One element especially highlighted in The Book of Holy Kings is the profound spiritual affinity between the various kings - Roman, Jewish, British, English, Scottish, Welsh - depicted in the text. There is a unity and shared purpose on view which goes beyond ethnic and denominational differences.
One might consider, for instance, King Harold (above) as an Orthodox king, Charles I as an Anglican king, and James II as a Catholic king. Two out of the three lost their lives prematurely and all of them lost their crowns. Why? Because they held the pass against the same forces of materialism and cold rationalistic progress - in all their various guises - as does Ransom in That Hideous Strength in his role as Pendragon of Britain.
It is not just a British thing. This is a universal principle - a deep defence of the sacred in the face of René Guénon’s Reign of Quantity - a struggle for the space to live and breathe as human beings ought to and as we were originally designed to, passing our days in the presence of the numinous, with the holy as a concrete daily reality, not a barren, formalistic abstraction.
It is a war for Divinity but also a ‘long defeat’ as Tolkien noted. There are echoes here with Shia Islam and how the Battle of Karbala (680) and the martyrdom of Imam Hussein is memorialised as if it was still taking place today and indeed as if it is always taking place. That primordial wrong will be righted when the Hidden Imam - Imam Mahdi - reappears at the end of the age. Justice will be shown to the dispersed followers of Imam Hussein and there will be, to borrow another Tolkien phrase, a general ‘healing of harms.’
In an analogous fashion we memorialise and relive the sacrificial death of Harold on Senlac Hill, the murder of Charles, and the banishment of Good King James. We open ourselves up, thereby, to the concealed metaphysical currents that dictate the course of history. There are synergies and parallels here that cut across otherwise very different cultures and religions. That is because they are true and real and because we are hard-wired to work alongside these master-motifs and not against them.
We have lost our way as the Kali Yuga has intensified though and our kings have been slain and our holy men and women marginalised and ignored. We have fallen into illusion and the Divine has hidden its face from us. But this is an aberration - a passing state of affairs which will not last too much longer.
The King will come into his own again. Maybe sooner than we think. According to The Book of Holy Kings, he is already back among us. Which of us will be the first to recognise him?