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

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

The wise Frenchwoman in the tale explains to Vincent that the women who link themselves to the group, who "pretend to understand and adore what they are about," are the kind of young woman "who likes to be hurt" (258), and this is how Cherry is involved. To her and her friends Vincent is an idiot, a joke, and when she lets Vincent see this side of her, he no longer sees her as Artemis the hunter; she now appears to have the look of the hunted.

The hunter in this tale is Blaise Boissevan, one of the worst of the young men and fairly reminiscent of Crowley, the Great Beast himself. Blaise and these evil young men make it their business to seduce young daughters of the bourgeoisie, get them pregnant, and then "there must be an abortion," leading the young women to suicide or death. The Frenchwoman tells Vincent that of the young women she knew, one was in a madhouse, one a cripple for life, and another "like one hypnotised" (259). Blaise had sent one of them out on to the streets to solicit for him, and she later killed herself, leaving a letter praising him and saying "they were all pioneers of a new civilisation" (259). We sense from this description of Blaise and his followers that Butts is penetrating the depths of this underworld and recreating some of the "profligacy and vice" she had encountered at Crowley's Abbey of Thelema where the doctrine "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law." (8)

Blaise, whose young women "usually die one way [or] another" (259), practices spells, and some of them are based on a desecration of the communion Host. Once we learn this, the title "From Altar to Chimney-piece" falls into place. On his final visit to the old sorceress, Miss Van Norden, Vincent notices on the cabinets a series of shining objects that he recognizes as "frames, supports, stands for the ciborium, the box--in this case a round of hollow glass, fixed on to the disk--to hold the wafers of the Host," now "made into delightful chimney-piece ornaments" (264). The old woman explains that they are from Spain and the only remnant of their sanctity is the Greek letter Chi painted in blue: "She picked up one and began to rub it on a filthy handkerchief of khaki cotton, on which she spat. The old paint was dry and cracked and the signature of Christ rubbed off at a touch" (264). Here Butts's concerns for spirituality and its deterioration into degradation and profanity reach their culmination. Ritual has been desecrated, desacralized by those who "play" at magic, black magic, but without a true understanding of spiritual connections. Butts's goddess, who in this tale wanted a master, is led astray by such magic, and the story ends with Cherry "gone off somewhere" with Blaise, and Vincent finally understanding. However, as with most of Butts's stories, we are not entirely clear what Vincent has come to understand. We only know we have been offered a glimpse into the darker side of the moon where the sickness of the brilliant children is "part of the world's sickness" (262), or as Butts explains in Traps for Unbelievers, "man is not God, and it is no use pretending that he is" (Traps 50). Vincent sees in them the curse of their civilization and wishes "his own wounds had won a better world for them, a world wherein they would not have found it possible to invent the form of life they had" (262), the Christ image so typical of war literature. As in her novel Armed with Madness, we see children playing at reality, re-creating values and re-inventing meaning. In this tale, it has turned as dark as one could expect of a world controlled by lost children. (9)