The Myth of Family: Friendship and Sexual Impropriety in the Feminist Occult Grail Narratives of Mary Butts’s Armed with Madness (1928)

ABSTRACT This article argues that in Armed with Madness Mary Butts proposes new options for successful living in the disaffected interwar years of the twentieth century, by adopting a counterintuitive modernist position of looking back to ancient myth and spiritual magic practice in order to look forward. In doing so, she questions establishment notions of female agency, personal relationships, and the role and constitution of families through the lens of feminist occult modernism; each of these themes is underpinned by magic and the supernatural as an elemental power within women and the landscape. At the centre of the narrative is a rediscovered jade cup, a purported Holy Grail; in her use of a traditional Matter of Britain theme and an ancient object freighted with magical and mystical power, Butts’s occult modernist vision is characterised by a gesture towards transformation, resolution and acceptance of difference, through the influence of the Grail.


Introduction
In 1906 a curious event in a quiet rural West Country market town evoked a mystic current underlying Britain, as the Somerset town of Glastonbury and the Holy Grail irrupted into public consciousness through the intervention of the mass media, claiming physical evidence of a Christian mystery in an invasion of twentieth-century materialism.Glastonbury resident Wellesley Tudor Pole had a mystic vision in 1906 which led to the discovery of a glass cup in a well by his daughter and her friend: this artefact was taken to be the Grail.The following year it became a cause célèbre, covered by the national press, and several leading figures were asked to inspect the cup.The incident was covered by The Daily Express (26 July 1907) and extensively reported in provincial newspapers in Somerset, the West of England and Bristol, and others as far afield as Derbyshire, the City of London and the East End.The newspapers reported that Wellesley Tudor Pole, "a well-known Bristol merchant", had "received an impression" in 1902 that a mystically significant object was concealed somewhere around Glastonbury Abbey, an [yet] must have grounded me well". 6Later, Butts recorded her reading on the Grail legends, including A.E. Waite's The Holy Grail (1909), and Jessie Weston's anthropological study From Ritual to Romance (1920). 7Butts also read Arthur Machen, who wrote "The Secret of the Sangraal" in 1907 in response to the Glastonbury story, which influenced his later Grail novel The Secret Glory (1922). 8Butts's understanding of the Grail legend was not only derived from literary sources, but also from visiting Somerset in July 1918 with her then-husband John Rodker.She was inspired by the ancient mythical history of "Avalon, and the Sanc Graal" that lay under a powerful elemental landscape of "large wind, the full green hills […] this roaring sea of glass". 9Butts felt that Glastonbury itself was "nothing but the source of 'mana', crystallised.Joseph of Arimathea, the Larks of Wonder, Anthem, Sanc Graal, Holy Thorn", the sacred place of origin of a cyclical mystery that played out over time, which Butts proposed "may be approaching its completion". 10utts discusses her interpretation of "mana", a concept she adopted from Jane Ellen Harrison, in her essay "Traps for Unbelievers". 11Harrison's description of mana as "a world of unseen power lying behind the visible universe", became for Butts a "nonmoral, beautiful, subtle energy in man and everything else". 12Mana in a "crystallised" form, Butts suggests, may be discerned in objects like the Grail cup that appear to transmit transformative "power" across time and space, the central notion of Armed with Madness.Butts's intention in her literary work is to excavate the "layer after layer" of complex, hidden human psychological drives and desires, which reveal her characters' true motivations under the influence of the Grail.The primary Grail scholar and contemporary of Butts, Roger Sherman Loomis, summarised the Grail legend in a way that seems to be most in tune with Butts's literary vision as " [t]o study the Grail Legend is to dig down through the ruins of buried cities, to uncover layer after layer of extinct civilisations and forgotten religions.The problem is not simple, nor is the answer". 13n Armed with Madness, Butts presents a radical reinterpretation of the Grail mythos for the interwar years, counterintuitively drawing from mediaeval chivalric romances and ancient Celtic myths in order to describe her modernist vision of Britain for the new age of the twentieth century.This vision engages with relationships and sexuality, the roles of women in the formation of households and their responsibility for uniting a family without solely relying on marriage and children to cement the unit.Butts also explores questions about spiritual values in Victorian/Edwardian capitalist society which are implied in the 1907 newspaper articles: how to balance pecuniary and proprietorial interests in ancient artefacts with their value as spiritual objects.This article argues that Armed with Madness proposes new options for successful living in the twentieth century by adopting the counterintuitive modernist position of looking back to the ancient past of myth and spiritual magic practice (including ancient forms of Christianity) in order to look forward, and, in doing so, questions establishment notions of female agency, personal relationships, and the role and constitution of families through the lens of occult modernism.At the centre of the narrative is a rediscovered jade cup, which is treated as a purported Holy Grail by the household of young people at Gault House.
In her use of a traditional Matter of Britain theme and an ancient object freighted with magical and mystical power, Butts presents her form of modernism through the aid of disruptors, including the mysterious cup itself, sexualities that present a challenge to heteronormative society, the concept of inheritance of land and property, and outsiders who challenge group norms; each of these themes are underpinned by magic and the supernatural as an elemental power within women and the landscape.
Throughout the novel there are hints that the Gault House household is caught between worlds, in a pattern of actions that must, like myths themselves, continue to play out, as Scylla indicates to Carston: "S]he said that odd things were always happening, and old patterns repeated themselves […] Always look for the supressed wish that's taken a wrong turning."14At the close of the novel there is the suggestion that the group will continue to replay its actions under the influence of the cup, as Felix arrives from Paris with another outsider (Boris the Russian émigré) to replace Dudley Carston the American.

Mythic Glimmerings at Gault House: The Modernist Familia
At the heart of Armed with Madness is Scylla Taverner's household at Gault House, a country house set on land between deep woods and the sea in the rural coastal village of Gault, Dorset.This domestic arrangement mirrors the mediaeval gentry "familia" described by mediaeval historians Christine Carpenter and Malcolm Mercer, but here the Taverner household includes a group of diverse relationships, characterised by Butts's easy acceptance of sexuality in all its forms. 15The mediaeval familia was a household that consisted of a core family of husband, wife and children who were surrounded by young knights, retainers, advisers, servants and "paying guests": its social setting was within a newly expanding "gentry" class of rural and urban elites based on kinship connections, concepts of mutual service and shared cultural pursuits, which included the enjoyment of the Grail legends of courtly romance. 16The Taverner household of the 1920s, headed by Scylla, is a mixture of relatives, servants and friends, young war veterans and visitors, creating a modernist familia whose boundaries are constantly renegotiated, but whose social class is essentially that of the country gentry, Butts's own.These household boundary violations occur through the movement of household members around the core family relationship of Scylla, her brother Felix and her cousin Picus Tracy, a young man who seems to be unwilling to accept adult responsibilities.Picus plays a trickster role, confusing and teasing his friends and lovers alike over the provenance of the alleged Grail cup he discovers in a well and hooks out with a spear; he also revels in his romantic inconstancy.Through the occult modernist Grail quest, Butts strives to reconcile this group of young people, who are each endeavouring to come to terms with the disruptive impact of the First World War, in a radically reformed modern family whose nature is expressed through the disruptive nature of the characters and their romantic exploits at Gault House.Picus moves between Scylla and Clarence; Scylla takes Picus and Ross as lovers, while remembering a list of other men with whom she has had relationships, or had designs on; Scylla's brother Felix has affairs with men in Paris and returns with Russian émigré Boris; and Clarence has nearly married Lydia.It is a picture of a merry-go-round of sexual intrigue in a quest for love and truth.Individuals come and go throughout the novel, some making a bid for a place within the familia, like the visiting American, Dudley Carston (through a hoped-for relationship with Scylla); some are hangers-on, including the young veterans from the Great War, whom Carston describes as the "unemployed condottieri" ("knights"), like the artist Clarence, Picus's wartime lover, who is seeking a purpose and means of reconciliation of his wartime experiences with the unclear demands of peacetime. 17In Armed with Madness Butts shows her characters at ease with fluid sexuality which, as Elizabeth Anderson argues, "privileges a multiplicity of identity and desire", in a liberated rejection of establishment mores.18Robin Blaser, in an early essay on Butts, notes, "In Mary Butts's world, for whatever reason, male homosexuality is not a matter of decadence, but, rather, of the way lives turn," and this matter-of-fact acceptance is evident in her treatment of the characters' relationships. 19Butts is demonstrating her approach to sexuality which was radical in its acceptance of non-heteronormative relationships.Butts writes candidly about homosexuality in particular, displaying familiarity with subcultural norms within an artistic, privileged group such as the Taverner familia.Finally, other individuals renounce the chance to be part of the household, as Lydia has done by walking away from a relationship with Clarence and, ultimately, repudiating her relationship with art, spiritual magic and the intellectual life which are central concerns of the Taverner milieu.Picus's father, the irascible and "unpleasant […] bad old man" Mr Tracy, an antiques collector, is a near neighbour who observes with disgust the sexual intrigues in Gault House; he eschews the notion of the vessel as Grail in favour of materialistic property, an object that his son Picus purloined from his collection as a joke. 20he Gault familia is a leisured, aesthetic "community of like minds", a group of artists, sculptors and literary scholars whose adopted mission leads them to "actively seek […]  [and] create quests" in their artistic engagement with "making pretty things". 21Ross the experimental landscape artist and Clarence the sculptor create "serious and accomplished" art, while the dilettante Picus "play[s] about with wax". 22The familia is later united by assuming the roles of questing "grail knights" with the scholar of myth Scylla as their "damsel of the Sanc-Grail" in search of the meaning of the jade cup. 23utts's portrayal of this Dorset familia of high modernism echoes literary and cultural traditions of the "eccentric" middle-class family, which comprise self-contained, selfconscious units whose identities are forged through invented languages and private games; the focus here has shifted to the younger members, a generational caesura from what Nicola Humble describes as "the ostensibly powerful adults". 24The Taverners's daily round is concerned with private games or "diversions" like "the Freud game" that create a group identity by confusing outsiders like Carston; their private language includes naming each other as characters from Greek myth or nature, for example, "Picus the Woodpecker who was Zeus", Nanna the housekeeper becomes "Hestia", Scylla is "birdalone", Picus, "cat-by-himself" and Ross, "bird-catcher".25This affectation of eccentricity operates to bind the young household together in an unconscious reaching for an unexpressed yearning for healing of the generational war-wound.The youth put up a façade of intellectual and societal superiority, but they are lost, and confused, attempting to find answers as to how the "ostensibly powerful adults" have let them down.
At the start of the novel the household's grip on their home is suggestively impermanent: the family "could not afford to live" in Gault House, which indicates that resourcegeneration is an ever-present necessity for the Taverners. 26This points to socio-economic questions that Butts raises in the novel, firstly about women's relationship to finance, or its lack, in the gentry class that relied for its stability on inheritance and financial transference through marriage; secondly, Butts considers the opportunities available after the war for women to make choices and reconstruct their own future, including in sexual relationships; thirdly, Butts questions how old families can be reconstituted and in what ways the nature of property and ownership might alter as part of the post-war reconstruction.Finally, Butts seeks to reveal the hypocrisy and dishonesty that underlie not only the older generation who set the scene for the horrors of modern warfare that led to the lost generation of young war veterans, but also the fatality of compromise for women in settling for a hypocritical, establishment marriage that stifles their creative and spiritual aspirations.
Butts treats each of these questions through her engagement with the Grail myth, in which the modern Grail object becomes the symbol and instigator of transformative power and change.

The Restless and Rootless Weird Momento
The true nature of the cup resists the modern rationalist analysis deployed by members of the familia: as Andrew Radford argues, they attempt to "classify, contain" the object as a mundane historical artefact, while simultaneously seeking to "close down or divert", interpretations that point to notions of the object's inherent sanctity. 27Radford's analysis reveals the slippery nature of the vessel as "a 'queer' stone curio", a "'holy' trinket" that remains a "weird momento" that defies containment, compelling the continued engagement of the group on the quest for the meaning and purpose of the object. 28cylla comments that the cup's "mystery" as a sacred relic is something that the men do not "quite disbelieve", an object shrouded in ambiguity and implicitly a vector of mana. 29Butts's Grail responds to a feminine magical current, resonating with both Goodchild's feminine divinity in Celtic Christianity and with the form of female assertive magic that Butts encountered in her work with the magician Aleister Crowley; the unfixed nature of the cup, as Jennifer Kroll argues, can represent both Christian and pagan spirituality, "the passion of the Christian dying god and the fertile womb of an earlier pagan earth goddess", an artefact that retains "magical healing powers". 30These various magical influences create the Grail that operates on individuals with either positive or negative results, depending upon the level of the recipient's preparedness to accept responsibility for their actions and realise their spiritual potential.In its positive effects the revelation of the Grail enables individuals to achieve self-knowledge and abjure hypocrisy, as in the cases of Carston and Picus, while in its negative effects the Grail is destructive through the unwillingness of individuals to acknowledge their errors and achieve self-realisation and transformation, the fate of Scylla's friend Lydia, which I explore below.
"Big Magic" at Gault House: English Temenos and the Vessel of "Blood and Intoxication" Butts engages in exploration of animistic spiritual forces around Gault, to create a vision of England replete with "big magic", reflecting on her deep personal experiences of magical practice that emerge from her engagement with the temenos aspects of English terroir, in her project to bring a spiritual/magical awareness to twentiethcentury literary culture, using the Grail object as the artistic vector for disseminating this literary current. 31The concept of temenos, or sacred enclosure, was described by Harrison as a place "cut off" from common land and "dedicated to a god"; for Butts it is the notion of sacred land as the abiding place of ancient animistic natural forces, a spiritual complexity that, like the Grail cup, resists easy categorisation. 32Butts's personal and artistic relationship with her concept of temenos has attracted recent scholarly interest, including David Matless on the "spectral landscape", of Butts's occult geography, a terrain vibrantly alive with unseen forces and ghosts; Sam Wiseman positions Butts alongside D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and John Cowper Powys in an exploration of landscape, boundaries and "liminality" in interwar fiction; Angie Blumberg's discussion of Butt's' "stratified landscape" is as a place in which women engage in "ritualistic encounters" for "transmuting the traumas of modernity", while Andrew Radford argues that Butts creates a "spiritualised stratified temenos" replete with "ancestral energies" which neatly encapsulate the mysterious ancient terrain around Gault House. 33In her essay "Warning to Hikers" (1932) Butts notes that "nature is a divinity usually seen as a goddess", which allies her vision of an animistic sacred landscape with the female current I am exploring here. 34Her essay is a diatribe concerning the preservation of 29 Butts, Armed, 81. 30 Kroll, "Mary Butts's 'Unrest Cure' for the Waste Land," 168. 31 Butts, Armed, 26. 32Butts, "Ghosties and Ghoulies," 349; Butts, "Warning to Hikers," 290; 293-5; Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual, 10. 33 Matless "A Geography of Ghosts," 337; Wiseman, The Reimagining of Place in English Modernism; Blumberg, "Mary Butts and the 'War-fairy-tale': Femininity, Archaeology, and Great War," 36; Radford, Mary Butts and British Neo-Romanticism, 40, 45. 34 Butts, "Warning," 289.
the sacred enclosure against the kind of urban tourist, like the American Carston in Armed with Madness, whom Butts considered a disrespectful risk to the silent sanctity of the mana-filled landscape.Andrew Radford argues that "commination […] is key" to Butts's spiritual protectionism; a threat of punishment by nameless vengeful supernatural forces for the "unbelievers" who would despoil the temenos by their intrusion. 35owever, for Scylla and those who understand and revere nature as "holy and delectable ground" this "spectral landscape" unlocks mystery and wonder; elements expressed in the sacred land around Gault. 36 In Armed with Madness, Butts's magical vision emerges as Gault House carries connotations of a different notion of impermanence than merely economic instability, through its setting in a liminal space on the border land between sea and woods, surrounded by the elements and the noises of the countryside, so that its solidity seems in some way fleeting.The house is "unpleasantly quiet", yet also "[m]arvellously noisy, but the noises let through silence", an "equivocal" acoustic confusion that has a destabilising effect on those who experience it, as "[n]ot many nerves could stand it". 37This signalling of an uncanny effect whereby sound is made but cannot be heard is redolent of deafness and ringing in the ear after a bomb blast, or the after-effects of a psychic disturbance in a haunted house or a spiritualist séance.Butts's vision encompasses both levels of un/reality and establishes her magical perception, which she sought to manifest artistically, at the very start of the novel.The elements and the land around Gault House are active participants in the action of the novel and the mood of the environment: they form Scylla's temenos and her "ritual landscape", but there is an active engagement with the land by the whole household "dwelling" in the area for generations. 38In Armed with Madness, natural phenomena are described as sentient, for example the stars "were watching", observing human activity dispassionately, but with a level of engagement that indicates the long-dwelling familia have themselves become a natural part of the environment.Butts is positing Gault as the setting for a kind of modernist animism in which the environment frames and responds to human interactions: the Taverner household is familiar with and accommodating of the "dis-ease" inherent in living close to nature, but for the urban outsider Carston, his encounter with active natural elements in the woods is a traumatic form of ordeal and initiation into the powers of the Grail. 39ault and the events which play out there challenge the observer's understanding of truth and belief.In her exploration of unbelief in the interwar years, Suzanne Hobson argues that Butts had a "strong sense of religiosity" that took her from occultism to High Anglicanism, yet throughout she adhered to "a muscular, tough-minded belief that makes things happen […] a form of magical thinking which 'works' […] conjuring things and situations into being out of nothing", including intervention in human 35 Radford, "Grail Quest," 304. 36Butts, "Ghosties," 350. 37Butts, Armed, 3. 38 Robb, "The 'Ritual Landscape' Concept in Archaeology".The term "Ritual landscape" describes groups of archaeological features and other significant forms in the landscape interpreted together, instead of as separate, unrelated monuments.The term was first used in the 1980s by countercultural groups of "earth mysteries" investigators documenting sacred sites and latterly adopted by academic archaeologists seeking to reinterpret cultural artefacts.McCarthy, Green Modernism, 156; 272.Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy has described the concept of "dwelling" as the "long-term imbrication of humans in a landscape of memory, ancestry and death, of ritual, life and work", which encapsulates the Taverner household's relationship to the land around Gault House. 39Butts, Armed, 9.
relationships. 40In Armed with Madness the power of belief to "realign[…] relations between people" is reified in the Grail cup, which appears to "make things happen" through its history and retains the potential for future interventions in human society. 41At Gault, there is a sense of the cyclical nature of time in the house: Scylla tells Carston, "We live fast and are always having adventures, adventures which are like patterns of another adventure going on somewhere else all the time." 42This suggests associations with other layers of time and reality, the perception of mythic dimensions of experience and the pervasiveness of magic, an image of the Buttsian multi-layered magical universe, in which all times and places exist at once, so that we can believe the movement of the Grail and its literary/artistic reverberations through time.These mythic dimensions relate to Butts's sense of her family's magical or supernatural inheritance, which she describes in her childhood memoir as a sense of "living in time and out of it.Even in another dimension of time", an inherited perception of other realities which remains central to her literary vision. 43Butts interpreted the Grail legend through an occultist's understanding of how the "Mysteries had an exoteric & [sic] esoteric side", writing in her Journal of the "final mystery" which touched on sexual magic and describing the "Grail Quest" in terms of traversing the mystical realms of the astral plane via mental processes of deep meditation, trance and clairvoyance.
In 1920 Butts spent two months at Aleister Crowley's magical commune in Sicily, the so-called Abbey of Thelema, using the time to develop her writing, in part in response to Crowley's instruction to her to produce what Amy Clukey has described as "magically revelatory literature". 44Her distaste for Crowley's practice and what she saw as his domineering attitude towards "his gulled, doped women" in the group led her to split with him, but she continued her own esoteric practice. 45During the 1920s Butts created fiction with strong female magic-working protagonists, privileged bohemians, like Butts herself, forming a "cultural aristocracy of chic young women", of which Scylla and Lydia are a part in Armed with Madness. 46I propose that Butts's novel includes other resonances of her spiritual work with Crowley, which included collaborating with him on his major magical treatise, Magick in Theory and Practice, which formed Part III of Crowley's book Magick Liber ABA: Book Four. 47Chapter VII of Book Four, "The Cup", concerns the magical use of an altar vessel. 48At one point this chalice is described as "full of bitterness, and of blood, and of intoxication", which can stand as a summary of the effects that the mysterious glass cup has on the group in Armed with Madness. 49Through the terrors of war and sacrifice, resolution may be found via the supernatural agency of the healing vessel, resulting in a sense of spiritual or psychic "intoxication" and relief.Kroll's description of the Grail object as bringing "confusion, violence, and anger, but also […] self-realization, healing and love", expresses the paradoxical yet redemptive nature of Butts's cup that I see paralleled in Crowley's altar vessel. 50The cup can possibly also stand for a Crowleyan acceptance that intoxication through worldly indulgence in pleasure is a worthy option for adults that may lead to spiritual insight, but equally, willed, socially transgressive behaviour that disrupts the bourgeoise may be an end in itself.
Marriage as Betrayal of/for the Uncompromising Woman: Lydia and the Negative Grail In On Living in an Old Country, Patrick Wright argued that the "reverence for family and deep ancestral continuities", found in Butts's writings, paradoxically "coexist with an equally profound suspicion of marriage and the generational conflicts to which it leads". 51In Armed with Madness the Taverner familia is dealing with precisely these "profound suspicion[s]", the consequences of the betrayal of the younger generation by the older, through the prosecution of the war and in their inability to create a stable home fit for the post-war world.It is an uncertain place for women and Butts shows that conventional marriage continues to betray women's best interests.Butts posits that creative engagement with new modes of life offers more risk, but potentially more individual fulfilment for women.Scylla adopts the de facto position of mother or responsible adult in the group, yet resenting the position she feels she occupies as the men's "sole stay […] separated and bound to them". 52She is free to pursue her own interests, but she has responsibilities towards the stability of the familia of young men around her.That this is an unusual and socially transgressive arrangement is evident from the comments of Lydia and her husband Philip, the London car dealer, who say it "does not do", to live as Scylla does, "alone with all those men", and "go against society". 53ritics have not focused much attention on the figure of Lydia, but I suggest that she presents a picture of the destructive forces Butts identifies as inherent in conventional marriage, which require a compromise that is fatal for women's independence.Lydia made a disastrous personal choice because of her relationships with two men, Clarence whom she misjudged, and Philip whom she married on the rebound.As a result, Lydia gave up her university career and the intellectual life, which for Butts is a kind of souldeath.In Mary Butts's world it is very difficult for women to attain both a creative life and personal stability within conventional marriage; the nature of the bargain women are forced to make is compromised aspirations and an abnegation of true independence.Butts deploys the magical power of the Grail to show the dangers inherent for women in this marriagebargain.The effects of what Butts describes as the "negative side" of the Grail destroy potential and enable a sterile marriage between Lydia and Philip that is a kind of spiritual waste land, denuded of artistic purity and creativity. 54ydia is a Gault familia member in exile in her London flat, mourning her exclusion from Dorset, as she asks Scylla, "What happened down South?London makes me ache for it"; her association with the grail quest through Scylla's visit only serves to accentuate Lydia's outsider position. 55The magic of the Grail led Lydia to transform her life and achieve her wishmarriagebut only through the "negative side" of the Grail. 56In her London flat, Lydia owns a "bowl of flint glass", suggestively a dark mirror-image or photographic negative of the Gault cup or bowl of green glass.57I suggest that the association between the two vessels is strengthened by Clarence's dream of Picus carrying "a glass dish that was the cup of the Sanc-Grail", speaking of "the lapis exilii, the stone of exile", one of the epithets scholars have used in connection with the Grail.As a symbol of her expulsion from the familia, Lydia's flint bowl becomes suggestively an expression of the notion of the lapis exilii. 58Flint as the sub-stratum layer around Gault is established at the start of the novel, where the "green road" or grassed track to Gault House is "worn down to its flints", pebbles which underlie the connecting route back to Scylla's ritual landscape. 59In the form of the flint bowl part of the deep magic of Gault is transposed to the city, where its negative function operates on Lydia, the erstwhile scholar and exile from the aesthetic life, now defined as an embittered "jealous woman". 60ydia's association with the Grail romances is evident as Scylla discovers her at home, reading the mediaeval Romaunt de la Rose, possibly in the original French.Universityeducated, intellectual Lydia has become stuck in an unstimulating respectable marriage in which she is permitted by her husband only to participate in an ersatz modern art, interior decoration.This pastime results in "faked cabinets and painful majolicas", the description of which stand as exemplars of her work and the shallowness of her current life, "very pleasant in front, but round the back made of hollow boards", in contrast to the free-spirited artistic life in the Taverner familia. 61Lydia has proved herself to be concerned with appearances which includes upholding a conventional form of sexual propriety.I suggest that for Butts the crux of the issue is that Lydia recoiled from embracing the range of human sexuality in its fullest, which Butts, with her complicated personal life, associated with independence, freedom and artistic expression.Lydia had "wanted once to marry Clarence", rather than live with him in a fluid relationship that would have included Picus. 62Clarence accused her of using him to fulfil her desire for a husband and being prepared to trick him to achieve this.The stress of reconciling his own feelings for Picus and Lydia's desire for himself caused Clarence to break down, yet Lydia remained silent to Clarence's accusations and to his mental distress.By her silence, she effectively rejects the Grail, which mirrors the consequences for Percival, the knight who does not ask questions about the nature and purpose of the Grail resulting in the loss of his opportunity to attain the spiritual reward it offers.Lydia's passivity in not speaking up for herself also mirrors the fatal passivity of the Fisher King, which leads to the destruction of his kingdom through wasted potential.After Clarence's breakdown, Lydia "had never been the same since".Following the shock of rejection she married Phil, her social inferior, on the rebound. 63Through this action Lydia lost her opportunity to create a free, independent life of artistic/intellectual pursuits and also walked away from the chance to remain part of the Taverner familia of culture and magic.Implicitly, Lydia retains some magical insight as she experiences "soft, bitter, little laps of far-seeing" about the imminence of her final parting from Scylla and the trap of her marriage, but her "bitter" intuitive vision leads only to hatred, not redemption, through the Grail's "negative side". 64That this negativity is characteristic of her marriage is evident through the interaction between Lydia, Scylla and Philip when the reverse image of the powers of the Grail cup is revealed.Lydia is wounded (she has a nosebleed) and Philip attempts to staunch the blood using the water from the flint glass bowl, which falls from his hands and becomes splintered as Philip tries to help her, effectively removing itself from his control, mirroring how the Grail is withdrawn from those knights whose behaviour has deemed them not worthy to attain it.
Butts shows how far Lydia has fallen from the life she might have had, as Scylla finds she cannot tell Lydia the story of the Dorset cup and "draw on her learning", the main reason for her visit to her old friend. 65In the Gault milieu, modern materialistic society is regarded as anathema to aesthetic and intellectual temperaments; in Hugh Stevens' phrase, "[n]ormality destroys the creative soul", and here Butts foregrounds both the demands of conventional marriage and the insidious self-sabotage that can destroy women's potential.Lydia has effectively devalued her own intellect in Scylla's eyes by marrying beneath her to a glamourous but ignorant and unreliable "gigolo" husband, whom she permits access to mock her accomplishments and interests. 66Scylla's flash of insight or clairvoyance reveals to her "the woman Lydia would be, when she would punish her fancy-boy for being the slick little animal that he was". 67enceforth, Lydia will become locked in mutual jealousy and emotional manipulation with her husband, a sadomasochistic relationship in which neither of them will speak the truth about their feelings for fear of betraying the appearance of marital stability and social standing, in a continuation of the Grail's negative side.
Occult Modernist Women: Hecatean Witches and the Celtic Grail Whereas Butts's Grail is a modernist reinterpretation of a mediaeval legend, the mythic structure of the novel enables Butts to reach further back, to ancient Greece, in her mythic reconstruction of occult modernist women.This reconstruction allies the individuals with characters from Greek myth and magic: critics like Rosalyn Reso Foy and Jane Garrity have made a close connection between Butts's female characters and Greek goddesses, seeing them "as" goddesses, but I suggest that Butts's women are power-wielding human women caught in the "sacred game", replaying action through "another dimension of time" under the influence of the natural magic of the land, the daimones from antiquity and the time-travelling object the Grail. 68Elizabeth Anderson argues that 63 Ibid., 115. 64Ibid., 118. 65Ibid., 116-7. 66Stevens, Modernist Sexualities, 4-5; Butts, Armed, 116. 67Butts, Armed, 116. 68Foy, Ritual, Myth and Mysticism in the Work of Mary Butts; Garrity, Step-Daughters of England; Butts, Cabinet, 13.
Butt's women are "priestesses of a sacred order" who utilise their sexuality in ritual magic, an apt description of Scylla. 69Butts identifies Scylla with the Underworld Goddess Hecate's role as the "Kourotrophos", or nurse and nurturer of children and young men, as well as a devotee of Hecate as Goddess of witchcraft and magic, whose animal associations include dogs, or hounds.In 1903 Jane Ellen Harrison first argued that the figure of Kourotrophos, "Child-Rearer", was the most ancient form of The Great Mother Goddess, the "Lady of the Wild Things", whose true name is unknown, but whose epithet "Kourotrophos" became associated with various later Hellenic goddesses, including Artemis and Hecate. 70The symbolism of these powerful female mythic and magical figures runs through Butts's fiction and in Armed becomes associated with Scylla (whose name indicates her relationship with Hecate, who was the mother of Scylla). 71Butts's identification of Scylla Taverner with Hecate is an important characterisation of Butts's own occult interests and experiences, which weave in and out of the novel.Scylla claims the power of words against men who speak derogatorily against her: "I am going to let things go.A witch and a bitch they call me.They shall see." 72 Scylla creates her Hecatean magical credo here, spiking the men's reductive joke and turning the intent back on those who sent it to her.With a few words Butts outlines Scylla's role as an independent woman unafraid of adopting transgressive means of achieving her aims in a male-dominated society: she needs no man to name her.Scylla's self-identification as "sometimes a witch and sometimes a bitch" is a neat summary of both Scylla's, and Butts's own, Hecatean nature and power as a self-willed natural magician. 73n top of the finely drawn classical magical-mythic framework Butts lays the Grail mythos, which from its earliest mediaeval forms contained Christian symbolism that later became part of the myths and legends of King Arthur as the pre-eminent British national hero. 74As Frank Baker (who knew Butts in Cornwall in the 1930s) notes, Butts herself became an Anglo-Catholic Christian, but there is an important current of female spiritual magic within Butts's fiction, which emerged from Butt's own experiences with the supernatural since her childhood. 75This female magical current is identified through Butts's engagement with female symbolism inherent in the image of the cup, with the gnostic Christian feminine mysteries of the Grail and, importantly, Butts's personal understanding of ancient Greek spirituality as the interplay of matriarchal goddesses and daimones, ancient spirits of land and place, which she experienced in the Dorset countryside.The Gault House cup is jade green, a material and colour which typically signals magical activity around women in Butts's fiction. 76The cup has been regarded as having unusual powers in its recent history as a "poison cup", a vessel that 69 Anderson, "Knight's Move," 250. 70Harrison, Prolegomena, 266-71. 71Ibid., 267-71. 72Butts, Armed, 10. 73 Ibid., 9. 74 Barber, The Holy Grail, 9-86; Loomis, From Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol. 75Baker, I Follow But Myself, 130. 76  Butts, Complete Stories, 117-25; 146-57; 332-45.See, for example, Butts's short stories in the collection Complete Stories: Daphne clothed in green in "Widdershins," the instances of jade occurring in "Brightness Falls" and "With and Without Buttons"; Cabinet, 11.In her memoir The Crystal Cabinet, Butts's linking of the colour green with magic begins in her uncanny experiences during her early childhood wanderings in garden and countryside, including observing a "little man digging […] he was real […] about two feet high […] dressed in green with a rusty red cap".
could detect poison in liquid; it has also been debased as a "spitting cup" for Mr Tracy's tubercular lady-friend. 77These shifting identities carry a sense of the cup in its actual and "Grail" aspects as a shape-shifting object that travels through time, retaining its ability to enable transformation and transmutation of substance and spirit.That the transforming power responds to female agency is evident when Scylla, the "damsel of the Sanc-Grail", meditates and (perhaps like Doctor Goodchild and Wellesley Tudor Pole before her) she falls into a trance, a state of mental detachment, and imagines herself lying along the top of the wood, "translating the stick and leaf that upheld her into herself: into sea: into sky.Sky back again into wood, flesh and sea". 78In the end the purpose and form of the cup is no clearer; its function is to be a disrupter, in which mode it has the effect of making the group face themselves and the truth of their relationships.In this, it is analogous to the Arthurian Grail's function of responding to its possessor's spiritual purity and of acting as a focus for spiritual purification.
Butts's commitment to the form of nature magic she invokes in the novel involves the cultivation of a gnostic understanding of the relationships of juxtaposed, obliquely associated objects and elemental forces, like "the moon and a stone, the sea and a piece of wood, women and fish". 79This perennial female animism is entwined with Butts's approach to Christianity in Armed with Madness, which is an appeal to antiquity, the earliest Celtic form of Christianity, aligning her spiritual imagery with the earliest versions of the Grail story, which braid the supernatural with a form of Christian magic.Roger Sherman Loomis, the primary Grail scholar and contemporary with Butts, described the Christian association of the Grail as, "but one aspect, the least baffling, the least mysterious," of the object and its associated narratives, in which he discerns "glimmerings of seasonal myth, of phallic ritual, of Celtic vessels of plenty, of divine weapons". 80From a creative literary perspective, Loomis's "glimmerings" can be discerned in Butts's novel as part of her mythic literary structure, providing elements contemporary with her other sources, James Frazer, Jane Harrison and Jessie Weston and also pointing to these elements as a means to enable the unfolding of a real divine feminine spiritual current. 81The Christian aspects of Butts's Grail quest touch on the vessel as a potential Church chalice of great antiquity from this earlier Christian era.For Butts, the Christianity of the modern establishment is stale and repressive, and she gestures towards a fresh understanding of religion in the twentieth century by an engagement with its past and an acknowledgement of a living, animistic current that pre-dates formal Christian worship.Scylla speaks of the cup as "big magic", a sacramental cup of ancient ritual. 82There is an allusion to other, older forms of Christianity, in the description of the local vicar of Tambourne, of whom Clarence says, "His orders aren't even valid", implying that he belongs to a religious Order that is not formally 77 Butts, Armed, 84. 78Ibid., 68. 79Butts, "Traps", 297-332. 80Loomis, The Grail: From Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol, 273-4. 81Frazer, The Golden Bough, three editions and twelve volumes, 1890-1915; Harrison, Prolegomena, 1903, Themis, 1912,  Ancient Art and Ritual, 1913; Weston, From Ritual to Romance, 1920; Barber, The Holy Grail, 245-6.Butts Armed,86.recognised by the Church of England. 83In this there is a suggestive echo of the work of Doctor Goodchild and his mission to reinvigorate the spiritual current of the Divine Feminine through engagement with a "Celtic" Christianity, that underpinned the original Glastonbury Grail story.In the final discussion about the provenance of the cup between the vicar, Picus and Carston, there is an undertow of religious magic long practiced in the same location, as the vicar speaks of the atmosphere of his church which evokes similar elemental forces to those that surround Gault House.In the church, there is a "filtering" of "the splendour of midsummer […] through old glass on cold stone" and an invocation of an equivalence between Christianity and "ancient mysteries", both of which are vectors for "formulae […] that work and still live" in the scientific age of the twentieth century, a trumping of scientism by enchantment and magic, as the vicar comments, " [i]n what lies the scientific triumph but that its formulae work?" 84 "Formulae" for Butts refers both to what sheand Aleister Crowleycalls the "formula" of a magical incantation and the scientific formula of the rationalist.The twinmeaning of the word "formula" contains an image of the interweaving of the opposing states of spirituality and science, but for Butts, the magical/spiritual is the more enduring.Butts proposes an alternative understanding of the past, informed by the continued resonance in the present of special items and actions created or started in the past.This suggests that special objects have a metaphysical existence of their own, as objects of destiny travel through time influencing human action.Scientific triumph occurs in a specific moment in time, but the magical/spiritual memories retain their power and purpose through time: they still work and carry vitality, as does Butts's modernist Grail with its power to create transformational change in the people around it.

Modernist Grail and Multiple Values
Through her modernist account of the Grail quest, in the form of debate around the cup's ownership, Butts explores questions about spiritual values in Victorian/Edwardian capitalist society which are implied in the 1907 newspaper articles.These questions include how to balance pecuniary and proprietorial interests in ancient artefacts with their value as spiritual objects, questions of "worth" in the aftermath of world war.The popular, even sensationalist, media Grail story throws light on a cultural moment, of a society caught between the enchanted and rationalist worldview, an interstitial space in which Butts grounds her fiction.It is interesting that the original owner of the Glastonbury glass vessel, Dr Goodchild, claimed to experience a "trance state" and an encounter with a mystical figure from another dimension whilst in Paris, an incident and location that resonate with Butts's treatment of Paris in her oeuvre, particularly in "Mappa Mundi".In this short story, a mysterious ghostly figure emerges in a back alleyway and, following behind this visionary entity, a naïve American visitor becomes lost in interdimensional spaces. 85utts hints at the ludic elements of the vessel's origins through Picus's cunning behaviour to obscure the prosaic fact that he stole the cup from his father's collection, in part to 83 Ibid., 154. 84Ibid., 138. 85Butts, "Mappa Mundi." annoy and taunt his father.These elements are also in place in the newspaper reports, which quote expert opinion from Alfred Nutt, Victorian folklorist and Arthurian Grail expert, to the effect that the claim of the sanctity of the cup is "absurd" and other reports hint at a hoax. 86Even the Occult Review, which featured extensively Arthur Waite's work on the esoteric interpretations of the Grail, repudiated Tudor Pole's claims for the glass dish, evidence that the somewhat sensational accounts in the mainstream press were not uncritically accepted within occult circles at the time of its first revelation. 87The inconstant and slippery nature of the Grail artefact throughout its literary history permits these opposing views and multiple interpretations in fiction to hold equal value; the Grail object, then, operates as an ideal metaphor for modernist prose like Butts's allusive and elusive style.Richard Barber outlines the creation of a "modern myth" of the Grail within Butts's own life time, including the British "Western Mysteries" spiritual current developed during the 1920s by occultist Dion Fortune, who gave special prominence to Glastonbury and the Arthurian Grail mythos, and who argued in favour of the Glastonbury glass vessel's sanctity. 88The story of the Grail as Butts uses it interweaves myth and modern life, acknowledging the continuing potency of the story. 89choing Sherman Loomis's summary of the Grail Legend's uncovering of "layer[s] of extinct civilisations and forgotten religions", Butts explores layers of time and space within her fiction, informed by her experience of astral journeys through spiritual planes, but also by her understanding of the reverberation of historical actions throughout subsequent generations.Importantly, Butts's literary exploration of the "layer after layer" of the human psyche reveal repressed and hidden unconscious and sexual imperatives that drive personal action and shape behaviour. 90As a modernist with roots in myth, Butts uses the potential of the protean nature of the Grail, an object which sits between several states of being and unifies apparent oppositions that permeate interwar culture; Butts's occult modernist Grail is, ultimately, characterised by a gesture towards transformation and resolution, or at least acceptance of difference, through the influence of the Grail.

Conclusion
In her rejection of the establishment family, Butts presents us with a radical vision of a familia for the twentieth century, a grouping that rejects heteronormativity, as Butts's vision of sexuality includes the opportunities to forge relationships which admit the "other" and have an intrinsic lack of fixity in mutual consent.This is part of her artistic exploration of how human relationships can be re-shaped in the anarchic possibility of the post-war years.Butts is more subtle than merely engaging in the fashionable modernist rejection of conventional life and suburbia that John Carey identifies, in favour of what I have argued here is a middle-class bohemian household as modernist familia, a fluid alignment of friendship and sexual partnerships.The familia upholds the concept of inheritance that is usually expressed through the traditional family structure. 91The 86 Millom Gazette, 1st August 1907. 87"Glastonbury Dish Not Actually the Graal." 88In 1930 Dion Fortune presented some of her Arthurian work in Glastonbury, Avalon of the Heart. 89Barber, The Holy Grail, 298. 90Loomis, Celtic Myth and Arthurian Romance, 139-40. 91Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses.
household is built around the core of a family relationshipa brother and sister and a cousinbut has space to include other individuals as needed: servants, retainers, visitors or those who need a period of asylum.Lydia and Philip, in the one ostensibly conventional heterosexual relationship in the novel, act as a Greek chorus of outraged respectability at the fact that Scylla lives surrounded by a group of men.In her critical description of Lydia and Philip's home and their behaviour, Butts does not suggest that this marriage is a laudable basis for the family unit. 92Butts sets a high bar for women by disavowing conventional monogamous marriage altogether; however, her central concern to promote a feminist refusal to settle for a life of patriarchal restriction and control is of crucial importance to her vision for women of the new century.Butts does not finally resolve, but suggests that the familia as a unit, functions best when fluidity is permitted and accepted.In her portrayal of the modernist Grail, Butts does not pin down the image of cup and spear nor reduce it to a symbolic heterosexual coupling: branching possibilities remain in a multi-layered magical vision of reality.True to its theme of the eternal quest, the novel remains somewhat open-ended, with the magical current still running.Butts proposes that her characters have developed a spiritual interconnection with the landscape through generations of rootedness in the landscape.Their way of life is held out by Butts not as an example of how society should change en masse, but by showing that society may be altered and realigned through the transformation of individuals, enabled by the action of the Grail: Gault House is a potent vision of an experiment in new ways of living for the New Age of the twentieth century.

Disclosure Statement
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