The Sacred Wheels of History
The Book of Holy Kings (XXIII)
Londinium, Monday May 4th 1981.
So what, you might ask, have the Grail Kings been doing throughout this ‘long defeat’, this millennium and a half of desacralisation, disenchantment, and ongoing alienation? Guardians, supposedly, of the country’s soul and spirit, you’d be forgiven for assuming that they’ve nodded off á la Blake’s Albion. Either that or they’re just figures of fancy – ‘lies breathed through silver’, in C.S. Lewis’s phrase – concocted by a naive, pre-scientific mentality.
Most ‘thinking people’ today would say something like that. But not me. I’m not most people. I’m Charles Edmund Denniston. I’m the Grail King. And the Grail Priest. So that’s how I know.
It’s a fair question though, and I don’t have all the answers. I have no idea, for instance, who many of my predecessors are. Some I have included in this book, others I have omitted, but more – perhaps most – remain completely unknown to me. But that’s how it should be. We don’t need to know every jot and tittle. Not on this horizontal, empirical level.
As with Blake and the Jacobites, it’s the vertical dimension that counts. Historical events are best understood as reflections of the colossal spiritual struggle that’s been raging since the revolt of Lucifer. And we’re all caught up in that. But there’s only so much you can say, only so much that people will understand, only so much, in short, that the Grail Priests and Kings can do.
Each day, at dawn and sunset, in the attic of our Clapham townhouse, I celebrate Mass in Old Solar, the language men and angels spoke before the Fall. Everything's so clear, obvious and transparent in that tongue. But we’ve lost the primal understanding that engendered this enchanted mode of being. Our minds are splintered and fragmented now. No longer whole. And these great themes can only be comprehended in wholes, Blake’s ‘fourfold vision.’ But we, of course, are stuck in ‘single vision and Newton’s sleep.’
That’s why I adopted a cautious approach with The Book of Holy Kings. Something needed to be said, I felt, to challenge this notion of history as just a series of mundane, material facts. I wanted to re-orientate my readers to the idea of an overarching mythic pattern within which these events unfold. But I didn’t want to say too much lest my words appear fantastical and I lose my grounding in people’s felt reality. This was to be the final chapter too, the revelation of my identity and the switch of metaphysical levels. But amazing things have happened these last few chilly weeks, and now I must write more.
My father, Arthur Denniston, was a model of patience and discretion. ‘Watch and pray’ were his watchwords, and that was his modus operandi as Grail Priest and King. He would often quote his immediate predecessor, the great Elwin Ransom, who in a time of doubt and crisis assured his Companions that:
‘You have done what was required of you. You have obeyed and waited. It will often happen like that. As one of the modern authors has told us, the altar must be built in one place in order that the fire from heaven might descend somewhere else.’
Ransom was a mid-twentieth-century titan, up there with De Valera, De Gaulle, and Salazar, yet you won’t encounter him in any history book. His life, however, been transposed superbly into fiction by Lewis who eventually came to recognise that what he once dismissed as baseless fables are in fact profound and timeless truths, operating on levels above and beyond the purely rational mind.
You can follow Ransom’s story in Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1942), and That Hideous Strength (1945). The books recount how he made contact with the ruling intelligences of Mars and Venus, even thwarting a repeat of the Fall on the latter planet. Back on Earth, Ransom becomes Pendragon of Logres, the steward and protector of Britain’s sacred core. This is one Lewis’s few missteps, for Ransom was not made Pendragon – one of several titles which King Arthur in his egotism claimed solely for himself – but rather Grail Priest and King in the Succession of Saint Joseph of Arimathea. He gathered a Company around him, exactly as Lewis tells us, to head off a pernicious assault of the Satanic powers on England’s holy soil. Then, his mission accomplished, he was lifted up to Venus to be healed of a grievous wound he had received in that same heavenly sphere (as told in Perelandra) fighting man to man with incarnate evil.
My father and my mother – Camilla Denniston – were both members of this Company. I myself am mentioned in That Hideous Strength when Ransom tells my mother, 'We in this house are all that is left of Logres. You carry its future in your body.’ That ‘future’ is me.
My father fell to his death off a rocky headland in Greece last summer. May he rest in peace and rise in glory. I succeeded him as Priest and King and straightaway began this book. I had to put my mark on things, I felt, and set fresh wheels in motion, but I had no idea what I was summoning forth and calling back to Britain. I have since been pounded, pummelled, and ground down into dust, and I know now that the same hammering will one day crush and overwhelm my country. Yet I wouldn’t have it any other way. This is the best place to be – where there’s no turning back, no looking away, no pretending that you haven’t seen. The fire, I mean, and the smoke and the ashes and the Phoenix.
Yes, that’s right, the Phoenix. That’s what I said. That’s what I saw in all its raw and rising glory and potential. There in the Clearing – where only the Real exists, where Old Solar is spoken and understood – the place where the Divine strikes like lightning, bringing an immediate end to the dark night of materialism and spinning anew the sacred wheels of history.
