Mary Butts Diary Entry

Saturday, 2 July 1921

Later in the evening A.C. made me go back into the cave. There was a rug on the floor with a diamond pattern, black and yellow. A round window looking out a cove and rocks at low tide with dark green weed. There was an odd bird—reptile, squat-looking thing on a shelf. It changed. I could not make it [illegible] tried. I came back.

With reference to the third box—like a hot-water bottle. This is exactly like it except it is dark green, hanging up in A.C.’s kitchen.

Analysis under hashish.

I cannot keep the image constant and developing—(too much Mercury[?].) Practice to keep an image steady.

The drug splits up what is known, what is at the moment. To develop, to create something willfully out of the images and situations, that is the difficulty. I practices shaping an astral body and made it sit on the top of the little [illegible] Osiris, and watch me from the other side of the room. It was easier when I [illegible] myself round widdershins. But no clairvoyance is increased beyond what we had prepared before.

(Except the odd voices in our room I called ‘Abramelin’, but which may have been nothing.)

There are pleasant and unpleasant things, but a near absolute pleasure is going in the [illegible] of [illegible], and enjoy the sequence—e.g. John—anguish, analysis of why that is less this time, the nature of analysis rising to giggles over the behaviour of the Guru—[illegible] lest one should say too much, mere giggles, a falling down in to a semi-actual state—the word [illegible] . . . [illegible] , the white square [illegible] the sky like on the mountain—Then slows and imaged—and so on—in to a metaphysical series and round again. Following the sequence objectively without choice i.e. the way to enjoy.

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