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Aleister Crowley Diary Entry
Tuesday, 10 July 1923
Die Mars
Slept fairly well—one wakening only—feel fit, CCXX, III, 11. Comment: forbidden to defend CCXX: to do so brings me down to the level of critics. We are creators, ‘Reason’ is the very principle we are out to transcend.
11.22 a.m. I feel inclined to make a preliminary analysis of CCXX, meditate on it daily, section by section, &write a brief summary of my ideas on it in a special book. This will serve as the negative of the plate: I shall get a sort of reversed image of what the Comment should be. Thus having got rid of all my positive thoughts on the matter, I should be free to write the Neschamic or Hadit-inspired Comment when the time comes.
But let me first get LXV & 777 out of the way.
11.56. Have written Ahitha [Roddie Minor] & Aimee [Aimee Gouraud].
2 p.m.
Eddie's [Eddie Saayman] letter. Mem[o]: to ask him daily ‘How’s your clap’ etc, till he can talk about it (a) as if it were rheumatism; (b) as if it were a stranger’s clap.
6 p.m. Have bathed. Long argument with O.P.V. [Norman Mudd] whose pedagogic perversions have led him so far astray from due decorum as to interrupt me constantly even in the middle of a sentence.
Note: to adorn each section of the Hag [The Confessions of Aleister Crowley] with two quotations; one from myself, one from some lesser genius. From letter of E. Saayman, dated 5 July, 1923:
‘Yet do I find it so bitterly hard that for one indiscretion the retribution is so out of proportion. When I consider the profligacy of others & compare my own case (&that when I had no will of my own) it just sends me raving. (P. 3). But what I do blame her for is taking advantage of me when I was in a condition not fit to be reasonable, & when I had no will of my own; in fact when I did not even know that I had done it until I found out that something was wrong with me’. (P.8)
On his own showing he has committed the greatest possible offence against the Law of Thelema. I have him cabled to come here at once.
I started to edit 777 after a lazy day. (LXV requires a special effort.)
Note: My ‘Death is not a way out of it’ seems to have haunted my clapstricken cunt-master—& possibly kept him from suicide.
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