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Cecil Maitland
Born: Spring of 1892 in Church Stretton, Shropshire, England. Died: Towards the end of 1926 in Hastings, Sussex, England.
James Alexander Cecil Maitland was born in the spring of 1892 in Church Stretton, Shropshire. His father was Ernest John Winslow Maitland, born in Toronto, Canada in 1857 and his mother was Annie Barbara Lowson Roberts, born in Hampstead, London in 1862. Ernest and Annie were married on 29 March 1891 at St. Saviours Church, Southwark, in London.
Maitland served in the infantry during the First World War from 1914-1916 in Princess Louise’s (Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders). On 3 April 1915 Cecil was made a Second Lieutenant and in 1916 he was in Edinburgh, aged 24 serving with the London Regiment, 4/3rd Battalion (Military Reg: 5635).
Maitland met Mary Butts (1890-1937) on the evening of 3 January 1920 when she visited a fellow writer and friend named Sally in Bayswater, London. Living with Sally was her lover, Cecil Maitland, and they all read their stories to each other. Mary and Cecil found some sort of occult sympathy in each others’ natures and over the coming months grew closer together, Mary affectionately calling Cecil ‘Sandy’; they spent much time discussing various aspects of the esoteric arts, such as the ‘Abyss’ on 6 February—‘Maitland has looked into it. . . .’ In fact, by February ‘she had realized the extent of Cecil Maitland’s knowledge of magic’.
By March 1920 the two lovers were deep in their magical studies, Mary practicing automatic writing and reading a huge amount of occult literature from Eliphas Levi to the ‘Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin’—on 29 March she declared: ‘Maitland and I are in love with the 4th Dimension’. On the same day the two adepts seal their union in blood—‘I made him fetch a corn razor, & slashed a cross on his wrist & on mine. 3 slashes to each in my eagerness to draw blood. We sucked each other’s cuts & kissed them, & lay back licking our own wrists.’
Mary became more and more infatuated with Cecil who would come to live with Mary at 43 Belsize Park Gardens in London—‘Lately I have dreamed of Cecil (he is sitting beside me) as my lover—each time, with less & less inhibitions. To-day I want it while he is here’ and ‘I’m satiated with the thought of his embraces. I want to lie with him in that room & leave there a patch of ivory & gold.’
In August 1920 Mary and Cecil were staying at Welcombe House, Bude, in Cornwall where Mary says in her diary on 11 August that he has a ‘violent suicidal impulse. Perception of J.F. [Johannes, who committed suicide] as an infuriated devil demanding that he instantly destroy himself.’ The next day she notes that he is ‘exhausted—like a man who had been fighting for his life.’
Mary and Cecil perform a séance using a planchette on 18 August 1920 and the next day Mary writes that Cecil is ‘a man under a doom. He has had from his childhood the perception of the dark place in reality, what we call the “Abyss”.’ Cecil’s despair deepens for Mary writes in her journal on 27 October that Cecil told her that ‘for the past weeks he had been crazy with desire for suicide.’ The loss of his friend Johannes played on Cecil’s mind continuously and even haunted him, for on 17 November he told Mary about his suicide attempt around the time of Mary’s daughter being born when he took poison, ‘a bottle of chlorodyne’ and six grains of cocaine which ‘half killed him’. Crowley makes light of this incident in his Confessions saying that ‘I heard that he swallowed a bottle of poison—not even a decent poison, such as a self-respecting suicide might be expected to use. I forget the precise ingredients. I think it was some sort of disinfectant, such as is sold without restriction because legislatures had failed to imagine anyone asinine or abject enough to make it a beverage. The luck still held. I don’t know whether it disinfected him, but it certainly made him as sick as a sewer.’ Cecil attempted suicide again on Sunday 19 December 1920 when he tried to shoot himself with his friend Johannes’s revolver and was taken to Paddington Hospital in London. Once again Crowley had an unkind word to say about it—‘He had tried to shoot himself in the heart with a revolver. One would imagine that it would have been safe to bet on his doing some damage. But no! His pistol was spiritually his twin. The bullet thought that it might hurt itself if it happened to hit a bone, so it skipped nimbly round his ribs and sought repose from the tribulations of existence in a comfortable cushion.’
In March 1921 they travel the continent, and in Paris where Mary declared ‘I am now going to have the best part of my life’, they met the artist Nina Hamnett (1890-1956) who knew absolutely anyone who was anyone worth knowing!
Crowley was wandering around Paris like a ghost in search of a house to haunt when Nina Hamnett told Mary and Cecil about the Crowley and his Abbey of Thelema in Sicily—Crowley ‘stayed in the Rue Vavin at the Hotel de Blois. I asked him if I could bring some friends to see him and he asked us to come in one day before dinner and have some cocktails. He said that he had invented a beautiful cocktail called Kubla Khan No. 2. He would not say what it was made of.’
On 11 March Crowley initiated Mary in the 1st degree of the O.T.O. and on 18th March Crowley taught her the Gnostic cross; she also makes the observation that ‘Cecil needs magical protection’, but before Crowley left for Sicily he also taught his anxious new disciples in the making other magical practices such as yogic asanas (postures), pranayama (breath control) and mantras as well as astral travelling. He obviously saw in Maitland an intelligent man worth cultivating with a great enthusiasm for magick much as he had seen in Victor B. Neuburg and would see again later in Raoul Loveday, despite such men’s obvious failings; in the case of Maitland Crowley found that the fundamental root of his weakness was the lack of any will-to-live which was absent and through magical training a fine and disciplined magical assistant could be made. In fact, he saw both Cecil and Mary in great need of his magical assistance and tuition, saying they were ‘both in very bad health and very hard-pressed for money.’—‘They therefore came to me. With my invariable optimism, I picked out all the promising points and overlooked the faults, or promised myself that I could easily correct them. Their wretchedness kindled my pity and I invited them to spend their summer in the abbey at Cefalù. I really believed that a month or two of simple life, free from temptations and distractions, with the quiet discipline of our regulations, might put them on the right road.’
At the beginning of June 1921, following a few days when Cecil became ill with some sort of eye problem, Mary and Cecil had decided to join Crowley at the Abbey of Thelema! Mary wrote to her husband John Rodker on 1st June: ‘Cecil and I have something particular to do together. . . . I’m going South to Sicily with him to find out what it is.’
In late June 1921 the two ‘adepts’ left for the Abbey of Thelema, Cefalù.
Life at the Abbey was certainly not what they expected, in fact, Mary was decidedly concerned about the lack of proper sanitation; Cecil probably had other concerns on his mind, such as the lack of cigarettes because Crowley ‘offered us every drug in and out of the pharmacopaea, and tried to take away Cecil’s cigarettes.
On 14 September 1921 Mary and Cecil signed their Probationers' Oaths. Two days later on 16th September they left the Abbey of Thelema and returned to Paris. In Paris they met their friend Nina Hamnett, who commented that they looked like ‘two ghosts and were hardly recognizable.’
By 28 September 1921 Cecil and Mary are back living in London at 43 Belsize Park Gardens, terrifically damaged by the Cefalù experience and with sizable drug habits. They had emerged from their sojourn with him [Crowley] considerably shaken and in poor health.
On 28 August 1923 Mary and Cecil completed their joint novel Backwards from Babylon before Cecil went to Paris with Mary in November and then on to Florence for four months.
They separated around February 1925 and Douglas Goldring casually informs us that Cecil went to live in a Breton fishing village with a group of friends, but the truth is he was probably severely depressed and struggled with suicidal feelings.
James Alexander Cecil Maitland died towards the end of 1926 in Hastings, Sussex; he was 34 years old. |
Mary Butts and Cecil Maitland Italy 1921
Mary Butts, Cecil Maitland and Douglas Goldring Paris 1922 |
