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Aleister Crowley Diary Entry Sunday, 11 July 1920
At first restless, I fell into a deep sleep, with a wish-fulfilment dream in which I had taken one dose. I was in Trinity—I forget details—remember being annoyed because I hadn't my cap and gown; and I was in chapel. I was technically liable to a fine: made me laugh. Woke, or rather was awakened at 7. My eyes were tired and sore, probably from yesterday's bathing etc. I get a strong desire to sleep, and a revulsion against cocaine. I had decided to try it in the morning when fresh, and didn't want to (I've noticed this objection to keeping appointments before, with love and other drugs). I tried to sleep and couldn't, my tiredness is now (8.15) wearing off slowly.
9.10. Two doses have made me 'normal', but I feel sleepy still, and resent being aroused. I have diarrhoea, by the way, from the sudden return to Cefalu diet, I expect, and this is a factor.
9.40. Two more doses have made me quite wakeful, though with a feeling of heaviness over the eyes, excited, anxious for more excitement, interested pleasantly in absurd trifles like the technique of shaving, regretful that my present state of mind is artificial and dangerous, but not in the least creative, although wishing that I could create.
9.50. Another dose. I am irritated at 'common things' being eager to employ my energies on something stupendous and sublime, but totally incapable of thinking of any such thing! I am impatient and restless, wanting to do six things at once, since I cannot settle to the one thing worth while.
10.15. Enjoyed an ear-piercing orgy: this does not mean music but actual lobe-boring for earrings.
10.25. Started thinking out my 'purification' course for the Elixir, annoyed that it doesn't come out right. By 'right' I mean that the practical details don't fit the Cabbala in an obvious and striking manner.
10.55. Very annoyed at having been called away to do some urgent routine.
11.40. I have continued, increasing the frequency of the doses. I have a feeling of fullness in the head, comparable to an attack of priapism. I am eager to work, enjoying a business letter as much as the essay on the Elixir of Life, which I am now dictating.
3.15. I have been going on steadily, and finished the Essay.
4.50. Brandy and Alostrael [Leah Hirsig]. Opus[1] VI, 31-666-31 [Leah Hirsig]. Operation: superb. Elixir: copious and well-formed, rather fluid. Object: Magical Power.
6.00. I have stopped Cocaine for some time. I still want it in the 'Let's make a night of it' spirit. I am irritated: 'Am I getting full value for my money expenditure?' I am inclined to go on, as a gambler is inclined to throw good money after bad.
I say 'If I could only beat the Ode to a Nightingale on the strength of another dozen doses!' I have absolutely no appetite for dinner, little as I ate for lunch.
6.15. However, I ate two anchovies on a piece of toast. I am absurdly interested in a game of chess I am playing myself.
6.25. I am going on, mildly indeed, but as a mere roisterer. The question of stopping the doses is waved contemptuously aside, in the mood called 'Devil-may-care'. This, although I feel that I am getting no sort of good from these mere 'penman's flourishes' as I seem to want to call them, extra doses, and realize quite clearly that I am lengthening the bill for no purpose. It's pure Charles Surface,[2] precaution worn off and honour precious thin! I'm enjoying everything in a senseless sort of way, with occasional vague threats that for one thing I am not writing another Macbeth, and for another that I am wasting what might have enabled me to write it in 'riotous living'. Also I have a slight anxiety that if this drug masters me, I may have to take a 'cure' at other hands than mine, and come out of the battle, alive perhaps, but with a hell of a limp. In other words I may be killing the best part of myself by opening the valves, and speeding up the combustion with pure oxygen. I wouldn't mind if the higher temperatures obtained purified and fused me—that is, for my poor men and women that are starving-a finer gold than I could ever get at a slower rate of burning my soul's coal. And how know what I do, and what it's worth? Might not this jagged and incoherent record serve, despite its crudity, as Blake's ravings, Shelley's hysterics, Nietzsche's groans and guffaws, Ibsen's phantasm-moanings, Byron's wounded-beast roarings, and Wagner's noise-carnivals have served mankind? Shall my most polished verses avail, passionate as their rhythm soul-kindling as their motive and their message, perfect as their form and Truth-blazing as their essence may be—who knows? The world's wheel may spin away from them; they may be esteemed as Hume esteemed Shakespeare, as Dr Johnson esteemed Ossian. Neglect may sink them in oblivion with that rival of Homer whom antiquity held holier yet than he, or fanaticism and ignorance burned them at the stake or scrawl inanest pictures upon them, as Fate decreed for my soul's sister Sappho. And careless what dogfish tare, or tempests swept away, the net of poesy that I wove with such excess of love and art in strength and beauty and cast with cunning, these hooks unbaited—nay, scarce barbed, unless with sharpness of raw teeth!—may take Leviathan, mankind's imagination, win spoil of the sea Time, paid—overpaid—with Fame's base currency, and hang as trophies, weapons of heroes of old time, in the profane and prostituted temples that posterity will raise to its false gods. See, then! I do not dare appraise my works; good seeming may prove bad, gold may seem dross, in a market where all values are fantastic. There is no touchstone of truth's gold in a world where men accept the gaudy bonds of their thieving governments instead of wealth, see national credit cut in two without a murmur, seek coloured-ribbon substitutes for honour, risk life in a knave's quarrel for the price of flattery, help rivet the chains on their own limbs to the tune of 'Self-Mastery' and, trimming men to the Procrustean bed, cannot even make a guess as to why that length should appear sacred, by whom the bed was made, for whom, or why—
7.20 p.m. I call my poetry 'true' or 'beautiful', these are relative terms, nay, terms scarce capable of definition. Thus my magical diary seems to have no plan, no form, either in detail or as a whole. But that is no more than my personal literary criticism; vitiated, even at that, by the fact that I am the Father of both modes of expression and we know that Milton (for one) preferred Paradise Regained to Paradise Lost, and did not even know that his Satan was his hero or that his Music would have to plead divinely solemn and eager at the bar of Posterity against his crime, with Limbo-penalty of being the dullest, the stupidest, the most sophistical pedantic, bigoted, wooden, and null theologian of an age of theological bores. So all this incoherent rambling, this over-ripe analysis, is only so in my partial, obscure, and standard-talking judgement. Some other mind might solve this mad equation, find truth, order, beauty and all else delectable therein, ever as science has found these things in the apparent chaos of nigh all phenomena, from comet's eccentricity to earth-crust's heaped confusion. Shakespeare, again, is only great because the main average consciousness of the men who think, turned towards him, found fun in his flunkey-flatteries, comedy in his titled-invert-tickle obscenities, and tragedy in his Raw-Head-and-Bloody-Bones melodramas. Had economics not thrust kitchen-knife to ham of the good knight his charger, had Fust not indeed his armour to cast types, had the True Lance of the Renaissance not unhorsed him at the first tilt, and broken through thick skull to swandown brain at the second, we should still read Amadis and Tristram in the boudoir, sigh for fair ladye in the smokeroom, threaten giant and ogre in the nursery and the schoolroom, while Cervantes, if haply he survived, had done so only among those rarest of the oppressed who, in the shipwreck of their lives, still battle with the sea, their plank their sense of humour.
For all its excellence, will Bunyan's ghost haunt the forsaken churchyards, and scare the children of the third Atheist generation? Why should it, more than Foxe's Book of Martyrs could survive the decay of the virulent Protestantism that nourished it with poison?
The earth has whirled away from the Patristics, the Pastorals, the Romantics, as from many another. To-day the Realist and the Mystic chance to lie in its path; we deify Blake, Nietzsche, even the heirs of Swedenborg, and, with equal rite, give honour to Father Balzac, the Son Zola, the Holy Ghost Dostoievsky!
But who may calculate Earth's course, even so far as the next year? We have seen Omar rise and set, admired Wilde's meteor, noted the riebula of Maeterlinck; they shine no more for us save in our memory, and their impulse, though it swerved us in our course, is a thing done with. Few are the books whose names, even, still have a meaning for the best-educated man when his ship sights the red beam from the Lighthouse that crowns the jagged reef map-marked as 'Forty'. Most of our boyhood's Demi-gods, poet and sage, Love's troubadours, Adventure's scalds, are even with 'the snows of yester-year', in the bookseller's fourpenny drawer, cuddling for warmth to last year's political pamphlets and this year's Six Best Sellers.
'There lies the knight Adonis that was slain', my masterpiece that I thought capable of spring-resurrection sempiternal. There, torn by Time's winds, behold 'Clouds without Water'. There, my 'The World's Tragedy' seems indeed my own. And the Italian lounger fingering my souled 'Mortadello' bethinks him that horsemeat sausage is of more worth than books, and hies him to his haunt where indeed spaghetti proves that it satisfies mankind when genius starves it, and, by the irony of the Gods, with its immortal serpent-coils strangles the throat of Dante.
I sum the case. I must create or perish, even as I must urinate or perish; the gods laughed loud to make one tube serve both to carry man's subconsciousness from life to life, yea, and more also, to teach him Love and Ecstasy, but equally to serve base use, the sewer to the slums of his bodily city.
I must create; but I can never know what in my frenzy I have created. I cannot cast its horoscope. Its fate depends not only on its vitality, its value, even were there fixed standards by which to measure these or any other of its qualities. If any being at all know any of all these things, it is the Subconscious, Very God of Very God, that fathers my mind-babes; for that may be indeed as It seems, Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent, independent of all conditions, free of all causes, indifferent to all effects.
My sole duty is then to make myself, body and mind, the perfect weapon, Excalibur or Aegis, Thoth-style or lsis-sistron, Ankh, Graal, Disk, Lotus or Caduceus of That which is hidden within me, my Subconscious Self or Holy Guardian Angel, whom I rank Ancient among the Ancient Ones, adored in the Dawn of Man's Sun-sphere, even in the land of Sumer, by those initiates as by myself to-night. Him know I by His Name that He revealed to me, Aiwaz, that is the hieroglyph of Will, of Love, of the Whole Way of the Word from Silence unto Silence, of the twinned Infinities Matter and Motion, of the True Formula of the Magick of Light, Life, Love, and Liberty. Thus know I Him, and by the Images of Himself that He hath bidden me fashion for His pleasure, the Writings and the Songs and the Oracles, yes, even the Figurings of the Mysteries of Number, and the Mazes of Colour and Form. Let me not seek Him, for He is able to find me, when He will. Let me not question Him, for He is Mystery, veiling Himself or masking, to reveal Himself, to dazzle or enlighten, as He will. Let me not rouse Him, for His sleep hath warders, that for my rashness may send forth a phantom to deceive, and distress me. Let me be vigilant, sound and alert of body and mind, wee-disciplined to most exact performance of his commands, free of desire lest I should criticize or oppose His will, capable to subdue the mob Language, that it becomes unanimous and truly as may he utter in human speech His godhead's unintelligible sublimity of Word.
To me, then, poetry, play, essay, all modes of thought-transcription even to this strayed-reveller Diary, shall be as one from this hour forward; my conscious will, my pleasure, my comprehension, my art, nothing, except they help to fashion a true mirror of His face. My word be to me an idiot's bleat, and His least Word the Combination to unlock the Safe where Miser Fate has shut the Diamond Truth.
It is now 9.25. I have written just three hours. I don't know what I've written. I don't care whether anyone will ever read it; but only whether it is He that had a Word to say, and whether I have set down as clearly and correctly as is possible—yes, also, as beautifully and musically as is possible—in the English tongue the human Equivalent of the Substance of the Word.
I have been taking Cocaine from time to time, and I don't care whether it has hurt me, if it has made me for the time a Scribe more worthy of Him; and I ask Him that I may not suffer such hurt as might injure my usefulness to Him. If my work for Him is done, well or ill, in this life, if I have shaken my engine to pieces, used up my store of fuel; if it begin to grind and creak, and the gauge register a sinking pressure of steam; then let the crazy wreck be broken up! It has no value in itself; it never had, except to answer to His hand. But if I may yet serve awhile His turn, let Him restore my natural Energy and Enthusiasm, that I may need nor wine to excite my pleasure, nor sop to dull my pain. Serve Him I will, though my blood sweat from me, though I put asp to breast, though I make madness my concubine, for brief delight of revel in the ill-famed inn of mine host Death.
But I had rather serve with sober service, good health, long youth, green age; and quiet death to snap my harp-strings when they no longer answer to His fingers. Thus far He hath given me health and strength, endurance and activity, intelligence and self-control, beyond the common. I have flagged, I have deemed myself dotard; I think this is not physical decline, for I take pleasure in athletics no less than I did five years ago. I think 'That lost infinity of noble minds', fame-hunger, has exhausted and depressed me. Baudelaire [Charles Baudelaire] as well as Milton has explained fame to me; she's strumpet, liar, cheat, her favours infected, and her price ridiculous, I know her: I despise her; yet in my boyhood I took her for a radiant, an immortal goddess; and I can't help feeling disappointed that her love for me has only filled my belly with wind, my blood with poison and my brain with fillies. I must make 'non-attachment' perfect. I must care nothing what my work is, or what comes of it. I must not care even whether I work but wait, and train my powers while waiting, for Aiwaz to use me as He will. I must not hurry Him by using stimulants, or hamper Him by letting my machine rust. When He comes, there must be oil in my lamp; and I must not consume that oil in distress signals for that He tarrieth, still less in trying to replace His wedding feast by Maenad rout. I write not even Thy Name, Aiwaz, to invoke Thee to mine altar. I write not Thy Name, Aiwaz, even to sanctify my page. I write Thy Name, Aiwaz, mine Angel appointed, only that I may be mindful of Thee, that art Creator, Preserver and Destroyer of my Soul, that art an Universe manifested of the thrice-twined Trinity whose Persons are equal Nothingness, that art in my Prometheus-Wand the Fire of Begetting, in my Agave-Cup the Water of Ecstasy, in my Aeolus-bag the Wind of Inspiration, in my Fortunatus-purse the Gold of Reality, and in my Abiegnus-Lamp the Substance of unquenchable Light. Mindful of Thee, I write Thy Name, Aiwaz, may I be, yea, may I be even as once long since, I cried from the Cross, my mind being open unto Thee the higher, my heart the centre of Thee my Light, my body the Temple of Thee, my Rosy Cross. Be my mind's limits vanish before Thy vastness, that it may house Thee; be my heart's will flame with its love of Thee; and be my body unprofaned, broad-based on health high-pinnacled with energy, that Thou its Rosy Cross burn in my blood and gild my skin with radiance, kindle my manhood to beget, and moisten my womanhood to conceive, the babes Truth, Beauty, Music, Wisdom, Love, yea, and many another, each one itself, yet all stamped nobly with their Father's features. I write Thy Name, Aiwaz, not to call Thee from depth or height, for Thou art beyond Space; not to summon Thee 'now', for Time's chain snaps at sword-stroke of Thy truth; but I have written, and write now, Aiwaz, Thy Name, that at the contemplation of Thee, mind and body may conspire together to be worthy of Thee, to grow like Thee, to forget their shame in Thy glory, and to make ready their service for Thy Word.
I, who am called of men, The Beast, or The Master, or The Supreme and Holy King, or The High Priest, and again the Black Maker of Magick, or The Betrayer of Oaths, or The Crazy Charlatan, or The Unspeakable Crowley, am in Thy sight none of these.
I am to Thee the harlot crowned with poison and gold, my garment many-coloured soiled with shame and smeared with blood, who for no price but of my wantonness have prostituted myself to all that lusted after me, nay, who have plucked unwilling sleeves, and with seduction, brine, and threat multiplied my stuprations.1 I have made my flesh rotten, my blood venomous, my nerves hell-tortured, my brain hag-ridden, I have infected the round world with my corruption.
My brain has devised new images of all abomination, created babe-thoughts loathlier than Time had yet seen. My mouth framed speech fouler than had ever made discord on air's strings. My heart hungered as no heart before for fierier rhythms, and fiercer torrents of blood. My body I despised, defiled, diseased, destroyed. I flung the sacrament to the swine, and in my monstrance elevated excrement.
To Thee I am this woman-thing, nameless because unique, an unimagined pit. Yet such art Thou, and such the Virtue of Thee, that at one glance toward Thee, an evil glance, a snake's glance or a witch's, lively with lust to rape, to envenom or to ensorcel Thee, I am-no more. I am to Thee virgin and bride, Thy ring upon my finger, my body gleaming through the gossamer of lawn that veils its glory and reveals it. I am all Thine, quick to conceive and bear Thine Image, taintlessly true, as Thou mayst will to create it. For she in me that played the harlot was but the phantom bred of a maid's vapours. So hideous was heart's hunger, so agonizing brain's distress, that the one's violence and the other's lunacy, drove me forth howling and foaming through the world, like a mad bitch. I sought Thee only; but I fixed fang in all flesh that I found, for that Thou mightest veil Thee under it. So I spread fear, I kindled hate, I maddened and slew whom I bit, I burned, I thirsted—O cunning harlot she! Thou but a maid's perverse imaginings, hallucination of her green-sickness?
Nay, by Thy Name, Aiwaz—again most solemnly, most passionately I trace its characters!—I swear that this my riddle is yet more strange, more Sphinx-perplexing, Oracle-obscure, than this. It rifles a God's grave for the Lost Word; it frames its lips to utter a dreadful and abominable Name; it slips the dagger-point of an assassin between the bones of the soul's spine. For I the harlot found Thee where I sought Thee, Thee who art everywhere; in mine atrocity's excess I won Thee, I possessed Thee, I enjoyed Thee, 'Twas thus, nor more nor less, than when Thy love gave back to its spoiled treasured-house the jewel of my virginity, sealed it and brake the seal.
For Thou mine Angel art none other than my Soul's Desire, perfect in purity, giant in Godhead, inscrutable, Infinity; and being my Soul's Desire, Thou art moreover not only the Sun-Disk of consecrated coin, God's body, and the Cup-spilth of wine, God's blood, but every dog-gnawed bone and every dram of raw unadulterated spirit, that theft or whoredom won me, eased belly's craving or lulled brain's anguish.
I am Thy bride, flower-decked, Thy queen of purity and beauty, throned on Thy Throne, crowned with Thy crown, as Thou hast led her from the Soul's Marriage in the Temple of Space, with stars for candles. And I with equal Truth am that Snake-girdled rottenness that made of each debauch Thy mass, caressed disease, wooed madness, pledged her troth to death, and recognized Thee, raped Thee, in all these.
For the White Magick of the Moon is the Black Magick of the Earth, none other; nor is the Yellow Magick of the Sun diverse in any wise. All Paths converge to Aiwaz; all roads are equal therefore, in the end, and it matters not whether one choose the Way of Sanctity, or the Way of debauch. Choice of Way matters not; yet since the End is one for all, it is only Choice of Way that matters.
The Yi and Gamiani for my mind; fresh air and cocaine for my nose; for my eyes Cefalu and scragginess of Leah [Hirsig]; for my mouth goat's milk and old brandy inward, obscenity and incantation outward; for my body the lustration of the Sea and the contamination of my mistress; for my soul—there is no contrast there! I will instruct the ignorance of my ignobler parts; there's naught but Aiwaz, even ye, who know Him not in all ye know, are He as they and I are!
P.S. 17 July. It is of course essential to the nature of Aiwaz that there should be apparent parts in Him, some of them ignorant that they are He.
1—[Crowley conducts a magical sexual operation.] 2—[See Sheridan, The School for Scandal, 1777.]
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