THE WHITSTABLE WHISTLER Article written by Chris Stone 2022

Hélène Williams: Magical Walking

I love to walk. It is one of my greatest pleasures, strolling along in the English countryside, breathing the air, listening to the birds, feeling the sun and the wind on my face, and absorbing nature in all her ever-changing glory. Best of all is when I have a companion with me, someone to share in these simple delights and to converse with along the way.

One of my regular walking partners is Hélène Williams, the artist. Well, I say “artist”, but that is only one of her many accomplishments. She is also a psychotherapist, sculptor, ritual magician, healer, poet, academic and performance artist. Whitstable folk will probably know her best for the performances she has given on the beach in conjunction with Mark Fuller, the man who made the diving helmet bench near the harbour. There have been several, including one at the end of the Streetin 2016 called The Gateway Between Two Worlds, which included a poem by me. You can find it on YouTube if you care to look.

I first met Hélène back in the early 2000s in the Neptune. Somehow the conversation turned to William Blake, one of my perennial obsessions. Hélène told me she had been brought up as a member of the Swedenborg church in London. Blake had also been a member of the same church, and his famous book, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, is in part a satire on Swedenborg’s ideas.

At the time I was working on material about the English dissenting tradition, that strand of English nonconformist thought arising in the wake of the Civil War, of which the Swedenborg church is an example.

On the back of this, I went to interview her. She lives in a caravan in the back garden of her house, which she shares with a budgie and a wood burner. It’s on a peculiar little housing estate on the outskirts of Swalecliffe where all the roads are named after cars. She leant me copies of several of Swedenborg’s books which she has owned since she was a child.

“There’s a luminosity to her work“

I saw some of her paintings and was very impressed. There’s a luminosity to her work, an inner glow that seems to shine through the images, like sunlight pouring through a stained glass window.

 For a while, we were engaged in a mutual exploration of magical ideas, which made our walks even more fascinating. This slowed down once Hélène started on an MA in mythology, cosmology and the sacred at Christchurch University. This didn’t stop me from being interested in what she was doing, however. It was walking with Hélène during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 that made the lockdown bearable.

 Hélène’s latest news is that she is now a member of the Golden Dawn, a magical group dating from the 19th century, that once included WB Yeats and Aleister Crowley as members. It’s like a university for ritual magicians. And magically, in among all her endeavours, Hélène and I still find time for those walks in the woods together.