Sobre los mitos del Rey Arturo y de la magia

Los ensayistas y literatos C. S. Lewis y Charles Williams recogieron la Materia de Bretaña, con su valor mítico, y lo plasmaron dualmente a través de las leyendas artúricas y la categorización de la magia a través de la división convencional entre magia blanca y magia negra. En este último supuesto, respetaron la división propia de los mitos de las artes mágicas entre teúrgia y goetia —magia natural y magia demoníaca— en continuidad con los planteamientos de la renacentista Academia Platónica de Florencia. Esta recepción del mito aparece nítidamente en las obras de C. S. Lewis, Esa horrible fortaleza, y de Charles Williams, Guerra en el cielo. Se trata de marcos de ficción, donde realizan un ejercicio mitopoético que vincula los mitos artúricos y mágicos para responder desde un fundamento metafísico y trascendente a preguntas perennes de la condición humana.

Sound and Ritualistic Language in Charles Williams’ War in Heaven

This study uncovers a link between sound patterns and ritualistic language in Charles Williams’ novels through an analysis of the relationship between type of sound and content. The study focuses on War in Heaven with a view to conducting a preliminary exploration into this link, and establishing possibilities for future research. Like Williams’ other novels, War in Heaven is saturated with the symbolism and ritual practices he learned in The Fellowship of the Rosy Cross and, potentially, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Williams’ experimentation with sound to convey his experience of ritual is explored through the framework of Roman Jakobson’s “Poetic Function”, to establish how Williams may have intended sound to contribute to the experience of the reader. Using a data driven approach, the study explores how sound patterns work with ritualistic content across War in Heaven, discovering a link between fricative sounds and ritualistic events.

THE CONCEPT OF CO-INHERENCE IN THE WORK OF CHARLES WILLIAMS

The article examines the concept of coinherence (or co-inherence) as one of the central and unifying concepts in the life and work of Charles Stansby Williams (1886 – 1945), English poet, writer, and literary critic, also known as “the third Inkling” in conjunction with C .S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Through a close study of the writer’s biography and letters as well as his poetry, novels, theological treatises and essays we trace the origin of the term “coinherence,” borrowed from the Church Fathers in the meaning of mutual indwelling of the Persons of the Holy Trinity, uncover the unique interpretation that Williams gave to the term, and look at various ways he used to integrate it into his writing. Understanding coinherence as a fundamental ontological principle of comprehensive mutual interdependence, exchanged life, and substitution as direct fulfillment of the Gospel commandment “to carry each other’s burdens,” Williams portrays it as a necessary condition of any truly human existence and expounds its universal nature on every level of life, from childbirth to money as a means of exchange, to mutual services of empathy, to intercessory prayer, and to self-sacrifice for another’s sake. In his thinking, people can carry each other’s burdens even through barriers of space and time, since they are simultaneously co-inherent to each other and to God who exists both outside of time and space and in all time and space. Thus, in his novels Williams often employs a version of Dante’s vertical chronotope of simultaneity, and one of the most important symbols that reflect the nature of coinherence is the City as a web of continuous mutual exchange and substitution, in its turn coinherent to the City of God. Williams portrays refusal to participate in the principle of co-inherence as “descent to hell” which is seen as a gradual unraveling of any personhood and ultimate annihilation.