Aleister Crowley Diary Entry

Sunday, 12 December 1920

6.5 p.m. I have been painting most of the day; mending various old crocks, but especially making a Trump IX, The Hermit, as seen in a vision last night. Also I began the Trump V, the Hierophant.

6.15 p.m. Genesthai [C. F. Russell] has been making an Ether experiment since about half past 12 o’ the afternoon. He only says-‘God damn!’ at infrequent intervals, and laughs coarsely at lascivious suggestions. In brief, it is a drunken sailor boy to the outward eye; but he seems to get certain interior states of considerable interest, and possibly of great value. This Brother has a husk of 100% American vulgarity which conceals a Great Adept. The task of his Holy Guru is then to work on the husk in the manner made familiar to us by the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford. He is a sort of Jude the Obscure, a gentleman, scholar, and potential Saint in the bodily garb of a Hooligan. This is a very difficult situation, as people who don’t in the least resent being told plainly that they are cowards, liars, and sodomites take umbrage at a guarded hint that their method of shaking hands is six weeks behind the fashion. However, l am a hell of a Holy Guru, and I shall tell him in plain terms ‘Be not animal, refine thy rapture’ and ‘exceed by delicacy’ and ‘let there be subtlety therein’ etc, as it is written in The Book of the Law.

He has the instinct of a gentleman not to wound another person’s most exquisitely frail fancy-feelings; but he has been brought up in an environment of coarse leering jeering brutes. He understands ‘stick it, in my dial, kid!’ but not the English equivalent of that phrase, ‘Spring’s smile depends on April showers’ or the Latin ‘Silence were sweeter’.

He wants Pure Love, 17-years-old with real gold hair and a guaranteed blush and the Ideal Ideal, and expects to pay Three Dollars for it, that being the recognized price all over the United States. The Passion of a Prostitute, the Vice of a Vampire, seem to him funny: how much more then the coprophile and bestial joys of those who know-know all and delight in all, having achieved and experienced all, so that they have turned from ice-cream and marrons glaces to Bombay Duck and Pate de Foie Gras. He is in his salad days, adoring Milk Pudding and refusing to look upon the Pheasant when it is high, preferring jam to chutney, and treacle to Roquefort. Yet in his own soul he knows better; he has merely been taught by American Public Opinion that Howard Chandler Christy and Charles Dana Gibson are Artists, to the prejudice of Toulouse-Lautrec and Goya. He must learn that the soul that he loves, the Woman of Whoredom, must indwell the worn flesh of Messalina; that her rankness betokens her rank; and to gloat upon the corruption of the body of Semiramis, counting the scars of her syphilis as sheer siren seductions, because they witness her wantonness, as to scorn the fatuous freshness of the Juliets and Desdemonas, who are only buds on the Tree of Lust, whose fruit is the Medlar, the Whore. He must learn that his animal strength and spirits, and the pride thereof, are not more his than they are the calf’s, but that the skill, experience, and intensity of the Sworn Sons and Daughters of Satan are desirable to the soul beyond any plastic excitants of passion; that the senseless gusts of spring are not to be compared with the steady savage storms of autumn.

He wants Old Brandy, I am sure; but he expects it to come in a new bottle with a gay label; he must Know that the dust and the cobwebs are signs that the spirit is mellow.

From every rottenness of Leah [Leah Hirsig] I get Her word of sorcery; the length of her term of service is her testimonial, signed by Priapus, that She is Past Mistress of the Lodge of Lust; the thickness of the mud on the sow proves how richly. she has rolled in the stye. I lust for her as I could never for a novice; her wrinkled ripeness guarantees her.

This truth learn thou, Genesthai, brother of mine! Learn this, thou Bull in my Pasiphae-pasture I Learn thou that I, worn out with wallowing though I be, or seem to be to thee, can breed thee Minotaur, while those meek calves that tempt thee with soft comeliness will but give birth to their base kind, to kine potential of no more than milk, veal, beef, and leather. Come, brother, come, my Bull! Desire me thou, delight me! Defile me and destroy me; I swear to thee my Magick shall repay thy pains. Come, seize me, master me, come, Bull of mine, reach out and take me roaring! I am thy mate, thy meat not natural to thee, therefore thine most surely as in thine Oath and mine that we would conquer Nature we have sworn. I love thee not; I loathe thee and I fear thee; therefore, I say my body be thy brothel! I yield myself to thee, I shrink from thee; thou art to me the Uttermost Abomination; come therefore thou, and sin with me the Sin of Shame, commit this crime thus twofold against Nature! In thy distaste for me, in thy contempt for me, my shameless soul, my soddenness, my soiled stupration, in these devouring them with cold and carnal acts, find thou the splendours and serenities thou hast sought, the sanctities that none but Sin, the Sin against thyself, hath power to give.

I also, every nerve deep-bitten, as with vitriol at thy touch, my delicacy quivering at thy coarseness, thy gross beast-lust an outrage to mine every daintiness, I too will take thee to me that I may make no difference between any one thing and any other thing, and love thee as I love myself, feeling the cruelty of thy clutch more dear than Death’s, the thrust terrific of thy thunderbolt not other than the Life of Zeus, begetting in my soul’s womb one, so mote it be! one Heracles to achieve the World’s Twelve Labours. Come, brother mine in the One Order, elect thy brow as mine to bear the Silver Star! Come, Knight Kadosch ordained, the Templars hail their comrade, cast thou thy pearls before the Sow of Purple, in the mire of this my Stye. Come, Cecil [C.F. Russell], come, my master, come to Alys [Crowley] thy slave; the god thy soul secrete in seed, and in the devil her body scatter it; she shall bear unto thee a son of this night’s Sorcery, a son of song to bear thy name and fame on every wind of the world when thou thyself art dust, thy body, and far from earth, forgetful, thou steerest through strange stars the ship of thy soul. Yea! as I loathe, I lust; I prostitute myself to thee, perversely prurient. Wilt thou not make this night the nameless nuptial, the Devil thy Lord and mine at Our Black Mass—8.23 p.m.

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