“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.”
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