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Aleister Crowley Diary Entry Sunday, 18 July 1920
1.20 a.m. Opus[1] IV, 31-666-31 [Leah Hirsig] plus everything. Operation: indescribably great: began at 6.30 a.m. of Saturday. Elixir: immensely copious, churned almost to foam. Object: to celebrate the Mass of Our Lord.
1.30. Stopped cocaine.
2.10. Talking to Leah; took a doch 'an doris.
2.35. Still talking. I note: Knowledge is based on discrimination, in every case. To distinguish this from that is our first step. More, knowledge of even one thing other than the knower implies discrimination between this and that; the dyad. Now moreover, Knowledge is the enemy of Life, ay, and of Love. Science has added knowledge to man, and made his life worthless to him, were it only by denying geocentricity and finding the source of religious fable.
Now, like my blind man (an hour or so ago) we might have a geometer in Flatland explaining problems like the cause of the appearance of a point which widened into constantly increasing circles and then diminished again by 'discovering' a Third Dimension containing a sphere which passed through Flatland's plane. We did have [Charles Howard] Hinton to explain some three dimensional puzzles by assuming a fourth, and [Walter William Rouse] Ball to make gravitation and certain physical laws intelligible in the same way. But the Flatlanders knocked their geometer out of shape, and men should have crucified Ball and Hinton; for if cubes be, planes are but mathematical conventions without real existence; and if tessaracts exist, solids are but their imaginary boundaries; like the Equator, real only on paper. A little knowledge is indeed a dangerous thing, for it aids men to tell this from that, even as sight, organ of knowledge, marks the red rose from the white, and as hearing profanes holy silence, vibrates its this-and-that which ends in Babel-discord. But ask Initiation—Knowledge, the wheel spins to Zero; our cobwebs of discrimination that man's mind, the venomous spider in his kingly palace, spun, is swept by the first whisk of Isis' broom into the dust heap of oblivion. So, thinking to increase Knowledge, we destroy it; we have tried to tie knots in a rope with ends fixed. We admire the ingenuity, wonder at the complexity, add one, and the whole tangle of fool's knot ravels out. When I destroyed discrimination, as I was bidden in The Book of the Law, I destroyed Knowledge; and having destroyed Life's enemy, Love's murderer, my complex is made simple; I can live again, love again, with the sublime ignorance of the wise Serpent who ate not the fruit he praised, with the blind passion of fire, that sees not its own light, nor feels its heat, yea, let me say it, I can live my life, can love my Leah, with the superb unconsciousness of a Star, with the supreme absorption of a God.
5.00 a.m. Opus[1] V, 31-666-31. Operation: very prolonged climax: very intense indeed. Elixir: copious etc., as in Opus IV. Object: as Opus IV. This left me as enthusiastic as ever. We went on again about 7-7.30 but to no instant end. Our Lord appeared to me and told me things. 'Things only exist by virtue of their opposites,' said He. 'Therefore I am no more than God of your illusory limitations, I express your preferences as man and woman. So I am the true God of your Work as you have now come to understand it and you did well to invoke me, and I am with you.'
The day passed in Fives, sleep, diving. Telegram from Jane [Jane Wolfe]: from Tunis, 21st. New Moon—this time clear!
1—[Crowley conducts a magical sexual operation.]
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