitaphs for all their sorrow's emptiness are but poor spells to lay the ghost of the shame of their weakness and fear. He lost faith: he lost appetite; he lost the power of the function. Love is the weak man's master, whip and a bullet between the eyes when the spur without pity and hack's foundered. Love is the strong man's friend, neither intrusive, insolent, aggressive, nor drivelling; a comrade night and day, inspiring, encouraging, helping him manfully when need is; he has a cheerful word, a genial smile, a sly poke o' the ribs, a jolly jest, a witty comment, a good story, a high romance. He is high priest of sacraments to cleanse, fortify, console, consecrate, or anoint as fits the occasion; hearing confession, ordering penance, giving absolution; advising, praising, warning, at one's need; leading the choir, swinging the thurible, swearing chrism, or bestowing loud, sweet, solemn word of benediction. He is one's sword and shield; one's captain and one's kind; he is one's oriflamme, one's armour, and one's charger; he sets his mouth in battle to a golden trumpet, and he struts, drum-major in the March Past of Life.

But to the man that fears him, shuns him, and at last tries to escape him by denying him, degrading him, soiling his garments, mocking his music; to him that makes a market in his temple, that stamps base coinage in his image, or counterfeits his signature on worthless notes: to him Love grants his prayer. The God disdains his defiled altars, shakes from plumed feet the dust of his unswept shrine, leaves to its mire the swine-thronged temple; silent, he goes his way, nor turns his golden glance. But still his image stands; the body of love survives the soul; nay, but it dies, it putrefies, its stench is poison to the breath of the man's life. Maggots invade its tissues, giving it motion of corruption, hell's obscene burlesque of the old tragedy that's held the stage so long. It holds the popular throng for its grimness, coarse jokes, pathos, heroics sham or genuine, tears mostly vile comedy mostly crude, sometimes (confess!) pure genius, surprises, grossness, vulgarities, alarms, excursions. But Lord! How long it is, how dull, whole acts of sheer banality! How can we stay thus cramped on this hard seat, crowded by apple-chewing, grunting or asthmatic mobs, sweaty and foul of breath and mouth, when we can hardly see the play? The theatre's a splendid if pretentious, over brilliant one: we can't judge the design from where we sit. The play we see in snatches; the light's bad, dazzling and dim at once, and the air's dusty. There are pillars and girls' hats in the way, and people are always getting up 'n going out; or coming in, maybe, but always noisily. The dialogue's ill-spoken, and we hear bit tags for the gross laughs, the maudlin tears, the frantic booing, the rare applause, mostly hysterical and caused by some misunderstanding of the situation, the asthmatic lungs and shuffling feet, the coughs, the whistlings, the senseless comments of my neighbours.

The play's a botch; the plot pointless, the scene disconnected, the acting worse than the worst amateur.

Why do I keep my seat? Is it because the scenario is so badly torn, its pages all disordered, because the prompter is snoring, the stage manager crazy with delirium tremens, and the actors so unrehearsed, ill-hung with tawdry finery, untrained to cue, unsure of speech, mouthed, drawled, bawled, mumbled, slurred, mispronounced, vulgarized, minced, mangled, meaningless, that I sit in the hope that in so many accidents there might be just one lucky one?

The play's old, as I said. The author is not known; he must be dead; if not, why doesn't someone hunt him down and kill him? Does he draw royalties?

I know why most folks try and sit it out. It's all so muddled, so inartistic, so unintelligible, that they can't grasp its sameness and stupidity. 'Never twice alike' says one old-timer, beerily, over my shoulder. What other pleasure have they but to crush in the World's Theatre and gape at this interminable, idiot, boring muddle-drama 'Life'?

But what of myself? To my shame I am aware of why I crouch and peer and strain my ears. The 'hero', wrinkled, plastered, rheumy, blue-chinned, black-toothed, the wheezing barnstormer—will the 'heroine', dyed frowzy hag, dewlapped, her paint sweat-seamed, will she smile—oh those gums!—on his h-h-honourable proposals? Or break his heart? What have they to do with my strange interest?, my aching patience?

Well, I've a fixed hallucination that he is really a hero, she his ideal and his mate; and I'm anxious to know the result, oblivious to the fact that I know the play's ghastly curtain, because I'm further fallen in madness, even to think that he and she are I and All My Heart's Desire. Yea:, I love truly, and I enjoy the play.

But what of our bishop-elect, with Love's corpse corrupting in his bowels ere his hair thinned? Could Friendship serve him? He had used it to betray it; to rob, to ruin, to enslave, to drive to death or madness. 'Ware hawks! No friends for me, says he; I know the breed!

Books? Their existence taunted him. Music? Reproach and the rest! Art? Beauty, vitriol rather than cream to his soul's ugly countenance! Children? His consolation: he could enjoy his work of lying to them, soiling them, trampling their fancy's flowers, trapping their feet, bewildering their minds, cauterizing their hearts, crushing their wills, weighing their souls against gilt leper-scabs in a false balance, watching them agonize into damnation as he had done himself. At school the pleasure was called 'passing it on'. For this it was that he stood, as well as his leg's ulcer let him, stood still as his shin's itch allowed, enjoyed the few words of the Head Master's eulogy of him and his life that his dulled ears could catch, smiling as benignly as the agony of his body and the poison of his own jest could endure, until the moment when he could kiss the ironic 'Peace be with you!', and chew the cud of his damnation at the innocent echo 'And with thy spirit'.

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