In my beginning is my end ...

The Book of Holy Kings (Epilogue)

‘Let he who finds this book write an epilogue if he sees fit’, says Denniston at the end of his narrative. So I will. But let it take the form of the prologue I wrote in my final Secret Fire essay on May 31st 2023 …

… When I was a boy there was a certain bookshop I used to love going into, down a cobbled street in the middle of Didsbury, the South Manchester suburb where I lived. It had a lamp-lit room that I found particularly compelling. You’d see Persian rugs and brightly coloured cushions laid out on the floor between the bookshelves. Lamps hung from the ceiling like little moons and an atmosphere of contemplative peace suffused the space.

Those lamps came into their own on damp, cloudy afternoons, and it would seem to me then that the room was aglow with an inner light, and that a latent force - hidden, but real and strong - was about to burst through and erupt into the world. I always felt on days like this that something extraordinary might happen, and one Saturday it did. A small hard-back book high up on the shelf caught my eye. It had an electric blue spine with gold lettering. The Book of Holy Kings, it said.

I took the book down. It had a golden griffin emblazoned on the front, which reminded me of a book I had been given at school some years before when I was learning to read (see image below). Intrigued, I sat down on a patterned purple rug and started to read.

I had not yet read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. But when I did and when I reached the part where Lucy reads from the Magician’s Book, I saw straightaway that my encounter with The Book of Holy Kings had the same style and stamp. As soon as I started to read, it felt like I was alive and present on the page, playing an active part. This was Lucy’s experience too:

‘It went on for three pages and before she had read to the bottom of the page she had forgotten that she was reading at all. She was living in the story as if it were real, and all the pictures were real too. When she had got to the third page and come to the end, she said, ‘That is the loveliest story I've ever read or ever shall read in my whole life. Oh, I wish I could have gone on reading it for ten years”

Those holy kings, as I was reading, seemed more real and credible than anyone or anything else in the whole wide world. It wasn’t that I had forgotten my surroundings – the lovely lamp-lit room, for instance – but rather that they had somehow been transmuted by the text and included and welcomed in its all-embracing flow, as if they belonged in the story, as if everything beautiful and good found its home within those pages.

So what was the book about? Once again, I run into the same problem as Lucy:

‘But here part of the magic of the Book came into play. You couldn’t turn back. The right-hand pages, the ones ahead, could be turned; the left-hand pages could not.

"Oh, what a shame!" said Lucy. "I did so want to read it again. Well, at least, I must remember it. Let's see... it was about... about... oh dear, it's all fading away again. And even this last page is going blank. This is a very queer book. How can I have forgotten? It was about a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill, I know that much. But I can't remember and what shall I do?"

I read the book through in one sitting. Like Lucy, I wanted to read it again. It was priced at £1. I raced home and grabbed my pocket money, but when I got back the shop was closed. I hadn’t realised how late in the afternoon it had got. By the time Monday after school came around, the book had been sold. I asked Mr. Griffiths, the bookshop owner, when it had been bought and by whom, and he said it had been a Greek monk that very morning, a visitor to the local Anglican church, The Shrine of King Charles the Martyr. He would be half-way to Athens by now. I was devastated and have never come across the book since or been able to track it down. Even from that first evening, I struggled to recall the details, though the flavour has stayed with me always, like a brand upon the heart, calling continually from the depths of my being and the heart of the Real.

Looking back now, I’d say The Book of Holy Kings was a kind of pseudo-history in the manner of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. It featured twenty-five kings and mingled history with legend. It often presented myth as concrete fact, so figures such as Aeneas and Joseph of Arimathea were given the same status as Alfred the Great or Richard III. It was a series of intense, poetically charged meditations with a page-length line drawing - a picture of the relevant king - at the start of each chapter. I am not a visual artist so I cannot reproduce these images, but I do intend, over the next twelve months, to rewrite and recreate as best I can that numinous text I found and lost in an afternoon four decades ago.

Why am I doing all this?

Well, ‘In my beginning is my end’, as T.S. Eliot writes in East Coker. The Book of Holy Kings would not have surged back into my mind had I not been meditating on the shape and form this final Secret Fire essay should take. The last chapter, you see, was about a future king who will restore both the Holy Roman Empire and our island’s link with the imperial crown. This ties in with and sums up everything that has been written here this past year. There can be no renewal and renovation unless the Emperor returns. The Wasteland will not bloom again unless this dynamic, catalytic symbol becomes once more visible and active. But for now, he is invisible and inactive. We sense this and miss his presence. We want him back, and this is why Lewis says:

‘Because ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book.’

Thus ends the prologue. And so, I have accomplished what I have set out to do. I have rewritten the book to the best of my ability. The way forward is the way through for us all now, ‘farther up and farther in’, deeper and deeper into the British Mysteries. That way lies not only salvation - both personal and collective - but regeneration and transfiguration too.

We can do it. We can turn things around. The roots are deep and our powers greater and stronger than we think. And if God be with us, as we hope and pray that He must be, then who can be against us?

I’ll continue to put my shoulder to the wheel as best I can, though no longer on Substack. It’s been a good two and a half years but it’s time to move on now. Eliot says it best again, this time in Little Gidding:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always--
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

And so, may the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, come down upon all you readers of this site and upon all your loved ones. Thank you for your presence and your witness. And may that Peace keep your hearts and your minds in the knowledge and the love of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, Our Lady and all the Saints. This day and always.

Amen.