Reanimating the Queen

What is it that we mourn?

“I cannot lead you into battle. I do not give you laws or administer justice but I can do something else - I can give my heart and my devotion to these old islands and to all the peoples of our brotherhood of nations.”

- Queen Elizabeth II, 1957

Televised speeches from a queen or king are not cobbled together on the fly. The words chosen here are charged with thousands of years of historical, poetic, and mythical significance.

Old islands. Devotion. Heart.

The heart of the queen stopped beating, and because of that, on September 9th 2022, Britain entered a period of national mourning. What I’d like to do here is float the idea that those who felt moved by the death of Queen Elizabeth II were mourning more than just the passing of a literal queen. What that ‘more’ is we’ll explore below, but first a note on intentions.

This miniature essay, or whatever it is, isn’t really about the literal queen or the literal king. Elizbeth seemed like a decent person who sacrificed a lot to play the role she was asked to. But the literal monarchs don’t interest me as much as the archetypes they are tethered to - those deep patterns and mythic persons which give literal sovereigns their mystique.

For many people, the Queen or King of England is still a numinously-charged figure. ‘Someone magical for people to look up to’, as many describe it. For those with royalist sympathies, the slightest sighting of prince Harry or William gets described as ‘absolutely electric.’ A woman, having just shook hands with King Charles, calls it ‘the best moment of my life.’ A middle-aged worker in a Warburtons bread factory claims that his brief exchange with the queen thirty years ago changed his life in a profound way.

The queen is numinously charged because of the silver threads linking her not only with the history of these old islands, but with the profusion of queens inhabiting literature, legend, and myth. Our cultural imagination is riddled with queens. From birth to death we are marinated in stories of Queens and Queens-in-waiting. The mirror-loving Queen of Snow White. Shakespeare’s Titania. Queen Mab. The Queen of Elfland in Thomas the Rhymer. The queens in fantasy literature. Queens in movies borrow from queens in books, and those have their tap roots in the re-imagined queens of history and the many queens of legend and myth.

In Asgard she is Frejya. In Olympus, Hera. In Egypt, Isis. There is Branwen of the Mabinogion, standing upon the cliffs with her white raven on her shoulder. There is Boudica, in the liminal terrain of legend, screaming in her chariot at the head of an Iceni horde. Aphrodite, queen of souls, laughing joyfully at the wildflowers springing up at her every step, and the birds circling her head, called into being by the shape of her breath.

That barely scratches the surface, but we start to get a sense of the unconscious associations and mythic residues that are brought up when the word ‘queen’ is spoken, or when a queen walks into a room. Without the silver threads linking the literal queen to the mythic, I doubt people would be so moved when they meet a member of the royal family.

With this in mind, let’s look again at that quote from Queen Elizabeth II.

“I cannot lead you into battle. I do not give you laws or administer justice but I can do something else - I can give my heart and my devotion to these old islands and to all the peoples of our brotherhood of nations.”

‘I can do something else - I can be a container for your mythic imagination.’

Since literalism and mechanical thinking have impoverished our mythic imaginations, a ghost-pressure has built up - a longing for the numinous to touch our lives. Human beings need awe. Without it, life becomes flat and colourless; a bullet-point checklist. Reverence is the virtue of awe, but I’d rather give my reverence to the spirit of a place or to the queens of myth, who are the many faces of soul.

What would a literal king or literal queen need to do in order to share in this reverence? Not this:

English Heritage announced this on Twitter as:

“Our spellbinding homage to Her Majesty The Queen! We’ve projected eight portraits of Queen Elizabeth II onto Stonehenge in celebration of the Platinum Jubilee.”

Many citizens of the British Isles reacted to this with anger, laughter, or a bafflement that included both. For me, it’s an on-the-nose attempt to stitch the literal queen to the soul of these old islands.

If you want to pull a stunt like this, then first consider a little artistry. Slapping on high-res images is the most literal, lurid, and ugly way of going about it, but even before you think about trying to braid the queen with one of Britain’s sacred sites, you need to earn the right.

How do you do that? You consistently take the kind of actions which help to dissolve peoples’ perceptions of you as a symbol of colonial empire - an empire that accumulated an awful lot of wealth by dominating people and nature through slavery, industry etc.

Whilst doing that, you - the queen or king - should see if you can stitch your soul to the soul of the land by walking its coasts and woodlands, its mountains, valleys, cities and hedgeways. You make a year long pilgrimage in the clothes of a commoner. You sleep under the shelter of oaks and come to know the stars. You pay immaculate attention to moss and birdsong, and learn their secret names. You walk with no money, relying on the generosity of people and the abundance of the giving land; wood sorrel, mushrooms, jack-by-hedge, windfall apples and venison from the royal woods, mischievously poached from yourself. If, by luck, you find a tenner, spend it on some fish and chips and give the change to a beggar.

What you don’t do is prevent your people from laying their hands upon a monument sacred to many. Stonehenge is owned by the crown, and people are not allowed to touch it.

‘…but I can do something else - I can give my heart and my devotion to these old islands.’

The mythopoeic perspective tells us that a river flows between queen and soul. She is lunar sovereignty, and carries the care of soul for hearts of the people.

In a time when the soul of the land is being corroded by mass extinction and mechanical thinking, by limited free speech and lethal technologies, when we are shielded from grief by anaesthetic habits, then we do right to mourn the death of the queen, but perhaps not the literal one.

Fortunately, the archetypes can never die, so the question now is how to build a bridge between the queen in you and the elemental queen whose voice rings out through the cosmos? That queen does not care about the boundaries between inner and outer. She dissolves the walls that seperate them, no matter how high human beings might try to build them.

The queen is dead. Long live the Queens.

Dedicated to Alan Charlton

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