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Aleister Crowley Diary Entry Tuesday, 17 August 1920
Have just finished (midnight,
16th-17th August) a long prologue to the Leah [Leah Hirsig] book. It
invokes her. She sleeps—dear girl—all plastered up, knees
and shins and wrists, from her fall; and she finished the
set, and' she'd wake right now if I wished to worship her!
She is what I never met before: pure Yoni decorated by the
rest of her in the same way as I am pure Lingam with frills.
My secret comes out in my most innocent poems, essays,
pictures, etc. and frightens people, they know not why. Hers
has been heavily veiled; it couldn't even devise masks. So
it was either naked or invisible, as occasion required. Now
I have freed it, it has become very fertile in imagining
fancy dresses to set off its charms. These vary infinitely,
from physical conceits to spiritual ecstasies. Its purity,
the secret worship she has paid it (the soul of her its high
priest, and all else in her ministrant thereto) have kept it
from allowing the contamination of attachments. It is
therefore capable of all, is wholly divine as it is fiercely
fleshly or darkly devilish. She must beware of missing
chances to increase its experience, merely because she
doesn't feel like it, e.g. she should try 31 on the beach,
and get up steam over
12.35 a.m. I think I'll go to bed.
12.40 a.m. No; don't feel like it.
I really want to know why the smell and taste of Our Philosophical Gold have such a strong effect in arousing the Kundalini's little Brother, in me. Is it its value? My joy in the victory? If so, why should one refuse some samples? Would a greater joy arise from accepting such? To this my cocaine-mind leers and whispers 'Yes!' It quotes the 'dog-gold in Leah's Shin' proposal in support. Her failure to do this disappointed me. Freud suggests (I think) that a fascination comes from a false connection made by children between two processes. I doubt this, for many reasons; though the behaviour of dogs argues his case acutely. I myself think that the spiritual idea of revolt against restrictions is the father of the act. It is a ceremonial protest against American Ideals (Similarly I prefer ugly women, as if to say, 'I am not tempted; I do this for its own sake'.) I don't wish to revolt the body, to nauseate it; but I may do just a little more than is quite pleasant, so that body may know its master insists on its sharing the Rite at his bidding, just as a devout Tory squire might make his servants go to church, but not pester them. In fact, I avoid excessive devotion unless (a) my sincerity is challenged, as in the Palermo post-Tunis rite, or (b) when specially excited so that 'pain' of any kind is only a mild tonic, or (c) when the spiritual idea flames in a smouldering body and takes its pleasure in the old-woman way.
The masochistic element is certainly present: I want to be Leah's slave, her abject; I want to abrogate the Godhead that melts soul in soul; the manhood that loves her womanhood, mates her, protects her, honours her, befriends her; even the animal that lives sense-centred is her own equal. I do really want to set my highest under her lowest; nay, then, below that which her lowest spurns. That be my soul's one God, for it, though she reject it, is of her!
There is also the possibility that pain of any sort is a spur to a worn hack. The schoolboy's nerves react to the Magazine Cover, the servant-girl's to the novelettes. To-day I am rarely in physical need of relief; and most of the time I need an idea to excite me, e.g. the other day I was in the public room in a chair. That chair took me back twenty years, to escapades, and I revelled in it. But one needs 'pain' in taste as one grows older; curry, brandy, caviar, are not for the unworn tongues of infants. Note that pain of bites, scratches etc., must never go far enough to claim the whole attention or even to divert its centre from its Love.
Masochism, too, is normal to man; for the sex-act is the Descent into Hell of the Saviour. It would be absurd for me to want Leah were she only a woman; but she's a Spirit, growing as I grow, new every time; thus we both need our new Magnetisms to combine and act accordingly.
This Act, then, is (1) a protest against (a) the Puritan, (b) the thought that anything is common or unclean, (c) division, even of Kether and Qliphoth. (2) A stimulus to (a) imagination, (b) nerve-centres by pain-pleasure, (c) Love by adding a variation to its modes of expression. (3) A sacrament to affirm (a) that there is no part of her that is not of the Gods, (b) that my love makes her mine own God, (c) that Her host, my God's body, nourishes mine and sanctifies it.
There is thus in it a Creed, an Invocation, and an Union.
The Gold must be her own, or made gold by her word or act. This fact definitely refutes the theory that the basis of the act is physical. There is no 'error of taste'.
1.45 a.m. I note that the 'victory' over cocaine last night disorganized my troops. I beat no drum. I fired no shot, to-day. On guard!
1.50 a.m. All the while that I have been at work on the Gold Situation, one of me has been gloating over it; it has had eyes in the back of my head, and watched Leah; even as she sleeps she is at the Athanor!
I am totally unmanned; but the Soul is only the more God for that, and It-though in the Aethyr poised like Ra the Hawk, indifferent to Its planets-seeks some expression of Its thought, Its will; It seeks incarnation. It wants the mind to rest from all these ramblings, the body to revolt from scratch of style, to drop scribe's tablets, don priest's alb (alb, for 'tis pure of aught!) It wants the body to say Mass, the Golden Mass of the Sun, to say it simply, to consume the Host, that and no more; for in this rite is holiness, is joy ineffable, is love perfected, is will fulfilled. It is sufficient in itself; it needs none other, is in itself sufficient, is the Salvation of the God in man, lest He go mad for loneliness.
My body would not; I constrain it; now shall it write no more. Haste thee to part the purple folds of the shrine's curtain; offer the scarlet shrine thy silent praise; partake of its gold grace, thy God within thee; then, thou art That!
2.18 a.m. I go. This act, very ecstatic led up to another.
2.45. Opus[2] XII, 31-666-31 [Leah Hirsig]. Operation: excellent. No difficulty at any point, despite the large amount of cocaine. Blame the over irritation caused by the length of previous orgies. Climax ineffably grand. Elixir: most absorbed. What was got [out] was good, but curious to the taste. Object: the Leah book. (Result: best poem in five years!)
7.00 a.m. Am up, feeling fresh, after some quite nice sleep. Later: a bad cold in the head has started. I wrote a really great Leah poem.
1—[Capricorn, a sign used by Crowley to denote the Scarlet Woman.] 2—[Crowley conducts a magical sexual operation.]
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