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Aleister Crowley Diary Entry Monday, 5 July 1920
Last night I made a little meditation on Confidence-in-Others. One can respect the Man-of-his-word, because he fortifies himself by the unity in his will. But this is only the case when he is free and proud, and keeps his word not because he is afraid to break it, but because he is not afraid to pledge himself to keep it, feeling himself master even of the future, not to be lassoed by desire, or saddled by alien will, not jibbing for temper, shying at fear-shadows, faltering from fatigue, or swerving at obstacles. To him a breach of his pledge is a defeat. But such a man is recognizable as such by the energy he disengages, the flame and glory of him, a vesture not to be mistaken by instinct. Quite otherwise is the fidelity of the passive type of man. When we trust the average man, we despise him; for our confidence means that we think we know his limitations. If he deceives us we are angry and punish him; but we are also, and that more deeply if we are ourselves royal, enraged at our own failure to envelop his possibilities completely. If we are weak, we feel hurt, wronged, like a puppy that has snapped at a wasp. But we do not respect him, except as his escape from his own slavery is a flight towards freedom. His consciousness of his bond may one day urge him to honest revolt. But we have respect for those who break the bonds of the law, convention and the like by virtue of their activity; martyrs even may seem heroic; much more than do kings, clan-chiefs, brigands, pirates etc.
When we do not trust a man, it is, as a rule proof that we fear him, that is, we confess that his nature is beyond our cartography: he is the Unknown which we hold terrible. To 'trust the people' is to despise them. But to trust a king-man is to praise him. I am proud to be trusted to do my will, to carry out an agreed plan; but humbled indeed should I be if I could be trusted to 'stay put'. In short, we honour activity and energy, despise passivity and inertia; in other words we praise man and dispraise woman. A man's adulteries are tokens of high spirit, a woman's betrayal of our trust in her, stupidity and cowardice. We only respect the 'fast' woman when she is bold about it, claims, as it were, to share our manhood. We despise the drudge-husband whom we cuckold, kick the fat rump of the dull dupe Bonacieux. We despise also the cow-mother type of female, but we respect Semiramis, Cleopatra, Catherine of Russia or, for other types of exploits, Sappho, Lady Macbeth, or Joan of Arc. And the quality common to these, their claim to honour, is their refusal to accept the female formula. We think that a man ought to be a man, but that a woman ought not to be a woman; at least so sings the god-passion in our hearts, all careless of convenience. It is only our wish to kill competition that makes us pretend we want to be respectable, and women virtuous, humanity (in short) to play the female while we do our male will.
My will to free mankind is so to speak sodomitic. I want my mistress to be mighty, sure of myself and my ability to master her though she be never so male.
6.30 p.m. I find myself still very confused practically as to action. Non-attachment is necessary; moreover I know the equivalence of all things. In my Mass the Host is of excrement, that I can consume in awe and adoration; while I make my Holy Guardian Angel the latrine of my imagination. And then I reverse the symbol, whirling my wheel until all form and colour is lost. So much for the mental images: I affirm and deny the Word of my Will so that it is (like the Tao) nor speech nor silence. So in actual life when I am consciously doing Magick, I drink the ecstasy of Babalon when my tongue laps the blood and the sterility that Leah [Leah Hirsig] pours for me from her abominable Graal, and I constrain the Light and Music of my poetry to pimp her vices, fiddle to the dance of her damnation; Beauty shall empty the slops in her brothel, Love be her poodle, Art her monkey.
But what of the common course of Life? What of my regular acts, the least of which involves just that discrimination which fetters me? Body and mind are not initiated; but must I draw them with me? Can I, indeed? Outside my circle I eat lobster and drink Heidseick; and God help the waiter if they're not to my taste! The point is: am I held back by this sort of thing? It is made urgent by the question of cocaine. There is a conflict in me about this, for I could easily let myself go, set my house on fire, so to speak. Why shouldn't I? Any answer evidently involves discrimination, the judgement that one thing is more valuable, relatively to some third thing, than another. Why cling to life or sanity? It is part of my Will, and so the simple way to do so? But is it? 'We die-does it matter when?' as the late Lord Tennyson, First Baron, so elegantly gave Grenville for a Word. It's an effort to stop taking the stuff, and an effort to cross the room and get some more. Either course implies a victory of Tweedledum or Tweedledee. Does the civil war prove that the apple of discord should be made into jam, that I was wrong as Eve when I first took cocaine? (But was she wrong?) I have had an exactly similar struggle, these ten years or more, about sugar and my precious waist! The Puritan's comment and counsel? As I imagine, to master, to exile, and forget any thought which is capable of breeding civil strife in the mind's polity, fomenting mutiny in the Will's army. Ascetics push this tactic very far, often indeed to the impoverishment of their being. The most powerful organisms thrive on their internal conflicts, grow by them. Unopposed governments decay; world-power is not the alternative of downfall, but its twin phase. When One and One have made Two, they must find another Two, or else they will split up One and One again. Our Cabbalistic Zero explodes just as soon as it is formed by the cancellation of the Universe of Plus N and Minus N. There must be a Will to watch, to referee, the prize-fights in its Mind's ring, when Trainer Circumstance brings up ambitious pugilists. The blood is spolia opima of the belly's victory over alien forms of matter; thought is the child of the marriage of consciousness with external things; act is the sentence, Will the verdict, in the High Court of the soul, where the Ego is judge, the nerves are the jury, the advocates briefed by rival clients who arc but selfish, incoherent brutes capable only of fear or greed, blind hate or stupid craving, dull worms alive only to pain, hunger, to the disquietude of animal desire.
What I now am—to catch myself up at a chance point as if it were the goal!—is but the carcass-heap that serves for monument for all this carnage of my agelong Verdun; it orts (sic) as I behold it and on every side worn veterans dream of, weary generals plan, new battles. The war's cause? No man knows; in all my hosts there's none so shallow as to think he knows, so stupid as even to discuss problems so blank of axiom as those that seek truth or righteousness. The war's aim? None conceives it; in the mobilization, maybe, fife and drum thrilled the man, the big words patriotism, duty, honour, glory, seemed to mean something; the women's tears and cheers, blown kisses and waved handkerchiefs, drew their blood from brain to heart; but the first battles showed them how fantastic were their hopes, what barbarous vanities their ribbons. Not, as in Aesop's fable, are the unplucked grapes sour; it is those that we crush that set our teeth on edge. We do not know defeat from victory; the mind and blood are most impartially bestowed in this great lottery. We know our wounds, our vermin, our cold, filth, hunger, fear, fatigue, and boredom; we know not if we are betrayed by our own leaders, sold by our statesmen, deceived and forgotten by those we loved, and for whose weal we feel obscurely that we went to the war. This courage, then, that has bred of its fumes this phantom Ego, is of the nature of things; its cruelty and insanity are characters of its bloody and unintelligible scrawl. My skirmishers, that trample the snows of Mount Cocaine, are but strayed leaderless detachments. Not knowing the cause or the purpose of the war; mistrusting the strategy of the marshals, the intelligence of the officers, the discipline and valour of the soldiers; uncertain of my own sympathy for either side, or whether victory, even were it possible, would be worth one dummy cartridge, it seems absurd to attach such importance to, or feel such interest in, this silly snow-squabble. If my blood stain those glittering crystals, if the wind whirl them up into my eyes and blind me, if their drifts swallow me up, if their fascination be siren-sweet to win me from my weary struggle to the sleep that may be—or may not be—dreamless and safe from any awakening, if those enchanting, those exhilarating slopes that promised me firm pathway to life's summit, boundless view, should in their treachery, my rashness, sweep me away in avalanche am I the worse? If I flee from the insanity of cocaine, may not General Paralysis ambush my flight? If I refuse to put my head in the noose of its craving, may not diabetes swing a lasso? If I deny my tongue its kiss, may not cancer woo me, as she did my temperate father? All this I have said to myself, and settled the matter, more than a quarter of a century ago, when it was a question of risks on mountains, in jungles, and I decided to face fever and cholera, bandit and tiger, chalk cliff and serac, without shopkeeper's reckoning. It has at least always been my will to fear nothing. I have lived dangerously. Cowardice is more horrible than disaster—Shakespeare gives multiple deaths to cowards, one only to the valiant. But I'll not fear death, one or many; I've lived 'more lives than one' and so 'more deaths than one must die' (as Wilde said) and I count death but a counterfeit obolus; fling it down gladly on the counter where they sell life's magnum of champagne for it, though the wine prove flat or too sweet, its joy false and ephemeral, its headache hideous! I have died already often enough; died to calf-love, to stamp-collecting, card-playing, first-edition-hoarding, society-fluttering, ambition-nursing, chess-excelling, fame-bellowing, tiger-hunting, salmon-fishing, golf-loafing, woman-bagging, rock-scrambling, ice-maze-threading, sight-seeking, sense-exciting, power-grasping, and some more. I regret neither the life nor the death of any of these.
I have tried the hashish life, the opium-life, the alcohol-life, the ether-life, the heroin-life; none of them has held me for a moment, or interfered with any of the other lives. I seem to enjoy anything that comes along, but to bid it cheerfully farewell. Why then should I fear to enter on the cocaine-life? What have I suffered in my life? The misery of my childhood: that made me the full man I am. The death of my first child [Lilith Crowley]: that wound has never really healed; but it has made me love unselfishly. The tragedy of my wife's downfall: that too still boasts of the cicatrix in my heart. But that gave me a new grip on life, intensified my will to help humanity. The poverty and humiliation of my five years in America: that killed my dependence, freed me from money-worries, fame-thirst, and most other remnants of attachment. The apparent failure of my whole career, as poet; of my mission as Logos of the Aeon.
I don't believe in my heart that I have failed, I know history too well for that. But the sting lies in my doubt of my own worthiness, of my own honour. I ask if I have done all possible to deserve the trust which They who sent me placed in me. That suffering is a spur; my flanks bleed, and I leap! I think the real focus of the skirmish in the snow is this: If I should become a slave to cocaine, should not I unfit myself to serve Them, and so betray Them? I am not really afraid of insanity or of death, in themselves; but I should like a green old age and a beautiful death as 'good publicity' for my life and work.
I want men to know that Freedom is not a murderess, or even a thief, but a goddess who gives health and long life as well as happiness. It will not do, then, for men to say that my courage flinched at cocaine, or my constitution went to the mat when it applied the strangle-hold. I want to prove that a mind free from complexes can despise drugs as a Christian can hardly do with coffee.
I know I am taking a chance; and I do it 'to the greater glory of Them that sent me'. A man trained in Magick as I am must be master of all passions, not their chained convict, like the addict, or their 'live to fight another day' runaway slave, like the Puritan.
I'll go to Trafalgar with Nelson, if I may, or to the Pole with Scott, if it must be; but never step on the quarter-deck with Byng.
I ask myself, however, one more question. Is not this very like the Temptation? 'He shall give His Angels charge over thee.' There's Browning's jeweller in Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, who 'solemnly tossed himself off from the top of a tower'. And there's Anatole France's Paphnuce in Thais) tempted to a similar indiscretion in the matter of a pillar. Do I challenge the Bantam Weight Champion 'Battling Coco' to a finish fight, and decline a friendly spar with 'The Newton Kid' Gravitation? The difference should be obvious. Gravitation is not influenced by Will, so far as we know at present. We must deny facts, or shut our eyes to danger. We must use the proper means to neutralize any force. We allied kite and motor to fight the earth's attraction; a mechanical exorcism for a mechanical Bogey. We slake lime with water, not with kind words; we recognize that to take thought will add no cubit to our stature. Johnson's crude stamp crushes Berkeley's lilies into the mud. This drug problem is a chemical problem? I admit it; I even insist on it; but add 'What chemistry!' Why do I not crown my dinner with bromine and sulphuric acid for coffee and Kummel? White arsenic for sugar in lemonade of prussic acid? Let me explain. Most organic poisons have a direct destructive action on the tissues: phosphorus burns and silver nitrate stains the skin without appealing to the mind; they merely wig-wag 'Pain'. But the body has wide jurisdiction over complex organic compounds; their action is uncertain; it depends upon personal idiosyncrasy and also on temporary physical mental states.
Thus some people always get a rash from eating strawberries. Allan Bennett could eat conium by the handful. Eckenstein [Oscar Eckenstein] would almost suffocate at one whiff of amyl alcohol. Russell [C. F. Russell] (Frater Genesthai) survived an injection—his first attempt—of 40 grains of cocaine, half a grain having been recorded as a fatal dose.
Sleeping draughts-chloral, veronal, laudanum etc.—merely excite the mind which does not aid the hypnotic action of the drug by composing itself to sleep. The action of hashish is as varied as life itself, and seems to be determined almost entirely by the will or mood of the 'assassin', and that within the hedges of his mental and moral farm. I can get fantastic visions, or power of mind-analysis, or spiritual exaltation, or sexual excitement of various kinds, or ravenous hunger, with supreme pleasure in eating or physical exhilaration, or intense appreciation of the comic or grotesque in everything, or delight in beauty, or creative energy, or vigour of imagination, or sensual drunken lassitude, or volubility, or sleep, whichever I please, absolutely at will, on a minute dose of the Parke Davis extract. This is simply because I have discovered the theory, and perfected the practice of the instrument; it is my Strad, and I, Kubelik; to another it might be firewood.
These drugs claim our attention because they suggest the little girl who, when she was good was very good indeed, when she was bad she was horrid. There is no particular point in asking the body to tolerate a pound of copper; success would be a mere ostentation, like teaching a pig to grunt Wagner; nothing is gained beyond the victory itself. But all the 'intoxicating' drugs act on the mind; through the body, of course, but with no important effect immediately visible. It is absurd to deny them the possibility of beneficial action, that is, at the moment; for there is a great sun-above-cloud of witnesses, whose radiance yet dazzles the ages. I will admit, to save squabbling about unproved assertions, that the use of drugs always damages health and shortens life; but so does Boche-holding in Flanders' mud, and we think it worth doing, and well done when 'tis done. Coleridge without opium would have left literature without Kubla Khan; another twenty years of the dull average Coleridge would hardly compensate, I think. Plenty of men died, lucklessly, ignorantly, stupidly, or rashly, that man might outstrip and outsoar the Eagle. Let us call Baudelaire [Charles Baudelaire], de Maupassant, Poe, James Thomson and the rest, pioneers of the drug-road to heaven. Their achievements should encourage us, their errors warn us; but we should aim to improve on their crude engines, trim their unstable balance, guard against repetition of their accidents, instead of abusing them, persecuting their successors, denying the possibility of their machine, treating the whole affair as 'shocking', as 'wicked' as 'immoral' and so on, as if they were bicyclists and this the year 1880! I cannot see that my experiments with hashish, ether, and cocaine are any less 'noble' (horrid thought!) than Simpson's with chloroform. 'Noble' was the science-men's epithet for him; to the others he was the man who eased the agony, and diminished the danger of child-bearing, and so thwarted the Lord God Almighty's generous intentions in the matter of getting square with Eve about the apple by obscenely torturing her and her daughters! I agree. I accept what's coming to me. My work will free man's will, disperse his mind-fog, show him God and morality as scarecrows stuck up by his tyrants, dry stocks, professor-like hung with old newspapers, and a priest's hat on the top.
I shall not expect the tyrants to hand up bouquets on the stage, not until Time has honoured me beyond their cavil, and they think it better policy to prove that the 'great poet', the 'master' has been woefully misunderstood, that he was a True Christian; advocated prohibition and. chastity and the 14-hour day; loved home, hymn-books, and hypocrisy; believed in banking, conscription, newspaper education, progress, and the Bible; and doted on Dickens, democracy, and decency; demanded state-slavery, the vote, and the suppression of pleasure; bent his head to authority, his back to labour, and his knee to the Jew. Well, then, the upshot is that I continue with cocaine. I am to face the facts, not to blink eyes or pull the wool over them, but to set jaw, march with steady stride, Integer vitae scelerisque purus,[1] toward the wolf. There may be death for me in his throat, or something won for man with the winning, even as Samson found honey in the lion he slew.
I am, in practice, to observe the effects in varied conditions, to seek a sound technique of administration a means of using to the full its virtues, of counteracting its fascination, and of avoiding its cachexia.
To begin with, then: what do I know? This is the general course of the experiment.
The first dose produces a curiously keen delight, rather formless, but suggestive of a hillman's heart-leap when after a long absence he returns and drains the first lung-goblet of mountain air. There's a memory throb, and a promise of new life. The past and future, more than the present kindle the pleasure of this first dose. (I am taking it mostly by the nose, using the tongue only to avoid waste. This method seems to show the drug a short cut to the brain.) The first dose sets up a demand for more. It's not in a hurry, but it wants to be sure that I mean to go on. This 'craving' is immediate, occurs before absorption can take place, I should think; so I consider it almost wholly subjective. It is probably excited by the memory of some struggle in which I refused to take more, or of some famine when there was no more to take. (If so, it argues that fear helps to create the thing it fears—as Shelley or someone else showed.) The next dose or two create a curious nervousness, an excitement unsupported by self-confidence. It reminds one of the timidity of a boy before seduction. He doesn't quite know what is coming; he is tremblingly eager, but yet a little afraid, partly on his own account, partly because he is not sure he will do himself justice. This state is succeeded by a kind of anxiety and restlessness, not unlike that of a man who means to spend the evening in some amusement, can't make up his mind what to do, and is irritable, impatient, annoyed, at his own indecision. There is some fear of being disappointed, of choosing the wrong theatre as it were. There is also the restlessness of the horse waiting for its master at the door. This feeling does not however, as one might expect, excite the mind to make plans. It seems to inhibit reflection, to brook no rival to itself in the whole field of consciousness. I flutter about, I toy with things, I potter without noticing much what I am doing, but I think I rather avoid allowing myself to get interested in anything. It is (again) as if l were waiting for a friend and don't want to start anything that I should have to break off when he arrived. The next stage is that I am aware of the master in the saddle, without my knowledge how he got there. We are off, a long, level, easy gallop, every muscle glowing with delight, the lungs intoxicated with deep draughts of pure sweet air, the heart strong and the brain clear. I am intensely happy, utterly calm, wholly concentrated. I am at work, but hardly know what work, since the creative unconscious impulse silences those parts of the mind which are not immediately necessary to its expression. I doubt if I could track the work to its source. The present entry seems to have sprung as an attempt to invoke the True Will to settle this squabble as to whether I am in danger of becoming a slave to cocaine. But I observe this constant feature, that my work is never planned, never has conscious goal, or groove, or bound to its scope. I constantly digress, and I have no thought of balancing the parts. It is random writing. I begin by jotting down some reflection, and the pen runs on. This is true even when I write poetry under the drug. It is not true when, as I used to do, I had my work planned first, and only used the drug to assist my concentration and postpone fatigue. (A plan more prudent in practice, this, no doubt; but less suited to my present task of observing its funny little ways.) In that planned work, the enthusiasm usually absorbs the whole attention, I take a dose from time to time but almost automatically. In the random work I am dimly aware that I shall need the whip, and there has been of late a certain dread of taking more. I seem to feel that I am putting too much 'on the slate'; that I shall have to pay heavily; the while I wonder if the work is good enough to justify the extravagance. This is caused partly I think by memory of one or two bad reactions, whose true cause was however not the debauch, but some indisposition from fever or indigestion. In my early experiments (1914) I noticed no reaction at all, in my last two I have wondered irritably why the terrible consequences which I am at such pains to minimize, don't come along at all!
At first the hours seem rather long; then concentration deepens and the next thing I know is that I have a bookful of something, I don't know what, and 'There's the grey beginning; Zooksl' I want to smoke incessantly, and find it hard to keep my pipe going. Sometimes I finish a job and go to bed with a raging determination to sleep, my duty to my health furiously reproaching me with my stolen hours. I cannot sleep. I think new thoughts, and fight in vain to keep my bed; I have to write them. This often means that I am in and out of bed a dozen times. With big doses and after a long continued spell of writing this does not happen. The mind seems paralysed; I am nailed to two or three thoughts, usually quite meaningless. They annoy me and yet there is a sort of senseless passion for them, and I repeat them over and over, quite unable to make any one of them the starting point of a tour. Sometimes I succeed in forcing myself to sleep, which always seems absurdly short. I wake angry that I have not slept it off more thoroughly. I notice how my mind's reaction to the experiment is nearly always fear laden. It always worries me, reproaches me, alarms me, threatens me, and urges drastic remedies. This is not nearly so marked with other drugs. Does the mind know instinctively that cocaine is the only dangerous one for me? (In point of fact, no other drug attempts to take the smallest liberty with me.) I decide ultimately to accept the situation. By this time it is perhaps anything from three to six hours since the last dose. I agree to get up and go out and have coffee.
To go back a little, I have usually taken neither food nor drink since I began the doses. The idea repels me, and I feel no need, and I dread wasting a moment on things temporal. Another throw-back: why was the last dose the last? Why did I stop? At first sight it seems a silly question. Why do I stop eating breakfast? But the cocaine-courtier asks it. Here in sure sooth applies the proverb: L'appetit vient en mangeant. From the start one is afraid that one will never stop. Yet the answer is just the same as in the matter of ham and eggs: the appetite is appeased by a definite quantity, a quantity which in my case varies enormously from day to day. When I am in good health, bursting with energy, a very small amount produces its full effect, and satisfies. When the first dozen doses are used up in anaesthetizing debilitated nerves, speeding up a sluggish heart, or ringing the tocsin in a sleepy brain, the effect is slower to arrive, the level attained much lower, the need of a new dose more frequent, the reaction painful and tedious, and the return to normal a hard grind up a steep slope. In health the reaction is hardly noticeable; the lost hours of sleep can be paid back without usury extorted for the loan. One takes the doses by pure instinct, without the lightest calculation, and in the same way one stops. If, after appetite is glutted, the work in hand is prolonged unduly, and one flags, it is no use for reason to interfere and prescribe more cocaine. Such superfoetation fails: the excess aggravates the tendency to collapse. On the other hand, it is very difficult to stop before the point of satiety is reached. To take up the dropped thread at breakfast where we left it, I find myself as a rule very tired, angry of course as well, impatient to be normal again, intensely wakeful, lucid, and sensitive to impressions.
My mind begins to work again; sometimes I get brilliant thoughts, epigrams, stray lines of verse, ideas for stories, all sorts of odds and ends. These are very insistent; they play and pester me. But I am sick of writing; unless they are very good and very short, I refuse to record them. Usually they are incomplete, and the mind will not work on them, either naturally or at my behest. My chief emotions are anger at myself for having taken the drug again, and the craving for the true remedy, sleep, which is still far off. The coffee, the fresh air, the impact of objective impressions, now combine to give me a sort of spurious normality. I become bright mentally and active physically; I perform various business rather better than my wont, and with that great self-confidence and pleasure. My anxiety about the reaction dissipates considerably, though I still £hare Martha's idea about the 'duty' of sleeping for a week. Probably l take lunch early, say at eleven o'clock. Sometimes I eat very light food, sometimes I have a monstrous appetite. I usually drink plenty of wine and cut out coffee so that I sleep two or three hours in the afternoon. I wake, still anxious; but if I have anything to interest me, I am fairly all right. Now the next day, even after a long night's rest, is likely to find me dull, bored, heavy. That's all, I think.
For the defence, my Lord, let me urge that all these symptoms of reaction are not much, if at all, more serious than those which would follow a whole night's hard writing without any drug at all. But there is this to be said, that I seem to myself growing lazier year by year. I don't seem to care to work at all unless I have some strong impulse, either natural or cocaine-begotten. But I deem this a result of my years of 'disappointment', so to call it; it's horrible to amass manuscripts. The lady whose husbands were always strangled by Asmodee6 must have begun to harbour doubts of the utility of marriage. [William] Seabrook saw this: I painted a masterpiece the moment I knew it would be honoured in his house. Lastly, what about the 'habit'? Again I must blame life. Cocaine restores me to my confidence in my work's worth, makes me careless of the fate of my soul's children, contemptuous of men's opinions, content to do my will without lust of result, creating images of Truth, Beauty or Passion as their reality shines in me, eager to love whether or no I win return of it. I love Alostrael [Leah Hirsig]; she is all my comfort, my support, my soul's desire, my life's reward, my dream's fulfilment, but for her I were indeed Alastor of the Solitude. She loves me for my work; whether she understands it or not doesn't matter either to her or to me; her soul tells her that my work must be great because it is the image of the God who has made her High Priestess in his temple; She knows and loves the God in me, not the man; and therefore she has conquered the great enemy that hides behind his clouds of poisonous gas, Illusion.
Through hideous months, dark with distrust that she would not deign to speak, she lost neither her love nor her faith; and I, in the deep simplicity of Lao-tze, would not ask myself if I loved her, but acted naturally. For this cause we love each other yet, and more than ever. Even as she divined and loved me God, veil over veil of my man-shadow hiding Him, so I pierced through the painted ape's face, the live Death of her loose skin on her grim skeleton, and came to a great Goddess, strange, perverse, hungry, implacable, and offered up my Soul-Godhead and manhood slain at one stroke of her paw-upon Her altar. So loving her, rejoicing that She has accepted me for Her slave, Her beast, Her victim, Her accomplice, I must love even Her mask, the painted simper, the lewd doll-monkey face, the haggard shamelessness of her flat breast, the grey starvation of Her belly, the insolence of Death pushing through flesh's flimsy curtain, and the great nameless Horror, the murderous raw poison-lily, eater of flesh. I'll nourish it with my whole Life, I'll cram its blossom with pure honey, and though it close on me and swallow me, I'll avail it; spring shall behold it bloom.
Yea! I love the Mask through which glitter Her unfathomable eyes; love it I shall while age rots it, till it drops from the ineffable radiance of Her face.
So then I understand my Work more clearly: infinite love of my Alostrael [Leah Hirsig], creation indefatigable without hope or fear, careless of all circumstance, passionless fulfilment of the Law of Thelema. She shall excite my imagination, lash my mind's stallions, tend my will's fire, fill my soul's lamp with oil. Her hand shall draw my sword, and give the signal for the battle; Her mouth shall scream the war-cry; Her heart fling out our banner; Her spur shall kindle me to the charge, and in the valley of Death as I lie slain victorious, she shall devise and manifest a city for my monument, a city fashioned in the image of my desire, and call it by my name. She shall revive me with Her breath; she shall fling wide my seed, that flowers of Art, new colour and strange form, straight trees of Truth, intoxicating fruit of Poesy, may give new wonders to the world. My hand shall slake her mouth's kiln with snow, and Hers shall moisten my dry lips with blood.
1—[Integer vitae scelerisque purus Non eget Mauri jaculis neque arcu. Horace. 'The man whose life is unblemished, and unstained by crime, needs not the javelins nor bow of the Moor', i.e. virtue is his protection.]
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