Introducing Mary Butts: Storm Goddess
“I have a weakness for Queer Street, and people who have that are soon past being astonished at anything.”
“Imaginary Letters”, Ashe of Rings and Other Writings
“These weeks I have been hindered wanting a formula. These books an occultism with their bastard words, credulities, falsities on facts, emotion & aesthetic falsities, inwardly revolt me. The symbols save when they were purely numeral & abstract, seemed but poor correspondences. Then I came back on a sudden turn. I remembered Prolegomena & the others, the profoundest study of my adolescence – mystery cults from Thrace to Eleusis. I remembered the Bacchae. There are my formulae, there my words of power. I am rereading the Prolegomena – it reels off before me in plain script (all the more because it was written by a woman, with no magical thesis to prove). There I shall find the way.”
Journal entry, 21 April, 1920
Sometimes the pieces I’ve scheduled to write for this blog just don’t seem to come together. What seemed like a good idea two months ago now seems flat and lifeless. My enthusiasm for ‘x’ essay has flown the coop – and anyone who’s been reading enfolding regularly will know that I have several not-quite-finished series of posts left hanging around. I’ll come back to them one day, or so I keep telling myself.
The fallback plan is to go through my numerous ‘writing’ folders and see what pops up. The other day I found a collection of jottings and related files in a folder labeled “Mary Butts 2013”. Looks as though a mere eight years ago I’d planned on writing something about Mary Butts, a novelist and magician whose life and work has been a long-time interest of mine, and whom I feel could do with more recognition and attention by contemporary occultists. Hence this post, a short introduction to the life and literary career of one of the twentieth-centuries most flamboyant occult practitioners, of whom composer Virgil Thomas said she was able to “stir up others with drink and drugs and magic incantations” calling her, “the storm goddess.”
Who, then, was Mary Butts? Modernist novelist, poet, essayist, magician, bohemian, bisexual – she married twice but had several passionate affairs with both women and men. An avid and diligent diarist, her journals began in 1916 and continued almost to her death. She was born in Dorset in 1890 and died in Cornwall in 1937. Over the course of her career, she published 3 novels, 3 collections of short stories, a novella, poetry, 2 historical narratives, two pamphlets, several essays, a partial autobiography, and a large number of reviews. Her work was praised and admired by contemporaries such as EM Forster, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marianne Moore, Charles Williams, and Virginia Woolf.
Her early life was spent at Salterns, a large house near Parkstone, in Dorset. Her great-grandfather, Thomas Butts, had been the patron of William Blake, and Saltern contained 34 works by Blake. These were sold by her mother in 1906 to cover death duties – which Mary bitterly resented. From her father, she gained a lifelong love of Greek myths and an intense love for the English Countryside. Her early life was, as she wrote in her posthumously-published autobiography The Crystal Cabinet, “saturated with the arts”.
It was in 1906 that her first poem (The Heavenward Side) and an essay were published by a periodical called “The Outlook”. Of Salterns, Mary later wrote:
“…at Salterns, at the dawn of my life, Power and Loveliness walked naked over East Dorset, side by side. Lay down to sleep together like gods on Purbeck, rose out of the dawn-washed sea.” 1
In 1909 Mary enrolled at Westfield College, London University. In 1912 she was expelled after she had gone to Epsom Races in the company of a teacher, Gwen Ingrams, with whom she had stayed overnight the previous day. It’s possible that Mary had an affair with Ingrams, or that her feelings towards her teacher were not reciprocated, as suggested by a 1912 poem:
"You're poor, she's poorer, and you're both alone. She's the utmost pain and glory of your life, You'd give her bread and all she asks a stone, And tries to cut your love out with a knife." During the 1910s Mary wrote a number of Sapphically-themed poems, some under the pseudonym Mark Bacon Drury (as yet unpublished) and by 1916 she had also written a novel, titled Unborn Gods - a love triangle between a man and two women, which candidly dealt with homosexuality, incest, abortions and and extra-marital affairs. Unsuprisingly, she was unable to find a publisher willing to take the novel on during her lifetime, and it remains unpublished to this day.
In 1913 she wrote a love poem dedicated “to Hal” (her first male lover) entitled Dionysiac. Here are the last 2 stanzas:
"Child of the mysteries am I my Lord, The cup wherein a strange God's wine is poured, A winnowing-fan, a thyrsos, and a sword. I am your Wife, who once initiate, To Dionysos priestess consecrate May know not fear or scorn or pride or hate."
In 1914 she graduated from the London School of Economics with a Social Science Certificate, and began working in London’s East End on the Children’s Care Committee (where she met the painter Stella Bowen) and later for the National Council for Civil Liberties, which supported “Conscientious Objectors” who resisted conscription into the military. It was also in 1914 that she met her lover, Eleanor Rogers. They had, from reading Mary’s Journals, a tempestuous and difficult relationship. Mary was a pacifist and supported the “conchies” as they were derisively known; whilst Eleanor (according to Mary) believed that anyone who did not support the war should be disenfranchised.
In 1916, when Mary begins her journals at the age of twenty-five, she is living in Hampstead with Eleanor, but corresponding daily (and falling in love with) John Rodker, a writer who was, at the time hiding out from the authorities as a conscientious objector. Mary’s journal entries eloquently describe her attempts to balance her two relationships:
“I try & persuade myself that John’s love will endure. It won’t, it shouldn’t, but I want it to so much. Sometimes Eleanor is less important than a needle’s point, sometimes she overshadows me like the sky itself.”
Mary married John Rodker in 1918. In 1920, she gave birth to a daughter, Camilla, at which point the marriage was already foundering. She separated from Rodker shortly afterward, and they were formally divorced in 1927. Rodker is best-known for his small press, The Ovid Press, publishing T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and drawings by Wyndham Lewis. After the demise of Ovid Press, Rodker published occult texts such as the Malleus Maleficarum and The Discoverie of Witchcraft.
Mary’s interest in the occult seems to have spiked in 1919. A diary entry for June records her thoughts on Waite’s translation of Levi’s The History of Magic. She was by this time friends with composer and magician Philip Heseltine – also known as Peter Warlock (1894-1930), who she credits with encouraging her into the study of magic. Throughout her journal entries for 1920 there are many references to her occult interests – such as practicing automatic writing and reading The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin. It was also in 1920 that she commenced an affair with Cecil Maitland, and an entry for 29 March 1920 recounts a kind “magical marriage” ritual between the pair:
“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.
Now with that—no more ritual than I have said, laughter masking eagerness—something clicked—something that was not arbitary, ‘not of the will of flesh.’ I felt certain of the reality of our association.”
On 7th March 1921, whilst in Paris Maitland, Mary met Aleister Crowley and appears to have received initiation from him into the O.T.O a few days later. Her journal entry for 15 March says:
“No success with Crowley’s receipt for going onto the astral plane. But when I write, or am moved in certain oblique ways, I do it inevitably.”
In her entry of the 19 April, she lists what she would like to accomplish from her magical practice, including:
“I. I want to study & enjoy & to enter if I can the fairy world, the mythological world & the world of the good ghost story. I seem them like three triangles moving into a circle.
II. I want by various mystical practices & studies to produce my true nature & enlarge my perceptions.
III. I don’t only want to find my true will, I want to do it. So I want to learn how to form a magical link between myself and the phenomena I am interested in.
V. I want to make this world into the material for the art of writing.
VII. I want to write a book not only about early theocracy & fall of man (the most respectable occultists fail here Stanislaus de Guaita), but a book written about this subject, historically under terms of human fallibility without deification of Pythagoras or the writers of the Kabala. A book with no balls about secrets, or sneers at the uninitiated. Above all with no worship of the past. A book to shew the relation of art to magic, & shew the artist as the true, because the oblique, adept.”
In June, Mary and Maitland joined Aleister Crowley in Cefalu for what would turn out to be a ten-week stay. During her time at Cefalu, she edited her novel, Ashe of Rings, experimented with a variety of drugs, and undertook to follow Crowley’s regime of magical exercises. Her diary records some of her astral journies whilst at Cefalu, and in August, that she was reading Crowley’s manuscript of Magick in Theory and Practice. Crowley, in his Confessions, commented that “I showed the manuscripts [of Magick] to Soror Rhodon [Mary Butts] and asked her to criticize it thoroughly. I am extremely grateful to her for her help, especially in indicating a large number of subjects which I had not discussed. At her suggestion, I wrote essay upon essay to cover every phase of the subject. The result has been the expansion of the manuscript into a vast volume, a complete treatise upon the theory and practice of Magic, without any omissions.” 2
According to Nathalie Blondel, Mary became less and less enchanted with Crowley during her stay at Cefalu. Whatever knowledge she felt he may have possessed was not offset by the living conditions, which she saw as appalling. She made several suggestions, such as installing proper sanitation facilities, as the Abbey of Thelema lacked niceties such as toilets. By the time she and Maitland left Cefalu on 16 September, she had decided that it was a “sham” and that she “would rather be the writer I am capable of becoming than an illuminated adept, magician, magus, master of this temple or another.”
Her journal entry for 11 January 1922 – by which time she was back in London, says:
“But I saw at Cefalu the familiar features of religion come again. And obscenity. And something exceedingly bad (not obscene), & something powerful.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. That is alright. But people are to be made aware of this by fear, bribery coercion etc, a religious movement re-enacted. The founder is to be Crowley & his gulled, doped women. I don’t doubt most new religions had some such start, but I feel that even Mahomet was better.”
Some years later, in 1925, Mary tried to sum up her years of occult study and practice:
“Five years ago I first became anxious to make a study of phenomena I felt were not explicable by understood physical laws— I date this conscious wish from my first acquaintance with Cecil Maitland, though previously I had studied ‘occultism’ & found it stirring, but unsatisfactory, a maze of blind alleys. I made various attempts, scrying, automatic writing, read up spiritualism, mystery cults, some neoplatonism & to no conclusion. Crowley, if anything, would have convinced me there was nothing in it. After five years, & lately I have not interested myself so much, realise that I have observed, all my life, a series of phenomena, not all subjective not technically related to the problems but which I now believe to be part of a series though the connection between them is not clear. They are inconclusive as yet, only observations & the observations may be incorrectly given, but it its impossible to realise them without emotion for I know now that they are the cardinal events of my life.
The stage I have arrived at is to connect these events with each other & to arrive at a theory for them. I have no doubt of them (as I might have doubted if I had seen an ‘angel’ in the blue glass ball) & my realisation has come slowly like a growth in nature, not an attempt to pry.”
Mary Butts seems, by this point, to have abandoned the project of magical practice, and instead settled for infusing her magical ideas and experiences into her writing.
And that’s where I’m going to leave this (for now at least). Anyone who wants to read more of Mary Butts’ flamboyant literary and magical career should consult the source texts below.
Sources
Nathalie Blondel, Mary Butts: Scenes from the Life (McPherson & Company, New York, 1998)
Nathalie Blondel (ed), The Journals of Mary Butts (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2002)
Mary Butts, The Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood at Salterns (Beacon Press, Boston, 1988)
Laura Doan and Jane Garrity (eds) Sapphic Modernism: Sexuality, Women and National Culture (Palgrave MacMillan, New York and Basingstoke, 2006)
Christopher Wagstaff (ed), A Sacred Quest: The Life and Writings of Mary Butts (McPherson & Company, New York, 1995)
NB: Scenes from the Life, The Crystal Cabinet, and A Sacred Quest are all available through the “books to borrow” option of archive.org. Editions of some of Mary Butt’s novels, short stories and essays are published by McPherson & Company
Notes:
