The Ancient Roots of Coronation and the Glorious Potential of Ruins
Weekend recommendations for May 5, 2023
A rare opportunity to see a 5,000 year-old ritual
This Saturday, the world’s only living remnant of a very, very ancient ceremony will be televised. I’m speaking, of course, about the coronation of King Charles III, and regardless of how you personally feel about monarchy, I think it’s worth tuning into if you are at all interested in things like the foundations of Western civilization and its roots in the near eastern Neolithic.
There are a smattering of remaining monarchs around the world, of course, but it’s only in Britain that we find a sacral coronation, complete with anointing, the roots of which go back to ancient Egypt. The ceremony has changed quite a bit over the millennia, of course, and it’s picked up all sorts of encrustrations from various eras and civilizations. It’s really a living time capsule, and I for one, am glad that we have an opportunity to see it.
I didn’t write about it because frankly. It would have taken me a ton of time and research. Fortunately, there’s a better option to learn more about this fascinating history: The Rest is History podcast’s latest episode on the Coronation.
There’s a special category of media I file under “Dad appropriate.” By that I mean something that we will both find interesting, that won’t have too many pop culture references he won’t understand; nothing too outré, transgressive, or explicit that he would find unseemly; and preferably a relatively neutral political point of view so as not to stir up disagreements between us.
We spent a lot of long car rides together visiting my mom in the hospital this winter, and our go-to listening became The Rest is History— what is now, I believe, the most popular history podcast in the world. There are some history podcasts that are literally just narrators reading scripts cobbled together by researchers (my brother listens to these, probably because he is a weird robot) or dry academics being interviewed by dry academics. RICP is neither of those. It’s two funny, knowledgable historians telling stories about history, cracking terrible jokes (I told you it’s Dad media), and sometimes going off the rails.
Anyway, their coronation ep (the first of 3) tells all about the deep roots of this ceremony better than I could. Do yourself a favor and listen to it before watching the ceremony.
Esoterica
Charles is famously a fan of the esoteric. His Coronation invitations featured The Green Man and the ceremony itself, while stripped down of some of the traditional pomp (like aristocrats in ermine robes), seems to have some new mystical details courtesy of Charles himself.
Here’s a quote from an article by Francis Young, an historian of occult Britain who is both superb and sometimes infuriating (he was really irate over the whole Green Man thing, for example):
Charles III’s Coronation will be the first in many centuries to take place directly on top of the Cosmati pavement made for Coronations in the reign of Henry III, a talisman designed to draw down celestial influences on the new king. The new “Cross of Wales”, the processional cross, contains a relic of the True Cross given to the King by the Pope; the holy oil for the King’s anointing has been consecrated in Jerusalem. Furthermore, the King has insisted that his anointing, the holiest moment of the ceremony, be entirely hidden by a specially designed screen adorned with words of the mediaeval mystic Julian of Norwich, and he has elected to wear the full sacred vestments of his forebears. The words of the ceremony of anointing itself are entirely unchanged, and they will be set within a celebration of Holy Communion.
I love the detail about Julian. Any guesses as to the words? I am guessing they can only be “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”
Ruin Soup
Dougald Hine, writer and co-founder of The Dark Mountain Project, has a new book out called At Work in the Ruins. I haven’t read it yet, but it sounds very much to be up my alley (and resonant for all my fellow ex-climate activist friends). From the description:
According to Hine, our answers shape our understanding and our thinking about what kind of problem we think we’re dealing with and, therefore, what kind of responses we go looking for. “But when science is turned into an object of belief and a source of overriding authority,” Hine continues, “it becomes hard even to talk about the questions that it cannot answer.”
In eloquent, deeply researched prose, Hine demonstrates how our over-reliance on the single lens of science has blinded us to the nature of the crises around and ahead of us, leading to ‘solutions’ that can only make things worse. At Work in the Ruins is his reckoning with the strange years we have been living through and our long history of asking too much of science. It’s also about how we find our bearings and what kind of tasks are worth giving our lives to, given all we know or have good grounds to fear about the trouble the world is in.
As I said, I haven’t read it yet, but I loved this interview Hine did with Gordon White of the Rune Soup podcast. They talk about how, to some extent, things have always been falling apart and humans have always had to sift through the rubble to build something new. At one point, Gordon speaks of the cult of ruins in Britain, and how these days they are cordoned off and preserved in amber, but once upon a time people picnicked and played in the midst of them.
I’m not sure that’s quite right though. It’s true, of course, that English Heritage tries to preserve them and prevent you from carting off stones. And Stonehenge is sadly cordoned off so visitors can only walk in wide circles around it.
But there are plenty of places where Ruins are just part of the fabric of cities and places. Remnants of old Roman walls lie in the midst of hulking concrete buildings in the City of London. And in Bury St. Edmonds, I was delighted to see homes and offices still existing within a partially crumbled stretch of the old abbey walls:
I think about that spate of post-apocalyptic ruin porn coming out of the old American Rust Belt cities—particularly Detroit— that was popular a decade ago. Will the National Park Service make exhibits of them one day and charge $20 a head to get in? Or will we find a better use for them?
That’s it for now. Have a great weekend.
Ah, thanks Rebekah! Glad you enjoyed the conversation with Gordon. When you get to the book, you'll find that I've quoted your words about "engaged surrender" from your Covid essay, which was one of the best things I read about the pandemic. And if you're planning on picking up the podcast series you started a while back, then I'd love to have a conversation sometime.