Wake Up To Royalty
Once more I have found that I am unable to make a video. The problems that dogged me last month have continued into this. I don’t even know what the problems are, let alone how to fix them! All I know is that the camera isn’t working.
This would have been my last attempt at a video anyway. I will be beginning a new Substack project in this space next month, and it will be written content only. There is one more essay to come in the Secret Fire series and that will be published at the end of the month, God willing.
In that essay, we will be taking a deep dive into the figure of the Emperor, particularly as he is portrayed in Chapter IV of Valentin Tomberg’s classic text Meditations on the Tarot. The Emperor is a unifying figure who brings all the disparate parts of the world and ourselves together. He is the ‘King behind the King’, as it were, God’s vice-regent on Earth and the ultimate source on this earthly plane of power and authority.
All I was going to do in this video was quote a couple of passages from two seminal Inklings works, That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis (1945) and Charles Williams’s The Greater Trumps (1932). Here we see the impact this royal and imperial archetype can have when it unveils itself, even if obliquely, to human consciousness. Here in Williams’s novel the gypsy Henry Lee is driving through the London evening with the young protagonist Nancy Coningsby:
A policeman’s hand held them up. Henry gestured towards it.
‘Behold the Emperor,’ he said to Nancy.
‘You’re making fun of me,’ she half-protested.
‘Never less,’ he said solemnly. ‘Look at him.’
She looked and, whether the hours she had given to brooding over the Tarots during the last few days, partly to certify her courage to herself, had imposed their forms on her memory, or whether something in the policeman’s shape and cloak under the lights of the dark street suggested it, or whether indeed something common to Emperor and Khalif, cadi and magistrate, praetor and alcalde, lictor and constable, shone before her in those lights - whichever was true, it was certainly true that for a moment she saw in that heavy official barring their way the Emperor of the Trumps, helmed in a white cloak, stretching out one sceptre arm, as if Charlemagne or one like him, stretched out his controlling sword over the tribes of Europe pouring from the forests and bade them pause or march as he would. The great roads ran below him, to Paris, to Aix, to Byzantium, and the nations established themselves in cities upon them. The noise of all the passing street came to her as the roar of many peoples; the white cloak held them by a gesture; order and law were there. It moved, it fell aside, the torrent of obedient movement rolled on, and they with it. They flashed past the helmed face, and she found that she had dropped her eyes lest she should see it …
Now, why should Nancy lower her eyes? Perhaps because part of her knew that to come face to face with that face might destroy all her certainties and turn her life upside down for ever. This is exactly what happens to Jane Studdock in That Hideous Strength when she encounters the Pendragon, Elwin Ransom, for the first time:
‘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 a boy, twenty years old. On one of the long window-sills a tame jackdaw was walking up and down. 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.
Pain came and went in his face: sudden jabs of sickening pain. But as lightning goes through the darkness and the darkness closes up again and shows no trace, so the tranquility of his countenance swallowed up each shock of torture. 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 believed, disliked bearded faces except for old men. But that was because 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.
These men - the Emperor and the King - are more then men. Each is a theophany, each a burning bush. Their presence brings the sacred into our lives, they bear the weight of glory and reveal to each of us what each of may - indeed must - become. In their own style and fashion, they are the way, the truth and the life, pointing us towards the white-hot core of reality and the High King above all High Kings who reigns in glory there.
We should remember them. We should recall them and evoke them, calling them forward from the past and backwards from the future, into the messy maelstrom of the here and now. They hold the keys to our survival and our flourishing. By God, we will need them in the days and months and years to come.
There are no more fitting figures to meditate on as we come to the end of this Secret Fire project. Yeats had it right in Sailing to Byzantium:
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, penne in a gyre,
And be the singing masters of my soul.
We will meet them again in these pages in two weeks time and maybe - who knows? - even sooner somewhere in the ups and downs of our daily lives.
I certainly find the notion of sacred royalty attractive, but always worry about its connection to practical politics, particularly the realities of rule by sinful men. For example, I have read that the Muslims over-ran large portions of the Byzantine Empire so easily partly because the people of these areas so hated the onerous taxation and general oppressive governance of the Empire. Though Christians, they preferred Muslim rule: this was the verdict of very many of his subjects on the Emperor. I have always preferred the model of the Western Middle Ages to the Byzantine Empire precisely because here there were independent power-sources that could balance the power of royalty: the Church, very powerful nobles, Guilds, Communes. Underlying this was feudalism, the idea that ruler and ruled have mutual rights and obligations. Given your sympathies with “Blue Labour”, I wonder what you think about the historical realities of rule by sacred royalty.