The genius of John Michell

I have been reading quite a lot of John Michell (1933-2009) recently.

If you don't know who he is, this is a good source:

http://www.exploringavebury.com/assets/uploads/files/JM%20Feature%20lge.pdf

In a nutshell, he was the most influential of British 'New Age' writers, a modern day Platonist - and a lot more; including being one of the staunchest advocates of Albion Awakening of the past couple of generations.

The reason I write is that, by and large, I have found reading Michell to be a very encouraging and cheering experience that induces a positive mind-set. So I wanted to present a short-list of why.

John Michell regarded himself as a kind of Christian (a rather Unitarian and Gnostic type) but on the negative side - like almost all such - he was an advocate and adherent of the Sexual Revolution; and I think this needs to be borne in mind.

Most people report Michell as having had an unusually happy and harmless life, but I don't really believe this is the whole story.

Having married late, I have personally had reasonably extensive personal, friend- and acquaintance-based knowledge of the kind of sexually-liberated, serially-promiscuous life which JM apparently lived; and from that experience I simply don't believe it ever is that care-free, harm-free, victim-less life of pleasure it is claimed and advertised to be. By contrast, I think it is spiritually corrupting, plagued by existential loneliness and leaves a wake of damage.

I think this lifestyle explains Michell's undiscriminating socialising on the one side, and on the other the way his hospitality and resources were manipulated and exploited by so many people for so long; and the unenlightened indignity of a 2 month duration marriage to a younger woman at the age of 74 is, to my mind, indicative of a profound dissatisfaction.

**

But, leaving all that aside without forgetting it; I would like to list six positive and constructive reasons why I enjoy reading John Michell, believe he was 'a Good Thing', on the side of the angels - and a staunch foe of the forces of darkness.

John Michell was: 

1. True to himself but dedicated to the transcendent. It was this core and habitual honesty that was the source of his unique yet broadly appealing charm and style.

2. Driven by creativity and love; not by anger and resentment.

3. Made humble by a quiet self-deprecating humour.

4. A pure lover of learning for its own sake (and not for status, nor what it could get him).

5. A communicator from the sheer bubbling overflow of enthusiasm; and not in an attempt to shape others' minds.


In sum - I believe that John Michell lived, truthfully albeit imperfectly, in such a way as to nurture, sustain and express his genius; and this is what I find most inspiring in his example and attainment.

Heddon Hill and Ingram church - John Michell semi-vindicated

On a recent walk I looked again at Heddon Hill in the Breamish Valley, Cheviot Hills, Northumberland:

As you can see, there are very striking terraces on the left of the hill, and these are partly obscured by later vertical ridge-and-furrow ploughing in the middle section - better seen here:

These markings are described on the OS Map and in guide books as 'cultivation' ridges - with varying estimates of age; from medieval right back to pre-Roman... who knows, the hill hasn't been excavated (and such excavations usually show features to be much older than expected, sometimes by thousands of years).

Looking at the 'terraces' I thought of the appearance of Glastonbury Tor and its 'terraces' - or as some - including John Michell - would have it... Ceremonial Labyrinth.

Could the distinct terraces on Heddon Hill actually represent the remains of a labyrinthine path? Ascending to some 'temple' at the summit? 

Michell's idea was that such features were often dedicated to a pagan deity whose identity was replaced by the angel St Michael; thus the ruined tower on Glastonbury Tor was from a St Michael's church. Michell then suggests that prominent sites dedicated to St Michael formed a straight line alignment (a Ley Line; some kind of energy flow, supposedly) across England:

Well, with such thoughts swirling; I was surprised to find that the very nearby church in Ingram, in the Breamish Valley, was also St Michael (and all angels)... 'Perhaps' the church in the valley replaced the temple on the summit a few hundred yards away?

So we have several Michell-esque ingredients of an 'alignment' or Ley Line here! The next step would be to get out the maps, a pencil and a long straight edge. But I have not yet taken the matter any further...

Who was the real-life Doctor Who?

 The Tardis is in the background, on Glastonbury Tor...

There is an answer to this question, you may be surprised to hear - and the name is well known to this blog's readers - The Doctor was John Michell (1933-2009).

As well as looking much like the Doctor's third incarnation (as played by John Pertwee) - he simply was The Doctor in his life; down to the smallest detail (including a sequence of attractive female companions) - as can be seen in the mini-biography by Paul Screeton (John Michell: From Atlantis to Avalon), or the collection of memoirs in the Fortean Times.

Michell was himself a Time Traveller; as is made clear from all of his writings - but especially a little known short story called 1850 BC Revisited, written in 1968 and republished in Screeton's book; in which the Doctor is renamed The Reader; which I excerpt here:...

One day the Reader was in the library looking through an old Somerset guide book, illustrated by photographs, taken some fifty years earlier. They showed scenes and landscape, all quite familiar; yet somehow familiar, somehow alien. 

Suddenly he understood the solution. Photography is such a recent development that no one has yet become conscious of the remarkable difference in colour, light, tone and atmosphere between a Victorian landscape and a similar view photographed today. 

Every age, the Reader perceived, has its characteristic visual aspect in the same way as it has its own peculiar note, detectable in the prevailing harmony of its desirable period; analysing its various qualities from the evidence of surviving objects, poetry and traditions; recreating for a moment the conditions of that time, and stepping inside...

Mythology, he realized, takes place not only in the past, but also in the future in accordance with certain almost recurring cycles. The psychic conditions that prevailed at the time of the Reader's experiment were sufficiently close to those of 1850 BC to justify his selection of that year as the object of his attempt. 

(The Reader then goes to ? Glastonbury Tor at the correct time on the correct day)... surrounded by his various instruments, his mirror, tinted spectacles, harp, amulets and bags of poppy seeds; together with the spear and arrowheads stolen without difficulty from a local museum. 

He sat entranced, absorbed in the subtle movements of the ether, that first surrounded and pervaded his body. The setting sun stood for an instant poised on a far mountain peak, like a balloon on a pin. The Reader struck his harp and cried out. 

His white robe shimmered green. 

The Sun disappeared, the Reader also...

The Traveller's Key to Sacred England - by John Michell (1988): a book recommendation

The Traveller's Key to Sacred England is a guide book by John Michell, which focuses on the kind of English places likely to be of interest to Albion Awakening readers, and provides the kind of information Albionites are most likely to value.

It would be an ideal book to give ideas of 'what to do' for someone visiting the country, or a native thinking about where to take a holiday.

Michell's comments are beautifully expressed, and generally very sound (at least as-of about thirty years ago - of course, some places have 'gone off' since then).

I shall open it 'at random' to give a flavour of the book:

St Catherine's Chapel Guildford: At the foot of the hill is the site of a religious establishment which vanished so long ago that no one knows whether it was a priory or a nunnery. The stretch of Pilgrim's Way which passes it goes between charming old cottages to the river, where the pilgrim's ferry has now been replaced by a footbridge. On the right of the path, just before it reaches the river, a spring well up from the bank. This is the holy spring of the Virgin Mary that refreshed every pilgrim on the way to Canterbury. Its waters are clear and refreshing today. 

Sherbourne Abbey, Dorset: The abbey was rebuilt in the twelfth century, and in the fourteen a parish church, All Hallows, was added on to its west end. Its parishioners used the abbey font for baptisms until 1437, when a quarrel broke out between the people and the monks... When a new font was set up in All Hallows, the monks smashed it. A riot broke out, and it is said that a priest of All Hallows shot a flaming bolt towards the abbey, which was then being rebuilt. It caught fire and was largely destroyed... A boss in the choir vault [of the rebuilt Abbey] shows the flaming arrow, shot by the clergyman of all Hallows, which caused the burning of the abbey. The monks of the time must have had great tolerance and humour to allow this event to be commemorated so soon after at had happened. 

Mother Shipton's cave and petrifying well, Yorkshire: Mother Shipton, born Ursual Sontheil in 1488, had the proper parents for a girl of supernatural powers, her mother being an outcast beggar woman and her father a local spirit or demon who haunted the forests outside Knaresborough... She is said to have been a hideous little creature, deformed , shrivelled and lame, with a huge twisted nose and pimples that were said to glow in the dark. Even so, she found a husband and became Mrs Toby Shipton. 

As compensation for her appearance, Mother Shipton had second sight and the gift of seeing into the future... The Major triumph of her lifetime was over the powerful Cardinal Wolsey, who she had prophesied would never enter the city of York. Hearing this, Wolsey swore that not only would he enter York but he would go on to Knaresborough and burn Mother Shipton as a witch. He was... 12 miles from York when the king's officers arrested him on a charge of high treason. He died at Leicester on the way back to London.

The mizmaze on St Catherine's Hill, Winchester: ... the date and the ritual purpose of the mizmaze are unknown; estimates of its age vary from three hundred to more than a thousand years. Treading the maze, by walking the furrows between its raised banks, is a mystical and therapeutic experience. It may be that in following the spiral patterns of natural growth and energy, one orders the mind and attunes oneself to nature's rhythms. The labyrinths which sometimes occur on the pavings of medieval churches traditionally represent the pilgrim's journey to Zion. 

In sum - people who like this sort of thing, will find this the sort of thing they like. 


 

Michell and Watkins

One hot summer afternoon, 20 June 1921, Alfred Watkins was at Blackwardine in Herefordshire. On a high hilltop he stopped and looked at his map before meditating on the view below him. 

 Suddenly, in a flash, he saw something which no one in England had seen for perhaps thousands of years. Watkins saw straight through the surface of the landscape to a layer deposited in some remote prehistoric age. 

The barrier of time melted and, spread across the country, he saw a web of lines linking the holy places and sites of antiquity. Mounds, old stones, crosses and old crossroads, churches placed on pre-Christian sites, legendary trees, moats and holy wells stood in exact alignments that ran over beacon hills to cairns and mountain peaks. 

In one moment of transcendental perception Watkins entered a magic world of prehistoric Britain, a world whose very existence had been forgotten. 

By John Michell - From The View over Atlantis 1969.

The back of the Album cover of the Albion Dance Band 1977 album, The Prospect Before Us depicts, in a parodic style, Watkins's epiphanic vision of occult meaning in the English Landscape - which, as retrospectively interpreted and elaborated by John Michell, led to the New Age spiritual renaissance as it happened in England

School history teaching about Albion should start with the Mesolithic

A rare surviving photograph of some druids emerging from the ancient mist

I was reading a (somewhat jokey, but actually serious) little essay by John Michell saying that modern school history teaching was made dull and inadequate by its avoidance of the great span of years before the Romans - and recalling that there used to be a great deal of vivid information taught about the Ancient British which is now left-out.

Michell was, without naming him, clearly discussing Geoffrey of Monmouth's book about the Ancient British Kings, which for several hundred years was something all educated people would know. Geoffrey's account goes right back to the discovery of Britain by Brutus the Trojan, when the land was won from the giants or titans who inhabited it - and there is a list of King (some with detailed biographies) from this point.

But I think he was correct - and I see many good reasons why British children should be taught their history right back to the Mesolithic hunter gatherers of the post-ice age (about 12 000 years ago). Plenty of interesting stuff can be inferred about such people - not just from the (scant) archaeology and understanding of climate, flora and fauna - but by comparison with the detailed knowledge of hunter gatherers in similar situations elsewhere in the world. Presumably these Mesolithic Men were either ruled-by or preyed-upon by the resident giants...

Then comes the Neolithic - with more archaeology but also more scope for reasonable and plausible inferences about the advent of agriculture - herding, then planting; and the role of their religion with its underground tombs, hilltop temples, ceremonial paths and - in general - vast sacred landscape.

At this time Britain - at least the southern parts - was probably like Ancient Egypt - highly organised, stable, peaceful, intellectual - and, I think, literate. It is hard to imagine how else such a complex society could have been administered, and over dozens of generations. There are plenty of complex, symbolic rock markings from this era, although there is no recognised archaeological evidence for written communication, yet.

The so-called Bronze age was not distinct - but divides into an early part that was an extension of the Neolithic; and a later part that was culturally like the Iron Age. Bronze itself made Britain central to Europe - because Cornwall was one of only a couple of sources for the tin required to make it; and there were enormous copper mines in Wales that were exporting all over the place.

From the late Bronze Age (including Stonehenge) Britain was a kind of post-apocalyptic world, where the high civilisation, literacy and national peace of the Neolithic collapsed - to leave small, warring tribes. Human sacrifice was almost certainly a major feature of their religion. However, this developed into the age of the druids - who perhaps were a remnant of the Neolithic priesthood; and a time when England became famous as the centre of druidical colleges.

This was also the era when recorded history begins to overlap with myth - as Julius Caesar made the first Roman attempt to conquer the Island. And thus we join-up to the standard curriculum; not forgetting the narrative of the young Jesus visiting Somerset and Cornwall and his uncle Joseph (of Arimathea) later building the very first Christian church in the world, in Glastonbury. And the later activities of Arthur and Merlin...

The point is that the supposed facts of archaeology and science (which are changeable, anyway) are regarded only as a basis or framework for intuitive imagination; to bring the past to life for children by vivid pictures and stories of 'what it was like' to live in those very different times; when people had very different priorities and interests.

The stories need to be plausible and coherent - and they need to be linked to some vision of national purpose - if so, then such a history is 'our' history, personally relevant - and perhaps inspiring.   

History, to be valuable, must be a story; and to be memorable a story must be engaging. The imagination comes first, not as a bolt-on optional extra. As such - this kind of history could, and should, be at the centre of all education.

Voyage to the West

Jennie looked at Cai. 'And where is this Court of yours? How do you get home?'

'I am home.' Cai grinned at her look of confusion. 'First, we walk back with you back to Carston. From there, well, let's just say it's not far. Logria never is. Under the leaves, in the reflections of a pond, you might just see it.'

He waved his hand vaguely at the winter country below them, at the farms and woods and the traffic on a distant road. 'Logria is out there,' he said.

Catherine Fisher, Fintan's Tower (1991)

*******

The notion of Albion (or Logria, as it's called here) as a hidden reality underpinning daily life is one that stirs and stimulates the imagination. Several place-names and sites across Britain have become associated in the popular mind with this 'secret country'. One thinks of Tintagel, for instance, or Glastonbury Tor, or Avebury, or the White Horse of Uffington.

For myself, it is a particular train journey which is most emblematic of Logria - from Newcastle to Liverpool, from East to West, from the courts of the morning to the couch of the setting sun, from the North Sea and the banks of the Tyne to the mouth of the Mersey and the Irish Sea.

We begin on Tyneside. England's north-eastern seaboard looks out towards Scandinavia, calling to mind the successive waves of Viking raids, invasions and settlements that bedevilled Northumbria between 787 and 1066. As we proceed westward, a number of different but inter-linked Englands emerge, starting with the England of Christendom and the Ages of Faith, given such outstanding embodiment in the Medieval splendour of Durham and York Cathedrals. Next come the twin industrial powerhouses of Leeds and Manchester, separated by the Pennines, that stark and spectacular mountain range, the 'backbone of England' and the heartland of the formidable Brigantes tribe in the age of the Roman Conquest and the lost Ninth Legion that set out to subdue the Celts and disappeared without trace in the mists of the North.

At the westernmost edge of our journey, the train clatters through the tunnels on the approach to Liverpool Lime Street. Sunlight flickers on the moss-lined walls from narrow slits of bridges overhead. The world, between the bridges, turns shadowy and dim. My reflection stares back at me, pale and luminous in the darkened window. Then, just like that, it vanishes, rendered invisible by the brightness of the station, spreading out around us like a rough-hewn open air theatre. The city beyond, with its vivid sunsets, artistic flair, and princely (if sometimes shabby) air, has a faintly Otherworldly feel, not fully of a piece, it seems, with the country before the tunnels. Just as Newcastle looks out onto the Norse world, so Liverpool turns towards Wales rather than England, towards Ireland and the Western Ocean; as far as the Isles of the Blessed, those mysterious realms at the rim of the world, where this level of reality ends and the next begins.

The veil between the worlds is thin in Liverpool. It is a numinous place, a Celtic place, an in-between place, yet as vital a piece in Albion's mosaic as all the rest - Manchester, Newcastle, Leeds, the Pennines, and the Cathedrals of Durham and York, which find their echo and reflection in Liverpool's pair of twentieth-century Cathedrals. And it's this symmetry and symbolism which makes the journey what it is for me - this multi-faceted slice of national life and history - following the day from sunrise to sunset, from the sea-road to Asgard to the great white ship that sails every night for Tir-Na-Nog.

Whenever I set out on this this voyage, you see, I sense the existence of the underlying pattern behind these varied aspects of Albion's story. Sensing is one thing, however, piercing the veil another. To perceive the pattern as a whole, to recognise and comprehend the deeper reality - to name it and articulate it - that would be to unveil and usher into the light of day the hidden meaning and purpose of this island Kingdom. The return of the Holy Grail to Logres would be one way of describing it. The maverick English prophet John Michell suggests another:

'The answer, when it comes, takes the form of a revelation. That does not mean a god or a UFO descending, but something that enters minds just when it is needed. Basically it is a pattern or a codification of number, and as you study it you realise that it is the pattern of creation and the human mind.' (Confessions of a Radical Traditionalist, 2005, p.285)

Michell's understanding is true, certainly for himself and maybe for others, but not for everyone. Each  of us experiences reality in a form and manner unique to ourselves and our own characteristics. As a lover of the word, for example, I suspect that the revelation might appear in the form of a narrative - a story, perhaps, or a speech, song, poem or play. Shakespeare came close to expressing it, I think. As did Blake. So too, in a different key, did Winston Churchill. But the right word - or the right combination of words - is yet to come. That will be the 'something' that enters our minds when we most need it. 

I feel its approach though, its growing presence and strength, as the train rolls out of Lime Street and the lamps shine like silver moons in the dusk. Two station staff, a man and a woman, stand talking at the end of the platform. The man says something, then points to the sky. They look up, as do I, but it's no good, not for me, because we're back in the tunnels and it's dark again except for my reflection gazing back at me in the window. Then it comes - the revelation - or something like it - on the far side of my face - golden letters in a flowing script, standing out distinctly against the greeny black of the tunnel wall. There isn't much to see. A handful of lines, nothing more. Barely a paragraph. The train gathers speed and I catch a couple of words: 'Wasteland' and 'waters'. There's a 'when' and a 'tree' and a 'King' too. Then it's gone and we're out of the tunnels, rounding the curve of the engine sheds, past the city walls and into the country beyond.

The moment has passed; the vision departed. But I don't feel downhearted; not in the slightest. I smile and sit back. 'Logria is out there,' I say to myself, as the train rattles on through the night, towards the eastern coast and the return - nearer with every turn of the wheel - of the renewed, rejuvenated Sun and - I know it in my heart now - the rebirth and restoration of this holy land.

Heralds of Restoration

Nicholas Roerich, Northern Midnight (1940)

*

The Northern Lights have been seen over Britain. The report I read in The Daily Telegraph of 9th September described the phenomenon in strictly scientific terms - a series of solar flares, visually stunning, for sure, but bearing no deeper significance.

An apocalyptic part of me wants to protest at this. Surely the coming of the Lights is a sign? A foreshadowing of some great event to come, as the appearance of Halley's Comet in April 1066 gave notice retrospectively of the impending Norman Conquest.

A balance needs to be struck, therefore, between a rationalistic, unimaginative reading of natural phenomena and a credulous 'signs and wonders' mentality, which leaves us finding messages in cloud formations and the like. C.S. Lewis gets this right I feel in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader:

'In our world,' said Eustace, 'a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.'
'Even in your world, my son,' said Ramandu, 'that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.'

The eye of imagination, the eye of faith, sees beyond the physical components that make up the universe. It does not deny their existence but neither does it view what something 'is made of' as its sole and absolute reality. It goes past the material level (the validity of which it respects) to the spiritual essence which lies at the heart of every created thing. William Blake expressed this wonderfully in his famous quote:

'I assert, for myself, that I do not behold the outward creation and that to me it is hindrance and not action. "What! it will be questioned, "when the sun rises do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea!" "Oh! no, no! I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty!" I question not my corporeal eye any more than I would question a window concerning a sight. I look through it, and not with it.'

This theme is illustrated superbly in the passage below from Rosemary Sutcliff's Arthurian novel Sword at Sunset (1963). Ambrosius Aurelianus, the High King, is dying of cancer. He takes his lieutenants, Artos (Arthur) and Aquila, on a winter retreat in a remote hunting lodge to secure the succession. A tense political discussion is interrupted by the appearance of the Northern Lights. The tone and flavour of the evening is altered dramatically as new perspectives open up for all three men.

Hearts start to soften. The display outside triggers deep-lying memories in Artos and Aquila and sparks a moment of fraternal understanding. Ambrosius, when he rejoins the conversation, speaks with an imaginative fluidity that was lacking before. The political becomes the mythical. Something hard and tight has been broken apart, creating a space for the deeper pattern behind the flow of surface events to emerge.

This is the lasting impression left on the reader by Sword at Sunset - the political transformed into the mythical. Artos, in the end, follows Ambrosius' recommendation and succeeds him after his death, though not as High King but Emperor of a restored Romano-British Empire. Artos has many scars - physical, emotional and spiritual - and gains little satisfaction from his twenty year reign. He does, however, bring peace and security to the land, and through his words, deeds and presence, sows the seeds of the great national myth that has sustained the imaginative life of our country ever since.

The Northern Lights, on this occasion, are heralds of restoration rather than harbingers of doom, signalling the advent of a mythic, archetypal hero and the flourishing of the realm. Let us hope that their most recent manifestation prophecies equally glad tidings. There is no reason why not. 'We live in a time of revelations,' wrote the maverick English mystic, John Michell. 'When our minds are ready, the pattern will appear.'

*******

... After we had sat in silence for a while, Ambrosius spoke again. "Artos, I have a sense of fate on me. It is not merely that our scouts report certain movements of the Saxons. I believe in my bones, in my very soul, that a Saxon thrust such as we have not seen before is coming this spring - by midsummer at latest: and when it comes, there will be a struggle compared to which the battles we have known will be but candles held to a beacon blaze. And believing that, I must believe that this, above all others, is not the time to be leaving Britain in the hands of an untried king, but rather in the hands of a strong and well proved war-leader. As to what comes after, so far as the question of my successor is concerned, the victory in such a struggle would be a mighty weapon in your hand, Bear Cub, and if you fail, then Britain will not need a High King again."

His voice had died almost to a whisper, hoarse in his throat, and his brilliant eyes were haggard, clinging to my face. Yet still I was half resisting; and not from humility but from lack of courage. I had always been one who dreaded loneliness, the loneliness of the spirit. I needed the touch of other men's shoulders against mine, the warmth of comradeship. I was a fine war-leader, and I knew it, but I shrank from the very thought of what Ambrosius was asking of me. I did not want the loneliness of the mountain top.

Aquila had risen some time before, and tramped over to the window at the end of the room; he was something of a lone wolf, old Aquila, and his own deep reserve made him flinch from the least probing into the reserves of other men; and I suppose he did not want to see our faces while the last stages of the thing were fought out. Suddenly he spoke, without turning from the window. "Talk of beacon blazes, there's something big burning over yonder beyond Ink-Pen, by the look of it!"

I got up quickly and went over to him. "Saxons! Open the window, Aquila." He lifted the pin and swung wide the glazed leaf, and the cold and the smell of frost flowed in against my face. The window looked north, and as the dazzle of the firelight faded from my eyes, and the stars began to prick out in the clear sky, I could make out a dull red glow in the sky, like red reflection of a great fire.

Even as I watched, the glow was spreading, rising higher into the stars. "It would take a whole city burning to yield that glare," Aquila said, and I could hear the frown in his voice. And then the formless glow began to gather to itself a shape, a great blurred bow, and out of its brightness suddenly a streamer of light flickered up into the dark sky, and then another, and another; and I wondered why I had been such a fool not to know the thing at once - I suppose because in my mind it belonged to the North, and so I was blind to it here in the South Country. I laughed, and something in me lifted as though at the touch of a familiar magic. "No Saxons tonight, old wolf. It is the Northern Lights, the Crown of the North. Dear God, how many times I have watched those flying ribbons of fire from the ramparts of Trimontium!" I glanced aside at Aquila, whose exclamation told me that he had recognised the thing he looked at, at the same moment as myself. "Sa Sa! You too! You must have seen them often enough in your thrall winters in Juteland."

"Often enough," he said. "They used to grow and grow until they were like great banners of light flying all across the sky; and the old men would say that they could hear a rushing of great wings overhead ... But one scarcely ever sees them here in the South, and then no more than the red glow that might be a farm burning in the next valley."

There was a movement behind us, the scrape of a chair being thrust back, and a slow slurred step on the tesserae, and we moved apart to make room for Ambrosius between us. "What is this marvel? This Crown of the North?" He set a hand on my shoulder and the other on Aquila's, breathing quickly and painfully, as though even the effort to rise and cross the floor had been a day's labour to him. "So - o," he said, lingeringly, when he had got his breath back. "A marvel indeed, my brothers." For in that short while that we had been standing there, the light had strengthened and spread, until one got the impression of a vast arc spanning the whole night, if one could have but seen over the northernmost hills that hid it from view; and from that unseen arc, as though it were indeed the head-band of a crown, a myriad rays sprang out, darting and wheeling to and fro, flickering out half across the sky, like ribbons of coloured fire that licked and trembled and died and darted forth again, changing colour moment by moment from the red of blood to the green of ice, to the blue of the wild-fire that drips along the oar blades of the northern seas in summer nights.

"I too have seen the glow like a burning in the next valley, and a flicker or so in the northern sky, from the high shoulder of Yr Widdfa," Ambrosius said, in the tone in which a man speaks in the place where he worships his gods, "but never the like of this ... Never - the like of this."

Voices, scared and hushed and excited, were sounding in the courtyard, a babble of tongues and a running of feet. Down there they would be pointing and gesticulating, their faces awed and gaping in the strange flickering light. "The others have seen it now," Aquila said. "They could scarcely make more startling chatter if it were a golden dragon in the sky."

"There will be many pointing to the north and bidding each other to look, tonight," Ambrosius said musingly. "And later, all Britain will tell each other that there were strange lights in the sky on the night before Ambrosius Aurelianus died; and later still, it will become Aquila's dragon, or a sword of light with the seven stars of Orion set for jewels in the hilt."

Nicholas Roerich, Fires of Victory (1940)

The Sacred Measures of Albion

Edited from: A Defence of Sacred Measures by John Michell

It is necessary, for the reasons set out in this pamphlet, to oppose with the utmost vehemence the proposal to abandon our traditional standards of weight and measure in favour of the metric units invented at the French Revolution. The fundamental reason for emphasising the importance of this issue is that it clearly epitomises the conflict between two contrasting philosophic or cosmological points of view...

The point at issue is whether an enlightened, humane and scientific civilization should adopt as its standards of measure units such as those still in use in England, which were formerly, and for good reason, regarded as sacred, having the advantages of tradition, inherent meaning and natural application, or whether the metric systern, which has none of these qualities nor any of its own to replace them, is the more appropriate...

Sacred measures are those units which relate to natural constants on more than one scale and demonstrate the unity between the macrocosmic body of the universe and the human microcosm. The present British units, the foot, mile, acre etc, are by this definition sacred; the metric units are not.

The foot and the other linear and land measuring units that relate to it are of indefinable antiquity. They were known to the Sumerians, Chaldeans and the ancient Egyptians and appear once to have been universal, for they survive in different parts of the world, wherever the interests of the people are still given precedence over those of modern technology and commerce.

Their advantages for all human purposes are obvious. A carpenter gauges an inch by the width of his thumb and its tenth part by his practised eye; a builder estimates the length of a wall by the two yard span of his outstretched arms, and a surveyor paces by the yard. Cloth is sold by the cubit, the distance from elbow to finger tip, and other such units as the span and handbreadth were formerly used which have now generally become obsolete.

Of course no two people have the same bodily dimensions, and the canonical man has never existed save as an idea or archetype. These traditional units are not, however, imprecise or inaccurate. Ancient societies regarded their standards of measure as their most sacred possessions and they have been preserved with extreme accuracy from the earliest times. A craftsman soon learns to what extent the parts of his own body deviate from the conventional standard and adjusts accordingly.

Sacred units of measure apply not only to the human scale but also to the astronomical. For this reason they were said, at a time when such language was more generally understood, to have been "revealed" to men, not invented by them.

The whole pamphlet is at:
 www.dozenalsociety.org.uk/metrix/sacred.html

Britain - a land under enchantment - the RVI (Recognise, Validity, Importance) mantra

Mrs Maltwood looked with a geomancer's eye at the Somerset plains and understood in a flash the secret of the zodiacal giants hidden in the landscape. 

Alfred Watkins, envisioned on the Bredwardine hills, perceived the veins and arteries standing out clear against the Hertfordshire fields.

Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson and many others sought the vital spots to penetrate the layers of time that cover the face of the country. The feeling they shared was of some forgotten secret. 

They glimpsed a remote golden age of science, poetry and religion in which the vast works they saw in the landscape were accomplished. 

Each of these English visionaries knew that what he saw was but a fraction of the great mystery, the key to which had been lost. 

Britain, they felt, was the holy land under enchantment. 

At the castle of the Grail King certain things must be asked before the spell is broken, so must the right question be found to lift the veil that hides the form and spirit in the landscape. 

From The View Over Atlantis - by John Michell, 1969.

**

In a era when so many people and nearly-all institutions are spiritually-corrupt to the extreme point of inversion; it is by awareness of the land that much goodness may be perceived, and this relationship with the land nourishes us with truth, beauty and truth - it is the land which mediates meaning and purpose.

Having had these experiences from direct contact, they may be drawn upon again and again when circumstances are averse - we can carry the land around in our hearts.

The land is there to be 'read'; so long as we are read it like a poem written on a much re-used ancient manuscript with earlier writings still shining through. And the core meaning does not come-through in paraphrasable content but directly to the heart - we feel its effects, we feel the difference it has made to our deepest thinking; but cannot re-state or communicate that meaning - at least not directly.

The problem is not communication - it is actively cutting-off communication. The land is one-sidedly communicating with everybody all of the time; but most people for most of the time are blocking the communication - perhaps only trying to open-up when visiting a well-known 'beauty spot'. (Often enough this is exactly the worst possible time to break the closed-off, blocking habit - due to the crowds, regimantation, and pressure to respond.)

Perhaps a mantra will help: RVI - Recognise, Validity, Importance

If we experience the land as alive, meaningful, significant to us personally; we need to Recognise the experience is happening; acknowledge the Validity of the experience (that it is something real and true); and recognise that the experience is Important (not an accident, not random nor an epiphenomenon - but a significant occurrence that needs to be taken note of).

Of course we probably won't be able read the landscape like an epic poem; or indeed appreciate more than an inkling of what is being communicated - but even that inkling is valuable, because it is divine.

And even the merest glimmer of recognising the validity and importance of a divine communication is necessarily and always life-changing.  

The Dances of Albion

I wait; asleep or awake, I wait. Novalis says, 'Our life is no dream, but it should and will perhaps become one.'

George MacDonald, Lilith

*

One of the recurring themes in Archpriest Andrew Phillips' pugnacious blog is a radical restructuring of what we now call Great Britain or the United Kingdom. Fr. Phillips foresees a time when all four realms - England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales - will play a role that is right and proper for them in the ordering of national life. No one realm will dominate; none will feel forced to bend the knee. A natural pattern and harmony will unfold, more akin to the curves, swirls and imagistic beauty of the Book of Kells than the static, one-dimensional form of governance we currently endure.

The Palace of Westminster, in Fr. Phillips' vision will become the new and long-awaited English Parliament, with central government relocated to the Isle of Man - within sight, as it were, of all four realms. GB/UK will join USSR, GDR, and other outdated acronyms in the dustbin of history, while the new polity will bear the far more resonant title of The Islands of the Northern Seas.

This scenario may or may not come to pass, but it strikes me as indicative of the way our sense of national identity, which until recently seemed so solid, is starting to shift beneath our feet. It was never, I suppose, quite so sturdy as it appeared, but that was certainly how it felt to me growing up in the 1970s and '80s. Despite the Troubles in Northern Ireland and no end of political and social strife, there never seemed any danger of the U.K falling apart or ceasing to exist. It felt far too stable and deep-rooted for that.

Was it all an illusion? It's difficult to say, but it's certainly becoming clearer as the years go by, to my mind at least, just what a recent notion 'Great Britain' is. GB took shape in the Early Modern era and reached its zenith in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is losing its imaginative force now, as older patterns, harking back to the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon layers of our history, begin to reappear. Scotland, for instance, already has one foot out of the Union. In Wales, where I currently live, the Welsh language is blossoming, while a distinctly English political and cultural consciousness - though still raw and far from fully-formed - is undeniably taking shape. Localism is attracting the hearts and minds of many. People, in my view, are becoming increasingly aware of what is unique and precious about their particular locality. We are living, as Blue Labour's Maurice Glasman has noted, in a time of interregnum. Established ways no longer compel our attention, while new, emerging patterns are still in a fluid, somewhat unpredictable state. They have yet to take on fixed and solid form.

This is exactly the terrain that John Milbank explores in his third volume of poetry, The Dances of Albion (Shearsman Books, 2015). Milbank is also a theologian and political theorist, best known perhaps for his leading role in the Radical Orthodoxy movement in Anglicanism, which aims to show (much as the Inklings did in the imaginative sphere) that creedal orthodoxy is at one far more exacting, far more exciting, and far more fulfilling than supposedly more palatable liberal alternatives.

Milbank, generally speaking, is economically left-wing and socially conservative. As such, he has become one of Blue Labour's most authoritative and distinctive intellectual voices. He differs from Glasman, however, in that he strongly believes that Britain's future lies within the European Union. His wants Britain to work alongside countries such as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic (together with like-minded individuals and groups elsewhere) to reform the EU from within and steer it in a post-liberal direction. He has gone so far (on his always-stimulating Twitter page) to cite the Holy Roman Empire as the ideal model for a reformed and restructured EU. So he certainly cannot be accused of political correctness in his support for Remain or of acting as a mouthpiece for fashionable, metropolitan opinion!

*

John Milbank has a broad and rich historical imagination. This gives his political thought depth and perspective and helps him frame current events in fresh and imaginative ways. He sees things in wholes rather than parts. He has said, for example, that the real issue in the Brexit debate is not the simple binary question of 'in' or 'out', but rather the nature of the relationship we wish to have with the countries physically closest to us. This isn't an avoidance of what's at stake or a piece of academic obscurantism. It's an approach which goes to the heart of the matter and a question with a lengthy pedigree, going all the way back to the usurper, Carausius, who removed Britain from direct Roman rule for a spell in the late third century.

Are we even in a position to answer such a question wisely, however? To understand the type of relationship we want with our European neighbours, surely we need to understand the types of relationship we currently have and would like to have in the future with the different races, traditions and heritages active in our own land. It would be good to feel able to fully interact with the multi-layered historical strata which our national story bears witness to. But an engagement with our past in all its fullness - Celtic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Danish, Norman, and more - has not been encouraged in recent centuries as much as it might have been. Since the execution of Charles I and the so-called Glorious Revolution, a Whiggish reading of what Britain is about has come to dominate the intellectual and cultural agenda. This interpretation champions everything rational, quantifiable, measurable and tangible. It has no room for Romance and regards what is invisible as inherently unreal. This is why William Blake railed against it so heartily and why his imaginatively-charged critique of late eighteenth-century mores remains bitingly relevant today. The same narrowing of vision, the same expulsion of the spirit, the same mercantilism and materialism, allied now to an ever more intrusive, ever more tech-heavy bureaucratic machine, still appears to set the tone. It was during Blake's lifetime that Napoleon called the English 'a nation of shopkeepers', and he was right to do so. But that was only what England had become. It was not and is not who the English really are. Not deep down. Not in their essence. And nor is it who they may one day become.

Appearances can be deceptive though. Just as the UK no longer feels as constitutionally solid as in the past, so too is this Whig construction of national identity starting to unravel. Something older and more archaic is rising to take its place, something wild and primeval, more in tune with the timeless, archetypal world of myth and legend than the 'facts and figures' ambience of secular modernity. It could, of course, be something dreadful - Yeats's infamous 'rough beast', his awful hour come round at last. Or, alternatively, it might be something altogether more positive, something which, as Wayne Sturgeon suggests in Albion Awake (Black Front Press, 2015):

 " ... looks both backwards and forwards at the same time in anticipation of realising the 'Ancient Future'; this 'ancient future' being an attempt at a synthesis of religion and social life akin to a radical traditionalist sacred order that allows for dynamic innovation but which is essentially timeless and changeless in its stability, unlike the dynamic of modernity that is constantly striving to change humanity and the world but from a materialist viewpoint." (pp.133-134.)

This is how the societal change we are beginning to feel might develop in a constructive direction. And this, I think, is what Milbank means on the back cover of The Dances of Albion, when he says that it was 'written in the hope of a true unity of Britain yet to come.' What is in play is a kind of archaeo-futurism, where we draw sustenance and inspiration from the many levels of our pre-modern past, which has been unfairly marginalised by the dominant materialist paradigm. The aim of this reconnection, this return to our source, is not to retreat from the difficulties of twenty-first century life, but to forge a different way of seeing and being in the world, where the past and future join hands, where the circle is made whole, and the sacred restored to its rightful place at the centre of human consciousness. There will be no more alienation then. No more atomisation and fragmentation. We will start to feel at home again - at home in our environment, at home in our bodies and minds, at home in our families, in our towns and cities, and at home with the Divine.

This 'New Jerusalem', unfortunately, will feel a long way off to many at the moment. The Wasteland is still very much with us. As Milbank writes in the collection's longest poem, The Pembrokeshire Cosmology:

Walking to the post-box
over the iron plateau,
I survey the reduction of culture
to its essence of prophecy.
The closed shops, meagre produce,
cold façades
and slurry-dumps at the edge of villages.
A comfortless succumbing to ressentiment
and mad hopes for a reconquered Britain.

At the opposite pole lies transfiguration, 'a dream to future times', as Milbank puts it in Dalriada:

Yet she came,
Sovereignty,
Shekinah.

And we brightened in her presence
like a rock
before the suddenly beams of the sun
when they issue from a barren cloud
divided by the roaring wind.

*

So how do we get from here to there? What lies in between? This extract below, I think - a vision and understanding - a manifesto, if you like - of what British life can be and should be and will be again and in some ways always has been. It has been suppressed - beaten down by the impoverished worldview, which has, for nigh-on four hundred years, banished the holy from our lives and squashed our spiritual and imaginative horizons into a tiny evidence-based box. But it will come again. It is already on the move. But it is wild and dangerous - like the 'Old Magic' in Alan Garner's Moon of Gomrath. It needs channelling and careful, reverent handling, and this is exactly what Milbank does here. Like David Jones in The Anathemata and The Sleeping Lord, and Geoffrey Hill in Mercian Hymns, he presents a mythic picture, which all the ancient peoples of this isle will resonate with as it speaks to the soul of Celt, Anglo-Saxon, Viking and Norman alike. It is pitched at the correct level - the pre-political level - and written in the right register to transcend the petty divisions and limited horizons which often make us less than what God created us to be. Newcomers to Britain, I also imagine, would be far more likely to be impressed by something like this than what is currently offered them in the 'Life in the UK' course. Because, as we have seen, there is much more to the Island of the Mighty than the initials UK or GB. Those letters represent a phase in our history, which is passing now. This extract from The Pembrokeshire Cosmology, on the other hand, speaks of our realm in its eternal aspect:

When there stood Troy-Town,
the original labyrinth;
an exact model
of the entire stellar universe

whence came the new line.
Bringers of life from the dawning sun
like the gypsy-girl
with her red scarf and dangling earrings
whom we sometimes encounter -
so dark, moon-kissed and gaudy
down the damp, pale, western lane,

bringing longing to us from where
we long not to go,
one of Diana's crew: she came
with lingering Brutus.
He who engraved an altar in new Troy,
slew the last giant
and hurled the dragon downwards,

before he dictated
that the eldest son should rule
under the Pendragon,
for the time being,

always, secretly to instil
the usages of Britain:
that a wife, children
and instruments of his calling
might belong to a man.

That Queens may rule
to greater victory.

That the forest,
unworked mine and
hunted creatures
are common to all.

That the child, old
and family instructor
are exempted from all work.

Nor are these weapons against these.

While there is equality of rights
and equity of taxation.

With a mixed government
at once regal and popular.
Without both,
then never to be either
in New Troy of the oak groves,
ringed summits
and branching temples

in all the local sites,
dispersed to yet more centres.
Some places are more than others
and without this priority
there would be neither order nor beauty.

*

If there is one action I would encourage us to take after reading this piece (apart from buying a copy of The Dances of Albion, of course) it would be to watch this 34 minute video of John Milbank talking in Moscow about how the new dividing line in theology is not so much between liberals and conservatives as in the 1960s and '70s, but between what he calls rationalists and romantics. Milbank is unashamedly romantic in his approach. So too, I believe, are the writers and readers of Albion Awakening. So, with this in mind, in my next (and final) piece for this blog, I want to write a fictional meditation on what the coming fall of Britain and the emergence of this new paradigm might look like.

Because the imagination matters more than ever now. Towards the end of his talk, Milbank praises the Inklings for stealing a march on the twentieth-century theologians by realising that the key to a Christian renaissance in our times lies not in the rational intellect but in the imagination. This, it should be added, is by no means to disdain reason, but rather to seek beyond it. It is not sub-rational, but supra-rational. The whole mythopoeic world of Narnia, for instance, sprang from an image in C.S. Lewis's head of a lamp-post in a wood in winter. It is the image - the picture, the representation - which comes first, then its manifestation in the world, and this applies to the political and social spheres as much as the religious and artistic. It is our task today, I believe, to reconnect with the deepest sources of our being - both as individuals and as a nation - and to cultivate the inner stillness and prayerful waiting on God we will need if we are to skilfully direct the images surging through at this time. The maverick English Platonist, John Michell, claimed as long ago as the 1970s that we are living in an age of revelations. The Dances of Albion gives those revelations what they (and we) need most of all - a sense of place and a local shape and form:

Yet for a place to be a place at all
it must constitute a centre.
Otherwise the detailed and lesser
would be merely the random.

Everywhere disperses to new,
absolute and unique dispositions.
The whole island is
but one great place and centre.
It is as the One,
                       Being, Intellect
manifest equally everywhere,
the entire also in the lesser places
and the minor saints.

The island, like Goodness,
is dispersed throughout itself
and overflowing beyond
its elusive circumference.

The Pembrokeshire Cosmology

John Milbank

Redditor Lucis Aeternae

I am currently reading The Anathemata by David Jones, a book-length poem, published in 1952, exploring the cultural and spiritual history of Britain. Here is a brief extract. The speaker is 'The Lady of the Pool', a kind of Medieval tutelary spirit of London:

    And then, as if he perceived a body - coming

as if he hails a personage

                          where was but insentience

and baulk of stone

                          he sings out and clear:

REDDITOR LUCIS AETERNAE

These, captain, were his precisive words - what sentiments I

can't construe - but at which, captain, I cried: Enough!

                          Let's to terrestrial flesh, or

bid good-night, I thought.

And here is a footnote provided by the poet to illuminate the Latin phrase:

REDDITOR LUCIS AETERNAE - 'Restorer of the Eternal Light'; this is inscribed on a gold medallion found at Beauvains near Arras, struck to commemorate the relief of London in AD 296 by  the Emperor, Constantius Chlorus, the husband of St. Helena (and father of Constantine the Great). He is mounted and with a lance, his horse stepping down from the gang-plank of a boat at a turreted gateway inscribed LON, where a female figure kneels with welcoming arms. The words, 'Redditor, etc.' are inscribed above the figure of the Emperor. Although this may but commemorate a chance victory in a war of rival generals, none the less Constantius, at that moment, was the outward sign of something and was himself the implement of what he signified, namely: in the domain of accidental fact, the saving of London from immediate sack; in the domain of contemporary politics, the restoration of Britain to unity with the West, and in the domain of perennial ideas, the return to Britain of the light of civilisation. (p.134)

In AD 296, the Roman naval commander, Carausius, usurped control of Britain and northern Gaul and declared himself joint-Emperor. The Imperial government found him a difficult opponent and Britain remained under localised, independent rule until Constantius' expedition ten years later. The episode (known as the Carausian Revolt) is superbly dramatised in Rosemary Sutcliff's 1957 novel, The Silver Branch. Here, Carausius sets out his stall before the two young soldiers, Justin and Flavius:

'The Wolves gather,' Carausius said. 'Always, everywhere, the Wolves gather on the frontiers, waiting. It needs only that a man should lower his eye for a moment, and they will be in to strip the bones. Rome is failing, my children.'

Justin looked at him warily, but Flavius never moved; it was as though he had known what Carausius would say.

'Oh, she is not finished yet. I shall not see her fall. My Purple will last my life-time - and nor, I think, will you. Nevertheless, Rome is hollow rotten at the heart, and one day she will come crashing down. a hundred years ago, it must have seemed that all this was for ever; a hundred years hence - only the gods know ... If I can make this one province strong - strong enough to stand alone when Rome goes down, then something may be saved from the darkness. If not, then Dubris light and Limanis light and Rutupiae light will go out. The lights will go out everywhere.' 

He stepped back, dragging aside the hanging folds of the curtains, and stood framed in their darkness against the firelight and the lamplight behind him, his head yet turned to the scudding grey and silver of the stormy night. 'If I can steer clear of a knife in my back until the work is done, I will make Britain strong enough to stand alone,' he said. 'It is as simple as that.' (pp.36-37)

Unfortunately for Carausius, and perhaps for the country, he did not escape a knife in the back. He was assassinated in AD 293 by his finance minister, Allectus, who clung onto power until the Roman reconquest. 

The Carausian revolt erupted just a decade after the end of the so-called 'Gallic Empire', where, between AD 260 and 274, the usurper, Postumus, had assumed control of Britain and Gaul in an almost identical manner. It surprises me greatly that none of this history, so far as I can tell, has been referred to in the endless media commentary surrounding Brexit. Carausius, in many ways, can be seen as the first Euro-sceptic. His revolt shows that in some sense Britain is indeed 'set apart', as William Wildblood cogently argued in his post 'Albion Set Apart' on 18th November 2017. 

Britain, on this view, is temperamentally unsuited to life as one cog among many in a giant European power-bloc. Geographically, the UK stands at one remove from the continent and that needs to be reflected in the way the country is governed. Britain, as Carausius intuited, is a nation that needs to find her own way in the world. She is independent by nature and it would be going against the grain  to corral her into compliance with a supra-national, overseas authority, especially one perceived to be 'hollow rotten at the heart.'

So far, so straightforward. But there is more going on here. Jones talks about the 'restoration of Britain to unity with the West' and the 'return of Britain to the light of civilisation.' For him (and the designer of the Beauvains coin), the restoration of direct Roman rule is clearly a good thing. But that is because Constantius openly declares himself the representative and restorer of a higher principle - the 'eternal light' of civilisation, heaven and the gods. The contrast with the European Union, jumping to contemporary times, couldn't be more stark. One of the great misjudgements of the Remain campaign, in my view, was to conflate Europe with the EU. Europe is a civilisation - at least 3000 years old - and a vast physical space, stretching from the Mayo coastline to the Ural Mountains. The EU is an institution, no different in essence from any other institution - Barclays Bank, for instance, or Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. It exists to maintain and perpetuate itself. It is grey, bureaucratic and faceless, with little of the romance, glamour and rebel-chic some Remainers project onto it. It has no links with any higher principle, as symbolised by the EU flag, twelve yellow stars in a circle on a blue background with absolutely nothing in the centre. You would get extremely long odds on a functionary like Jean-Claude Juncker styling himself Redditor Lucis Aeternae. Juncker himself would be appalled at the thought, and that says everything, to my mind, about where his institution stands spiritually and philosophically. Nowhere at all, in brief.

The EU's big problem is that it has no spiritual dimension whatsoever. It doesn't know how to connect with people on the level of spirit and imagination. It has no spark, no fire, and has, in recent years, become increasingly hostile to the Gospel despite the religious faith of its founders and its roots in post-war Christian Democracy. More sobering than the EU's shortcomings, however, is the sad fact that were a Restorer of the Eternal Light to turn up at a British port tomorrow he would most likely be deported straightaway. It is someone or something on this level, I believe, that 52% of the British people were, perhaps unconsciously, voting for in the 2016 referendum. Something essentially spiritual. But this has been not been understood, acknowledged or reflected in all the debate that has gone on since in Westminster and the media. Pro-Leave circles are perhaps the worst. A paper like The Daily Telegraph, for instance, views Brexit exclusively in terms of its potential for economic growth and increased global trade. It doesn't see it as an opportunity for spiritual and cultural renewal. It doesn't even go there, and this, I feel, is emblematic of a stunning lack of imagination and independent thought running right through the UK establishment.

The Brexiteers would be better advised to start forging links with the EU's Central and Eastern European members, particularly the 'Visegrad Four' of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. These countries have displayed a fierce national pride and a feisty independence of spirit in their recent dealings with Brussels. Decades of communist tyranny havre taught them the value of their own national patrimony and also the preciousness and precariousness of European civilisation as a whole. They are also (with the possible exception of the Czech Republic) profoundly Christian in outlook and orientation. In November 2016, for example, the Polish government officially placed the nation under the patronage of Christ the King, while Hungary's President, Viktor Orban, recently said this:

'Ever more frequently nowadays I hear that sixty years ago the European Union's founding fathers marked out the route. Europe, as Robert Schuman said, will be Christian or it will be nothing. The year 2017 has presented European countries with a historic task. A new task has been given to the free nations of Europe and the national governments elected by free citizens. We must protect Christian culture. We must do this not to oppose others, but to defend ourselves, our families, our nation, our countries and Europe, "the homeland of homelands,"'

Now, I'm not naive enough to think that the V4 don't have challenges and temptations of their own, but they are at least facing in the right direction, which is probably more than can be said for the UK at this moment. The only thing that can reorient us, I believe, is something that will never happen because the world today is so addicted to restlessness and ceaseless change. Britain needs to step off the wheel, in short. She needs to take a break and gather her thoughts, pressing the pause button for as long as it takes, so her inhabitants can start to feel their way into the essence and soul of the country, beginning to think seriously about what British identity is and what kind of relationships we would like to have, first of all between the UK's four constituent parts, then towards Europe, and finally to the world beyond.

Such a space for quiet recollection will never be officially sanctioned, as I say, but there's nothing to stop us engaging in it ourselves as individuals or groups. We could read John Michell's The Traveller's Key to Sacred England, maybe, and visit some of the sites he mentions. For more on this, please see Bruce Charlton's post of 4th January 2018. Or, as Bruce also suggests, we could read Geoffrey of Monmouth's, History of the Kings of Britain, or immerse ourselves in any of the titles discussed in William's Albion Awakening Booklist post of 17th December 2017.

Whatever we choose to do, it is less opinion and debate that is required and more thought and reflection. We have become fixated, to a degree, on political procedures and solutions. But there is a pre-political level of myth and intuition which drives the direction a society takes at a more fundamental level. It's all about the kind of stories we tell ourselves and the stories we believe to be true or false. We need to return for a while to the primal, archetypal level of things, then tune back in to the land we have become alienated from, and listen to the story it's telling us. Where does it want to go? What does it want us to do? Then we can step forward into the future in confidence and clarity of mind.

Maybe what emerges from our time in the wilderness will appear strange and unsettling. The Russian Orthodox priest, Fr. Andrew Phillips, has proposed on his blog (www.orthodoxengland.net) the dissolution of the UK and its replacement by another acronym, IONA - The Isles of the Northern Sea. He wants Westminster to become the site of a devolved English Parliament and for central government to relocate to the Isle of Man, an island rich in British mythological lore and within sight, as it were, of all four countries.

It could well be that such a radical reimagining of who we are is exactly what is needed to propel us out of the current impasse. But nothing authentic or original will come to the surface without contemplation and stillness. We have to get beyond the head level - into the heart, the imagination and the guts. Argument and counter argument will get us precisely nowhere. We'll be stuck at the level of cliché forever, more and more dependent on the market and the state (and increasingly technology) to provide us with answers to problems we don't have the imaginative capacity to deal with any more. 

Silence is the key. As Cardinal Robert Sarah points out in his recent book, The Power of Silence:

Mankind must join in a sort of resistance movement. What will become of our world if it does not look for intervals of silence? Interior rest and harmony can flow only from silence. Without it, life does not exist. The greatest mysteries of the world are born and unfold in silence. How does nature develop? In the greatest silence. A tree grows in silence, and springs of water flow at first in the silence of the ground. The sun that rises over the earth in its splendour and grandeur warms us in silence. What is extraordinary is always silent. (p.34)

The still small voice that Elijah heard on Mount Horeb is there for nations just as much as it is for individuals. And it is that still small voice - more than any Emperor, military commander or  referendum result - which is the true Redditor Lucis Aeternae.