The Ransom Files

Discerning the True King From His Counterfeits

Why have I chosen certain writers and not others to illustrate the themes of this Substack project? One answer would be that I know them well and generally speaking it makes sense to write about what and who you know. More importantly, I also believe that the writers featured in this series were touched to a greater or lesser degree with the prophetic spirit. The depth and range of what they were tuning into has not yet come into public view. It is neither the past nor the present that speaks through their work but the future. One cannot refer, therefore, to Lewis, Tolkien, Eliot, Jones, etc, as reactionaries or purveyors of nostalgia. It is not what has gone before that powers their work but what is to come. This leads us back to the first essay in this series and the future-orientated theology of John Zizioulas. As I wrote in April:

For Zizioulas, faith is a line of force which pulls us forward into the future. It is this future state of completion and fulfilment - the Eschaton or the the 'Eighth Day' - which does the work, calling us up and on, 'farther up and farther in.’ As Lewis shows us at the end of The Last Battle, it is this level alone which is truly real. It gives form and structure to both past and present.

Lewis’s novel That Hideous Strength (1945) has long been acclaimed for its prescience and prophetic insights. This outstanding essay, for instance, by Mihai Marinescu hones in on the transhumanist Credo of the NICE (The National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments), and the book has felt especially relevant during recent times, with talk of a ‘great reset’ and official disapproval of embodied, face to face encounters. The NICE takes this animosity to its logical conclusion - the decoupling of humanity from the material world and even from our physical bodies, which anchor us time and space. It is an updated form of Gnosticism, a rebellion of the pure, supposedly unlimited spirit against the messiness of material reality and the constraints it imposes on us. Paul Kingsnorth taps into this mentality in his novel Alexandria (2020), where people upload their consciousness into a futuristic, enhanced version of what we know today as the Cloud.

Contemporary global capitalism works in a similar way. It seeks to detach us from inherited loyalties to the native culture we were born into. These are dismissed as limiting factors. They hold us back and keep us from achieving our potential. That is the yarn that has been spun to us by the ‘great and the good’, certainly since 1968 and probably before. It is a straight up lie - bland and nefarious at the same time. Custom and tradition provide us with what until recently (and then only in the West) has been the natural birthright of every child - a sense of belonging, a sense of home, a sense of orientation. Without these, we have no fixed star to guide us, no ballast to fall back on, nothing fixed and solid to rally around and build upon. These clear and stable realities in no way limit our potential or hinder our future development. If anything, they make achievement and fulfilment far more likely.

It is not that these loyalties define us exactly. That would be to go too far. They are contingent, like everything else, but they give us an inner core and a connection to a people and a faith, which were here before us and will be here long after us. We are links in a chain, as emphasised in a previous essay, not atomised individuals, yet it is the latter which the ‘rulers of this age,’¹ in St. Paul’s words, are trying might and main, through stripping us of our patrimony, to turn us into - distracted, rootless, godless consumers. It is a physical and spiritual attack on our essence as sons and daughters of the Most High. It is a more than human assault. That is where its power comes from. The politicians and activists involved are mere husks - like Wither and Frost, the leaders of the NICE - mouthpieces and puppets of the demonic. Elwin Ransom, the Pendragon, fights against this evil in That Hideous Strength, and so do we. It is a war, to quote the Apostle again, ‘against the Archons, against the Powers, against the Cosmic Rulers of this Darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the celestial places.’²

Gender Theory, in recent years, has added an extra dimension to this conflict with its assertion that gender is a fluid and malleable thing which can be changed on the basis of feelings and that this overrides the laws of physical biology. This is another act of theft. Our identity from childhood as male or female is something we should always to be able to rely on - settled and secure - a safe harbour we can return to and refer back to as we set out on the voyage of life. That is up for grabs as well now and in a state of restless flux. What will be next? Because there will be a ‘next.’ The Revolution never stand still. The endgame, I sense, is what Kingsnorth explores in Alexandria and Lewis foresees in That Hideous Strength, what the latter called ‘the abolition of man - the end of humanity and the ‘liberation’ or the ‘uploading’ of our consciousness into a frictionless, non-physical, virtual sphere.

This is where our fixation on individual autonomy and the right to choose eventually takes us - a flat out rejection and reversal of the Incarnation; a rebellion against the Logos, the Word made Flesh; and a full-on assault against God and on everything that makes us human. Lewis called it. ‘Dreams,’ he wrote, ‘of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of man as god … There was now at last a real chance for fallen Man to shake off that limitation of his powers which mercy had imposed upon him as a protection from the full results of his fall. If this succeeded, hell would be at last incarnate.’³

The point of this essay, however, is not to meditate on the Counter-Initiatory nature of the NICE. Marinescu, again, does that best. I want to hone in on the figure of Ransom himself - who he is, what he does, what he stands for, and what he gives us in terms of teaching and example.

Why is he important? Why is he so relevant and essential? Because it is crystal clear now, all across the board, that we are entering a period of huge turmoil and uncertainty. The liberal-globalist paradigm which has set the agenda since the end of the Cold War is either poised to expire or morph into a highly illiberal, quasi-totalitarian form of progressive authoritarianism. Soft totalitarianism, Rod Dreher, names it, and it already appears to have assumed control in Canada and parts of the US.

So, the future will not be like the past, though if globalism continues to hold sway, then what we will see is a deepening and intensification of existing trends. Fr. Spyridon Bailey, in this powerful talk, tells us that the Antichrist will be a personification of this inverted scale of values. The whole twenty minutes are essential viewing, and I would suggest that the smart money would most likely concur with Fr. Bailey’s prophecy. That said, there is, I believe, another possible outcome. I keep thinking about Christ’s description of Antichrist, ‘that if it were possible he would deceive the very elect.’⁴ Try as I might, I just cannot see an incarnation of globalism deceiving ‘the elect.’ I am not referring here to high-ranking prelates or well-known talking heads. I am talking about monks and nuns and the holy men and women of all the religions, who keep the world turning through their constant prayer and acts of charity. Such a personage would cut no ice with them. He would be too obvious - too choreographed and predictable. Who then would be capable of tempting the elect?

I am going to throw one name into the ring, that of Aleksander Dugin (b.1962), the Russian philosopher, theologian, and political scientist. Western news outlets call him ‘Putin’s Brain’ or ‘Putin’s Rasputin’, though so far Dugin has never met the Russian President and there is no evidence that Putin has read Dugin and formed an opinion of him. Nonetheless, it is becoming apparent that Dugin’s concept of a ‘multipolar world’ has percolated widely through the Russian political and military establishment and his influence is growing overseas - in India, Turkey and Iran, for example, and also in anti-liberal circles in Europe and America.

Most of Dugin’s writing is in Russian, which I am unable to read. I have only read him in English and French, and even then only a fraction of what he has published in those languages. So there are huge gaps in my understanding of his project, but I have read and seen enough (without claiming to be part of an élite) to have been tempted many times by his worldview, especially at times when I have felt frustration and varying degrees of fury at the West’s political and cultural trajectory.

I rate and respect Dugin very highly. For me, he is the world’s Number One thinker. Few, if any, can match his insight into the active process of dissolution which is gaining such horrifying traction in our world. Michael Millerman nails this in his penetrating review of Dugin’s book The Great Reset vs The Great Awakening (2021):

After gender politics, Dugin warns, transhumanism will come more fully to the fore, since ‘the human is also a collective identity, which means that it must be overcome, abolished, destroyed.’ Just as the ‘individual’ can choose to be ‘religious or atheist’, ‘male or female’, soon the choice will extend to be ‘human or not.’ The Great Reset does not want anyone to get in its way: belief in a ‘relevant essence of man’ hinders progress.

This takes us straight back to That Hideous Strength and the NICE’s transhumanist agenda. Frost and Wither, as noted above, have allowed themselves to become conduits for Satanic powers. Dugin is alive to this reality too. He sees beyond and through the screen of surface appearances. Like St. Paul, he understands that it is not ‘flesh and blood’ which assails us but ‘the spiritual forces of wickedness in the celestial places’:

Wars between people, including even the most cruel and bloody are but pale comparisons to the wars of the gods, the titans, giants, elements, demons, and angels. And these, in turn, are but figures illustrating even more formidable and profound wars unfolding in the Mind, in the sphere of the Nous …⁵

There is much to admire in Dugin’s oeuvre. I find his concept of the Fourth Political Theory a bold and imaginative attempt at reshaping the assumptions of political philosophy. Liberalism, in this schema, is the first political theory, Communism the second, and Fascism the third. Liberalism is centred around individual autonomy, Communism around class, and Fascism around race. The fourth political theory, in contrast, has its focal point in Heidegger’s notion of Dasein or ‘Being.’ At first glance, this sounds far more appealing - more holistic and more spiritually-attuned - than the series of dry abstractions, all rooted in materialism, which have passed for political theory since the Enlightenment.

For all his qualities, however, there is something which ultimately turns me away from Dugin. It could be that whenever he talks about the multi-polar world it is Russia which is depicted as the pivot and centre. This is natural enough in a Russian thinker, perhaps, but it does raise the question as to whether Dugin’s ideal world is as multi-polar as he claims. Is it not, rather, a well-thought out attempt at exchanging American hegemony for the same, though maybe differently expressed, degree of Russian power?

Dugin’s predilection for chaos also needs to be considered. As Charles Upton shows in his Dugin Against Dugin: A Traditionalist Critique of the Fourth Political Theory (2018), Dugin often appears to promote anarchy and chaos, as if the post-liberal world can be built around the disorder that is now beginning to subsume it. Upton quotes from Dugin’s essay on Aleister Crowley:

Between the aeons of Osiris and Horus there is a special period, ‘the tempest of equinoxes.’ This is the epoch of the triumph of chaos, anarchy, revolution, wars, and catastrophes. These waves of horror are necessary to wash away the remnants of the old order and clear the space for the new one. According to Crowley’s doctrine, ‘the tempest of equinoxes’ is a positive moment which should be celebrated, expedited, and used by all the votaries of ‘the aeon of Horus.’ This is why Crowley himself supported all the ‘subversive’ trends in politics - Communism, Nazism, anarchism and extreme liberation nationalism …⁶

This is a category error on Dugin’s part. Order does not emerge from chaos. It does not surge up from below but is given to us from above, from Christ, the Logos, the Creative Word made flesh. Alarm bells ring at this point and they become hard to ignore when, now and then, a harsh and ranting tone takes control of Dugin’s prose. Something brittle and strident sneaks through. Even allowing for poor translation and a measure of creative hyperbole, passages such as this (from Knights Templar of the Proletariat) seem to emanate from a place of anger and resentment rather than from the Holy Spirit:

Sooner or later he (the Proletarian) will look up and deliver his last blow. With a crowbar against the deathly dull eye-socket of the computer, at the glowing window of a bank, at the twisted face of an overseer. The proletarian will awaken. Rebel. Murder … It is the sounding of Angelic Trumpets. They - smiths of Tartar - once again yearn for their proletarian revolution.⁷

Upton’s critique is sharp and exact:

There is obviously no mercy here, either for the avengers or their victims. No mercy, because Heaven is never taken by storm. According to the prophetic books of William Blake, Orc the rebel, in revolution against Urizen, who (in his fallen state) is the tyrant of the alienated, abstracted Logos, finally becomes Urizen, and so still lies under his oppression. This is the unalterable decree of the Kalachakra, the Black Wheel of Time. The Titans, the Asuras, the Jötun, fighting and dying and coming back to life again throughout all eternity, lay siege to Heaven, sacrifice and strive to win it, but they can never enter it. They can never come into the City of Light because as soon as they do, the City that they longed for immediately becomes the City of Hades. Everything the Titans, the Asuras, the Jötun touch is transformed into the land of the shades, the iron walls of the same familiar prison - because that is their nature. Self-will cannot enter Heaven; it can only build its own characteristic Hell.⁸

Ultimately, for myself at least, this is where Dugin’s philosophy leads - to a dead end. Maybe this is why I view Alan Garner’s Elidor, and the character of Roland in particular, as so relevant for our times. What I thought was a transcendent voice turned out to be just another echo in Plato’s cave. I am not in Aleksandr Dugin’s class as a thinker - very few are - but after twenty years of wrestling with him this is the verdict: much promise and potential but a paucity so far of edible and nourishing fruit.

Who then do we turn to? Who can guide us out of the civilisational pit we are sliding into? How will we recognise him? How do we ensure we are not off-shoring our issues onto an imposter or a pseudo-messiah? It is at times like this that Elwin Ransom flashes into my mind like lightning in a winter sky. He is a lodestar and a touchstone. Unlike with Dugin or with Malebron in Elidor, we do not need to weigh up and ponder if he is good or not. He is blazingly and transparently good, and there is a force and vitality to this goodness which fills us us with confidence and hope. Anyone who calls out the globalist behemoth and becomes a public figure will need to replenish our spirits exactly like this, otherwise they will not be worth following.

With this in mind, I have taken three extracts from the book - three ‘Ransom Files’, if you like - that highlight different aspects of this goodness and the impact it has on those who meet and work with Ransom. Take, to begin with, Jane Studdock’s reaction upon her first encounter with him. Superficial accretions of modernity and progressivism fall away at once to reveal the existence of a deeper, hierarchically-attuned sensibility. The scene is the Blue Room in the Manor House at St. Anne’s on the Hill, where Ransom is gathering his Company to aid him in his battle with the NICE:

‘This is the young lady, Sir,’ said Miss Ironwood.

Jane looked and instantly her world was unmade. On a sofa before her, with one foot bandaged as if he had a wound, lay what appeared to be a boy, twenty years old … Winter sunlight poured through the glass; apparently one was above the fog here. All the light in the room seemed to run towards the gold hair and the gold beard of the wounded man.

Of course he was not a boy - how could she have thought so? The fresh skin on his cheeks and hands had suggested the idea. But no boy could have so full a beard. And no boy could be so strong. It was manifest that the grip of those hands would be inescapable, and imagination suggested that those arms and shoulders could support the whole house. Miss Ironwood at her side struck her as a little old woman, shrivelled and pale - a thing you could have blown away …

How could she have thought him young? Or old either? It came over her that this face was of no age at all. She had, or so she had believed, disliked bearded faces except for old men. But that was before she had long since forgotten the imagined Arthur of her childhood - and the imagined Solomon too. Solomon … for the first time in many years the bright solar blend of king and lover and magician which hangs about that name stole back upon her mind. For the first time in all those years she tasted the word King itself with all its linked associations of battle, marriage, priesthood, mercy and power.⁹

In this scene, which takes place in the kitchen on a wild and stormy night, Ransom is preparing his troops for the shock of coming face to face with the reawakened Merlin - a completely unknown quantity at this stage of the book. Power and glory radiate out from Ransom, yet he remains humble at all times and conscious of his status - even as Pendragon - as a servant of the Most High. Everything and everyone is placed under the protective aegis of Christ (Maleldil, as He is known in the book). He is the fount and source of the primordial strength that both Dimble and Jane connect to as Ransom (the Director) is speaking:

‘Don’t be afraid; but don’t let him tray any tricks. Keep your hand on your revolver … You understand, Dimble? Your revolver in your hand, a prayer on your lips. Then, if he stands, conjure him.’

‘What shall I say in the Great Tongue?’

‘Say that you come in the name of God and all angels and in the power of the planets from one who sits today in the seat of the Pendragon, and command him to come with you. Say it now.’

And Dimble raised his head, and great syllables of words came out of his mouth. Jane felt her heart leap and quiver; it was as if the words spoke themselves through him from some strong place at a distance - or as if they were not words at all but present operations of God, the planets, and the Pendragon. For this was the language spoken before the Fall and beyond our Moon. Language herself, as she first sprang at Maleldil’s bidding out of the molten quicksilver of the star called Mercury on Earth, but Viritrilbia in Deep Heaven.

'Thank you,’ said the Director. 'And if he comes with you, all is well. If he does not - why then, Dimble, say your prayers and keep your will fixed in the will of Maleldil. I don't know what he will do. You can't lose your soul, whatever happens; at least, not by any action of his.’

'Yes,' said Dimble. 'I understand.’

‘You are all right, Jane?’

'I think so, sir,' said Jane.

'Do you place yourself in the obedience,' said the Director, 'in obedience to Maleldil?’

'Sir,' said Jane. 'I know nothing of Maleldil. But I place myself in obedience to you.’

'It is enough for the present,’ said the Director. 'This is the courtesy of Deep Heaven: that when you mean well, He always takes you to have meant better than you knew. It will not be enough for always. He is very jealous. He will have you for no-one but Himself in the end. But for tonight, it is enough.’¹⁰

Order and pattern, redemption and salvation, restoration and renewal - all these things, as stressed previously, are bestowed upon us from above. It is not the conflict swirling around the town of Edgestow that gives Ransom his inner force but his participation in a living, dynamic hierarchy. In this final Ransom File, also set in the St. Anne’s kitchen, we see the Director prove his identity to Merlin by showing himself as belonging to a lineage of kings, prophets and priests, a golden chain of sovereignty and grace. At the end of it, there is only one response that Merlin can make …

… ‘You have answered well,’ said the Stranger. ‘I thought there were but three men in the world that knew this question. But my second may be harder. Where is the ring of Arthur the King? What Lord has such a treasure in his house?’

‘The ring of the King,’ said Ransom, ‘is on Arthur’s finger where he sits in the land of Abhalljin, beyond the seas of Our in Perelandra. For Arthur did not die; but Our Lord took him to be in the body till the end, with Enoch and Elias and Moses and Melchisedec the King. Melchisedec is he in whose hall the steep-stoned ring sparkles on the forefinger of the Pendragon.’

‘Well answered,’ said the Stranger. ‘In my college it was thought that only two men in the world knew this. But as for my third question, no man knew the answer but myself. Who shall be Pendragon in the time when Saturn descends from his sphere? In what world did he learn war?’

‘In the sphere of Venus I learned war,’ said Ransom. ‘In this age Lurga shall descend. I am the Pendragon.’

When he had said this he took a step backwards, for the big man had begun to move and there was a new look in his eyes. Slowly, ponderously, yet not awkwardly, as though a mountain sank like a wave, he sank on one knee; and still his face was almost on a level with the Director’s.¹¹

How Ransom became this way is a topic for another time and a sustained meditation on the first two novels in Lewis’s ‘Space Trilogy’: Out of the Silent Planet (1938) and Perelandra (1943). Our focus here is on That Hideous Strength, and the prophetic elements embedded in the text. My contention is that it should be read not just as a prediction of the New World Order’s fetish for transhumanism but also as a foreshadowing of the coming of the Grand Monarch of Catholic prophecy. I will devote an essay later in this series to this bright, heraldic figure, plus two further studies - one on The Lord of the Rings and the other on The Last Battle - which will look at the kings in both books, Aragorn and Tirian, through the prism of the Grand Monarch prophecies.

Nostradamus wrote extensively about this emblematic character, as did numerous saints and mystics such as Anne Catherine Emmerich and St. John Vianney. The Grand Monarch will appear when the world will seem wholly given over the the combined forces of evil and destruction. Against all odds, he will roll back the powers of darkness and banish them for a time from the earth. Together with an ‘Angelic Pope’, he will restore and renew Christendom, and the world will know a period of peace and fulfilment like never before. The Grand Monarch’s reign is intimately linked to the future Golden Age I referred to in my first essay, though in itself it is not that Golden Age. It is, rather, the light of this approaching new aeon shining through already into the darkness of our times. This is what the Grand Monarch does. This is what he is - a personification of the resacralisation of the world which thinkers and artists such as Martin Shaw, Iain McGilchrist and Jonathan Pageau have been discussing so fruitfully of late.

The Grand Monarch is a universal figure. He has his analogue in the Muslim world, for instance - especially in the Shia Muslim world - in the form of the Hidden Imam. He is a real and potent archetype, the herald of the Eighth Day, who sets the stage for the Antichrist’s last-gasp power grab and the Second Coming of Christ in glory. In the confused days to come, he will be the one to follow. How will we recognise him though? How will we know him from his counterfeits? Let us remember this final extract from That Hideous Strength - the descent of Jupiter upon St. Anne’s. This is what he will be like. This is how we will feel at his advent:

Upstairs his mighty beam turned the Blue Room into a blaze of lights. Before the other angels a man might sink; before this he might die, but if he lived at all he might laugh. If you had caught one breath of the air that came from him, you would have felt yourself taller than before. Though you were a cripple, your walk would have become stately: though a beggar you would have worn your rags magnanimously. Kingship and power and festal pomp and courtesy shot from him as sparks fly from an anvil. The ringing of bells, the blowing of trumpets, the spreading out of banners are means used on earth to make a faint symbol of his quality. It was like a long sunlit wave, creamy-crested and arched with emerald, that comes on nine feet tall, with roaring and with terror and with unquenchable laughter. It was like the first beginning of music in the halls of some king so high and at some festival so solemn that a tremor akin to fear runs through young hearts when they hear it. For this was Glund-Oyarsa, King of Kings, through whom the joy of creation principally blows across these fields of Arbol, known to men in old times as Jove and under that name, by fatal but not inexplicable misprision, confused with his Maker - so little did they dream by how many degrees the stair even of created being rises above him.¹²

1. 1 Corinthians 2:6

2. Ephesians 6:12

3. C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (Pan Books, 1955), p.121.

4. Mark 13:22

5. https://eurasianist-archive.com/2018/04/03/introduction-the-aims-and-tasks-of-noomakhia/

6. Charles Upton, Dugin Against Dugin: A Traditionalist Critique of the Fourth Political Theory, (Reviviscimus, 2018), p.91.

7. Ibid, p.521.

8. Ibid, pp.521-522.

9. That Hideous Strength, p.84.

10. Ibid, pp.137-138.

11. Ibid, pp.166-167.

12. Ibid, pp.204-205.