Mary Butts Diary Entry

Sunday, 7 August 1921

Pranayama 20 minutes. Held in breath, rather lengthened. Sense of two cool spots on soft palate, two centres—which were one—of a kind of cool fire that quieted and refreshed something that is hardly in my conscious nature.

The last few days in the Abbey deserve analysis. There are various points which merged, and evoked the situation.

(i) The Abbey will not provide me with more than a very few cigarettes a day, and made it a practical breach of our affiliate oath to supply our own.

(ii) We reached a certain point on the night [30 July] of the sacrifice of Seth^[1] in our judgment of the place.

 Life here involves quite noticeable hardship.

On the account of (i) we gave up our cherished trip to Palermo to sanitation, scent and good food.

C.M. [Cecil Maitland] is delicate, nervous and unwell. I object to further asceticism being imposed on him arbitrarily when there is already a good deal to endure. So we shrugged our shoulders and bought our own—I am smoking very little.

Moreover, as we saw perfectly, the underlying idea was a complex of Lea’s [Leah Hirsig] dislike of us transforming itself into a wish to do us good. To this is to be added Lea’s fanaticism, the Beast’s fanaticism.

There are several circumstances that caused us to revalue our first appreciation of this place.

(i) Lea—apparently—if the Beast’s word is worth anything, had sexual union with the goat before he was killed.

(ii) The children here not only witness sexual acts, which on the whole, I approve, but are occasionally expected to amuse—the nymphomaniac Lea—she is our only evidence—‘Kiss Lea again as I shewed you’.

(iii) Poupée, the baby, died on Lea’s verbal account from careless feeding from her diary (a) because it was her baby ‘will’. (b) or ‘Shummy’ [Ninette Shumway] drove her to suicide. (c) or the Beast mattered most to her [illegible].

(iv) Lea’s diary is—filthy—She went with the Baron [Baron Carlos La Calce], and their first sexual act so divorced sex from aesthetics as to shock my morality.

(v) She whores on the Naples and Palermo streets (this question has been treated before.) In piquant contrast—it is she who eggs the Beast on to [illegible]—for all, for [illegible].

(vi) Both dope out of all reasonable proportion.

(vii) Part of this, stated in diaries and causation (i) (iii) (iv) (v) may be to blame—god knows what affected inversion of normal decencies.

Then, some days ago, the Beast attacked me—I had an unsolved complex that was baulking me. This is true—I have known it for a year, and partly realize its nature—I faced it again here, and he began to nag me about it.

So there is I. thing in myself which is hard to face—the Fear I need not re-describe—and that I work on

II. Abbey—filth.

III. Abbey tyranny.

IV. Ill-health in both of us.

I summoned the ‘daimon’. He said ‘observe’ and ‘balance’. ‘Will’, ‘dare’, ‘attain’, ‘keep-silence’, his humour, his calm. He ‘hears very clean lines’. He led me down a passage of such oblique curves I was afraid and delighted. [illegible] he said. He reminded me of good painting, excellent music, the quintessence, he sorted, and displayed and blew the fevers cool.

To-day the Beast quit his nagging, and began to appear to bribe me with 7º=4^o. I was civil and silent.

The daimon who had shewn we had to walk in detachment blew a flame through me. There was nothing for it to fire. ‘It sinks or I am ready to depart’.

This is a proper ordeal—Peace to every heart about on the earth to night. Pranayama 30 minutes. Asana 25. Breath lengthening—ten, ten, twenty average—cool spots again, and revived physical well-being.

Now to balance last nights account—C.M. left a note-book about with an infamously realistic description in it of Lea—She found it, and read it, and was ill, and the Beast was very kind to him.

When he was in bed, they asked me in to a pipe of opium with them, and the Beast with extreme tact and fine teaching told me about it. I had to defend C.[ecil], uphold C., open up the cigarette question, get so much of our own way as possible, and put matters as right as possible with the Beast, our host.

There was their outraged feelings, their unhappy feelings, their charming self-restraint, their fanaticism, their theories, their wisdom and [illegible].

I agreed that what C. had written was one half of the trouble, but I put everything as to ‘[illegible] to our sail’ plane, produced Cecil in well-read repentance, and to-day all is well.

But the falsities of this place remain evident as the Cefalù rock, with their simplicities, their attainments, blind and conscious.

Pranayama. 15 minutes. 10 . 10. 20. Great [illegible] Mantra ‘ac’ardua’ went well. Cool spots.

Read [Ira Craddock’s] Heavenly Bridegrooms.

Understood an Arcanum. Want Cecil to.

1—On 30 July Crowley conducted a ceremony where he sacrificed a goat. Part of the ceremony supposedly included the goat copulating with Leah Hirsig.

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