I am reading The Greater Trumps by Charles Williams (1931), about an upper-class English family that discovers a deck of cards they have is the original, full-powered Tarot. As I went, I came across the part where Aaron “pointed to the Fool in the middle of the field. It was still: it alone in the middle of all that curious dance did not move”. Ha, thought I. Paul McCartney’s “Fool on the Hill” is keeping perfectly still, too. (1967)

Then a few chapters later, I read “she was under them—those awful moving origins of storm”. Well, yes, it is the nexus of the crisis, and the origin of storms, just like Blue Öyster Cult sang in “Astronomy” (1974). That’s two.

Now that I’m keeping my eyes open, “the remote figure of the juggler, standing in the void before creationA line-drawing icon of a juggler who's got balls and stars in a shower over his head was, and flinging up the golden balls which came in to being as they left his hands, and became planets and stars…” sounds a lot like “He took the stars in his hands and as he scattered them he’d shout, ‘I’m the joker of the Universe.’” That’s from “The Great Sun Jester”, again by Blue Öyster Cult (1979).

As the saying goes, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. What’s going on here? The hypothesis that Williams was deliberately incorporating references to rock songs from 30-40 years in the future, I swiftly rejected. On the other hand, though, I only found out about Charles Williams from reading The Oddest Inkling. Were he famous enough to inspire rock bands1, I would have heard of him in my wasted teenage years. So what’s the thread connecting these things? McCartney was writing about his guru, the Maharishi, but he was thinking of the tarot card too, at one remove. Could be just happenstance.  

The Blue Öyster Cult link is more interesting. The lyrics to “Astronomy”2 were written by Sandy Pearlman, who sounds like exactly the sort of person who’d read Charles Williams. I asked over on Reddit, where u/AmazingAngle8530 told me that Pearlman certainly read Dion Fortune, so the odds are good that he read books by other early 20th-century British occultists, too. “The origin of storms” doesn’t have to be an allusion to Williams; it was a term used in the early 19th century by the people who were trying to create a science of weather. However, the context looks more like mysticism than meteorology.3 Pearlman’s other cult interests make me think this one’s real, and deliberate. The lyricist of “The Great Sun Jester” is Michael Moorcock, who presents a different problem. Moorcock has read everything, but his opinion of at least two Inklings is famously negative. Would he have consciously alluded to Williams?4 Moorcock is certainly not averse to re-using ideas: Balo the Jester in “The Singing Citadel” appears to be the same character as the Fireclown, which is another name for the Great Sun Jester.5 Williams’s working-class origins could have made him acceptable, but I’d need to see some proof.

So maybe there’s an older thread of myth we’re seeing here, where wise men are seen as fools because they remain motionless, and weather comes from mystical powers, and cosmic jugglers put the celestial bodies in place. Or maybe speculations like this just happen when you read too many Charles Williams novels.

 

Notes

  1. But only those beginning with “B”.
  2. The line “acid and oil on a madman’s face” always made me think he’d been careless with the vinaigrette.
  3. Williams’s exact phrase, with origins plural and storm singular, appears to be his alone, according to Google Books.
  4. Maybe at gunpoint.
  5. Pink Floyd’s “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” may be another reference to the Fireclown.