NOT MY KING
"It was a moment in history and pretty spectacular. I wouldn't have missed it for the world. No one else in the world does the pomp and ceremony like us."
Those sentiments, quoted by Reuters, come from a spectator among crowds at the coronation of Britain's newest King, Charles, and his consort Camilla. While much of the world might have been aware that such a huge, and hugely expensive (estimated at around 25 million GBP) event was taking place, few if any beyond the borders of Britain itself will have been subjected to the hours and hours of wall-to-wall media coverage that it was awarded here within the UK.
Yet, for all that a few tens of thousands crowded on the Mall to watch Charles and Camilla briefly trundle past in a gold-encrusted carriage, there's no real argument that the institution of monarchy is losing support among the British population. A recent survey found that while there's still a majority (around 60%) in broad favour of keeping a monarch as head of state, there's a significant fall in the royal family's popular support among the young and only 36% of the younger generation wish to keep the monarchy at all.
The decline appears most marked outside England. While Loyalism in the North of Ireland remains a substantial (if itself declining) outlier of monarchist enthusiasm, the Nationalist community obviously has little time for the rulers of an occupying state. In Scotland and in Wales, there was also notably less enthusiasm for the grand spectacle being played out in London. As such, the stature of the monarchy may even be considered an indicator for the relative strengths of reactionary and relatively progressive attitudes in Britain.
One of the major strands of criticism for Charles' coronation has been its immense cost to the public purse. At a time of daily struggles for the majority, with exponential growth in the number of food banks and the number of people in desperate enough need to use those food banks, and with a growing crisis in the cost of living and swelling numbers of homeless, the Coronation looks at best as a frivolous expenditure, money better spent on feeding those in need.
Where I depart from that line of argument is in the suggestion that the Coronation has been at all frivolous. Far from it. We should never underestimate the enormous power of the non-rational in swaying the emotions of people, most especially of people en masse. It's the non-rational elements that dominate crowd psychology – those elements that work on the level of the unconscious and the human spirit. The flags, the massed ranks of colourful military uniforms, the music, the soaring architecture of cathedral and palace, the glittering regalia, the religious ceremony, the aura of fame and wealth and power, the sense of a tradition linking the present to a more glorious past – all these and more contribute to a spectacle designed to stir the spirits of those watching and to stir them in a particular direction.
The British ruling class is old, and it is clever. No one else in the world does the pomp and ceremony like us. The Coronation, and its ilk, is theatre on a grand scale. But this is a theatre of reaction. It is designed very deliberately and skilfully to bind the mass of the population into support for the established order, an established order that is represented in Britain above all else by the monarchy, and thus empowers the entire pyramid of privilege at the top of which the monarch teeters.
What it feeds, also, is a culture of toxic deference that runs through the whole of British society, flowing from top to bottom as a dismal undercurrent. There's a master/servant relationship ingrained deep within the British psyche, which can find expression throughout the workings of British society. There remains a sharp awareness among the wealthier echelons of class distinctions in everything from the “proper” use of cutlery, and the “proper” servile behaviour of retail staff, through to the bourgeois class solidarity of “the old school tie”, all of which is designed to exclude working-class people from the circles of the privileged and maintain a sense of strict hierarchy.
Make no mistake, the great occasions of state, whether funerals, weddings or coronations, are workings of ritual magic but rather than healing or spiritual advancement these are without exception the magic of manipulation. Their function is generally twofold. In the case of the Coronation, in Westminster Abbey the ritual intent is to transfer the power of the land, its sovereignty, to the newly enthroned monarch and maintain the golden thread of it within their bloodline. Outside, on the streets, the magic draws the populace into a web of power in which the mass are disempowered by their identification with the monarch, with the state, and with the systematic, deeply entrenched hierarchy that the monarch represents.
This is an abuse of magical ritual that is frankly a further obscenity, alongside the more mundane obscenity of squandering vast sums of public money to parade an upper-class man through the streets of London surrounded by stolen goods.
Sadly, there are some neo-Pagans – at least in Britain – who have fallen under the spell. Some have seen the image of the Green Man printed on the Coronation invitation card and taken it as a sign that the new King is secretly a Pagan (here's a shock – he isn't). There have been claims that he is some kind of planetary guardian chosen by the Gods, which seems almost a degeneration into believing in the divine right of kings (again, he isn't). There have been those pointing to the High Church ritualism as being an example of the Western occult tradition (in this case, well it is and it isn't...).
The willingness of some neo-Pagans in Britain to believe such absurdities is not new. One might question, for instance, the shoehorning of historical and “patriotic” personalities such as Sir Francis Drake and Horatio Nelson into the ranks of supposedly discarnate occult authorities. On the demise of Elizabeth II, there were a few who even went so far as to declare that the dead Queen was a Goddess, no less.
While King Charles certainly does have a well-known track record of interest in various environmental matters, the appearance of vegetation and the Green Man in a minor piece of Coronation paraphernalia is a recuperation of the imagery. To quote Wikipedia, just for once:
“In the sociological sense, recuperation is the process by which politically radical ideas and images are twisted, co-opted, absorbed, defused, incorporated, annexed or commodified within media culture and bourgeois society, and thus become interpreted through a neutralized, innocuous or more socially conventional perspective. More broadly, it may refer to the cultural appropriation of any subversive symbols or ideas by mainstream culture.”(Source)
While its origins, history, and meaning are complex and contradictory, the image of the Green Man is essentially irruptive, the expression of a powerful, subversive and transformative energy. Likewise with contemporary neo-Paganism, the better elements of which have evolved from rather conservative beginnings into a potential force for social and environmental justice.
We should not allow ourselves, our community, our spiritual energies and traditions, to be recuperated in helping prop up a decrepit institution of monarchy that, in any case, becomes increasingly a mere branch of shallow celebrity culture. Indeed, as social and climate crises accelerate and deepen, it's surely up to us as Pagans to embody precisely that irruptive, subversive and transformational energy of the Green Man, and to be at the forefront of political and social movements for change.
Philip Kane
Philip Kane is an award-winning poet, author, storyteller and artist, living in the south-eastern corner of England. He is an “Old Craft” practitioner, a supporter of Anti-Capitalist Resistance, and a founding member of the London Surrealist Group. Philip's work has been published and exhibited across Europe, in the Middle East and in the USA. He is a contributor to The Gorgon's Guide to Magical Resistance (Revelore Press, 2022).