Glen Cavaliero has stated that the novels of Charles Williams, of which ''All Hallows' Eve'' is the last, move towards "an ever more perfect fusion of natural with supernatural". The magical ceremonies that are meticulously described play a leading role in the plot's development and are not all the product of the author's imagination. T. S. Eliot, in his introduction to the American edition, raises the possibility that some may have been "borrowed from the literature of the occult". Williams had, indeed, once belonged to
A. E. Waite's
Rosicrucian order, itself one of many offshoots of the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Waite's order, however, was predominantly directed towards
Christian mysticism, although it had its ceremonious rituals. The magical ceremonies described in the novel are directed by Simon Leclerc in an increasingly desperate effort to subordinate Betty to his will, now that the complication of her love for Jonathan Drayton challenges his influence. The effort to make a final division between Betty's material and spirit bodies fails when Lester substitutes herself. It is a double failure, however, leading to the curtailment of Simon's power. Simon had persisted with his ceremony even when it was plainly not going to work, thus breaking a fundamental rule in magic. His will to dominate increasingly interferes with his clarity of purpose thereafter. The second ceremony involves the creation of the homunculus as a way of removing Lester. Though successful in itself, Simon's contempt for those he manipulates makes him underestimate the power of love. Lester now has a spiritual bond with Betty and also wishes to make amends to her husband; the acquisition of a body, however deformed, is the means by which she can thwart Simon's murderous intention yet again, which his lack of empathy is unable to foresee. Love and hate are pitted against each other in other ways too. As a child Betty had been secretly
christened by her nurse, who had made the
Holy Spirit her sponsoring
godparent. This is the third ceremony in the novel, described when Betty visits her old nurse with Jonathan. The fourth ceremony is Simon's consequentially foredoomed attempt to destroy Betty by means of a clay figure to which hairs from her brush have been added. In terms of the mechanics of the novel, the mistake made here is allowing ill-will to intrude into what should be a selfless ceremony. It is at this point, as Simon stabs at the image, and then at Betty herself, that the last of his power disappears and the cries of his followers are heard as they discover the cures he performed on them have now been reversed. The identity and function of the figure of Simon has been the subject of frequent discussion. A parallel is suggested with the figure of
Simon Magus, an early convert to Christianity who used his position for personal benefit. There is also a hint that the character is based on
Aleister Crowley, especially in so far as Simon Leclerc has made his name by preaching a message of love purely out of self-interest.
William Butler Yeats, who knew Crowley from his days in the Order of the Golden Dawn, had commented of his magical colleague that "For all his mouthings of the word 'Christ', Christianity seems never to have penetrated." Another interpretation of Simon is that he represents the figure of the
Antichrist. In his drive for personal dominion, Simon dismisses
Jesus in his thoughts as an ineffectual forerunner, "that other sorcerer of his race, the son of Joseph". For him, too, his more recent rival,
Adolf Hitler, was nothing but a fool : "I am the one to come, not Hitler!" It was seldom that Williams allowed contemporary events to penetrate his mythologies of good and evil quite so overtly. The symbolic City through which Lester and Evelyn wander at first is far less clearly depicted, perhaps because, as Glen Cavaliero describes it, the concept is to be understood on so many levels. Firstly it is Jonathan Dayton's blitzscape, the contemporary London punctured with ruins, an outlook projected into the dusky world through which the dead women wander. But on closer examination it is the archetypal City, there as a potentiality in a time before there were inhabitants on the spot and prolonged into the unknowable future. Ultimately, it is not the named city of London but all cities and that "sense of many relationships between men and women woven into a unity" that Williams had described in his essay "The Image of the City in English Verse" (1939). From a theological point of view, this is
The City of God, sustained by the
communion of saints, that refuses into itself the spirit of egocentric exploitation that Simon represents. At this level, as Eliot said of the whole novel, "What [Williams] had to say was beyond his resources, and probably beyond the resources of language, to say once for all through any one medium of expression." ==References==