|
Aleister Crowley Diary Entry Thursday, 31 May 1923
Die Saturn
12 Noon. Alostrael [Leah Hirsig] with Ethyl [Ether] 12.12 a.m.[1]
Four with Eye in it turns upside down and suggests a cock Now more like the sign for Jupiter than the figure 4: now turns to 2 twined serpents and these make Trident. Means: 3 = 4, or 4 = 3; not sure which.
Pretty girl, dull gold band on head: tapestry behind her: all suggests Burne Jones.[2]
Lyre suggesting Apollo appears (‘I’m going from one God to another’). Asks for Message from Gods: 4 reappears-a row of them along a country road. A cross appears, many in one, suggests gold and silver. Rose appears, huge jewelled mosaic effect.
2.40 p.m. Slept early and well, but too long. I can’t persuade Alostrael to do her obvious duty: to come into my bed in the morning and wake me by caresses of word and deed. Damn her!
3. p.m. Ethyl for inspiration to continue Hag [The Confessions of Aleister Crowley]. 5.27.58.—0h! what an advertisement. I got several pieces of advice:
(1) [illegible] at any cost—just when I feel rottenest about it etc.
(2) Publisher before issuing my memoirs puts all property in his wife’s name etc.—I see now that this is pretty bloody silly. The publisher has the printer and others to reckon with. I understand the scope of the English libel law—all this foreseen. I’m annoyed: shall go on with Ethyl now, but quite possibly chuck her as unreliable in consequence of this evident betrayal.
I feel the need of a—new word—dislike too familiar, contempt too-tolerant—and I want this word for Carlo la Calce!!!!! There’s a most astounding complex under all this!! (Please don’t think I’m drunk, dear A.C., it was all worked out exactly to the last w.)[3]
(A.C. returns: To hell with all this! What about my Memoirs?)
5. [p.m.] Woke, I suppose!!! from a most astonishing series of analyses and recognitions of various phenomena. Was I asleep? The time suggests that I must have been. Was I dead? The character of the dream almost persuades me so.
P.S. I had put Ethel away about 3.40 or so. Would have sworn I had not slept at all: and the waking was not like anything I have ever known.
The whole experiment seems very unsatisfactory and rather alarming.
Lea’s criticism: ‘as if you had got pretty far away from yourself’. It suggests to me an almost complete dissociation of the normal mental elements. Where e.g. did La Calce come from? I worked out at the time (I remember) that I must be subconsciously jealous of him as father of Ninette's [Ninette Shumway] new baby [Isabella]. And this is connected some-how with piece of advice No. 1 [above). As to that advice, again, I began to work out ways of doing it—several mean cowardly dirty tricks—and though I thought (or accepted the hypothesis provisionally) that my career—‘soul’s salvation’—life etc.—depended on my doing this, and though I could bring no wise arguments against it, I decided not to do it simply because it would not be the conduct of a gentleman [cf. previous experiments, and decisions of 666 as to how far to trust spiritual experience].
After ‘waking’, I felt very annoyed and rather scared and went walking—felt utterly rotten. Presently I was violently sick, which did me good in all I was out over an hour. But I have been uncomfortable, and void of Spiritual Energy all day. I think I have a slight cold, and that this condition always upsets me thoroughly—or has done of late months. I get fits of extreme fatigue and somnolence, can take no pleasure in anything—and do so. Wine and the like seem to do little or no good; and I am very irritated at having to take anything in the nature of a stimulant. Perhaps another course of Arsiquinine would help. Piece of advice No. 2, by the way, is not original. I remember thinking it out long ago.
1—[Intercourse with Alostrael combined with the taking of ether provided Crowley with the following visions.] 2—[Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet ARA (28 August 1833 – 17 June 1898) was a British artist and designer closely associated with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.]
|