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Aleister Crowley Diary Entry Saturday, 17 July 1920
5.35 a.m. I have had a long 'wish-fulfilment' (no doubt) dream of being in Whineray's [Edward Whineray] shop in London, and getting large quantities of cocaine from him. I did not take any, save a grain on the tongue to test the quality. I then dreamt of Jane Wolfe. I was with two other girls, one of whom had a negro husband named Austin. He was in another section of the train by which we were travelling. Jane was on this train; I found her most immensely fat and white; she instantly produced a huge penis-like organ. She said I couldn't have any connection with her but I was to do for her what she actually did for herself, which was to use the head to beat up an egg in a bowl. She produced these. Though disgusted, I complied, she masturbating me. Presently I realized that she was not Jane at all. After various incidents the real Jane turned up. The other woman wanted to buy me, but I was true to Jane and the other two, whom I regret I can't recognize.
The original Oedipus legend was that a Parsifal-Fool-Ghost was once the own child of the king whom he slew in the annual contest, and the curse lay in the failure of the tribe to secure exogamous fertilization.
I got an idea for a child's book on Alice in Wonderland lines, with a real dream as plot, the aim to slay sire and wed dam always masked by the Dream Censor, with his Protean theatre-wardrobe, to operate the dream changes.
6.05 p.m. Slept most of the morning; swam and slept most of the afternoon. At 5.30 Alostrael [Leah Hirsig] and I began the Celebration of the Mass of Our Lord.
By the way, Leah made notes of my last big night with cocaine. I took doses, at first four, in fifteen minutes; then after lunch twenty-three doses in three hours; after that no count was kept, but I went on till about 1.00 a.m. as I suppose. This is not Science!
6.30. I notice that the temptation to go on steadily with cocaine (in any given orgie-orgia, religious experiments) is deeply subconscious, almost like the need to breathe. If one is doing one's work very fluently, one takes none; if one stops for a moment, one reaches instinctively for the bottle. In Leah's list there are some intervals of only three minutes between doses, and others of fifteen to twenty minutes. She herself connected this wide variation with the length of the paragraphs dictated. The moment a new thought is required, a new dose is demanded. It's just like trying to keep a top spinning: one lash may by luck or skill send it faster and steadier than another; but sooner or later it falters, and there is nothing for it but another stroke of the whip. If a real inspiration take hold of one, at any period, one may forget the drug altogether, as if the whipping top were changed by Magick into a Dancing Dervish, or a Star. Thus, last night, Leah's caresses ousted her rival Borgia from my affections and my memory in a very few minutes.
I am inclined to the opinion that a state of mind such as that in which I wrote The World's Tragedy would do as much for me. But here is my rock of stumbling: to write SUCH A BOOK, even with the Idea and the Power ablaze and priapic in the brain, needs a third Person in its Trinity, if the deed is to be done. That Person is the conviction that the work is necessary, important, all else in life at best a preparation for it. And that Person is now almost an exile from my Kingdom. I can't believe that anything matters more than anything else. I can eat and drink, love Leah, swim, play Fives, with infinite zest. Why? Because I like to do so, and these things don't pretend to be more, or other, than they are. But I have the fixed idea that a Book 'ought' to be a Word of the Immortal Gods, mighty in Magick, et cetera, ad nauseam; and my very Initiation itself has taught me that the Universe is centred on each one of the rock-rooted blooms of sea-nettle that stung me this afternoon as much as on a Mahabrahma, were there such an one as He. Crudely put, I cannot take myself seriously any longer. The Way of the Tao, of automatic reaction to impressions, not valuing any above another, has become my Path. I can write this Diary, firstly because it is a habit, but secondly because I don't particularly expect anybody to read it . Formerly it was less to express or edify myself than in the fiery hope that others might take heed by my errors, courage at my success, and come with less pains to mine own initiation-goal, yea, and beyond it. But now that I have come where (it may well be) few others of our monkey-transcending race have trod, leaving ground of body, dared Daedalian to explore the unmapped abyss of air—'Afloat in the aether, oh my God, my God!'—I am no more. Earth's landmarks became unfamiliar as I soared; clouds hid them; soon Earth's self was but a pellet in the immensities that swallowed me. All stars were seen to be but minute accidents of space, scarcely decipherable, utterly insignificant. History was but a lewd scrawl on the blank wall of unintelligibility; philosophy but an idiot's gabble, science and religious Autolycus—trash. As for myself! Indeed, I might declare myself sole God, all-containing, all-creating, since this Universe was but a phantom in my mind. But then being so blank-faced, brainless, it might blush before the candle-and-turnip-on-sheeted-pole of schoolboy. Nay, more, as all features faded in the twilight of my discrimination, and vanished in its night, there was no more, nor form nor being, to be my Universe, and so to constitute my 'Self'. From this great Dissolution I emerge, indeed, as 'twere a man born blind, cured for a month, might sink again to his old world, only to recognize how incomplete and unintelligible it is without sight's explanation of its problems, and quite unable to accept the witness of touch or hearing to the true character of a phenomenon, or to imagine that a four-sense-philosophy can be taken seriously. Yet he, with his month's light, seemed to add to his knowledge, even to aid his understanding. It gave him one more touchstone to tell This from That. For me, far otherwise; in my initiation's vitriol all difference dissolved. A blank circle means more to the geometer when he draws one or two diameters; they help him to discover new properties thereof; but if he could draw all diameters, 'twere a blank as at the first. And even if the blind man, taking himself seriously, might hope to help his fellow-folk of Darkness by the explanations gained in his month's light, can I do so, who know that my whole gain is loss? I know that Buddha is no more than a dead lotus-leaf, nay more, none other. I know the Path of the Wise one with a blind alley, John Keats no holier than a drunkard cursing.
(8.40. After an interval for two sets of Fives.)
So then there is no reason why I should not do anything which is evidently my nature or will to do; but to make an effort to 'sacrifice the lower to the higher', or 'self to Humanity', is absurd when the victim is also the god. 'Work without lust of result' says The Book of the Law. It sounded hard. Now I know that no result is possible, that lust dies ashen; but why work? Blavatsky [Helena Petrovna Blavatsky], too! 'Kill out ambition; but work as those who have ambition.' But she offers a prize: humanity's enlightenment. It tempted me, be sure; I gave all for that, 'twas my Pearl of Great Price. And lo! tis no more than Fame's stage tinsel, Wealth's Shahravah-coin of leather, or Love's Nessus-shirt.
The only answer to all this appears to be my Montauk demonstration of How A could increase without ceasing to be A by its combination with B, C . . . Z and so on. Or, how my inviolably perfect, my infinite, my immortal soul, could yet profit by exchanging its Rest for an Orbit of Incarnations.
But since then I seem to have become so conscious of A, so sure of its identity with B and the others, that the game seems absurd, like trying to play whist with blank cards, three dummies (or even four I) no rules, and for no points. I suppose that this is a natural state of mind for A to have; A is a universal proposition 'All S is P' which means nothing as soon as it is proved, since P becomes implicit in the definition of S. A is defined only by infinities and contradictions, like Shiva or The Tao; therefore A is Nothing, to itself or to anything else, as pure A. That, no doubt, is why it corrupts itself with B. It thus finds a meaning for itself. (Kether is colourless, not even white, brilliance.)
10.10. Have taken the forty-four of the 'K without the Hs' for Set.
10.15. I conclude that I shall either deliberately defile A with B and thus regain the illusion that my Work is important, or discover that all this while I have been working better than I knew.
After all this, the truth is miserably petty; but out Thou, stark Virgin, from Thy well!
She smiles; 'You would be satisfied and proud and passionate, eager to do more and better, if only that cheap bookcase of warped wood and blistered paint with knobless drawers and cracked glasses had on its shelves a few new volumes nicely printed, neatly bound, of what you call your Works.'
'Truth! dare you say I am so vain a thing as that? That I am still a schoolboy eager to reach the Sixth, and see his name in the School list with his that won a scholarship at Trinity, and his that took the prize for Greek Verse with dull wooden iambics that none shall ever read but the Examiner who judged them?'
Truth smiles again: 'Vanity, all is Vanity! You'd cut your name in the rotting bark of the dead Tree of Fame that's lost in the jungle of Rumour; but there are Those who will not hold thee shamed that thou hast played Bank Holiday Tripper, intruded thy cognomen upon Nature, or put pollution upon hallowed places, if for thy fellow-scribblers thou has Aeschylus, Laotze, Catullus, Baudelaire [Charles Baudelaire], Heine, Shakespeare, Keats, Blake, Rabelais, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Balzac, and James Branch Cabell.'
'Vanity, ay! Vanity, Vanity of Vanities! But as I lured thee to seek me, not careful of the risk, not haggler of the cost, by bloated promises that thine own sword soon pierced, pigs' bladders swollen with foul wind of Fame, with Nitrous Oxide of Knowledge or even with Poison Gas of Love, so do I tell thee now that the boy's vanity is worth my maiden Truth, and thou shalt envy Shelley, and ousting him, challenge Kit Marlowe, and outroar him, insult John Milton, and out-thunder him, nay, match thine eagle-vision against Blake's, outstare him, and violate the Muse of Swinburne, that she acknowledges thee her Lord even in the flaming bed that scorched his limbs, and sent him limping to the Southey-Wordsworth Hospital for Incurable Poets, Icarus Street, Eunuch Square, W.C.'
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