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Aleister Crowley Diary Entry Thursday, 23 March 1922
1.45 A.M. 1 1/2 Luminal. Must write S.W. [Scarlet Woman].
8.40 A.M. I am suffering from a severe shock. After eating my breakfast this morning I said to myself "a little sleep and yet a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep": but though I felt very lazy, I found it hard to close my eyes; it hurt them when I did so, and they fell open again naturally. Then I remembered that I had suggested to myself that I should wake at 8 and get up at once in just the "right tone of voice" (as one may say) on which the whole stunt seems to depend. That it should be physically painful to close my eyes (did not sleep till after 3) is a serious phenomenon.
4.44 P.M. (40 1/2 41 41 1/2 42) I felt no craving today, but after my Turker [Turkish Bath] I had so much expectoration that I took three small doses [of Heroin] to ensure comfort, and one now "for fun". I slept a little in the Turker, by the way, even in the sudarium before massage. It seems that my auto-suggestion of wakefulness took itself very literally—I appreciate the cosmic quality of the idea, but never mind! Its operation was confined strictly to the moment covered by its verbal (or mental) intention, which was to prevent me from falling asleep immediately after breakfast. and to enable me to get up and out by 9 o'clock.
This phenomenon seems to me singularly precise and indubitable. A similar auto-suggestion with regard to herpin confirms the main theory, which (by the way) is also a branch of my theory about "drug-habits". I have now used my Nubian ring to :chance my luck" in the matter of getting a girl. It becomes important to investigate
(a) the limits of the power
(b) the question of the Magical Link
(c) The connection of autosuggestion with the method by which the Orgia of the Gurus [?] become effective.
It is true
(a) that I have had surprising failures in various petty Orgia.
(b) That I have had successes on an enormous scale, beyond anything that I would have imagined, or can explain by any hypothesis other than the ordinary Magical Physica.
(c) that autosuggestion, stretched to its breaking-point, does not affect the question of the Book of the Law. But it is obviously quite clear that one can use this method of autosuggestion to break off Heroin and accomplish other minor Orgia of types which do not depend upon the cooperation of alien consciousnesses. We can perhaps extend our Orgia to works affecting men or nature by suggesting further that the universe is part of our own consciousness. This opens the way to the error of "Christian Science" and similar follies, no doubt; but the safeguard of recording every experiment should be efficacious.
Note: My heroin record in this Part II amounts to 40 doses in 11 days; so that I have kept below the minimum daily dose of Part I (when there was grave discomfort) without effort or disturbance. I propose to close Part II with the Equinox of the Spring; and I predict that I shall be able to bring the average daily dose down to 2 doses during the first week of Part III. Indeed, I expect to do much better than that; for I will buy myself a cut-glass bottle with a chased gold or silver top—or one of Chinese love, such as jade—to contain morphine; and the morphine will be even more physiologically beneficial than the heroin. It will give me intense bien-être, even in minute doses; it will stop all unpleasant bronchial and similar symptoms; it will confer a philosophical calm of the most concentrated kind; and it will help me to rewrite Snowstorm so superbly that it will sell for a big sum.
7.20 P.M. Cut by Iris Tree and (almost) by Nina Hamnett!!! It is really the sublimity of the comic to see two such silly lydies giving themselves airs. As if Doll Tearsheet tried to snub Dante. Such girls only exist by virtue of the creative power of poets; they are phantasm pictured by his perversions. Even Dana Gibson invented a "Gibson Girl"; without him the type would have remained indistinguishable from their sister sluts. When they pretend to be artists of various sorts, that's merely one of the qualities postulated by their poet, no less than their Beardsley lips, their Swinburne sadism, their Tennyson meek-modest gentility, or their Burne-Jones slenderness. This is why men who are deluded into believing that women exist in reality are always damned. Thus: suppose a sentimental grocer falls in love with a Rosetti woman, and wins her, the contact destroys the illusion; she becomes the mere Form of the Idea which is the grocer. He is amazed and disappointed; he has killed what he loved. Only poets can find Truth in Love, because their Idea is their God, and they impose their Form on any woman that comes along. Their troubles come from failure to express themselves perfectly, as happens when their technique is defective, their material stubborn, and their will unequal to their Work. I have failed many times. But I have made my Scarlet Woman, perfect beyond all praise, from a dull ugly school-teacher, ignorant, tired, old, and common. Only three years and three months—behold a peerless Proctophile, a Priestess of Passion, prehensile to the Phallus of Pan, an adept in all Arts, a daughter of Dionysus by Diana, her ardour, her faith, her courage, her candour unmatched in the world. She stands supreme, naked and pure, a focus of force; she is young, she is strong, she is eager. With me she has passed through the pylons, through all. No deed but we dared it and did it! No sorrow but we suffered it! No filth and no venom but we made it our meat and drink! We have turned every possible plague into physic. We have hugged every hate to our hearts, crushed its curse into blessing. We have curled our lewd lips upon all that we loathed, tasted it slowly with sensual shame as our tongues licked its leprosy into our throats, swallowed its slime with snake's stealth, and breathed out its bestial foetor in each other's faces, fervid and fierce, till the stench set our souls ablaze with hell-fire, made our minds mad to know themselves masters of muck, and drenched our bodies with dew of desire to writhe in rejoicing that abominations itself had been become the accomplice of lust. Drunk with the deadliest drugs, smeared with the slimiest spilth, clawing and spitting like cats, worrying and wrenching like wolves, writhing and wrestling like snakes, howling and growling out words, the vilest still hateful because they were human, we wore down the night and the day before yielding to Nature, and summing our Sin in one spasm supreme whose horror, huge anguish, burst asunder the bonds of the body, sent our souls to the stars, struck us down on the bed corpse-clammy, inanimate idols of clay, our sweat steaming up from our skins, our tongues lolling out like the tongues of spent hounds, and the song of the Spirits of Sin, the siren secrets of Satan our father and lover, awakening the ears of our inmost intelligence!
I did not mean to write this Paean to Babalon when I began the entry. But it will serve as my Invocation, that I may obtain the Word of the Equinox. I will perform an Opus of the Gnosis, alone or with a friend, to complete the ceremony.
(The above, by the way, all written after 3 A.M. on Tuesday)
9.30 P.M. With Aimee [Aimée Gouraud]—enfin seuls! My message was "Conquer" and I did.
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