Diary of a Drug Fiend

by Aleister Crowley

  She was in, thank goodness. I don’t know what tale I told her. I don’t know why I was stupid enough to trouble my head to invent one. She’s a real good sport, Maisie, and doesn’t care what you do as long as you don’t interfere with her.

  She had some white silk, and we sewed up the H. in little packets, and stitched them in the flounces of my dress. I kept about half, and put it in an old envelope she had. That was to make my peace with Peter. But I needed two or three good goes on the spot.

  I had a fit of hysterical crying and trembling. I must have fainted for a bit. I found myself on the sofa with Maisie kneeling by me and holding a glass of champagne to my lips.

  She didn’t ask any questions. It wasn’t her business if my story was all lies.

  I felt a bit better after a while. She began to talk about King Lamus. She had fallen for him the first time she met him, about a year ago, and had become an enthusiastic pupil. She could do what she liked; she was free, plenty of money of her own, no one to interfere.

  In a way, I hated her for her independence. It was really envy of her freedom.

  I felt that Basil was the only man that mattered, and I had missed my chance with him through not being worthy. I had ended by losing him altogether; and the irony of it was terrible, for I had lost him through loyalty to Peter at the very moment when I thoroughly loathed and despised him.

  Yet I knew that Basil would admire and love me for that very loyalty itself. It was the first thing that I had ever had to show him. My only asset had made me bankrupt for ever!

  Maisie had been talking quietly while I was thinking these things. I slid out of my concentration to hear her voice once more. She was in the middle of an explanation of her relations with Basil.

  “He claims to be utterly selfish,” vibrated her tense tones, “because he includes every individual in his idea of himself. He can’t feel free as long as there are slaves about. Of course, there are some people whose nature it is to be slaves; they must be left to serve. But there are lots of us who are kings and don’t know it; who suffer from the delusion that they ought to bow to public opinion, all sorts of alien domination. He spends his life fighting to emancipate people in this false subjection, because they are parts of himself. He has no ideas about morality. His sense of honour, even, means nothing to him as such. It is simply that he happened to be born a gentleman. ‘If I were a dog,’ he said to me once, ‘I should bark. If I were an owl, I should hoot. There’s nothing in either which is good or bad in itself. The only question is, what is the natural gesture?’ He thinks it his mission in the world to establish this Law of Thelema.”

  She saw my puzzled look.

  “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,’ she quoted merrily. “You must have heard those words before!”

  I admitted it. We laughed together over our friend’s eccentricity.

  “He says that to every one he meets,” she explained, not only to influence them, but to remind himself of his mission and prevent himself wasting his time on anything else. He’s not a fanatic; and in the year that I have known him, I’ve certainly got on more with my music than I ever did in any five years before. He proved to me – or, rather, showed me how to prove to my own satisfaction – that my true Will was to be a singer. We began by going through all the facts of my life from my race and parentage to my personal qualities, such as my ear and my voice being physiologically superior to that of the average musician, and my circumstances enabling me to devote myself entirely to training myself to develop my powers to the best advantage. Even things like my guardian being a great composer! He won’t admit that was an accident.”

  “He claims that the coincidence of so many circumstances affords evidence of design; and as so many of these are beyond the control of any human intelligence, it leads one to suppose that there is some individual at work somewhere beyond our limitations of sense who has made me a singer instead of a milliner.”

  “Oh, yes, Maisie,” I interrupted, “but that’s the old argument that the design of the Universe proves the existence of God; and people have stopped believing in God chiefly because the design was shown to be incompatible with a consistent character.”

  “Oh, certainly,” she admitted without a qualm. “The evidence goes to show that there are many different gods, each with his own aim and his own method. Whether their conflicting ambitions can be reconciled (as seems necessary from a philosophical point of view) is practically beyond the scope of our present means of research. Basil implored me not to bother my head about any such theories. He simply laughed in my face and called me his favourite nightingale. ‘Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird,’ he chuckled, ‘but neither wast thou born to take a course of Neo-Platonism.’ His whole point is that one mustn’t leave the rails. If I had convinced myself that I was a singer, would I kindly refrain from meddling with other affairs?”

  “I know,” I put in, “as the captain said when the first officer interrupted him, – ‘What I want from you, Mr. Mate, is silence, and precious damned little of that!’”

  Again we found ourselves laughing together. It was really very extraordinary the way in which talking to Basil or his pupils exhilarated the mind. I began to see why he was so distrusted and disliked. People always pretend to want to be lifted out of themselves, but in reality they’re terribly afraid of anything happening to them. And Basil always strikes at the root of one’s spiritual oak. He wants one to be oneself, and the price of that is to abandon the false ideas that one has of oneself. People like the sham teachers that soothe them with narcotic platitudes. They dread having to face reality in any form. That is the real reason for persecuting prophets.

  Of course, I was full of H., but Maisie had made me forget all about it for a moment.

  “Who’s that thin girl that’s always there?” I asked her.

  It was an automatic spurt of jealousy.

  “Oh, Lala,” said Maisie, “she’s rather a dear. She’s a queer girl, one of the queerest ever. Swiss or something, I fancy. He’s trained her for the last three years. He met her, I don’t know how, and asked her to pose for him. She told me once how startled she was at the reason he gave. ‘Did you write that psalm,’ he asked her, ‘“I can tell all my bones, they look and stare upon me?’ “‘You know the girl hasn’t got an ounce of flesh on her body. She’s perfectly healthy; she’s just a freak of nature. And while he sketched her he asked her to suggest a title for the picture. ‘Paint me as a dead soul,’ she answered. He caught up the phrase with fiery enthusiasm, and began to work on an enormous screen, a triptych with the strangest beasts and birds and faces, all arranged to lead up to her as the central figure. She is standing naked with a disproportionately large head grinning detestably. The body is almost a skeleton covered with greenish skin. It made a perfectly grisly sensation. I wonder you haven’t seen it.”

  As a matter of fact, I had seen a photograph of it in some newspaper, and now I remembered that Bill Waldorf had pointed her out, roaring with laughter, as the Queen of the Dead Souls. Basil had said that London was full of dead souls.

  “It’s nothing to do with that story of Gogol’s,” said Maisie. “Basil thinks – and it’s only too ghastly true – that most of the people we see walking about, and eating and drinking and dancing, are really dead – ‘dead in trespasses and sins,’ as my old uncle used to say – in the sin of not knowing themselves to be Stars, True and Living Gods Most High – ”

  I sighed with sadness. I, too, was a dead soul – and I had given up the Lord of Resurrection that morning out of loyalty to another dead soul. And – the same afternoon! Faugh! What a charnel-house Life is! How chill and damp and poisonous is the air! How the walls sweat the agony of the damned!

  “And look at Lala now!” Maisie went on. “He had to put her through the most frightful ordeals – for she was very dead indeed – but she got to the other end of the tunnel all right. She’s a Gr
eat Soul, if ever there was one in the world, and he has raised her mortal into immortality. Her corruptibility has put on incorruption – and she radiates light and life and love, leaping through the years in utter liberty – ”

  “But what does she do now?” I asked with a dull pain at my heart.

  “Why, her True Will, of course,” came back the flaming answer. “She knows that she came to this planet to bear witness to the Law of Thelema in her own person, and to help her Titan in his task!”

  Maisie was really stupefying. Every one knows that she was in love with Basil from the first, and is, and always will be. How was it that she could speak of another woman who loved him without jealousy, and, as things were, without envy? It was true, perhaps, after all, that he had some huge hypnotic power, and held them helpless, filed away like so many letters. But Maisie was bubbling over with energy and joy; it was absurd to think of her as vampirised, as a victim. I asked her about it point-blank.

  “My dear Lou,” she laughed, “don’t be too utterly gaga! My Will is to sing, and Lala’s is to help him in his work – why should we clash? Why should there be any ill-feeling? She’s helping me by helping him to help me; and I’m helping her by showing that his Law has helped me, and can help others. We’re the best friends in the world, I and Lala; how could anything else be possible?”

  Well, of course, she was herself doing a notoriously impossible feat. The point of view of Basil and his crowd is simply upside down to all ordinary people. At the same time, one can’t deny that the result is amazingly invigorating to contemplate. I could quite understand his idea of developing mankind into what is practically a new species, with new faculties, and the old fears, superstitions, and follies discarded for ever.

  I couldn’t stand it another second. Maisie had given him – and herself – up, and yet she possessed both herself and him: I had clung to him and to myself, and I had lost both – Lost, lost for ever! I got up to go home; and before I reached the street I realised with desolate disgust and despair the degree of my degradation, of my damnation; and I hugged desperately my hideous perverse pride in my own frightful fate, and rejoiced as the horrible hunger for heroin made itself known once more, gnawing at my entrails. I licked my lips at the thought that I was on my way to the man whom my love had done so much to destroy – and myself with him.

  To begin with, no more of this diary why should I put myself out for King Lamus? “Every step he treads is smeared with blood,” as Gretel once said.

  Yes, in some infernal way he had made me one of his victims. “All right – you shall get enough magical diary to let you know that I’m out of your clutches – I’ll put down just those things which will tell you how I hate you – how I have outwitted you – and you shall read them when my Dead Soul has got a Dead Body to match it.”

  September 14

  I expected Peter would be in; impatient to know if I’d wangled McCall. Instead, he turned up after twelve, full of champagne and – SNOW!

  My aunt, what a lucky day!

  He was boiling with passion, grabbed me like a hawk.

  “Well, old girl,” he shouted, “what luck with McCall?”

  I produced my package.

  “Hurrah, all our troubles are over!”

  We opened our last three half-bottles of fizz to celebrate the occasion, and he gave me some coke. And I thought I didn’t like it! It’s the finest stuff there is. A sniff to the right and a sniff to the left and a big heap right on my tongue; and that wasn’t all.

  “I tell you what’s been wrong,” he said in the morning. “Who the hell could expect to be right in a place like this? I’ve got right on to the ropes. We need never run short any more. We’ll go down to Barley Grange and have another honeymoon. You’re my honeysuckle, and I’m your bee.”

  He went and flung open the door and shouted for the woman to pack our things while we went out to breakfast, and have the bill ready.

  “What infernal fools we are,” he cried as we went sailing down the street to the Wisteria where you can get real French coffee and real English bacon.

  We looked at ourselves in the long mirror. We could see how ill we had been, but all that was gone.

  Decision and self-confidence had come back; and love had come back with them. I could feel love mingling its turbulent torrent with my blood like the junction of the Rhone and the Arve in Geneva.

  We walked into a shop and bought a car on the spot, and took it away then and there. There was one at the Grange, but we wanted a racer.

  We drove back to Greek Street in a flood of delight. It was a bright, fresh autumn morning; everything had recovered its tone. Winter could never come. There was no night except as a background for the moon and the stars, and to furnish the scenery of our heavenly hell.

  September 17

  The Grange is certainly the finest house in the world. There is only one drawback. We didn’t want callers. County society is all right in its way; but tigers don’t hunt in packs, especially on the honeymoon. So we had to send the word around that the precarious state of my health made it impossible for us to receive. Rather an obvious lie, motoring the way we were. The ’plane had come back from Deal, but we didn’t do any flying.

  Cockie gave various reasons; but they were unconvincing. We roared with laughter at their absurdity.

  The truth was that he was nervous.

  It didn’t make us ashamed. After what he had done, he could rest on his oars. It was only temporary, of course. We’d made ourselves rottenly ill in that gaga place in Greek Street. We couldn’t expect to get back to the top of our form in a week.

  Besides, we didn’t want that kind of excitement. We had enough in other ways. We found we could see things. That ass, Basil, was always talking about the danger of magic, and precaution, and scientific methods and all that bunk. We were seeing more spirits and demons every day than he ever saw in ten years. They are nothing to be afraid of. I should like to see the old Boy himself. I’d –

  September 18

  We found a book in the library one rainy afternoon. It told us how to make the Devil appear.

  Cockie’s grandfather was great on that stuff. There’s a room in the north tower where he did his stunts.

  We went up after dinner. Everything had been left more or less the way it was. Uncle Mortimer never troubled to alter anything.

  There was a legend about this room too. For one thing, grandfather was a friend of Bulwer Lytton’s. We found a first edition of A Strange Story, with an inscription.

  Lytton had taken him for the model of Sir Philip Derval, the white magician who gets murdered. Lytton said so in this copy.

  It was all very weird and exciting. The room was full of the strangest objects. There was a table painted with mysterious designs and characters and a huge cross-hilted sword; two silver crescents separated by two copper spheres and a third for the pommel. The blade was two-edged, engraved with Arabic or something.

  Cockie began to swing it about. We thought flashes of light came from the point, and there was a buzzing, crackling sound.

  “Take this,” said Cockie, “there’s something devilish rum about it.”

  I took it out of his hand. Of course, it was only my fancy; but it seemed to weigh nothing at all, and it gave a most curious thrill in one’s hand and arm.

  Then there was a golden cup with rubies round the brim. And always more inscriptions.

  And there was a little wand of ebony with a twisted flame at the top; three tongues, gold, silver, and some metal we’d never seen before.

  And there were rows and rows of old books, mostly Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.

  There was a big alabaster statue of Ganesha, the elephant god.

  “This is the place,” I said, “to get hold of the devil.”

  “That’s all right,” said Cockie, “but what about a little she-devil for me?”

 
“Oh,” I said, “if I’m not satisfactory, you’d better give me a week’s salary in lieu of notice.”

  We laughed like mad.

  Something in the room made our heads swim. We began kissing and wrestling.

  It’s all very well to laugh at magic, but after all certain ideas do belong to certain things; and you can get an idea going, if you’re reminded of it by a place like this. . . .

  (Lady Pendragon’s Diary is interrupted by a note written on some later occasion in the handwriting of Mr. Basil King Lamus. Ed.)

  Lou means all right, bless her! She makes me think of Anatole France – La Rotisserie de la Reine Pédauque – old Coignard has been warned by the Rosicrucian not to pronounce the word Agla, and the moment he does so, a wheel comes off his carriage, with the result that he gets murdered by Moses.

  Then, again, all the Rosicrucian’s Predictions come true; and he himself goes up in a flame like the Salamander he has been invoking. He looks upon his own death as the crown of his career – the climax towards which he has been working.

  Anatole France is, in fact, compelled to write as if the Rosicrucian theories were correct, although his conscious self is busily exposing the absurdity of magic.

  It looks as if the artist’s true self were convinced of the actuality of magic, and insisted on expressing itself despite every effort of the sceptical intellect to turn the whole thing into ridicule. There are numerous other examples in literature of the same conflict between the genius and the mind which is its imperfect medium. For instance – at the other end of the scale – Mr. W. S. Maugham, in “The Magician”, does his malignant utmost to make the “villain” objectionable in every way, an object of contempt, and a failure. Yet in the very moment when his enemies succeed in murdering him and destroying his life’s work, they are obliged to admit that he has “Accomplished the Great Work” – of creating Living Beings! “Every man and every woman is a star.” – B. K. L.