Charles Williams and Modern Occultism: The Influence of A.E. Waite
By
Aren Roukema
2013
Prof. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Advisor
Dr. Marco Pasi, Reader
A Thesis
Presented to the
Graduate Faculty
of Humanities
In Partial Fulfillment
Of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts (Research)
in
Religious Studies
Acknowledgements
My deepest thanks go to Prof. Wouter J. Hanegraaff of the Centre for the History of
Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents (HHP) at the University of Amsterdam for
supervising this research, and also to Dr. Marco Pasi of the HHP for acting as reader. I
also wish to thank Jimmy Elwing for his feedback on parts of the text. I am much indebted
to the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica in Amsterdam, and to the J. Ritman family, for
giving me access to their comprehensive collection of both published and unpublished
materials by A.E. Waite. Thanks also to Dr. R.A. Gilbert, as access to this collection would
not have been as fruitful without his help. Most of all, I would like to thank my wonderful
wife Deborah for her unflagging support, motivation, and understanding.
Copyright 2013: Aren Roukema
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1) Charles Williams, A.E. Waite, and their Scholars
Introduction
1
Clarification of Terms
2
Biography
--Charles Williams
--A.E. Waite
Shared Mystical Pursuits: The “Secret Tradition” and “Romantic
7
12
Theology”
A Brief History of Williams Scholarship
17
2) Constructing a “Cordon Sanitaire”: Two Artificial Dichotomies
Occultism vs. Mysticism
21
Occultism vs. Christianity
28
3) In Search of the Higher Self: Charles Williams in the F.R.C.
The History and Structure of the F.R.C.
35
The Initiatic Journey
43
The F.R.C. and the Golden Dawn
46
The Novels of an “Adeptus Exaltatus”
60
4) The Coinherent Magus: Charles Williams and Magic
67
Magic and Mysticism
68
A Question of a Center—Williams’s View of Magic
--The Divine-Centred Magus
--The Way of P’o-Lu
“Artistic Theurgy”: Williams and Sex Magic
70
5) Kabbalah—Charles Williams and the Middle Pillar
87
82
Conclusion
98
Bibliography
100
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
1
Introduction
He saturated his novels and poetry with occult symbolism, he pursued poetic and
mystical sublimation by elevating his libido through ritual magic, he was a member of a
secret society descended from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the base of the
occult philosophies of W.B. Yeats and Aleister Crowley, and yet Charles Williams has
been almost universally distanced from occultism.1 Williams (1886–1945), a fiction writer,
mystical poet, scriptwriter, and biographer, was also a dedicated theologian and church
historian, and thus has been the focus of much research generated by scholars interested
in his contributions to Christianity. This focus, however, has often resulted in a distinction
between Williams and occultism based in a centuries-old Christian polemic against
esoteric knowledge. This distancing is often accomplished by linking Williams’s esoteric
philosophy directly to Arthur Edward Waite (1857–1942), an influential figure in the modern
occult context by virtue of his scholarship on a wide range of esoteric subjects and his
involvement in a number of secret societies devoted to the study and application of those
subjects. Scholars have dwelt less on this involvement, however, and more on Waite’s
polemical distancing of his esoteric philosophy from occultism. However, close historical
analysis, as well as literary interpretation in the case of Williams, shows that the
relationship of both men to occultism is more complex than has previously been
acknowledged. In what follows, I will argue that the philosophies of Waite and Williams
bear marked debts to occult adaptations of esoteric thought, and that the work of Charles
Williams, particularly his novels and poetry, cannot be properly interpreted without a
recognition that his life and thought were defined by an unproblematic blend of Christian
mysticism and occultism.
The question of Charles Williams’s relation to occultism is the focus of this research,
but addressing this issue will also require extensive analysis of Waite’s life, work, and
philosophy, as the two men have become so closely entangled in Williams scholarship that
they often seem to be assumed to be the same person, producing the same thoughts. In
fact, more scholarship on Waite has appeared in research on Williams than in the few
1
As discussed below, I use the term “occultism” to refer to a specific historical movement,
extending from the mid-nineteenth century until the present day, rather than a particular
philosophy.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
2
publications dedicated specifically to Waite. I will begin this process of dual analysis by
introducing the reader to Williams and Waite and then reviewing the problems of
scholarship that result from the link between the two. Following this I will examine the
stance taken toward occultism by the two authors, and then qualify that stance with
historical analysis of their participation in Waite’s secret society, the Fellowship of the Rosy
Cross (F.R.C.), as well as their approach to magic and their involvement with Kabbalah as
specifically interpreted within modern occultism. This analysis will also necessarily feature
elements of literary criticism, as Williams’s life and thought cannot be understood without
reference to his work, and vice versa.
Clarification of Terms
First, however, a clarification of terms such as “occult,” “occultism,” and “esotericism”
is in order. Much of the confusion surrounding the question of Williams and Waite’s
involvement with esotericism comes down to a general misunderstanding of these
concepts. This problem, almost always encountered in Williams scholarship, stems from a
general multiplicity of usage found in society in general. Though the scope of this thesis
does not allow a full review of the fluctuating history of these terms and the movements
related to them, it is necessary that I clarify my own usage before proceeding further.2
Adjectives such as “occult” and “esoteric” are often understood, even today, in a
dramatically pejorative sense. Wouter J. Hanegraaff argues convincingly that such
negative understandings stem from a “Grand Polemical Narrative” by which Western
culture has defined its identity over the centuries in relation to a constructed “other”—a
group of traditions not always otherwise related, such as alchemy, magic, Kabbalah,
witchcraft, and astrology—but collected in an intellectual “wastebasket” within Western
culture. This process began, in Hanegraaff’s conception, with the construction of a “pagan
other” by Christianity as it grew in power and gained sway over European culture. Pagan
elements were incorporated into Christianity early on, and have continued to exert
influence in Western culture in the continuing popularity of pagan practices and the interest
in currents such as Hermetism and Zoroastrianism, particularly following the Renaissance.
2
For a fuller introduction to the fluctuating use of these terms, see Hammer, Claiming
Knowledge, 5-6.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
3
These vestigial pagan remnants have been obscured however, as Christianity, and later
other cultural dominants, employed polemical discourse to purify its own identity from
pagan attachments by attacking its “other.” By the eighteenth century, working from this
dichotomy of pagan vs. Christian, Western culture began to acknowledge a relation
between the traditions now categorized as belonging to Western esotericism. Though this
term was not actually used until the nineteenth century, it describes the formation of a
“reservoir of what modernity rejects,” specifically referring to the formation of Western
culture around the central pillars of monotheism, which rejected esoteric knowledge as
pagan, and Enlightenment rationalism, which rejected it as irrational and superstitious.3
An important aspect of Hanegraaff’s argument is that esotericism must be seen as a
product of historical developments, many of them discursive and many of these polemical
in nature, rather than as a single monolithic tradition of secret knowledge passed down
from antiquity. This latter conception is, as we will see, largely how Waite and Williams
understood esoteric knowledge. However, I will employ the theoretical approach to
esotericism now generally found in analytical academic work, where the term is not
understood as a hegemonic historical phenomenon, but rather as the manifestation of
long-standing, often antagonistic, discourses in Western culture. In this conception,
esotericism is, in Andreas Kilcher’s words, “The sociologies, politics, techniques, cultures,
and poetics of knowledge by means of which epistemological formations such as magic,
kabbalah, occultism etc. are founded, transmitted, transformed, defended, or degraded.”4
Just as it should be understood that there is no specific “esotericism” that can be studied
as a phenomenon in its own right, the individual movements grouped together in the
“wastebasket” category of Western esotericism should also be seen as fluctuating
traditions in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s sense of a tradition as an ongoing dialectical
conversation, in which it is assumed that a reified encapsulation of a particular tradition
can never be authentically achieved.5 Seen in the light of this understanding of tradition,
every magician, every alchemist, every kabbalist in every period has found themselves
3
Hanegraaff, “Forbidden Knowledge,” 230–46. Hanegraaff, “The Trouble with Images,” 108–
10, 113. See Hanegraaff, Esotericism in the Academy for his analysis of the historiography behind
the development of Western esotericism, and Hanegraaff,
Power of Ideas, 256, for a short summary of his argument.
4
Kilcher, “Seven Epistemological Theses,” 145.
5
See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 358–60.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
4
exploring a particular tradition of knowledge from within their own subjective sphere of
understanding, influenced by their own particular cultural context. Within these particular
contexts they have added to already existing, longue durée traditions of esoteric
knowledge, in addition to adjusting, defending, and attacking these same traditions so that
each is subject to a continuous process of permutation and transformation, to the point
where they can only be said to exist as “traditions” at all because they are products of
categorization necessary for the ordering of human thought. All references to “esotericism”
and specific esoteric traditions in this thesis are made in light of this view of esotericism as
a necessary category of thought, rather than an actual historical object. I will, however,
frequently refer to the more emic view of esotericism as a monolithic, ahistorical body of
knowledge, as that is how most of the historical figures featured in my research saw it.6
Before the term “esotericism” came into wide use, the same body of affiliated
traditions was united under terms such as the “occult sciences,” generally referring to more
practical esoteric knowledge, found in traditions such as magic and alchemy, and the
“occult philosophy”, a more encompassing notion used to describe the reintroduction of the
ancient wisdom narrative in the Christian context of the Renaissance.7 “Magic” was also
frequently used as a term to encompass both the practical and speculative aspects of the
pursuit of esoteric knowledge. In the process of identity construction described by
Hanegraaff, however, “magic” and “occult” were appropriated as polemical terms used to
dismiss all knowledge branded with these labels as demonic (Christian polemics) or
irrational (scientific rationalist polemics).8 However, the virulent Enlightenment rejection of
these terms also allowed for their sublimation by anti-Enlightenment elements in society.
In the nineteenth century a number of individuals and movements began to
specifically identify themselves as occultists and their activities as magical, and returned to
esoteric currents of the Renaissance and Early Modern periods to further their knowledge
6
There is a diverse range of opinions on the historical boundaries and theoretical definitions of
“Western esotericism.” For some of the most authoritative see Hanegraaff, Guide, particularly 2-17;
Von Stuckrad, Western Esotericism, 1-11; Bogdan, Rituals of Initiation, 6–20; Kilcher, “Seven
Epistemological Theses, 143–48. Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism, 10–15.
7
See Hanegraaff, “Notion of “Occult Sciences,”” 77–82.
8
Hanegraaff, foreword to Aleister Crowley, viii; “The Trouble with Images,” 110; “Notion of
“Occult Sciences,”” 83–87. On the history of the terms “magic” and “occult,” see Hanegraaff,
Esotericism and the Academy, 164–90.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
5
of the “occult sciences.”9 In doing so, those who identified themselves as occultists were
forced to find a fit between pre-modern and early modern esoteric knowledge and the
empirical demands of post-Enlightenment rationalism. This synthesis did not not
necessarily lead to a rejection of the Enlightenment values of empiricism and rationalism;
indeed, Hanegraaff has defined occultism as a modern subcategory of esotericism that
attempts to adapt esoteric knowledge in order to respond to the disenchanted world
proclaimed by Max Weber. Rather than reject the world disenchanted by scientific
naturalism, Hanegraaff states that occultism “accepts that world (consciously or
unconsciously; in a spirit of resignation or with enthusiasm).”10 Occultists, as many
scholars of esotericism have pointed out, frequently embraced scientific principles and
framed their knowledge in a naturalistic discourse. As Antoine Faivre describes it, “The
occultists were not opposed to modernity and did not consider scientific progress as
noxious; they sought instead to integrate them into a global vision capable of bringing out
the vacuity of materialism.”11 Therefore, in addition to the use of “occultism” in a longue
durée sense as a term largely synonymous with “esotericism,” the term is used by
historians to refer to a particular current that arose at the onset of Late Modernity,
appearing spottily in the early 1800s, but developing into a full-force cultural movement by
the end of the century.12 Some characteristics of this modern esoteric movement, as
opposed to its earlier precursors, include a greater synthesis of non-Christian (particularly
Eastern) religions, the incorporation of new views on social hierarchy and gender inclusion
(which particularly manifested in newer traditions such as mesmerism and spiritualism), a
quest for enchantment in the face of the disenchanted world perceived to have been
produced by Enlightenment rationalism and scientific materialism, and an incorporation,
despite this quest, of Enlightenment values such as scientific progress and biological
evolutionism. These latter two characteristics required a movement away from material
9
Hanegraaff, “Forbidden Knowledge,” 247.
Hanegraaff, New Age Religion, 423.
11
Faivre, Western Esotericism, 80. For more on the relationship between occultism and
Enlightenment rationalism see Hanegraaff, New Age Religion, 421–23; Hanegraaff, “How Magic
Survived”; Owen, Place of Enchantment, 238–257; Pasi, “Occultism,” 1366; Pasi, “The Modernity
of Occultism,” 61; Asprem, ”Magic Naturalized,” 140–45; Hammer, Claiming Knowledge, 50-51.
12
Waite himself used the term in this manner. E.g. Doctrine and Literature of the Kabbalah,
196.
10
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
6
explanations for occult phenomena.13 Thus, for example, magical function was often seen
as an effect of imagination that produced psychological effects within the self so that
magicians themselves, rather than their surroundings, were affected.14 A similar example
is the development of a specifically spiritual form of alchemy that sought the transmutation
of the self but rejected the traditional alchemical focus on the transmutation of metals.15 In
addition to these adaptations of traditional esoteric practice, occultists also tended more
toward universalist and perennialist interpretations of the ancient wisdom believed to have
been passed down from antiquity.16 Where their esoteric forebears looked for proof of the
truth of Christianity in this ancient wisdom, occultists tended to synthesize a variety of
symbolic systems, with a love for bricolage which Egil Asprem calls “programmatic
syncretism.” With this term, which I will return to often, Asprem argues that occultists
systematically organized a wide range of symbolism from a large variety of different
traditions to develop “a pragmatically better and more refined esoteric system” in order to
better communicate and discover the universal esoteric knowledge available to all but
found by few.17
In this new occult context, a plethora of movements devoted to the advancement of
esoteric knowledge sprang up. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–91) founded the
influential Theosophical Society, which featured important figures of the period such as the
poet and active occultist W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) and Anna Kingsford (1846–1888) an
esoteric theologian, anti-vivisectionist, and women’s rights advocate. French occultist
Eliphas Lévi (1810–1875, born Alphonse Louis Constant) merged magical concepts with
Kabbalah and the Tarot, a synthesis that had an enormous impact which continues to
reverberate in occult circles to this day. One notable group influenced by Lévi was the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society founded in 1888 by three
13
For the boundaries and characteristics of modern occultism see Hanegraaff, New Age
Religion, 421-22; Hammer, Claiming Knowledge, 7; Pasi, “Occultism”; Galbreath, “Explaining
Modern Occultism,” 15-32; Gilbert, Golden Dawn, 20-23; Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism,
86–90; Asprem, Arguing With Angels, 45-77.
14
Hammer, Claiming Knowledge, 49-52; Hanegraaff, “How Magic Survived,” 365–71.
15
See Principe and Newman, “Some Problems,” 388–95. The modern interest in spiritual
alchemy was motivated by Mary Ann Atwood’s publication of A Suggestive Inquiry into the
Hermetic Mystery (1850) and perpetuated by a number of leading figures in modern occultism,
including William Westcott and A.E. Waite.
16
Pasi, “Occultism,” 1367.
17
Asprem, “Kabbala Recreata,” 135–36. Cf. Bogdan, Rituals of Initiation, 121.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
7
Freemasons, William Wynn Westcott (1848–1925), William Robert Woodman (1828–91),
and Samuel MacGregor Mathers (1854–1918). The Golden Dawn dedicated itself to the
advancement of esoteric knowledge, particularly through experimentation with practical
magic, but the ultimate aim of its adepts was the elevation of the self toward union with the
higher, or divine self, a goal accomplished through concepts and symbolic systems
discovered in Rosicrucianism, Kabbalah, the Tarot, alchemy, Freemasonry, and ritual
magic among a variety of other esoteric traditions.18
A.E. Waite was a central figure in this group, and its goals and rituals were formative
in the development of the F.R.C., of which Charles Williams was a member for over ten
years. This thesis will seek to position Waite and Williams within this specific modern
occult context. The meaning of the term “modern” is, of course, also in need of
clarification. I will use it to refer to the period beginning in the middle of the nineteenth
century and filtering out in the middle of the twentieth, though of course such temporal
boundaries can never be anything but artificial.19 They will assist us, however, as we
proceed to examine the occultism of Charles Williams.
Biography—Charles Williams
Charles Walter Stansby Williams was born into a working-class family in London on
20 September 1886, but worked his way up in English society despite lacking the funds to
finish his degree at University College London.20 Partly through social connections
developed in an editorial position at Oxford Publishing House, and partly propelled by his
literary achievements, Williams worked his way into the elite literary circles of modern
England. In fact, Williams is perhaps best known for the company he kept.21 T.S. Eliot
(1888–1965), who published Williams’s last two novels, was a close friend. As a member
of the famous Inklings writing group, Williams also befriended C.S. Lewis (1898–1963) and
18
Quite a bit of research on the Golden Dawn is now available. Among the best are Howe,
Magicians of the Golden Dawn; Gilbert, Golden Dawn, and Bogdan, Rituals of Initiation, 121–44.
The rituals and knowledge lectures of the Order can be found in Regardie, Complete Golden
Dawn, and Golden Dawn (4 volumes). The latter publication contains the material used by the
Stella Matutina, an offshoot of the original Golden Dawn.
19
Here I follow what is usually seen as the widest separation of the bookends of the modern
period. See Lewis, Modernism, xvii.
20
Williams’s primary biographer is Alice Mary Hadfield. See Introduction; Exploration.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
8
J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973). Tolkien enjoyed Williams’s company but found his writing
impenetrable, while Lewis adored both the man and his work with only superficial
reservations (he found him “ugly as a chimpanzee”).22 In addition to arguing points of
literary analysis or theological speculation with the Inklings over ale at the Eagle and Child
Pub in Oxford, Williams spent the years before his death lecturing on Dante, writing poetry
and prose, and establishing himself as the leader of a secret society called The
Companions of the Coinherence, a loosely affiliated group of adepts, mostly young
women, who followed him as a “spiritual exemplar”23 in the practice of “coinherence,” a
quasi-magical form of physical, emotional, or spiritual healing achieved through the ritual
substitution of the self for another.24
Williams is best known for his fiction, though his seven supernatural novels are not
easily understood, which may explain their less enthusiastic reception compared with the
work of Tolkien and Lewis. The veil that obscures Williams’s fiction is primarily due to the
dominant presence of esoteric subject matter not familiar to most readers. The first novel,
Shadows of Ecstasy (1933, written 1928), features a magician who seeks to use his
power, combined with military might, to establish a sort of autocratic state of Romanticism
in England, while the second, War in Heaven (1930), features a struggle, through magical
means, for possession of the holy grail, which has been rediscovered in England. Many
Dimensions (1931) also features a struggle for possession of a magical object—this time
reminiscent of the philosopher’s stone—while the conflict in the The Greater Trumps
(1932) revolves around two magicians who seek power by bringing the characters of the
Tarot to life. Descent into Hell (1937) features a young woman seeking to rescue a dead
ancestor from his entrapment in the spirit world, while a historian, infatuated with a
younger woman who has scorned him, replaces her with a succubus. All Hallows Eve
(1945) presents a necromantic magician who seeks global power through incantations
constructed by reversing the divine names of Kabbalah. Williams’s critics have sought to
downplay his real-life interest in the strange currents that ripple through these novels, but
21
See Willard, “Acts of the Companions,” for an extensive review.
Tolkien and Carpenter, Letters, 202; Lewis to Arthur Greeves, in Carpenter, Inklings, 101.
23
Cavaliero, “Gavin Ashenden,” 4.
24
On the concept of coinherence see Newman, “Companions of the Coinherence,” 6–13;
Wendling, “”Flesh Knows What Spirit Knows.” The subject is also covered more extensively below
in Chapter Four.
22
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
9
esoteric symbolism does not merely decorate the walls of Williams’s fiction—it erects
them. While the fantasy novels produced by Lewis and Tolkien have been published in
hundreds of languages and editions around the world, Williams’s novels remain relatively
unknown, though they can still be found in print, most recently from Faber and Faber, who
republished them in 2012.25
In addition to his novels, Williams published a fair amount of non-fiction, including
biographies of figures such as Francis Bacon and Queen Elizabeth I, a history of
witchcraft, and a number of books and essays on Christian theology. He published seven
volumes of poetry, which also rely heavily on esoteric symbolism, particularly in
combination with the mythos of the Arthurian legends. Williams also wrote 16 plays,
though he is not well known as a playwright and many of these plays were performed
within his personal circle rather than on a public stage. He rounded out this diverse body of
production with several volumes of literary criticism, including The English Poetic Mind
(1932), and The Figure of Beatrice (1943), which also functions as a theological work
consistent with the content of another important work of metaphysics, Outlines of
Romantic Theology (1941, written 1924). Both works analyze Dante’s relationship with
Beatrice in light of Williams’s Romantic theology, which sees human love as
correspondent to Divine love and therefore as an important part of the mystical quest for
unity with God.26
Williams’s association with the Inklings in his Oxford years certainly deserves the
lion’s share of the credit for the fact that his work is still known in the twenty-first century.
However, it can’t be said to have had much influence on his work, as six of his seven
novels, all of his poetry, and most of his theological writings were complete by the time he
made the Inklings’ acquaintance. Another important intellectual figure from the time
deserves much more credit for shaping Williams’s thought, namely the mystic and scholar
of Western esotericism, A.E. Waite. Williams met Waite in 1915, after he read Waite’s The
Hidden Church of the Holy Graal (1909) and felt moved to send him a recently published
25
The novels are also now available in a 2012 omnibus edition from Oxford City Press.
For an excellent review of Williams’s publication history see Willard, “Acts of the
Companions,” 275-76.
26
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
10
volume of poetry, The Silver Stair (1912).27 After some initial correspondence and a
meeting, Waite invited Williams to join the F.R.C. in 1917. Williams was an important and
dedicated member of the Order, but left in 1927 for unknown reasons. He remained in
contact with Waite, however, and the F.R.C. seems to have remained important to him, as
he instructed a friend to bury his regalia after his death,28 a gesture that seems to indicate
both the importance of his involvement in the Order and of the vow he had taken to
maintain its secrecy.
Arthur Edward Waite
Like Williams, Waite made his way onto the intellectual stage of modern England in
spite of a mediocre education and less than ideal social and financial circumstances.29
Waite attended school until around the age of fifteen, after which he dropped out to intern
as a clerk.30 Following this he tried to make it as a poet, but ultimately found that it was
more profitable to publish works of amateur scholarship on the esoteric traditions that saw
a surge of interest in the context of the occult revival of the nineteenth century.31 Waite
wrote dozens of books and hundreds of articles on a variety of topics, including alchemy,
ritual magic, Freemasonry, the Tarot, Kabbalah, Martinism, Arthurian mysticism, and
Rosicrucianism. He also translated or edited collections of work by many important figures
in the history of Western esotericism, including Paracelsus (1493–1541), Edward Kelly
(1555–97), Thomas Vaughan (1621–66), and Lévi. R.A. Gilbert, the only scholar to provide
biographical work of any substance on Waite, feels that Waite has been influential among
both scholars and practitioners interested in Western esotericism. In his own day, Waite
helped stimulate the growth of interest in occultism, particularly in the English speaking
world, through his books on ritual magic, his translations of Lévi’s work, and his active
participation in and promotion of various esoteric societies. The Tarot deck that he
designed is still in use today as a tool for divination and meditation.
27
For details of Waite and Williams’s relationship, including meeting, see Ashenden, Charles
Williams, 5; Willard, “Acts of the Companions,” 270; Gilbert, A.E. Waite, 23; Newman,
“Companions of the Coinherence,” 3–4.
28
Ashenden, 6n32.
29
See Waite, Shadows, 14-18.
30
Ibid., 46.
31
Gilbert, Bibliography, 11.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
11
Although many of Waite’s books have seen very little of the light of day, some of his
work was relatively successful, particularly in the esoteric community. Among these works,
The Doctrine and Literature of the Kabbalah (1902), The Holy Kabbalah (1929), The Book
of Ceremonial Magic (1913), The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), The Real History of the
Rosicrucians (1887), and The Secret Tradition in Alchemy (1926) seem to have gained the
most exposure. Some are still quoted today in works of academic scholarship, though
Waite’s research is often historically and philologically suspect due to his lack of research
training and the fact that his historical research was always second in importance to
communicating his mystical philosophy, as openly stated in the introductions of many of
his books. Hanegraaff argues that Waite has had more impact than any other in the AngloAmerican world in promoting the concept of an esoteric current of knowledge in Western
culture.32 The lack of any higher level academic work to compete with Waite’s prolific
output of encyclopedic volumes related to various esoteric subjects made Waite the
“virtually unavoidable authority” for anyone looking for a historical framework for the
various esoteric traditions until quite recently.33 Gilbert offers a less guarded presentation
of Waite’s impact on the academic study of esotericism: “His idiosyncrasies and
carelessness over minor details do not weaken the foundations he laid; his work was
sound enough for it to carry the superstructure of modern scholarship when it begins to
build, as it must, upon his researches.”34 This prediction, made in 1989, has come true in
that contemporary scholarship has indeed seen a boost in esotericism, but Waite has
received little of the credit for building the foundations of the discipline, and even less
research dedicated to his life and work.
In addition to his scholarly interest in esoteric subjects, Waite involved himself heavily
in various groups that were founded in England in the midst of the occult revival. He was a
member of the Theosophical Society, the Quest society of G.R.S. Mead (1863–1933), and
a number of masonic lodges. He joined the Golden Dawn in 1891, and though he left the
order for a time, he returned in 1896 and ascended to the second order of the Golden
Dawn, known as the Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis (R.R. et A.C.) on 3 March 1899.35
32
Hanegraaff, Esotericism in the Academy, 248.
Ibid., 249.
34
Gilbert, A.E. Waite, 161.
35
For a history of Waite’s involvement in the Golden Dawn, see Gilbert, A.E. Waite, 109-26;
Gilbert, Bibliography, 11.
33
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
12
On 4 March 1903, after joining the Sphere group led by actress Florence Farr (1860–
1917), Waite wrote in his diary, “I look shortly to be the most initiated man in Europe.”36
Waite also founded his own orders. Foremost among these was the F.R.C., which he
launched in 1915 with the founding of the Salvator Mundi Temple in London, with Waite as
Imperator for life.
As in the case of Williams, Waite’s reputation is accentuated by the people he knew.
He was, of course, acquainted with leading figures in modern occultism, including
Blavatsky, Mathers and Westcott. Waite also corresponded with Dr. Gerard Encausse
(1865–1916), better known as Papus, a leader in French Martinism, and had a long and
productive meeting with Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), the founder of Anthroposophy, during
his 1912 visit to London.37 Waite was also well known to several literary figures in the
period, all involved with occult movements to varying degrees, including W.B. Yeats,
Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951), his close friend Arthur Machen (1863–1947), and, of
course, Charles Williams.
Shared Mystical Pursuits—The “Secret Tradition” and “Romantic Theology”
One factor responsible for bringing Waite and Williams so closely together in the
minds of scholars is the remarkable similarity of their mystical philosophies. Waite centres
both his scholarship and his personal belief structure around a perennial current of
knowledge that he calls the “Secret Tradition.”38 This tradition has a chosen few initiates,
who Waite calls “the Holy Assembly,”39 able to identify the esoteric substrate of the Secret
Tradition beneath exoteric forms of doctrine. These initiates can come from any cultural,
temporal or doctrinal background, but the perennial tradition of knowledge that they are
able to access and communicate is universal, though it will be expressed by members of
the Holy Assembly in historically specific terms. Waite specifically identified the Secret
Tradition with esoteric knowledge, based on the fact of its hiddenness. “The true student of
36
Gilbert, A.E. Waite, 117.
Ibid., 121, 127.
38
References to the Secret Tradition can be found throughout Waite’s work, beginning in
Doctrine and Literature of the Kabbalah. Also see Gilbert, “Masonic Career,” 16-17; A.E. Waite, 97;
Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, 248.
39
Waite, Shadows, 170-71.
37
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
13
Theosophia in its widest meaning believes in the existence of a knowledge—which in
effect is occult science—handed down from remote ages.”40 Like many esoteric thinkers,
Waite thus saw the knowledge of the Secret Tradition as having descended to modern
times as a body of secret knowledge passed down from ancient Greece and the Near
East, and thus historically derived and subject to minor culturally specific permutations.41
However, Waite also emphasizes the Secret Tradition’s “eternal pre-existence,”42 In this
view it existed “before the world was with God” and is a form of knowledge universally
accessible through personal gnosis—intuitive knowledge gained through access to divine
wisdom.
The Secret Tradition is, more than anything else, a body of knowledge that taught the
path to mystic union, or unio mystica, with God.43 Unio mystica is a concept that Waite felt
could be discussed intellectually—as he himself frequently did—but intellectual concerns
are ultimately pointless in comparison to actual mystical experience, which has to be
encountered on an individual level and cannot be described on any level of human
understanding. However, the path to unio mystica is paved by interaction with symbols that
can express all but the most intimate aspects of the Secret Tradition. In Waite’s system
these symbols reveal the divine to humans by reflecting the supernal realms above in the
material world below through the doctrine of correspondences between the macrocosm
and microcosm, a common element in esoteric systems.44 Waite concludes that the “Holy
Assembly” of initiates in the Secret Tradition have all come to the same conclusions
through the knowledge offered by the unity between spirit and matter that is granted by the
40
Waite, Holy Kabbalah, 10. This is a rare usage of the phrase “occult science” for Waite in
this period (1929). It is safe to assume that he intends the term to mean “hidden knowledge” rather
than modern occult science.
41
See Waite, Doctrine and Literature of the Kabbalah, 10-12; Holy Kabbalah, 15, 25; Secret
Doctrine in Israel, 16, 19; Secret Tradition in Freemasonry, Vol. I, ix.
42
Waite, Holy Kabbalah, 16. Also see Doctrine and Literature of the Kabbalah, 10-12, 123,
127, 490; Secret Doctrine in Israel, 19; Secret Tradition in Freemasonry, Vol. II, 379; Holy
Kabbalah, 15, 574.
43
For the essence of Waite’s beliefs on the praxis of achieving unio mystica see Waite,
Shadows, 235–45; Gilbert, A.E.Waite, 163.
44
Antoine Faivre lists the concept of correspondences as one of four definitive identifiers of
esoteric thought (Access to Esotericism, 10-15), while B.J. Gibbons states that “the occult
philosophy” can be reduced to the “single principle” of the doctrine of correspondences (Spirituality
and the Occult, 6-7). Waite calls the doctrine “the one Catholic and Hermetic axiom for a root
principle of philosophy…the universal sacramental doctrine” (Secret Tradition in Alchemy, 267).
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
14
doctrine of correspondences: “Est una sola res,45 and they whose heart of contemplation
is fixed upon this one thing may differ but can never be far apart.”46 “Est una sola res”
reflects the correspondent unity created between the self, matter, and spirit by the
immanent presence of the divine in the world. Waite describes this cosmology as a
“philosophical pantheism” which “identifies the universe with God.”47
Williams did not incorporate the Secret Tradition wholesale into his own work, but the
idea of correspondences between macrocosm and microcosm was just as important to
him. It was, in fact, the basis for his own concept of a universally accessible wisdom
narrative. Williams describes the doctrine of correspondences as both a perennial wisdom
and a tradition handed down from antiquity: “It is a very ancient idea; it was held before
Christianity and has been held during Christianity; it was common to Christians, Jews, and
Mohammedans.”48 He interpreted the doctrine of correspondences both as “the idea that
man is a small replica of the universe,” and as a unity between the spiritual and material
worlds.49 One of his most repeated maxims reflects this second meaning: “This also is
Thou; Neither is this Thou.”50 Phenomena are one with the divine, which Williams often
called “the Unity,” so they are “Thou,” but they can never actually be the distant ineffable
Divine, so they are also not Thou. For Williams, what appeared to modern man as
disenchanted lumps of molecular dust was actually a unity of spirit and matter in which
created nature should be seen as an aspect of its creative divine principle. Williams
scholar Glen Cavaliero connects the author’s adherence to the doctrine of
correspondences to his poetic vision, saying that this “Hermetic interpretation of the
[Christian] Faith” results in a view of the world in which it is “read and understood rather as
45
“There is only one thing”—a quote from the Emerald Tablet attributed by many esoteric
thinkers to Hermes Trismegistus (c. 600-800 CE—actual author unknown).
46
Waite, Hidden Church of the Holy Graal, 549-50.
47
Waite, Shadows, 259. In present day terminology, Waite’s system is best described as
“panentheistic,” a term which describes the material world as impregnated with the presence of
spirit, but not itself divine.
48
Williams, “Index of the Body,” 82. Also see Ashenden, Charles Williams, 131-39 on
Williams’s understanding of correspondences.
49
Williams, “Index of the Body,” 82.
50
Williams, War in Heaven, 137. Cf. Cavaliero, “Introduction,” 8. The maxim likely recalls the
advaita vedanta declaration of cosmic unity: “tat tvam asi” (that art thou) and its opposite “atat tvam
asi” (thou art not that), but I have not been able to definitively establish this as Williams’s source.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
15
though it were a poem…Everything is related to everything else as part of one created
whole.”51
The doctrine of correspondences was also important to Williams on other levels. A
correspondence between human and divine love, for example, provided the cosmological
basis for his theology of Romantic love. Williams felt that one must accept the possibility of
the complete union of matter and spirit that allowed for Christ’s incarnation in order to
understand his Romantic Theology, a “science of God” influenced by many traditions,
including Christianity, Kabbalah, and Romanticism.52 A full analysis of Romantic Theology
within the context of these traditions is outside of my current scope, but the essential
emphasis of the doctrine is that the experience of human love and desire parallels mystical
union with God, and can actually generate unio mystica if properly directed. The
experience of falling in love produces “a new state of consciousness” which transmutes
the body and mind of the lover, so that “his soul itself will enter upon a new state,
becoming conscious of [the] grace of God.”53
Williams does not seem to have valued the esoteric traditions as specifically as Waite
did—preferring to pluck symbolism and philosophy compatible with Romantic Theology
from the trees of a wider orchard, particularly the fruits of Christian mysticism,
Romanticism and poetry, especially Milton, Blake, Coventry Patmore, and, most of all,
Dante. His personal life, however, indicates a definite valuation of secret knowledge. His
involvement with the F.R.C. and the founding of his own secret society shows implicit
support for the concept of a “Holy Assembly.” His main biographer, Alice Mary Hadfield,
who knew Williams personally and was a member of the Companions of the Coinherence,
says that Williams “was a man who lived and expressed a ‘mystery’, a hidden
knowledge.”54 Williams thus seems to have embraced the idea that knowledge of the
mystic path could not necessarily be widely expressed and communicated.
Williams’s focus on the correspondence between divine and human love is also
found at the core of Waite’s quest for unio mystica. This ascension towards the divine is
accomplished by a variety of methods, but love must always be an ingredient. Waite saw
the way to God as a way of love, though not love in a conventional, emotional sense. The
51
Cavaliero, “Introduction,” 4.
Williams, Romantic Theology, 7.
53
Ibid.,15-16.
52
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
16
love that directs the mystic towards unio mystica is the highest function of the mind, a
“state of pure intelligence in deep contemplation.”55 Like Williams, Waite saw the sexual
and emotional love between man and woman as correspondent to the love between the
masculine and feminine aspects of God that, in their duality and separateness, allow for
the unity of all things in their coming together. Waite found this concept in several
intellectual currents, but he growingly emphasized Kabbalah as the greatest proponent of
this theory, which he titled “the Mystery of Sex,” following a mistranslation from the Zohar,
one of the central texts of Kabbalah, likely written and collated by Moses de Leon (c.
1250–1305) in thirteenth century Spain.56
Waite and Williams found further sources for their mystical philosophies in the
esoteric traditions, particularly in Early Modern and Renaissance era forms of alchemy,
Kabbalah, magic, and Neo-Platonic philosophy. Both men expressed admiration for
esoteric thinkers in this period, such as Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), Cornelius Agrippa
(1486–1535), and Jacob Boehme (1574–1624). More than any other figure however,
Waite and Williams were influenced by their fellow Englishman Thomas Vaughan. They
were inspired by Vaughan’s statement that the incarnation of Christ is the key to the
mystery of the correspondent union of spirit and matter.57 Another important influence on
Waite’s and Williams’s unitive cosmologies was English Romanticism, which shared their
goal of realizing the oneness of man and the world. The mechanism for this realization
was imagination, which the Romantics elevated to the status of the highest power of mind,
a value that was particularly important to Williams’s poetic praxis. The unity sought by the
Romantics, however, was often more an awareness of oneness between the self and the
world, while Waite and Williams very much sought a threefold unity of self, world, and God.
54
Hadfield, Introduction, 11.
Waite, Shadows, 238.
56
Waite, Secret Doctrine in Israel, 191, 226; Holy Kabbalah, 342, 370. Gershom Scholem
states that the actual Hebrew term has no sexual or erotic connotation (Major Trends, 222-23). On
the history and authorship of the Zohar, see Scholem, Kabbalah, 57–59.
57
Waite, “Thomas Vaughan,” 90; Williams, Witchcraft, 230-31. Also see Ashenden, Charles
Williams, 118–30.
55
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
17
A Brief History of Williams Scholarship
Given the similarities between the mystical philosophies of both men, it is unlikely
that Waite’s writings and personal influence did not significantly define Williams’s own
thought, particularly with reference to his understanding of the esoteric traditions. Most of
these influences are widely recognized in current scholarship, but I have reviewed them as
important background to an issue that has been much more contentious—the association
of Waite and Williams to occultism.
Critics have produced a wide range of reactions to this question. R.A. Gilbert portrays
Waite as a Christian mystic, while Leon Floquet, in an 1898 attack on English
Freemasonry, accused Waite of devil worship and argued that his writings and his
participation in masonic Rosicrucian societies such as the Golden Dawn showed him to be
one of the leading promoters of “mystico-magical” luciferianism in England.58 Williams has
been hagiographied by his biographer, Alice Mary Hadfield, as a “twice each Sunday”
church going saint with “extraordinary intellectual and spiritual powers,”59 while Theodore
Maynard (1890-1956), a literary critic of the period, decided that Williams was a Satanist
after reading his Poems of Conformity (1917) and wrote a scathing review of the
collection.60 Those scholars who maintain an image of Waite and Williams as modern
Christian saints in the making tend to deny or reduce their interest in esotericism,
particularly in its modern occult forms, while accusations like Floquet’s and Maynard’s tend
to emerge from a radical misunderstanding of the marked presence of esoteric themes in
their work, based in a prejudice against esoteric or occult traditions derived from the Grand
Polemical Narrative discussed above.
Though recent scholarship on Williams displays some problematic discourses in
relation to his involvement with Waite and with esotericism in general, earlier scholars
tended to ignore both Waite’s influence and the presence of esoteric symbolism and
philosophy altogether. Williams scholarship began to develop in the late 1950s with the
publication of Hadfield’s biographical work, An Introduction to Charles Williams (1959).
58
Floquet, Luciferianism, 53. Also see Gilbert, “Masonic Career,” 10.
Hadfield, Exploration, 16.
60
Henderson, ““It is Love that I am Seeking,” 132. Maynard later retracted this accusation,
saying that Williams had “established for himself a philosophical point of contact between
Paganism and the Christian Faith.”
59
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
18
Interest in Williams was assisted by the growth of a small but vibrant school of Inklings
research that provided a vehicle for publication of articles and books on Williams, usually
accompanied by corresponding research on Tolkien, Lewis, and (less often) their
colleague, Owen Barfield (1898–1997), a follower of Anthroposophy.61 Most scholars from
1950–80 were interested in Williams for his contributions to Christian theology, though
sustained research on his poetry and novels was also completed. Despite the notable
presence of esoteric themes and symbolism in Williams’s writing however, Thomas
Howard, the most well known critic of his fiction in the period, managed to conclude that
Williams was not interested in the occult at all, except perhaps for an early period of his
life. Occult symbolism, in Howard’s opinion, was simply present in Williams’s novels as a
vehicle for the imagination.62 These early scholars seemed dimly aware of Waite’s
possible influence on Williams’s work, but generally tended to ignore it.63
Scholars writing before 1987 must be forgiven for these omissions however, as they
were forced to rely solely on Hadfield’s biography, which, though strong in a number of
other areas, contains very little of value regarding his esoteric interests. Hadfield omits
Williams’s membership in the F.R.C., either because she was unaware of it, or because
she wanted to keep it secret. For example, she says that in 1924 Williams had “no social
background, no contacts of neighbourhood, club or hobby,”64 this despite the fact that
Williams was in fact deeply involved with the F.R.C. at the time. In that year he acted as
Master of the Temple (the highest rank in the Order after Waite’s rank of Imperator) and
received his promotion to the highest achievable grade of Adeptus Exemptus, 7=4 on 10
July.65 Later scholars have continued to trust Hadfield as a reliable source despite such
errors, and in spite of the fact that she and other scholars of her day were naturally
hampered by a lack of available contextual scholarship related to the esoteric traditions
which Williams so frequently explored.66
61
See Carpenter, Inklings; Reilly, Romantic Religion; Hillegas, ed. Shadows of Imagination.
This last volume contains several essays particularly devoted to Williams.
62
Howard, Novels of Charles Williams, 23-24, 257. Howard, like most early Williams scholars,
does not differentiate between “occult” and “esoteric.”
63
On problems in early Williams scholarship see McLaren, “Hermeticism,” 14; Lindop,
“Charles Williams,” 15.
64
Hadfield, Introduction, 68.
65
Records of the Holy House, 136.
66
Those who did try to attend to the esoteric imagery in Williams’s work had trouble describing
it in terms other than “sorcery”, “witchcraft”, and “black magic”. George P. Winship, for example,
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
19
In 1987 however, Williams scholars were given a much needed boost by R.A.
Gilbert’s biography, A.E. Waite: A Magician of Many Parts. Gilbert, aided by access to a
collection of the minutes and rituals of the F.R.C., showed that Williams was an involved
member of the F.R.C. for ten years, from 1917-1927.67 Gilbert’s book also allowed easier
access to Waite’s life and thought, as well as a better understanding of the ritual activity of
the F.R.C., though he elects not to include many specifics out of respect for the order’s
secrecy.68 Gilbert also calls out Williams scholars, quite rightly, for playing down the
influence of Waite and the F.R.C. because of worries about discrediting Williams by
associating him with the Golden Dawn (confused for the F.R.C.), as well as concerns
about the effect an uneducated academic such as Waite might have had on “the literary
figure they seek to lionize.” In taking such an approach, says Gilbert, “They perpetuate not
only their own prejudices but also errors of fact in the biography of Charles Williams.”69
Following the publication of Gilbert’s biography, scholars seem to have felt much more
able to tackle the issue of Williams’s interest in esotericism, usually through the lens of
Gilbert’s summary of Waite’s philosophy. Few scholars would now question the presence
of esoteric currents in Williams’s work, particularly in his novels and poetry.70
Problems remain, however. Williams scholars wish to wade into the question of his
interest in esotericism but lack the knowledge and methodological tools to properly do so.
who must above all be credited for even daring to tackle the issue in a 1969 essay, observes that
“it is a bold scholar who would trace [Williams’s] steps in the dark and tulgey wood of witchcraft”
(“Novels of Charles Williams,” 115).
67
Thomas Willard is the only other scholar (that I am aware of) who has had access to these
materials, though he doesn’t seem to have reviewed them in full. With the permission of the
Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica (B.P.H.) in Amsterdam, I have also been able to consult the
rituals and minutes of the F.R.C.. Most of the rituals from the lower three orders are available on
the web in various locations, but I have only been able to find the rituals of the Fourth Order at the
B.P.H.. Israel Regardie printed the rituals for the F.R.C. grades of Neophyte and Adeptus Minor in
1984 (Complete Golden Dawn, Vol. 7, 60–126), but I have found no Williams scholar who seems
to have consulted them. Regardie also printed what he claimed to be the Adeptus Major ritual of
the F.R.C. (127–58), but a comparison with the document at the B.P.H. indicates that it comes
from another source, likely the Independent and Rectified Rite of the R.R. et A.C., begun by Waite
after the split of the Golden Dawn in 1903.
68
Gilbert, A.E. Waite, 142n1. While I admire Gilbert’s ethic in this respect, I have chosen to
include elements of the F.R.C.’s rituals, as they are crucial to understanding Williams’s relationship
to occultism and some of the central themes of his novels.
69
Gilbert, A.E. Waite, 148.
70
For some of the best scholarship on Williams and esotericism see Newman, “Companions
of the Co-inherence”; Willard, “Acts of the Companions”; MacLaren, “Hermeticism”; Ashenden,
Charles Williams.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
20
Rather than contextualize esoteric elements of Williams’s thought using sources from
contemporary research produced in the growing field of Western esotericism, Williams
scholars tend to rely on older, somewhat outdated research materials. Waite is often used
as one of these outdated sources, even as he is concurrently included as a personal factor
in analysis of Williams’s beliefs. Those who take this last approach are left quite unable to
objectively analyze Williams’s employment of esoteric philosophy, since Waite rarely
communicated esoteric doctrine without attaching value judgments of his own. Most
crucially, scholars quickly become confused by Waite’s frequent polemics against
particular schools of modern occultism. I do not wish to be misunderstood here—I am not
accusing Williams scholars of laziness, malfeasance, or deliberate ignorance. Esoteric
knowledge, almost by definition, is not disseminated widely to the general public. Any
researcher wishing to determine the extent of Williams’s interest in esotericism, let alone
his specific modern occult adaptations, is required to pore through tomes of information,
both primary and secondary, in an effort to approach Williams’s esoteric context from an
angle even remotely similar to the context experienced by the author himself. Williams had
a lifetime to gain his esoteric perspective, an opportunity rarely possessed by his critics,
myself included. Nevertheless, lack of knowledge is not an excuse for jumping to
convenient conclusions, and this, unfortunately, has commonly been done, especially
when it comes to avoiding connections between Williams and occultism.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
21
2) Constructing a “Cordon Sanitaire”: Two Artificial Dichotomies
Occultism vs. Mysticism
Gilbert’s proof of the extent of Williams’s involvement with the F.R.C. has cleared
some of the air around the cloudy question of Williams’s esoteric interests, but has further
obscured other questions, particularly that of his relation to occultism. Scholars of both
Williams studies and Western esotericism owe Gilbert a great debt, as his survey of
Waite’s life and thought is clear, concise, and manages to synthesize tens of thousands of
pages of published texts, as well as unpublished letters, diary entries, and manuscripts,
into a volume of just under two hundred pages that faithfully represents Waite in almost
every regard.1 However, Gilbert sometimes seems a little too close to his subject, as he
develops a picture of Waite’s relationship to occultism that too faithfully represents the
picture that Waite develops for himself, particularly in his autobiography, Shadows of Life
and Thought (1938). Gilbert distances Waite from occultism, following Waite’s construction
of a distinct dichotomy between occultism and his own mystical philosophy and practice,
largely without questioning Waite’s motives or attempting to contextualize his claims in
comparison with other occultists or mystics.2 A reevaluation of Waite’s claim from a nonpolemical standpoint shows that the situation is much more complex than Waite’s
dichotomy indicates. He frequently incorporated occult elements into his mystical
philosophy with one hand, while polemicizing against artificially reified traditions of “magic”
and “the occult” with the other.
Waite stated in his biography that he began turning “far from things occult” as early
as 1890, when he was “moving ever further from the false dreams of occult philosophy and
practice.”3 However, these recollections of an earlier time, formed much later in 1938,
1
See Gilbert, “Masonic Career,” 1, for a list of sources in the collection from which he worked
to write his biography. This is the same collection now housed at the B.P.H..
2
Antoine Faivre takes an opposing view, stating that Waite was “a very important author
whose works are resolutely in the line of the occultist movement of his period” (Western
Esotericism, 82). Gilbert himself seems to hold some of the same polemical views of occultism that
Waite frequently expressed, as he refers to masonic groups not focused on inward spirituality as
“falling into the follies of occultism” (“Masonic Career,” 31), and says that those who prioritize
Waite’s studies of occultism over his mystical writings represent “the folly of an age that exalts the
irrational” (A.E. Waite, 13).
3
Waite, Shadows, 127, 146.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
22
represent a highly problematic simplification of his relationship with occult ideas and
society. It is certainly true that Waite frequently criticized occultists and separated his own
ideas from what he considered to be occultism proper. His criticisms revolved around two
central problems with modern occult applications of esoteric knowledge. His first criticism
was largely that of the amateur scholar—he felt that occultists willfully ignored the
historical context of the esoteric traditions they pursued. Waite would no doubt have
sympathized greatly with Adorno’s description of occultism as the “metaphysic of dunces,”
as he attacked groups such as the Theosophical Society for their “lush growth of weedy
wonder and concern over things occult,” pursued along “putative paths of power and
distracted paths of research,” rather than in a proper historical vein.4 Waite particularly
focused this critique on Lévi and Mathers, even though his own approach to the esoteric
traditions bears the clear influence of both men, as we will see.5 Waite’s other central
contention was that occultism was dangerous. This accusation was twofold. First, Waite
followed the centuries old Christian accusation that magical power was evil because it was
a desire after personal power.6 Second, and more importantly, he felt that occultists
focused on the phenomenal—on the personal gain and personal transformation they could
achieve within the material sphere rather than the spiritual—and thus were distracted from
their true mystic calling. “Phenomenal occultism and all its arts,” said Waite in 1913,
“Indifferently connect with the tradition of the mystics: they are the path of illusion by which
the psychic nature of man enters that other path which goes down into the abyss.”7
However, Waite’s actual attitude toward occultism, even its phenomenal aspects, is
much more complex than has been acknowledged. Each of Waite’s criticisms of modern
occultists contains elements of hypocrisy. Despite his attack on the “weedy wonder” of
occultists, his concept of the Secret Tradition mirrors the “programmatic syncretism” of
modern occultism, as it is essentially a body of knowledge assembled ahistorically from a
4
Adorno, “Theses Against Occultism,” 175; Waite, Shadows, 145; Divine Union, 26.
Waite’s reasons for focusing his polemics on particular occultists and not on others are
unclear. For example, despite being subject to frequent public attacks from Aleister Crowley
(1875–1947), Waite never retaliated, even though Crowley, a well-known occultist who embraced
many of the occult characteristics Waite criticized, would have made a very suitable “other” for his
polemics. Waite may have intended a retaliation against Crowley in his reference to Mathers as a
“mentor stultorum”, or “teacher of fools” (Book of Ceremonial Magic, 2). Mathers acted as
Crowley’s mentor in the latter’s early years.
6
Waite, Book of Ceremonial Magic, 336.
7
Ibid., 2.
5
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
23
variety of esoteric traditions for the purpose of revealing a hidden, perennial truth beneath
them. Moreover, Waite attempts to draw a stark dichotomy between his own mysticism
and occultism based on the distractions of the phenomenal world, but there are two
problems with this approach. First, in the above statement from 1913, Waite specifically
quantifies the target of his polemic as phenomenal occultism, thus implicitly assuming the
existence of a more speculative form of occultism to which his criticism does not apply
and, presumably, which he continued to value. This dichotomy reflects a distinction made
by scholars such as Edward A. Tiryakian and Mircea Eliade, who make a distinction
between theoretical esotericism as “esotericism” and a practical form of esotericism as
“occultism.” In a similar manner, Waite attempts to absorb speculative forms of esoteric
knowledge into his philosophy as “mystical” and reject practical forms as “occult.”
However, I follow Hanegraaff’s rejection of this distinction, which is based on Robert
Galbreath’s observation that practicing occultists would not accept a separation of
theoretical knowledge from personal participation and development of the self.8 On the
surface of things, Waite does not follow Galbreath’s position, as he very much encourages
such a separation, but when we take a closer look at his actual philosophy and practice in
chapters three to five, we will see that he merged speculative esoteric knowledge with
practical, ritual activities intended to transmute the self and elevate consciousness in
precisely the manner that Galbreath describes.
The second contradictory element in Waite’s distinction is that though he rejected
phenomenal occultism as unimportant for the mystic path, he saw esoteric symbolism as a
vital part of the mystic journey right up until the ultimate stage of unio mystica. As we have
seen, Waite saw symbols as tools with which to effect the elevation of mystical
consciousness through the power of contemplation and imagination. This was particularly
important to the ritual activity of the F.R.C.. The importance of symbolism was
communicated to adepts in the process of ascent to the grade of Adeptus Minor, the first
rite of the Fellowship’s inner Third Order, where the initiate began the process of
transmutation needed before further ascent toward the divine could be accomplished:
“There is no object in nature, no memorial in the written word of grace which cannot be
used [as a symbol]. There is above all no conception, whether of Divine Things and
8
Hanegraaff, New Age, 422; Galbreath, “Explaining Modern Occultism,” 17-18.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
24
Persons, or of saints also and angels, which will not open to us great vistas of secret
knowledge by this philosophical solution.”9 Despite his usual dismissal of occultism, this
broad-based embrace of the power of symbol seems to have complicated the issue for
Waite more than he usually let on. The language he employs in his biography of the
French mystic, Louis Claude de Saint-Martin (1743–1803), reflects this gradient: “It
happens quite often that where occultism is about on the surface there is mysticism
somewhere behind.”10 This same idea appears in Shadows of Life and Thought, where
Waite describes himself as having ascended toward unio mystica through the phenomenal
mediation of symbols, in a manner similar to many occultists of his period who used the
symbolism of the kabbalistic Tree of Life to effect an elevation of consciousness: “As one
who ascends the Tree of Life, I have passed upwards clothed in Symbols and have dwelt
amidst a ministry of images.”11 It must be noted that Waite does maintain a distinction
between practical esotericism as occult and speculative esotericism as mystical, as he
believed that the reliance on symbols to ascend toward the divine must cease in order to
achieve actual unio mystica.12 Still, Waite’s immanent cosmology and Romantic ethic
required him to value the material world for purposes that recall Hegel’s attempt to
overcome Kant’s dichotomy between phenomenal and noumenal by proposing different
stages of knowledge available through the contemplation of phenomenal objects. The
mind, in Hegel’s Phenomenology, comes to awareness of Spirit and comes to know its
own essence through studying spiritual manifestations in phenomena.13 Though the
ultimate goal of Waite as mystic was “to lose the symbols in their meanings,”14 he certainly
continued to value the symbolic power of the esoteric traditions in much the same way as
his modern occult contemporaries.15
9
Waite, “Adeptus Minor,” 49.
Waite, Saint-Martin, 8.
11
Waite, Shadows, 277. On the Golden Dawn’s use of sephirotic symbolism to effect mystical
experience, see Owen, Place of Enchantment, 73, and Chapters Three and Five below. For a
diagram of the Tree of Life as commonly pictured in modern occultism, see Figure 1.1.
12
Waite, A Manual of Cartomancy, 126.
13
Allen, “Phenomenology of Religion,” 206.
14
Waite, “Adeptus Minor,” 49.
15
Waite, Divine Union, 187. Waite’s concept of union with the divine owes much to the
Christian mystical tradition, and particularly to Meister Eckhart (1260-1329), often credited with
generating the idea that the divine lives within the self and is always discoverable by the self.
Eckhart posited that God and the soul are always already one and that the task of one seeking to
experience unio mystica is therefore to empty oneself of material distractions through perfect self10
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
25
Waite’s binary opposition between occultism and his own mystical philosophy is thus
an example of Gerd Baumann’s theory that between every such opposition, constructed
for the purposes of defining the self in relation to a projected “other,” there is a liminal
space in which a ternary principle will inevitably be found.16 Baumann offers Edward Said’s
famous concept of Orientalism as an example of one of three types of identity construction
in which such a third principle will be operative. Baumann points out that Said’s
presentation of the construction of Western identity as rational and progressive, as
opposed to non-Western others as superstitious and backwards, includes a component in
which Westerners treasure this non-Western other for the spontaneity and richness which
they perceive their own culture to have lost, and seek to incorporate these elements back
into Western culture in order to regenerate it.17 Waite is an individual example of such
“reverse mirror-imaging.”18 He constructed his identity as a mystic by rejecting occultism
as mysticism’s phenomenal other, concerned only with the insignificant intrigues of
practical magic and the development of personal power.
An intriguing passage in Studies in Mysticism (1906) reveals that Waite understood
the discursive power of transforming terms such as ‘occult’ and ‘mystic’ and contrasting
them against each other. Waite argues that there are certain terms between which an
opposition becomes constructed over time, “although it is not justified by their primary
significance.” He gives the example of the “very clear differentiation” which has come to
exist between ‘occult’ and ‘mystic’, although, “fundamentally speaking, the two words are
identical.” Despite their original similarity of meaning in earlier times, Waite states that we
have come to understand the occultist as the disciple of one or all of “the secret
sciences”—he gives the examples of alchemy, astrology, divination, and magic—while the
mystic “has no concern as such with [their] study.”19 Given this obvious awareness of the
discursive power to be gained by contrasting the two terms, based in a conscious
reflection of their pre-existing binary usage in general society, Waite’s dichotomy between
annihilation in order to be able to understand this oneness. See Cohn-Sherbok and Cohn-Sherbok,
“Jewish and Christian Mysticism, 111-12; Forman, The Innate Capacity, 9. A full contextualization
of Waite’s mystical philosophy within the history of Christian mysticism is still to be written. Waite
himself wrote frequently on the subject however. See Waite, Divine Union; Studies in Mysticism.
16
Baumann, Grammars of Identity, 33–36.
17
Ibid., 20–21.
18
Ibid., 20.
19
Waite, “The Life of the Mystic,” 29–30; reprinted in Studies in Mysticism, 5-6.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
26
the occultism of the “other” and his own mysticism should be seen as a boundary quite
purposefully carved across an otherwise diverse esoteric spectrum in which the distinction
between the two was actually much more complex. At the time he discussed these
discursive aspects, Waite regarded the opposition between the two terms as largely
analogical, but in later years he put up a high boundary fence between the two, strung with
the sharp barbwire of polemic, likely for the purpose (whether conscious or unconscious)
of consolidating his identity as a mystic. Despite his polemics however, Waite’s actual
stance toward occultism continued to occupy Baumann’s liminal ternary space, as he
never stopped interacting with the esoteric traditions in a manner that reflected much of
the Zeitgeist, function, and values of modern occultism.
This reevaluation has been necessary because Waite’s dichotomy between
occultism and mysticism, often connected to a similar distinction between magic and
mysticism, has been projected onto Williams by a number of scholars.20 A central problem
with this projection, however, is that Williams himself never stated a clear aversion to
occultism, and did not try to separate his Romantic Theology from its esoteric influences or
occult context. Williams’s clearest statement on his opinion of modern occultism is found in
an essay on the doctrine of correspondences, “The Index of the Body,” where he says,
“The word “occult” has come into general use, and is convenient, if no moral sense is
given it simply as itself. It deals with hidden things, and their investigation. But in this case
we are concerned not so much with the pretended operations of those occult schools as
with a certain imagination of relation in the universe, and that only to pass beyond it.”21
Williams refers to the word “occult” partly in its longue durée sense, as the study of “hidden
things,” but he also refers to its contemporary usage, and it is clear that his opinion on
modern occultism has much more complexity than Waite’s stark dichotomy would allow.
Williams takes a dismissive stance to the “pretended operations of those occult schools,” a
vague term that could refer to any number of esoteric movements throughout history, but
which probably does contain some of Waite’s rejection of the phenomenal concerns of
occultism. However, his valuation of the “imagination of relation in the universe” is very
much in line with the magical praxis of many occultists of his time, who held that magic
20
See McLaren, “Hermeticism,” 3; Roma A. King, Pattern in the Web, 165; Ashenden, Charles
Williams, 52, 55.
21
Williams, “Index of the Body,” 83.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
27
was essentially a process of psychological transformation through the power of
imagination. Williams thus values the adeptship of interaction with symbolic imagery
pursued and generated by occultism even more than Waite. Williams is well known to
have been different from most Christian mystics in that he changed the usual balance of
the via negativa and via affirmativa of pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.22 Williams
respected the via negativa usually pursued in Christian mysticism, an ascetic path that
rejects the world in order to detach the soul from the love of things that are not God, but he
placed this path much lower in his system than the via affirmativa. In this “way of
affirmation” Williams placed a high value on materiality and earthly experience, based on
the virtue of God’s immanence in the world.23 Like Waite, Williams saw the extension of
the mystic quest as ultimately imageless and transcendent, but he affirmed the importance
of the elements of nature and the symbols derived from human expression as vital not just
to his mystic life, but to his life as poet and lover as well.
Despite the openness to aspects of occult philosophy and practice enabled by
Williams’s “way of affirmation,” scholars have constructed what Ashenden calls a “cordon
sanitaire” around Williams’s work. Ashenden defines the cordon sanitaire in relation to
alchemy, observing that Christian academics have been leery about Williams’s interest in
the subject because it incorporates “pre-Christian” elements. However, says Ashenden,
those who wish to distance Waite and Williams from alchemy are not following their true
interests. Ashenden’s criticism can be extended much further than the domain of alchemy.
Scholars have constructed a cordon sanitaire to protect Williams’s work from association
with a variety of other esoteric traditions, particularly those related to modern occultism,
despite their clear importance for his work.24 Ashenden himself sets up a barrier around
modern occultism. He observes that T.S. Eliot described Williams as an “occult writer,” but
assumes, without offering any evidence, that Eliot used the word “occult” in its “primary
and literal sense of “hidden.”” Typical of a cordon sanitaire approach, Ashenden proceeds
22
See Cohn-Sherbok and Cohn-Sherbok, “Jewish and Christian Mysticism,” 159.
Williams, “The Way of Affirmation,” 154. C.f. Ridler, introduction to Image of the City, xxxix—
xl; Heath-Stubbs, Charles Williams, 15–16.
24
The influential literary critic, F.R. Leavis, states that Williams’s interest in the occult can’t be
missed if “you approach as a literary critic, unstiffened by the determination to “discriminate
Christianly,”” and concludes that this interest means his work should be rejected on a spiritual
level: “To pass off his writings as spiritually edifying is to promote the opposite of spiritual health”
(The Common Pursuit, 253).
23
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
28
to state that only “commentators with less precision” would assume that Eliot meant to
associate Williams with occultism.25
When Williams’s esoteric interests are admitted by scholars, they are described as a
return to the “hermetic culture” of the Renaissance and the Early Modern period,26 or
dismissed as simply a method for either “expounding the doctrines of Christianity,”27 or
vivifying his poetry and prose on a mythopoeic level.28 While all of the above descriptions
have a good degree of merit, these explanations risk glossing over the deep meanings
Williams extracted from the esoteric cultural milieu of his own time, as well as the
continuities that exist between his own life and the occult themes, symbolism, and
characterization in his novels and poetry. Moreover, such simplifications commit a frequent
error of scholarship identified by Kennet Granholm, who points out, speaking generally of
scholarly analysis of esoteric currents in cultural products such as books and music, that
scholars tend to separate “real” esotericism from “simulacrum” forms found in popular
culture. Granholm notes the near impossibility of separating the real from the artificial
forms of esoteric expression in the study of popular culture—a category in which
Williams’s fiction certainly falls—and advises that it is best to do away with assumptions
that a cultural product may not reflect serious esoteric expression because it is an artistic
creation.29 In the case of Charles Williams it is particularly advisable to avoid such a
separation, as it is clear when reading his fiction, as John Heath-Stubbs states, that he
held the ideas he employed for the purposes of entertainment “with profound
seriousness.”30
Occultism vs. Christianity
Another common cordon sanitaire argument in Williams scholarship is that he was
interested in occultism in his early years, but made the switch to orthodox Christianity in
his “mature” years, a change that is often described in heavily value-laden language.
25
Ashenden, Charles Williams, vii.
Ibid., 232.
27
Cavaliero, introduction to Letters to Lalage, 4.
28
Mordecai, “Charles Williams,” 268; Roma A. King, “Mythical Poetry,” 11-13; Cavaliero, Poet
of Theology, 4; Winship, “The Novels,” 118.
29
Granholm, “Ritual Black Metal,” 8.
26
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
29
Ashenden, for example, states that while the early novels contain “explicit hermetic
culture,” the later novels feature “the more traditional language of [a] Christian dynamic.”31
This argument strengthens the cordon sanitaire because it allows authors to acknowledge
esoteric symbols and themes in the novels, while simultaneously liberating Williams
scholars from their anxiety that their “spiritual exemplar” may have been permanently
tainted by occultism. However, positions like Cavaliero’s are complicated by the significant
presence of magical, kabbalistic, and alchemical motifs of a particular occult bent in even
the latest of Williams’s works. All Hallows Eve, his last novel, and The Region of the
Summer Stars (1944), his last collection of poetry, thoroughly review a variety of aspects
of magical practice.32 Thomas Willard, who takes a refreshingly open-minded approach to
many aspects of Williams’s interest in esotericism, offers a more balanced approach to the
issue, but still relies on a distinction between Williams and occultism based on his
Christian identity: “Insofar as the occult was opposed to religion, and in particular to the
Christian religion, it was obnoxious to Waite no less than it was to Williams. Insofar as the
word “occult” was compatible with religion, it seemed useful enough.”33 Despite Willard’s
more nuanced approach, the statement that Waite and Williams only found the occult
valuable if they could incorporate it with Christianity is an example of a typical strategy in
constructing a cordon sanitaire argument. Like Ashenden’s approach above, Willard’s
statement allows him to grant Williams his occult cake, but on no terms allow that he might
ever have eaten of it.
To be clear, Williams’s view of occultism certainly did change over the course of his
life. Moreover, I am not in any way trying to suggest that he was not a Christian. He was
clearly a devout Anglican, and Christian theology and symbolism are vital to his work and
philosophy. However, he would not have been interested in the exclusivity cast upon his
work and thought by the cordon sanitaire. He would likely have looked quizzically upon
30
Heath-Stubbs, Charles Williams, 8.
Ashenden, Charles Williams, 72. Cf. Cavaliero, “Gavin Ashenden,” 4.
32
“The Calling of Taliessen” (Region of the Summer Stars, 12–17) is particularly laden with
magical symbolism, much of it positively presented.
33
Willard, “Acts of the Companions,” 278-79. Interpretations based on Christian exclusivity are
a chronic problem in Williams scholarship. For further examples see Cavaliero, Poet of Theology,
173; Hefling, “Words, Images, and (the) Incarnation,” 76; Ashenden, Charles Williams, 79, 125;
Irwin, “Christian Doctrine,” 139; Howard, Novels of Charles Williams, 233–34; Lewis, “Arthurian
Poems of Charles Williams,” 107.
31
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
30
Hadfield’s statement that he was “the great protagonist of Christianity as alone among
religious revelations exposing and defining the glory of mortal flesh,” particularly as he is
well known for disdaining Christianity’s history of aversion to physicality because it
obscured the correspondence between divine and human love essential to Romantic
Theology.34 As we have seen, Williams’s Romantic Theology was based in a universal
wisdom narrative not exclusive to Christianity. Williams often chose his own Christian
tradition as the vehicle through which to express the tenets of Romantic Theology, but
ultimately he describes the experience of love, and its ability to connect humans to the
divine, as a universal experience: “Romantic lovers in any part or in any age of the world
have achieved their proper end under whatever creed they professed. The present
business is merely the formulation of Christian theology; not a denial or correction of
others.”35 This example of Williams’s view of himself as working with universal principles
within a Christian context provides an excellent framework for his approach to esoteric
ideas and symbolism. Williams saw no need to differentiate between doctrinal systems.
Elements of esoteric traditions such as magic, Kabbalah and alchemy, could be integrated
with Christian theology, even in their modern occult forms, with no need for a cordon
sanitaire. War in Heaven provides us with an extreme example of the integration of a
“rival” tradition with Christianity, as Gregory Persimmons, after frequently using black
magic to destroy his enemies and attempt possession of the Holy Grail, is told by a
mysterious divine messenger, “There shall be agreement with you also in the end, for you
have sought me and no other.”36 Persimmons sought the divine (symbolized by the Holy
Grail) through dark forms of goetic magic, which Williams usually presents in a negative
light. However, though he pursued union with a dark god, along dark pathways, it was still
God he looked for, as Williams saw the divine in everything, and everything in the divine.
Waite also accepted many symbolic pathways to union with God. He saw himself as
a Christian because he felt it important and natural that mystics be rooted in the original
faith system to which they were born, but ultimately he viewed the universal mystical
experience as “catholic to all ages,” all places, and all traditions.37 Waite saw the perennial
34
Hadfield, Introduction, 85. On Christianity’s failure to appreciate human physicality see
Williams, Romantic Theology, 9; Ridler, “Introduction,” xxxviii.
35
Williams, Romantic Theology, 8.
36
Williams, War in Heaven, 246.
37
Waite, Divine Union, 319.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
31
wisdom of the Secret Tradition as accessible through Christian theology, but also through
any other form of doctrine.38 He believed, however, that religious faith systems only
provide a limited expression of the wisdom available through mystical experience, which
transcends the limitations of the material world. According to Waite, the primary value of
the various dogmas of the world’s faith traditions is their construction of symbolic tools that
can be used to attain unio mystica. This concept is clearly declared in the F.R.C.’s
Adeptus Minor ritual: “Under whatever names, and with whatsoever varieties of pageant
and established form, all true Rites and Mysteries, in respect of their intention, have been
ever but one Rite expounding one Mystery, which—to summarise it in all brevity—has
been the re-integration of man in God.39 Waite’s focus on the importance of the symbolic
systems of the natural world in guiding the adept toward unio mystica shows that he is, as
I have said, a proud panentheist. Any scholar wishing to limit Waite to Christian doctrine
alone should take heed to his purposeful distinction between Christian theology and his
own mystical panentheism: “The universe of Theology—as it seems to me—is a mighty
little thing, while that of which I conceive is without beginning or end.”40
Establishing Waite’s universalist approach to religion is important to our analysis of
Williams’s own approach to Christian doctrine, because Waite’s influence has been used
to reinforce the cordon sanitaire in this area as well. Despite his clear belief that the Secret
Tradition can be found beneath any form of religious doctrine, most Williams scholars have
insisted on seeing Waite as exclusively Christian and applying this view to their analysis.
This projection allows the assertion that the esoteric traditions Williams discovered in
Waite’s writings and in the F.R.C. had “already been Christianized.”41 This understanding
of Waite can be traced back to Gilbert, who argues, despite Waite’s frequent claim to have
lost his faith in Catholicism, that “he not only maintained his church attendance but
became a strident apologist for the Faith.”42 Gilbert tries to solidify Waite as an orthodox
38
Waite, Shadows, 196: “I know well enough that on ultimate realities…the East and West
speak the same language because they draw from the one Centre.”
39
Waite, “Adeptus Minor,” 37.
40
Waite, Shadows, 259-60.
41
McLaren, “Hermeticism,” 3; Ashenden, Charles Williams, 1, 71, 120.
42
Gilbert, A.E. Waite, 23. In an article published 25 years after his 1987 biography, Gilbert
adjusts his position on Waite’s relationship to Catholicism: “[Waite] could eschew Catholic dogma
while retaining its ritual, its atmosphere, and his own interpretation of the doctrines of the mystics
of the Church.” Gilbert presents a much more accurate picture in this later research, aligning Waite
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
32
Christian thinker by associating his claim to the mystical tradition solely with Christianity.
Gilbert relies heavily for his argument on the fact that Waite drew extensively from
Christian imagery and tradition in designing the rituals and theology of the F.R.C..43
However, Waite also relied heavily on other traditions, particularly Kabbalah, and was
insistent that they be seen in their authentic historical sense, not merely in their
“Christianized” versions.44
The need to cleanse esoteric knowledge and symbolism through some sort of
epistemological exorcism was not a concern for Waite. Thus, if scholars feel they must
apply Waite’s approach to Christianity to Williams as though they were joined at the
intellectual hip, it would be more accurate to respond to Waite’s influence by presenting
Williams as more removed from orthodox Christianity than by thrusting him toward it. This,
however, would be equally unwise, as comparisons between the two men on such issues
can only be taken so far. The dangers of over-comparison are clear from the way that
Waite has unjustifiably been used to fortify the walls that prevent occult connections to
Williams, thus obscuring the possibility that Williams’s thought could be concurrently
Christian and esoteric, Christian and occult.45 In Williams’s view, the incorporation of
esoteric currents and Christian theology did not demean his work—rather it enriched it.
Such distinctions emerge, I would suggest, from processes of identity construction
performed in the interest of scholars themselves, rather than out of a motivation to
accurately represent Williams. The separation of Williams from occultism allows scholars
to create an identity for him that is defined by an adherence to a reified form of “orthodox
Christianity” set in permanent opposition to an occult other. The logic then used to
distinguish Williams from occultism is that he simply could not have been interested
because he was a Christian. However, assuming that Williams’s work and theology can
and should be distinguished from modern occultism is highly problematic. Christianity can
only be set in direct opposition to occultism if both traditions are purposefully reified so that
all complexities are reduced from a broad spectrum of similarities and differences to a
less with the church and more with “a stable community of fellow believers who engaged in the
“practical mysticism” of his Rosicrucian Order” (“The One Thought,” 251).
43
Gilbert, A.E. Waite, 142, 146.
44
Waite, Doctrine and Literature of the Kabbalah, 121.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
33
simple “us and them” binary. Indeed, there are many examples of both Christians and
occultists making such a reduction. Christians, following in the tradition of the Grand
Polemical Narrative identified by Hanegraaff, have often constructed their own identity as
characterized by elements such as monotheism, light, goodness, and humility, in
opposition to occultists as connected to superstitious pagan elements, darkness, evil, and
the will to power. Meanwhile, a number of occultists embraced Christian polemics against
esoteric thought as a crucial strategic element in defining their own identity through alterity.
Aleister Crowley is the most famous example. After a childhood spent in a strict Plymouth
Brethren community, he set himself up in polar opposition to Christianity and its traditional
values, embracing practical magic, experimenting with a wide range of sexual acts, and
identifying himself as the great Beast of Revelation. Such opposition to Christianity has
been defined by scholars such as Marco Pasi and Leon Surette as one of the defining
characteristics of modern occultism.46 I tend to agree more with Liz Greene, however, who
takes a more inclusive view of the issue, arguing that most modern occultists took a
“heterodox but nevertheless broadly Christian” approach to their beliefs and activities.47
The virulent anti-Christian stance taken by some occultists is an important feature of the
movement and certainly shouldn’t be ignored, but ultimately Crowley’s approach to
Christianity was a minority position. I would argue that most occultists occupied
Baumann’s ternary—the liminal space that will inevitably be found between binary
opposites. These were occultists like Anna Kingsford, both an influential member of the
Theosophical Society and a professed Christian. Kingsford held heterodox theological
views—she denied a historical basis for Christianity, did not see Jesus as the sole route to
salvation, and did not elevate Christianity above other religions—but she adhered to a
Christian identity nonetheless.48 Eliphas Lévi is also an important example as he had an
45
As proposed by Gareth Knight (Magical World of Charles Williams, 11). Knight, a former
member of Dion Fortune’s Society of Inner Light, has himself synthesized occult and Christian
worldviews (King, Ritual Magic, 158).
46
Pasi, “Occultism,” 1366; Surette, Birth of Modernism, 94.
47
Greene, Magi and Magiddim, 125.
48
Joscelyn Godwin states that Kingsford was a very important influence on other occultists
who merged Christianity with esoteric thought, including Annie Besant (1847–1933), a leader of
the Theosophical Society, her friend and fellow explorer of esoteric knowledge, the Rev. C.W.
Leadbeater (1854–1934), and “the Christian parts” of the philosophy of Alice A. Bailey (1880–
1949) an influential figure in Theosophy who has been credited with creating the foundations of the
New Age movement (Theosophical Enlightenment, 346). Cf. Pasi, “Modernity of Occultism,” 67.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
34
enormous impact on the development of modern occultism. Levi valued magic and
Kabbalah, which he considered to be ancient traditions that originated with Zoroaster, but
he believed that Christianity became the true guardian of these traditions at the time of the
birth of Jesus, after which esoteric knowledge pursued outside the Roman Catholic church
lost all legitimacy.49 Charles Williams occupied a similar position in the liminal space
between the artificial binaries of orthodox Christianity and occult thought. His synthesis of
the two overthrows the dichotomy that has been assumed by many scholars.
Hanegraaff observes that there “always yawns an abyss” between the way
mainstream polemical accounts represent esoteric thought and its advocates and how
they are found to be once critical historical research has gone beyond polemical
assumptions to actual fact. The mission for those who study Western esotericism, he
continues, is to correct skewed views of Western culture that have resulted from this abyss
by depending less on “hegemonic claims and ideologies” and more on historical
analysis.50 The remainder of this thesis seeks to do just that. I will attempt to correct the
gap between the cordon sanitaire picture of Charles Williams and the more complex
actuality of his relationship with modern occultism. I will do this through a specific
examination of three aspects of Williams’s life and thought that display this complexity: his
experience in the F.R.C., his theory of magic, and his interest in Kabbalah. Since the
influence of Waite has been cited in almost every attempt to separate Williams from
occultism, I will include Waite’s perspectives and their influence (or lack thereof) on
Williams.
49
Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, 245–47. For Lévi on the importance of
maintaining involvement in the Catholic church, see Book of Splendours, 139–42.
50
Hanegraaff, “Trouble with Images,” 111.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
35
3) In Search of the Higher Self: Charles Williams in the F.R.C.
The History and Structure of the F.R.C.
There is no better example of the complexity of the approach taken to modern
occultism by Waite than the blend of Rosicrucian, Freemasonic, kabbalistic, alchemical,
and magical symbolism and philosophy that Williams encountered in his ten year
involvement with the F.R.C.. Prior to the release of Gilbert’s Waite biography, Williams was
widely believed to have been a member of the Golden Dawn. This was based on reports
from friends who stated that Williams confided to them that he was a member. Thanks to
Gilbert, few scholars now see this as accurate. Even though he was thought to have been
a member of the Golden Dawn, however, early scholars tended to ignore the ramifications
of Williams’s suspected connections with this occult order. Following the publication of
Gilbert’s research, the question of Williams’s involvement with the F.R.C. has been much
more commonly addressed. A likely part of the reason for this is that Waite’s order offers
better prospects for maintaining the cordon sanitaire than does the Golden Dawn. Analysis
of Williams’s activities in the F.R.C. tends to dichotomize between the F.R.C. as mystical
and the Golden Dawn as magical and occult. This dichotomy stems in part from Waite’s
polemical distancing of his order from “lesser circles of initiation,”1 but the view of the
F.R.C. as “wholly mystical” and “wholly Christian” owes just as much to Gilbert, who has
been readily cited by Williams scholars anxious to uphold the cordon sanitaire.2 Ashenden,
for example, reassures us that the F.R.C. offered Williams an orthodox Christian
experience: “Those who misunderstand or know next to nothing about the nature of
Waite’s Rosicrucianism fear that Williams spoke from a position outside the boundaries of
Christian orthodoxy. That was not the case. In fact his use of that tradition enabled him,
after developing his own distinctive mythical framework and mythically charged language,
to speak remedially from within Christian culture.”3 Ashenden cautions that it is essential to
distinguish between the F.R.C. and the Golden Dawn because the latter group pursued
1
Waite, “Neophyte,” 41.
Gilbert, A.E. Waite, 142.
3
Ashenden, Charles Williams, viii. Willard takes a similar approach (“Acts of the Companions,”
272, 295).
2
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
36
goetic magic, “that is rather more “black” than “white,”” and was involved in “serious public
scandal.”4
A much more complex picture of the F.R.C. emerges, however, once the rituals,
professions, and constitution of the order are held up for examination. In the following
analysis of the initiatory experience that Charles Williams encountered in the F.R.C., I aim
to deconstruct the distinction between the F.R.C. and occult groups like the Golden Dawn
to show that while the F.R.C. was certainly Christian and mystical it also drew important
methods and concepts from modern occultism and shared its central aim of spiritual
attainment. Like any good simplistic polemic, the casting of the Golden Dawn as the
“other” of the F.R.C. has some accuracy. Certainly adepts on both sides would have
agreed that the Golden Dawn was much more interested in practical occult knowledge,
such as that employed in ritual magic. However, many specious assumptions are sowed
into the dichotomy as well. Without granting the possibility of a richer, more complex fabric
of interrelations between the F.R.C. and occultism, we cannot begin to properly
understand the initiatory experience that Williams found in Waite’s order. Without this
understanding, it will remain impossible to identify the roots and purpose of the symbolism
that Williams sowed through his novels and poetry.
Placing the F.R.C. in its modern occult context through comparisons with the Golden
Dawn is both natural and productive, as the latter society was very much a parent to its
rebellious Rosicrucian stepchild. Both orders were influenced by a number of previous
Rosicrucian groups. The first, and arguably the most influential order for both the F.R.C.
and the Golden Dawn, never actually existed. This was the original “Fraternity of the Rosy
Cross,” the purported authors of two manifestoes mysteriously released in early
seventeenth century Germany: the Fama Fraternitatis (1614) and the Confessio
Fraternitatis (1615). This secret brotherhood claimed that the body of their founder,
Christian Rosenkreutz, had recently been discovered in a hidden tomb, his body unmarked
by time, 120 years after his death. As I will discuss further on, this legend played an
important role in the rituals and symbolism of both the Golden Dawn and the F.R.C..
Further Rosicrucian orders would also play a role. Though the brotherhood announced in
the Fama was fictional, the manifestoes certainly kindled real interest in the concept of a
4
Ashenden, Charles Williams, 3.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
37
Rosicrucian secret society in the seventeenth century.5 It was not until the mid-eighteenth
century, however, that the first historically identifiable groups claiming Rosicrucian identity
formed in the the context of German Freemasonry. The first of these, the Gold- und
Rosenkreuzer, founded ca. 1763, was the source of the grade structure for a later masonic
Rosicrucian order, the Societas Rosicruciania in Anglia (S.R.I.A.—founded 1867), which in
turn provided the grades for the Golden Dawn’s Westcott, Woodman, and Mathers, all
members of the S.R.I.A. before they founded their new occult order in 1888.6
The F.R.C. also had roots in masonic Rosicrucianism. Like Westcott, Woodman and
Mathers, Waite was heavily involved with the S.R.I.A., in addition to other masonic groups,
partly in order to gain material for the construction of his own rites.7 Waite made no
attempt to attach himself to the mythical order attested in the Rosicrucian manifestoes, as
his research led him to conclude that the existence of such an order was unlikely.8
Nevertheless, like the founders of the Golden Dawn, he saw no harm in using the myth as
a symbolic vehicle for the transformative journey of the adepts in his order. The F.R.C.
also utilized a calendar system dating from the founding of the legendary Fraternity of the
manifestoes (in addition to the Gregorian calendar), so that, for example, an invitation to a
convocation sent in 1925 was dated the “Symbolical Year of the Order 547.”9 Waite
perceived his Fellowship as “the guardian of a path of symbolism communicated in Ritual
after the manner of the chief Instituted Mysteries, past and present.” The F.R.C. was
therefore the heir of past secret societies, including previous Rosicrucian groups based in
5
On the history of Rosicrucianism see McIntosh, Rosy Cross Unveiled; Edighoffer,
“Rosicrucianism I”; “Rosicrucianism II.” The Rosicrucian manifestoes are printed in the appendix of
Yates, Rosicrucian Enlightenment.
6
On the Gold- und Rosenkreuzer, see McIntosh, Rosy Cross Unveiled, 82–94. For its grade
structure, see 89. Another fictional Rosicrucian group lay behind the Golden Dawn as well, as
Westcott claimed to have received authorization for the founding of the order from a high ranking
adept named Anna Sprengel, a supposed member of a pre-existing German branch of the Golden
Dawn. Most scholars agree, however, that Westcott likely created both Sprengel and the German
Golden Dawn to legitimize the founding of his own order. See Howe, Magicians of the Golden
Dawn, 25; Bogdan, Rituals of Initiation, 125; Asprem, Arguing with Angels, 47. Gilbert, A.E. Waite,
105–07; McIntosh, “A Surprising Discovery.”
7
Waite, Shadows, 161; Gilbert, A.E. Waite, 128, 130. On Waite’s involvement with
Freemasonry, see Gilbert, A.E. Waite, 124–32; Gilbert, “Masonic Career.”
8
Waite, Doctrine and Literature of the Kabbalah, 365.
9
“Invitation to opening of the Portal of the Fourth Order from Sacramentum Regis to members
of the Ordo Sanctissimus Roseae et Aureae Crucis, 28 June 1925.” B.P.H.. Waite Collection.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
38
the “Speculative Art” of Freemasonry.10 In the twenty-first article of the “Constitution and
Laws of the Fellowship,” Waite specifically connects the F.R.C. to the Gold- und
Rosenkreuzer, or at least to the rise of masonic Rosicrucian groups in Germany, saying
that the history of the fellowship, “in one of its forms…is referable to the third quarter of the
18th century.”
This shared influence from groups like the Gold- und Rosenkreuzer and the S.R.I.A.
is an important subtext for examining the roots of the F.R.C. in the Golden Dawn, but
Waite’s 12 year on-again-off-again membership in the Golden Dawn was, of course, most
impactful. This membership ended with the Golden Dawn itself, as Waite led a minority
group of the members of the R.R. et A.C. in schism against the others, resulting in the
eventual breakup of the order into the Stella Matutina and the Independent and Rectified
Rite of the Rosae Rubeae et Aurae Crucis (I.R.R.), led by Waite and two others, which
maintained control of the group’s Isis-Urania Temple in London.11 The I.R.R. declared that
they intended to move toward a mystical instead of an occult construction of the Golden
Dawn’s ritual practices.12 In 1914 Waite closed the Isis-Urania Temple for good, citing his
disagreement on the authenticity of the cipher documents whose “discovery” by William
Westcott had originally resulted in the founding of the Golden Dawn.13 In 1915 Waite
launched the F.R.C. with the intention, he declared in the order’s constitution, of providing
an initiatory society “concerned only with the quest and attainment of the human soul on its
return to the Divine Centre.”14 The goal of the order was thus definitely mystical, but as
usual the interaction with symbols on a variety of levels of phenomenal understanding was
involved in attaining this goal.
Waite structured the F.R.C.’s grades after the Gold- und Rosenkreuzer system, and
also followed the Golden Dawn in linking each grade to one of the ten sephiroth on the
kabbalistic Tree of Life. The F.R.C., however, had four orders, with a total of eight
achievable grades, as opposed to the two orders and six grades of the Golden Dawn.
Waite likely assigned four orders to his grade system in order to make it better correspond
10
See the constitution of the F.R.C., printed in Gilbert, A.E. Waite, 184.
For the history of Waite’s involvement in the Golden Dawn, see Waite, Shadows, 121–33,
213–30; Gilbert, A.E. Waite, 109-26; Gilbert, Bibliography, 11.
12
Waite, Shadows, 228; Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 254–56.
13
For the complicated history of the cipher documents see Howe, Magicians of the Golden
Dawn, 1-25; Asprem, Arguing with Angels, 49.
11
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
Figure 1.1—Diagram of the Tree of Life15
14
15
Gilbert, A.E. Waite, 182.
Waite, Secret Doctrine in Israel, frontispiece.
39
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
40
to the Tree of Life, which is divided into four hierarchical worlds.16 The first world is Assiah,
the world of action, to which Waite assigned the grade of Neophyte and the grade of
Zelator, which both the Golden Dawn and F.R.C. equated with Malkuth, the lowest of the
ten sephiroth.17 Waite then assigned the Second Order grades of Theoreticus (the sephira
of Yesod), Practicus (Hod), and Philosophus (Netzach) to the second world, Yetzirah, the
world of formation. The Third Order grades of Adeptus Minor (Tiphareth), Adeptus Major
(Geburah), and Adeptus Exemptus (Chesed) corresponded to Briah, the world of
formation.18
The F.R.C.’s Fourth Order corresponded to the three highest sephiroth, known as the
“supernals”—Kether, Binah, and Chokmah—which make up Atziluth, the world of
emanation. However, there were no further grades above Adeptus Exemptus. At one point
Waite does refer to entrance in the Fourth Order as attainment of “that Grade which may
be called Adeptus Exaltatus,”19 but this is the closest he ever comes to identifying a grade
structure equivalent to the higher reaches of the Tree of Life, as there was no rank or
hierarchy in the Fourth Order because all initiates were “joined or integrated in the Holy
Assembly.”20 This hierarchy of levels of initiation mirrors the grade system of the Golden
Dawn up to the point of Adeptus Minor, but after this point Waite’s prioritization of mystical
experience is clearly visible, as higher orders did exist in the Golden Dawn but were
perceived as inaccessible to ordinary human adepts. The highest three grades of the
Golden Dawn’s mythical Third Order were perceived to be the purvey of mysterious secret
chiefs who occupied the astral plane, and were thus a rank above the secret chiefs with
whom Mathers claimed to have been in contact in order to receive the rituals and other
materials used by the R.R. et A.C.21
Despite the differences between the grade structures of the two orders, Waite’s
initiatory system should be seen as a specific response to his time in the Golden Dawn.
Given his distaste for inaccurately or illogically syncretized symbolism, it is likely that he
structured the F.R.C. with four orders specifically to correct what he would have seen as a
16
See figure 1.1.
See figures 1.2 and 1.3.
18
On the concept of the four worlds concept see Scholem, Kabbalah, 119–20.
19
Waite, “Portal of the Fourth Order,” 19.
20
Ibid., 7-8.
21
Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 15–16; Bogdan, Rituals of Initiation, 122.
17
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
41
Figure 1.2—The Grade System of the Golden Dawn22
Golden Dawn Grade
First Order
Neophyte (0=0)
Zelator (1-10)
Theoricus (2=9)
Practicus (3=8)
Philosophus (4=7)
Second Order
Adeptus Minor (5=6)
Adeptus Major (6=5)
Adeptus Exemptus (7=4)
Third Order
Magister Templi (8=3)
Magus (9=2)
Ipsissimus (10=1)
Corresponding Sephira
Malkuth
Yesod
Hod
Netzach
Tiphareth
Geburah
Chesed
Binah
Chokmah
Kether
Figure 1.3—The Grade System of the F.R.C.
F.R.C. Grade
First Order
Neophyte (0=0)
Zelator (1-10)
Second Order
Theoricus (2=9)
Practicus (3=8)
Philosophus (4=7)
Third Order
Adeptus Minor (5=6)
Adeptus Major (6=5)
Adeptus Exemptus (7=4)
Fourth Order
Adeptus Exaltatus
(0=0 in Supernis)
22
Source: Asprem, Arguing with Angels, 50.
Corresponding Sephira
Assiah—World of Action
Malkuth
Yetzirah—World of Formation
Yesod
Hod
Netzach
Briah—World of Creation
Tiphareth
Geburah
Chesed
Atziluth—World of Emanation
Daath
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
42
sloppy application of three orders to four worlds. Waite may also have seen the addition of
rituals for the grades of Adeptus Major and Adeptus Exemptus as an improvement on the
Golden Dawn system. Waite, as founder and Imperator of the order, took the honorary
grade of Adeptus Exemptus, 7=4, along with several other members of the F.R.C., without
going through the usual initiatory progression.23 This was necessary for the proper working
of rituals, which required higher grade adepts to initiate lower ranking postulants, but it is
interesting that Waite chose 7=4 as the highest achievable grade of his order, since it is
precisely this designation that the founders of the Golden Dawn chose to grant
themselves. In the Golden Dawn however, no other initiate could ascend past the grade of
Adeptus Minor, 5=6. The addition of the Adeptus Major and Adeptus Exemptus rituals
allowed the F.R.C. to be less hierarchical as all initiates could ascend to the same level as
their Imperator at 7=4. Although we cannot know for sure, it is likely that Waite’s
experience of being permanently held below the rank of the three Golden Dawn chiefs
irked him somewhat. This frustration may have motivated him to set up his own society
with a more egalitarian hierarchy, although there was never any question of anyone but
Waite acting as Imperator.
Though Waite frequently claimed that the elements of Kabbalah he adopted into his
system were derived from the Zohar and therefore not related to modern occult
adaptations,24 the F.R.C.’s employment of sephirotic symbolism was derived from the
Golden Dawn’s particular interpretation of much later kabbalistic concepts. The Golden
Dawn system was largely based on Lurianic diagrams of the Tree of Life in the Kabbala
Denudata (1684), a Latin translation by Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1636–89) of a
variety of kabbalistic texts and commentaries.25 Though Waite states that neither
23
Records of the Sacred Temple, 1.
E.g. Waite, Doctrine and Literature of the Kabbalah, xviii.
25
See Scholem, Kabbalah, 120, on the Lurianic origin of the Tree of Life diagrams in Kabbala
Denudata. See Asprem, “Kabbala Recreata,” 145; Greene, Magi and Maggidim, 63n43, 66, re: the
Lurianic influence in modern occultism. The sephiroth began to be portrayed as a tree beginning in
the Sefer ha-Bahir (ca. 900—1100 CE), but they were arranged in a single line, rather than three
pillars, and the tree included only eight sephiroth, beginning with Binah and extending downwards
(Scholem, Kabbalah, 107). The Zohar rarely describes the sephirotic system in terms of a clear
classification. The sephiroth appear more often in symbolic terms, spoken of as levels, links, roots,
garments, crowns, and a variety of other images rather than as particular entities arranged in a
24
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
43
Rosenroth’s translation nor Lurianic Kabbalah adequately represent the “true” Kabbalah of
the Zohar,26 he seems to have had no problem structuring the F.R.C. around the sephirotic
system drawn from these works.
The Initiatic Journey
Charles Williams was initiated into the grade of Neophyte, 0=0, on 21 September
1917, at the Salvator Mundi Temple of the F.R.C. at the Imperial Hotel on Russell Square,
London.27 On this particular occasion the Neophyte ritual was followed by the Festival of
the Equinox, at which the F.R.C., as usual, appointed new members to positions of
leadership, including a new Master of the Temple. Williams took the secret order name of
“Qui Sitit, Veniat” (He who is thirsty, come), derived from Revelation 22:17. Waite appears
to have held a high respect for Williams, as he was tasked with the role of “Ostiarius”
(gatekeeper) in both the rituals that took place before his ascendence to the second grade
of Zelator, 1=10. This is the first instance of a Neophyte playing a role in the rituals prior to
Williams’s initiation, though after this point it seems to have become a more accepted
practice. On 19 April 1918 Williams achieved the grade of Zelator, and thus completed the
rituals of the First Order.
Over the next year, Williams advanced quickly through the Second Order grades until
he reached the level of Philosophus, 4=7. Williams rarely missed a meeting in this period
and frequently repeated the role of Ostiarius. After his advancement to Philosophus, he
was made an “Aquarius”—a lesser officer of the temple. On 7 July 1919, Williams was
inducted into the Third Order via “The Ceremony of Reception in the Portal of the Third
Order.” On 26 August he was “raised on the cross of Tiphareth” in an Adeptus Minor grade
specific cosmic pattern. See Matt, “Introduction,” 33–37, for a concise description of sephirotic
theory in the Zohar.
26
Waite, Holy Kabbalah, 420, 479.
27
This review of Williams’s time in the F.R.C. represents the most comprehensive account
currently available (though certainly there is enough material for a full-length book on the subject),
but other accounts can be found in Gilbert, A.E. Waite, 149; Willard, “Acts of the Companions,”
269, 272-73; Newman, “Companions of the Coinherence,” 3-4. My account is constructed from the
minutes and rituals of the F.R.C. accessed at the B.P.H.. The minutes are contained in the
Records of the Sacred Temple (2 volumes) for the F.R.C., and Records of the Holy House, (2
volumes) for the Ordo Sanctissimus Rosae et Aureae Crucis, a separate inner society which
encompassed the Third and Fourth Orders.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
44
ritual that involved, as it did in the Golden Dawn, being literally bound to a cross in
symbolic emulation of Christ’s death.28 Williams seems to have enjoyed these initial Third
Order rituals, as he participated in the induction of other initiates in the Portal ritual five
times, and the Adeptus Minor ritual nine times, in the next two years. He was also very
active in the lower two orders during this period, acting in several “official” capacities,
including the relatively minor offices of “Thurificans,” which he held for six months, and
“Proclamator et Lucifer,” which he held for nearly a year. In both functions he participated
in rituals to celebrate each solstice and equinox in addition to the rituals designed for
initiation of adepts into the grades of the lower two orders. He held the more significant
office of “Warden of the Temple” for six months, and on 26 September 1921 he was
invested as “Master of the Temple,” which, Imperator Waite would have told him in the
relevant ritual, is “the Highest Office which I can bestow on you in this Temple.”29
Williams’s involvement in the F.R.C. reached a peak as Master of the Temple, as his
duties included leading all rituals, appointing junior officers, and keeping minutes of each
meeting. Williams was appointed Master of the Temple twice more, in 1923 and 1924.
Each appointment represented a period of intense involvement, after which he would
appear at meetings more sporadically until he took on another leadership role.
Williams was elevated to Adeptus Major, 6=5, on 5 June 1923, surrounded by other
adepts of Waite’s new inner order, the Ordo Sanctissimus Rosae et Aureae Crucis (O.S.R.
& A.C.), which he formed from the Third and Fourth Orders in 1922.30 Williams’s
ascendance to the grade of Adeptus Exemptus, 7=4, on 10 July 1924 was a strange one,
as another adept performed the ritual in the role of postulant while Williams and a third
aspirant to the grade looked on. After achieving the grade of Adeptus Exemptus, Williams
attended an O.S.R. & A.C. ritual only once in the next year, as he had been appointed to
his third term as Master of the Salvator Mundi Temple on 30 September 1924 and was
busy attending lower order rituals. On 1 July 1925, however, the O.S.R. & A.C. suddenly
gained prominence in Williams’s occult life, as the first rituals of the Fourth Order were
performed and Williams, along with the other leading initiates of the F.R.C., entered the
ultimate stage of the order’s ritual progression.
28
Records of the Holy House, 20; Waite, “Adeptus Minor,” 28–34.
Waite, “Installation of a Master of the Temple,” 4.
30
Gilbert, A.E. Waite, 143. The acronym follows Waite’s usage.
29
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
45
Throughout July of 1925, the O.S.R. & A.C. held multiple performances of “The
Ceremony of Reception in the Portal of the Fourth Order” and its partner “The Ceremony
of Contemplation on the Further Side of the Portal which is 0=0 in Supernis.” Williams
went through the portal on 22 July and then through the “Further Side of the Portal” on 29
July. On 16 September Williams participated, for the only time, in the rarely performed
“Ritual of Return in Light on the Threshold of the Holy Supernals.” Through the next two
years he continued to attend both the F.R.C. and O.S.R. & A.C. sporadically, but his
interest seems to have been waning. He did not, for example, attend any of the equinox or
solstice celebrations during this time, though it was generally expected that members
attend these rites.31 On 29 June 1927, Williams played the role of “Second Spokesman” in
a new ritual for the Fourth Order written by Waite in 1926, “The Ceremony of Consecration
on the Threshold of Sacred Mystery,” which Waite created as a bridging ritual between the
Third and Fourth Orders.32 This was to be Williams’s last known involvement with Waite’s
order. The minutes record that he sent his regrets for absence from the celebration of the
next autumnal equinox, but after this Frater Qui Sitit, Veniat disappears from the records.
Scholars have speculated as to why Williams ceased his involvement with the
F.R.C., though with very little success. The simple application of Occam’s razor to the
problem may be called for on this question however. It cannot be coincidence that
Williams’s last known participation in the F.R.C. involved the only ritual he had yet to
experience. Having experienced all the rites, a certain curiosity would have been satisfied
and, like a reader reaching the end of a good page-turner, Williams may simply have
chosen to close the book on the F.R.C.. Williams’s involvement in Waite’s order thus
displays his character as poet, artist, and dramatist. As long as he was involved in the
ceremonial, as long as new stories and new symbols waited to be revealed, the F.R.C.
held Williams’s interest. It thus seems that he saw the F.R.C. less as a source of regular
religious expression, and more as a source of energy and symbol to direct toward his
artistic and mystical pursuits.
31
32
Ibid., 145.
R.A. Gilbert, personal correspondence, 30 August 2013.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
46
The F.R.C. and the Golden Dawn
The F.R.C. represents some of Williams’s deepest involvement with esoteric
philosophy and practice. Moreover, it represents by far the most sustained interaction with
Waite and his particular approach to esotericism. The question of Williams’s relationship to
modern occultism, so often defined by scholars according to the extent of Waite’s
influence, is thus closely related to the question of the F.R.C.’s occult identity. I would
therefore like to take a close look at the similarities and differences between the F.R.C.
and the Golden Dawn, first because the two are inextricably related through Waite’s
personal experience with the Golden Dawn and the material he drew from that experience,
and second because the Golden Dawn represents the most well known typological model
of modern occultism. A comparison between the two orders will aid us enormously in
identifying the extent of the occult identity that Williams encountered in his ritual
experiences.
Because of the relationship between his own society and the Golden Dawn, Waite
was forced to try and find a balance between respect and scorn for his old cadre of adepts.
On the one hand he said that the Golden Dawn offered nothing of consequence, accused
it of connections to “malefic influences,” and described its rituals as “a mass of confused
Symbolism.”33 On the other hand though, he acknowledged the Rosicrucian and masonic
heritage shared by the two orders, and confessed that the Golden Dawn rituals had one
point of importance, “being the notion of a Candidate ascending the Tree of Life.”34 Indeed,
this is hardly a minor similarity. As Barbara Newman notes, this concept was the central
focus of both orders, and was, if anything, an even more pronounced goal of the F.R.C..35
In actuality Waite must have found more points of importance in the Golden Dawn rituals
than he admits in his autobiography, because the first seven rituals of the F.R.C. still bear
evident similarities to the corresponding Golden Dawn versions, particularly the ritual for
advancement to the grade of Adeptus Minor.36
33
Waite, Shadows, 125; 218; 230.
Ibid., 230.
35
Newman, “Companions of the Coinherence,” 5. See Bogdan, Rituals of Initiation, 122, on
the importance of the Tree of Life for the Golden Dawn’s system.
36
For a contradictory opinion, see Francis King, Ritual Magic, 112. The process of
transforming the Golden Dawn rituals so that they better reflected Waite’s approach to initiatic
34
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
47
The equivalent ritual in the Golden Dawn, known as the “Ceremony of the Grade of
Adeptus Minor,” along with its partner, the “Ritual of the Portal of the Vault of the Adepti,”
are different in tone, purpose, and origin from the rituals of the lower orders.37 The two
rituals were introduced by Mathers in 1892 as part of the founding of the R.R. et A.C..
Mathers claimed to have received them from some of the unidentified secret chiefs often
found forming and supporting masonic or Rosicrucian orders.38 Mathers had also had a
hand in creating the lower order rituals, but their Second Order cousins are more polished
and display a somewhat more defined focus, which may help explain why Waite seems to
have incorporated them into his F.R.C. rituals with less adjustments. Waite valued the
Adeptus Minor ritual so highly, in fact, that while he accepted Mathers’s claim to authorship
of the Ritual of the Portal, he believed the Adeptus Minor ritual to be above Mathers’s
talents, and in fact to be above the usual ritual quality found in the Golden Dawn itself.
“There is nothing to suggest,” Waite stated suspiciously, “That it ever came out of the
same mint as the Rituals of the Golden Dawn.”39 In fact, there are many factors that
suggest that the Adeptus Minor grade was produced by Mathers, including the clear
similarity of style and purpose to the Ritual of the Portal and the ritual’s snug fit with the
rest of the Golden Dawn system. Few scholars apart from Waite would question Mathers’s
authorship.40
The similarity between the two Adeptus Minor rituals allows an ideal forum for a
comparison of the goals, purposes, and methods of the two orders.41 Both rituals are
crucial to the overall plot structure of their orders—namely the journey of the adept,
through transmutation of the self, to mystical union with the divine, higher self. This journey
is represented through three primary symbolic systems in the Adeptus Minor rituals: the
story of Christ, the myth of Christian Rosenkreutz, and, as in all the rituals of both orders,
ritual activity occurred over a long period of time and involved several different permutations. The
process began ca. 1905, when Waite began rewriting the original Golden Dawn rituals for the
I.R.R.. See Gilbert, A.E. Waite, 137.
37
The full text of these rituals is available in Regardie, Complete Golden Dawn, 2-61.
38
Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, xvii.
39
Waite, Shadows, 226.
40
See Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, xvii; Bogdan, Rituals of Initiation, 125; Gilbert,
Golden Dawn, 35.
41
These two rituals are also ideal because they are both available in printed publications.
Waite’s Adeptus Minor ritual is available in Regardie, Complete Golden Dawn, 92–126. For a
summary of the Golden Dawn’s Adeptus Minor ritual see Howe, 85–88.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
48
the sephirotic symbolism of Kabbalah. The Adeptus Minor grade was linked particularly to
Tiphareth, an important sephira for both systems, symbolically representative of the point
in the initiatic journey where adepts prepared themselves, through a process of personal
transmutation, for spiritual attainment.42 Given the focus on transmutation, it is no surprise
that alchemical symbolism also played a role, particularly in the F.R.C. ritual where the
Adeptus Exemptus gives the postulant a silver chain and uses alchemical symbolism to
describe its importance: “This is in correspondence with the material part of your
personality, which has been purified by the rites of our Order. Once it was lead, my
Brother, and once a burden of grief. Now it has suffered conversion, and the chain is
therefore of silver.”43 This purification of the material aspect of the self requires a mystical
death, similar to the blackness, or nigredo, that was seen on lead or other base metals as
alchemists attempted to filter out impurities in order to transmute them into more valuable
metals such as silver and gold. This death was encountered in a blend of alchemical,
kabbalistic, and Christian symbolism that is seen clearly in the language of Waite’s ritual,
where the adept is said to have “died upon the Cross of Tiphareth.”44
This process of transformation is extensively represented in both rituals by the life,
death, and rebirth of Christ. A number of ritualistic acts are performed to symbolize the
spiritual transmutation achieved by Christ in these three stages. In both orders the initiate
is bound to a cross while swearing an obligation. In the Golden Dawn ritual the postulant,
“a member of the Body of Christ,” is seen to “spiritually bind” themselves to the “Cross of
Suffering,” thus accepting hardship for the self as a process of death and rebirth.45 The
aspirant is also bound for the more practical purpose of taking a “solemn Obligation of
Secrecy, Fidelity, Fraternity, and Justice.”46 This particular obligation is not repeated in the
F.R.C., but both obligations state, in the words of the R.R. et A.C. ritual, that the aspirant
will “apply myself to the Great Work, which is, to purify and exalt my Spiritual Nature.”47
Both rituals also feature the postulant being marked on the forehead, feet, palms, and
42
Owen, Place of Enchantment, 77.
Waite, “Adeptus Minor,” 24.
44
Ibid., 47.
45
Regardie, Complete Golden Dawn, Vol. 7, 41.
46
Ibid.
47
Regardie, Complete Golden Dawn, Vol. 7, 42; Waite, “Adeptus Minor,” 31.
43
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
49
breast by a dagger dipped in wine.48 The script uttered during this part of the ritual, which
guides the adept through the transformation represented by the Christ journey in order to
achieve the mystical elevation of consciousness, is unchanged in Waite’s rewrite.
Christ symbolism is pervasive in the F.R.C. rituals, second only to the dominant
sephirotic symbolism around which the order and its grades are organized. Waite
frequently relies on Christ as “the Great Exemplar of initiation” who expressed the mystic
path not just in word and symbol, but also in the manner of his own life.49 According to
Waite, Jesus is an exemplar for mystics because “His birth, life, death and resurrection
[are] a synthetic presentation in ritual form of the spiritual history of each individual who
attains in God.”50 The Christ story thus has a high significance on the “Divine Plane,” a
significance that can be mystically reenacted in each person, and in the hearts of the
adepts of the F.R.C..51 This is the discovery of “Christ-mystical,” who is equivalent to the
divine self that, via the cosmic unity inherent in Waite’s immanent cosmology, resides
within each human self. The discovery of this divine self is equivalent to unio mystica, a
state in which the mystic shares in the Christ-life: “When we awaken to consciousness
therein, each can say unto each: I am the Resurrection and the Life.”52
If we look at the F.R.C. only through the particular scope offered by this importance
of Christ for the mystic journey, it is easy to see how scholars would justify describing
Waite’s order as “wholly Christian,” and any additions of esoteric symbolism as
“Christianized.” However, though Waite believed that Christ as known and described
through history, symbol and ritual represented a higher divine reality, he did not limit this
reality to Christian doctrine. Mystic experience, as we have already discussed, was
“catholic to all ages” in Waite’s philosophy, and thus, he believed, “It must be held to follow
that people who do not accept the historicity of Christ are not, for such reason, to be
excluded from the Great Quest.”53 Waite himself expressed uncertainty as to whether the
Christ story was a reflection of a historical reality or a symbolic system “projected upon the
48
Waite, “Adeptus Minor,” 28-29; Regardie, Complete Golden Dawn, Vol. 7, 43.
Waite, Adeptus Minor,” 37. Also see Waite, Divine Union, 320.
50
Waite, Divine Union, 185.
51
Ibid.
52
Ibid., 187. The quote refers to a statement attributed to Christ. See John 11:25.
53
Ibid., 319, 321.
49
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
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material plane from a hidden place of sanctity.”54 This view of the doctrinal Christian image
of Christ as yet another symbol of an ineffable divinity throws the simplified dichotomy of
the F.R.C. as Christian rather than occult into serious question. The view of the nature and
function of Christ that Williams encountered in the esoteric ritual activity of the F.R.C. is
not significantly different from that expressed by many occultists, all of whom saw no
difficulty reconciling their esoteric Christianity with other forms of modern occultism. Anna
Kingsford, as we have seen, is one high profile example. Kingsford saw herself as a
Christian, though like Waite she sought beyond a literalistic reading of the Bible and linked
Christ to an otherwise ineffable divine principle involved in mystic union. In a series of
lectures published as The Perfect Way, or The Finding of Christ (1882), Kingsford and her
colleague Edward Maitland (1824–97) describe the importance of Christ to the mystic
quest: “Man, ascending by evolution from the material and lowermost stratum of existence,
finds his highest development in Christ.” As seen in both the Golden Dawn and F.R.C.
systems, Christ is a mystical exemplar for Kingsford and Maitland because he represents
a combination of divinity and humanity, and is therefore symbolic of the point where “the
two streams, the ascending and the descending, meet; and the man knows and
understands God.”55 Christ therefore, as Joscelyn Godwin observes, becomes less a
historical figure and more a symbol of the state of man at the pinnacle of spiritual
attainment.56 Kingsford also had views of Christianity that would not have fit into Waite’s
system of “qualified Christian mysticism.” She believed, for example, that the soul is
continuously reincarnated until it is ready to achieve unio mystica. Nevertheless, the
similarities between Kingsford and Waite are clear. Yet, though Kingsford embraces an
esoteric form of Christianity, she is unproblematically acknowledged to be a leading figure
in modern occultism while Waite, and the F.R.C. along with him, is distanced from modern
occultism based on his attachment to Christianity.57 As we have seen, Williams is pulled
along in the tide created by this dichotomy between Christian and occult.
54
Ibid., 320.
Kingsford and Maitland, The Perfect Way, 154.
56
Godwin, Theosophical Enlightenment, 337–38.
57
Kingsford is also said to have been influential in the development of the Golden Dawn,
particularly via the founding of The Hermetic Society (1884), which, like the Golden Dawn, pursued
a particularly Western form of esotericism rather than the more Eastern focus of the Theosophical
Society (Godwin, Theosophical Enlightenment, 344; Butler, “Intellectual Origins,” 89).
55
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
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In addition to the reliance on Christ symbolism, both Adeptus Minor rituals review the
legend of Christian Rosenkreutz, reenacting his entombment and the finding of his tomb
by the secret Fraternity of the Rosy Cross after 120 years. In both rituals the discovery of
the tomb is equivalent to the rediscovery of a secret knowledge, a narrative of ancient
wisdom that has “existed from time immemorial,” though there is a difference in the
perception of the origin of this knowledge.58 The F.R.C. ritual sees this knowledge more in
the sense of a philosophia perennis—“All true Rites and Mysteries, in respect of their
intention, have been ever but one Rite expounding one Mystery”—while the Golden Dawn
speaks of the ancient wisdom in more historically specific terms—“The Rites were
practiced, and the Wisdom taught, in Egypt, Eleusis, Samothrace, Persia, Chaldea and
India, and in far more ancient lands.”59 This difference may help explain the frequent
incorporation of Egyptian symbolism in the Golden Dawn rituals, which is completely
absent from the F.R.C. texts.60
The tomb of Christian Rosenkreutz also has a variety of other important symbolic
connections. Following the experience of mystical death through suffering and selfsacrifice on the cross, the discovery of Rosenkreutz’s tomb represents the final stage of
mystical rebirth, akin to Christ’s resurrection from the tomb.61 The tomb is also seen as a
symbolic representation of the universe, entered by the adept “as a door that is entered at
birth.” Conversely, it is also instrumental, as a repository of correspondent symbols, in the
adept’s transcendence of the material universe. The tomb is thus “a temple opening from
earthly into spiritual life.”62 Given the symbolic importance of the tomb, both orders
focused on its aesthetic arrangement within their physical temples. Waite seems to have
highly valued the R.R. et A.C.’s design of the tomb, as he incorporated the same
construction, with some minor changes, into the F.R.C.’s temple. Part of this similarity is
58
Regardie, Complete Golden Dawn, Vol. 7, 43.
Waite, “Adeptus Minor,” 37; Regardie, Complete Golden Dawn, Vol. 7, 43.
60
The use of Egyptian symbolism and language, as well as the pantheon of Egyptian deities,
was quite popular in modern occultism (Bogdan, Rituals of Initiation, 139). Waite seems to have
scorned it because he did not believe that any of the symbolic systems that he particularly
valued—Christianity, alchemy, and Kabbalah—originated historically in Egypt. This was an opinion
(a largely correct one) that Waite had reached on a scholarly level. Most occultists would not have
agreed with him, however, a point of dispute which tended to cause Waite much grief. See, for
example, Waite, Doctrine and Literature of the Kabbalah, 125-26, where he upbraids Westcott for
stating that Kabbalah originated in Egypt.
61
Regardie, Complete Golden Dawn, Vol. 7, 50.
59
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
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due to the fact that both orders followed the description of the tomb given in the Fama
Fraternitatis,63 and thereby incorporated the tomb’s heptagonal structure, placed a brass
altar in its centre inscribed with various mottoes, and painted triangles on the ceiling and
floor. However, Mathers also made a number of additions, all indicative of the modern
occult taste for mixing and matching symbols from various traditions. For example, the four
Hebrew letters of the kabbalistic tetragrammaton—Yod, He, Vau, and He—were inscribed
on the altar, but with a further innovation that reflects the importance of Christ symbolism
to the ritual, as Mathers followed the Christian kabbalistic synthesis of Johann Reuchlin
(1455—1522), an early modern German Hebraist who added the letter Shin in the middle
of the tetragrammaton to form Yeheshuah, the Hebrew name of Jesus, which is the “key
word” of both Adeptus Minor rituals.64 Though Waite rejected Christian Kabbalah on a
scholarly level, he seems to have valued Reuchlin’s formulation in this case, as he
included it in the F.R.C.’s recreation of the tomb.65
Waite also included other adaptations. A rose with 22 petals was set into the triangle
on the ceiling, and said to be in symbolic correspondence with the 22 paths of the Tree of
Life, while the triangle itself was said to represent the three supernal sephiroth—Kether,
Chokmah and Binah—and corresponded to the light side of the Tree of Life.66 The triangle
on the floor represented the “Averse and Evil” sephiroth of the Qlippoth, the dark side of
the Tree of Life. Around the black triangle was written, “He Descended into Hell.”67 The
triangles on the ceiling and floor represent the fact that the adept must, like Christ, traverse
both the dark and light “phases of our being.”68 Between this spectrum of dark and light
there is all conceivable colour, and thus the seven walls of both tombs were decorated
with the seven colours of the rainbow, intended to refer to the Golden Dawn’s complex
colour symbolism of the “Minitum Mundum”—“the Small Universe or Foundation of
62
Waite, “Adeptus Minor,” 14.
See Yates, Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 246-47, for the original Fama Fraternitatis
description. For the Golden Dawn tomb description see Regardie, Complete Golden Dawn, 48. For
the F.R.C. see Waite, “Adeptus Minor,” 44.
64
See Scholem, Kabbalah, 198.
65
Waite also expresses support for the Yeheshuah formulation in Saint-Martin, 241.
66
Regardie, Complete Golden Dawn, Vol. 7, 55: Waite, “Adeptus Minor,” 59.
67
Waite, “Adeptus Minor,” 57; Regardie, Complete Golden Dawn, Vol. 7, 55.
68
Waite, “Adeptus Minor,” 57.
63
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
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Color.”69 In both orders this colour symbolism related to the sephirotic “Path of the
Chameleon.”70 In a didactic moment rare in the Golden Dawn Adeptus Minor ritual (though
far more common in Waite’s version) a long passage details the Path of the Chameleon, in
which colour is seen to blend downwards through the sephirotic tree. All colours can be
found in the three supernal sephiroth, but each of the lower seven sephiroth are
associated with a particular colour. The adept who makes the symbolic journey through
the Tree of Life, including the synthesis of all colours, which is “blackness and bordererth
on the Qlippoth,” gains the right to be known by “the Mystic Title of Hodos Chameleonis,
the Path of the Chameleon, the Path of Mixed Colors.”71 The colour symbolism of the tomb
thus mirrors the journey of the adept from suffering to redemption, from dark to light, death
to resurrection. Both rituals symbolically locate the vault on the “place of Holy Mysteries,
the Invisible Mountain of the Wise,” known as “Mons Abiegnus.” Both Waite and the
Golden Dawn place the symbolic location of this mountain at the centre of the earth.72
The reconstruction of Christian Rosenkreutz’s tomb is thus an excellent example of
the programmatic syncretism common to both the Golden Dawn and the F.R.C., as
symbolism from a variety of traditions is incorporated with the Rosicrucian myth in order to
represent a perennial narrative of the mystic journey through death to regeneration and
spiritual attainment. After the initiate has been raised on the cross of Tiphareth, and has
entered the tomb of Christian Rosenkreutz, both Adeptus Minor rituals end with the
mystical raising of the adept from the tomb. This resurrection is equivalent to “the
realisation in experience of the Spirit as the Divine Self.”73
The F.R.C. rituals, as well as Waite’s other writings on mysticism, make frequent
reference to this divine self, often referred to as the “Higher Self.” The Higher Self was a
popular concept among modern occultists. The idea can be traced to aspects of older
esoteric traditions, particularly to Kabbalah, where the neschamah, the highest of the three
parts of the soul, is held to be able to apprehend the nature of the Divine and the secrets
69
Regardie, Complete Golden Dawn, Vol. 7, 54.
Waite, “Adeptus Minor,” 59.
71
Regardie, Complete Golden Dawn, Vol. 7, 54. The Hodos Chamelionis concept adapted
pre-existing kabbalistic applications of colour symbolism to the sephiroth. See Drob, Kabbalistic
Metaphors, 50.
72
Waite, “Adeptus Minor,” 13; Regardie, Complete Golden Dawn, Vol. 7, 35, 55.
73
Waite, “Spiritual Life in the Grade of Tiphareth,” 14-15.
70
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
54
of the universe through contemplation on the Torah and its commandments.74 PostZoharic Kabbalah saw the division of neschamah into three parts, for a total of five parts of
the soul. This conception appears to have been particularly influential on Mathers, and
through him on the Golden Dawn, as it posited that yechidah, the highest part of the threepart neschamah, was equivalent in divinity to Kether and represented sublime levels of
intuitive awareness of God, a state of mind achievable only by a chosen few.75 In an 1893
lecture to the Golden Dawn, Mathers repeated this idea and connected “Jechidah” to the
“Divine Consciousness.” By virtue of its presence in Kether, this aspect of the soul exists,
according to Mathers, in permanent union with the divine, with full knowledge of all aspects
of divinity.76 This kabbalistic concept of a higher part of the soul should be seen only as a
symbolic influence, however, as Jewish kabbalists did not propose effecting unio mystica
between the lower and higher aspects of the soul.
The idea of the Higher Self as it is specifically understood in occultism can be traced
to H.P. Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society77, and was one of a variety of concepts
that Aleister Crowley used to describe spiritual attainment,78 The Golden Dawn also
incorporated the concept.79 In one of the unofficial knowledge lectures of the Golden Dawn
(transcribed in documents known as “the Flying Rolls”) Westcott stated that the main
object of the R.R. et A.C. adepts should be the development of the spiritual nature of the
adept through a “higher magic.” Every effort must be taken, he said, “to purify and exalt the
Spiritual Nature so that you may be able to unify yourselves with what the Hermetist calls
his “Higher Genius.”80 Moina Mathers (1865–1928), wife of Samuel MacGregor Mathers,
told a group of adepts of the grade of Zelator that the Higher Self is found within, and until
74
Scholem believes that the neschamah was the result of a thirteenth century kabbalistic
mystification of the neoplatonic rational soul (Scholem, Kabbalah, 155–59).
75
Scholem, Kabbalah, 157.
76
Mathers, “Constitution of Man” (Flying Roll XX), 145. On yechidah and the Higher Self see
the Golden Dawn knowledge lecture, “Hodos Chameleonis: Concerning the Tree of Life,” in
Regardie, Complete Golden Dawn, 42–43. “Yechidah,” says this lecture, “Is the highest part of
man as Man. It is that which toucheth, or is the manifestation of a higher and greater range of
Being. This Yechidah is at the same time the Higher Human Self and the Lower Genius, the God
of the Man” (42).
77
Pasi, “Varieties of Magical Experience,” 152. Cf. Blavatsky, Studies in Occultism, 12.
78
Pasi, “Varieties of Magical Experience,” 147-60.
79
Other terms used were “Divine Genius” and “Higher Genius,” while union was also
described as “Knowledge and Conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel.” See Pasi, “Varieties of
Magical Experience,” 147, 152; Bogdan, Rituals of Initiation, 143–44.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
55
knowledge of this self is achieved the adept will not be able to know God. “When you can
know the God of yourself it will be possible to obtain a dim vision of the God of All, for the
God of the Macrocosm only reflects Himself to Man through the God of Man's
Microcosm.”81
Given the importance of union with the Higher Self in the Golden Dawn, it is no
surprise to find the concept in the R.R.et A.C.’s Adeptus Minor ritual. “In Thee I am Self,”
says the postulant in prayerful pose, “And exist in Thy Self-hood from Nothing. Live Thou
in me, and bring me unto that Self which is in Thee. Amen.”82 This idea of discovering the
divine through the correspondent unity of self and God is repeated in the same language,
with the same tone of supplication, in the F.R.C.’s Adeptus Minor ritual: “Through all the
Grades of the Christhood, give unto us the realisation of the union, that we may attain that
self which is in Thee.”83 Upon the successful attainment of this union of higher and lower
selves, it was believed that the adept would become aware of all things as one: “Those
who have been separate in manifestation shall know themselves one spirit in Thee, Who
art All in all.”84 Waite describes this coming together of divine and human selves in terms
of a union of mind, a coming together of subject and object that allows for direct gnosis.
Said Waite, “The Mind of God is our own Mind in the God-state…There is no other source
of knowledge.”85 This conception of the highest form of human thought as equivalent to
divine thought recalls Mathers’s connection of the Higher Self to divine consciousness via
the kabbalistic concept of yechidah. Waite makes the same association, calling yechidah
“a spiritual state or mode in the ascending scale of inward being” and connecting it to the
“supernal part of our nature” with which “it is possible to be united therewith according to
the Secret Doctrine.”86 In Waite’s system, the union of Mind and mind, Self and self has
the potential to be so complete, that through his awareness of the divinity within himself
80
Westcott, “The Aims and Means of Adeptship,” 115.
Moina Mathers, “Know Thyself,” 151.
82
Regardie, Complete Golden Dawn, Vol. 7, 40.
83
Waite, “Adeptus Minor,” 27. A very similar prayerful phrase is found in Waite’s “Ceremony of
Reception in the Portal of the Fourth Order,” 15: “Thanks be to Thee for the self within and without,
and for the higher self which is in Thee.”
84
Waite, “Adeptus Minor,” 27.
85
Waite, Shadows, 239. For a more detailed discussion of the concept, see 237.
86
Waite, Holy Kabbalah, 129–30.
81
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
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man is “deified thereby.”87 This belief that the inner self achieves a sort of godhood by
virtue of its unity with the immanent divine surely has less in common with the orthodox
Christianity preferred by the cordon sanitaire, and more with the elevation of the self
pursued in occultism.
The Adeptus Minor rituals thus clearly display the shared goals, mythical structures,
and metaphysics of the two orders. However, the consanguinity between the F.R.C. and
the Golden Dawn was not only textual and intellectual. There were also important
methodological similarities, particularly the shared taste for modern occult symbolic
bricolage. Waite did not incorporate symbolism into his rituals as indiscriminately as other
occult groups, but he still drew from whatever esoteric traditions suited his Secret Tradition
purpose of guiding initiates toward unio mystica. For example, though he spoke out
several times against the efficacy of astrology, he had no problem implementing concrete
astrological symbolism into the F.R.C.’s “Ceremony for Advancement to the Grade of
Zelator,” where the postulant carries “the Sacred Swastika” as a badge of admission. The
swastika is described as “a great astronomical symbol which speaks to those who can
interpret concerning the Divine in the universe.” The swastika’s function in allowing the
adept to perceive the immanent God involved a syncretic incorporation of further
symbolism, in this case numerological and alchemical: “It is formed of 17 squares,
extracted in a peculiar manner from a square of 25 squares. Observe that the Sun is in the
centre and that it is surrounded by the four symbolical elements and the twelve zodiacal
signs.”88
There was one other important methodological similarity between the F.R.C. and the
Golden Dawn, one that tends to apply to esoteric societies in general. The initiates of both
orders were sworn to keep their activities absolutely secret. Order members swore an
obligation not to reveal ritual activities or secret doctrine to non-members. Waite kept this
oath religiously, referring to the F.R.C. in his autobiography only as a “new Rite which
arose, as if from the dead ashes [of the I.R.R.].”89 Waite also honoured the vow of secrecy
he had taken in the Golden Dawn, going so far as to foil the attempt by the Stella
Matutina’s Israel Regardie to publish the Golden Dawn rituals in England, though he
87
Waite, “Portal of the Fourth Order,” 38-39.
Waite, “Zelator,” 18.
89
Waite, Shadows, 229.
88
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
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regretted that he could not manage the same feat in America.90 Williams also seems to
have maintained this vow of secrecy, which would explain why the few friends with whom
he did discuss his participation in the F.R.C. seem to have been quite confused as to the
nature of his activities. A theory not yet floated for why Williams claimed to be in the
Golden Dawn rather than the F.R.C. is that he may have seen this as a convenient way to
respect his vow to the Order. This is, of course, pure conjecture, but the advantages of
such a strategy for a secretive adept are clear. Such a method would have allowed
Williams to let his friends and family know that he was attending the meetings of a secret
Rosicrucian society, and even walk in the doors in broad daylight, but still keep them
entirely in the dark.
The secretive aspect of the F.R.C. is important for our consideration of its place in
the modern occult context. As far as the order’s clandestine meetings and secret
knowledge go, it has much more in common with occult orders like the Golden Dawn than
with mainstream Christianity, which has always laboured to make its doctrine available to
as many prospective converts as possible, whether through open worship services in
publicly accessible spaces, or (since the Reformation) the distribution of the Bible,
presented as the word of God given to all humans and translated into as many languages
as possible. The rituals of the F.R.C. present a stark contrast to such a proselytizing ethic.
In addition to the fact that they were not available to non-initiates, they contain passages
of untranslated Latin, as well as symbolism that is incomprehensible without the
possession of particular forms of esoteric knowledge.
I have been identifying similarities between the Golden Dawn and the F.R.C.
because the lack of acknowledgement of these consanguine elements has helped to
reinforce the cordon sanitaire. However, the differences between the two orders should not
be ignored. I will highlight them here briefly so that it is understood that I am not trying to
say that the F.R.C. was simply a sort of Golden Dawn 2.0. First, while both orders
frequently employed Christian symbolism, and were also attached to an esoteric Christian
heritage by virtue of their Rosicrucian lineage, the F.R.C. specifically attached itself to a
“Christian mode” of interpretation when incorporating esoteric symbolism in its rituals,
though, as I have shown, this did not preclude a corresponding attachment to occult
90
Gilbert, A.E. Waite, 153.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
58
concepts and practices.91 The preference for a Christian mode of interpretation does not,
however, extend past the level of doctrine and is therefore no longer of consequence at
the imageless stage of the mystic journey. As Waite the Imperator would have told
assembled F.R.C. initiates in the ritual for the grade of Neophyte: “We are dealing, my
Brethren…not alone with the question of religion but with its heart and centre, behind all
the external differences of systems and churches and sects.”92 Moreover, not all
differences between the two orders can be used to substantiate an artificial dichotomy
between occult and Christian. The Golden Dawn Adeptus Minor ritual relies more on direct
biblical quotation than the F.R.C. ritual does,93 while the F.R.C. was built even more
prominently around a uniquely modern interpretation of the sephirotic Tree of Life.
I have already alluded to another key difference, namely that the Golden Dawn
pursued occult studies and practices that Waite very specifically eschewed. Thus, though
the two Adeptus Minor rituals have much in common, the Golden Dawn’s version was
intended to accompany a period of intense study into various methods of practical magic,
such as divination, skrying, and astral travel,94 Adepts would also spend time crafting
magical implements such as wands and daggers, practice Enochian magic for purposes
as diverse as invoking angels and playing four person “Rosicrucian chess,” and develop
their powers of clairvoyance.95 Moreover, while the achievement of union with the Higher
Self was understood in terms of spiritual enlightenment in both orders, Golden Dawn
adepts also understood spiritual attainment as a source of power with which to achieve
either the above magical goals, or the psychological transmutation of the self. Waite, as
we have seen, rejected such earthly concerns as having nothing to do with the mystic
path. However, as I have tried to show, the difference between these approaches can
easily be overstated. As Alex Owen has shown, the Golden Dawn’s exploration of magical
techniques “was seen as part of the process of attaining the great gift of occult wisdom,
which presages the kind of enlightenment for which the true Adept strives.”96 The adepts
of the F.R.C. certainly worked within a different value system when it came to practical
91
“Constitution & Laws of the Fellowship,” printed in Gilbert, A.E. Waite, 184.
Waite, “Neophyte,” 45.
93
See, in particular, Regardie, Complete Golden Dawn, Vol. 7, 39-40.
94
Regardie, Complete Golden Dawn, Vol. 7, 42.
95
Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 288–89; Asprem, Arguing with Angels, 57–63;
Regardie, Complete Golden Dawn, 43; Gilbert, Golden Dawn, 67.
92
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
59
occultism, but the ultimate goal of the two orders remained that of spiritual attainment.
Moreover, most of the training in practical magic was intended for personal use, rather
than deployment in a ritual setting. It is also likely that only a few order members applied
their magical knowledge to their personal lives once they had passed their Second Order
examinations.97 Thus, the actual ritual setting of the two orders was much more similar
than might initially be thought.
The ritual and symbolic environment in which Williams flourished as a mystic and
poet in the F.R.C. can thus be accurately described as a unique blend of Christian,
mystical, and occult. Despite Waite’s discursive distancing of his order as purely mystical,
the F.R.C. clearly rose out of the occult milieu in general, and had its roots in the Golden
Dawn specifically. A central difference in approach remains, however, in the F.R.C.’s
requirement that the adept move past symbols and other phenomena in order to achieve
the imageless heights of mystical experience. The ascension of the F.R.C. initiate was a
journey powered by interaction with symbols intended to express various aspects of
supernal reality, but in the Fourth Order this interaction ceased. Beyond the Fourth Order
Portal Grade the adept acted without the aid of symbols: “Beyond this world no Signs are
given—no Names or Passwords spoken. This is therefore the Great Rite of the dissolution
of Symbols.”98 Even here though, the role of symbol only lost precedence during the
fleeting moments of the experience of unio mystica. Adepts were expected to return from
their illumination to express the “tidings of the Hidden Church [with] the sacred word of
symbol.”99 The adepts of the Holy Assembly thus became the “fontal source whence all
the signs proceed.”100 Prior to his initiation into the Fourth Order Williams had absorbed
the symbolism of the Secret Tradition. Now, as a member of the Holy Assembly, he was
expected to generate it.
96
Owen, Place of Enchantment, 76.
Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 104.
98
Waite, “Portal of the Fourth Order,” 8–9.
99
Waite, “Portal of the Fourth Order,” 42.
100
Waite, “Further Side of the Portal which is 0=0 in Supernis,” 35.
97
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
60
The Novels of an “Adeptus Exaltatus”
And generate he did. Williams’s novels and poetry are themselves a bricolage of
symbolism. Like the F.R.C. rituals, kabbalistic and alchemical symbolism features
prominently, along with the trumps of the Tarot deck, the hallowed symbols of Arthurian
mysticism, and, most of all, a variety of magical symbols and practices. Williams’s reason
for incorporating this esoteric symbolism has perplexed scholars of his work. Perhaps the
best explanation offered by critics is the one first proposed by T.S. Eliot, who observes that
what Williams tried to communicate in his novels and poetry “was beyond his resources,
and probably beyond the resources of language…What it is, essentially, that he had to
say, comes near to defying definition. It was not simply a philosophy, a theology, or a set
of ideas: it was primarily something imaginative.”101 Eliot’s statement is somewhat vague,
as “something imaginative” could be stretched off into a lot of different directions, but it
captures the artistic aspect of Williams’s use of esoteric symbolism. He employed it to
communicate metaphysical concepts that were, for him, inexpressible through normative
explication, especially since many of these concepts were related to the mystic journey.
Thus, while one influential critic has claimed that Williams wrote his novels only for
the money, I wish to suggest quite the opposite.102 No doubt he hoped to profit from any
publication he made, but perhaps it is no coincidence that Williams began to write his
novels in the same year that he was elevated to the Fourth Order, where he received the
summons as a member of the Holy Assembly to generate symbolism with which the
Secret Tradition could be communicated to the masses, though only the very few who
could recognize the perennial “truth” would join the quest upon which Williams and his
fellow knights of the heptagonal table had embarked. Williams employs esoteric
symbolism in his novels in much the same way that he encountered it in the F.R.C.—
undiluted, unexplained and uninterpreted—simply presented in word or visual form in order
to summon an inexpressible truth to the mind. In this he mirrors the practice of his fellow
occultist, W.B. Yeats, who also elevated the poetic praxis of symbol. For Yeats,
purposefully clouding a metaphysical message in symbolic language could actually allow
101
Eliot, T.S, “Preface to All Hallows’ Eve,” xiii, quoted in Howard, The Novels of Charles
Williams, 3. Also see Cavaliero, Poet, 161; Moorman, Arthurian Triptych, 89.
102
See Carpenter, Inklings, 95.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
61
readers to comprehend its deeper meaning and divine significance. A symbol, said Yeats,
“Entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.”103 Williams, like
Waite, believed that the esoteric traditions had been employing Yeats’s concept for
millennia to communicate the nature of the divine and the path to unio mystica. Williams’s
clearly conscious decision to rely on esoteric symbolism in his novels was thus almost
certainly a product, at least in part, of his time in the F.R.C.; an effort to carry out his
Fourth Order task of communicating the Secret Tradition in a manner both open and
secret.
There is no better example of Williams carrying out his responsibility as a member of
the Holy Assembly than his presentation of the mystical journey of one of the central
characters of Many Dimensions, Chloe Burnett, to awareness of the unity of herself with
the divine and all other aspects of existence. Many Dimensions follows Chloe and her
boss, Lord Arglay, the Chief Justice of England, as they seek to restore a curious stone,
called the “stone of Suleiman,”104 to its rightful place. The stone has been stolen from its
Sufi guardians and is causing havoc in inter-war England because of its many abilities. It
offers many of the powers dreamed of by modern occultists, including astral travel,
telepathy, healing, and clairvoyance. It even enables time travel.105 The stone can offer
such complete control over time, matter, and space because it is the same essence as the
“First Matter…from which all things are made.”106 Williams thus creates this powerful
symbol from the alchemical idea of the philosopher’s stone, pursued by Arab and
European alchemists as a substance made powerful because of its unity of spirit and
matter. As a “union of opposites” and a mixture of “corporeal and incorporeal elements”
the philosopher’s stone, just like the stone of Suleiman, “incorporates the spiritual and
material aspects of the whole universe.”107
Williams also incorporates kabbalistic symbolism into his construction of the stone as
a mystical symbol. The stone is inscribed with the letters of the tetragrammaton, and
frequently linked to Shekinah, the feminine aspect of God that is manifested in the lowest
kabbalistic world of Assiah, and therefore the aspect of God that is accessible to man.
103
Yeats, “Symbolism in Painting,” 148.
The Islamic name for Solomon.
105
Williams, Many Dimensions, 20, 24, 101, 192, 198.
106
Ibid., 56.
104
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62
Connected to this is another important ability of the stone—it can be divided into a myriad
number of copies, which Williams, channeling Platonic philosophy, calls “Types” of the
original divine stone.108 The various governmental officials, academics, and private
corporate interests who seek the power of the stone want to divide it so that the Types can
be sold or otherwise profited from. Chloe, however, instinctively feels that division of the
stone’s unity is a deep travesty, and moreover that the stone, which represents Shekinah,
the estranged feminine aspect of God manifest in the material world, needs to be returned
to union with the transcendent masculine half of the divine. This instinct builds on the goal
of Jewish kabbalists to restore the unity of the divine masculine and feminine principles.
This idea became particularly important in Lurianic Kabbalah, where the division of the
divine was framed as the result of a primordial catastrophe called “the breaking of the
vessels,” essentially an origin myth in which the emanation of the sephiroth from their
divine source, known as Ain Soph, went wrong, resulting in the brokenness of the material
world.109 More importantly for Williams’s Holy Assembly priorities however, the quest for
union of the estranged feminine and masculine divine principles provides a backdrop to
Chloe’s quest for unio mystica, as over the course of the novel she comes to realize
herself as Shekinah, just as adepts in the F.R.C. sought to realize themselves as divine.
She is aware of the stone’s higher nature when she first sees it, and is disgusted by the
greed with which other characters in the novel seek it. As she progresses in awareness of
the stone’s true divine nature, she also begins to understand the wishes of the stone and
respond to them. As the novel approaches its climax, other characters, particularly Lord
Arglay, begin to notice that she and the stone are becoming similar in essence. The link to
Shekinah is made clear as Lord Arglay sees Chloe’s hand resting next to the stone and
“wonder[s] suddenly at the kinship between the two.” He then fancies that Chloe’s hand is
the hand used in early paintings to “image the Power behind creation,” a power which is
ascribed to Shekinah in Kabbalah.110
107
Crisciani, “Conception of Alchemy,” 173.
Williams, Many Dimensions, 260.
109
See Dan, Kabbalah, 57.
110
Ibid., 230. For a brief review of the concept of Shekinah in Kabbalah, see Dan, Kabbalah,
45–49. As I will discuss in detail in Chapter Five, Lord Arglay is equated with the masculine
principle in the stone. The stone is thus a complex symbol. While at times it represents divine
unity, so that both masculine and feminine principles are in the stone, at other times it represents
108
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63
Chloe reaches a point in her mystical journey where she is prepared to take the step
toward realizing herself as a unity with God and nature, an experience of unio mystica that
also helps the stone itself return to its transcendent source. At Lord Arglay’s instruction,
Chloe takes the original stone in her hand and aligns her will with it. The divided Types of
the stone come of their own volition to the London house in which Chloe stands and join
with the original stone: “Through her they poured into the Stone upon her hands.”111 Once
the stone has achieved this, another process takes place, in which Chloe, as though she
were another type of the archetype, also becomes united with the stone. Chloe is not
herself aware of how this operation takes place, but Lord Arglay witnesses it. It is worth
quoting a section of the novel’s action to get an idea of the mystical language and
symbolism (primarily kabbalistic in this case) that Williams uses to express the experience
of mystical union pursued in the F.R.C.:
He had seen the Types come together and pass through her form, colouring but
never confusing it, till they had entered entirely into the Type upon her hands.
But scarcely had the last vestige of entwined light and dark grown into the One
which remained, scarcely had he seen her in herself standing again obedient
and passive, than he saw suddenly that the great process was reversing itself.
As all had flowed in, so now all began to flow out, out from the Stone, out into
the hands that held it, out along the arms and into the body and shape of which
they were part. Through the clothes that veiled it he saw that body receiving the
likeness of the Stone. Translucency entered it, and through and in the limbs the
darkness which was the Tetragrammaton moved and hid and revealed…what
the Stone had been she now was.112
Like much of Williams’s writing, both poetry and prose, this is a passage dense with
complex symbolism and obscure references—such as “the darkness which was the
Tetragrammaton”—that are difficult for any reader to interpret. These broad symbolic
divine estrangement, symbolic of Shekinah in manifestation, and therefore only represents the
feminine divine principle.
111
Williams, Many Dimensions, 260.
112
Ibid., 261.
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64
vistas are intended to direct the reader to vast metaphysical ideas that quite eclipse the
narrower context in which they are expressed. For our current purposes, we can see, as
clearly as is perhaps possible, Chloe’s symbolically represented progression into unio
mystica. Having guided the stone to unity, or at least acted as a vehicle for the stone to
unify itself, Chloe stands “her in herself,” a reference to the material, ego-self discovering
the Higher Self within. With this discovery, she becomes the stone, a clear allegory
(considering that the stone represents God in manifestation) of unity with the divine.
At the end of her experience of unio mystica, Chloe transcends to an even higher
state of divine union, one that requires the death of her physical body, as it is a height of
attainment not available, in Williams’s conception, for material human beings. Just before
this movement into transcendence takes place, however, as Chloe is in the state of
oneness with the stone described in the passage above, she is said to be “clothed in the
beauty of the End of Desire.”113 This term is frequently used in the novel to describe the
experience of unio mystica, but not openly so.114 The End of Desire, says the Hajji, the
Sufi guardian of the stone, is both what the stone offers to those who seek it, and what it is
in itself.115 Williams is no more clear than this about the meaning of the phrase, but the
word “end” appears to have a double meaning, indicating both the goal of desire and the
cessation of it. In the first sense the phrase refers to the desire for the divine that is the
basis of Williams’s Romantic Theology. In Chloe’s case, she is able to adore the divine by
also adoring Lord Arglay, a lower form of the divine masculine principle. Thus, Chloe
ascends to unio mystica through the correspondence of divine and human love
emphasized by Romantic Theology. Williams’s description of Chloe as “clothed in the
beauty of the End of Desire” seems to connect both Chloe’s mystical ascension and
Romantic Theology in general to the Platonic concept of mystical elevation via the
contemplation of beauty. As expressed in the Symposium, man can achieve
contemplation of “the divine beauty itself, in its unique form” through the desire aroused by
113
Ibid., 262.
Ibid., 42–45, 95, 102, 115, 129, 262.
115
Ibid., 43.
114
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65
“obvious beauties” such as those of the human form.116 In the same way, Chloe “sees the
beautiful through that which makes it visible” in her experience of unio mystica.117
Once Chloe has achieved the goal of her desire, her longing ends. This cessation of
desire is described in the F.R.C. rituals in terms of union with the Higher Self: “Behold, I
am that which I sought, and the end of my desire is with me.”118 Unio mystica is presented
as the end of desire in the F.R.C. rituals because there is nothing left to desire once the
initiate realizes that all things desired have been a part of the self all along, by virtue of the
unity resulting from the presence of the immanent God. Williams thus shares Waite’s
understanding of union with God as an awareness of the self as all things because of its
correspondent unity with them.
Many Dimensions is thus an excellent example of Williams’s incorporation of
elements of his F.R.C. experience into his novels. Alluding to the particular symbolic
permutations of a small secret society is not, of course, a recipe for straight-forward
communication, though with some work the novels are largely comprehensible for readers
familiar with esoteric symbolism. Before Williams is criticized too harshly for his obscurity
however, Eliot’s idea that he simply had a message that he felt he could not communicate
in ordinary language must be kept uppermost in mind. Williams seems to have been
attracted to esoteric symbolism for the same reason he was drawn to the ritual activity of
the F.R.C.—it allowed the quill of his imagination to sketch the outline of a metaphysical
116
Plato, Symposium, 211c—11e.
Ibid., 212a. I am indebted to Wouter J. Hanegraaff for pointing out the Platonic heritage of
the concept of “the end of desire.” See Hanegraaff, “Under the Mantle of Love,” for his ideas on the
subject—particularly in relation to Renaissance formulations of Platonic love.
118
Waite, “Adeptus Minor,” 60. Cf. Waite, “Portal of the Fourth Order,” 31-32. Hanegraaff has
also pointed out to me that Waite’s formulation of “the end of desire” as a discovery of the divine
self was very likely influenced by Saint-Martin’s concept of “l’homme de désir” (“man of desire” or
“man of aspiration”). The man of desire is he who is possessed of a soul that is so aspires for God
that he is able to discover the spark of divinity that still remains within the self from its prelapsarian
state of full unity with the divine. Through a realignment of his will with God’s, the man of desire is
able to realize the divine presence within himself and also the presence of spiritual forces
immanent in nature. This is as far as the possible influence of Saint-Martin’s concept extends,
however, as the French mystic posited a future evolution of humanity into a critical mass of men of
desire, after which all of humanity, along with nature itself, would return to its original state of
perfect union with God (McCalla, “Saint-German,” 1025–30). Neither Waite nor Williams extended
the concept of the end of desire past individual mystical attainment. Moreover, while Waite seems
to have relied somewhat on Saint-Martin in developing the term “the end of desire,” he did not see
Saint-Martin’s “theory of reintegration” as a new contribution to mystical theory (Waite, SaintMartin, 252).
117
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reality that both he and Waite considered to be quite outside the realm of phenomenal
understanding.
66
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
67
4) The Coinherent Magus: Charles Williams and Magic
In my discussion of Williams’s ritual activity in the F.R.C. I have frequently skirted
around two central aspects of esoteric knowledge that underwent particularly substantial
adaptations within modern occultism—Kabbalah and magic. I have held off on in-depth
discussions of the relation of Waite and Williams to these traditions because they are both
deserving of specific focus, particularly in the context of this evaluation of Williams’s
stance towards occultism. In the next two chapters I will attempt to place Williams within
the context of modern occult interpretations of the magical and kabbalistic traditions, while
also continuing to evaluate Waite’s influence.
Of all the issues related to the occult context of Williams’s work, the question of his
interest in magic has been the most discussed. The central reason for this is that it simply
cannot be ignored. Both his poetry and prose are littered with themes, characters,
symbols, settings, and plot devices derived from various magical traditions. Early Williams
scholars could brush all this aside as the mere devices of fiction, but over time
biographical details have emerged that have much complicated the situation. The
publication of Letters to Lalage, a volume of letters written by Williams to a young woman
named Lois Lang-Sims, was a particularly significant development. These letters revealed
that Williams carried on a unique master-slave relationship with Lang-Sims that involved
several incidents of what appears to have been a type of ritual magic, which Williams used
to exalt his consciousness through sexual excitation. It should come as no surprise by now
that despite this evidence some Williams scholars have tended to chuck the magical baby
out with the occult bathwater. There are however, some very notable exceptions that have
contributed to a much more complexified view of Williams and magic than can be found
with regard to other areas of his occult interest.1 Among these scholars the usual
association of magic with black magic and demonic activity that has descended from the
Grand Polemical Narrative is completely absent. In its place is a view of magic as a
diverse, historically specific tradition. It is important, as Hanegraaff observes, that magic
be seen in this way rather than as a single reified historical object. Speaking of the history
1
See Newman, “Companions of the Coinherence”; Knight, Magical World of Charles Williams;
Dodds, Charles Williams, particularly 159–60; Gauntlett, “Charles Williams and Magic,” for
examples of this more complexified research.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
68
of magic since antiquity, Hanegraaff states that “the term could mean very different things
to different parties, and each participant in the discourse had a wide choice of
connotations to highlight or play down at will, according to his particular religious, scientific,
or philosophical agenda.”2 Williams’s magical ideas are certainly an excellent example of
the value of this statement, as he absorbed magical values and concepts from the early
Christian church, the Christian magi of the Renaissance and the Early Modern period, and
modern occultism. Like all of Williams’s esoteric thought, Waite seems to have had some
influence in defining Williams’s choice of which magical elements to “highlight or play
down,” but overall Williams developed less along Waitean lines in this respect than in other
areas.
Magic vs. Mysticism
Because I don’t believe Waite had as much impact in this area, I don’t want to spill
too much ink discussing his magical views, but it is, of course, necessary to discuss some
background in order to substantiate my claim that Williams developed the large part of his
magical theory independent from Waite. In his early years, before his professed movement
away from occultism, Waite’s vision of magic was very similar to that of the naturalistic
perspective held by many modern occultists. Waite held that “certain occult [hidden]
forces” in man could be applied in a particular way so that “the latent potentialities of a
variety of physical substances are developed into manifest activity.” This “constitutes
Magic in the full, perfect, and comprehensive sense of that much abused term.”3 Despite
his acceptance of both the efficacy and value of practical magic in these early years
however, Waite still prioritized his goals as a mystic. He thus preferred theories and
practices that made magicians “able to apply the arcane laws of evolution to their own
interior selves.”4 The magus, in this conception, would do better than to waste magical
energies on phenomenal interests, turning instead to the transformation and perfection of
the self in preparation for divine union. This valuation recalls the central purpose for which
2
Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, 177.
Waite, Occult Sciences, 12.
4
Ibid., 8.
3
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
69
the initiates of the Golden Dawn employed magical practice, particularly in the Second
Order.
As the nineteenth century wound into the twentieth, Waite’s mystical priorities began
to prompt him to turn against all forms of magic, in the same vein as his dichotomous
separation of mysticism and occultism. His first step was to reject all forms of practical
magic, though he retained, for a while, his support for the idea of a “Higher Magia” that
“justified the original meaning of the term Magic,” and essentially acted as a term for what
he would soon begin to call the Secret Tradition.5 At the time he founded the F.R.C., Waite
continued to acknowledge the efficacy of practical magic but he rejected its practice,
arguing that “the mystical path and term have no connection with operations of this kind.”6
At this time Waite even saw it necessary to sacrifice his use of the term “Higher Magia” to
his dichotomy between magic and mysticism: “If it be said that, in virtue of the word and its
root-meaning, Magic means hidden wisdom, then I register as beyond controversy that it
should never be used in this sense, owing to its abuses throughout the centuries.”7 This
rejection of any use of “magic” as a term indicates once again that many of Waite’s
rejections of occultism were discursive separations rather than complete theoretical or
practical distinctions. In this case, Waite’s fear of associations with past semantic abuses
seems to have motivated him to discard a term related to magic not in order to reject the
Higher Magia but to save it. Waite thus seems to have felt forced to demarcate a
dichotomy between mystical and magical practice that quite outstripped the view of other
mystics in the period. Evelyn Underhill, probably the most well known modern British
mystic, shared Waite’s belief that magic was “the antithesis of mysticism.”8 In fact,
Underhill left Waite’s I.R.R. in 1904 because she felt there was too much of a focus on
5
Waite, Studies in Mysticism, 54; Ceremonial Magic, xx.
Waite, Divine Union, 23. Cf. 5–6. As suggested to me by Hanegraaff, Waite’s distancing of
himself from practical magic may have been motivated by reading Saint-Martin’s similar
renunciation of theurgic esoteric practices. It is likely not a coincidence that Waite’s shift away from
phenomenal occultism began at the same time as he was reading Saint-Martin and preparing a
detailed biography, The Life of Louis Claude de Saint-Martin: The Unknown Philosopher, published
in 1901. Saint-Martin left the Elus-Coëns, the masonic order of his mentor, Martinés de Pasqually
(1715–79), in 1790 after deciding that the theurgical concerns of the order were a distraction from
the mystic path. As translated by Waite, Saint-Martin stated: “Our understanding forbids us to
regard as a means of regeneration [unio mystica] anything which belongs to the realm of external
facts.” Le Nouvel Homme, 23, quoted in Waite, Saint-Martin, 254. Cf. McCalla, “Saint-Martin,”
1025.
7
Waite, Divine Union, 24.
6
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
70
practical occultism. However, though she disdained the actual practice of phenomenal
forms of magic, she still valued it as “the survival of a great and ancient tradition,” able to
extend, though not escape, the boundaries of the phenomenal world.9
The purity of Waite’s dichotomy, like any simplification based on binary opposites, is
thus open to question, particularly with reference to the ritual activity of the F.R.C.,
designed, as we have seen, to effect the elevation of consciousness required to achieve
unio mystica—a process that was seen as quite magical in nature in the Golden Dawn.
However, I will not attempt a deconstruction of this particular aspect of Waite’s distinction
between mysticism and occultism here, as it is not reflected in Williams’s view of magic.
There are scholars who have used Waite’s dichotomy to distance Williams from magic,10
but this approach is quite difficult to maintain after taking more than a cursory glance at his
life and work. While it has been argued that Williams moved even further toward orthodoxy
when it came to magic than Waite,11 the historical data seems to indicate the opposite.
A Question of a Centre—Williams’s Theory of Magic
A review of the presentation of magic in Williams’s novels and poetry, as well as the
magical experiments he performed in his private life, show a fascination with all aspects of
the subject—from the “black” magic of the medieval grimoires to a “white” spiritual magic
that had important ramifications for his concept of coinherence. Williams’s novels indicate
a personal interest in the history, myth, and symbol surrounding the concept of goetic
magic. Like Waite, however, and like the majority of modern occultists, Williams had
serious reservations about such forms of magical practice. However, Williams’s distinction
is actually quite different from Waite’s, as he leaves room for forms of practical magic that
are acceptable either because they contribute to achieving unio mystica, or because they
selflessly contribute to effecting the will of God. On a personal level, Williams pursued
forms of magical practice, apparently in order to elevate his artistic consciousness, that he
would not have expressed theoretical support for.
8
Underhill, Mysticism, 69.
Ibid., 142-43. On the problem of separating “magic” and “mysticism” see Versluis, Magic and
Mysticism, 2.
10
See, for example, McLaren, “Hermeticism,” 3; Ashenden, Charles Williams, 3n14.
11
Ashenden, Charles Williams, 115.
9
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
71
In addition to biographical details and a small amount of scholarship on the subject
of magic found in Witchcraft (1941), a history of goetic magic from antiquity until the
seventeenth century, the enormous amount of magical symbol, allusion, and
characterization in Williams’s fiction presents a consistent magical worldview that is
continuous with Romantic Theology and coinherence.12 Gareth Knight, one of the few who
has reviewed Williams’s work with an unproblematic view of the potential for a Christian
occultism, has provided us with perhaps the best description of the philosophy of magic
that appears in Williams’s novels, which Knight says “are illustrations of the practicalities,
pitfalls and potential of magic in most of its forms and phases.” He continues, “Indeed the
tenor of his books tends not to a condemnation of a magical view of the world but to the
elevation of magic, its redemption in a sense, to a form of mystical and transformative
interchange.”13 Knight thus identifies a non-dichotomous valuation of magic in Williams’s
novels that blurs unproblematically with Christian and mystical aspects of his philosophy.
The Divine-Centred Magus
Williams’s elevation of particular forms of magic actually stems from the concept of
the Higher Magia, and even seems to have been specifically developed from Waite’s
particular concept of it. In Witchcraft, Williams describes the roots of magic and the
emergence of four types of supernatural powers that emerged into Western society in
antiquity: goetic, theurgic, and divinatory magic, and a fourth less common and more
mystical variety: “Some few to whom the magical art was indeed “high-priestess of
heaven”…pushed on by a pure learning, followed in honour and chastity towards a
sublime union with the final absolute power; there was a means of doing this, but it was
12
Using works of fiction to establish an author’s worldview is an approach that is obviously
fraught with interpretive peril. However, Williams’s novels can be more didactically interpreted than
most works of fiction. His novels are so vividly affected by their author’s metaphysical obsessions
that they can be read as religious texts at their most didactic, and philosophical dialogues at their
least. They are thus theological presentations as much as works of entertainment. Regardless of
whether the novels are meant for entertainment or instruction, we can safely assume that Williams
would not have violated sacrosanct aspects of his philosophy just to please an audience. This
assumption springs from the mythopoeic worldview he shared with his Inklings counterparts. As
Roma A. King observes, “For Williams, myth is not a fictional tale but a serious, intuitively
apprehended pattern of cosmic relationships imaginatively embodied in a structure that points
beyond itself to an illuminating reality about the nature of man and his place in the cosmos”
(Pattern in the Web, 2).
13
Knight, Magical World of Charles Williams, 11.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
72
very secret.”14 Magical art as the “high-priestess of heaven” is thus parallel to Waite’s idea
of a higher magic as a perennial source of wisdom explored for the purposes of effecting
“sublime union” with the divine. The comparison stops here, however, as we have seen
that Waite abandoned the idea of a higher magic, discursively at least. Moreover,
Williams’s concept of the Higher Magia was much more inclusive than Waite’s, except
perhaps in the latter’s early years.
Williams included practical forms of magic into his body of accepted practice, based
on logical conclusions drawn from the doctrine of correspondences. His conception was
much less operatively defined than the natural magic of the Renaissance and the Early
Modern period, but his reasons for maintaining the concept of magic in the first place stem
from the activities of hermeticists such as Agrippa and Vaughan. Williams valued esoteric
thinkers such as these because they pursued the union of divorced matter and spirit with a
zeal not mirrored by the Christian Church of the time. The means they used was “not
necessarily opposed [to the Church], nor even alternative…but certainly practical, could
the praxis be discovered. The desire and the design spread widely, and while the Wars of
Religion devastated Europe, the intellectuals, in their own intellectual way, sought the
Union, and (according to their capacity and interest) the various Corollaries of the
Union.”15 Williams is speaking specifically here of the alchemical goal of unifying spirit and
matter, both physically and on the level of personal spiritual transformation, but both goals
were seen as inherently magical in function by the alchemists in question. Vaughan,
following Agrippa, saw this magic as perfectly compatible with Christianity.16
Williams’s concept of the Higher Magia thus returns to its Renaissance roots to
accept forms of magic that are not simply theoretical, but also practical. His criterion for
acceptable magic was simple—the aims of the magus must be centred in the divine.
Rather than a dichotomy between magic and mysticism, Williams proposed an opposition
between the magician as either self-centred or divine-centred, a distinction that Knight
frames as “God’s magic” versus “the distortions of it that are wholly man’s.”17 This divinecentred magic took a specific doctrinal form in Williams’s concept of coinherence. Williams
14
Williams, Witchcraft, 35. The reference to magic as “the high-priestess of heaven” is from
the Apologia of Apuleius.
15
Williams, Witchcraft, 223.
16
Vaughan, “Magia Adamica,” 132. Cf. Williams, Witchcraft, 221.
17
Knight, Magical World of Charles Williams, 67.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
73
took this term from a Patristic description of the nature of the Trinity in which its three
members are held to be of separate identities, but to dwell in each other, not just in
similarity of essence but also in a process of constant sharing or substitution of identity.18
Humans can literally mirror this process of substitution by offering their own selves in place
of others. Late in his life, Williams founded his own order, The Companions of the
Coinherence, based upon the principle of supporting others through this form of transsubstantive magic. While Lois Lang-Sims’s publication shows that there was some abuse
of power in his role as leader of the Companions, there is also evidence that Williams
directed the use of “God’s magic” in ways that reflect the selflessness portrayed in his
novels. For example, when Hadfield, a member of the Companions of the Coinherence,
undertook a sea-voyage from Bermuda to England across the war torn seas of 1944,
Williams worried both for her safety and for her state of mind. He therefore instructed
Lang-Sims, who had never met Hadfield, to take on the coinherent task of offering herself
to stand as sacrifice on behalf of the “the Company.” “Present yourself shyly to Almighty
God in exchange for her,” Williams commanded Lang-Sims, noting that she may feel
nothing in return, or she may be “suddenly inconvenienced.” “This is a real thing,” said
Williams, forestalling any assumptions that the function of coinherence might be purely
metaphysical.19
Williams did not offer a precise method for Lang-Sims to follow in offering herself in
exchange for Hadfield, but we see clearer examples of the process in his novels.
Williams’s characterization of Sybil in The Greater Trumps provides perhaps the best
image of the coinherent adept. The Greater Trumps is the story of a magical Tarot deck
that has the ability, through the doctrine of correspondences, to control various divine
principles and bring their correspondent equivalents to life in the material realm. As with
the stone of Many Dimensions, there are characters that seek to use this magical artifact
for their own gain, but Sybil has no such interest. She possesses the ability to control the
forces unleashed by Henry and Aaron—two characters who describe themselves as
sorcerers and who seek to use the Tarot deck to gain earthly power—but she does not use
this power. Her magical ability derives from her centeredness in God, but Henry mistakes
18
Newman, “Companions of the Coinherence,” 6.
Lang-Sims, Letters to Lalage, 53. Cf. Newman, “Companions of the Coinherence,” 9;
Gauntlett, “Charles Williams and Magic,” np.
19
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
74
the peace and strength that come from Sybil’s permanent state of mystical awareness of
the unity between her purpose and that of the divine, and describes her as “a woman of
great power” who “possesses herself entirely.”20 In Williams’s actual vision however, Sybil
has submitted herself so totally to the divine will that she is no longer aware of herself at
all. Rather she is prepared to use the power gained from being centred in the divine for the
good of others. “Aunt Sybil,” says her nephew Ralph at one point in the frenetic action that
results from a storm which Henry causes through the power of the Tarot, “Would find a
torture-chamber divinely lovely, so long as she was the one on the rack.”21
From this divine-centredness, Sybil gains the abilities of the coinherent adept. She is
able, for example, to heal Aaron’s ankle using magic based in coinherent exchange: “Her
hand closed round the ankle; her mind went inwards into the consciousness of the Power
which contained them both; she loved it and adored it: with her own thought of Aaron in his
immediate need, his fear, his pain, she adored. Her own ankle ached and throbbed in
sympathy…that of a life habituated to such intercession.” This coinherent magic is worked
by virtue of the correspondent unity of all figures involved in the act—Sybil is in God and in
Aaron, and they are in her.
It is extremely important to note that though this act of healing is carried out through
the adoration of the ”Power that contained them both,” there is a conscious act of
individual will required. “She interceded; she in him and he in her.”22 Newman points out
that the power of coinherent magic corresponds to the power of prayer and is similar in
function, but this comparison does not adequately represent the praxis of coinherent
magic.23 Prayer is passive—the closest it gets to action is supplication. Sybil’s magic, on
the other hand, is active, it requires more than simply the passive inaction of the mystic—it
is a purposeful act. It thus requires the strong will that occultists saw as vital for magical
action. The Golden Dawn saw a strong personal will as requisite both for the development
of magical abilities and for entry to the Second Order, possibly following Eliphas Lévi’s
insistence on the primacy of the will in magical action.24 Aleister Crowley defined magic as
20
Williams, Greater Trumps, 85.
Ibid., 160.
22
Ibid., 219.
23
Newman, “Companions of the Coinherence,” 11.
24
Bogdan, Rituals of Initiation, 154; Owen, Place of Enchantment, 69; Gilbert, A.E. Waite, 89.
21
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
75
the “Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.”25 Will was an
essential aspect of Williams’s magical praxis as well, to the point that in Witchcraft he
distinguishes between unacceptable magic as related to Power, and acceptable magic as
defined by the correspondence between divine and human will.26 However, while the
modern occult emphasis on will may have impacted Williams’s conception of magical
practice, his divine-centred magus diverges from the occultist goal of developing the
individual will in order to increase personal power. Sybil’s magical actions would be
completely inefficacious if her will were not aligned completely with God’s.27
Another important illustration of divine-centred magic, which has also been discussed
by Knight, is seen in Descent Into Hell, Williams’s second last novel, in which Peter
Stanhope, a coinherent adept who a number of scholars believe to be modelled on
Williams himself, seeks to save Pauline, a young woman he has befriended in the course
of putting on a community play, from the terrifying presence of her evil doppelgänger.28
Stanhope does this through coinherent magic:
He visualized her going along a road, any road; he visualized another Pauline
coming to meet her. And as he did so his mind contemplated not the first but
the second Pauline; he took trouble to apprehend the vision, he summoned
through all his sensations an approaching fear. Deliberately he opened himself
to that fear, laying aside for a while every thought of why he was doing it,
forgetting every principle and law, absorbing only the strangeness and the terror
of that spiritual identity…The body of his flesh received her alien terror, his mind
carried the burden of her world.29
This is a classic example of coinherence, as Stanhope accomplishes the destruction of the
doppelgänger, which he believes is likely a manifestation of Pauline’s psyche, by taking on
her fear in an act of substituted love. An important typological similarity to modern occult
25
Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, 9.
Williams, Witchcraft, 14.
27
For further discussions of the magical aspects of Sybil’s character see Knight, Magical
World of Charles Williams, 59; Newman, “Companions of the Coinherence,” 11.
28
Knight, Magical World of Charles Williams, 67.
29
Williams, Descent into Hell, 100–01.
26
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76
magical practice is seen in Stanhope’s act, as he accomplishes it through visualization and
elevation of the imagination to the point where he is literally able to experience himself as
Pauline in order to take on her terror. Williams’s coinherent magic thus features the
increasing reliance on imagination seen in modern occult conceptions of magic, which
aimed to develop the imagination through various visualization techniques.30 Hanegraaff
describes this focus on imagination as a shift toward the psychologization of magical
practice, taken in order to adapt magical theory to the disenchanted, post-Enlightenment
worldview. This view of magical function is quite different from pre-Enlightenment forms,
which relied on explanations external to the self, usually based on the correspondences
held to exist between material objects and divine principles, or on the manipulation of
forces that were extant in the universe but were hidden from human perception.31
Chloe and Arglay also practice magical visualization in the process of their efforts to
help effect the will of the stone, which is, remember, representative of the immanent God.
They attempt the rescue of a lab assistant who has been sent back in time by the novel’s
villain, Sir Giles Tumulty, who had been experimenting with the stone’s abilities in his
quest for personal knowledge and power. Chloe and Arglay travel back in time to rescue
the assistant by contemplating on several symbols that Arglay draws to represent the
players involved in the rescue. These symbols “help the mind” effect a movement of
consciousness into the past. As usual, complete submission to the stone, representative of
divine power, is required for success.32
One might protest that in scenes like this Williams is simply exercising his right as a
fiction author to play with his concept of coinherence in a magical setting. Williams,
however, was not above experimenting with such practices himself. In a letter to Lois
Lang-Sims, for example, he discusses the pentagram and its magical uses in a manner
that suggests a definite familiarity with the subject: “It is a sign in some traditions of any
occult Rite.” Williams cautions that it must be drawn the proper way, then clarifies, “It is for
the Banishment of Evil Spirits or Elementals and the stabilizing of the good. But drawn
reversed, which would be upside down and against the sun, it is the very opposite, and
30
Hanegraaff, “How Magic Survived,” 369; Owen, Place of Enchantment, 151.
See Hanegraaff, “How Magic Survived,” 366–69.
32
Williams, Many Dimensions, 134-43.
31
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
77
magically evil.”33 Both a belief in magical praxis and the distinction between acceptable
and rejected practices are at play in this letter. It is unclear where Williams learned the use
of the pentagram ritual, but one possibility is that he somewhere encountered knowledge
of the Golden Dawn’s Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram, used to invoke divine beings or
safeguard the adept from unwanted spiritual influences. After initiates passed through the
neophyte grade they were given this ritual as preparation for defending themselves against
threatening spiritual forces.34
Williams’s incorporation of specifically modern developments in magical praxis,
particularly his focus on the roles of the will and the imagination, show that his idea of the
coinherent magician, though very much his own conception, is a product of the magical
context of his own time. Williams’s other category of magicians, a group that seeks a type
of magical power that is erroneous because it is centred on the self rather than the divine,
is also specifically related to modern occultism.
The Way of P’o-Lu
Williams calls magic worked outside of the divine centre a “perverted way of the
soul.”35 Selfish magic is not evil for Williams because it is demonic or dangerous, but
because it does not take into account the divine purpose that should be correspondent to
the purpose of the magician. For Williams, this is the way of “P’o-lu,” a hellish land in the
mythos of his Arthurian poetry. P’o-lu is “the terrifying wilderness, the “upside-down of the
world.””36 Viewed by the dim half-light of P’o-lu, self-centred magic is divine-centered
magic practiced upside down. Rather than direct divine power according to the will of God,
the self-centred magus draws it down to adjust materiality according to his own will.
Williams’s novels are filled with characters that seek power outside of the divine
centre. There are only two possible outcomes for these characters—redemption, or the
damnation of P’o-lu. While Sybil of The Greater Trumps is concerned only with the welfare
of other characters and the restoration of order after the chaos that occurs when the divine
33
Lang-Sims, Letters to Lalage, 75.
Gilbert, Golden Dawn, 60; Francis King, Ritual Magic, 57; Gauntlett, “Charles Williams and
Magic,” np.
35
Williams, Witchcraft, 9.
36
Lang-Sims, Letters to Lalage, 17.
34
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
78
principles are unleashed in the world, Henry and Aaron follow the way of P’o-lu in their
obsessive desire to possess the cards for their own power and knowledge.37 These two
are ultimately redeemed—the first by love, the second by shame, but far more often
Williams’s goetic magicians experience damnation.38 Giles Tumulty of Many Dimensions is
perhaps the best example of a damned magus.39 Tumulty’s quest for magical knowledge
completely lacks a divine focus, which results in two outcomes he cannot foresee. First,
Tumulty’s magic is weaker than that of the divine-centred characters in the novel. Lord
Arglay is able to use the Stone of Suleiman to see inside Tumulty’s mind, but Tumulty is
not able to read Arglay’s thoughts in return.40 Tumulty suffers a similar defeat in his
attempt to take over Chloe’s mind. At first he succeeds, but when Arglay interrupts the act
by asking Chloe, “What is it that you serve?” he loses control.41 This failure occurs
because Chloe realizes that it is the stone—ie. Shekinah, the divine manifest in the
universe—that she serves and turns to re-centre herself. Frustrated by his inability to gain
power over the pair, Tumulty curses Chloe, unaware that she is in the process of realizing
her identity with Shekinah, and thereby curses Shekinah herself: “”Damn you,” it was
Chloe whom he half-unconsciously apostrophized, “are you tucked away in it [the stone]
as if it was Arglay’s bed? I only wish I could get at you.”” In response to his curse, the
stone reveals itself to him as both the essence of his material surroundings and as the
great cosmic centre of all things. But Tumulty has condemned himself to P’o-lu through his
own self-absorption and the stone therefore remains out of reach: “[The Stone’s] greatness
was all about him, yet its smallness lay, glowing gold, at the remote centre…and then the
Stone in the centre changed and was the Stone no more.”42 Though the divine is all about
him, Tumulty has only sought power in and for himself. His fate is eternal estrangement
from the divine centre.
Williams’s clearest presentation of the pitfalls of self-centred magic is the
necromancer Simon le Clerc of All Hallows Eve. Le Clerc, who has elongated his lifespan
to 200 years, channels his power through utterances of twisted kabbalistic names from the
37
Williams, Greater Trumps, 182.
Ibid., 228-29.
39
Tumulty reprises this role in War in Heaven.
40
Williams, Many Dimensions, 211.
41
Ibid., 205.
42
Ibid., 243-45.
38
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
79
dark, Q’lippoth side of the Tree of Life, learned in an unnamed French school of
occultism.43 Le Clerc is connected, through many allusions, to the antichrist, but his name
is probably also a reference to Simon Magus, the notorious magician who tries to buy the
power of performing divine miracles from the apostle Peter in the book of Acts.44 Several
scholars have also theorized that Simon le Clerc may be a direct reference to Aleister
Crowley.45 This has only been proposed as a possibility—indeed the only argument of
substance that has been offered thus far is Willard’s observation that Crowley called
himself Simon in Moonchild, a novel that contains caricatures of a number of prominent
modern occultists.46 However, there may be something to this connection, though Crowley
could only ever be seen as a partial influence in the construction of le Clerc’s character.
The most intriguing evidence is that le Clerc, in the manner of a typical antichrist figure,
subverts both mystical and Christian doctrine by frequently appropriating love as a guiding
principle. Williams portrays this appropriation in a manner that recalls one of the two
maxims of Thelema, the religion revealed by Crowley in The Book of the Law: “Love is the
law, Love under Will.”47 In All Hallows Eve, Simon le Clerc intones, “Love is the fulfilling of
the law.” Williams’s authorial voice takes on a sarcastic tone after relating this statement,
as he notes that le Clerc says it “as if uttering some maxim of great wisdom.”48 Whether or
not Williams intended a specific reference to Crowley here, le Clerc’s character certainly
represents a harsh critique of self-centred magic. Le Clerc’s central goal in the novel is
union, however it is a union with two copies of himself that he has magically created and
sent to other parts of the world to gather followers in a quest for global domination.49 Thus,
le Clerc’s goal is not divine-centred unio mystica, but union with his own self. This clear
critique of selfish, aggrandizing magical practice extends to a rejection of occultists such
as Crowley who sought union with the Higher Self but did not see it as an aspect of God.
If Williams did intend le Clerc to refer to Crowley, it would only have been a reference
to Crowley’s image as portrayed in the media—an image that the latter did nothing to
43
Williams, All Hallows Eve, 39–40.
See Acts 8:18–24. Williams discusses Simon Magus in Witchcraft, 32–34.
45
Willard, “Acts of the Companions,” 292; Duriez and Porter, Inklings Handbook, 86.
46
Including Waite, whose portrayal is particularly unflattering. See Crowley, Moonchild, 103,
107–08, 121.
47
Crowley, The Book of the Law, 157.
48
Williams, All Hallows Eve, 120.
49
Ibid., 38, 69.
44
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
80
correct and everything to accentuate. We have seen that Crowley embraced his identity as
“other” to orthodox Christianity. He also presented Thelema as specifically anti-Christian.50
Crowley’s reputation, however, self-perpetuated or not, has sometimes tended to elide
other elements of his occult practice and philosophy that have much in common with
Williams’s views. Crowley valued magic both as a naturalistic process that could be
empirically substantiated and as a tool for achieving spiritual attainment. Regular magical
practices, such as ritual sex magic, could still be used to achieve this latter goal, but the
purpose and interpretation of these practices was quite different than when used for
practical purposes. Crowley used a variety of expressions to describe his goal of spiritual
attainment, including union with the Higher Self, but he also described it as equivalent to
mystical union with God.51 Crowley is thus a perfect example of the need to approach
figures associated with esoteric movements with a critical eye that looks past the illusions
created by reified categories such as “occultism” and “Christianity.” Williams, as I have
tried to show, is another excellent example. Though scholars have distanced him from
occultism because they are uneasy about associating him with reviled figures such as
Crowley, Williams’s goal of spiritual attainment was not entirely different from that of “the
Beast.” Like Crowley he pursued this goal through rituals designed to elevate
consciousness, and, as we will see shortly, he was also like Crowley in that he was not
above using sexual excitation for this purpose. There are, of course, stark differences
between the two men, but these are often more in presentation than in actual action or
philosophy. Williams presented himself as a coinherent saint, while Crowley took on the
mantle of the lusty, polysexual antichrist, but behind both identities there was magic.
The magical philosophies of both Crowley and Williams show that opposing magic as
practical to mysticism as purely metaphysical results in a weak distinction that is easily
blurred, one that would not likely have been embraced by many occultists in the period.
Williams’s continued valuation of the Higher Magia and his presentation of coinherence as
50
Bogdan and Starr, introduction to Aleister Crowley, 3-7. Williams would have almost
certainly been aware of Crowley’s reputation, whether through the social channels offered by the
F.R.C., his work at Oxford Publishing House (which published some of Crowley’s poems in The
Oxford Book of Mystical Verse), or slanderous stories in the media (Willard, “Acts of the
Companions,” 292).
51
Pasi, “Varieties of Magical Experience,” 66-75; Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, 25.
Liz Greene points out that this “quest for transformative religious experiences” was a central goal
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
81
a “redemptive magic” show that he did not follow Waite’s stark dichotomy between magic
and mysticism. His own distinction between self-centred and divine-centred magic finds
clearer echoes in a long tradition within Western esotericism in which self-seeking,
aggrandizing forms of magical practice are rejected, but magical powers are otherwise
“welcomed for their utility rather than avoided as stumbling blocks.”52 This view was
common in the modern occult context. Anna Kingsford, for example, divided magic along
lines of white and black. White magic, in her conception, was magic in which individual will
was united with the divine will, while magic based on individual desire was black.53 Alison
Butler argues that this understanding of magic informed the approach taken by the Golden
Dawn.54 The Order certainly did apply a similar valuation between black and white magic
based on the good or evil intentions of the adept. “Purity of aspiration and of life” were the
“first and essential qualities” demanded of prospective members of the R.R. et A.C. before
they could begin studying the magical knowledge of the Second Order.55 This was no
superficial gloss either, as Aleister Crowley was denied entry into the R.R. et A.C. because
its leadership felt that he was ill-suited for the occult study of the higher order.56 His
reputation as a magician who pursued magical knowledge for selfish and malignant
purposes did not fit with the R.R. et A.C., which valued what Owen calls a “sacred trust” in
which magic could not cause harm or be used for black purposes.57
Williams’s theory of magic thus has more in common with the ideas of occultists such
as Kingsford and the adepts of the Golden Dawn than with Waite’s strict dichotomy.
Williams followed Waite in rejecting black magic as “certainly evil,” but he departed
significantly from Waite’s branding of white magic as “foolish” and written ceremonial as
“either a debased and scandalous travesty…[or] a trivial and misconstrued application.”58
Thus, scholars who apply Waite’s magical theories to Williams risk quickly running astray
shared by Waite and Crowley, despite the latter’s frequent vituperation against the former (Magi
and Magiddim, 308).
52
Gibbons, Spirituality and the Occult, 38-39.
53
Butler, “Intellectual Origins,” 91–92.
54
Ibid.. Butler cites Flying Rolls numbers I, II, V, and VI as exemplifying Kingsford’s
understanding of magic.
55
Moina MacGregor Mathers, “Preface,” 4. Cf. Westcott, “The Condition Needed for Entry into
the Second Order,” quoted in Gilbert, Golden Dawn, 126-29; Owen, Place of Enchantment, 74.
56
Owen, Place of Enchantment, 79.
57
Ibid., 74.
58
Waite, Ceremonial Magic, 15; xxvii.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
82
of the author’s actual beliefs and intentions. Of course, there is also an opposing risk of
exaggerating Williams’s correspondence to occult magicians such as Crowley. I must
emphasize that this is not my intention. Williams himself spares no opportunity in his
novels and poetry to make the distinction between his concept of coinherent magic and
the self-centred magic of adepts such as le Clerc, whose magical focus is as backwards
as his pronouncement of the tetragrammaton. Though such a distinction must be heavily
mitigated, there is still an operative difference between Williams’s approach to magic and
that of occultists such as Crowley, who sought a level of personal power that Williams
found abhorrent.
“Artistic Theurgy”: Williams and Sex Magic
The approach to magic that has emerged from details about Williams’s personal life
complicates his distinction between divine-centred and self-centred magic, however. The
publication of Williams’s letters to Lang-Sims has shown that in practice he was not always
so different from a Tumulty, a le Clerc, or a Crowley as his magical theory dictated he
should be. Letters to Lalage contains letters sent to Lang-Sims by Williams between 9
September 1943 and 18 January 1945, five months before his death. These letters reveal
an image of Williams quite different from that of his hagiographic biographers. Between the
letters and Lang-Sims’s personal account, it becomes clear that Williams developed a
mildly sado-masochistic relationship with Lang-Sims, transforming her into the mythical
figure of “Lalage”—part schoolgirl, part slave.59 Lalage participated with Williams in a
practice that is similar, in some ways, to the practice of elevating consciousness through
sexual magic. Alone together in Williams’s room at Southfield House in Oxford, 1944, he
instructed her to bend over a chair and lift up her skirt. She did so obediently, at which
point he took a ruler, struck her hard on the behind and then began to walk quickly about
the room, “talking as if he were agonizedly trying to catch up with ideas that were forever
flying beyond his reach.” He then stopped suddenly and embraced Lang-Sims, standing in
59
Lang-Sims, Letters to Lalage, 60.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
83
absolute stillness.60 Lang-Sims theorizes that Williams was “appealing to a traditional
methodology concerned with the achievement of power through sexual transcendence.”61
Lang-Sims was not the only woman with whom Williams engaged in such behaviour.
We also know of Joan Wallis, a young woman with whom he engaged in similar activity,
though with more ritualistic elements. Williams would meet Wallis and make “smooth
strokes” over her buttocks with either a sword or a wand while Wallis bent over. At other
times Williams wrote on Wallis’s arm or drew patterns with the tip of a needle without
drawing blood. Though Wallis told him she didn’t enjoy what he was doing, Williams
justified his actions as necessary for his artistic process. “This is necessary,” he said, ‘for
the poem.”62 Lang-Sims theorizes that Williams made such odd demands of her for a
similar reason: “From some cause hidden deep in his nature, he needed the creative
power that he derived from their fulfillment. Without that power he could not work.
Essentially, it was a power derived from the consciously directed holding in check of the
passions associated with romantic love.”63 As Lang-Sims candidly admits, Williams was
not in love with her and Wallis,64 but even with the women he loved—his wife Florence and
his secretary Phyllis—Williams employed his technique of transforming sexual arousal into
artistic power. He prolonged the “first bliss” of these romances by refusing to conjugate
them—he put off his marriage to his wife Florence for nine years in order to intensify his
poetic inspiration, and pursued Phyllis for over fifteen years but never actually engaged in
sexual relations.65
Williams thus held off from consummating his desires in order to alter his
consciousness, thereby actuating both his poetic and mystical potential. Ashenden says
that Williams appears to have been aware of the overlap between magic and artistic
enchantment proclaimed, in particular, by Yeats, but that though he practiced a type of
“artistic theurgy,” Williams “remained a practitioner of magic only in the sense that he was
a poet.”66 However, Williams’s use of a combination of ritual practices and sexual desire
60
Ibid., 68.
Ibid., 69.
62
Newman, “Companions of the Coinherence,” 5; Hadfield, Exploration, 106; Lang-Sims,
Letters to Lalage, 69.
63
Lang-Sims, Letters to Lalage, 17.
64
Ibid.
65
Newman, “Companions of the Coinherence,” 14.
66
Ashenden, Charles Williams, 25, 30.
61
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
84
go far beyond the bounds of simple poetic praxis. His practices seem to have roots in the
diverse tantric practices of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, as Lang-Sims suggests,67
but the elements of ritual activity involved in Williams’s master-slave experiences,
particularly in the example of Wallis, bear similarities of purpose (though not of practice)
with the sexual magic practiced by a number of occultists. Williams’s actions need to be
seen in the context of practitioners who incorporated Eastern tantric practices with
Western forms of ritual magic in order to achieve spiritual attainment, such as Paschal
Beverly Randolph (1825–75), an American occultist who also identified himself with
Rosicrucianism, Theodor Reuss (1855–1923), the German founder of the Ordo Templi
Orientis (O.T.O.), a magical group which concentrated on the practice of sexual magic,
and Aleister Crowley, who became the leader of the O.T.O. in 1910. This connection
should not be taken too far, since Randolph, Reuss, and Crowley focused on many other
goals that Williams would have seen as the misdirected aggrandizement of the selfcentred magus. Even the process of achieving spiritual attainment through sexual desire
was quite different from Williams’s practice, as the rituals of these other three usually
involved sublimation through actual sexual activity rather than elevation of consciousness
through unconsummated desire. Reuss claimed, for example, that the “central secret of
the O.T.O. was in fact a derivation of the Catholic mass, in which the union of man with
God was achieved by ingesting semen.68 The variety of Crowley’s ritual sexual activity is
legendary, while Randolph taught that the “mystic forces of the soul open to the spaces”
only at the peak of mutual orgasm.69
We don’t know where exactly Williams got the inspiration for his practices of sexual
sublimation, and it would certainly not be accurate or productive to exaggerate the link
between Williams and Randolph, Reuss, and Crowley. The comparison does show,
67
Lang-Sims, Letters to Lalage, 69.
Quoted from Urban, “Yoga of Sex,” 424. Reuss derived the connection between the
eucharist and spermatophagy from the Chevalier Georges Le Clément de Saint-Marcq (1865–
1956), who argued in L’Eucharistie (1906) that Christ served up semen rather than bread and wine
at the Last Supper, and that the apostles continued to carry on this tradition. See Pasi, “Knight of
Spermatophagy,” 381–82, 393–96.
69
On Crowley’s sexual experimentation, see Urban, “Yoga of Sex,” 432; Owen, Place of
Enchantment, 215. Randolph’s teaching is quoted from an unpublished pamphlet, “The Ansairetic
Mystery. A New Revelation Concerning Sex! A Private Letter, Printed, but not Published” (ca.
1870), in Deveney, “Pascal Beverly Randolph,” 362. For further research on Randolph’s sexual
magic see Godwin, Theosophical Enlightenment, 255-56.
68
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
85
however, that aspects of this very personal, private magical practice are analogically
similar to the sex magic practiced by some occultists, and cannot simply be attributed to
the influence of Eastern Tantra, or, as Lang-Sims suggests, medieval practices of
repressing sexual desire.70 The details that have emerged regarding Lang-Sims and Wallis
thus indicate another link between Williams’s magical practice and occultism that goes
quite beyond the restrictions of the cordon sanitaire. Lang-Sims’s personal experience with
the author forced her to the conclusion, different from most Williams scholars, that he was
“no dabbler in the occult,” that Williams had acquired knowledge of magical ritual
somewhere and must have “been involved with the practices of ritual magic within a
fellowship established for that purpose.”71 So far as we know, this was not the case.
Depending on one’s definition of magic, the F.R.C. could be construed as magically
oriented in that it provided a ritual setting for the exaltation of the consciousness of the
adept, but it certainly never taught the use of magical rituals for the purposes of sexual
exaltation.
Regardless of the intellectual or experiential influences on Williams’s tantric “artistic
theurgy,” the stories of Lang-Sims and Wallis reveal a man whose actual magical praxis
was more complicated than the theory revealed in his writings. Williams’s activities were
more parallel to the way of P’o-lu than to the divine-centred magic that was his ideal. His
ritualistic attempts at achieving mystical ecstasy fail the demands of his definition of
acceptable magic because they were clearly performed out of the desires of the self—
whether that desire be sexual, artistic, or mystical. Williams’s personal life shows how
difficult it would be to apply his definition of acceptable magic to an actual human life
influenced by actual human desire. The impossibility of the selfless adeptship achieved by
characters such as Sybil, Stanhope, Chloe and Arglay makes their characters come off
rather flat.
Regardless of the applicability of his theory of magic however, Williams clearly
valued it as a vital part of the coinherent life of an occult Christian adept. Disavowals of
70
It should be noted that even supposedly Eastern concepts of Tantra had already been
westernized in the nineteenth century by orientalist scholars, who tended to focus on the sexual
aspects of tantric practice (often dismissively), ignoring other elements of what was actually a very
diverse tradition applied to many aspects of life (Urban, “Yoga of Sex,” 410-14).
71
Lang-Sims, Letters to Lalage, 18. Unfortunately, Lang-Sims continues on to reinforce the
dichotomies of the cordon sanitaire, claiming that Williams approached his magical activities with
“that Christian orthodoxy that secretes within itself all mysteries and all knowledge.”
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
86
Williams’s valuation of magic based on Waite’s theories are thus invalid. Williams
unabashedly established a framework for proper magical praxis in his work, particularly in
the novels. Separated from entanglements with Waite scholarship and the artificial
discourse of magic versus mysticism, a picture of the godly magus emerges—centred
selflessly in the divine, vitally aware of the correspondence between above and below, in
submission to divine will, but called to the realm of imagination for magical action.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
87
5) Kabbalah—Charles Williams and the Middle Pillar
The function of imagination was also vital for Williams’s experience with Kabbalah.
This tradition, particularly its focus on the correspondence between divine and human
male-female relationships, was vital for the development of Williams’s Romantic
Theology.1 Here, perhaps more than in any other aspect of Williams’s esoteric philosophy,
Waite had a strong influence. Ridler notes that though it was The Hidden Church of the
Holy Graal that led to Williams and Waite meeting, it was The Secret Doctrine in Israel that
interested Williams the most.2 This was the volume in which Waite focused on the
kabbalistic doctrines that he felt contributed to the Secret Tradition, particularly the
concepts of Shekinah and the Mystery of Sex. In addition to its role in elaborating
Romantic Theology, Ashenden and Roma A. King both argue that Williams was interested
in Kabbalah for the symbolism it could offer to his poetic vision.3
Considering the many evenings Williams spent imagining himself ascending through
the sephirotic limbs of the kabbalistic Tree of Life in the ritual setting of the F.R.C.
however, it is hard to imagine that Kabbalah didn’t carry a more experiential meaning for
Williams’s magico-mystical practice. In Ritual Magic in England, Francis King states that
he completed a lengthy analysis of the influence of Williams’s experience with the system
of kabbalistic imagery developed in the Golden Dawn and passed through Waite (in what
King feels to be a degenerated form) to the F.R.C..4 Such an analysis is sorely needed,
but regrettably King either doesn’t seem to have completed this research or was not able
to find a suitable publisher, as no such publication seems to exist. Nor has any other
scholar of Waite or Williams attempted to compare the use of Kabbalistic symbolism in the
two orders.
Waite’s Kabbalah has been the subject of slightly more research, but a void still
remains. Gilbert touches on Waite’s kabbalistic ideas, but was naturally restricted from indepth analysis in the course of writing a full biography. Liz Greene has recently made a
solid effort to fill the void of research on Waite’s Kabbalah, with a half chapter of Magi and
1
See Ashenden, Charles Williams, 40–55.
Ridler, introduction to Image of the City, xxv.
3
Ashenden, Charles Williams, 56; Roma A. King, Pattern in the Web, 15-16. King argues that
Williams was ONLY interested in Kabbalah, like all “occult elements,” for their aesthetic value.
4
Francis King, Ritual Magic, 112.
2
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
88
Magiddim (2012) devoted to the subject, but though Greene’s account of Waite’s thought
is well-researched and accurately represents his ideas, her analysis suffers from a
perennialist approach that leads her to conclude that Waite and his fellow occultists added
little that was new to Kabbalah, and merely recreated the essential doctrines of the major
Jewish schools.5 I take the opposite view, following scholars who argue that modern
occultists significantly adapted kabbalistic thought to suite their own particular mystical or
magical needs.6 Rather than simply attempting to represent a reified version of early
Jewish Kabbalah, Waite constructed a unique set of kabbalistic ideas and symbols that
was very much a product of his own time. His focus on the potential for Kabbalah to
contribute to his quest for unio mystica, as well as his use of Kabbalah as a taxonomic tool
with which to structure both his personal philosophy and the F.R.C., show that he drew
from modern occult sources as much as (or more than) he followed traditional Jewish
Kabbalah, in addition to adding his own adaptations of kabbalistic thought that better
served his mystical philosophy.
Kabbalah is a very diverse tradition, which frequently features multiple
understandings of concepts and symbols.7 Waite’s interpretation of Kabbalah has its own
unique features, just like any other. Waite, of course, did not see his interpretation as
subjectively defined or historically situated; rather, he believed that he, as a member of the
Holy Assembly, had identified the key elements in Kabbalah that represented the universal
knowledge of the Secret Tradition. Waite made much of the fact that he had drawn these
elements from study of the Zohar. In his three books on Kabbalah he scolds occultists,
particularly Lévi and Mathers, for relying on later translations of the Zohar, such as the
Zoharic texts in von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata, rather than going back to the true
source of the doctrine.8 Of course, those who rely on Mathers’s subsequent partial
translation of Rosenroth’s work receive an even harsher scolding.
However, it is unlikely that Waite himself read any more of the Zohar before 1906
than was available to him in Rosenroth’s translation, after which time he read a French
5
6
133.
7
8
99.
See Greene, Magi and Magiddim, 308–22.
E.g Hanegraaff, “Beginnings of Occultist Kabbalah”, 108–09; Asprem, Kabbala Recreata,
On the difficulty of defining a particular “Kabbalah,” see Dan, Kabbalah, ix-x.
E.g. Waite, Holy Kabbalah, 423; Doctrine and Literature of the Kabbalah, 358; Shadows, 96–
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
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translation by Jean De Pauly (1806–1903). Prior to this point, though he published The
Doctrine and Literature of the Kabbalah in 1902, Waite could not have read the Zohar in
the original, as he did not read Aramaic, which makes up the majority of the text, or
Hebrew, also found in its pages.9 Thus, though he managed to form a view of Kabbalah
through alternate sources that was good enough to be commended by Gershom
Scholem,10 Waite could be just as prone to misinterpretations and reformulations of the
“original” Kabbalah as any other esotericist in the modern period. For example, he
enthusiastically assumed that the kabbalistic texts of the Zohar communicated the tenets
of achieving unio mystica, though scholars such as Scholem, Joseph Dan, and Boaz Huss
have argued that a concept of mystic union similar to that found in Christian mysticism did
not exist in Kabbalah until modern times.11 Waite himself did not express much support for
a kabbalistic concept of unio mystica in The Doctrine and Literature of the Kabbalah, but
he became much more enthusiastic about the idea by the time of the writing of The Secret
Doctrine in Israel and The Holy Kabbalah.12
Waite made similar non-Zoharic adaptations to his conception of the kabbalistic Tree
of Life. While his books present a view of the sephiroth cobbled together from a variety of
Jewish kabbalistic sources, the initiatory experience he created within the F.R.C. was very
much a product of specific modern occult adaptations of the symbolism of the Tree of Life.
These adaptations were the result of Waite’s exposure to one of the classic examples of
programmatic syncretism given by Asprem—the grade system of the Golden Dawn, also
9
Waite says in his autobiography that he learned Latin and Greek in his teens, but never
mentions acquiring Aramaic and Hebrew (Shadows, 42). Despite the fact that Waite frequently
cites the Zohar in his books, Gershom Scholem assumes that Waite was compelled to rely on De
Pauly’s translation “owing to his own ignorance of Hebrew and Aramaic” (Major Trends, 208).
10
Scholem, Major Trends, 208. Interestingly, Scholem compliments only The Secret Doctrine
in Israel, while judging the earlier The Doctrine and Literature of the Kabbalah as of “little value”
(Major Trends, 212n25), despite the fact that the latter volume is more focused on relating an
objective view of Kabbalah, while the intent of the former is to identify elements of Kabbalah that
are consistent with the Secret Tradition. Even in The Secret Doctrine, however, Scholem feels that
Waite’s use of De Pauly’s “faulty and inadequate” translation hurt his interpretation somewhat.
Scholem seems to have changed his mind about Waite entirely by the time he wrote Kabbalah
(1974), in which he states that Waite’s works were “essentially rather confused compilations made
from secondhand sources” (Scholem, Kabbalah, 203).
11
Scholem, Kabbalah, 160; Dan, Kabbalah, 8; Huss, “Mystification of Kabbalah.” A significant
number of other scholars take Waite’s view, including Moshe Idel (Enchanted Chains, 3–4, 6–11,
19–26, 34–35, 64–69; New Perspectives, 59–73) and Arthur Green, though even they admit, like
Green, that to speak in terms of direct experience of God in the Zohar “was considered far beyond
the bounds of propriety” (Green, “Introduction,” lxvi).
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
90
organized around the Tree of Life.13 The idea of creating systems and structures to
represent the manner in which the ten sephiroth emanate from Ain Soph is much older
than the Golden Dawn. So too is the tendency to associate the various sephiroth with a
variety of symbols and aspects of nature, such as the planets, the astrological signs, and
the elements.14 The Golden Dawn, however, followed Lévi in taking such associations to
new heights. The order arranged the trumps of the Tarot, the Hebrew letters, astrological
signs, geomantic figures, alchemical principles, the planets, the angelic hierarchies, occult
colour symbolism, geometrical shapes, and the masonic grades of the order’s initiatory
structure around the central motif of the sephirotic tree.15 The Golden Dawn also adopted
the kabbalistic tendency to equate the structure of the sephiroth to the human body.16 With
such a taxonomic tool at their fingertips, adepts could carry out their goals as magicians in
search of both material power and spiritual attainment. The sephirotic tree acted as a grid
that the magician could reference in order to pursue practical magic via the power granted
them by the correspondence between above and below, or it could be used as a tool for
the imagination as the adept sought to achieve unio mystica.17
Waite constructed the symbolic system of the F.R.C. along similar lines. The
Fellowship did not encourage its adepts to develop personal power through magical
practice, but just as in the Golden Dawn, F.R.C. initiates visualized themselves ascending
through the order’s grades in terms of kabbalistic symbolism.18 Liz Greene argues that
Waite understood the Tree of Life as an imaginative portrayal of the ascent to unio mystica
12
Secret Doctrine in Israel, 231; Holy Kabbalah, 375.
Asprem, Kabbala Recreata, 146–47. Cf. Bogdan, Rituals of Initation, 121. Francis King also
identifies Kabbalah as a system of classification (Astral Projection, 143). For a specific example of
programmatic syncretism using the Tree of Life, see Mathers, “Introduction,” 18, where the tree is
used to align astrological symbolism, angelic orders, and the sephiroth.
14
See Dan, Kabbalah, 45, on the symbolic associations applied to the sephiroth in early
kabbalah.
15
Asprem, Kabbala Recreata, 146-47; Howe, Golden Dawn, xii. Asprem points out that
Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata, which most modern occultists, including Waite, used as a primary
resource in developing their understanding of kabbalah, already contains a distinct movement
toward synthesizing Kabbalah with other esoteric systems, particularly alchemy. Asprem argues
that this may have “shortened the step” toward seeing Kabbalah as “the matrix for a programmatic
syncretism” (Kabbala Recreata, 146).
16
Regardie, Golden Dawn, Vol. 1, 193–216.
17
See Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, xi—xiii; Owen, Place of Enchantment, 73.
18
See Waite, Doctrine and Literature of the Kabbalah, 376; Secret Doctrine in Israel, 106; Holy
Kabbalah, 290, 474, on the possibility of mystical ascension through contemplation on the
sephiroth.
13
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
91
rather than in terms of a rational system.19 However, the F.R.C.’s grade structure and its
use of the sephirotic tree to organize symbolism from a number of diverse traditions
indicate that Waite, like the Golden Dawn, was motivated by both the opportunity for
rational classification and the elevation of mystical imagination. The symbolism of the
Fellowship was meant, according to its constitution, to imply “a Doctrine and Practice of
Mystical Religion, understood in its universal sense,” but the order’s constitution also
states, “The tradition and symbolism of the Fellowship are a derivation from the Secret
Doctrine of Israel, known as Kabbalah.”20 Thus, though the visual and oral ritual setting of
the F.R.C. reflected a bricolage of symbols drawn from Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry,
alchemy, colour symbolism, and astrology, Kabbalah was the post around which these
diverse strands were woven.21 Characteristic of programmatic syncretism, Waite followed
the Golden Dawn in disembedding particular aspects of sephirotic symbolism from their
Kabbalistic context and reapplying them for the purposes of expressing the perennial
knowledge of the Secret Tradition.
In addition to a taxonomic tool, the Tree of Life acted as a sort of map for the
imagination. Each initiatory ritual involved the opening of at least one sephirotic path so
that the adept could proceed further up the tree toward unio mystica. For example, the
path of Resh was opened for a Frater Theoreticus seeking to advance to the grade of
Practicus, thus allowing the adept to envision themselves advancing from Yesod to Hod,
the sephira equivalent to the Practicus Grade.22 Each path and each sephira, the adept
was told, “are modes and aspects of consciousness.”23 The sephirotic tree thus acted as a
symbolic tool for the imagination to effect the transformation of mind and consciousness
needed to achieve unio mystica.
Not only did Waite follow the Golden Dawn in relying heavily on sephirotic
symbolism, he also accentuated his old order’s focus on the median line formed on the
Tree of Life by the four central sephiroth. This line begins with Malkuth at the base and
19
Greene, Magi and Maggidim, 324.
“Constitution & Laws of the Fellowship,” printed in Gilbert, A.E. Waite, 184.
21
A characteristic example is found in “The Ceremony of Admission to the Grade of Adeptus
Major,” 56, where the postulant is taught that the sephira relevant to the grade (Geburah) is
associated with a particular hand signal, a specific hand grip, the “lineal figure” of the grade (a
pentagram), the third river of Eden (Hiddekel), the mystical title of “Peregrinus Vallus,” and a
“mystical number” (15).
22
Waite, “Practicus,” 12.
20
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
92
ascends through Yesod to Tiphareth, culminating in Kether at the crown. The median line,
known in both orders as the “Middle Pillar,” was an important concept in the Golden Dawn,
but Waite made it the central focus of the F.R.C.. Waite attributes the Middle Pillar concept
to Knorr von Rosenroth, and there is a long standing tradition in Kabbalah of the ascent of
the souls of the deceased via a cosmic pillar to paradise. However, there is no tradition in
Jewish Kabbalah of the souls of the living ascending through the sephirotic tree to the
higher realms and then returning to the material world, even in the Zoharic texts that Waite
saw as the only legitimate form of Kabbalah.24 Waite’s focus on the Middle Pillar is
therefore his own adaptation of sephirotic symbolism to his mystical philosophy, one with
definite roots in the Golden Dawn’s Middle Pillar theory.
The use of the Middle Pillar in the two orders also has important differences,
however. The Golden Dawn saw the Middle Pillar as a visualization tool that could be used
to draw down power from its divine source in Ain Soph. Adepts seeking initiation to the
Second Order were to dedicate “a great deal of time” to practicing the Middle Pillar
technique,25 which required the adept to visualize their body aligning with the Middle Pillar
of the Tree of Life, thus “rais[ing] your consciousness to your Kether above your head.”
Having drawn down this power, the adept would be able to strengthen their personal aura
and thus resist the ill psychological effects of visiting the sick or interacting with people
who “have a depressing effect.”26 Particularly in later manifestations of the Golden Dawn,
such as the Stella Matutina, this technique came to be seen as useful for drawing power
into the self (usually seen as psychological elevation of the self’s hidden power) in order to
effect a wide variety of magical purposes.27
However, the Middle Pillar was a two way street in the Golden Dawn. It could also be
used “as a map for man’s return to his soul’s source.”28 In “The Ritual for Spiritual
Development,” for example, the adept performs the Middle Pillar technique and then begs
the divine to enable the archangel Metatron to bring “the “Divine influx” to the base of the
23
Waite, “Portal of the Fourth Order,” 20.
Waite, Holy Kabbalah, 559; Idel, Ascensions, 57, 101.
25
Regardie, Golden Dawn, Vol. I, 90.
26
Ibid., 179-82.
27
Hanegraaff, “How Magic Survived,” 369; Guide, 116.
28
Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, xii. It should be noted that Waite also saw the Middle
Pillar as multi-directional, describing it as the path on which “great influences come down,” but he
24
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
93
pillar “to rend away the veils of darkness from my mortal vision” so that the initiate can in
turn ascend toward “attainment to the eternal Glory.”29 The purpose of the Middle Pillar in
the F.R.C., which Waite also refers to as the “middle way,” the “middle path,” and the
“linea media,” was similar. Initiates of the F.R.C. ascended through grades that
corresponded to all of the lower seven sephiroth, but for Waite the Middle Pillar
represented the straight path to unio mystica.
This elevation was exhibited visually for the adepts of the F.R.C.. In the ritual for the
Portal Grade of the Fourth Order, the Middle Pillar is visually displayed as the High
Priestess, representing Shekinah, walks in front of a procession with a banner marked with
the sephirotic symbol of Daath, while other brethren walk behind with the banners of
Tiphereth, Yesod, and Malkuth.30 The Acting Usher of the Rite takes the banner of Kether
and walks last in the procession: “In this manner the Way of Ascent to the heights is
exhibited.”31 Such visual symbolism is introduced already in the Neophyte ritual, as an
adept playing the role of “Guide of Paths” sits between two pillars, thus representing the
Middle Pillar. As in the Golden Dawn, the two pillars are taken from Freemasonry and
corresponded to the left and right sides of the Tree of Life. The left pillar is symbolic of
Mercy and the feminine, while the right pillar is masculine and represents judgment, or
severity.32 The Guide of Paths, a figure specific to the F.R.C. Neophyte ritual, is the
“Mediator and Reconciler” of these two opposing cosmic principles.33 This Guide is linked
to Shekinah in the F.R.C., just as Waite frequently links the Middle Pillar and Shekinah in
his books, thereby linking the Middle Pillar concept to his principle of the Mystery of Sex.34
did not approve, as we have seen, of manipulating divine power for the purposes of practical magic
(Waite, “Neophyte,” 39).
29
Regardie, Golden Dawn, Vol. 3, 248, 252, 259; Cf. Owen, Place of Enchantment, 77.
30
Daath is a complementary sephira that began to appear between Chokmah and Binah on
diagrams of the Tree of Life from about the end of the thirteenth century. It is not considered a
separate sephira, but rather an external manifestation of Kether (Scholem, Kabbalah, 107). For
Waite, the importance of Daath was not so much its place between Chokmah and Binah as its
place between Tiphareth and Kether on the Middle Pillar. Waite held Daath to represent the
boundary between the ineffable and that which can be described and encountered through symbol.
Symbols are thus, according to Waite’s conception, both generated and dissolved in Daath (Waite,
“Portal of the Fourth Order,” 20).
31
Waite, “Portal of the Fourth Order,” 34.
32
Waite, “Neophyte,” 16.
33
Ibid., 39. Cf. Waite, “Theoreticus,” 12.
34
Waite, “Portal of the Fourth Order,” 8; Secret Doctrine in Israel, 192, 196; Holy Kabbalah,
343.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
94
In Waite’s conception, Shekinah ascends to reunion with Jehovah, representative of the
male divine principle, in the ineffable realms of the three supernal sephiroth. Shekinah thus
“symbolizes Divine Espousals,” and will be the “Guide of Paths” to show the adept that
same “middle path [to] the return of the mind into Union.”35
The connection of Shekinah to the Middle Pillar was a concept already present in
Kabbalah, but it was further adapted by Waite for his own mystical purposes.36 In his
autobiography, Waite seems prepared to attribute much of the Middle Pillar concept as it
appears in the F.R.C. to the Golden Dawn. After noting that later kabbalists in the
Renaissance and Early Modern period systematized the sephiroth into the Tree of Life
schema used in his own time, Waite says, “A much later mystical school went to work in its
turn, and theosophised on the linea media as a path of ascent, which opened to the Mind
in a state of unconditional dedication to the Quest of God.” He calls this mystical school a
“very informal school” and then says that an even later school “became less informal…and
yet more mystical.”37 In the context of Waite’ references to the I.R.R. and the F.R.C. as
mystical rather than magical replacements for the Golden Dawn, it seems likely, though
not definitive, that he is drawing a historical path of progression for the Middle Pillar
concept from the Golden Dawn to its culmination in the F.R.C.. The concept is definitely
more mystical in the F.R.C., in that its focus is purely on spiritual attainment,38 but as in the
Golden Dawn the Middle Pillar is described as a path for the elevation of mind and
consciousness: “The way of the soul’s ascent…[is] one of ascent in mind…realisation of
mind in God, consciousness in the supernal part of mind.”39 Waite sets up a hierarchy of
mind, arranged along the Middle Pillar, with definite echoes of the hermetic or NeoPlatonic Mind. The mind of man, a “Logical or Rational Mind,” conceives and dwells on the
Mind of God until a union of the two is achieved.40 This is, as we have seen, a union that
takes place within the self, thus a union of minds is in effect an elevation of the human
35
Waite, “Neophyte,” 39; Waite, Doctrine and Literature of the Kabbalah, 252; Secret Doctrine
in Israel, 35, 255; Holy Kabbalah; 161-62, 394.
36
See Gikatilla, Gates of Light, 31–32, where Shekinah is discussed as a median of the
opposites of the left and right sides of the tree.
37
Waite, Shadows, 236.
38
See, for example, Waite, “Ritual of Adeptus Major,” 40: “The ascent of the Tree of Life
carries us far from earth, far from the ways and forms of material thought.”
39
Waite, “Portal of the Fourth Order,” 39.
40
Waite, Shadows, 236–37.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
95
mind to the level of Divine Mind: “Mind explores itself and reaches thus a so-called Higher
Mind.”41
Both orders also dwelled on the importance of the Middle Pillar as symbolic of a
balance between the pillars of Mercy and Severity.42 Moina Mathers applied this to the
equilibrium that must be sought within the self, cautioning junior adepts that before making
any big decisions or actions, let alone judging those of others, they should try to unite with
the Higher Self, standing with their heads under the crown of Kether in the Middle Pillar,
not leaning too far toward either Mercy or Severity lest they become unbalanced.43 In the
F.R.C., union with the Higher Self also required finding equilibrium between opposing
divine principles: “Between the Thrones of the East and the Altar are the two Pillars…They
are symbols of Light and Darkness, Active and Passive, Mercy and Severity, Male and
Female, the pairs of opposites in all things, ever seeking equilibrium, which is attained
through union at the centre. Between them lies the Narrow Path of Ascent in the Spirit.”44
Thus, though there are significant differences in approach to kabbalistic symbolism,
the example of the Middle Pillar indicates that the programmatic syncretism Waite used to
assemble the symbolic and initiatory structure of the F.R.C. was very much rooted in the
modern adaptations of the Golden Dawn. The Kabbalah that Charles Williams
encountered in his time in the F.R.C. was not simply attractive to him on a poetic level, or
merely useful to him as a footnote to his Romantic Theology. Like other modern occultists,
Williams encountered sephirotic symbolism as a central taxonomic device and employed it
as a tool for visualization with which to effect mystic union through the power of
imagination. In a letter to Lang-Sims on 31 November 1943, Williams shows that concepts
like the Middle Pillar were still central to his worldview six years after leaving the F.R.C..
Williams finishes the letter by wishing Lang-Sims the balance of the middle way: “In the
41
Ibid., 238. Cf. Waite, “Portal to the Fourth Order,” 39.
As Mathers notes, the search for equilibrium is “a fundamental qabalistical idea” (Kabbalah
Unveiled, 14). On the equilibrium between mercy and severity see Idel, Enchanted Chains, 50;
Scholem, Kabbalah, 109; Greene, Magi and Magiddim, 63–65.
43
Moina Mathers, “Know Thyself,” 156-67. Cf. Bogdan, Rituals of Initiation, 143.
44
Waite, “Neophyte,” 37. Waite draws on the Golden Dawn Neophyte ritual here. See
Regardie, Golden Dawn, Vol. 6, 19. Cf. Waite, “Portal to the Fourth Order,” 43; Secret Doctrine in
Israel, 35; Holy Kabbalah, 201.
42
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
96
Sephirotic tradition, the left side was Severity and the right was Mercy; together they were
the Way of Benignity. So, be all things to you, so, all things in you.”45
Williams also frequently illuminated his novels and poetry with sephirotic symbolism.
In his depiction of Chloe Burnett’s experience of unio mystica, for example, Williams relies
heavily on Middle Pillar symbolism. Chloe, as we have seen, represents the figure of
Shekinah, and indeed comes to embody her. The connection is partly based on the fact
that Chloe, like Shekinah, is a lower form of manifestation preparing for union with the
unmanifest God, but by the climax of the novel Chloe has also come to represent
Shekinah in her connection to the Middle Pillar, by which she ascends to transcendent
divine union. Before this can happen though, a union must be effected between Chloe,
representing the feminine side of the Tree of Life and therefore also representing mercy,
and Lord Arglay, representing the masculine side of the Tree, and also, as Chief Lord
Justice of England, representing judgment and severity. Over the course of the novel
Chloe and Arglay grow closer together and become reliant on each other. At one point,
Chloe even equates Lord Arglay with “the End of Desire.”46 As in the F.R.C., this term
bears multiple meanings. As a narrative device, it hints at a potential for sexual union with
Lord Arglay, and thereby connects to the possibility of progressing toward divine union via
the correspondence of human and divine love at the centre of Romantic Theology. On a
purely symbolic level, Arglay as the End of Desire also points to the cessation of desire
achieved through union with God. In this sense Lord Arglay represents Jehovah, the
absent masculine divine principle with which the soul seeks the end of desire, just as
Chloe represents Shekinah. Arglay realizes his kinship with Jehovah, describing himself as
“the Light that is in the Stone,” the “Hiddenness” of spirit that is united with the manifest
Shekinah in a unity of spirit and matter, above and below.47
As the transcendental climax of Chloe’s mystical ascent is about to unfold, she and
Arglay gather with the Hajji, the Sufi guardian of the stone, to decide how to solve the
problems that are besetting England as the stone’s various Types are exploited by greed.
It is decided that the stone will be restored to its supernal source—symbolic of Shekinah
45
Lang-Sims, Letters to Lalage, 46.
Williams, Many Dimensions, 95.
47
Ibid., 228–29.
46
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
97
reuniting with Jehovah.48 Lord Arglay, speaking “as if he gave judgement from his seat in
the Court,” decrees “that there is but one Path for the Stone” and asks Chloe if she is
ready to be that Path. As if to ensure that the connection between the stone, Shekinah,
and the Middle Pillar is clear, Williams has Chloe ask Arglay if he wills that she become
the path. “But why will you have me tell you what to do?” Arglay asks. “Because you said
that the Stone was between us,” she answers, “And if that is so how otherwise can I move
in the Stone.”49 Chloe identifies the path as the stone, and this path as located between
her, the pillar of mercy, and Arglay, the pillar of judgment. The Middle Pillar symbolism is
clear here, particularly in the context of the F.R.C.’s equation of the middle path to
Shekinah, and the association of the stone with Shekinah and Chloe in the novel. We have
already seen the conclusion of this assignation of Chloe to the path. She achieves union
with the Higher Self and then moves beyond this to transcendent union with the ineffable
Divine principle. As she makes this ascension, only Arglay, united to Chloe “in the justice
of the Stone which lay between himself and the woman he watched,” witnesses her return
to the Divine, the letters of the tetragrammaton—which indicate the union of all aspects of
God—imprinted on her forehead.50
This single example is representative of a variety of plot devices, symbols,
characters, and themes in Williams’s novels and poetry that can only be properly
interpreted with knowledge of the specific experience of Kabbalah that Williams
encountered in the F.R.C.. Much research remains to be done on the kabbalistic context of
Williams’s work, and even more awaits scholars willing to wade into Waite’s verbose
volumes on the subject. In the case of both men, this research has likely been hampered
by the degree of specialized knowledge of Kabbalah required. The challenge presented to
the researcher, however, is mirrored by the difficulty of comprehension encountered by the
average reader of Charles Williams. In addition to the novels and poetry, Williams’s
Romantic Theology cannot be properly understood without including Kabbalah—in its
Jewish, Christian and modern occult contexts—in the process of exegesis. If Williams’s
work is ever going to become more accessible to a wider range of readers, further analysis
of his kabbalistic views will be vital.
48
Ibid., 255.
Ibid., 257.
50
Ibid., 261.
49
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
98
Conclusion
For now, I hope that this brief look at the Middle Pillar concept and its occult context
has at least made clear the limitations of approaching the life and work of Charles Williams
with an implicit assumption that he was somehow completely removed from modern
occultism. The importance of modern sephirotic symbolism to the central themes and
symbolic structures of Many Dimensions provides an example of the need to maintain an
awareness of Williams’s connection to the occult milieu in which his social and religious life
were rooted. Williams’s kabbalistic conceptions align quite closely with Waite’s, to the point
where it is easy to suspect that he did not encounter much Kabbalah outside of Waite’s
books and his personal imaginative experience with sephirotic symbolism in the F.R.C..
Waite’s influence is clear in many other areas as well. From grail symbolism to the Tarot to
alchemy, the ink from Waite’s pen seems to have spilled over through a mystical osmosis
of narrative to the pages of Williams’s novels and poetry. In other areas however, rash
exaggerations of the connection between the two men have led to misinterpretations of
Williams’s work. This remains a danger in Williams scholarship, as I have tried to show
with the example of his magical ideas, which were developed and pursued independent of
Waite’s stringent dichotomy between magic and mysticism.51
The question of Williams’s involvement with occultism can only be approached with
an eye for historical complexity, and an appreciation for the fact that notable difference
does not necessarily cut out the possibility of significant sameness. There are important
differences between Williams’s thought and that of other individuals and groups who are
more commonly thought to typify modern occultism. A difference that applies to both Waite
and Williams is that they embraced the anti-Enlightenment potential of esoteric thought,
valuing its potential to maintain the enchantment granted by Romantic imagination, instead
of adapting it to the empirical structures of Enlightenment rationalism as many modern
51
Interestingly enough, no scholar has yet to examine the effects that Williams might have had
on Waite. Certainly, there is a lack of resources to which we could turn to answer this question—
Waite does not, for example, mention Williams in his autobiography—but there must surely have
been some interplay. This unidirectional focus, a weakness which my own research also displays,
likely only exaggerates the impression that Williams derived the majority of his esoteric thought
from Waite and his experience in the F.R.C..
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
99
occultists did. Waite and Williams shared the occult urge to address the problem of
disenchantment, but they did so largely through more traditional cosmologies and spiritual
conceptions. Unlike occultists who envisioned separate astral realms in which they could
operate psychically outside of the ordinary laws of physics, the esoteric systems that
Williams discovered through Waite were not expressed naturalistically or legitimated via
empirical principles. Waite’s employment of the sephirotic tree as an initiatory tool was
similar in many ways to Golden Dawn’s use of the symbol, but no F.R.C. initiate would
have been encouraged to visualize the tree in order to balance their physical aura or rise
up to the astral plane.
Another difference is that Williams, like Waite, tended to embrace Christian
mysticism as a guiding principle for his explorations of esoteric thought and practice, while
many occultists were attracted to the movement precisely because they were looking for
religious expression and experience outside of the traditional boundaries of Christianity.
However, the cordon sanitaire that connects all aspects of Williams’s thought to orthodox
Christianity, while rejecting all associations with occultism, cannot be sustained in light of
his involvement with the F.R.C. and his interest in a form of magic that can be described
as both practical and spiritual. Though the cordon sanitaire has been further strengthened
by appealing to Waite’s dichotomy between Christianity and occultism, this distinction also
collapses in light of Waite’s participation in various occult secret societies, his reliance on a
perennial ancient wisdom that he saw as discoverable in a wide variety of esoteric
traditions, and the influence of the Golden Dawn on his esoteric beliefs and practices.
The distinction between Waite or Williams as concerned with the mystical and
noumenal rather than the phenomenal and occult can also be discarded. Even in the
aspects of their lives and thought that have been described as purely mystical, the
importance of the role of symbolism in the mystic journey ties them to phenomenal
concerns for all but the ultimate stages of unio mystica. Both Waite and Williams thus
espoused a form of mysticism that is a distinct departure from the traditional Christian
mysticism to which they are usually tied. While Christian mystics have more often
embraced the via negativa, Waite and Williams followed a wide variety of esoteric thinkers
who have gravitated towards the via affirmativa, an embrace of the material that allowed
them to ascend Jacob’s ladder towards the divine, based on the assumption that the world
below corresponds to the heavens above. Waite and Williams both embraced symbolism
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
100
for its offer of intuitive knowledge of God, and its role as a tool with which to elevate
human consciousness until it has discovered the divine consciousness within. For
occultists, this affirmative mysticism had the ability to blend seamlessly with more practical
quests, regardless of Waite’s discursive attempt to create a stark dichotomy between the
two.
Such dichotomies show the danger of assuming the applicability of monolithic terms
like “occultism,” “magic,” “mysticism,” and “Christianity.” These terms are necessary for
communication, but should not pass unqualified beyond the introductory stages of a work
of scholarship. They also show the need for continued research on esoteric movements,
figures and ideas in order to provide more nuanced and mature pictures of historical
fractals like “the occult.” The case of the stark distinction between occultism and
Christianity in the case of Charles Williams is a particularly strong proof of the need for
such reassessments. We have seen this problem from the point of view of Williams
scholars wanting to disassociate him from occultism, but the opposite problem also exists.
Scholars of the Golden Dawn often tend to skim over the important Christian subtext in its
rituals, and scholars of occultism tend to focus only on the anti-Christian stance of the
Theosophical Society and figures such as Aleister Crowley. Waite and Williams are
examples of dedicated, heterodox Christians who blended various modern occult
adaptations of esoteric thought with their faith. This blending balances the rejection of
Christianity found in modern occultism and thus shows the need for a complex, nuanced
view of the relationships between various traditions and ideas. The view of occultism as
rejecting Christianity and being, in fact, its inverse other, has been fairly dominant in
Western society—among Christians, occultists, and scholars alike—but this distinction
quickly erodes under the microscope of specific historical, biographical, and cultural
analysis.
Roukema / Charles Williams and Occultism
101
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