Phil Rickman, Charles Williams, and Powers of Evil

Phil Rickman, the British author, died on 29 October 2024 and the Phil Rickman Appreciation Group on Facebook suggested that people read his novel December during the month of December as a kind of memorial tribute to him.

I started rereading it. I first read it about 3 years ago, and found it a rather difficult read -- see my review here. This time I read it more slowly. It is a complex book, five parts with a Prologue and an Epilogue. Don't skip the Prologue! If you are reading it for the first or second time, I recommend re-reading the Prologue at the beginning of each part.

I first came across Phil Rickman when I was browsing in a bookshop in 1999. The title of a book, Crybbe intrigued me, so I took it off the shelf and read the blurb, which made him sound like a cross between Charles Williams and Stephen King, so I bought the book, and was not disappointed. 

I went on to read most of his novels, all the ones I could find, anyway. Somehow they didn't all seem to make their way into bookshops, or else they were sold out quickly. December was published only a month after Crybbe, but it was 20 years before I found it, in a secondhand book shop.

At one level, this is a ghost story. Charles Williams wrote one ghost story, All Hallows Eve, told from the point of view of one of the ghosts. December is told from several points of view, with so many switches that it is sometimes bewildering, but never from the point of view of the ghosts.

In this story five rock musicians have a contract to produce a record in a ruined abbey in south Wales. Four of the musicians are thought to be psychic, and the producers think that this, combined with the setting, should produce an interesting album that will sell well. The story begins with one of the musicians, Dave Reilly, being spooked by the sudden appearance of thirteen tallow candles in the studio and running out to take refuge under a tree. There he has a vision of dying outside a large building, and later the news comes over the radio that John Lennon was killed at that exact time, and he is haunted by the ghost of John Lennon. Three of the other members of the group are also haunted, each in different ways, and the group splits up. 

Fourteen years later they are called back together to complete production of the album, which had been abandoned, and they somewhat reluctantly agree. One of the members, Tom Storey, is approached through his wife's business partner, Martin Broadbank, who organises a dinner party for them to meet.  Broadbank's housekeeper cum concubine, Meryl, who is a spiritualist, and has a vision of most of the people at the dinner party suffering a violent death.

Later in the story Meryl finds herself in the company of Tom Storey, and tries to find out more about his psychic experiences, which, as a spiritualist, she sees as glamorous and exciting. But as events develop she comes to realise that she is out of her depth. She looks at herself in a mirror and

In the glass she sees not the old smouldering allure in the mysterious dark-eyed one who looks beyond the horizon, but plain perplexed apprehension in the unpainted eyes of an ordinary middle-aged woman.

And she longs to be back with Martin, for whom the only unknown forces are market forces. With whom she can safely be a believer in Other Spheres, a confidante of ghosts, and it doesn't matter because she's the only one, an exotic eccentric in a world of businessmen and socialites.

Meryl has been bound up with her perception of "unknown forces" as weird, mysterious, exotic and spooky, and perceives things like market forces as safe and ordinary and part of everyday life. Yet in the story the market forces are perhaps the most unsafe of all. It is market forces that are driving businessmen like Max Goff and Sile Copesake who in this story represent the money behind the music.

Also central to the story is the death of John Lennon, shot to death in New York City on 8 December 1980. But in December 2024, when so many Phil Rickman fans are reading his novel December, another businessman is shot in New York city. Some of this seems to have an uncanny application to Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare, alleged to have been shot by Luigi Mangione. As Max Goff and Sile Copesake are to music in December, so was Brian Thompson to health care in everyday life. And Max Goff also makes an appearance in Crybbe.

Phil Rickman hints at a theological point here. Meryl looks for the unknown spiritual forces in all the wrong places, when all along they are right under her nose, the market forces driving the behaviour of the guests at her dinner party.

Another theological point is evident in the case of Brian Thompson. Attacking the flesh and blood representative of spiritual forces is ineffective. Brian Thompson  was replaced in his office the very next day. As St Paul says:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic forces of wickedness in the heavenlies (Eph 6:10-12).

And he says elsewhere that the weapons of our warfare are not carnal. Flesh and blood oligarchs can be replaced. The real enemy is the spiritual power of the ideologies that drive them.

Understanding the Dark Side

An interesting review of Christopher Partridge, Understanding the Dark Side: Western Demonology, Satanic Panics and Alien Abduction, Chester University Press, (2006).

Understanding the Dark Side:

Although the subtitle promises to be a survey of western demonology, Satanic panics, and alien abduction Partridge’s survey is more a deconstruction of UFO religion and the eclecticism of its sources. The extra-terrestrial religious ideas may have had their origin in theosophical strains of Eastern thought but the religion of groups such as Heaven’s Gate is in fact more rooted in western demonology, specifically the adaptation in popular culture of the idea of the nephilim (Gen 6: 1-4). In the space of a short lecture Partridge has done a good job at delineating the dialectic between theory and popular culture and so, from the perspective of those interested in alternative and fringe religions the author has done a good job in charting the field. However, for those like my self who do not spend much time thinking about the theology of the Raelians a more interesting phenomenon - why as the stranglehold of ‘Christian’ understandings of the world been dissipated have these religions relied on parodies of Christian demonologies. In understand that popular culture is tapping into a latent understanding in invoking such ideas from Christian sources - however, the fact that the UFO religions have followed suit strikes me as a far more interesting question both theologically and sociologically.

Father Seraphim Rose, a Western convert to Orthodoxy, in his book Orthodoxy and the religion of the future maintained that UFOs were in fact demonic manifestations.

UFOs, however, are one area where I'm inclined to be modernist rather than postmodernitst or pre-modernist; in fact I'm altogether prosaic and literalist about them. As I see it, if you believe that you have established that UFOs are demons, or creatures from another planet, they are no longer UFOs but IFOs -- Identified Flying Objects. A thing cannot be both identified and unidentified at the same time.

A few years ago I was visited by a member of an Old Calendrist group, Paul Inglesby, who seemed quite obsessed with UFOs, and was trying to drum up support for his campaign of appealing to governments to do something to stop the abductions by space aliens that he was convinced were taking place. He simply didn't see my point at all when I said that if he had identified them as craft of space aliens they could no longer be UFOs (he pronounced it "you foes"). It wasn't exactly a UFO cult he was advocating, more like a conspiracy theory.

He asked me if I "believed in" UFOs. I said I didn't believe in them, though I had seen one. He asked me what I thought it was, and I said if I knew that, it wouldn't be a UFO. For what it's worth, here's what I wrote about it at the time, on an autumn evening in 1964, when I was at university

In the evening I went over to the Union to phone Fr Hallowes. It was about 6:00 pm, and as I walked across the car park I saw a red object travel across the sky from south to north. It was almost due West of the Union, and then it looked like an artificial satellite, moving slowly across the sky, very much as I saw the first Sputnik moving, nearly seven years ago now. That was the only satellite I had ever seen before, and I almost stopped looking and went on to the Union, But then I stopped, because when it was almost due west it seemed to stop, and then moved in a series of jerks. Then it started to move round a star -- at least that's what it looked like to me, but parallax probably meant that it only looked like it. Neil Perrett came along then, and we both watched it. It was higher up in the sky moving back more or less the way it had come, still in jerks, and it seemed less bright. Obviously it was not an artificial satellite, but must be an aircraft of some kind. Too far away for a chopper, but it may be a fast plane, very far away, but somehow it didn't look like it. Not a satellite, not a plane, what the hell can it be? A piece seemed to fall off it, and then it was travelling back, moving north to south, when it dropped a few more pieces, and finally disappeared -- disintegrated altogether. I went on to the Union, and Neil went back to res.

Not a bird, not a plane, not an artificial satellite, not an alien spacecraft, not a demonic manifestation, simply an unidentified flying object - a UFO.