Aleister Crowley Diary Entry

Saturday, 9 June 1923

Die Saturn

11.50 a.m. ‘We are dust—with exultation!’ (A lot of emotional rot with this.)

11.55 a.m. (A laugh.) I know how to make people traverse places without hoodwinks. All this in reference to the fiction that kind people hoodwink you when you are going through an initiation, which means that you pass from one state A to another state B, if you are a bloody fool; & if you are a bloodier fool you put on the Rosy Cross. You have to see everything that happens-that’s all.

Note that by taking any of these thoughts one can build up a complete civilization.

12 noon. Even here gesture is original & not conventional.

12.03 p.m. That’s why you can’t predict anything (P.S. lt’s the end of a game—immaterial what it is & therefore insignificant.)

12.06 p.m. ‘I love you!’ ‘I know you do.’ ‘That’s the joke, you don’t know! You haven’t got the means of knowing. Yet perhaps you do. But you don’t know it as well as I do. You have to go through all I’m going through to know!’

We do want an interpreter between the sane & the insane more than anything else. (I gave 666 a little laugh by saying ‘a doctor could never be that’. 31-666-31 [Leah Hirsig].)

12.14 p.m. No one has ever been so far in expressing analysed thought. Research ought to follow that up.

2.07 p.m. Have I had to come to Tunis to learn equality? is a question which I do not ask owing to my habit of patience. I have returned the phrase in any number of ways between thinking it & saying.

Groans & sobs. Excuse my emotion. Was there ever such a forlorn outpost as the one I’m at? Conscience binds men together.

2.11 p.m. Groans. (Are they ecstasy or anguish or both?)

2.12 p.m. Groans.

2.13 p.m. My God! Yes! It’s the reality of this spit of sand as opposed to all the humbug that they say about it & yet it is merely one bit of the surface of the Earth & it’s up to us to do anything with it that appears suitable. Everything comes out all the same, of course, but I have made a deeper analysis of it all. You didn’t seem to realize how far away I was from wanting to have people put up stones & cathedrals about it.

2.19 p.m. Thoth invented articulate speech. Until then nothing could communicate. You don’t know what that means till you know the extent of the Universe, same as I do, & I hope you never will.

A few little naps—diarrhoea-mandar at 6.15. Pulse quick. But calm & peaceful on the whole. ‘I want to be an aviator’ like a tired boy.

7.17 p.m. Ethyl [Ether]. I am worrying whether the cloisters dedicated in my honour may not be in appalling taste.

Why is it that the formula of the Dying God should be associated with these ideas of Beauty?

Because 6 is Tiphareth. Does not that assume, not merely superhuman wisdom, but something inconceivably beyond that, in the people who designed the Tree of Life? Yes it does. And why shouldn’t there be such a party of people? And am not I united with that body by every fibre of my being? Now that the nonsense of symbols has been abrogated.

It’s in this sense that I have succeeded in my life’s work, that at last I am received among the Brethren of the Star, the Star which the ignorant call Silver, the learned call still or shining. I never heard that calling a star names interfered with it. (Laugh.) I have my life’s asymptote, & instead of falling into the sere & yellow, I am going to shine & in order to get the strength for shining, I’m going through the Hell I’ve been through. I thought there was no reward & it disheartened me, & there isn’t any reward & by God! I’ll go on. Perdurabo!

(I should think it was interesting—your part of the job. I asked ‘Isn’t your part?’ The answer—It will be bloody interesting, believe me, kid) (Excuse me for dropping into American) will be very interesting when looked at in perspective. Went through ‘Storm Fiend’ [asthma], this time without assistance. Any one who thinks that the S.[torm] F.[iend] is all that H[eroin]. has up his sleeve has another think coming. The S.F. is bad enough, it keeps you twitching your limbs in search of rest which does not come. But that is only one of innumerable demons that may obsess the soul, & there is only one way through: ‘Do what you wilt’, which is most effective when it doesn’t mean anything at all. A mere saying [of] the words drove away the whole obsession which had been trying to obtain possession of my mind. But with ‘Do what thou wilt’ I’m coming through this show or any other show that can be put up.

8.40 p.m. Talk [by] 666 [to] 31-666-31 [Leah Hirsig] re H[eroin].

666 claims that he has not had the desire for H more than 6 times in these days he’s been without. He hates, however, to be beaten, but I argue that though the sworn ‘diet-crank’ is impossible, yet at times one must compromise when the body needs a rest from certain foods, stimulants, etc.

‘The natives of Venezuela use cocaine wisely.’ I don’t like to admit that I would ever take another dose of H., because it seems like weakening on my immediate resolve to stop it. That is so true that I get an immediate image of my taking a dose now, when I don’t in the least want it & am not thinking about it, simply to show how bloody independent I am.

Now what are the disadvantages of such actions?

1. I have to start counting again the number of hours since I took it.

2. I feel that I’d haul down the bloody flag. By God! I’ll go on if it kills me. I will, Leah. If I ever do take it again, it will be when I’m under no pressure of any sort to do so & then, I’ll be bloody careful never to make it a daily habit. This will overcome the difficulties about elimination. I think that’s the principal thing: Never to make it a daily habit. Take as much as you like any day but leave a clear 36 hours in which to get rid of the drug.

I repeat what I said before, that no one should be entrusted with a government job until he has acquired a habit & cured himself without skilled aid. He’s allowed to have a woman who loves him to look after him—if he can find one. She must have a memory, & she must put down what he sees when he passes through the places where candidates are mercifully hoodwinked by Nature. Yes, I admit this is unnatural; a violation of the Mysteries of Nature. Prometheus is my name. I don’t care. I shall bring infinity of disaster in my train; but through me Humanity will win out to a greater power upon the Universe. Through me men will dare to dig deeper into the mystery of themselves & their thoughts; through me men will win to subtler machinery for interpreting between the different planes of ideas.

What a far-off hope that is! The idea that my ravings should be of interest to Humanity & that [Dr. Thomas] Domela^[1] should be interested in them, & therefore come & superintend them, & therefore I could take some H. as a preliminary measure!

(My remark—absent treatment.) What you are now witnessing is the elimination of oxy-heroin from the human carcase. You’ll admit the symptoms are really disgusting & I doubt whether, in the absence of Ether it would be possible to hold out for a minute.

9.33 p.m. There’s something in the contention of the Prohibitionist’s that the human race should march towards its goal (Patrick Henry!) without the interference of any alien substance. But it may also be asked whether it is not the intention of nature to build up these alleged alien substances into protoplasm.

Am I to be the only righteous man? this is the first time that I understand the sublimity of a passage of scripture which I completely forgot, but the idea is that the man reproaches the Lord in some such way: ‘With so much iniquity around, why should I be righteous?’ The answer is that it isn’t iniquity all around, each man may be righteous in his own way. Very good. Why should my righteousness involve me in the unpleasant situation which I find about me? In other words, why can’t I have just one sniff of H? Ferris will tell you that the answer has something to do with Cromwell.

Money is a matter of arithmetic. The only real money that is ever made is made by doing some small operation repeatedly, with a profit on each one. In Manchester language: ‘Small profits & quick returns.’

Mother Sereda (earlier).

10.10 p.m. Absolute sincerity has as many sheaths on it as the rest of them. (‘Them’= other moral qualities, apparently simple. I saw the way in which things ordinarily classed to be absolutely sincere, are seen not to be so.

1—Crowley’s doctor in Tunis, who he went to see about stopping his heroin habit.

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