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Aleister Crowley Diary Entry Saturday, 21 August 1920
1.35 a.m. Finished 'Astrologer'. I worked rather fast, with a very difficult theme. I seemed able to catch up all the loose ends instantly, to grasp the whole 'universe of action' without effort, and to cap climax with climax, spontaneously, thus exploding the dump of waste munitions more pyrotechnically than I had directed the barrage. The play was meant to end with Victor's death; that left Justice with a hole in her net; I gaffed the slippery fugitives. The astrologer's conscience awakened by Fate's turning her lies into truth, her real power bursting its trickerydom, its triumph and her death—when the Gods come to a profaned temple their lightning wrecks it—this sudden apotheosis, ends also the murderer, convicting him, purging him to confess Truth's might and his own crime, and consecrating him by the fires of suicide.
I see my fault about this matter of scenarios: I despised the movie mode of art; I could not take it seriously. I could not believe in my own work; I deliberately tried to be bad when I thought badness might please producers. I thank Jane [Jane Wolfe] for the change; she has made me genuinely interested (besides teaching me some technique) and my last two scenarios have been my own, not sneers at other people's. I can't get Beauty in them, for they have no form; save only that balance, neatness, and smoothness of action are not unbeautiful, as in a chess problem. But my new interest is a little more than the intellectual pleasure of handling forces, by agreed rules, as in chess: I begin to play with live pieces. My old scenarios were rigid as algebra; cause and effect were cast, not 'wrought. Each piece had its move, and I knew it; given the 'position', the mate came in so many moves. Now pawns complain: 'The King dead? Bah! What happens to me?' And I like my folks to be my friends, to refuse to clerk for me, to urge their claims . . .
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