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Aleister Crowley Diary Entry Tuesday, 6 December 1921
Have re-read the more interesting parts of Farrère's "Les condamnés à mort". In giving my life to humanity, there is no sentimentality: I am simply helping along the organism which is capable of transcending "Self-Consciousness". Note, by the way, how well the doctrine of the Abyss and the Black Brothers tallies with this purely physical theory.
6.0 P.M. After tiffin I got a sudden impulse to paint—probably due to Opus[1] VII and did a No. 2 and No. 6 panel—practically finished both of them—very elaborate, "The Mauve Mountain" and "La baigneuse a l'écharpe". The first is a superbly effortless landscape, very bright muscous colours; as sane as a [John] Constable, and yet distinguished. The second is an "undoubted Crowley"—a furnace of passionate colour. Intensely vivid, it is not forced. Vermillion and gold sunrise, a corona over a snow peak, rose-edged purple clouds separating the glow from the blue above. The peak rises in the nick of middle-distance mountains, and the whole is framed by a clairiere. The forest is a mass of very varied trees; flowers, rocks, and a pool in the foreground. By the pool sits a fat black-haired woman with a vermilion scarf.
After every "withdrawal from the vision" I seem to have made an immense advance in power and dexterity. I felt more sure of myself that I have ever done before, and perfectly free as to expression. Nothing had to be thought out consciously; there was no striving after effect.
1—[Crowley refers to a magical sexual operation which occurred on 5 December 1921.]
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