"Brightness falls": magic in the short stories of Mary Butts

Studies in Short Fiction, Fall, 1999 by Roslyn Reso Foy

The suggestion of the occult and secret rites is the focus of another enigmatic story "From Altar to Chimney-piece" (Last Stories [1938]), one Jascha Kessler calls her "Jamesian story about evil" (Kessler 13). This frightening tale carefully blends biographical events with occult secrets, the sacred and the profane, to filter a darker view of Butts's contemporaries and their activities. In the story set in Paris, Cherry, Butts's young, female character ripe for any encounter, takes on the role of witch, similar to that of Judy in Butts's novel Ashe of Rings. She is no longer the mysterious but beneficial daimon with connections to that other world; instead, like Judy, she calls up the dark powers of her race as she captures and attempts to destroy Vincent, the story's narrator. After a long, slow introduction, uncharacteristic of Butts, we learn that Vincent is near 40, a Cornish gentlemen, and "a piece of middle-aged war breakage" (244),

   lacking at any time the power to seize life by the throat and strangle it
   into submission, he was one of those who work joyfully for whatever in
   their age is best. The stuff out of which the "perfect, gentle knight" was
   made; and at the time, in war or medicine, in government or agriculture, in
   works of organisation or mercy--a man who needed, for his full development,
   a law, a worship, if possible a congregation and a church. At best, a hero.
   (239)

In this passage Butts reveals some of her major concerns for what is missing in civilization just as in Traps for Unbelievers she expresses her concern for the loss of any central "belief or practice of religion, organised or private" (Traps 5). Religion, "what has up to now been considered as necessary as air" (Traps 31), has gone out of fashion as have the values of this "gentle knight," and for Butts it is essential to reconnect with ancient deities, Christian or pagan or both.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, Darwinism had caused a serious spiritual crisis and from that crisis an interest arose in replacing what was lost. Madame Blavatsky, the Theosophical Society, Rosicrucianism, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, for example, provided for some a satisfaction for the spiritual cravings that had developed. By the early twentieth century, the renewed interest in spirituality was a vital element of modernist thought, and investigation into the occult with its secret wisdom became part of the world of artists and poets. Butts, in "From Altar to Chimney-piece," offers a glimpse into a society trying to understand the loss of spiritual values and moving in directions contrary to what she feels the practice of occultism and spiritualism should be.

Mircea Eliade's word for such loss is "desacralization." In his discussion of the sacred and the profane, Eliade claims that "desacralization pervades the entire experience of the nonreligious man of modern societies and that, in consequence, he finds it increasingly difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man in the archaic societies." These archaic men, tended to live "as much as possible in the sacred or in close proximity to consecrated objects" (Eliade 12, 13). Eliade claims that for "primitives as for the man of all pre-modern societies, the sacred is equivalent to a power, and, in the last analysis, to reality" (Eliade 12). Interestingly, Butts, in delineating her concerns for modern man, examines what occurs when man is not imaginative enough to understand the role of the sacred and profane in his existence. What happens, Butts suggests, is that he could become a "crank" merely playing at the specifics of the ritual game. He has lost his connection to the past and interprets the valid aspects of magic and ritual in terms of some "pseudo-science" for which meaning has been lost and distorted.