Tuesday, December 07, 2004
CHARLES WILLIAMS
Recognized authority on the occult revival , James Webb, discusses Charles Williams on p. 510 of _The Occult Establishment_:
The popularity of Tolkien—and to a lesser extent, of his friends Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis—emphasizes once more the religious or occult connections of fantasy. All three writers subscribe to a form of Christianity: Catholicism for Tolkien, for Williams an interesting personal mysticism which probably owed a lot to his early occult studies, and for Lewis a Neo-Platonic form of Christianity that was not above accepting some of Williams’s unorthodox theories. The three formed a group they called “the Inklings,” which met regularly and included a leading Anthroposophist, Owen Barfield.
Glen Cavaliero reviews Williams Novels for “The Lost Club Journal,” saying of him:
Although recognizably by the same hand, the novels differ a good deal in content and methodology. The most conventional of them, War in Heaven (1930), is a relatively straightforward account of the discovery of the Holy Grail in a country church and of the struggle between good and evil forces to possess it, the latter being embodied in a group of occultists, the former guided by the devout yet intelligently sceptical parish priest. Although the book is exciting, frequently humorous and rich in theological insights, it repels some readers by its detailed accounts of black magic – understandably, for these carry real conviction: Williams was for many years a member of A. E. Waite’s Christian Rosicrucian order, The Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, and thus had a professional knowledge of esoteric rites.
Paternoster Publishing offers this analysis of Williams:
Charles Williams's involvement in the occult cannot be dismissed as a brief aberration of his youth. We now know that he belonged to A.E. Waite's Fellowship of the Rosy Cross for over a decade, even acting as Magister Templi for two brief periods during the mid-nineteen twenties.
CanadianChristianity.com offers:
Before he wrote these books, Williams had taken an interest in the occult. He spent 10 years as a member of the Rosicrucian-influenced 'Fellowship of the Rosy Cross' (FRC), an offshoot of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn --whose members included poet W.B. Yeats and infamous occultist Aleister Crowley. Williams left the group in 1927; for the rest of his life, he was known to be a staunch Anglican.
The reality of occultism is such that it cannot be glossed over even when a former occultist repents. Occultism opposes Christ and Christianity. That is its main focus. It has a permenant impact on the person who dabbles in it. Frequently those who leave it spend much energy trying to warn others away. Perhaps this is what Charles Williams was attempting to do with his novels. Regardless, a story about Williams such as the "Touchstone" article provides is incomplete without mention of this occult connection.
