Albion Besieged

A point often repeated in this blog is that England had a spiritual task to accomplish but is failing to do it. Occasionally the country has started on that work, as with the poets of the Romantic era, the moral concerns of the Empire (and, yes, the British Empire certainly did have those as expressed in ideas of decency, integrity,  fair play, emotional restraint and the like), the groundbreaking work in the field of imagination of the Inklings, the mystical/spiritual revival of the 20th century which may have disintegrated into the facile self-indulgences of the New Age but which had a lot of potential at one time,  and so on. But none of these things developed as might have been hoped even if most have had an impact on the national consciousness at one time. The forces ranged against them have been too many and too powerful for the ideas they put forward to have gained real traction in the minds of more than a few.

So where do we go from here? The vote to leave the EU was a cry for help and a last-ditch attempt to stop the corruption of the soul of the country and its absorption into a Europe which is itself being taken over by an atheistic, materialistic bureaucracy that recognises nothing of a transcendent nature; indeed, by its policies and ideals actively seeks to suppress anything of that nature, for example by refusing to acknowledge Europe's Christian roots as fundamental. Not that most people thought of things in quite those terms, but they had a sense of loss even if they weren't quite sure what was being lost. They can be mocked by the elites who have sold their souls for material advantage, and whose sophisticated worldliness masks a spiritual emptiness but, while motives are certainly mixed, there are still enough people who realise at some level that something important is being left out of the reckoning and that man cannot live by bread alone. Even though bombarded by materialistic propaganda, seduced by consumerism and cheap entertainment, led astray by the sexual revolution and deprived of any real spiritual education, there remains a core of truth in many people that will not just lie down and die.

Everything comes down to motivation. Do people really want truth and goodness and beauty or will they rest content with fake imitations of these things as long as they are comfortable, well-fed and entertained? There is the theory that greater wealth and leisure give people more time to explore deeper aspects of reality but that does not appear to have been the case at all. Perhaps a degree of economic hardship is what we need if we are to return in any numbers to religion. I don't suppose God ever wants his children to suffer unnecessarily but, if we continue to refuse to acknowledge reality, that must eventually have consequences in this world as well as the next.

In the popular imagination England saved Europe from Napoleon and she saved Europe from Hitler, and there is some truth in that though obviously she did not do this on her own. Without her allies she would have failed and there is a lesson in that. What she needs to do now, though, is save Europe from itself. But if she is to succeed in that she must rediscover a national identity and that must be based on her past, even on an inner mythology that embodies the best of the national spirit, the spirit of the angel that is Albion. At the moment, Albion is under siege with few to defend its (his? her?) reality but if we can throw off our besottedness with trivial entertainment and make contact with the depths of the imagination then we will find Albion there waiting for us. We need to reconnect with the roots of our being for only thus can we be saved from a kind of spiritual attenuation or wasting away in which our quality of consciousness becomes ever thinner and more monochrome, perhaps to the point of requiring constantly greater external stimulation just to be maintained at a tolerable level.

Meditate on this image if you would enter Albion. There are many entry points into the archetype of the land and places to contact its presiding genius, but this is a particularly powerful one.

The Seven Sisters on the Sussex coast