Asceticism

Asceticism, in Marsh's model, is a person draining their own life energy by their own will. The distinction she draws immediately is about who is doing the draining: when it is your own will depleting your own animus, that is asceticism. When an external will controls the depletion, the same act is torture. The line between discipline and abuse, on this account, is the location of the will. She names three forms. Debt asceticism drains energy against something owed, Tantalus asceticism is depletion in the presence of an unreachable satisfaction, and punitive asceticism drains energy as self-punishment. Marsh is pointedly unimpressed by ascetic feats where the person has no appetite for life to begin with, noting that going without primary anima is no great accomplishment for someone who experiences it with revulsion.

Asceticism ordinarily names religious or philosophical self-denial, the disciplined renunciation of comfort and pleasure for spiritual or moral ends, and it is often held up as admirable. Marsh reframes it in energy terms as self-depletion of anima, separates it sharply from externally controlled depletion, which she calls torture, and questions its prestige when the practitioner has no capacity for primary anima to renounce.