Confessions of Aleister Crowley

246 largely recruited from the assassin class --- there is no other --- one can well understand why the gentry maintain, to a great extent, the ancient custom of surrounding themselves with armed retainers. As soon as Beelzebub got on the job, the magical assaults ceased; and, deprived of the stimulus to perform Magick, my interest faded once more. We spent out time in sport an society, tempered by pregnancy, as if there were no hereafter. I used my official titles and position without emphasis, very much as a peer takes advantage of his social privileges without ever giving a thought to the Hose of Lords as a political institution. On July 28th my wife gave birth to a girl, called Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith. Nuit was given in homage to our Lady of the Stars; Ma, goddess of Justice, because the sign of Libra was rising; Ahathoor, goddess of Love and Beauty, because Venus rules Libra; I'm not sure abut the name Hecate, but it may have been as a compliment to the infernal gods; a poet could hardly do less than commemorate the only lady who ever wrote poetry, Sappho; Jezebel still held her place as my favourite character in Scripture; and Lilith, of course, holds undisputed possession of my affections in the realm of demons. {409} Duncombe Jewell remarked later on that she had died of acute nomenclature. Cad. In my ears rang that terrible cry of Macduff, "He had no children." Everything had gone as well as possible, and we were the happiest house party in the Highlands. There was only one problem, that of keeping my wife amused during her convalescence. She was normally an intensely active, joyous being, but she had absolutely no resources. She could not play even the simplest game of cards, and of my whole library of three thousand books and more there were only some half dozen that she cared to read. Hill Caine was too deep for her. It was up to me to produce an example of the only kind of literature she understood. Now the objection to this form of art is its monotony; its preoccupation with detailed incident precludes a plot, and the range of its characters is deplorably limited. The men are nearly always priests or peers; the women countesses, school mistresses or milliners. These books possess the merit of frankness of the most engaging kind; but they frequently strain one's credulity. The heroes of medieval romance are not so inhumanly disproportionate to the facts of life; that the author could claim the title of realist only ads to one's disgust. They arose every instinct of my puritanism with almost insane intensity. I suppose I was really furious at the fact that the wife whom I loved so passionately and honoured so profoundly should be intellectually circumscribed in this way. My only remedy was a reductio ad absurdum. I resolved to write a novel myself --- one of this kind, but it should be very much better and bigger. And damn the expense. No priest nor monk should be my hero. I would have an archbishop. He should not be as superhuman as six men; he should do better than six hundred. My models had annoyed my by the pathetic paucity of their vocabulary. Having the excellent dictionary of John B. Farmer and W. E. Henley, I was able to avoid repeating myself. However, I took the liberty of inventing many new words and phrases to add further variety. So for every detail, I would show up the imbecile ineptitude to this type of literature by exaggerating its faults at every point. I pounded off a chapter a day of this novel on my typewriter and read it to my wife, Gerald, Ivor and the rest of the house party, except my aunt, who shared the psychology of my wife, only on the other side of the fence. Rose could not see in the least what I meant; like Colonel Gormley, anything whatever that turned her mind towards the subject of love produced a direct excitement and was pleasing. The effect was the same on my aunt, except that she had schooled herself to pretend that it was unpleasing. Even in France the pudibond fury of the bourgeoisie is rampant. Part of the public horror of sexual irregularity so-called is due to the fact that everyone knows himself essentially guilty. "Methings the lady doth protest too much." If men would face the facts of life, including their own constitutions