Charles Williams was an occult master, a Christian mentor, and a member of the Inklings with Tolkien and Lewis. He wrote seven startling metaphysical thrillers: bizarre, engaging, wild novels in which the supernatural invades ordinary life. In this course, we'll talk about Shadows of Ecstasy, in which an immortal guru invades England with an army of African soldiers, offering magical transmutation of the passions to his followers. While Williams wrote this novel first, it was published later, but still reveals an early, ambiguous phase of his religious thought.

While this course is part of a cycle of seven classes on the various novels, they may be taken in any order; however, this is the strangest and most disturbing of Williams's fiction, so students would probably benefit from taking at least one other module in this cycle first.