Coronation

“And peaked wings pointed to the Northern Star.

And eastward fronts the statue, and the crown

And both the wings are made of gold, and flame

At sunrise till the people in far fields,

Wasted so often by the heathen hordes,

Behold it, crying, ‘We have still a King.’”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King

Human beings intrinsically seek hierarchy; we seek final residence within a kingdom.

The presence of a king provides surety, the presence of walls provides safety, the presence of a nation provides identity, and the presence of roles provides purpose.

Many are spiritually stateless, transiting innumerable kingdoms in a single day, searching for a fire to warm themselves and a task to lend their hands to.

The kingdoms of money, of politics, of ego, and pride, and power, and passion, and knowledge, and justification, and culture, and conflict, and desire, and despair, and triumph, and travail, and time…

Some of us are dissatisfied with these kingdoms that we encounter; we resent the fact that we are foreigners, passersby, in every land. We seek to establish ourselves, to stake our claim, in places far from our origin; we fortify, and calcify, our hearts and minds. Ultimately, we often settle for residence in kingdoms that are not ours to inhabit, choosing the utter certainty of darkness over the nascent, flickering possibility of Light.

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.”

Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

The kingdoms of darkness are legion; the Kingdom of Heaven is singular.

Many are content with serfdom in these dark kingdoms, subsistence farming the crop of the zeitgeist. Whether the harvest consists of reality television, or nuclear warfare, or aspic dinners is insignificant; the perennial condition of the time-bound man is absurdity and futility. 

“All is vanity and a striving after wind…”

Others, wary of the fruit of the zeitgeist, elect to sell it instead; they know, in their heart of hearts, that the fruit is poisonous - still, they concede to “conform to the pattern of the world,” in the name of profit, or necessity, or, ultimately, in the name of ignorance and fear.

Some aspire to knighthood, leading fierce campaigns into blind alleys. The subsistence of the serfs and the tepidness of the merchants no longer satiates; vainglory, passion, pride, treasure, and other forms of quicksand provide the illusion of satisfaction. These “knights,” in reality, are sellswords.

Even fewer in number are the aristocrats and diplomats; the tenders of the stone-cold courts of false kings. These are the progenitors of all the countless “-ists and -isms,” to use the terminology of Aldous Huxley. In contemporary terms, this is an ideologue and bureaucrat; a lost soul, trapped in a vortex of words, and wrong-thinking, and titles, and technicalities, and false-sworn allegiances.

And, of course, there are the countless kings; the big fish in the little ponds, the infantile tyrants, the abusive tycoons, the bullies, the small-town gangsters, the smooth-talking charlatans. The usurper, in an ultimate sense, forsakes himself; he squanders his birthright in a brief flash of temporal infamy, followed by an everlasting oblivion.

Herod and Hitler, Mussolini and Mao. The princes of the earth differ in name only; Death is their sole inheritance.

They believe they have power; they have no Power.

The countless kingdoms of moth and rust will all return to Nothing; the King alone remains.