"There is no longer any sacred kingdom... there is nothing sacred today. From churches to forests, everything can be bought and sold. … We are now in a new country. We should pray that we can find our way in it.”
Paul Kingsnorth
I spent most of the day, along with several hundred million people around the world, watching the funeral of the late Queen Elizabeth on television. The funeral was full of remarkable, well-planned and often moving moments, as one would expect from an event that England had been preparing for since the 1960s. A lot of things don't work very well in Britain anymore, but this kind of pageantry is something we still do well. I don't think we'll ever see anything like it again.
I say “ostentatious,” but that’s a derogatory word. What happened today was a rolling, dense tangle of symbolism, full of historical significance and anchored in a very specific nation and time period. What did it symbolize? I think, above all, something that our culture has long since stopped believing in and that as such, it can no longer effectively process, or perhaps even fully understand. I was reminded of this by one particular moment in the ceremony.
You can see this moment in the photo above. It's a view down from the top of the tower of Westminster Abbey to the Queen's coffin below. The Abbey is of course cruciform in plan, and the coffin was placed where the nave and transept meet, where the two arms of the cross meet. At one point the camera showed us this view and then focused down on the scene, and it seemed as if some kind of energy was flowing from above down into the coffin, and then spilling out across the marble floor into the assembled crowd. It occurred to me at the time that this was an accurate visual representation of the world that the death of this Queen was definitively ending, and it also occurred to me that this must be one of the reasons why her passing had such a huge impact - an effect that went far beyond the person that the Queen actually was. What we saw as the camera panned down was the manifestation of an ancient concept of sacred royal power through technological tricks.
This concept was the solid foundation on which the political structure of all medieval societies was built, and in theory at least, it is the architecture that still underpins Britain today, where bishops still sit in parliament with the power to change laws and whose monarch's crown is adorned with a cross. Authority in this model of society flows downward, from God and to the monarch, who then uses this bestowed power to go out and serve—and rule—his people.
Forget for a moment whether you are a Christian, a monarchist, or whether you just think it is a hoax to cover up a gross exercise of power. I am not trying to make an argument here: I am trying to understand something that I think at least partly explains how we got here.
The point of the sacred kingship model is that all real power resides in and emanates from a great, mysterious, unknowable, creative force at the heart of the universe—a force that, for lack of a better word, we call “God.” Whatever power a monarch may exercise in this temporal realm is ultimately not his or hers. At the end of today’s funeral, the orb and scepter, symbolizing the queen’s spiritual and temporal power, were removed from the top of her coffin, along with her crown, and given to the care of the church. In that moment, Elizabeth became symbolically what she had always really been and what we all are—little, ordinary people, naked before God.
This idea – that any power exercised by a human ruler ultimately comes from a spiritual plane – is neither British nor European. It is universal. It was accepted by Pharaonic Egypt and the original indigenous peoples of America. It was believed by the Anglo-Saxons and the Japanese emperors. Cultures large and small, imperial and tribal, on every continent, have shared some version of this understanding of the world for many millennia. Power, it tells us – politics emphasizes – is not a mere human invention, because the world is not a mere human invention. Something – someone – other is behind it, and when we remain silent in these cathedrals or in these forests, we can still hear it. Those who seize power in this world will ultimately be held accountable for it. And it is best if they know this now.
What is significant about this royal death is that the late queen actually believed it. I think her son, the new king, believes it too. But the society around him is failing to understand it. Today, authority is thought to flow from the bottom up, from “the people” and into the government that supposedly rules in our name. In this model, there is no sacred center and no higher authority to which we are accountable. There is no heavenly grant of temporary office that will one day be returned and an account made. There is only raw power, rooted in materiality, which in itself has no meaning beyond what we attribute to it. There is only efficiency. There is only management. There are only people.
My aim is not to advocate the return of medieval monarchy. As I say, I am not here to argue. Yet, like Jonathan Van Maren, who makes a similar case today in a moving essay, I feel that this death is significant to many because, whether we know it or not, it marks the final departure of this worldview. There is no longer any sacred kingship, and our political leaders do not bother to pretend otherwise. Indeed, nothing is sacred today. From churches to forests, everything can be bought and sold.
Perhaps, like some others, you are celebrating the passing of such an outdated view. But tonight I am thinking about something I pondered many moons ago when I began my series of essays here. I am thinking that at the heart of every culture there is a throne, whether we know it or not, and that if we expel its previous occupant—and the entire worldview that went with it—we should better understand what we intend to replace it with. Someone or something is about to take that throne, whether we know it or not. I cannot recall any society in history that has believed, as ours does, that all that matters is mere matter. That nothing resides above the spires of an abbey. That there is no throne. If there were any such cultures—well, they couldn’t bear to tell us about it.
As I say, I am not arguing. I am just looking. I look down from that height at the nave and the transept and the coffin draped in the standard and I think: I have just heard the last message for Christian England. We are in a new country now. We should pray that we may find our way in it.
Translation: Jiří Zemánek