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Aleister Crowley Diary Entry Friday, 16 July 1920
9.20 a.m. I woke early with bronchitis, treated it, and am now after some good Fives, feeling very fit. I am getting very restless as to my work; I feel that I am wasting time etc. etc. and it is this feeling of impatience which urges me to take cocaine. I know that just as surely as I could kill a tiger at fifty yards with my .450 cordite, that I could start something creative within half an hour if I took a few sniffs of 'snow'; and the temptation is therefore a real one, and entirely 'virtuous'. I merely yearn to serve God better-and quicker. There is no question of vice or indulgence; it's pure aspiration. The sole point at issue is: can the means at hand be used without abuse? Baudelaire [Charles Baudelaire], at the end of 'The Poem of Hashish', in an eloquent peroration, assumes that 'artificial' stimuli cannot replace prayer and labour. But he begs the question: no one would object to coffee or tobacco, unless he were insane; if then I can use cocaine as others use coffee well and good.
8.45 p.m. At about 5 or 5.30 I got the idea for my 'Graymalkin'. I found I could not get the confidence to write it, though I had worked out the details pretty fully. I therefore deliberately broke my resolution, and at 6.40 took a very limited quantity of cocaine, such as I judge enough. (Correctly, the event showed.) I started the poem instantly, couldn't eat dinner, and finished it and the cocaine together about 8.20.
I have now taken enough to make me want to make a night of it, but not so badly as to yield. The true motive of taking it being now quite satisfied by my achievement; for I know that Graymalkin is a first rate Ballad.
My wildness and weakness I shall place in the hands of Alostrael [Leah Hirsig], and hope to sleep early.
10.50 p.m. Opus[1] III, 31-666-31 [Leah Hirsig]. Operation: from-bath-born-wonderful. Elixir: well-mixed, much retained. Object: ideas for my work.
This operation was entirely successful, by the way, in checking any desire for cocaine. At this moment I wouldn't take it if offered. I feel I have done a man's day's work, and may sleep. In the main, it's the old story of Juliet curing Romeo of Rosaline. 'Un clou chasse l'autre.' Also 'Satan finds more mischief still for idle hands to go do'. It's curious fact, by the way, that my enthusiasm for cocaine is a direct flower of my Puritan root-ancestry. It is my abhorrence of the idle, useless, unprofitable, moment that pleads for cocaine at my mind's bar. To me loafing is the 'sin' par excellence. I want to serve God, or as I put it Do My Will, continuously: I prefer a year's concentration with death at the end than the same dose diluted in half-a-century of futility. As some one says—I forget whom—I have 'The deliberate preference for a short life and a gay one'. But on the other hand, I check that preference, just as I prefer natural to hothouse fruit. But, if my fruit never ripened naturally, then hothouse, by all means, and damn the expense! I wish I could rely on the natural sun of fame and the natural rain of our occasional cheque!
11.15. I sum the Experiment. The cessation of cocaine caused me appreciable symptoms: physical, either of reaction or deprivation; mental, of undue preoccupation; 01 moral, of craving. I cut short the period of 'ordeal', but for an adequate purpose and in a rightly-calculated measure. I adjusted means to end, and produced no trouble that simple natural counter-irritation could not allay.
1—[Crowley conducts a magical sexual operation.]
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