Armed With Madness

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Picus is a complex mythological figure, possessed of prophetic powers and usually taking the form of a woodpecker, the sacred bird of Mars. It is with Picus as woodpecker linked with Zeus, the great thunder-hurling god of Greek mythology, that Armed With Madness is concerned. Butts was familiar with the discussion of “the woodpecker-king” and “bird-magic” in the classical scholar Jane Harrison’s Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912). Harrison stresses the identification of the woodpecker with Zeus and provides Butts with the line quoted by Scylla from the Suda, a Greek literary encyclopedia compiled at the end of the tenth century AD: “Here lies the Woodpecker who is also Zeus.” For Harrison, “Picus enshrines a beautiful lost faith, the faith that birds and beasts had mana other and sometimes stronger than the mana of man.” (Mana, which also occurs in Armed With Madness, is a Melanesian term which refers to an invisible power or vital energy which permeates the world; certain animals or places or people being particularly charged with mana and so as particularly sacred; tabu recognizes mana as a dangerous force and the attitude of scruple or avoidance.) Butts too doubtless knew, or knew of, Picus Who is Also Zeus (1916) by Rendel Harris, which explains the identification from the primitive belief that the thunder was a bird: the Great Black Woodpecker, Picus Martius. Hence the numerous references to Butts’s Picus as bird-like and specifically as “the woodpecker”; hence too his dual reality—just a character in the novel like any other but also unlike, imbued with an uncanny difference, a mythical significance; he sets off the sacred game through his trick with the cup, leads Scylla into the secret wood, has something of the magician in his manipulation of mana.