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Aleister Crowley Diary Entry Sunday, 5 December 1920
I have had a Campaign of 1918 against the Hun, Pythagoras and broken up the lines of General Lysis.
I felt sure that as Pythagoras made Number the base of his system, the Golden Verses must enshrine his teaching, dogmatic and practical, in one way or the other. On the surface they seemed little more than platitudes; Fabre d’Olivet’s excursus was to me but a brilliant series of conjectures. I tried repeatedly to discover some esoteric import in the Text; but without avail.
Last night I began a new translation, for I had noticed that d’Olivet’s was full of loose paraphrase, and even at times injustifiably alien from his author. The Greek, too, is precise and compact, rather in the style of a mathematical or chemical treatise, and I suspected technical words of the Jabulon[1] type. I then translated the three lines of the Paraskeue and found all the important words to be significant of number, order, etc. Thus ’τιμα is only ‘esteem’ secondarily; its radical sense is ‘estimate’. I am encouraged to continue.
Later. I am apparently convalescent. I read Claude Farrere’s Fumees d’Opium and want to write a Hymn to the Pipe.
Note: C H A T T I N G is absolutely prohibited unless the chatters feel chatty. Otherwise chatting is the hardest and most tedious kind of work.
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