The English Chemical Theatre

Four Years of Chemistry

2012-01-30T03:59:00.000-08:00

I feel in the mood for a mini celebration; and why not? The English Chemical Theatre is four years old today. It hasn't always been the most regular of online journals and there have been times when I simply can't be bothered and just want to throw in the towel, but I don't regret starting this project for a moment.

The English Chemical Theatre was born of laziness, or rather of the desire to avoid it. I'd developed the idiosyncratic habit of marking the festivals of the sacred year, not on their appointed days but whenever it suited me. This was a reclusive and lazy habit and I was fully aware of it. By making a conscious effort to research the traditional background of the feast days as historically celebrated in England, and marking them with a blog post on the day they were meant to be celebrated, I could shift this habit and bring myself back into line with the traditional world.

The Theatre grew out of this root to become a deeply personal outlet of spiritual rants, political frustration and traditionalist diatribe: hopefully an entertaining one.

In the process the blog has become the closest I've ever had to a diary and I've grown to see it as a close friend.

I'm going to make more of an effort this year to update The English Chemical Theatre more regularly, and I can promise you nothing but vigorous honesty, spiritual invective and political incorrectness!

Thanks for reading!

Mike Oldfield - Music of the Spheres (2008)

2011-09-29T02:25:00.000-07:00

More than any of Mike Oldfield’stwenty plus albums, Music of the Spheres succeedsin expressing the artist’s deep felt belief that music should bring toexpression the spiritual and transcendent elements of human experience.

Gone are the wailing electricguitars and prog- influenced sounds of such albums as Ommadawn, Hergest Ridge & Tubular Bells. Music ofthe Spheres is piano driven and is backed up with a full orchestral compliment, recorded at London’sAbbey Road Studios.

Oldfield is ably assisted byvocal assistance from renowned soprano Hayley Westernra on the track On My Heart. Chinese pianist Lang Lang; who more recentlyplayed at the opening of the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and was featured artist atthis year’s “Last Night of the Proms”, contributes his remarkable skillsthroughout the album. The subtle arrangement skills of Karl Jenkins (who onceplayed oboe on the 1975 orchestral production of Tubular Bells) are also utilised to full effect in adding a furthertranscendent element to the recording. Jenkin’s influence is most notable insome of the choral pieces, such as Aurora.

At the same time, Music of the Spheres is pure Oldfield,and will be familiar to any fan of his music. The hypnotic piano riffs of Harbingerare reminiscent of the opening movements of TubularBells used in The Exorcist. Oldfield’scharacteristic use of classical guitar maintains a folky feel throughout thealbum and creates a link with his previous work.

The dramatic vistas of soundOldfield evokes in this album will be particularly appealing to lovers of Elgar,Holst and Howard Shore as well as folk, prog-rock and Jazz – a testament to theenduring eclectic creativity of the great English composer.

Music of the Spheres lives up to its name and is deeply moving in parts, grabbing the listener by the soulfrom the very first track. There is ahypnotic power and tranquillity hidden in tracks such Silhouette which uplifts and leaves one refreshed andoptimistic.

I find that much of today’s musichas so absorbed the darkness and nihilism of the age that listening to itincreases your enthralment to the world, rather than giving a newperspective. Historically however, oneof the primary roles of music was to help lift up the heart to a higher levelof being – and truly attentive listening could be a highly spiritualexperience.

Music of the Spheres comes as close to this ideal as any moderncomposition I have heard for a long time, and as such is well worth a listen.

Skrewdriver - All Skrewed Up (1977)

2011-09-28T04:33:00.000-07:00

It gives me great satisfaction tobe able to break the hiatus of posts on the English Chemical Theatre with abrief and nasty review of a Skinhead classic – Skrewdriver’s seminal All Skrewed Up. I’ll be honest that the last sixmonths have been a little on the pants side: the economic downturn which hasraged with varying intensity since 2008 has finally begun to bite me on thebum. Business is down and stress levelsare high. What better prescription than40 minutes of no nonsense punk angst?

Despite the band’s later infamy, All Skrewed Up received decent reviewsin the music press of the time and shows a good level of musicianship sometimesmissing from contemporary punk outfits. The lyrics are pure therapy as well – with all the clichéd rants abouttax codes, angry youth, 9-5 drudgery and restrictive social norms. The album is surprisingly coy when it comesto bad language and there are none of the Neo-Nazi/White Power references whichwere later to turn Skrewdriver into the house band of the National Front.

All Skrewed Up and the wider punk movement were a strong andvivacious reaction to a decadent, tired and irrelevant society. What was true of the mediocrities in the lateseventies is no less so of today’s society. I smile at the thought of what Skrewdriver’s wordsmiths would have madeof the beastly business rhetoric of “Human Resources” or the painful sham whichis the X-Factor.

All in all a perfect panacea fora disenchanted English chemist, stranded somewhere between youth andwisdom. Stand out tracks for me are theblues driven Where’s It Gonna End and the classic punk workout An-ti-so-cial.

Frumenty

2010-09-04T05:56:00.000-07:00

I like weekends at the moment. Our new Foxhole is far less high maintenance than the old place and so I get more opportunity to indulge in my penchant for gastronomic exhibitionism, especially my interest in historic recipes of the weird and wonderul kind.

Today it was time for frumenty, a wheat porridge eaten widely in the middle ages, so much so that it can quite justifiably be seen as a sort of medieval chips, a suitable accompaniment to all manner of dishes and palates. The savoury version involves stewed bulgar wheat with salt and seems to have been eaten by rich and poor alike. The humble Jacques Bonhomme may have enjoyed frumenty with bread or a potage of boiled vegetables, or with fish, whereas no less a personage than King Henry IV chose frumenty as part of his wedding feast, to accompany a course of roasted porpoise.

With no offence to the palates of medieval England this bland glutinous porridge didn't really appeal to my postmodern sensibilities, and so the recipe I followed was a slightly later version, a sweet frumenty which became popular in later years in the north of England as a Christmas dish.

This morning we had frumenty as part of a hearty breakfast with freshly baked bagels, turkish coffee and apple wine. Yum.

Sweet Frumenty
(Serves three foxes)
100g bulgar wheat
500ml full fat milk
handful of raisins and chopped dates
Cinamon stick
2 tbsp honey
1 egg yolk

Soak the wheat overnight in plenty of water. In the morning, drain, mix with the milk in a pan and bring to the boil with the cinnamon stick in with the it. Let simmer for 20 minutes or so then add the dried fruit, allowing to simmer for a further 40 minutes. Top up with milk if the pan drys out at all. When it is ready, remove the cinamon stick and mix in the egg yolk and the honey. Enjoy

Non Angli, Sed Angeli

2010-09-03T11:37:00.000-07:00

St Gregory the Great was apparently inspired to launch his mission for the conversion of the English by the beautiful countenance of two English slave boys up for sale in the Roman market. "Not Angles but Angels" was his famous comment. I don't know whether this story is grounded in fact or whether it is the apocryphal invention of a whimsical chronicler. Either way, the central spirit of the story is today the same as it has ever been: this was the beginning of the conversion of our people, the event which catalysed the growth of the great and beautiful Anglo-Saxon culture, the springtime of the English people.

Gregory the Great is in many ways more worthy of the title "Apostle of the English" than the surly Greek-Sicilian monk who acted as his missionary and who is known to history as St Augustine of Canterbury. Augustine had the brawn, but Gregory had the brains. What followed on the conversion of first the Kentish Jutes is recorded eloquently within the pages of Bede's History of the English Church and People. It is a tale, beautifully embroidered with legend, with which every Englishman should be aware, as it is nothing less than the origin narrative of our culture, the Exodus of our island race. The fusion of Germanic culture and virtues with the ideialism and spirituality of Western Roman Christianity in early English culture is something of which we can all be proud and which can still nourish us in our dotage. This was the youth of the English people, and as such set many patterns and characteristics which endure to the present day.

In many ways St Gregory the Great is also a model for the renewal of the papacy in the modern world and for the reconciliation of England with it's catholic roots. It is worth mentioning, on the eve of the papal visit of Benedict XVI to England, the warm ties England enjoyed with Rome right up to the Reformation. It is also worth mentioning that Gregory was pope when Christendom was still one, before the schism with Constantinople and before the development of the doctrines of papal supremacy, papal infalibility and Petrine exclusivity.

On the feast day of this, one of our true patron saints, it is worth reflecting on the birth of Christian England and the characters which made it great; a culture of duty and service, martial self-reliance a genuine piety and a deep appreciation of beauty. Many both within and outside the Church will be looking forward to the upcoming papal visit with hope and anticipation and I for one pray that it will assist the beleagured remnants of historical Christianity to take heart and hang on and will help usher in the spiritual renewal within the church that has been like a slow train coming. In these days when Englishness is in the last flickering of it's old age, if not already expired, let us call to mind that we are called not to be English, but to be angels.

The Grey King and other Macabre Tales

2010-08-31T00:52:00.000-07:00

Many legends and tales have been told of the grim slopes and mist shrouded peaks of Cader Idris, the mighty and solitary guardian of the southern reaches of Snowdonia. For centuries, denizens of the windswept villages of Barmouth and Dolgellau have spoken in cracked whispers of the lurking presences and half concealed horrors of the old mountain, under whose watchful shadow they lived their lives.

Few outsiders ever ventured to this rainy and near forgotten corner of Wales, isolated as it was from the outer world of civilisation. Local shepherds spoke of mysterious inhabitants of the mountain and of the reputed presence of the Grey King - the lord of the underworld himself, who never failed to press his dark claim on the souls of any traveller foolhardy or brave enough to venture into the upper reaches of his domain.

All such stories were simply bait to the bold spirits of Christendom's greatest adventurers. Freshly returned from the siege of Antioch, there were few dangers at which the valiant knights Efnisien Paddhammer, Philarchus Grosses Von Tronnenheim and Nor Torch of Jihad would blanch.

So it came to be, that in the cold summer of the year of our Lord 1102 our bold gentlemen three struggled from their warm corners of the world to the barren foothills of Cader Idris and with a hastily muttered prayer on their lips, and a flickering thought for wives and retainers left behind, they set their sights on the mysteries and reputed treasures awaiting them at the summit.

The beginnings of the journey were inauspicious, as the brave warriors battled their way through densely forested foothills, laying steps to tame the wilderness and fighting off the swarms of orc who poured down the slopes to repel their advance. The companions had a right sweat on by the time they reached the eery central plateau of the mountain. With the jagged arms of the mountain reaching up into the clouds on every side, a deafening silence descended upon them, heavy with the promise of hidden malice and unspeakable creeping things.

The adventurers finally reached the edges of a still black lake, where they set camp and took a break to renew their sustenance. Suddenly the vast neck of a lake monster reared out of the unfathomable depths of the lake and grabbing Efnisien by the butt cheeks whilst he was defecating by the lakeside, dragged him into the depths. Not to be deterred, Philarchus and Nor- in full armour - dived unhesitatingly into the black depths to confront the monster as it prepared to have it's wicked way with their comrade. Fearlessly they hacked off the beast's head and dragged their friend to the safety of the land, only just in time to preserve Efnisien from certain violation.

Wet and shaken, the heroes were ill equipped for the next, strenuous part of the climb, as they battled against terrible odds and hurricane force winds through the layer of clouds. For days they struggled with no visibility and against the titanic forces of the Grey King himself, who with mighty gusts attempted to wrench them from the slender and slippery rocky footholds and hurl them into the yawning abyss. At the end of their endurance, Efnisien swallowed the magic beans he had purchased from a sorceress at Llantesco. All at once the powers of the wind-gods raged within him and he fired tempestuous fury at the Grey King, beating him at his own game.

After many trials and tribulations, the three adventurers reached the summit of the mountain and gripped hold of the sacred stone of power, and with an unearthly groan, the grey King relinquished his grasp and roared away, defeated. All that now remained was for the adventurers to claim the hidden treasure, which legend had it was buried beneath the hut of the sixth century hermit St Diego of Maradonna. Locating this hut close to the mountain peak, they searched in vain for the treasure. Outside the storm began to rage anew and the friends knew they would be holed up in the hut until the winds abetted. they knew they needed warmth and food, and should prepare for renewed combat in the morning, as the grey King regrouped his fiendish hordes.

Lighting a fire was their first challenge.... Nor, being of Moorish extraction, has the natural ability to create explosive bursts of fire and, coupled with gusts from Efnisien's magic beans, they attempted to muster a fire with which to cook their supper of roast elk, wheat porridge and pickled nun. Sadly the cloud cover was too damp and the winds too strong for the fire to hold. In a cunning stroke of genius, Philarchus weaved his huge mass of soft hair into an effective wind break, and the fire was finally able to hold. A curious thing it was that Philarchus, though a giant of 20'6", has a mass of curly hair reminiscent of a hobbit whereas Efnisien - himself a hobbit of no more that 1'9" in height, was bald as the day he was born.

After a hearty meal the three warriors returned to their beds, where they polished their weapons vigorously throughout the night, anticipating the dangers that may appear with the return of the sun.

Without warning, in the darkest watch of the night, a mysterious light appeared from the direction of the summit, filling the entire hut with a cold blue glow. The warriors bravely braced themselves for combat as two sinister figures approached the darkened doorway. Imagine the surprise of the bold adventurers three when instead of the emergence of the the expected fiends of hell, in through the doorway came two bold knights of Christendom, who had embarked on the self-same quest up the mountain. The party agreed to join forces and together search for the treasure, and to make an escape from the clutches of the mountain, fighting every step if need be.

The night passed without incident and together they began the long journey homeward. The two newcomers pointed out a pony trail which promised an easier descent of the mountain, and as the storm was still raging the three adventurers eagerly accepted their offer as guide. All boded well until they reached a fork in the path, and the newcomers indicated that the treasure was located in a mystic lake beyond the rise of steep bank of scree. Nor, with his unquenchable lust for gold, eagerly agreed to follow. Efnisien and Philarchus were sceptical, and agreed to guard the party's rearguard from marauding beasts. If separated they were to meet back on the main path leading off the mountain to Dolgellau.

Efnisien and Philarchus waited for hours, and when no sign of Nor appeared, they began to worry, and to retrace their steps to the main path. As they waited they spied several mirages appearing as parties of travellers on the hills and once even thought they saw Nor himself, but then the vision faded. Too late they realised that the two knights were not who them seemed, and that the Grey King had plotted their destruction in an most ingenious way. Heaven only knew what could be happening to Nor at that moment, although Efnisien and Philarhcus had a pretty good idea...

Philarchus knew they had to trace the road across the valley to discovery the magic wand of communication, where they might be able to contact Nor and even drag him back from the land of the faeries. The two men were pixie led for many hours before they were able to find the wand of communication. On activating the device a desperate message from Nor came through, that he was trapped in a faery prison at Dolgellau. Efnisien and Philarchus valiantly set out to his rescue, and using a combination of arcane chants, where able to force the Grey King to disgorge their prisoner from the dimension in which Nor was trapped. By this time he had been rogered many many times. Reunited again, the three heroes had to admit they had been foxed by the Grey King and with weary limbs (and rectum in Nor's case) and without any treasure, they wended their way back toward civilisation.

The great grey shrouded mountain of Cader Idris stands still, it's slopes a lurid warning to any other adventurer who might consider himself a match for the Grey King!

As narrated by Philarchcus Grosses Von Tronnenheim, AD 1102

Abba

2010-08-26T08:43:00.000-07:00

Another thing about fathers... One of our Lord's great insights was his deeply personal relationship with God, the fact that he taught us to relate to God as Our Father, and not in a distant patriarchal sense either. No, the word used by our Lord to describe God is Abba, the Aramaic form of Daddy. Readers familiar with baby babble will immediately realise the etymology of abba, an observation that only strengthens the deeply emotional connotations of the relationship with God to which we are called to aspire.

The practical result of this theology is that in Christian societies the benchmark for fathers is set pretty high, to say the least. Forget school. Forget the church. In this world view the place children first learn about God is the home and the model for the fatherhood of God is their abba. You might think that it's no wonder fathers so often fail to live up to the expectations of their children and that dad's crack under the strain of it all, and you'd have a point. It is indeed rather unfair to expect mere men, selfish creatures at the best of times to live up to the standards set by the Father of all things. After all, God is perfect, ineffable and indescribable. However, it does encourage us dads to have lofty standards, to aspire to be loving, tolerant, understanding, supportive, merciful, generous and the like. It teaches us that we should never be complacent in our role as father, that if we are called to be beacons to society and heads of our families there is always more we can do.

There is also a resultant correlation between how society views God and how it views God. Is it any surprise that in an age where the institution of fatherhood has been discredited by the actions of selfish men, where dads have been emasculated by "female emancipation" and where the concept of family itself has begun to deteriorate, that the idea of God too - the ultimate daddy - should also be tarnished and cast aside.

This outcome is a great tragedy and we men of the west should shoulder our full share of responsibility for the breakdown of traditional values, for the plight of single mothers, for rootless teenagers without role models and for the modern morass of spiritual apathy, where God is an absentee father with little relevance to his children. The great hope is that we have it within our individual means to do something about it, to act as silent evangelists in our homes and world but simply accepting the duty which comes naturally - to be abba to our children.

Honour Thy Father

2010-08-26T08:25:00.000-07:00

For those chemistry fans still out there who've wondered whither Reynard has disappeared to of late, I'd originally intended to post this piece around Father's Day but didn't get around to it - if that is any consolation.

Fatherhood - what a strange and glorious thing! My little foxcub is now six months old and has adeptly assumed her rightful place as the apple of her Daddy's eye and has got me thinking more deeply about fatherhood as a concept. For a start, I realised quite quickly how much my own Dad loved me as a child, the difficulties he faced and what a good job he did. I mean, I've always known Dad loved me but now I really really know, because I know firsthand now what it means to be a dad. Anyone reading this who has borne the blessed cross of fatherhood will hopefully be able to resonate with this point.

Secondly I've noticed how fulfilled I feel now; it's a deep awareness that I've ticked an innate box essential to my experience of life as a man. Don't get me wrong, I don't particularly enjoy being a dad, and I have less spare time, spare money etc etc. I don't really get any warm fuzzy sensations or instincts when I look at my offspring either, not like a mother would. I often whinge about having chosen the wrong path, having made "miscalculations" with my life and about being unsuited to the stress and bald materialism of family life. This being said, I have been happy to assume the duties of fatherhood and feel enriched as a result - all this in spite of myself; which I suppose is the whole point of it. Traditional gender roles, duties and responsibilities force us to step outside the limits of our egos in an act of self-surrender, and we emerge happier as a result.

Out Of Eden

2009-10-21T12:20:00.000-07:00

Of all the Christian doctrines relegated to the philosophical trash heap by the moderns as being too unpalatable or unfashionable, original sin was probably the first. This surprises me somewhat, as original sin is about the only Christian doctrine that is completely self-evident. Humans are born, they deteriorate and die, just like everything else in this world, animate or not. Likewise human ideas grow stale, devotions grow into dusty habits, human institutions decline, love mellows into contempt. We are sinners and our society, with all it's glorious myriad of different human endeavours, is as subject to the same relentless laws of entropy and decay as the rest of the cosmos. "Remember man that ye are dust". Gloomy, yes, but true nonetheless. At the least, a recognition of this fundamental fact can serve as a sobering antidote to pride, another quintessentially human fault.

Such is the case with my own revolt against the modern world, or rather, with the current chapter of it. For the last three years i have gloried in a rural existence, flirting with self sufficiency, wine making, food growing and splendid isolation. Ah, sweet desert how I long for thee... The Foxhole is about as isolated as rural England gets, well removed from any main roads and equidistant between two obscure villages. We may only be 12 miles from Nottingham, but not many Nottingham natives have even heard of Colston Bassett. What a blessing for a would-be hermit.

But within four weeks I will be gone. Why? The ongoing march of human events demands it. There have been many times when I have succumbed to hubris, that the pattern of my life has become too staid and comfortable, that the austerities which once bought enlightenment now often act as a veil that hides my sins from the eye of my conscience. Entropy, my friends. There have been times when my isolation has eroded my ability to empathise with others, and the reality of my life as a social mammal.

And what is forcing me out of Eden. It makes me smile to think that it is the most natural thing in the world. The honourable yoke of Fatherhood has fallen on me again, necessitating a move to a larger village with better facilities and to a house we can afford on less money.

Yet from the decay of fallen leaves rises up a new beginning. I am heartbroken to be leaving my foxhole, but what better challenge than the joys and burdens of parenthood. How wonderful to embrace this new dawn. The revolt lives on under a new guise. I shall raise a glass of beetroot wine to the prospect!

St Joseph

2009-05-05T11:03:00.000-07:00

The first of May is recognised as the feast day of St Joseph the Workman. This feast was added to the Church’s calendar by Pope Leo XIII in 1895 to supplement St Joseph ’s main feast day of 19^th March, which is almost always overshadowed by the events of Lent. Cynics have often claimed that St Joseph the Workman was instituted simply to deflect from the hijacking of Mayday by Trade Union militants and revolutionary socialists. This would be to do injustice to Pope Leo, one of the greatest Popes of recent centuries. He was a prolific agitator in favour of social justice and had a genuine concern both for the dignity and importance of the working man and the justified grievances of the 19^th century urban poor. Today, the feast of St Joseph continues to give a more spiritual focus to Mayday, that most plebeian and enjoyable of feasts, giving an alternative to both the mischief of the organised Left and the absurd adoption of Mayday as “Beltaine” by the Neo-Pagan fraternity. However, the main historical significance of the institution of St Joseph the Workman is that it marked the final apotheosis of St Joseph into patron of the Church and Catholic role model par-excellence.

One could be forgiven for assuming that St Joseph had always held a pre-eminent position in the saintly aristocracy of Christendom, after all he was the effective earthly father and supporter of Christ himself. It is inconceivable that Joseph was not a major formative influence on the young Messiah. He would have fed, clothed and supported the child Jesus, who, as the scant childhood details in the Gospels suggest, was a precocious, outspoken and highly intelligent young man. In the fullness of time, St Joseph would have taught his ward carpentry and bequeathed to him the family business. Jesus’ intricate knowledge of scripture and Jewish tradition would also have owed a lot to lessons given him by his Dad around the family table. Biblical scholars are agreed that St Joseph was probably dead before Jesus began his ministry in the last three years of his life. In England , dozens of Catholic schools and churches are under his patronage. Popular images from the pulp-piety era of the 1880s depict St Joseph as a gentle, doe-eyed, doting father, protectively sheltering our Lord. Statues and images created since are unanimous in showing a close, obviously affectionate relationship between Jesus and St Joseph , a model father-son relationship of mutual devotion and respect. Yet it was not always so…

For much of Christian history, St Joseph has suffered an unfair press, especially in the West. One will notice that the feast of St Joseph in March is entirely lacking in traditional folklore and festivities. Although it was an observed part of the liturgical year, the only folkloric reference I’ve found to it in English tradition is in connection to the sort of weather rhyme which so typifies festivals preceding the spring equinox. Church devotions to St Joseph in medieval England are also surprisingly rare. The English liturgical calendar is interesting in the sense that it preserves a snapshot of medieval saint’s days as they stood on the eve of the Reformation. After this turmoil, though the observance of saint’s days in England persisted, the liturgical calendar became frozen. With the dubious exception of King Charles I, the Church of England has never attempted to unilaterally canonise any of its figures, and has not recognised the huge numbers of individuals canonised by the Catholic Church in the rest of Europe after the great schism. A telling fact is revealed about the importance of St Joseph to medieval Catholics by the reform of the liturgical year undertaken by Henry VIII before the protestant inspired reforms of his later reign. Englishmen of the early Sixteenth Centuries enjoyed an impressive ninety five religious feast days on which no work was allowed and many other minor holy days on which half a days work was the norm. By modern standards this would have added up to an equivalent of 120 days annual leave for the average oppressed English peasant, including Sundays of course, which were always a day of rest. The major feasts in question ranged from Christmas, at which time people usually had the full twelve days off work, to popular feast days such as Rogation Day, Assumption Day and Holy Rood Day, not to mention other, more dubious festivals such as that of the blatantly fictitious St Distaff (7^th January). The corpulent ginger bearded tyrant narrowed the calendar down to around fifty major and minor holy days, along with others on which work was expected. The new slim look calendar retained the festivals of many obscure saints, but excluded that of Jesus’ Foster-father, a day that had only ever held minor-feast status. The conclusion is inescapable. St Joseph did not hold an important role in Catholic England. His cult only gained in importance in the Church after England had apostatised from the Catholic fold.

How can one explain the seemingly inexplicable obscurity of St Joseph in the pre-reformation West, and his subsequent rise to prominence as the archetype of the caring family man? Neither of Jesus’ earthly parents get much mention in the Bible, but where Mary was elevated by tradition into a central focus of mysticism and devotion, St Joseph was reduced to a side-actor in the gospel drama, or even an object of fun and ridicule. In the cultural golden age of the high-middle ages, Mystery Plays were enormously popular in England . Almost every major feast day hosted them, and special Gilds arose in many parishes and localities specifically to produce them during the annual cycle. St Joseph was well known for his role in the Christmas mystery play. Here he played the role of the comic relief. He was depicted as an elderly, affected Jew with grasping hands, hooked nose and flowing black robes. Somewhere between Fagin and Widow Twanky, St Joseph was a pantomime character, unable to accept the divine impregnation of his wife and the divine nature of his foster-son. This playhouse view of St Joseph was commonly accepted throughout the medieval west up to the Fifteenth Century. Even in the Christian East, where St Joseph had historically enjoyed wider veneration, he was often depicted in nativity icons as despondent and downhearted, a symbolic figure representing human doubt and incomprehension.

This all began to change in Fifteenth Century Spain, when St Joseph was bought on board as the poster child of the burgeoning reform movement. It is an unfortunate use of historical terminology that labels the “Reformation” as a purely protestant phenomena. The Protestant Reformation was a divisive, sporadic and generally destructive phase of cultural and spiritual vandalism that swept Northern Europe in the Sixteenth Century, inspired by a heretical reading of the works of St Augustine . Those outcomes deemed most positive about this movement, namely more widespread knowledge of the Bible and vernacular liturgy, both owed their origin not to Luther, but to another Reformation, one that began a century earlier and which never broke communion with the universal church. The movement of spiritual renewal which began in Fifteenth century Spain soon spread throughout the Church, and had its climax at the council of Trent in 1570. Among its first fruits was the famous Polyglot Bible, a triumph of renaissance scholarship that translated the entire Bible side by side in Greek, Latin & Hebrew. Across Europe , popular lay devotions began to take root. The rosary, Devotio Moderna and the Imitation Of Christ all owe their popularity to this spiritual flowering. Primers, missals, Bibles and prayer books in vernacular tongues, all impeccably orthodox in content, appeared in huge quantities all over Europe , hot from the new printing presses. In the great context of history, the Protestant reformation was a mere sideshow.

In Spain , St Joseph was taken as the symbol of this new, laity driven spiritual reform movement. The transformation of the saint from a clown-like mystery play character to model Christian male was no mean feat, and required a closely monitored publicity campaign. The Spanish crown threw itself energetically into its task. New images and statues of both St Joseph and the Holy Family were encouraged and new devotions commissioned. To serve the correct purpose, however, the new flowering of St Joseph images had to be tightly regulated. Gone were the depictions of a stereotypically Jewish Joseph with hooked nose, rabbinical garb and deep wrinkles. The new images of the saint were not permitted to be too old, lest they conform to the old comic-cuckold St Joseph . Nor could St Joseph be too young, lest he appeared inexperienced. St Joseph was to be repackaged as the ideal of rugged Christian manhood, a solidly working class saint who nevertheless combined chastity, piety and erudition with self-reliance and honest manual labour. Through the powerful advocacy of St Theresa of Avilla, one of the great undisputed matriarchs of Western Mysticism, Joseph also gained popular currency as a spiritual tutor and mystic guide, a saint whose intercession was to be highly valued. Over the course of the Sixteenth Century this new impression of St Joseph was to become the dominant one, replacing the old symbolism of theatrical buffoon in the West and deeply flawed symbol of human doubt in the East. The Counter-Reformation ensured that the new St Joseph became established as a much loved and honoured saint across Europe , a reputation a long-time in the making, and one which was richly deserved.

Ora Pro Nobis

2009-04-27T10:47:00.000-07:00

St George & the dragon; a familiar image, an obscure origin, and an icon perpetually shrouded in controversy. I have previously written on the identity of St George himself. What interests me now is his relationship with the English people, with their self-image, their history, and with their future destiny. What is it about St George that evokes such passion in some, hostility in others and indifference in most. It is not the anti-George stance taken by the leftist self-haters among our fellow Englishmen which surprises me, but the ambiguity in which he is held by the patriots of our nation. Our neighbouring British peoples take great pride in celebrating their patronal feasts. St Patrick’s Day is notoriously famous among even those with a tenuous claim to Hibernian blood. It is recognised in Ireland by a public holiday, as is the feast day of St Andrew in Scotland . This survival of the medieval cult of the saints in Scotland, a country whose people embraced Protestantism far more whole-heartedly than the English ever did, makes a lie of the assumption that devotion to St George simply withered away in England after the Deformation. The fact is that, apart from a period during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when a state sponsored cult of St George flourished, with its centre in Windsor , the saint has never been fully accepted as the undisputed patron of the English. The cult of saints was once feverishly strong among the English, and its survivals are still strongly evident today, but our medieval forebears were notably parochial. Folk were likely to prefer devotion to a local holy well, relic or local saint, or the patron of their home parish or trade guild, than those with pretensions to patronage of the whole nation. Among pretenders to this title were St Edmund the Martyr, St Edward the Confessor and St Thomas of Canterbury, along with widely venerated but officially uncanonised figures such as Alfred the Great, King Henry VI & King Harold II. St George was beloved of the fighting clique which governed the country and patron of soldiers generally. Along with St Michael the Archangel, he was one of the holy warriors popular with the warlike Normans , and imported into this country by them. St George was recognised as the embodiment of devotion and Christian chivalry but did not enjoy universal appeal. Why the fuss then?

General observation of St George’s Day in England could have been introduced at any time since the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. This momentous event saw the decline of the party-hating puritan ascendancy that had attempted to suppress all religious and secular celebrations and also heralded the birth of the nation-state, with its emphasis on national, rather than regional or trade-specific identity. Since this time there has been a consistent patriotic lobby agitating for St George’s feast day to be given due public status. The advocates of such a move range from traditional-minded Anglicans to secular nationalists. Some lobbies, such as the long standing Royal Society Of St George have enjoyed royal patronage and high-level political support. The failure of this historical movement in their three century endeavour rests on the lack of consensus among Englishmen as to the relevance of St George himself, a controversy that has its roots in the high middle-ages. The partisans of St Edmund are still active among England ’s radical traditionalists. This St George’s Day just gone I saw the flag of St Edmund, a St George’s cross with the crown and arrows shield of St Edmund, flying over the beer garden of the Man of Kent in Rochester.

Personally I have no strong feelings whether St George’s Day should be made a public bank holiday or not. It would be nice, but I doubt it will actually change anything. A fresh wave of public sponsored St George’s Day events in 2008 & 2009 is very encouraging, and many people, including myself, already choose to take this day off as a holiday and make a point of celebrating it with friends and family. For most, another bank holiday will just be another occasion to swarm the pointless and characterless shopping malls that cover England like a disfiguring rash. Crucial to my understanding of the semi-mythical saint and his patronage of our dear land is the icon of St George slaying the dragon. This icon is so commonly depicted, on clothing, money, jewellery and in royal circles that we lose sight of its profound power. The image of St George overcoming his bestial foe is not only among the most potent of religious images, but it is a sacred heritage to contemporary England bequeathed to us by our Christian heritage. Never has the icon of St George been more relevant than it is today.

The familiar icon is directly based on the sacred image of St Michael, Prince of the heavenly Hosts, striking down the devil and trampling him underfoot. It is a simple and potent symbol; the divine power is victorious over the base anti-human forces of greed, darkness, ignorance, chaos, evil and worldliness personified as the devil. The great adversary is overcome and humans are freed from his bland, faceless tyranny. It is irrelevant to this discussion whether this profound symbol is of Christian origin or owes its genesis to Mediterranean , pre-Christian symbolism. The meaning is the same. The myth and the corresponding icon of George slaying the dragon and thereby rescuing the humankind once bound and prostrated to the fiend’s power, is a medieval development of the St Michael icon. A person, group, or dare I say a country, who takes this icon as their personal standard is consciously aligning themselves with the powers of justice, light, good and honour, and are committing themselves to oppose the forces of evil, death, oppression and injustice.

One would have to be naïve not to recognise that modern England is in the grips of the dragon. St George’s patrimony is enslaved to material greed, has been betrayed by self-seeking relativism and is ignorant of its spiritual heritage. We are in deep darkness and confusion. The English have drunk deeply of the poison chalice of pride, blindness and self-delusion. The dragon is consuming us at his leisure, and we are willingly offering ourselves up to his jaws.

On Thursday 23^rd April 2009 I on impulse wandered into the beautiful cathedral of St Andrew in Rochester , a stern Romanesque building that in my opinion ranks among the loveliest churches of England . I witnessed the end of a small, private ceremony in the nave, where the Bishop of Rochester was exchanging niceties with some officials in fancy looking livery. When the party had dispersed I took a look at the focus of the group. A handsome icon of St George and the Dragon had been presented to the Cathedral to mark the feast day, and stood on a small table in front of the main lectern with a single candle burning before it. Maybe it is time for us to again invoke the aid of our powerful defender and to invite St George to return and claim his patrimony.

Grave New World

2009-03-09T05:27:00.000-07:00

Darling of the chattering classes Barack Obama is well known for his opinion that science should be free from political interference. I wonder then how he reconciles this position with his decision to lift the ban on federal funding to human embryonic stem-cell research which has been in place since 2001. This will in practice release the flood gates of government funding for experimentation on human embryos, something which Obama has always been openly in favour of. Government funding for research on human embryos… That’s about as close to “political interference” as it gets isn’t it?

Fasting

2009-03-06T03:15:00.000-08:00

Along with prayer and almsgiving, fasting is one of the three traditional disciplines of Lent. Of the three, it is the one that has persisted in popular observance for the longest time. This week I have overheard many comments from people about “giving things up for Lent”, who are otherwise completely unreligious. Of course, these days, the concept of Lenten fasting has been largely divorced from its religious context, and has been erroneously equated with the popular fad for dieting. For obvious reasons, popular choices for Lenten denial include chocolate, alcohol, sweets and cigarettes, among both those of a religious and non-religious persuasion. We all have an innate desire to preserve our life, and to reduce our dependence on unhealthy or destructive habits, even if we lack the willpower to sustain our resolutions. This is why people still use Lent, birthdays and “New Year’s resolutions” as a stimulus to change. This is no bad thing, but in the process the meaning of Lent is obscured.

Lent is not about losing weight, exercising more or giving up ingrained habits, although used in the right way these tactics can be helpful. Lent is not about self-denial in order to effect material self-improvement. The essence of Lent is of renewing a deeper relationship with God through stripping away the accretions of sin and self-indulgence that gather around our souls like dust, and blind us from enjoying a proper relationship with the divine source. The Lenten journey is essentially a penitential one. By repenting of our manifold failures and making a true effort to turn away from our decadent material concerns, we aim to make a conversion of life, re-orienting ourselves towards God. This is why the Archbishop of Milan has recently called the young Catholic faithful to give up not cakes and coffee for Lent but text-messaging, facebook and their playstations. If this conversion of life leads us to give up smoking or lose the love-handles then that’s all well and good, but this is a secondary effect of the real purpose of fasting.

Shame Academy

2009-03-06T03:14:00.000-08:00

For me at least, an essential element of a free society is that its academic institutions are free from overt political bias or control. As such I am disappointed to see the growth of a rabid anti-Israel lobby among our academic and scientific institutions. The call by four hundred British academics to boycott an exhibition by Israeli scientists at the Science Museum is frankly disgusting. The call stopped short of calling for a total boycott of Israeli academics, a move promoted by a group of forty British radicals. The rationale offered by the boycotters is that Israeli Universities were “complicit” in the recent war in the Gaza strip. This suggestion is not only without any basis in fact, but also carries the implicit condemnation of Israel’s recent war of self-defence. Lets call a spade a spade here. Israel has been the subject of sustained attacks by radical Islamic terrorists for many years. It is a struggle that directly or indirectly affects us all. The vast majority of the Palestinian “freedom fighters” are not valiant partisans struggling for their own strip of land. The Palestinian militants are part of the world-wide Islamic Jihad aimed at the West in general. The peace process in the Holy Land has repeatedly foundered on the Palestinian’s unwillingness to renounce terrorism as a political instrument. This includes indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli civilians and suicide bombings as a matter of tactical policy rather than acts of desperate resistance. Israel’s immediate Cassus beli was the sustained rocket attacks on Israeli towns by Islamist militants supplied with arms through clandestine tunnel networks linking Gaza with Egypt. The Hamas regime in Palestine was aware of these things but was unable, or unwilling to do anything about it.

It is always an unqualified tragedy when innocents suffer the costs of war, and it is admirable that an international relief effort was quickly organised to assist beleaguered Palestinian civilians. It should be noted that Israel made no effort to hamper this humanitarian mission. In fact, they organised regular cease fires to facilitate aid work and allowed free traffic of aid vehicles across the border. However, we should not let compassion blind us to the fact that this was a just war. Israel took justifiable action after considerable provocation. The Palestinian militants are not heroes. These terrorists do not deserve the disturbing, unqualified support which they enjoy from large sections of the British intelligentsia. This support now extends not just to radicalised student demonstrators but to the heart of Britain’s “chattering classes”. It is a worrying development indeed if the “Red-Brown Alliance”, that bizarre rapprochement between the New Left and radical Islam has now spread into our influential academic and scientific communities.

The popular demonisation of Israel in the British press during the war was unpleasantly biased and insensitive. The almost clichéd comparison of the Israeli Defence forces with “Nazi Storm troopers” was as inaccurate as it was unnecessary.

European critics of Israel (I’m no unqualified supporter myself) should remember something very important. Israel is a fellow Western state with which we share a culture, economic interests, a political heritage and shared history. Most of its citizens are descendants of long established European Jews. Behind the petty terrorism of Hamas, Fatah etc is the sinister face of international Islamic terrorism, which cares no more for us than it does for Israel. The choice is quite simple. We can support Israel as a civilising influence and as a Western advocate in the Middle East or we can undermine her. If Israel is undermined, the geo-political balance of power in the region is likely to pass to Iran, a nation whose dominant culture is implacably hostile to Europe and all it stands for. Such an outcome should make even the loony left pause for thought.

Comedy Of Errors

2009-03-02T12:19:00.000-08:00

I am happy to endorse the boycott of Comic Relief/Red Nose Day on 17th March, as suggested by Fr Tim Finegan (Hermeneutic Of Continuity) and Catholic Action UK

The danger of generic charity giving on such a large scale is that we lose control over the charities we support, and our money often ends up supporting dubious organisations whose work around the world, no matter how good intentioned, does more harm than good. I encourage all patrons of the Theatre to boycott Red Nose day and all connected fundraising ventures.

Comic Relief is known to follow a liberal/modernist agenda in the causes and organisations it supports. For example, two of Comic Relief's major partners for African development are Oxfam and the African Women's Foundation, charities which openly support abortion and dubious methods of birth control.

Almsgiving is one of the traditional disciplines of Lent, so please donate the money you would have spent on Comic Relief to a worthy cause of your choice.

I especially reccommend the Society For the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) and the St Vincent De Paul Society (SVP)

If you are reading this and run a blog, spread the word! Post a simple "boycott" post along with the NO THANKS graphic above.

The Long Shadow of Auschwitz

2009-03-02T09:20:00.000-08:00

I was pleased to read that the controversial Bishop “Borat” Williamson had issued a formal written apology on 26th February for his comments regarding the Holocaust. Hopefully this will put an end to the storm of controversy which has erupted around the unfortunate Bishop, but, knowing the liberal press, I won’t hold my breath for the moment. I would like to try to bring a little clarity and balance to a controversy which rings warning bells on several different levels. Firstly, I greatly admire Bishop Williamson for issuing this apology. It was without qualms the right thing to do. His comments, in the capacity of a Bishop, had heaped negative press on the SSPX, Pope Benedict and the wider Church. However, the furore against Williamson has had the acrid hysterical character of a witch hunt from the outset, something which in itself is a worrying development. The bishop-baiters have largely taken out of context comments regarding Nazi Atrocities made to a Swedish journalist in an interview on Swedish Television (SVT) last November. On the strength of this, Williamson has been reviled as a Neo-Nazi, Holocaust-denying, Jew hating extremist. Looking at Williamson’s comments in the context of the whole interview, as well as his general position expressed throughout his public career, gives a different picture.

Richard Williamson is not a Nazi sympathiser. He is not anti-Semitic and he does not deny the Holocaust (although he avoids using the brand-name). He accepts that the Nazi regime is guilty of huge massacres and genocidal acts, against German dissidents, European Jews, Polish and Russian civilians and Russian prisoners of war. All he did was express reasonable doubt about the scale of atrocities against Jews reported in most orthodox accounts of the Holocaust. Bishop Williamson claims that this opinion had been formed in the late eighties, at a time when the evidence for Nazi atrocities was widely varying and often contradictory. There were also large holes in the official records. The reunification of Germany bought into the public attention more records which rectified this situation somewhat. However, if outright Holocaust denial is no longer supported by the historical facts, there are still no definitive answers as to how many victims were involved. That many hundreds of thousands or even millions of Jews were involved is not in doubt. Sadly we may never know the numbers or identities of many Russian Jews murdered in the woods of the Ukraine by SS execution squads, for instance. This is exacerbated by the fact that these murders were not always distinguished from the general brutalities of German anti-partisan operations behind the front line. This is one example of the difficulties of piecing together a precise and historically accurate picture of the Holocaust.

As a non-historian, Bishop Williamson’s personal opinion was that the number of Jews killed specifically because they were Jews, (as opposed to because they were Jewish homosexuals, Jewish communists, Polish-Jewish partisans etc) was considerably less than the official figures suggest. While not denying that these individuals were unjustly killed for one reason or another, he suggested that the lack of evidence could call the Holocaust, as a distinct political-historical phenomenon, into doubt. Based on the evidence available at the time, this was a legitimate position for Bishop Williamson to take, albeit a highly controversial one, and one that ignored the near-pathological obsession with Jews at the heart of National Socialism. His denial of the existence of gas chambers is more tenuous, being based on a 1988 report by American technician Fred Leuchter, which has since been widely and authoritatively discredited.

Williamson has never suggested that the Nazi atrocities never took place, that the Holocaust was a fabrication, or was part of a Jewish conspiracy, or any other such nonsense. He merely suggested that the dominant interpretation of that part of history may be inaccurate.

Williamson’s interviewer was no doubt aware of the SSPX’s reputation for harbouring anti-Semites and extreme right-wing sympathisers. While this may well be true, the right-wingers in the SSPX are more likely to the ultra-reactionary conservatives than Nazi sympathisers. I fail to see how any traditionalist Catholic could associate with such an anti-Christian, materialist political creed as Nazism. It is almost a social cliché that SSPX seminaries have been known to contain such anti-semitic tracts as the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I cannot comment on this. I’ll leave it to the SSPX seminary directors to decide what reading material should be in their libraries. However, as defenders of the faith it is important for priests to have a firm understanding of recent history, philosophy and social trends. The Protocols, dubious forgery though it is, had a profound influence on Twentieth century history. The Church cannot simply ignore its existence. The same goes for other controversial tracts. Many of the most erudite contemporary philosophers have an in-depth grasp of Nietzsche, Marx and Heidegger. Does this make our (Non-Anglican) seminaries hotbeds of Socialism, atheism and post-modernism? I am not denying that some individuals may hold dubious political beliefs within the SSPX, but I would like to caution against the temptation to condemn them or their members out of hand on face-value evidence.

This qualified defence of Richard Williamson does not excuse him of an act of shocking political naiveté. It is simply irresponsible for an authority figure to be airing such politically loaded opinions in the public sphere. Public figures, Bishops especially, have a ministry of public service, and although this will sometimes inevitably involve taking a counter-cultural position on matters of principle, I fail to see what good could possibly have come from Williamson airing his highly explosive amateur opinion. An intelligent man such as Richard Williamson should have known how divisive, controversial and upsetting these opinions would be. If he didn’t, one must ask whether Williamson is not too politically naïve to serve in the role of a Bishop. After all, there are more subtle ways of getting one’s point across. If he was aware, and gave his opinion in contempt of the furore it would inevitably cause, it raises serious concerns about his suitability for holding such a sensitive office. The debate instigated by Williamson about Nazi atrocities may have some broad historical relevance. However, the question at hand is whether the Church needs a maverick Bishop who is prepared to risk so much in order to make an individual political statement? I would argue that it doesn’t. The Holy Father’s strategy is one of moderation and persuasion. In this way he is restoring tradition to the centre of the Church, and is gradually advocating a conservative cultural and religious renaissance at the very heart of Europe, without arousing undue hostility. Reckless adventurers such as Williamson threaten to damage or undo this important work.

Of equal importance in all this is the question that is thrown up over the limits of valid historical enquiry. An obvious sensitivity must be shown toward survivors and victims of atrocities that are still within living memory, especially when the political questions surrounding these events have evidently not yet been resolved. On the other hand, it is essential that our recent past is dissected with rigorous historical scrutiny in order that the correct lessons are learned and an accurate interpretation of human action is bequeathed to coming generations who will not remember the events themselves. This is a feat of fine balance, and reminds us of the social obligations incumbent on historians. Discussions of the Nazi atrocities since the late 1970s have repeatedly violated this balance. The Williamson affair underlines the fact that tact, openness, tolerance and honesty are still very much lacking on all sides of this debate. I do not think it does credit to the self-honesty of the west that no discussion of the Nazi atrocities is permitted which diverges from the official consensus on the subject. If we cannot objectively analyse unsavoury opinions we will never move beyond our own prejudices in our search for the truth. If we are not careful, this attitude of censorship will play into the hands of those genuine extremists who see history only in terms of conspiracy. If the Holocaust was to come to be widely viewed in this way, it could only be detrimental to our future.

Whipping Toms

2009-02-24T05:29:00.000-08:00

Denizens of Leicester could have enjoyed an extra saucy treat as the sun went down on Shrove Tuesday. After cock fighting in the morning and football in the afternoon, young men would start to congregate in the Newarke area of town brandishing cow whips. It was customary knowledge that anyone foolish enough to still be in the area when the sun began to set would be fair game for the Whipping Toms, who would set about their unfortunate victims with their whips.

In their defence, whipping anyone above the knee was considered bad sportsmanship, and people could avoid a thrashing by kneeling down and paying a small fine. It was generally understood that folks still congregating in the area would be deliberately courting the attentions of the Whipping Toms, and would often come armed with clubs and stones for the purpose.

Needless to say, this long established custom fell foul of the Victorian obsession with public order, and it was banned through a private member's bill in the House of Commons in 1846. Youths who congregated in Newark the following Shrove Tuesday, hoping to defy the new law, were dispersed by the police.

The Trials Of Life

2009-02-24T02:49:00.000-08:00

Since my last post the snows have melted, the ground has (almost) dried up and the air is alive with the first promise of new life. Traditional wisdom tells us that Spring can only be really deemed to have set in once the vernal equinox has past, so we should be wary in dismissing the possibility of more harsh weather and heavy frosts. However, winter seems to have lost some of it's grip, and that is enough of an excuse for the denizens of the animal and plant world to start getting to grips with the struggle to breed. And why not... The nocturnal woods outside the Foxhole echoe with to the plaintive mating calls of frisky tawny owls, and the area's diurnal occupants are no less restive. This morning I strolled the couple of miles across farm tracks and soggy fields to the village of Cropwell Bishop. To the left I noticed two male hares having a high speed battle in the meadow and above the hedgerows to my right yellowhammers indulged in arial cat fights over prime nesting real estate. We should call to mind that though we are happy to breath a collective sigh of relief at the first signs of the coming spring, for our animal neighbours, "red in tooth and claw", this is a violent and stressful time of year. With the growth of urbanisation, the undoubted beauty of spring has been progressively "de-naturised", until it is thought of as nothing more than a pastoral ideal, a contemplative postcard painted for our own enjoyment.

We forget that for people too, this was once a time of impending hardship, amid the relief at winter's passing, and joy at the coming season of growth. With winter stocks depleted, the Lenten fast was often a physical necessity, mirroring wide spread spiritual practices. Before the seventeenth century, the dark threat of famine was often very real, especially if the previous year's harvst had been less than abundant. The juxtaposition of exuberence, relief, worry and anticipation was aptly expressed within the traditional sacred year.

Today is Shrove Tuesday, now famous for it's association with pancakes but once one of the most enjoyable feast-days of the whole year. Children would be released from their education or duties and would be allowed to indulge in the traditional English sports of Throwing at Cocks and Cock fighting. All in all not a good day for chickens. In some locations, Cookeels, hard buns served with chicken and dried fruit, would be the fare of the day. In other areas, many of the egg related customs we now associate more with Easter would have been celebrated today. These would of course included pancakes, egg and spoon races and painted egg competitions for the more genteel of children. Of course, for all ages of adulthood, partying and drinking would have been the order of the day!

The general carnival atmosphere of Shrove Tuesday was starkly contrasted with the physical and spiritual struggles associated with Lent. Lent is not as strictly marked as it used to be, but,, back in the day, it was no laughing matter. Dairy products, alcohol and meat were strongly restricted by both social pressure and the authority of the Crown. Everyone knew that the coming of spring meant hard work, hunger and little reward, as they prepared fervently for the coming of Easter, and of better times.

Ten Years

2009-02-14T02:43:00.001-08:00

Kathleen Parrett (nee: Lawson)
6th August 1924 - 14th February 1999

Wife. Mother. Grandmother

Just behind the door...

Requiscant in pace

Alchemy In Winter

2009-02-07T03:12:00.000-08:00

As I have no doubt hinted, the Foxhole in winter is a drafty, cold place, a bleak environment made hospitable by an abundance of warming alcoholic beverages. Tradition has bequeathed to us a whole menu of spiced winter cocktails, from the classic mulled wine to the once popular but now less well known lamb's Wool. This unappetising sounding concoction was a mulled cider brewed up with cloves and nutmeg. Into the cauldron was placed a skinned, baked apple. As it slowly disintegrated it gives the beverage the supposed texture of lamb's wool, albeit one which has been rolling in yellow snow. Its actually quite nice, and was once associated with St Agnes' day on 20th January. (Agnes, Agnus... Tenuous, but who cares? A drink is a drink! :-))

With this winter chill in mind, it should come as no real surprise that the Foxhole Brewery and Country Winery has been somewhat inactive of late. I was a little concerned how this latest cold snap will have affected my wines, (the latest, an elderberry and raisin wine is still in its early stages of fermentation, having been laid done just before Christmas) but everything seems ok so far. All is sleeping however, not abandoned.

The Lt Colonel of my Sealed Knot Regiment, The King's Lifeguard Of Foot, told me recently about an "instant wine" recipe which he had turned into an uproarious success. Intrigued by this apparent disregard for the subtle alchemical rules of wine making, I listened closer. My commanding officer had apparently made a delicious tasting young wine of 16% abv in about four weeks from cartons of orange juice! This used to be so popular at musters that he often used to sell thirty bottles or more. As soon as Colston Bassett thaws, be sure that Reynard will rise to this challenge. Oh yes. War has never been so much fun ;-).

Purification

2009-02-06T13:09:00.000-08:00

In the liturgical year, February is the traditional month of purification, so called after the major feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin (Candlemas) on 2nd February. It is a time of preparation, of wiping the slate clean in time for the introspective, penitential season of Lent. The ancient Hermetic dictum "as above, so below", contains much truth. The inner process of purification is mirrored in the outer world by what is often the harshest period of winter. This year, Our England has not left us disappointed. Last Sunday, 1st February was St Bride's Day. It happened to mark the departure of the incumbent parish priest at my wife's Church. This priest had officiated at my wedding and I count him among my personal friends, so my wife and I both attended his very moving and beautiful farewell service. The first flurries of snow were falling as we left the Church, snowflakes which would herald a nationwide deep freeze that continues to this day. A purification. It is always entertaining, as well as humbling, to see the sophisticated apparatus of the modern world bought to its knees by the relentless forces of nature. In my own little microcosm, this week has been an at times excruciating trial by ice, as the Foxhole's boiler buckled under the cold weather, leaving us without heating. The echoes of disruption have been felt by most people in the country.

In the surrounding countryside, the land has been transfigured into a desolate and beautiful winter wilderness which is rarely so widespread in modern England. Scarcely an urban street has not been adorned with a snowman or two and the rural vistas of lambs mid snowclad fields are simply magical. It is times of purification such as this which both teach us not to take the fleeting comforts of our pampered life for granted, and also reminds us of the transcendent beauty of the natural world, which still has the power to storm into our cossetted worlds and overwhelm us with its sublime majesty.

Unam Ecclesiam

2009-01-23T05:02:00.000-08:00

We are approaching the close of the Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity, a venerable institution, which in my opinion provides a positive model of ecumenism often missing from the modern Church. There are some Church groups and ecclesial communities who revel in their “separatist” credentials, but most Christians profess “one Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church” and consider Christian disunity to be a scandal. This is a remarkably positive assertion, considering the many centuries of fratricidal conflict, schism and acrimony that have rendered the Church, but what does it mean in practice? Ecumenism is putting this desire for reconciliation into practice “in the field”, as it were.

Practical Ecumenism, however nobly intentioned an enterprise, has yielded mixed blessings. The scars caused by the reformation ran deep, and it was only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that a de facto recognition and tolerance began to surface between the Catholic and Protestant camps. At this point, Ecumenism might stretch to prayers that Christians might be reconciled under one particular viewpoint, rather than invocations for divine retribution on heretics, but not much further than that. With the explosion of missionary activity across the world in the nineteenth century, protestants and Catholics began to cooperate more on a practical level in the field for the common goal of civilising the savage. Back home in Europe, a steady dialogue developed between the Churches, in the face of the common enemy of militant secularism. This became even more urgent during the long and brutal twentieth century, when Christians of all persuasions had to dig deep to resist the assault of the modern world.

In the nominally protestant Church Of England, a strong Catholic revival, the Oxford Movement, flowered in the second half of the nineteenth century and was for a time the dominant force within the Church, until inertia, defections to Roman Catholicism and institutional resistance stifled the vitality of the movement. A similar movement, though on a smaller scale, blossomed within the state Lutheran Churches of Germany, Norway and Sweden. The Catholic Church too, seemed more open to dialogue with the schismatic branches of the Western Church as well as with its estranged Eastern sister. All was moving in a very positive direction until Pope Leo XIII released his Apostolicae Curae in 1893, condemning Anglican orders as invalid. This came as a shock to many at the time, both within the Catholic Church and the Church of England, who were expecting the Pope to recognise Anglican orders, to be followed by a formal reunification of the Churches. It was this set back which underlined the still existing doctrinal differences between Christians and got people thinking about the obstacles they faced and how to supersede them. It is at this point that the modern Ecumenical movement was born.

In the Church of England the Catholic movement was split three ways by Pope Leo’s bombshell announcement. Some simply upped sticks and went over to the Universal Church. Among these were some of the most talented English Catholics of the century, including John Henry Newman, Robert Benson and Ronald Knox. Another faction, which persists today as the Anglo-Catholic movement, refused to recognise the Pope’s verdict and persisted in cultivating the Catholic tradition within Anglicanism, ignoring the ultimate ecumenical implications of this position. The third child of the Oxford Movement came to be known as Anglican Papalism, a Catholic tendency which persisted in seeking reunion with the mother Church.

In 1908 the Anglo-Papalist Catholic League launched the “Church Unity Octave”, a week of prayer for atonement and unification which was such a success that it was progressively adopted by a large number of denominations, including all the major Episcopal churches and the Roman Catholic Church. It is still very widely observed today, this in itself being a triumph for the Ecumenical movement. To what extent have these prayers been answered?

This is where the question of Ecumenism falls on stony ground. What should be the ultimate goal of Church unity? In the twentieth and twenty first centuries, the Western Church has been relentlessly assaulted by the heresy of modernism. The effects of this cancer are immediately visible in both the Catholic Church and the Church of England, with liberal “folk masses” now being the rule in the former and homosexuals and women “priests” ruling the latter. Modernism has also expressed itself through the Ecumenical movement. One might even say that the Ecumenical movement has exacerbated the effects of the modernist heresy by introducing a dangerous relativism to matters of Church doctrine. Ecumenical activities have always had the tendency to reduce spiritual matters to the level of the lowest common denominator, rather than to aim at raising participants to a new level of unity. This reductive ecumenism is the polar opposite of what the Catholic League originally had in mind.

In the place of the stripping away of all the riches of centuries of Christian tradition in the search for unity, The League looked to a positive ecumenism, when the varied voices of Christendom could once again sing in unison. For good or ill, the reformation spawned a myriad of various protestant sects. Many of them took an aspect of the once unitive Christian religion and developed it, reminiscent of the tricks evolution plays on animals caught in a specialised environmental niche. For some, this was their love for the Bible, for others, a rich vernacular liturgy, for others still, contemplative prayer etc. These will only find balance and realisation again within a united Christendom. This is why I agree with the League’s original goal of seeking visible unity with the See of St Peter. This is a positive ecumenism and a worthy goal, a Church founded on “unity over uniformity” Exactly as the medieval church had been, in fact, before the ruinous centuries of the reformation. Anglicans especially are invited not to jettison the liturgical and musical heritage which makes them distinctive, but to come back home with these treasures intact. The “Anglican Usage” parishes of the Catholic Church in the USA give an example of how this can be done. The centuries old tradition of Eastern Catholic Churches in full communion with Rome gives another hope to the future of Ecumenism.

The Catholic League still exists, under the name “Unitas”, and its members may take hope from some grass roots collaborations between Anglicans and Catholics which give an alternative Ecumenism to “praise services”, Taize chants and acoustic guitars. Some major cathedrals, such as St Paul's and Westminster in London have organised choir exchanges this week. Other developments include Catholic Masses being hosted in ancient Anglican Churches. However, there is no indication that the modernist heresy is slowing down. The last couple of years have seen the beginnings of a spiritual, traditionalist renewal within the Catholic Church but, sadly, liberals are still in control of the Anglican Communion at its highest levels. The Church of England’s pro-homosexual stance, along with the scandalous perversion of Holy Orders evinced in the ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate, have further splintered the Church and have botched all hopes of eventual reunion. The future of the ecumenical movement in England seems to rest on the emergence of a new Oxford Movement within the Church of England to end the liberal ascendancy and complement a general renewal of tradition throughout Christendom. This goal is worth a prayer or two this week.

An Omen Filled Season

2009-01-22T04:28:00.000-08:00

A recurring theme in January is the careful scrutinising of mundane phenomena to discern the path of future events. In a predominantly rural society, where so much depends on the capricious patterns of the weather, much import would naturally be given to trying to predict the clemency of the year ahead. Admittedly, using a system of simple superstitions associated with Saint’s days might not appear the best way to achieve this, but even in our age of “scientific” meteorology, weather predictions are often scarcely more accurate than those obtained by divination.

Today, St Vincent’s day, is supposed to augur well for the coming year if it is sunny. I am not sure if the opposite is true, that rain on St Vincent’s Day is believed to be inauspicious? I hope not, as at the time of writing in Nottingham it is decidedly soggy outside. Several saints days in the sacred year are notable as predictive of future weather conditions. These appear at pivotal times of the agricultural year. The feat of the Conversion of St Paul on 25th January was host to an identical tradition. Candlemas, at the beginning of February also has weather connotations, and the famous St Swithun’s day in July is also famous for divining the weather.

In the case of St Swithun, a colourful legend has developed to explain why his day is important in determining the weather of the coming months. I can’t find anything connected with poor old St Vincent of Saragossa, an obscure saint if ever there was one, to explain why sunshine on his feast day should be seen as a good omen. Maybe it is pure coincidence?

Oh well, lets just put up our umbrellas and hope for the best!

St Agnes' Day

2009-01-21T09:43:00.000-08:00

St Agnes was a fourth century Roman martyr who enjoyed a thriving cult throughout medieval Europe, including England, right up to the Reformation, and beyond, when St Agnes remained the focus for a few bizarre superstitions.

In life, the saintly young lady refused to be wed to the man her wealthy father had chosen for her, opting instead to preserve her virginity and commit her life to Christ. Unimpressed, her doting father did the only thing a concerned parent could do in the situation, and consigned her to a brothel! Several disappointed clients later it was clear that the obstinate lass was not prepared to compromise her virginity for any man. There really was no further option other than to have the unfortunate Agnes tortured to death.

In death, Agnes became the patron saint of marriage and those searching for a husband. Quite how a woman who preferred death to marriage came to be invoked in this way is quite beyond me, but it proves once again that popular traditions do not always develop along strictly logical lines. Her feast day accordingly became one of a handful of occasions in the sacred year to be associated with divination. We have already touched on this on New Year’s Day. Other notable occasions were St Mark’s Day and All Hallow’s Eve, which will be dealt with in due course.

The form this divination took varied from place to place, but was most strongly associated with teenage girls and young women. On her patronal day, St Agnes was believed to be able to grant young women a vision of their future husband on the fulfilment of a simple ritual. In one form the postulant would lay out a row of pins in the earth and then withdraw them one by one, storing them in her sleeve, all the while singing paternosters. In another tradition, the hopeful romantic would sew her left garter to her right stocking whilst intoning the following verse:

'I knit this knot, this knot I knit,
To know the thing I know not yet,
That I may see
The man that shall my husband be,
Not in his best or worst array,
But what he weareth every day;
That I tomorrow may him ken
From among all other men.'

The girl would then go immediately to bed without looking over her shoulder. If she was to be wed, her husband to be was to visit her in a dream and gift her with a kiss. This once popular folk-blend of hormonal teenage sensuality and innocent romanticism was evocatively captured by Keats in his 1819 poem “The Eve Of St Agnes”, written shortly after his own engagement.

'They told her how, upon St. Agnes's Eve,
Young virgins might have visions of delight,
And soft adorings from their loves receive
Upon the honey'd middle of the night,
If ceremonies due they did aright;
As, supperless to bed they must retire,
And couch supine their beauties, lily white;
Nor look behind, nor sideways, but require
Of Heaven with upward eyes for all that they desire.

'Out went the taper as she hurried in;
Its little smoke, in pallid moonshine, died:
She closed the door, she panted, all akin
To spirits of the air, and visions wide.
No utter'd syllable, or, woe betide!
But to her heart, her heart was voluble,
'Paining with eloquence her balmy side;
As though a tongueless nightingale should swell
Her throat in vain, and die, heart-stifled, in her dell.

'A casement high and triple arced there was,
All garlanded with carver imag'rice
Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot grass,
And diamended with panes of quaint device
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,
As are the tiger-moth's deep damask'd wings;
And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,
And twilight saints, with dim emblazonings,
A shielded 'scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings.

Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast,
As down she knelt for Heaven's grace and boon;
Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,
And on her silver cross soft amethyst,
And on her hair a glory, like a saint.

Her vespers done,
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant bodice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,
In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,
But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.

Soon, trembling in her soft and chilly nest,
In sort of wakeful swoon, perplex'd she lay;
Until the poppied warmth of sleep oppress'd
Her soothed limbs, and soul fatigued away;
Flown, like a thought, until the morrow day,
Blissfully haven'd both from joy and pain;
Clasp'd like a missal where swart Paynims pray;
Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain,
As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again.

Stol'n to this paradise, and so entranced,
Porphyro gazed upon her empty dress,
And listened to her breathing.

He took her hollow lute,—
Tumultuous,—and, in chords that tenderest be,
He played an ancient ditty, long since mute,
In Provence call'd "La belle dame sans mercy:"
Close to her ear touching the melody;—
Wherewith disturb'd, she utter'd a soft moan:
He ceased—she panted quick--and suddenly
Her blue affrayed eyes wide open shone:
Upon his knees he sank, pale as smooth-sculptured stone.

'Her eyes were open, but she still beheld,
Now wide awake, the vision of her sleep:
There was a painful change, that nigh expell'd
The busses of her dream so pure and deep,
At which fair Madeline began to weep,
And moan forth witless words with many a sigh;
While still her gaze on Porphyro would keep;
Who knelt, with joined hands and piteous eye,
Fearing to move or speak. she look'd so dreamingly.

"Ah, Porphyro! "said she, "but even now
Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear,
Made tuneable with every sweetest vow;
And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear:
How changed thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear!
Give me that voice again, my Porphyro,
Those looks immortal, those complainings dear!
Oh, leave me not in this eternal woe,
For if thou diest, my love, I know not where to go."

'Beyond a mortal man impassion'd far
At these voluptuous accents, he arose,
Ethereal, flush'd, and like a throbbing star,
Seen 'mid the sapphire heaven's deep repose,
Into her dream he melted, as the rose
Blendeth its odour with the violet,
Solution sweet: meantime the frost-wind blows,
Like Love's alarum pattering the sharp sleet
Against the window-panes.

"Hark! 'tis an elfin-storm from faery land,
Of haggard seeming, but a boon indeed.
Arise—arise! the morning is at hand;—
Let us away, my love, with happy speed.

And they are gone: ay, ages long ago
These lovers fled away into the storm.'

Old Habits Die Hard

2009-01-21T09:40:00.000-08:00

As I’ve mentioned before in this blog, England was a little slow off the mark in adopting the new “Gregorian” Calender. It wasn’t until 1752 that England fell into line with the rest of Europe and ditched its unwieldy and increasingly inaccurate Julian calendar. “And why not”, some might say. After all, this wasn’t the first time, and certainly wouldn’t be the last time, that England would prevaricate about falling into line with customs adopted by mainland Europe.

One thing is certain. The change of calendar played havoc with England’s traditional sacred year. Many traditional customs were suddenly stranded in the new calendar, all of a sudden divorced from their calendrical context. This can make studying English tradition a little problematic at times. Also, as tradition is antithetical to sudden, radical and arbitrary change, many customs died out around this time. They simply couldn’t adapt quickly enough to avoid extinction. Of course, many traditions survived, but a theme which crops up time and time again is that of groups of hard-line traditionalists persisting in celebrating their festivals on the old date.

Within a generation or two most of these anomalies had disappeared, but a few “old style” traditions persisted for a bizarrely long time. For instance, as recently as the early twentieth century, a few people were still celebrating “Old Christmas Day” on 6th January. Rural Gloucestershire in 1906 was the site of the last reported observance. Quite why this persisted so long is unknown. Possibly “Old Christmas Day” also implied a reaction against the innovations bought in by the new-fangled “Victorian Christmas”? Following logically from this, die-hards who celebrated Christmas on 6th January would also mark 17th January as Twelfth Night. Accordingly, “Old Twelfth Night” enjoyed the same traditions of partying and wassailing as the more commonly observed end of the Christmas period, albeit among a localised and dwindling group.

I assumed that any remnant of “Old Twelfth Night” would be long since dead, but I was wrong! A friend from my village informed me that he attended a wassailing event on 17th January in Knock Hill in Somerset, an event held at this time every year. It is quite amazing that a half-remembered “Old Twelfth Night” tradition could have survived in a forgotten rural corner of the country, a whopping 256 years after the adoption of the Gregorian calendar and a good century after Twelfth Night itself was reduced to little more than the day we all take our Christmas decorations down

Beauty Of Holiness

2009-01-21T09:39:00.000-08:00

Like many of England’s cathedrals, Old St Paul’s had a rough time at the hands of the reformation. The once magnificent rood screen and high altar were deconstructed and its glorious collection of images, statues and relics, along with the shrine of St Eorcanwald, were destroyed. To add insult to injury, the nave was also opened up as a public thoroughfare, bypassing the labyrinth of trading streets one once needed to traverse in order to bypass the Cathedral. The result was that this venerable bastion of English Christianity became partially secularised. Tombs, shrines and former chantry chapels now played host to all manner of shops, food stalls, and even a playhouse! St Pauls became a notoriously raucous den of thieves, gamblers and con artists. Somehow the religious life of the Cathedral limped on amid the din, but it must have been like trying to hold a prayer service in the middle of a busy marketplace. The current building of, course is a “new” building, erected on the site of the old Cathedral after the devastation of the great fire of 1666. New St Paul’s cathedral is one of the architectural wonders of the world, so it needs no introduction. It is apparently one of the largest churches in Christendom. I accordingly gave it central place in my pilgrimage on Friday. The question I had in my mind was whether St Paul’s had been able to make a spiritual come back from the sorry twilight decades of the old Church? Had Holy London again taken root in one of its most ancient spiritual centres? Well, Christopher Wren’s masterpiece is impressive, there’s no doubt about that. The Eastern inspired murals and craftsmanship of the Chancel and High Altar are second to none. The impeccably crafted tombs and memorial statues are concordant with the overall feel of the building, so that the Cathedral avoids the crowded “mausoleum” atmosphere which afflicts Westminster Abbey, for instance. There were even a couple of images set up in the nave fronted by stands of votive candles, a concession to Catholic sensibilities unthinkable when the Cathedral was built. However, something was missing. St Paul’s was impressive in the same way as other wonderful London buildings, such as the Museum of Natural History, or the Old British Library Reading Room, are impressive. Despite the mind-bogglingly awesome central space and dome, the Cathedral lacked the gravitas immediately apparent in the older, gothic Churches. The genius of the old Cathedrals was that, on entrance, the very geometry of the building drew one’s heart and mind, in stages, towards God. The sacred focus at the very summit of this was the elevation of the consecrated host at the High Altar beyond the rood screen, the very climax of Christian life, and of the church itself. As a protestant cathedral, the architectural focus on the climax of the mass is missing. One’s attention is drawn not to the High Altar but to the vast central space, where spiritual focus is dissipated in a haze of disorientating awe. The New Cathedral also hadn’t fully lost its marketplace atmosphere of the sixteenth century. Much of the baroque nave felt more like a museum than a church, and I feel the £11 entrance fee crossed the line between necessary expenses and avarice. (I have similar feelings about the £12 charged to access Westminster Abbey)

If Holy London wasn’t immediately apparent in St Paul’s, it certainly was in other areas. The great Catholic Westminster Cathedral was one of the highlights of my trip. It was a great privilege to be able to attend two solemn masses in this beautiful church, and to witness first hand the spiritual renewal in the church known to advocates and critics as the “Reform of the Reform” Both masses I witnessed followed the “Novus Ordo” of Pope Paul VI, but had been re-spiritualised with the inclusion of many beautiful Latin and choral elements. From the beating spiritual heart of Catholic England, these innovations are slowly beginning to filter into the provinces. In the long run this may be the most important effect of Pope Benedict’s rehabilitation of the traditional mass, not the reintroduction of the Tridentine mass itself, but the positive influence that sublime form of worship has on the celebration of the Novus Ordo

Forlorn Hope

2009-01-19T12:04:00.000-08:00

Before people get too excited about the upcoming inauguration of the first non-white American president, I'd like to remind theatregoers that Obama has consistently been in favour of full term abortion, by which the unfortunate babies are often simply left to starve to death. This is infanticide by any other name.

Call me a cynic but I do not believe Obama's election heralds a brave new era any more than Tony Blair's much feted election to the British premiership did in 1997, and we all know how that turned out.

Holy London II

2009-01-16T02:37:00.000-08:00

A pilgrim's guide to some lesser known medieval gems...

St Andrew Undershaft
St Mary Axe at Leadenhall St, EC3 Aldgate Tube

Dedicated to the patron saint of Scotland, St Andrew dates back to 1147. Those of us who earn our keep by the pen will be particularly interested in the tomb of John Stow, a tailor by trade, whose detailed account of London in 1598 was, perhaps, the first Amateur Historian's Guide to Medieval & Tudor London. Keeping Stow company are the remains of the painter Hans Holbein the Younger. Although St Andrew was one of four City churches to survive both the Great Fire and World War II unscathed, our era has not been so kind. Terrorist attacks in the early 1990s severely undermined the ancient structure, which has only recently been re-opened for public use.

St Bride's
Bride's Lane off Fleet St., EC4 Blackfriar's or Chancery Lane Tube

Disregard, if you will, that the distinctive "wedding-cake" structure is Wren's, and not a tad medieval. The atmosphere of St Bride's is ancient and authentic. Indeed, parts of the crypt are so ancient and authentic, you may well feel the hair on the back of your neck rise! Our Roman, Saxon and Celtic ancestors worshiped on this site as early as the 6th century and tradition holds that St Brides was the first church in London to practice the Christian faith. Its significance was not lost on the monarch; in 1205, the Curia Regis, principal court of the country, was held at St Brides. King John held his 1210 parliament here and in 1375, Edward III issued a writ confirming the Charter of the Guild of St Bride. Of course, it's appropriate that this "cathedral of Fleet Street" was the site of the City's first printing press, and that Wynkyn de Worde, successor to London's first printer, William Caxton, was buried before the high altar.

St Giles Cripplegate
Fore St, EC2 Barbican or Moorgate Tube

One of the oldest churches in the City, St Giles was established in 1090 as a lazar house by Henry I's consort "Good Queen Maude" (a.k.a. Matilda, a.k.a. Edith, but that's another story altogether). Evidence of an earlier Saxon-era chapel has been found on the site. The current church was built in 1340, although massive construction in 1545 and post-World War II has left only the ancient tower intact. Inside, you'll find several important tombs, including those of author John Foxe, naval expert Sir Martin Frobisher, and the poet John Milton. Sir Thomas Moore's parents were married at St Giles, as was the famous Elizabethan actor Edward Allen. Be certain to investigate the noteworthy ruins of the Roman bastion and ancient City Wall that border the churchyard

St Helen's Bishopsgate
Great Helen St, EC3 Liverpool Street Tube

The largest surviving ancient church in London, St Helen's boasts a rather interesting design, the result of it once having been two separate houses of worship. The first was a 13th-century parish church, dedicated to the mother of Emperor Constantine. The second was the chapel of a Benedictine convent. On the convent side of the church is a "squint", which allowed the nuns to observe the parish masses. (This small window on secular life was apparently not enough to sate the good sisters, who eventually had to be admonished to "abstain from kissing secular persons," a habit to which they had become "too prone".) Among the attractions here are several handsome brasses, including one of a woman in heraldic mantel.

St Katherine Cree
86 Leadenhall St at Creechurch Lane, EC3 Tower Hill or Aldgate Tube

One of eight medieval churches to survive the Great Fire of 1666, St Katherine's was, nevertheless, rebuilt by Inigo Jones in 1628. The original church predated 1280, when it stood on the grounds of Holy Trinity Priory. The only portion of the church that dates from medieval times is the lower portion of the tower - and this, in fact, was originally part of a different building! However, if you are interested in ancient guilds and livery companies, step inside and admire the ceiling. The striking coats of arms painted there are replicas of those awarded in ancient times to specific trades.

St Magnus Martyr
Lower Thames St, EC3 Monument Tube

Throughout the Middle Ages, the St Magnus green was an important gathering place where local citizens congregated, shouting down official heralds as they read royal proclamations or ogling criminals as they bore their public humiliation. The church was closely linked with Old London Bridge - in fact, the approach to the bridge used to pass right through the porch of the church building. As you enter the gates, you can still see the stones from Old London Bridge, as well as remains from a Roman wharf. A wonderful display of the medieval bridge is on display as soon as you enter the church. The building, alas, is yet another product of Wren's.

St Margaret Pattens
Rood Lane, East Cheap, EC3 Monument Tube

Rebuilt by Christopher Wren (yawn) in 1687, Margaret Pattens still possesses a number of relics from its ancient past. Look for the "1067" inscription on the old stone porch.

St Michael Paternoster
Royal College Hill off Thames St Cannon Street Tube

One of the City of London's most glorified characters must be Dick Whittington. Four-time Lord Mayor of London, Whittington's true life and personality are hard to separate from myth, despite the awe-inspiring bequests he made to the City upon his death and the plethora of worshipful stories told in his honor. However, we do know that St Michael is very much "Dick Whittington's Church" and the connection is most interesting. Although the church dates from 1219, Whittington is credited with founding it, for his generous endowments enabled the church to greatly expand in the 1400s. Whittington approached the project as a small "religious village", complete with almshouse and a College of Priests. He established his own residence next door. This is a fellow who must have lived by the creed, "once is not enough!". Not only was he Lord Mayor of London four times, but he was buried at St Michael's on three separate occasions. Unfortunately, his grave has been missing since the Great Fire, but his memory lives in a beautiful stained glass window on the west wall.

St Olave's
Hart Street Seething Lane and Fenchurch St, EC3 Tower Hill Tube

Originally founded in the 11th century, the current church dates from 1450. Having survived both fire and bombs, this charming church - often described as a "country church in the heart of the City"- has an evocative churchyard and numerous Tudor memorials. Perhaps the oddest "person" said to be buried here is Mother Goose. Church documents record her interment on 14th September 1586.

St Sepulchre-Without-Newgate
Giltspur St and Holborn Viaduct, EC1 St Paul's Tube

One of the most impressive landmarks in a neighborhood of important buildings, the 15th-century Church of the Holy Sepulchre has long been linked with the Old Bailey, just opposite. For centuries, a dour churchman would take to the streets outside the church and ring the sorrowful handbell of "inspiration" for prisoners on the eve of execution. In the morning, the tower's tenor bell would toll their execution.

St Ethelburga
Bishopsgate

This is the smallest of the City churches, founded in 1250 and rebuilt in 1390. A mere 51' x 30', this is the perfect example of a medieval parish church, designed to accommodate a family, their household and, perhaps, a handful of neighbors

Holy London

2009-01-16T01:56:00.000-08:00

Holy London?? Has Reynard lost his mind, you might say? For many, myself included, the mention of London evokes images of a cesspool of filth, materialism and decadence. As a country boy at heart, who adores the tranquility and silence of being close to nature, London is, in many ways close to my idea of hell. The noise, the beggars, the shallow commercialism, the avarice of the financial quarters, the cacophony of a myriad of foreign tongues, all helps to create a nightmarish vista redolent of Dante's Inferno or Bunyan's Vanity Fair. You might expect me now to hark back to a supposed golden age when it was all different, when London's elegant streets echoed to the sound of monastic chants and gentle harpsichords...

Well I won't, because it would be untrue. From my reading of history, London has always been dirty, over-priced, over-crowded and generally overrated. However, that wasn't, and isn't, the whole story. From an early age, beneath the film of filth and grime, there has been an underlying alternative identity. Medieval Londoners were proud of their city's rich religious heritage, and rightly so. London was a focus of pilgrimage right up to the Reformation. In the eyes of its inhabitants, this multi-faceted capital was "Holy London" in a very real sense.

William FitzStephen's Descriptio Londoniae of 1183 vividly describes a thriving pilgrim traffic and native religious life. England's capital, one of the greatest cities in Western Europe then, as now, was home to no fewer than 13 monastic Churches and 100 parish churches. With an approximate population of 30,000, this was an impressive concentration of religious institutions.

London shares in the Christian history of England almost from the word go. St Paul's Cathedral was established very shortly after the conversion of Kent. The great old Cathedral, with its towering wooden spire (destroyed by lightening in 1561) was once considered one of the wonders of the world. The Church itself was home to one of the great pilgrim cults of London, containing the shrine of St Eorcenwald. The second great pilgrim centre of London was, of course, the shrine of St King Edward The Confessor, situated in the great Royal Monastery at Westminster. Other highlights included the vast monastic complex of St Mary Overy (now Southwark Cathedral) and the establishment of the Knights Templar just to the west of the old city.

All this has inspired me to take a pilgrimage to the old capital. The character of London, and of the English themselves, underwent a tumultuous transformation in the century and a half following Henry VIII's ill fated schism and much which was good and sacred about English cultural life was lost or crippled. Holy London was one of the first casualties of the reformation. In a quiet way, though, this golden thread continues to this day. I lived and worked in London for many years and often failed to notice the treasured ecclesiastical heritage all around me, jewels which survived both reformation and great fire. It is this London, Holy London, which I am seeking to capture on my pilgrimage, and which I hope will make a steady reawakening in popular consciousness. An expression of the enduring strength of Holy London is the magnificent Westminster Cathedral, just over a century old but one of the undisputed ecclesiastical masterpieces of the city. Accordingly I'm intending to begin my pilgrimage with mass there later on today.

"The Ploughman Feeds Us All..."

2009-01-10T10:46:00.000-08:00

It was decreed by the Council of Tours in 567 AD that no one should be expected to work on the twelve days between Christmas and the Epiphany. These days were to be given over to "prayer and thanksgiving" As we have seen, the feast of Christmas increased in importance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, wheres the once colossal bender associated with the "Twelfth Night", the secular arm of the Epiphany celebration, has faded into almost nothing. Whatever the reckoning, by this time, our archetypal "traditional" farm worker of yore will be busy polishing his plough and dusting off his smock for a new agricultural year. Plough Monday, the first Monday after Epiphany, was the official start of the farming working year. What better excuse for a celebratory piss up!?

Plough Monday is an old, old festival, with that idiosyncratic mix of the bizarre, the sacred and the profane which characterises many of the fixtures of the sacred year. We know that Plough Monday was celebrated before the Norman Conquest. The eleventh century Aecerbot records a para-liturgical blessing of the plough and the soil which must have involved many members of the community and taken most of the day. It was never authorised by the Church and involved some quasi-pagan elements, but these have often been exaggerated. The important thing to note is the tacit involvement of all sections of the community in invoking luck on the coming year's agricultural endeavours. In the fifteenth century it was the custom to keep candles burning in the parish church all day to invite God's favour upon the village's labour. The town plough, that piece of equipment reserved to be loaned to the poorest members of the community, was kept in the Church during the day and no doubt was the focus of topical sermons and propitiatory collects. Plough Guilds grew up in some areas whose job it was to raise enough money to keep these lights going every year, to maintain the town plough and to contribute to church funds. Guildsmen would lead fundraising drives throughout the locality on this day, accompanied by the plough to facilitate this. As is to be expected, a certain amount of jollity and pageant grew to accompany this activity. By extension, "Plough Sunday" and "Plough Tuesday" inevitably grew up to prolong the festivities, but never widely caught on. At the reformation, religious guilds were suppressed and the plough services, with their real-world focus and beautiful array of lights were deemed "superstitious" and were abolished, another victim of the puritanical heresies which ravaged English society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Many of the secular elements of Plough Monday again became popular in the eighteenth century, either through conscious reinvention or through residual survival in some communities. Groups of young men, known variously as "Plough Jags", "Plough Witchers" or "Plough Bullocks" would rampage through the streets rattling collecting tins and getting riotously drunk. Sometimes the plough was left at home, but often it was bought along for the ride, with the latent threat that t would be used to furrow the front yard of any would be benefactors who didn't spare a few coins for the ale fund. These revels were often directed by a "fool" and the Plough Jags habitually dressed up for the occasion. Burly farm labourers would don women's clothing, or blackface, or would stuff straw in their shirts to give the appearance of hunch backs. These raucous but ultimately harmless traditions were tolerated in the heyday of rugged liberty, but started to fall out of favour when the social tone became more moralistic towards the end of the nineteenth century. The Plough Monday celebrations were increasingly regulated or suppressed altogether. The rise of mechanised farming sounded the death knell for this tradition along with many others. Attempts by the Royal Agricultural Society and the Church Of England to revive the religious aspects of the festival after the second world war were short lived. Where they were successful in reinvigorating the Harvest Festival, with Plough Monday they failed. Today, few people have even heard of it.

The Birds

2009-01-07T12:53:00.000-08:00

I love global warming, don’t you? I enjoy this time of year, especially when we have a “proper winter” like we’re having now. The large artificial pond in Rushcliffe Country Park , where I walk every day, has been frozen over almost continuously since the beginning of December. I enjoy watching the birdlife of the park huddled around the scant and shifting patches of open water. In winter the pond attracts a fascinating range of ducks and wildfowl, and this year is no exception. This winter I’ve seen Little Grebes, Shovellers, Tufted Ducks and Cormorants visit the pond, along with its regular role call of swans, mallards, coots and the solitary heron. My favourites though have to be the large flocks of black headed gulls which call the park home. They must be among the most cantankerous members of the avian kingdom, always cawing, squabbling and fighting over food and mates. It was the feast of the Epiphany yesterday, and as I enjoyed my usual stroll I recalled the example of King Herod, and the object lesson it gives us on the futility of human grandiosity. The parochial jealousy of Herod on the nativity of Jesus betrayed a complete misunderstanding not only of the role and ministry of Our Lord but also of the true nature of life itself. Herod’s involvement in the drama of the Gospel narrative is the only reason history has remembered him. In his day he was an unremarkable sub-king clinging on to a small strip of land in the armpit of the Roman Empire . The real political power he enjoyed was negligible, as he was in reality a subordinate of the Roman Provincial Governor. He has bequeathed little or no memory of his existence to history, except the portrait of a petty, vicious, little man, hopelessly entangled in limited and meaningless political concerns. The history of the world contained, and contains, thousands of such individuals. Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il and Ide Amin come to mind, along with other countless droves of nameless kinglets and despots who have escaped the pages of human history, un-mourned and unremembered. How petty and senseless their concerns seem when the larger vista of human events is bought into view. And what of the bigger players? Where are the Ceasars, the kings, the great and the good of that forgotten age? They are gone, dust, their efforts of no more lasting consequence that those of the odious Herod. The same will happen to our own civilisation. From dust it came, to dust it will return. In the big scheme of things, we are all just so many gulls, squabbling over our own little patch of ice, an empty possession which in a very short time will be gone. It is useful to use the mythological and religious mosaic of the sacred year as an opportunity to turn away from our petty concerns and to turn our minds to the vastness of time, and to God. This is an experience as enlightening, and comforting, as it is humbling.

Anatomy Of Melancholy

2009-01-07T12:50:00.000-08:00

2009 is less than a year old and already the atmosphere of social pessimism about the coming year is almost stifling. The question I will ask is when did so many people suddenly become economic experts? Has the London School Of Economics turned out an unprecedented number of graduates (into the most unlikely of places) this year? Or has the general public simply been reading up on its Friedman, Smith and Keynes? Whatever the answer may be, wherever I have been this year, people are convinced that the 2009 will set the stage for a calamitous economic meltdown. The theories vary from mild recession to a full scale socio-economic collapse, replete with the veiled echoes of distant jackboots. Every possible scenario in the middle ground is covered by the great experts of the general public. The truth is, we don’t know what is going to happen. We can only study precedent and note that the more people worry about these things, the worse they usually get. People don’t actually know very much about economics, but they forge strong opinions anyway. The press is full of non-economists giving gloomy predictions about a “dark and terrible year” to come. These sentiments are then mindlessly parroted by members of the public at all levels of society. The popular media is saturated with quasi-apocalyptic ruminations about the “credit crunch”, a term now used completely out of its original (and correct) context as a contraction of available financial credit. “The Credit Crunch” is now a catch-all phrase for a looming, indeterminate economic malaise, a cultural bogey, in other words. That many are facing hard times is indisputable. That there has been an unpleasant confluence of economic maladies over the past 18 months is also well established. However, media critics, and by extension the general public, need to take some responsibility for the future and start seeing things in their proper context. Journalists do have a certain social responsibility beyond selling newspapers or catching viewers. They have it within their grasp to set an optimistic tone that could help our country weather any coming storm, rather than propagating a viral pessimism which runs the risk of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Our economy is based on the absurd conceit that if we continue to consume luxury goods, everything will keep ticking over. Most sectors of the economy are directly or indirectly geared to supporting the retail market of unnecessary luxuries. If people stop consuming, the whole thing folds. It is the fear of the consumer economy disintegrating which is now persuading people to withdraw their money from the economy, the very thing which could hasten such a collapse! I personally find the consumer economy shallow and distasteful and have never believed it had long term sustainability. However, it is in no one’s interests to provoke an economic crisis which could be avoided or its effects lessened by a posture of optimism rather than misinformed paranoia. It is in everyone’s interests to “dig deep” and consider ways in which our social economy can be transformed in the long term into one which is both more rewarding and sustainable and less based on material consumption. I would like to see our media making a serious attempt to grapple with these issues. In the short term however, the age old maxim of economic prudence is still applicable. “Live within your means, see what happens, and don’t worry!”

The Import Of New Year's Day

2009-01-01T03:31:00.000-08:00

Divination of the future in a seemingly arbitrary world has always been a part of the traditional sacred year. As I continue to explore the traditional calender of the English during 2009, we will look at numerous , sometimes slightly barmy methods that our ancestors have used in years past. I do not practice divination, nor do I believe in its efficacy, but present these tidbits as an integral part of our cultural history. If its good enough for them, its good enough for me!

There is always something to be said about the start of any venture. People are apt to augur the success of the whole by observing how things happen at the beginning. On a purely practical level we are all aware of this. Issues at the beginning of a relationship, business venture or building project are likely to point to long term underlying problems which need to be addressed. To placate the same natural needs within our inner lives, we have developed countless half remembered customs, traditions and superstitions connected with the beginning of things, to increase the possibility of success and give warning of any impending problems.

For obvious reasons, the coming of the New Year has accrued more than its fair share of such traditions. Even the most mundane of activities take on an enhanced significance during the first opening hours of the year. Key to all this is the idea that luck is a somehow tangible force which flows through the home at this time of year. It is provident to take all necessary precautions to ensure as much luck as possible flows into the house, and to prevent any from escaping. These crucial endeavours were believed to colour the coming year for good or ill. It is important for, instance to ensure that nothing whatsoever leaves the house on New Year’s Day until something has been bought into the house, otherwise, all the luck will flow out of the house… Washing etiquette was even more crucial. In some areas it was best to go smelly on New Year’s Day, as to wash the body or garments of clothing was to risk a household member being “washed away” by death during the year. Understandably this tradition was stronger in fishing communities and seaside towns. A lot of importance was also place on the first footfall over the threshold of the house in the New Year. A lot of luck depended on the characteristics of the year’s first visitor. The most auspicious guest was a tall, dark haired man.

New Year’s Day is a traditional day for divination. This would commonly be carried out by opening a book at a random page shortly after midnight on New Year’s Day, or immediately after waking in the morning. The passage where the right forefinger rested was believed to hold a personal message for the New Year. The Bible was usually the book of choice, but for those who baulked at the idea of using the good book for divinatory purposes, there was a long standing belief that books of poetry could serve the same ends. St Augustine ’s 4^th century “Confessions” mentions the custom of using the works of Virgil for divination in this manner.

There were always those who attempted to make a more thorough going science out of divination.

This was certainly true of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors. The text The Import Of New Year's Day (BL Cotton MS. Vesp.D.xiv f.75b) gives a number of predictions for the coming cycle based on the day on which New Year's Day falls. The following is its prediction for Thursday...

When it falls on a Thursday, it will be a clement winter, and a windy spring, and a good summer, and a good harvest.

So... Happy New Year it is then!

Verbum Caro Factum Est

2009-01-01T03:19:00.000-08:00

If I may say so myself, this Christmas has been one of the finest on record. I have just returned to the Foxhole after a wonderful extended Nativity Octave.

The Winter solstice on the 21st of December saw me in South Glamorgan celebrating the reception of my brother Griff into full communion with the Catholic Church. From the home of this wayward son of Mother Church I journeyed to my parents in Kent, where we marked Christmas, St Stephen's Day, St John the Evangelist's Day, Holy Innocent's and the Feast of the Holy family, with a customary mixture of religious pomp and material indulgence.

I am glad to be home, and staring out at the thick hoarfrost coating the woods opposite the foxhole, I'm thankful for all the blessings of 2008 and look forward to another barnstormer of a year to come!

Wassail!

2008-12-23T09:06:00.000-08:00

“It’s the most wonderful time of the year” crooned Bing Crosby back in that golden twilight era when Christmases really were white, real mistletoe grew wild in the woods and we really did head down to the Christmas Party Hop to rock around the Christmas tree on Christmas eve. It’s a hazy pastiche of a 1950s American Christmas which retains a lot of popularity today when we think of “Christmassy” things. This is only the latest development in a very old European tradition focused on one of the most important festivals of the sacred year.

A couple of blog posts cannot do Christmas justice. It really needs no introduction, for a start. We all know it, and we all love it, even if we find aspects of it disagreeable or irksome. Christmas is a prime example of a successful tradition. Owing in no small part to its wholesale adoption by the commercial sector since the Victorian era, Christmas has remained an unquestioned part of the traditional landscape, extraordinary in an age when many traditions have died out. Christmas is also a rare example of a tradition which continues to grow in scale and popularity, rather than declining. Christmas was never always so big. It was always important, to be sure, but not to the extent it is today.

Without wanting to delve too much into the history of Christmas, the growth and transformation of the tradition was due to two major changes. The first of these was the Victorian reinvention of Christmas. To call this cultural invigoration of the festival “Victorian” is slightly misleading. People in 1807 were complaining that Christmas wasn’t celebrated in the way it was when they were children, 24 years before Queen Victoria inherited the English throne. People always liked celebrating Christmas – Churches and homes were often decorated with greenery and gifts were exchanged, for instance – but in the nineteenth century people made an art form out of it. The nineteenth century saw the writing of many hundreds of Christmas carols, the innovation of Christmas cards, the introduction of the Christmas tree from Germany and a cultural shift from being a principally religious festival to being a celebration of the family and family life. Christmas was a major benefactor of the media revolution of the nineteenth century. The nostalgic portraits of Christmas invoked by popular novelists like Charles Dickens captured the imagination then as they still so today, and helped create a lasting image of Christmas still viewed with much love and affection.

The media revolution continued into the twentieth century, prompting the successive Americanisation of the Christmas ideal. This was due both to the leading position of the USA in the field of advertising and popular entertainment from the 1940s onwards, and to the global popularity of Santa Claus, very much an American figure. “Old Father Christmas” is an old English figure symbolising the spirit of fun and festivity that was supposed to rule at this time of year. When visually depicted at all, he was an old fat gent in festive garb, often crowned with a wreath of holly. He probably developed from medieval ideas of the Lord of Misrule, the officer appointed by towns and noble households to organise midwinter festivities, but reached his apogee as poster child for the campaign to defend Christmas from Puritan attempts to ban the festival in the 1650s. From that time through to the heyday of the Victorian revival he remained a recognisable but low key figure on our side of the Atlantic. The great transformation of Father Christmas into Santa Claus came in America in the nineteenth century and was largely the work of an obscure Lutheran pastor. The Visit Of St Nicolas, more commonly known as The Night Before Christmas, painted a story of a small elf like entity who rode a flying sleigh pulled by reindeer and who left presents for children in stockings. The St Nicolas connection owes something to a loose reading of old legends of the fourth century saint, who was a great philanthropist, but has no connection to the corpulent drunkard Father Christmas of English tradition.

The next half century saw a progressive fusing of the two figures, the old jolly Father Christmas and the child loving being who leaves gifts for children. This figure was depicted in early twentieth century media in a variety of outfits, including red and green robes. It was the Christmas 1931 advertising campaign by Coca Cola which left the image of the red robed Santa Claus irrevocably imprinted on the traditional imagination. I’m not known for being pro-American in my outlook, but I see nothing negative in the influence the former colony has had on the Christmas traditions of the European homeland. People, myself included, often complain about the gross commercialism and gluttony associated with Christmas. While this is undoubtedly true, this was a process which was in place long before Christmas became coloured by predominantly American cultural images.

Both the Victorian reinvention of Christmas in the nineteenth century and the American popularisation of the old festival in the twentieth are traditionally valid innovations, even if they are not to everyone’s taste. In fact, the influence of secular American culture may actually have saved Christmas. The growth of the Santa Claus/Father Christmas tradition as a regular feature of the cultural and commercial landscape went hand in hand with a subtle shift in cultural emphasis. Before the nineteenth century Christmas was primarily a religious occasion. The Victorian reforms moved the emphasis to a celebration of the family. Developments in the twentieth century recreated Christmas as a celebration principally for children. Generations of families have celebrated Christmas as a special day where children are treated and enjoyed for the joy they bring. This has given Christmas a self-reinforcing gene which secures the tradition a long term future. Even if bored teenagers might baulk at the drawn out customs of their individual families, when they have their own children, they will most likely want to celebrate Christmas themselves, attempting to recreate the magic of their childhood for their own offspring.

As a closing comment I’d like to point out that neither of the major developments of the previous two centuries have destroyed the religious element of Christmas. The complaint of the religious that Christmas has become overly secularised cannot be ignored, of course. The material aspects of the celebration all too often obscure the religious and charitable faces of the season. However, Christmas has not undergone the rigorous secularisation of many of the festivals of the sacred year. The continuing popularity of Christmas carols and songs with religious themes or lyrics has preserved the Christian nature of Christmas, and will do for many years to come. It is also one of the few times of the year when the religiously ambiguous majority reconnect with their spiritual nature by filling our glorious churches and cathedrals to bursting point.

So, a happy Christmas to all patrons of the English Chemical Theatre. Enjoy.

How The West Was Lost

2008-12-14T05:47:00.000-08:00

This is the third part of my meditation on the Decline Of The West.

Just such unforeseen circumstances swept Europe into the abyss in the summer of 1914. To search for long term causes of the First World War is to somehow avoid confronting the tragedy of the whole thing. The cultural pessimism of the salon intellectuals, the arms race, the naval rivalry between Great Britain and Germany and the disturbing rise of political socialism form an unpleasant backdrop to the war, but not its ultimate cause, although each influenced its outcome. To ask what caused the Great War is like asking what causes a line of dominoes to topple down. The national security procedures put in place by the Great Powers of Europe in the decades before 1914 created a process of escalation which, when initiated, was very difficult to halt. There were no safeguards in place to prevent an international crisis escalating to war. After the process had begun, the key players were virtually powerless to stop it. This is what did happen in 1914. The fuse was lit, no one was able to defuse the bomb and so it exploded, destroying everything…

In the aftermath of four years of war, Europe stood aghast. It was now revealed that the comfortable world of Nineteenth Century Europe had been a house of cards. The “decline of The West”, inconceivable before the war, was now a topic on everyone’s lips. Even in early 1918 this topic would have seemed absurd. Oswald Spengler swam against the tide of German public opinion as he completed his manuscript in the spring of 1918. Decline Of The West was written during the height of the successful German spring offensive, when it was popularly believed that Germany would win the war, a victory which would usher in a new golden age both for the Reich and for Europe generally. Six months later, of course, everything was in ruins. To Spengler’s disgust, his great work influenced not the new rulers of Europe , but the generation of angry young soldiers who felt cheated, betrayed and brutalised by the war. A critical reading of Spengler’s Decline was to influence many of the inter-war fascist movements, including National Socialism in Germany and the cerebral fascism of Oswald Mosley in England .

The dissipation of European greatness between 1920 and 1970, crowned by the ideological slaughter of World War Two, and the passive occupation of Europe by two alien super powers, was ultimately a question of political control. For centuries before the industrial revolution, the balance of political and economic power had rested with the landowning aristocracy. The economic power of the merchant classes had been increasing steadily since the fifteenth century but political control, despite aberrations bought on by the occasional revolution, remained with the landed classes. The industrial revolution saw a massive shift of both economic power and cultural emphasis to the prosperous and thriving urban centres. This was a major demographic shift. Despite this, on the eve of the First World War, the political class of the major European nations was from the same landed background as it had been for centuries. The old ruling class still held the strings of power, even though the balance of economic power had shifted overwhelmingly away from a land based economy to an urban, industrial economy. This was an anachronism, to be sure, but it had ensured the cultural and social integrity of traditional Europe throughout the previous troubled century of economic change and political turbulence. This cannot be under-estimated. The gentry and noble classes had historically acted not only as lynch pins of the rural economy but also as stalwarts of tradition, magistrates and defenders of the Church. This was still the case at the opening of the twentieth century. A clear illustration of this is that, even in the heyday of the urban, industrial age, the cultural focus was still oriented towards the countryside. The British soldiers of the Great War were called to the battlefield not by images of their factories and tenement houses, but by the exhortation to defend the rural idyll of “Old England”.

To put it very bluntly, during the First World War they were all wiped out. Although the military role of the aristocracy had long since fallen into abeyance, the young of the landed classes were traditionally strongly represented in the army at time of war, and still formed the majority of the officer corps. When war broke out in August 1914, the upper class youth of Austria , Germany , France , England and Russia left the universities and flocked to the recruitment centres. In the brutal campaigns of 1914 and 1915 they were slaughtered. Their loss was irreplaceable. This is not to denigrate the great sacrifices made by all strata of society in that grim fratricidal war, but the loss of the “bright young things” was most keenly felt. Gone were the young men who, before the war, had been destined to be the Members of Parliament, Officers, Lawyers and Priests of the twenties and thirties. Many of these old families became bankrupt or simply died out. Next time you visit one of England ’s wonderful old Churches, take a look at the walls, floors and side chapels, bedecked by the memorial plaques of the local gentry families. Often, many generations of the same family are represented in the Churches were they worshipped. These plaques all stop very shortly after the First World War. The most recent I have seen is from 1931, and that is exceptional.

In other words, after the war, traditional Europe suffered from a lack of natural leadership. Those who took their place lacked the traditionalism and natural qualifications of their aristocratic predecessors. It was the urban middle classes, specifically the nouveau riche of the industrial revolution who now took over the reigns of political power. This was not through some inevitable logic of history or some other rubbish. It was the accidents of war, pure and simple. Of course, many of the new ruling class were conscientious, conservative and very able, but they had not been bred to appreciate the exercise of power and social responsibility. In the 1920s and 1930s, the political zeitgeist was subtly rearranged so that the principle focus was the economic concern of maximising profit, rather than preserving traditional integrity and the balance of power. This was probably not a conscious process, but nevertheless, between the wars, politics became irretrievably subordinated to the interests of economics. This was to continue up to our present age. “Eternal” principles, such as defence of the church, tradition, rural society etc were seen as important only if they fulfilled the needs of economic expediency. Culture became a matter of individual concern and religion a personal eccentricity, rather than a social concern. This was not yet the age of multiculturalism, but it paved the way for it. Hand in hand with the shift in political power came the eclipse of the “high culture” of the previous century. Without the guiding hand of a traditionally rooted ruling class, the effects of the erosion of tradition and the de-Christianisation of the working classes became apparent. A recognisable “pop culture” emerged in the 1920s that would reach its heyday in the 1960s. It utilised the new media technologies of radio and television and hinged its appeal on mass entertainment. Tradition was elbowed to the sidelines. In the sphere of politics, in both the domestic and international spheres, crass popular ideologies dominated the agenda. The twentieth century has often been called the “Century Of The Common Man”. For the period after 1918, this has a strong element of truth about it. However, there was not much originality in this “popular revolution”. The great ideologies and popular pastimes of the twentieth century all had their roots in the crises of the nineteenth. The difference was that in the Nineteenth century a traditional ruling class had been able to contain and channel these forces toward socially constructive ends. In the twentieth century, with Old Europe dead, these popular impulses were allowed to run amok, the result being the reduction of politics, culture and religion to the level of the lowest common denominator.

With the government now being run in line with business interests, it was entirely logical to encourage mass immigration in the decades after world war two to avoid the costs of paying higher wages to scarce British workers. A short term solution to a labour shortage was put in place without any thought as to its long term cultural consequence. This is purely an example of the new attitude, but by this time the dominoes were toppling again. The fundamental imbalance in society between economic interests and social wellbeing has resulted in a process of dissipation and escalation which accelerates to this day. Thus was tradition betrayed. This is how the west was lost

House Of Cards

2008-12-14T05:41:00.000-08:00

This post is a continuation of the thoughts contained in my Prophet of Decline a week ago, so if you haven’t read it yet, give it a once over now.

What causes of the “modern crisis”, given theoretical form by Oswald Spengler at the close of the Great War, can we elucidate from an examination of nineteenth century Europe ?

Can the nineteenth century be seen as a period of decline at all? All the signs point to quite the opposite. This was a time of increasing prosperity, of better standards in education and health care and developing scientific knowledge. For most of the nineteenth century, Europe was governed by a patchwork of conservative nation-states that were more-or-less at peace most of the time. Commerce was thriving and Europe was at its peak of influence in world politics. The nineteenth century saw a high point in “high culture”, in terms of theatre, opera, literature and artistic output. Tradition survived and even flourished (if sometimes in a repackaged form), and enjoyed the support of the ruling class, even in industrialised western Europe. The peoples of Europe even seemed to have put aside the bitterness of the Reformation. Christianity in this period was forward looking, strong and self-confident. The Churches of Europe were able to engineer a remarkable transformation of social ethics and public standards after the excesses of the previous century, and were heavily involved in missionary work across the world. What then was the problem? The logic of history, along with the benefit of hindsight, tells us that below the surface a deep rooted rot was setting in, intimately connected with the process of modernisation.

My question is a rhetorical one. Anyone who is familiar with my mode of thought will probably already know what I think about the causes of decline in the nineteenth century. I will say them anyway. According to my reading of history, the decline which came to the notice of Herr Spengler was caused by two processes during the nineteenth century:

1) The decline of Christianity among the working classes of industrial Western Europe, and the failure of the Church to co-opt the industrial revolution for the ends of preserving traditional Europe .
2) The successive erosion of tradition due to the growth of industrial culture and the migration from the countryside to the cities.

I will deal with these two points in due time. To start with, however, I must point out that neither of these processes on their own were the cause of Europe ’s decline. Even together they could have been managed. Nineteenth century cultures were rooted in tradition and were always making efforts to reinvigorate and defend traditions which may otherwise have been undermined by industrialisation. Historicism as an architectural style is one example, as is the romantic movement in literature and the Victorian efforts to “re-market” Christmas. Ok, Nineteenth Century “traditionalism” has been criticised for heavy handedness, arrogance and historical ignorance but at least they did something to defend tradition. The culture of the Victorians is something beautiful in its own right. What similar efforts have been made by the ruling classes of our own age? Also, by the turn of the twentieth century, the Church had woken from its slumber and had successfully begun evangelising the new industrial cities. For instance, the Church of England was at the forefront of the extension of educational provision among the urban working classes and the Catholic Church became a leading mouthpiece for social responsibility and economic justice.

This makes a lie of the old assumption that the modern world is incompatible with tradition. It is true that the industrial revolution destabilised European society and was a corrosive influence on tradition, but, with strong leadership, the old ruling classes were able to contain the changes and naturalise them. The whole point of tradition isn’t to reject change, but to guide, temper and transform it. There is every sign that the strong traditional culture of Europe was able to do exactly this with regards to industrialisation for most of the nineteenth century. The same can be said of the political chaos unleashed by the French revolution, and then the nationalist revolutions of 1848. Old Europe bounced back, strengthened by its trials. All this points to Nineteenth Century Europe being a thriving traditional society, successfully dealing with the challenges of its era, as Europe had done for centuries.

Both the erosion of traditions and the de-Christianisation of the working class had the potential to cause grave problems for the future but neither were unmanageable. However, they did both eat away at the underside of European culture. In the event that unforeseen circumstances plunged Europe into a major crisis, these two spiritual illnesses were ticking time bombs.

St Nicholas' Day

2008-12-06T09:07:00.000-08:00

Today is the feast day of St Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, patron saint of people who don't wear pants, known to sneak down a chimney or two...

Reynard Recommends: Kerfuffle

2008-12-06T09:02:00.000-08:00

This group of young people are exceptionally talented. I had the pleasure of seeing them play live at Lowdham village hall in north Nottinghamshire a few weeks ago. The gig was sold out and had a fantastic atmosphere. For kids in their early twenties, Kerfuffle have a mature knowledge of the folk music tradition and an excellent musicianship that would put to shame many a folk outfit twice their age. These guys have played major events such as Cambridge Folk Festival, Cropredy and the Green Man in recent years, so it is a real credit to them that they still enjoy playing the intimate little venues. Listen up! This is the future face of English folk music.

http://www.kerfuffleonline.co.uk/

Prophet Of Decline

2008-12-06T08:58:00.000-08:00

It is ninety years since Oswald Spengler published the first edition of The Decline Of The West. The title is both shocking and surprising and just reading it can act as a wake-up call for someone of our generation who happens across it. We are accustomed to taking the prosperity, progress and benevolence of our society for granted, when we think about it at all. Twinned to this is the widespread assumption, fostered by left-wing intellectuals, that the peoples of the “developed world” are a kind of feudal elite living off the fat of the “developing world”. To one indoctrinated by ideas such as this, already present in Spengler’s, the idea that the West is in decline is disturbing. What sort of decline are we talking about? In 1918, the Great War notwithstanding, the European nations still dominated the polity and economy of the whole planet. The USA was still emerging from the “long nineteenth century” and there was no other political or economic focus then existing to challenge Europe ’s global position. The economic position of the West is still impressive today, despite the loss of empire, political pre-eminence and cultural self-confidence. We panic about transient economic downturns whilst still enjoying unprecedented material prosperity. So what is all this talk of decline then? Was Herr Spengler talking out of his lederhosen?

No is the simple answer. Spengler’s book The Decline of the West is not the central issue here. It is true that the book itself helped usher in a cultural epoch of its own. It has inspired politicians, philosophers, architects, historians and even mystics right down to our present day. Spengler’s premise was in some ways remarkably prescient, in other ways not so. Here is not the place to discuss it in depth. Spengler drew comparisons between the life-cycles of several historical cultural groups and civilisations and from this developed an organic philosophy of history. He also saw the signs in our own civilisation of its impending decline and final collapse. The theory is not important but the idea behind it is. Spengler was one of the first writers to make a serious attempt to explain the spiritual cancer in Europe ’s heart that was starting to become apparent. The vague cultural pessimism of the salon intellectuals of late nineteenth century Paris and Vienna was bought into sharp focus by the unparalleled brutality of the Great War. A whole generation was swept away in an orgy of bloodshed. It was clear to the survivors that something, somewhere, had gone seriously wrong.

Today, the signs of cultural and spiritual decline are glaringly obvious, amid the endemic decadence and apathy. We are still going through a process which people were starting to notice ninety years ago. This is important to remember when looking for the roots of the “Modern Crisis”. There is not much agreement as to what exactly this crisis is and when it started. Many place the visible beginning of the crisis in the aftermath of the Second World War. when Europe began to culturally collapse very rapidly. Others have traced the crisis to the French Revolution, which supposedly gave birth to the modern world and all its evils. Still others have put the “beginning of the end” even further back, to the Enlightenment, to the Reformation, to the end of the Holy Roman Empire, or even as far back as the conversion of Europe to Christianity, over 1500 years ago. Many, of course, assign much more recent roots to the modern crisis. For some it is the sell-out of western liberal-democratic values (for some these values are themselves cause of the decline) in concessions to militant Islamist immigrants since the end of the cold war. For others, perhaps the majority, the world just isn’t the same as it was when they were kids. The decline of the West is reduced to nothing more than nostalgia for a world that never existed outside individual childhood memories. All of these interpretations shed light on the big picture but ultimately fall short of giving a satisfactory explanation. Spengler’s Decline Of The West must be recognised as the watershed that it is. Before this time, conservatives would grumble and complain as they always will, but they never wrote seriously about the end of European civilisation. Oswald Spengler was a remarkable polymath, but he was by no means an exceptional genius. If the immediate and visible roots of the modern crisis had stretched back much further than a few decades before 1918, lets say the mid nineteenth century, then it is inconceivable that other authors did not broach the subject beforehand. Since the 1918 watershed, Spengler’s prophecies of decline have cast a long shadow over dozens of conservative and traditionalist writers. Admittedly, by the laws of historical casuistry, the decline of the West can be traced back many centuries. To shed light on the immediate causes of our present crisis it is necessary to examine the social, cultural and spiritual forces that were reshaping Europe in the nineteenth century…

To be continued.

The Alchemist's Apprentice

2008-12-06T08:48:00.000-08:00

You may have been following my various attempts at wine and beer making over the last year? It’s the thread titled “Practical Alchemy” if you fancied catching up on my misadventures to date. I’ve been making wine since July and currently have 9 gallons on the go. The latest addition is 4 gallons of wine squeezed from the Foxhole’s finest apples. I’ve yet to sample this batch and it will be a long time before its ready to bottle but I’ve had a lot of people asking me about this so I hope it doesn’t disappoint! It will certainly be a memorable wine due to all the blood, sweat and tears poured into it… Not literally, don’t worry! In the absence of a fruit crusher and cider press, I pulped 26kg of apples in a cheap blender in a cheap blender I’d bought from Amazon last year. This was a necessary evil, and by the end of the session the pungent aroma of smouldering electronics told me the blender needed to be put into early retirement. After ten days of fermenting on the pulp, Mrs Fox and I had to squeeze the juice into a five gallon fermenting container by hand, using a small muslin bag. Watch this space…

My wine making experiments have been a mixed bag, but I’m glad to say they have excited the interest of the youngest member of my family. My fox cub has been an enthusiastic helper and my most successful wine so far, a full bodied combination of banana and date, was her idea. (She also suggested tomato and carrot wine but I haven’t taken her up on it yet.) My daughter is seven years old and is at that wonderful age when her Dad is really cool for the very same reasons as she’ll think he’s a sad old git in five years time. Ah, the joys of youth.

Some of the brews have been a pleasant surprise. The Banana and date wine, for instance, has cleared wonderfully and, though still very young, carries the promise of a rich fruity flavour when it matures. The Tea and Raisin wine, my first wine, tastes like an excellent dry sherry. I’m very pleased with it and will be bottling it at the end of January. Maybe a touch of beginner’s luck? I don’t know? J Most of my other wines are looking promising. The beetroot wine and the blackberry wine are showing particular potential.

My one serious concern is the delicious sounding onion, raisin and potato wine. Yum. The first issue was the revolting looking starch particles which were suspended in the wine like little powdery worms. I’ve mostly remedied this by filtering it through muslin into a new demijon, but the wine still isn’t clearing. More serious is the unpleasant taste, and the fact that the wine is so acidic it burns the throat. The way it is, even a tramp would have difficulty drinking it. I’m not giving up. I’ve added a whole load of sugar and some yeast nutrient to kick-start the fermentation again and take the sour edge off the brew. I’m also going to try some chalk to reduce the acidity. I might try adding some meths to make it more palatable. I bet that Hugh Fearnley-Whittinghall bloke doesn’t have to contend with these problems!

If I can make this wine into something that is drinkable and reasonably pleasant I will consider my apprenticeship complete!

Pseudonomicon

2008-12-06T08:35:00.000-08:00

What is it with some corporations and faux-latin company names? Is it just me or does anyone else find it pointless and mildly irritating?

Capita, Experian, Eon, Cantate, Arriva, Principia, Consignia etc

Why I say, why? Do they really think that these names bestow in them a certain gravitas, an innate authority? What was wrong with companies having straight down the middle, do-what-it-says-on-the-tin kind of names? Do I sense a certain ‘short man’s syndrome’ at work among the big players of early 21st Century capitalism?

The Royal African Company, Tate & Lyle, AG Bishop & Sons, The Dutch West India Company, Lehman Brothers, Turner & Hooch.

Isn’t that better? The best names in the market are always estate agents. If you have a stupid and/or pretentious surname you can relax in the knowledge that your children will likely become successful estate agents or solicitors.

The prize has got to go to an agricultural estate agent active in the East Midlands ; Piggott & Crone. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Innocence II

2008-12-03T12:32:00.000-08:00

And more of the same. What can I say, I'm bored... And easily pleased! ;-)

Enid Blyton's Golly Wog. In the new television adaptation of Blyton's Noddy, the mischevious Golly Wogs have been replaced by Goblins...I can't see this going down too well on Broadway now, can you?

Innocence I

2008-12-03T12:23:00.000-08:00

There's an unescapable bit of post-modern irony about this post so I offer apologies all round, not least to my own bruised sense of aesthetic integrity...

I find it somewhat amusing how the most innocent of symbols and depictions can be twisted by the fickle tides of history until they represent something completely different, something somehow tainted and abhorrent. Amusing as this process often is, it gives one pause for thought to contemplate what contemporary symbols of cultural mirth or innocence will be construed as quasi-demonic by the decendants of today's liberal -left elite.

Why can't we go back to the days when you could call a spade, well, a spade..

You can't beat the real thing...

Good family entertainment

Waiting

2008-12-03T12:11:00.000-08:00

Autumn has been and gone and the land is finally in the grip of winter once more. I often don’t have much time for what passes for winter in my homeland. There is rarely much snow or definitive “winteriness”, for want of a less clumsy expression. A couple of years ago we barely had a winter at all, just a few months of icy cold drizzle and long dark nights before an early Spring. Often, the English winter is wet, muddy and steely grey, never dramatic, beautiful or crisp. I recall starting this blog with a sideways sweep at “Seasonal Affective Disorder”. As a society we have a repugnant habit of making up medical “disorders” as excuses for our feeble inability to relate to the rigours and cycles of the natural world. However, I myself have felt the melancholy sighs of Autumn within my own life this year, stronger than at any time for the past decade. There is always an aspect of this in any life attuned to the fickle currents of the seasons, but I can’t say I’m sorry that the mournful beauty of the Autumn is behind us, and the stark chill of winter has begun.

So far, the “big chill” has been promising. We have been blessed with heavy frosts and the first showers of heavy snow. The light is shallow, crisp and bright, and the vistas of winter trees, like skeletal hands pointing accusingly at the skies, are beautiful in a new and very real way.

Last Sunday was the first day of Advent, and the beginning of the Church’s liturgical year. We have ahead of us a few weeks of preparation, introspection and waiting before the solstice comes and the light begins its slow return to the frozen Earth. This fits perfectly with the time of year. The agricultural year is done, the beasts have been slaughtered, fuel has been gathered. The weather does not lend itself to outdoor pursuits and revelries. What better time to gather around the hearth, to play games, tell tall tales and drink warm mead and mulled wine! It is also an opportunity for introspection, to reconnect with the divine source of our own being, in preparation for the coming of the New Year.

The Day Our England Died

2008-10-14T13:46:00.000-07:00

On this day 942 years ago the last of the Anglo-Saxon kings, Harold II, was killed in action at the battle of Senlac Hill, near Hastings. Thus ended the period of history categorised by historians as the Anglo-Saxon period. This used to be a much neglected time and for a long time there was a popular misconception that pre-conquest England was a backwards land full of half-civilised barbarians. This view has been painstakingly corrected over the last century through a more generous spirit and meticulous research. Much of this has been due to the hard work of the dedicated traditionalists of The English Companions since 1966. Anglo Saxon England, an absurdly generalised catch-all phrase for such a complex and volatile period of history is now recognised as having an advanced social, economic and political infrastructure at least on a par with that in contemporary mainland Europe. Was the conquest of 1066 a major discontinuity?

In the sense that the physical English elite were dispossessed and replaced by those of Norman extraction, yes. Harsh laws designed to keep the native English quiescent point to a brutal occupation regime existing in England for the couple of decades after the conquest. It is now known that the war of 1066 did not end after the battle of Hastings, but that a fierce resistance movement persisted for several years. However, within twenty years the rhythm of English life had begun to return to normal. The notable long term difference to before was the widespread use of Norman-French as the language of court and law, alongside latin. This was to persist until the early fourteenth century. Other evident changes were the formalisation of the feudal system in England already well established on mainland Europe. There was also a notable change in architectural aesthetics and certain remaining Germanic customs, such as the elaborate feasting tradition, died out or were transformed beyond recognition. But the question remains, how much of this would have happened anyway, regardless of the outcome of the Anglo-Norman war?

I'd like to indulge myself in an experiment in alternative history. Lets say that Duke William's army was soundly defeated at Senlac Hill, and that the Duke was able to escape back to Normandy to nurse his wounds… Though the Normans and their Scandinavian allies had been defeated and the war was over, The House of Normandy now had a claim to the English throne. It would have made no difference even had William been killed or captured during the war, as the claim would no doubt have been transmitted to his eldest son Robert. England didn't have a formal system of hereditary transmission for their monarchy at the time, which was part of the problem. Before his death, King Edward had allegedly promised the throne to Duke William on his death. There is strong evidence that this was the case. The childless King Edward was half Norman himself, and the Duke was his close kinsman. Edward was also a moderniser. He had little time for the quasi-teutonic customs of his people and was in favour of the latinised, sophisticated European culture radiating outwards through France and Italy in the eleventh century. Accordingly, his reign had seen a close alliance with Normandy. Edward had reorganised the Church and royal bureaucracy along Norman lines, and from the 1040s the legal system had been reformed to incorporate increasing elements of the European feudal system. "Work exchanges" of English and Norman Churchmen and civil servants cemented a close social and political relationship between the neighbouring countries. A close military alliance had also existed between England and Normandy for most of the eleventh century, as the two states shared a common interest in closing the English Channel to Viking pirates. On the other hand, King Harold II's claim to the English throne was hotly disputed, even within his own kingdom. These doubts wouldn't have just magically disappeared had William's invasion been defeated. King Harold's family, the Godwin Clan, were representatives of the powerful English nobility rapidly gaining in political and military influence. His father had been the Earl of Wessex. Though Wessex was the seat of the old English line of kings, of whom Edward was the last representative, the Godwins themselves were not of royal blood. They were a half-Danish family of ambitious parvenus established during the reign of King Canute. Although primogeniture was not official custom in England, it was traditional practice for the King to be a prince of royal blood, an "Atheling". The successor would be nominated by the incumbent king during his lifetime, and on his death, the appointment would be confirmed by a council of the most powerful nobles, the Witan. (The romantic notion that Anglo-Saxon Kings were elected by a representative body has no basis in fact) This system usually ensured a smooth effective transition of power, but in 1066 it went quite badly wrong, exposing a critical weakness in the political process. Bypassing the wishes of the late king, Earl Harold of Wessex, whose sister was King Edward's widow, managed to manipulate the Witan into approving his accession as king. The elevation of one of the English Earls to the throne did not bode well for future political stability…

What late eleventh century England needed was strong, stable government. In "real" history it got this in the form of the Norman Kings, who soon went native and ushered in an era of great prosperity for England. Returning to our counter-factual scenario, in the Autumn of 1066, King Harold had successfully defeated his two main rivals. The Norman invasion had been repulsed and the most potent domestic challenge, a Danish invasion instigated by his treacherous brother Tostig, Earl of Northumberland, had been crushed and the Earl killed. Nevertheless, significant challenges remained. Duke William of Normandy (or his sons) still harboured their claim to the English throne and it was only a matter of time before the King of Denmark once again seized the opportunity to press his own claim to the throne… In real life he did this in 1068, supported by English partisans in the north. Internally, the Kingdom was riven by factional rivalries between powerful Earls. The restive Earls of Mercia and Northumberland were only with difficulty bought to accept King Harold's election and support the war effort. With external peace restored, how long would it be before their family ambitions turned into military insurrection, bringing with it the very real possibility of foreign intervention. Would they be successful the next time round? Perhaps our history books would now be telling the tale of the Norman conquest of 1068, or 1072? Finally, what sort of king would Harold II have been? We know he was a charismatic leader and a good soldier, as well as a ruthless politician, but is this enough to be a good king? King Richard I "The Lionheart" a century later was all of these things, but was an appalling failure as a head of state. By 1066, the Godwins had already begun a successful process of filling the high positions of church and state with their family members and retainers. Under a Godwin king this would have continued. Perhaps Harold II could have successfully dominated the over-mighty Earls and established a strong English dynasty. This is a pleasant fantasy. Just as likely, however, the reign of Harold II could have seen a general breakdown of law and order in England amid the squabbling of rapacious and irresponsible nobles, such as that which actually did happen during the "anarchy" of the reign of King Stephen in the 1130s.

Before I let you get on with your work, I'd like to mention the briefly the social changes that came out of the Norman conquest. There is every chance that the social, legal and ecclesiastical changes begun during the reign of Edward the Confessor would have continued under King Harold II. The alliance with Normandy would have been shattered of course, but trade with mainland western and southern Europe would have continued to grow. The great viking age, when European trade was dominated by ships based in the great ports and fjords of Scandinavia was over by the mid 1060s. The Danish invasion of England in 1066, defeated memorably at the battle of Stamford Bridge, proved to be the last attempt of a Scandinavian monarchy to flex its political muscles in Europe before the 17th century. The economic realignment this entailed inevitably bought a cultural reassessment in its wake. Within a few decades of the failed Norman invasion of 1066, England would invariably have followed suit with the rest of Europe and established a strong dynasty, whether domestic or foreign in origin, based on the principal of primogeniture. In the final analysis, our counter-factual twelfth century may have been little different from the feudal economy and chivalric culture that characterised that century in real history.

Nine Lessons For Nine days

2008-10-11T12:36:00.000-07:00

So the false god is being dethroned eh? Everyone knows about the current global economic crisis so I won't recount it here. I'm sure its hit your pocket as much as it has mine. Who can tell at this stage whether it will be the last death throes of the west as envisaged by the likes of Troy Southgate or a more limited banking crisis whipped out of proportion by the media, the sort of "bust" which afflicts us every 10-15 years or so? Who here can remember the dark days of the 1970s, the housing crash of the eighties and the economic recession of the mid 1990s. black Monday and all that? You get my point. Who knows where the wind will blow. Maybe this crisis will bring about a rebirth of spiritual values in society, or a greater consciousness of tradition or sustainability. I can see some evidence of this in my limited experience of the world, but will they be permanent or particularly profound changes? i don't know.

The rabid and naive prophecies of the left are understandable. They seize on any economic quibble to back up their flawed Utopian theories. The widespread denunciation of capitalism within conservative circles is something new. I've seen alot of it lately, and on an emotional level I'm with them 100%. I have always been disgusted with capitalist economics, and with the avarice and covetousness of human nature. A rejection of it has always been at the centre of my own "revolt against the modern world". It took a recent conversation with a close confederate in the seclusion of the inner Hebrides to help me see an alternative point of view. He quite rightly pointed out that capitalism, (note the small "c") is simply the process of free trade. This is something that has operated under every conceivable political-economic system from the autocratic monarchies of antiquity, the feudalism of medieval Europe and the command economies of socialist Russia and China. Perhaps it is the "ism" which is the problem here. It is the elevation of abstract material processes to the status of ideologies that is the new idolatry worthy of attack. This can be applied to Capitalism, the ideological veneration of wealth creation that exalts greed as a virtue and is undoubtedly to blame for our present crisis. It can also be applied to Socialism, to Traditionalism, to Ecologism, to Liberalism... All these ideologies miss the point somewhat, they mistake a method for ultimate truth. I don't want my dear friend the Dandy Highwayman to think I've been won over to his anti-ideological position entirely-I'm still a sucker for causes and I believe humanity needs its flags to rally around- but I will concede he has some strong points to make. Granted, our present society, or sections of it, have drank deeply from the chalice of mammon and are now writhing from the poison, but lets not be too sanctimonious about this. No current ideology really offers a more viable alternative to our present economic system. Capitalism (with or without the capital "c") is after all born of our own inherent drives and weaknesses. It serves our acquisitiveness, our greed, our parsimony and our sense of ambition. In one form or another, it will always be with us.

I have just completed a personal novena to the Holy Spirit. In Christianity, a novena is a nine day stretch of fervent prayer for one motivation or another, modeled on the nine day period in the Gospels between Christ's ascension and the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles at Pentecost. My novena didn't coincide with Pentecost but, hey, I needed it. The guide I used was a novena written by a Father of the Oratorian canons and available through the Catholic Truth Society. It used as its focus the fruits of the Holy Spirit as detailed by St Paul in his letter to the Galatians. One fruit was covered for each day of the novena. Love, peace, joy. patience, kindness, gentleness, fidelity, gentleness, self-control. These virtues are traditionally held to be the defining features of the ideal human being, and not just by Christianity. truth is truth after all. I consider myself to be a basically good human being, and I had intended my novena to be a comforting invocation of the virtues which I strongly admire. Instead, it was a discomforting role call of all my faults and personality flaws. To think that I was once pronounced a spiritual "Adept" bu the Temple of Set. What a joke! Each day, by coincidence or divine providence (the result was the same regardless), I was presented challenges related to the virtue I was exploring. At every hurdle I was tried and found wanting.

When reading the news about those who are now reaping the fruits of usury, lets not indulge ourselves in self satisfied gloating. There's not going to be a revolution. Its down to us to look inside and change our own lives.

No Heaven For Cowards

2008-10-08T11:10:00.000-07:00

Its funny how time flies isn't it? One moment I'm sleeping off the Michaelmas goose (well, chicken in my case) and the next you wake up and its nearly mid-October.

Yesterday was the feastday of Our Lady of Victories, a celebration that was originally instituted to commemorate the great European victory over the Turks at Lepanto in 1571. Nowadays, when marked in the Church, 7th October is celebrated as the feast day of Our Lady of The Rosary, which usually takes liturgical precedence. I still think Lepanto is worth remembering, especially as the epoch making significance of the battle has been diluted or lost as the centuries have past. In our multicultural, Muslim hugging age, it is easy to forget that for the first millennium of its existence Islam was engaged in a military offensive against the West. For much of this time Europe was on the back foot. The first victim was the Romanised, Christian western seaboard of Asia, which fell to the hordes of the Prophet almost immediately. Next to go was the ancient civilisation of Egypt, and the fertile fields of North Africa, once the bread basket of the Roman Empire. In the dark days of the eighth century, the Muslims overran Spain and penetrated deep into France before being repulsed. All the same, Spain and Sicily were lost to Islam for many centuries. In 1453, after centuries of struggle, Constantinople, the second Rome, was overran, and hordes of Turks swarmed into south-east and central Europe. Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, Wallachia and eventually Hungary fell to the green menace. The Turks penetrated even as far as the gates of Vienna in 1529. Meanwhile, the Mediterranean coats of France, Spain and Italy were continually ravaged by slave raiding pirates operating out of North African ports. It is estimated that over a million white Europeans disappeared into the slave markets and harems of the Muslim world. The religion of peace indeed? Sixteenth century Europe was still very much a culture under siege.

This context should be remembered when considering the phenomenon of the crusades. The crusading movement, far from being a self-seeking, imperialist venture, was one of the highest achievements of Christendom. That individuals invariably debased the ideals of the movement and that many of the crusades broke down amid the fratricidal squabbling sadly familiar throughout European history, should not detract from the nobility of the bigger picture. Beginning in the late eleventh century, the crusades were an admirable pan-European response to Islamic aggression. The "Holy League For the Defence of Christendom", gathered in response to the fall of Rhodes to the Turks in 1522, was one of the last expressions of this crusading spirit. The main participants in this league were the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, Portugal and the Italian states. The immediate result was the huge naval battle fought at Lepanto in October 1570, which ended as a crushing defeat for the Turks. The most remarkable thing about this campaign was the truly pan-European nature of the Western battle fleet. In the midst of the bitter internecine squabbling of the reformation, the Christian fleet still boasted freelance contingents of sailors and marines from all over Europe, including England and Protestant Holland. Everyone in Europe knew that a hugely important victory had been won, but the long term impact was not immediately apparent. The long term result was the decline of the Islamic onslaught. Ottoman sea power was crushed. Never again would the Mediterranean be a safe haven for Muslim pirates. Although the Ottoman Empire continued its land campaigns for another century, the Austrian victory at the gates of Vienna in 1683 ended their offensive capabilities on land as well. For the Islamic Empire, it was the beginning of a long decline which concluded with the disbandment of the Ottoman Empire in 1919.

What great irony it is that, in the very hour of final victory, the governments whose duty it is to protect our cultural and material integrity, should sell out our European homeland, and let the Muslims in by the back door. Unchecked Islamic immigration, born of economic greed and misguided liberalism, is in danger of achieving in a few decades what fifteen centuries of armed struggle failed to do

Michaelmas

2008-09-29T12:06:00.000-07:00

Love them or hate them, it was probably the Normans who were responsible for popularising the cult of St Michael the Archangel, alongside that of St George, come to think of it. He is one of Christianity's great warrior saints, and so was understandably popular among this warlike and dynamic people. His great cult centres of St Michael's Mount in Cornwall and Mont St Michel in Normandy, both offshore island fortresses, were once thriving pilgrimage spots, drawing the pious from miles around. The Church has rightly given the feast of it's greatest angelic defender very high status. In the Benedictine breviary I use, today is marked as a first class feast, although not much mention is made of the feast day in the modern church. A shame really.

In England, Michaelmas was once widely celebrated. Today, most English families will have passed the day in complete ignorance of it's former significance. This would have been unthinkable, just a few short generations ago, and so it is the sworn duty of the English Chemical Theatre to jog a few memories! Michaelmas was a quarter day, one of the great festivals of the sacred year coinciding with the principle stations of the sun, so there were of course a number of civic and social functions associated with it. It was a popular time, for instance for the election of new public officials. In London, the new Lord Mayor is still chosen on this day. To coincide with this, there is an interesting tradition of misrule that was widely associated with Michaelmas day. It was common traditional lore that during the gap between one outgoing administration and the inauguration of the new one, normal laws and mores were suspended. These "Lawless Hours" were often highly ritualised and involved temporary outbursts of controlled chaos. We see repeated examples of this throughout the traditional year. It points to an understanding of law not as an overriding all pervasive principle, but a more personal view of politics where certain institutions and individuals acted as founts of law and justice. The greatest of these was of course the King.

More than this, Michaelmas was a simple, homely, family feast day, once held more dearly than Christmas and certain to evoke similarly warm emotions. There was a very old tradition that equated the eating of goose with St Michael's day, far more ingrained than the current custom of eating turkey at Christmas. It was often deemed lucky to eat goose on Michaelmas, and, conversely, unlucky if this tradition was ignored. This connection with good or ill luck is at least five centuries old, as an old fable recalls Queen Elizabeth I commanding the nation to eat goose on Michaelmas day to invoke good fortune to repel the impending Spanish invasion. This is almost certainly apocryphal, but gives hints as to the age of this tradition. Needless to say, a large goose industry was spawned around this feast day. The two oldest goose fairs in England, that of Nottingham and Tavistock, both originating in the 13th century, may well in part have sprung up at this time of year to cater for the consumer demand for Michaelmas dinners. Both still exist, and Nottingham Goose Fair, held on the first Wednesday of October exactly as it was in 1284, is one of the largest pleasure fairs in the country.

Except for those who shoot wildfowl, procuring geese is a difficult and expensive thing to do these days although the steady growth in popular game cooking is beginning to remedy this. Lets hope that this custom, along with the family joviality of Michaelmas can make a come back in our hectic world.

A Series of (Un)fortunate Events...

2008-09-27T17:46:00.000-07:00

Exactly a year ago at the time of writing (01:46), I was enjoying my stag night in London. Correction, I had enjoyed my stag night. After a cracking time sinking ales at the Ship and Shovel in Charing Cross, a good meal at Porters restaurant in Covent Garden and some live blues at a sweaty jazz bar in Soho we then began a painful Odyssey back to North Kent. On the way we had what hand on heart was the worst Chinese meal I have ever had, spent several hours walking through the bitterly cold wee hours of a London night and several more on rickety buses before having to be picked up by my mother from outside Tesco at Foot's Cray at seven AM.

While this was unfolding in the nation's capital, one hundred and fifty eight miles away, my wife to be was polishing off several bottles of wine with her most loathsome friend, an abhorrent slug-like beast called Fisheyes. As the wine flowed, the future Mrs Fox went out into the dark woods opposite us to gather fuel, and Fisheyes decided to do an impromptu "psychic reading" on a pair of my work trousers. She left after spinning a mendacious yarn about my dark and sordid past reminiscent of the Daily Sport. A typical evening in rural England you might say? Anyway, alone, tipsy and paranoid in an isolated cottage after her friend's departure, Mrs Fox went rifling through my collection of books, found the most diabolical looking one, and burnt it...

The book in question turned out to be Sir Walter Scott's completely innocuous Letters On Demonology and Witchcraft, a fascinating collection of letters revealing the persistence of folk beliefs in well, witchcraft and demons, in post-enlightenment Britain. Interestingly, at the time I owned many truly dubious books, which she completely bypassed. Oh well. The book in question happened to be one of my favourites and had already generated the sort of quirky memories and attachments I love about books. It was a cheap paperback I'd bought in Oslo some years before and I remember my bank had erroneously charged me £75 for the book, rather than the current exchange rate for 75Norsk Krona, about £8 at the time. Such is history. After an initial strop I forgot about it and Mrs Fox hasn't touched one of my books without permission since! :)

This weekend my brother-in-law and his fiance visited the Foxhole to celebrate Michaelmas. They are soon to be married and during the evening Mrs Fox started turning the house upside down looking for a flower brochure she had specifically set aside for Sarah to look at, and which had mysteriously gone missing. Pulling back one of the sofas in the living room, the first thing I noticed, lying amongst a pile of receipts, two penny pieces and hair clips was a dusty but otherwise unscorched copy of Letters On Demonology and Witchcraft! I dusted the new discovery and returned it lovingly to my bookshelf, smiling at the synchronicity of it all. I'd found it quite randomly exactly one year, to the hour, since it had been apparently burnt. What's bugging me now is, as she definitely burned one book that ill-fated night, which one was it!

To be continued?

Guisers

2008-09-23T14:58:00.000-07:00

It is common for many points in the sacred year to feature an element of misrule about them. We have already examined the trickster's connection with the vernal equinox and Mayday. It will be remembered that mischievous spirits are also associated with the Summer Solstice in June, All Hallows Eve at the end of October and Yuletide, the greatest trickster fest of them all! It will probably be no surprise therefore, to learn that harvest celebrations also have their elements of trickery. In my discussion of the "harvest home" I have already mentioned the election of a harvest King and Queen, who would sometimes preside over a period of "misrule" where secular and ecclesiastical rules where by tradition deemed to be temporarily suspended. I have since came across a tradition of "guisers" associated with harvest festivities. The guisers were typically youths who, at the time the harvest home parties were being held, would dress in masks and garish outfits. They would then run about the locality in mobs, attempting to gate crash the various "harvest homes". As can be imagined, at times this festive intrusion would have been welcomed as a light hearted addition to the party spirit, at others it would have resulted in fights, disruption and disorder. Needless to say, the Victorian trend for regulating these events effectively did away with the "guising" tradition. Interesting similarities will be noted with the tradition of mummers and of "wassailing" at Christmas

Song of September

2008-09-22T13:56:00.000-07:00

Here's a health to our master, the founder of our feast

I hope to God wi' all mi' heart his soul in Heaven may
rest

Anf all his works may prosper, whatever he takes in
hand

For we are all his servants, here at his command

Then drink, boys, drink and see you do not spill

For if you do you shall drink two, it is our master's
will!

Here's a health unto our Master and our Mistress shan't
go
free,

For she's a good provider. provides as well as he.

For she's a good provider and bids us all to come.

So take this cup and sup it up, for tis our harvest
home.

Home boys home, home boys home!

Fill it up to the brim and drink it off clane

For 'tis our harvest home

"Harvest home" drinking song, recorded in Dorset 1935

Plough The Fields and Scatter

2008-09-22T13:41:00.000-07:00

In the fields around Colston Bassett, the final wheat fields have been harvested. Several wheat fields adjacent to the foxhole were only harvested this weekend, and the farm at the end of the road from us was buzzing with frantic tractors tooing and froing to the fields. This is very late. Only last weekend I waded through one of the fields on the way to a prime blackberry site opposite the ruin of St Mary's Church. The wheat itself was drooping toward the ground and filmed with a dusty mildew, so I can only assume the farmer plans to use it for cattle fodder?

Anyway, I've been putting off my harvest post until now, as it's traditional for the harvest to be celebrated only when the last of the wheat has been bought into the barn. Across England, up to the age of mechanisation, this was an earth-shatteringly important time in the rural year. Work was plentiful, and labourers and farmers would have been working long hours since mid July in order to gather the year's produce. In some areas, such as the hop fields of Kent, it was common for city folk to take time off in order to help with the harvest in the country, and the opportunities for itinerant workers were plentiful. Accordingly, with the harvest over, the large agricultural workforce could breathe a sigh of relief. On the other hand, this was a time of anxiety for many. With harvest over, itinerant workers had to make plans for how to support their families over the winter. Many also had to move from their temporary accommodation to "winter quarters". This was such a well-established part of the economic landscape that the upcoming feast of Michaelmas was sometimes known as "pack rag day".

Still, emotions were high and there was money in the pocket. The pubs would have been full that night! Rural pubs would have been doing a roaring trade during harvest time. Pub lovers that the English assuredly still are, the evidence points to the beloved institution enjoying a still greater popularity in past centuries. For instance, Colston Bassett (population 223) is currently serviced by one fairly decent pub. In the eighteenth century, the village, whose population was either the same or smaller, contained no fewer than five pubs. Unbelievable.

The last cart load of wheat to be wheeled through the village was the occasion for raucous celebrations. From the agricultural team a harvest king and queen were nominated, the queen often being a burly countryman in drag, and an inebriated parade would commence. As the royal procession passed, the revellers would often be pelted with apples by waiting villagers. At the climax of the parade, an effigy of wheat would often be decorated and dressed up and displayed prominently in either the village church or the principle tithe barn. The form this took varied from region to region, and contrary to widespread misconceptions, there is no evidence of this tradition being representative of pre-christian harvest customs. Nor is there any likely connection with the hugely popular cult of the Virgin Mary in pre-Deformation England. Rather, the custom of creating wheat effigies seems to be a (traditionally valid) innovation of the late eighteenth century, building on less elaborate, earlier traditions of decorated hay bales. The small corn dollies so beloved of American tourists and Beefeater restaurants did not gain widespread popularity until the 1940s, by which time many of the old harvest customs were already dead.

Probably the highlight of the harvest festivities was the "Harvest Home". These were large barn parties held for the agricultural labourers. Most commonly these were specific to individual farms of small groups of farms. Alcohol would flow freely and the occasions became notorious as as hotbeds of public disorder. In accordance with the stricter line on public morality taken during the Victorian period, the harvest homes became subject to closer regulation. As the last days of the tradition drew near, by the years preceding the first world war the harvest party had become a discreet pastiche of its former glory. A typical harvest home in 1912 would be held for a whole village rather than for individual farms. It would be a strictly ticketed event and would include the presence of local dignitaries such as MP, parish councillors or the local Vicar. The extreme cultural dislocation of the Great War and the mechanisation of farming spelt the end of the harvest home, along with a whole way of life. 1920s England was a brutalised, pessimistic place with scant room for the antiquated customs of a bygone age. This being said, harvest celebrations lingered in some areas into the mid 1930s, and some vestiges survived for much longer. For instance, I remember attending barn dances in southern Kent in my young childhood.

Nursing hangovers, it was a customary right for rural folk to go "gleaning" in the fields for a few days following the final harvest. Gleaning was often done by women and groups of children, and involved gathering stalks of wheat which had been missed during the harvest. This was of significant economic importance to many families, giving the opportunity to gather enough grain to make a good amount of flour, beer or animal feed for the winter. It was hard work but all accounts point to it being a light hearted activity enjoyed by the rural children.

A connection with the harvest in our modern urbanised culture has been maintained through the medium of harvest festivals in schools and Anglican Churches. The thought that the Church would fail to sanctify such an important cultural and economic occasion is unthinkable, but ecclesiastical celebrations of the harvest seem to have died out after the Reformation, with only the secular festivities persisting into modern times. The admirable revival of church harvest festivals, now seen as such an archetypal part of rural Anglicanism, was largely due to the Reverend Robert Hawker, an enterprising Anglican priest of the 1840s. Hawker, a Cornishman of the village of Morwenstow, was evidently a larger than life character, known for his colourful preaching and love of cats. He was also a keen ecclesiastical historian and an enthusiast for the Oxford Movement. Along with many of his colleagues, Hawker was keen to reclaim for the English Church many of the ancient liturgical and doctrinal treasures so rashly cast off during the reformation. Frustrated by what he saw as the Church's missed opportunity to renew its ancient heritage, he made a death bed conversion to the Roman Catholic faith. Though the influence the the Church of England has subsequently declined (largely through mismanagement), the custom of harvest festivals has passed to the secular school system, thus maintaining a remnant of this important tradition for future generations

Summer's Gone

2008-09-21T10:01:00.000-07:00

Today is the Autumnal equinox, the end of the light half of the year, and a time when hours of light and darkness are in equilibrium. determined by our world's orbit around the sun, this equinox, along with it's vernal counterpart and the two solstices, form the four quarter days of the natural sacred year, on which we hang all our traditional trappings and celebrations.

Where the balance of the vernal equinox marked the balanced poise of an athlete about to spring into action, the autumnal equinox has the balanced feeling of satisfaction after a hard day's labour. Ahead of us lies six month where the earth drays its resources back within itself. We too are invited to turn our gaze inwards, to rest, recuperate our strength, hatch new plans and learn new skills.

In England, today has never really been much of a big deal. The celebration of the equinox takes place on St Michael's Day next week. Today is the feast day of St Matthew, and in the traditional calender marks the official end of Summer. An old adage runs along the lines of "St Matthew brings the cold and dew". Prescient as this may well be, it has to be remembered that the same was used to describe St Bartholomew's day on 24th August, and since then we've had some of the best weather this summer has had to offer. I think its more the "ew" that counts in this case, rather than any talent for folk-meteorology!

Forbidden Fruit

2008-09-19T10:48:00.003-07:00

People who buy blackberries are idiots, pure and simple. I'm not concerned if you're offended in reading this. If you spend money on such a readily available commodity you are either bone idle, have more money than sense or are completely alienated from the natural cycles of the country in which you live. For me, blackberry season is one of the most wonderful times of year. The hedgerows lining England's capillary-like network of country lanes heave with the fruit from late August until well into October. It is an irony typical of nature that such a barbed, invasive and unpleasant plant as the bramble should bear such succulent and versatile fruit. Blackberries are delicious picked straight off the bush, or with cream, in pies or crumbles, jams, jellies, wines or in brandies and vodka. The list goes on and on. They're good for you too. What could be better?

This being said, it was once a widely held belief that blackberries picked after either 28th September or 11th October were past their best or even poisonous. Taking into account the calender change of 1752, it is clear that the feast of St Michael is the key date here. Modern ignorant buffoon that I am, I can vouch from personal experience that blackberries up to the end of October can still be very juicy and tasty, and give no ill effects. Indeed, when foraging for blackberries just the other day I noticed fruit on the bushes that was yet to ripen. What could cause this sudden festering of nature's bounty? The answer is simple. It’s the devil.

Yes, fresh from his nutting expedition of earlier in the month, Old Scratch turns his infernal hand to blackberries from Michaelmas onwards. The poison comes directly from the devil's touch, although folklore is divided as to what form this takes. In some, more discreet legends, the devil despoils the fruit by rubbing his feet over them, or by wiping them with the end of his tail. In other regions, "His Royal Highness" interferes with the fruit in more earthy ways...

So you've got just over a week to grab as many of the black beauties as you can before the son of perdition does unmentionable things to them. What are you waiting for?

Rustic superstition this may be, but you'll think twice about picking that dusty looking blackberry in late September now, won't you!

I remember when...

2008-09-19T10:48:00.002-07:00

One of the advantages we traditionalists have in our struggle to defend and revive our traditional culture, is the positive emotional associations people have with tradition. This, unfortunately is not lost on marketing professionals and soundbites of the type listed below are all too common. Regardless of this, I hope it succeeds in giving an example of the positive connotations "tradition" continues to invoke. Take for example...

Traditional Upholstery, traditional English food, traditionally crafted wooden cabinet, traditional ale, traditional wedding venue, traditional service, traditional coaching inn, traditional gentleman's tailor, traditional traditions, ad nauseum

We all know the tune. To go on would be to overstress the point. Suffice to say that a "tradition" conjures up sepia tinted associations of quality, harmony and nostalgia. Partly this is nostalgia for a world that never existed. People, myself included, love taking a misty eyed look at a supposedly rose tinted past existing some time before our birth. An entire industry specialising in reproducing posters of old adverts, propaganda prints and imitation gramophones has sprung up based on this premise. How many "Le Chat Noir" posters or Lewis Chess sets do we really need, for instance? We also have a strange tendency to idealise the world of our youth, a process that starts young and continues to build as we grow into old age. Your grandad's "during the war" stories are a prime example of this, but this tendency is found equally amongst the young. Traditionalists of the 1960s-1980s. Yes, you, don't hide. How many reunions and "school discos" have you found yourself in? How many hours of your life have you spent listening to one of your peer group warble on about this children's tv show or the other, or what toys they used to play with? I find a hard nosed examination of history is an effective remedy for the delusion inherent in this way of thinking, but I can't deny that this nostalgia is an ingrained and valuable part of our emotional makeup. History shows that people have always clung to the past in this way.

People are naturally conservative in temperament. Our challenge is to awaken this nostalgia in order to revive the half-hidden centuries old connection we have with the genuine organic traditions that have sustained us for countless generations.

The Royal Art

2008-09-19T10:48:00.001-07:00

The golden age of alchemy was a period of European history before the emergence of modern science, with it's strict demarcations between "spirit" and "matter", "science" & "religion". The word Alchemy itself an arabic term "Al-Khimi" meaning "From Khem", a nickname given to Egypt on account of the rich black soils of the Nile. It is a rich and venerable tradition that is bewildering in its complexity. At its core it is simple. The one focus of alchemy was the transformation of base materials into more rarefied. Matter. This could just as much apply to the transformation of the human spirit as the generation of gold from lead, or medicines, tinctures etc from herbs and barks. Thus, whereas the methods developed by seventeenth century alchemists have undoubtedly influenced the emergence of modern science, probably the greatest contribution of alchemy to the modern world is in terms of medicine. The distillation of essences, oils and tinctures pioneered by medieval alchemists form the bedrock of numerous disciplines of "alternative" medicine. Including the famous Bach's Flower Remedies. The science of metallurgy also owes a considerable debt to the much maligned activities of the "puffers" of medieval Germany. The dense jargon of mystical chemistry and richly symbolic tradition of alchemical art has inspired seekers of all sizes and calibres since the dawn of time. This isn't always a good thing. The arcane, trade-specific nature of medieval alchemical symbolism means that an almost infinite number of meanings can be read into the huge corpus of alchemical tracts and prints still widely available. All that happens is that each interpreter recreates alchemy in his own image. This happens from generation to generation. The medieval alchemical tracts were produced within an economic culture where protectionist trade guilds jealously guarded the secrets of their profession. Though I don't know of any "Alchemist's Guild", there can be no doubt that medieval alchemists shared the same cryptic mentality toward their craft. The downside of this is that several centuries later it is almost impossible to interpret the alchemical texts with any certainty. Interesting as the various interpretations by Jungian writers (among others) are, I prefer to take these with a pinch of salt and to approach alchemy as an antiquarian rather than an initiate. I love the chemical aesthetics and terminology of the "Royal Art", and, as regular readers will know, I often make use of it in an illustrative or tongue in cheek way to embellish my posts. Among other things for instance, I like to use the alchemical metaphor to describe my brewing endeavours! In this and other things, I have a way to go before achieving the philosopher's stone!

Out with the old

2008-09-19T10:48:00.000-07:00

I have taken the opportunity of the impending change of seasons to do a bit of "spring cleaning". As far as this effects the ECT, I have updated the post categories to make them more thematic and consistent, and have gotten rid of dead and obsolete sites from my links menu. Apologies therefore go out to newcomers who are reading through my old posts, as the links I have referred to in the posts may not now be wholly accurate. If you would like to set up a reciprocal link with the ECT, leave a note on one of my posts and let me know.

How Rood!

2008-09-14T00:58:00.000-07:00

Today is Holy Cross Sunday, or Holy Rood Day, or even Rood Sunday if you like. This one is obscure even by the usual standards of the sacred year. During the final episode of a serious of vicious and prolonged wars between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Persian Empire, the Persians captured Jerusalem in AD 619. The sack of the city was legendary and eclipses all others, including the much cited looting spree of 1099. In fact, it has been argued convincingly that the city has never regained its economic standing since. Among the booty carted back to Persia was a sacred wood shard purported to be a fragment of the true cross. This is of course impossible to verify at this distance in time. Save to say that it was a relic of the utmost importance at the time. Imagine the rejoicing then when the Persians were trounced ten years later and the relic recovered. The Persians were in fact defeated so decisively that their Empire went into permanent decline, and the Eastern Roman Empire was secured from the Persian menace perpetually. No one could have guessed in AD 629 that within twenty years both Persia and much of Western Asia, including Jerusalem, would be overrun by the hordes of Islam, a phenomenon that at the time didn't even exist. That aside, the precious relic was transported to the Imperial city of Constantinople with due pomp during the extensive victory celebrations, and the day has been celebrated ever since. Its not known what happened to the relic after that, or what its ultimate fate was when Constantinople itself fell to the Turks in 1453. No doubt this kept conspiracy theorists amused for centuries.

Closer to home, Holy Cross Day developed the endearing epithet of "The Devil's Nutting Day". Being a significant divergence from the spirit of the original festival this deserves some explanation… As one can no doubt deduce from this, there was obviously a folk connection between Holy Rood Day and gathering autumnal nuts. This seems strange to modern ears, especially considering that most nuts aren't ripe for at least another month. This tradition may well have emerged when cooler temperatures during the "mini ice age" meant that Autumn developed earlier in the year than it does now? Alternatively, this tradition is a survival of customs that developed before the reform of the calender in the eighteenth century, placing the "Devil's Nutting Day" at the end of September rather than the middle. This makes more sense to me at least. Anyway, Rood Sunday being always the Sunday after Holy Cross Day itself, the feast itself always falls on 14th September.

When it fell during the week, it was at one time customary for schools to be allowed time off to go collecting nuts. Here's where the connection comes in. What with fresh Autumnal beauty and teenage hormones running high, "nutting" often turned into "rutting". An old saying went that "a good year for nuts is a good year for babies". This association was so strong that to "go nutting" was a common euphemism for indulging in frolics. Hmmm…

I'm not sure how Old Scratch became connected with this particular day. It was on Holy Cross Day that the Devil himself was supposed to scout the English countryside looking for nuts for his troop of hungry little imps. He would dress like an old English gent and would carry off any unwary children he could get his claws on.
Could this be an invention by Victorian moralists to put a curb on teenage shenanigans in the hazel thicket? Such indeed is what a merry gaggle of young Dorset nut-gatherers thought when they embarked on a September spree in 1850. After only a brief time in their local woods they were overcome with such an unexpected sense of unease and a smell of brimstone that they fled in terror.

People wonder why I have such a fascination with folklore. Look at the development of this tradition from an ancient half remembered war to having the same connotations as a school leaver's disco. It well illustrates the beauty of tradition. Happy nut gathering.

Another England

2008-09-06T12:22:00.000-07:00

Many are now faced with the realisation that the Decline of the West isn't just a bugbear of the paranoid right and is a daily and worsening reality in our storm blighted land.

The following is not a manifesto, nor is it a particularly coherent set of principles. It's certainly not meant to read like a collection of quasi-political soundbites It's a random and highly personal set of points which cut to the bottom of what "traditionalism" is all about for me, and the sort of England I'd love to live in.

Support for the Monarchy as fount of justice and honour, guardians of tradition, defenders of the people and Father of the people.

Support for the mission, fabric and institutional security of the traditional church

Uphold regional customs,festivities, fairs and feast days.

Uphold the family, the rock foundations of any stable society.

Encourage heterosexual marriage, the only true guarantor of healthy society.

Restore proper gender roles to both English men and women.

Support the historic class system and the idea of an ordered, hierarchical society.

Reinstate the moral obligation for the strong to be guardians and protectors of the weak.

Uphold the traditional English morality of honour, fair play and manners.

Preserve England's organic, unwritten constitution and resist trends towards codification.

Phase out the political party system in parliament, whereby one court faction lords it over the entire nation with the pretense of the legitimacy of mass popular support.

restore credibility to the political system by reinstating a more selective voting franchise.

Abolish the ridiculous cult of political correctness, and it's principle protagonist, the state funded BBC.

Resist moves towards the creation of any super-national state body, whether European or otherwise.

Restore traditional discipline and Christian values to English schools.

Replace state welfare with Gilds, philanthropy and group charity.

Encourage trades Guilds and bands to replace the confrontational "class war" assumptions of trades unions and to encourage economic cooperation.

Encourage both economy and government to be conducted at the lowest, most local level possible.

Aim for the widest possible distribution of the "means of production" as possible. As far as can be achieved, all should be encouraged to own the means of their labour, whether this is a tradesman owning his own tools or a group of IT workers as collective stakeholders in an enterprise in which they share mutual responsibility.

End the culture of selfishness and irresponsibility by forcing people to be more self reliant.

Aim for the greatest possible level of self sufficiency, at the level of family, region and nation.

Promote the history of our people amongst the young, ending the culture of shame about our past.

End immigration and as far as is practicable encourage the humane repatriation of foreign nationals.

The complete cultural assimilation of all settled immigrants.

Preserve our countryside, our rural economy, our ecosystems and natural resources.

Encourage architecture which is concordant with the traditions of our land.

Revive traditional sports and recreations.

Encourage the flowering of folk music, dance and celebration.

More to come at some point I'm sure!

Decay

2008-09-03T10:38:00.000-07:00

As the light waned during yesterday evening a ragged patchwork of storm fronts streaked the September sky. Dark cloud formations piled heavy droplets of rain upon the harvested fields and angry thunder chased forked lightning across the darkening skies. To us watching, it seemed like the dying Summer was turning its frustration and anger in on itself, burning up the last of its vitality in futile gestures of self destruction.

True enough, today's bright, clear morning brought in its wake a crisp cold wind and the feeble Sun could transmit only a token heat through the cloudless sky. Autumn is creeping up on us. I don't think there is any time of year that I actually dislike, but the transitional periods of change at the turn of Winter to Spring and of Summer to Autumn are my undisputed favourites. I love the sense of change and turbulence in the air, and relish watching the drama of the seasons unfold before my eyes.

The last week has seen the sudden appearance of the signs of decay characteristic of Autumn. The timbre of life is frantic yet resigned as the plant life draws its vital force back into itself and animals stock up for the impending winter. For people too, September is a month of preparation, of taking stock and tying up loose ends. In the fields there are still some crops left to be harvested and berry season is coming into full swing.

In the kitchen, September traditionally sees the ominous task of collating and preserving the various produce of the summer months. Much of the food from the Foxhole Centenary Garden, such as the beetroots and blackcurrants, have been frozen. For the majority of human history before electric freezers, this would have posed further problems. Little wonder then that much food was transformed into pickles, jams and preserves at this time of year, or dried and hung in the pantry.

Our Anglo-Saxon ancestors dubbed September Haligmonath- Holy Month, which illustrates that the next few weeks aren't entirely about rushing about like the proverbial blue arsed fly getting preserves ready for the winter. Its also the end of harvest, time to reflect on the last few months, give thanks for a good harvest and quite frankly kick our feet up a bit.

The month kicked off in style on Monday with St Giles' Day, the feast of another obscure medieval saint who once enjoyed huge popularity. On the Saxon Shore of North Kent, within easy reach of the area in which I grew up, 1st September is the official launch of the Oyster catching season. In Southern England it is customary to toast St Giles and a good catch with some gin and a plate of oysters. Oysters aren't really my thing but I did partake in a few large gins to keep up the tradition! Looking ahead a few weeks the harvest festivals celebrated feebly in schools and churches these days are pale reflections of what was once a major festival at the end of September, Michaelmas.

Legends of the Pall

2008-08-30T02:31:00.000-07:00

An alternative myth of origins for the pallium...

Rather than being derived from civil service uniform, the pallium was always a symbol of papal and archiepiscopal authority. The first pallium was a white woollen yoke laid on the tomb of Saint Peter as a sign of his purity and service to God after his martyrdom. The symbol was then taken up by his successors as a badge of their authority and their role as fonts of tradition.

I read this account yesterday evening in CH Lawrence's excellent study "Medieval Monasticism". Both accounts derive ultimately from the tradition of the Church and neither are necessarily mutually exclusive of the other. The truth, for what its worth, is lost in the mist of time.

My feeling is that the civil service story is the more likely origin, and the symbolism of the yoke of Peter was invented by later apologists and papal propagandists when the original meaning had been forgotten, although the latter story has more poetic appeal.

Archeologism

2008-08-29T02:47:00.000-07:00

An interesting object lesson on tradition in theory and practice was illustrated to me recently by changes surrounding the Pope’s use of the pallium. On the surface this may appear to be an arcane discussion of ecclesiastical minutiae and of precious little relevance to non-Catholics, so I’ll keep the background information brief.

The Pallium, or Pall referred, in the civilisation of late antiquity to a simple woollen cloak or sash draped about the shoulders over other vestments, usually without a visible clasp. The use of the pallium, worn over robes of office, became the norm within the Roman civil service, and as with much civil service protocol and custom, was incorporated verbatim into the ecclesiastical structure of the early Church. As its usage developed, the pallium became a specifically religious item to be worn only during the celebration of mass. It became progressively more elitist being first confined to Bishops and then, by the eleventh century became a vestal symbol of the papal office and dignity. From then on, it has been a badge of honour and office within the Pope’s gift to bestow on the senior ecclesiastics within the College of Cardinals. Indeed, to be given the pallium became a shorthand expression for the bestowal of executive authority within the Church, either as a Cardinal or papal legate.

Of course, in the long centuries since its incorporation by the Church, the pallium has undergone many changes in style, reaching a pinnacle of ceremonial elegance during the counter-reformation of the late sixteenth century onwards.

The point at hand here is that during the reign of Pope John Paul II, the style advisors around the papal curia attempted to undo the accretion of pallium developments and go back to a more original style of garment, consistent with its ancient usage. The result was that the Pope’s pallium was radically different to those worn by his immediate predecessors.

The current incumbent of the papal throne, Benedict XVI, has put aside the ancient style of pallium favoured by his predecessor and reverted to the newer elaborate form as developed gradually by Church tradition.

Now, which of these is the most genuinely traditional course of action? Is it the quest to seek out the most authentically original forms of a practice and seek a return to those pure, ancient norms, or is it to accept the evolutionary development of a custom in its entirity, even if these changes render the current tradition recognisably different from it's original usage? The answer to me is clear. Consistent with Benedict's general pro-traditional stance within the Church, the most authentically traditional position to take is to use the pallium that has been bequeathed to the present Church through centuries of development, change and evolution. To choose the first option would be to take a radical position, using the word's original etmyology of returning to the root. True radicalism and tradition are incompatible concepts. This does apply to the concept of "Radical Traditionalism" except where the term is meant to imply a relative "radicalism" in relation to contemporary social and cultural norms.

A hallmark of an authentic tradition is its ability to change and develop as it is transmitted, consistent with its internal rules and spirit. These organic developments then become valid parts of the tradition itself. Innovations, negations and amendments imposed on the tradition from outside without reference to its internal logic can cause serious or fatal damage to the organic tradition. We have seen such revolutionary attacks cripple the traditional culture of the west since the time of the Reformation and is the hallmark of the modern iconoclastic attitude. On the other hand, arbitrary reversions to "purer" or allegedly less corrupted forms of tradition can be just as damaging, denying the organic nature of tradition and reducing it to an aesthetic object of curiosity and artifice. The temptation to slip into this bland antiquarianism, eloquently dubbed "archeologism" by Pope John XXIII, is something we need to vigilantly guard against in our struggle for cultural renewal.

Great Europids

2008-08-28T14:23:00.000-07:00

Norman Lowell 1946-

Maltese lunatic and would be leader of the "Imperium Europa"

Does more to discredit right wing politics than any other living human being

Fantastic, if unintentional comedian

Currently in prison.

Great Englishmen II: King Henry V

2008-08-28T14:08:00.000-07:00

Henry V, King of England & France, Lord of Ireland

16 September 1387 - 31 August 1421

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,Or close
the wall up with our English dead!In peace there ’s nothing so becomes a manAs
modest stillness and humility;But when the blast of war blows in our ears,Then
imitate the action of the tiger:Stiffen the sinews, summon up the
blood. William Shakespeare's King Henry V Act iii. Scene 1.

Practical Alchemy V

2008-08-27T04:27:00.000-07:00

That’s it chaps, the Foxhole Country Winery is in full productive swing. Not wanting a repeat of the blackcurrent prohibition of recent months, I snaffled (is that a word?) our hard grown crop of beetroots and put them in the boiler to turn into delicious full bodied red wine. That’s the plan anyway. Boy are those tubors messy. As is so often in these brewing enterprises, my foxcub was a full and willing accomplice, and was gleefully sitting on the Kitchen work surface next to me as I butchered the beetroots. She has now informed me that she will be making banana wine next weekend. Looks like I need to start gathering the ingredients then!
Here's the recipe for the beetoot wine if anyone wanted to try it:

6lb beetroot
2.2 lb sugar
1 lemon
1 gallon water
2 tsp pectolase
Yeast & nutrient

Scrub and slice the beetroot. Boil in the water for 45mins- 1hour until tender. Retain cooked beetroot for yummy salads, cheese sandwiches and soups. Strain beetroot water onto the sugar in a fermenting bin. Dissolve sugar and add lemon juice. When cooled add nutrient and pectolase. After waiting till the must has cooled further to about blood temperature add the yeast and wait for the fermentation to work its way out. I'll then transfer the wine to a demijon until it is clear and stable, before bottling.

Emptiness

2008-08-26T12:48:00.000-07:00

I have just returned from a few wonderful days spent on Tenera Mor, one of a remote archipelago off the north-western coast of Scotland called the Summerisles. No, I didn't see a single wickerman despite searching high and low for the best part of a week! Nothing that interesting I'm afraid, unless you happen to like mile upon mile of desolate heather moorlands, capricious seascapes and some of the most spectacular mountain vistas in the British isles. Good job I do really... The iconic Wickerman film was in fact filmed in the near(ish) isle of Skye but took inspiration from the serene isolation of the Summerisles. The journey was an arduous one, 14 hours in total from ground zero in Colston Bassett, albeit including a detour to visit my in-laws in Stranraer on route. It was well worth it though. We hired a farmhouse on the island along with three very close friends and spent the days drinking, walking, reading, playing board games and drinking some more.All very grown up, even discounting the fact that we spent the best part of two full afternoons playing Dungeons and Dragons. I was glad to be able to get over to the mainland last Wednesday for a bit of mountain walking. The slog through endless unmarked peat bog to reach the lower slopes of the ascent was arduous, but the views at the peak were well worth the effort. At this time of year, an equivalent mountainous area in North Wales, the Loch Lomond area or the Lake District would have been dotted with tourists and ramblers. On this range, however, we had nothing but herds of red deer and bemused looking sheep for company, and the vast skies and biscuit tin panoramas were virtually empty of the scars of human habitation.I thoroughly recommend to anyone with a love of walking or peace and quiet to pay the area a visit, or even those who have become progressively disheartened by how busy and unpleasantly built up our island home is becoming. It is a joy to find places not a million miles away that still exude the discrete power of emptiness.

St Lawrence' Day.

2008-08-10T10:49:00.000-07:00

Today was the feast day of St Lawrence, once an extremely popular member of Europe's semi-divine pantheon of Saints, to whom no fewer than 238 English churches were dedicated before the Deformation. I stepped outside the foxhole this morning and the hedgerows embracing the farm track were filled with the alien majesty of green dragonflies and cottage white butterflies, a sure sign that the last days of summer are beginning. The strong wind today was a refreshing balm from the dust of the summer's heat, but within a few weeks that wind will be bringing with it the first heralds of impending Autumn.

I was overjoyed to both see my parents this weekend and to have my foxcub back home after spending a week with her grandparents in Kent. We had a late meal and candlelit chats till late into St Lawrence' Eve, and today we enjoyed a leisurely lunch and a pleasant walks over the fully riped wheat fields to the village of Langar. Everywhere was a lazy, indolent feel in the air, one that accords well with the saint's reputation as "Lazy Lawrence". Even the priest at mass today hadn't bothered putting on a chasuble and the gaggle of attendant altar servers were bedecked in bermuda shorts and tee-shirts rather than their customary cassock and cottars. Tut tut...

Anyway, to get back to today's theme, I've never really thought St Lawrence deserved his reputation as patron saint of idlers. This I believe comes from a seventeenth century popular ballad and story called "Lazy Lawrence", and had nothing to do with the saint, but, when tar sticks it becomes difficult to wash off. Historically not much is known of Lawrence's earthly life, save that he was a Roman Deacon who was martyred in a particularly unpleasant way in AD 258. He was said to have been slowly roasted to death on an iron griddle. Apparently blessed with legendary fortitude, hagiographic myths attribute to the saint a grim humour in the face of torture which warms the humour bone even today. After cheerfully enduring several hours of roasting, Lawrence requested that his tormentors turn him over, as he was fully done on that side. It's somewhat distasteful therefore that a long standing tradition in Andover used to be the slow roasting of a a festal ox to commemorate this day, but then, medieval folk-religion was a always a great mixture of reverence and mirth...

Anyway, today I am invoking the patronage of Lazy Lawrence to take a little break. This is not due to any theological schism, change of heart or personal crisis. I have no need to excessively prod the dusty corners of my soul right now. I simply am very busy. Since starting this blog in January, my academic writing has suffered considerably. Apart from my two part article on the history of dog-fighting for Runa Magazine, I have produced no new research pieces. I have unfinished an essay on the legendary giants Gog and Magog which has been gathering virtual cobwebs in my hard drive for over a year now. I also have a completed article on "Neo-Monasticism" that is in need of extensive reworking to remove polemical elements. On top of this, I have just finished proofreading the second edition of Metaphysics of War for Integral Tradition Publishing and have the proofreading and introduction for Gorlesleben's "Zenith of Mankind" to contend with.

High time therefore for a summer recess, although this won't mean a complete absence of posts. On the feast of the Assumption (this Friday) I will be travelling up to the Summer Isles in North-West Scotland for a holiday with my family and a couple of my brothers, so I shall take this opportunity to bid you all a fond adieu until my return.

May God bless you and your progeny, and don't do anything I wouldn't do ;-)

Dies Caniculares

2008-08-07T14:32:00.000-07:00

This is customarily a hot and sticky time of year. The nights are still and humid. The air is thick with biting insects and the dense vegetation has taken on a dusty, parched hue. Feeling irritable and restive? Finding it hard to sleep? Perhaps you are unmotivated or lethargic? You may be suffering fevers, allergies, bad luck or unexplainable bad health. Your hens are not laying, your cattle are weak and produce little milk. Your wine is souring in its jars and the rivers are murky and brackish. Your dogs are agitated and erratic. Perhaps you've got that feeling that something inexplicable isn't quite right… If so, then it must be the dog days.

At this time of year, Sirius, the Dog star rises in conjunction with our own Sun, inaugurating what is traditionally the most inauspicious time of year. The precise dating of the Dog Days varies from year to year, and also varies depending on whether one calculates using the position of the major dog star, Sirius, or Proclyon, the minor dog star. This means that, if we are astronomically correct, the dog days of summer can fall any time between early July and early September depending on the year and where you live in the Northern hemisphere. Lets face it though, these things aren't really about astronomical precision are they? The synchronic rising of Sirius and our own star has indeed been radically thrown out since the origin of the tradition by the procession of the equinoxes.

The idea of the dog days can be traced to the tradition of the Greeks and Romans to describe the hottest time of year, when the air is stagnant and progress is slow. Accordingly, Roman tradition gave them the span 3rd July- 11th August, regardless of the actual position of the evil star at this time. That this was an accepted time of year in our own island is well attested. The Church of England's 1552 edition of the Book Of Common Prayer mentions the "Dog Daies" encompassing the period 6th July-17th August. Seeing as the Book Of Common Prayer is a simplified vernacular plagiarism of several earlier liturgical sources, we can be certain that the Dog Days have been well established here for many centuries. Romans with an eye to divine providence would sacrifice a brown dog to appease the wrath of Sirius at this time. It is unknown what the heresiarchs of the English reformation would have prescribed!

It is possible that the Roman termination of the canicular days was originally extended in England from the 11th to the 17th August to incorporate the feast day of St Roch, patron saint of dogs, on the 16th. Certainly within the Church of England it is reasonably common for some parishes to hold an animal service around this time, where domestic pets and animals are blessed within the church building. I can't say authoritatively whether this is connected to old traditions of the dog days and St Roch or not, although it is doubtful whether the practice itself has a lineage preceding the twentieth century.

Our expressions "dogging around" and "dog tired" may indeed be less references to the unique indolence of man's best friend and more to do with this sullen and languid portion of the summer months.

Practical Alchemy IV

2008-08-06T13:26:00.000-07:00

Something for the weekend vicar?

The Devil’s Tea
8 pints strong tea
2.5 lb sugar
1 lb chopped raisins
2 lemons
Yeast & nutrient

Potato & Onion Wine
0.5 lb chopped potato
0.5 lb chopped red onion
1 lb chopped raisins
3 lb sugar
2 lemons
Yeast & nutrient

The Day of Judgement

2008-08-06T13:22:00.000-07:00

At the time of writing we are six days into August. It is the feast of the Transfiguration, and I have completely missed Lammas. Well, I say *missed* it. Rather I didn't get around to writing anything for the blog about it. This was partly due to having broken digits on my left hand that make typing rather irksome, and partly due to celebrating the season with a raucous party at my Parent's home, as Lammas should.

So what's the big deal with Lammas then? Firstly, it is one of the eight seasonal festivals which Wiccans have claimed as their own. I hate to spoil the party but from the outset I need to make it clear that there is no evidence Lammas was celebrated by our pre-Christian ancestors. That's not to say it wasn't of course. This time of year is when many cultures celebrate the first fruits of the harvest, the English being no exception. Our own traditions, however, date to no earlier than the glory days of the Anglo-Saxon Church (which is still pretty impressive really). As with many of our ancient festivals obscured by the dust of centuries, Lammas has been subject to a fair bit of confusion. Our forebears in fifteenth century York had obviously decided the festival was "Lamb-Mass", as there are records of tenants of the Minster being obliged to present one of that season's lambs for the use of the church at High Mass on 1st August. If our nineteenth century source for this tradition is to be trusted, it records a subsidiary tradition which had evolved later due to a certain misunderstanding.

Almost certainly the etymological roots of Lammas lie in the old English "Hlafmaesse", or "Loaf-Mass". Connected to this idea may have been the presentation of loaves within the Church liturgy in celebration of a successful wheat harvest? This can unfortunately only be inspired speculation at this distance. Whether this was a generally celebrated festival or not is unknown. The verifiable sources for offerings in Church from this time of year have all taken place in Churches dedicated to St Peter Ad Vincula, St Peter-In-Chains, whose festal day is 1st August. The dedication to St Peter in chains comes from the story in Acts of the Apostles where the hero's prison chains were removed by the nocturnal visit of an angel. What we probably have here is a confluence of ecclesiastical tradition and local folk customs.

Whatever the religious implications of Lammas, it had widespread importance in the secular calender. In the later medieval period the custom spread from Scotland to reckon rents and excise duties at Candlemas and at Lammas. Connected with this was the common practice of granting licences to hold trade fairs during Lammastide. This was a busy day of reckoning in the business calender which developed a connection equivalent to the "end of the financial year" in modern parlance. So ingrained did this connection become that the day of judgement at the end of time itself became colloquially dubbed "the latter lammas".

Accordingly the expression "I'll pay you at the latter Lammas" implied that the creditor in question could whistle for their money. I wonder if that originated in Scotland as well?

Practical Alchemy III

2008-08-06T13:16:00.000-07:00

One might with some justification say that my first steps in wine making have not gone especially well. I remember home made wine. It's always cast a certain rustic glamour over me. My maternal Grandfather was always a keen winemaker, and even as a child I remember him making a delicious elderflower champagne and scoffable quantities of sloe gin. I also recall rack on rack of my mother's vinegary looking crab apple wine gathering cobwebs in the cupboard under the stairs in my childhood home. Later in my teenage years a friend of mine bought a bottle of home made Tamarind and Apple wine to a New Years Eve party I attended. I was hooked!

Observers who know both myself and my 'Gramps' have been quick to point out the similarities between us and so will not be surprised when I decided to assume the mantle of this proud family legacy… He was excited about my ale making experiments earlier in the year and so when I saw him at Easter he presented me with a couple of handsome glass demijohns and a well thumbed book of wine recipes from the mid sixties.

It was a matter of curiosity really. Colston Bassett is a wonderful village packed with fruit trees and the edible bounty of nature. In the Foxhole garden we have a huge apple tree which can't be less than seventy years old, and that this year is heaving with apples. We also have half a dozen blackcurrant bushes which a few weeks ago yielded up 4kg of berries. Along our farm track are plentiful elder trees, Blackthorn trees (for sloes) and Damson trees, and the lanes girding the village swell with blackberries when the Autumn comes. With such an inheritance, who could refuse the challenge?

Such is the theory of it at least. In reality, I missed the best of the elder flowers at the end of June whilst waiting for my stock of wine making equipment to arrive, and when the blackcurrants were harvested Mrs Fox refused point blank to let them disappear into a wine making endeavour. Ok, there is a precedent for this. In the "Tambora Summer" of 2007 our blackcurrant bushes yielded about 15 berries between them (maybe a few more!). Without further ado, I snatched these and threw them into a large saucepan to make jam. It was delicious, and when not gracing a slice of thickly buttered bread it makes an excellent high strength glue. I actually had to through my last jar away the other week, as, where I had obviously put the jam into the jar when it was too hot and then screwed the lid on, no amount of coaxing and straining could persuade the jar to open again!

Anyway, I digress. The upshot of all this was that I made my first ever proper wine out of tea and raisins. This I decanted into demijohns on 25th July. I put a second batch in for primary fermentation yesterday, cunningly fashioned from potato and onions. Don't turn your noses up! You can make anything taste good if its got enough sugar in it!

Storm in a Teacup

2008-08-06T13:11:00.000-07:00

The English Chemical Theatre is now a little over six months old, so I thought I'd take a few moments and look back on what's happened, and what we can look forward to in the months ahead! It is also August and while being an introspective person generally, I make especial efforts to reflect during this, the month of my birth. Coincidentally, over the past few years I have often involved myself with a reflective "Book of Life" project at this time of year, so that's my justification if one were needed. In general I've enjoyed this year so far. Yes I've been broke. Yes work has been frustrating etc etc But there's something to be said for personal and emotional stability and that is a gift I've been able to enjoy these past two years.

I started the ECT as an indirect result of a conversation I had with Griff (formerly Afagdu) and the Dandy Highwayman when we were in Lindesfarne just before Christmas last year. In hindsight it was a productive few days. In many ways a lot has changed since that bitterly cold, windswept and rum soaked visit to the bleakest outpost of northern England. In the pregnant midwinter darkness of 22nd December we made what would be my last ritual toast to the old Germanic gods on a blustery hillock to the seaward side of Lindesfarne Castle. In the sumbel that followed we made our oaths for the year to come. On Christmas Eve I made my way from Northumberland to meet my wife and daughter in Kent, taking a roundabout stop for an Italian meal in Cardiff on the way. The next morning I attended Christmas morning mass with my Dad, thus continuing on my (at the time unconscious) road back to Rome.

The publication of The Initiate, and my official reconversion to Roman Catholicism have been the most influential events of the year so far. The ECT has not played any real part in this, although through it I have been able to capture in snapshot certain moments of my life for future reflection. My intentions for the ECT on establishment were threefold:

1: To enable me to develop a more informal writing style distinct from the bombastic academia which characterises my academic writing
2: To act as a vehicle for the promotion of traditionalist cultural and political opinions.

3. To force myself into a spiritual discipline of marking the major festivities of the traditional sacred year.

The name itself is a flippant Anglicisation of Theatricum Chemicium Brittaniae, a mid seventeenth century collection of alchemical verse in English once categorised by the great antiquarian Elias Ashmole in Oxford.

In general I'm pleased with how its gone. I'll be honest. I find blogging a pain in the arse and there have been many times when I have been tempted to jack it in, but I'm pleased I've persisted thus far. Looking back it seems I've spent a lot of time defending my understanding of tradition from, on one side political misappropriation by the radical right and the encroachment of postmodern relativism on another. Although I am glad I've taken this stand, I'm uncomfortably aware I may have fallen into a "People's Front of Judea/Judean People's Front" trap, that quandary well known to both Monty Python fans and political activists of all persuasions.

I think I've said enough to make my point quite clear with regards to both the New Right, Postmodernism and occultism, so for the coming months I will endeavour to reach out to intelligent people who may not care about tradition, rather than squabbling with those who do…
Accordingly, over the next half year I want to investigate what viable elements of traditional society we have left in the West, and how these can be defended. As a case study of the cancerous effects of modernity on England's traditional life I also intend to carry out a comparative study of the history of two English villages...

Woven Wheat Whispers

2008-07-27T09:55:00.000-07:00

Last Friday was payday for me, so , as is my custom, I attempted to log onto Woven Wheat Whispers in order to download my month's fill of the weird and wonderful fringe of folk music. Sadly I found that the site had been taken off line. Woven Wheat Whispers was a remarkable venture, being, as far as I am aware, the only legal download service dedicated specifically to folk music and folk related genres. This is a shame, as the available music catalogue had been getting steadily better and the number of subscribers and interested parties was up. It is an especial pity as, for many of the avant-garde and experimental folk artists that I favour, Woven Wheat Whispers was the principle means of publicity and support. The small company had begun to make a breakthrough into the mainstream folk market with the release of the widely acclaimed "John Barleycorn Reborn" compilation last September, in conjunction with cult Neofolk label Coldspring. On his blog, site owner Mark Coyle had this to say:

We have had paid high profile adverts in many magazines through 2007 and
especially 2008 that have not made any difference to recent sales at all. As a
(very small) commercial service, the folk press didn't give us coverage and
without their support it was genuinely difficult to break through to a wider
folk customer base. For example, due to their rules about not promoting
commercial interests we couldn't mention our service in many folk online
discussion groups. This seems to limit their ability to help the development of
independent folk services and labels. Our suspension and now closure hasn't even
been remarked on in the folk discussion groups. Nor did more than a handful of
people email us in response to the earlier post about service suspension or
leave comments. Whatever moment of interest we had, has passed.

If this indeed is the case, it is a shame, and a sad reminder of the sink or swim considerations that need to be heeded by anyone seeking favour with the consuming public. I think he is wrong however, in his analysis that public interest in folk music has waned. I know for a fact that the genre(s) still has a hardcore, devoted set of fans, one which continues to grow. The failure of Woven Wheat Whispers may have as much to do with Coyle's misplaced idealism as any other factor. As a small venture, WWW needed the pragmatism to accept friends when they were offered. Before Initiate I went to press I contacted Mark to enquire if he would be interested in fielding a free A4 advert for WWW. I am another of those misguided idealists who never makes a successful businessman, so me offer was 100% genuine, and knowing Coyle it was no doubt taken on face value as well. The response I got from him was both dismissive and rude, declining our offer on the grounds that he didn't like our publishing partners, Integral Tradition Publishing. Not wanting to discuss here the strengths and weaknesses of our partner in publishing Initiate I, I would suggest that the outlook for folk music is not as apocalyptic as Coyle suggested on his blog. Rather, his venture has fallen victim to a combination of "realeconomik", a thieving public who prefer itunes and Demonoid to a small music specialist, and the misplaced idealism of a left wing intellectual, who prefers to complain first and think later (and then complain some more).

Despite this, hats off to the genuine efforts that Mark Coyle has made in this field. It is now open for another adventurous spirit to take up the baton and run with it. Any takers?

Reynard Recommends: The Shires.

2008-07-27T00:53:00.000-07:00

The wry thoughts and always entertaining offerings of a dear brother in arms. Add to your favourites list. http://shires.wordpress.com/

A Moment of Indolence

2008-07-27T00:35:00.000-07:00

I make no apologies for the lack of posts in the last ten days. I hope that I am not so sallow skinned as to have nothing better to do at the height of summer than to sit chained to my computer screen drifting in cyberspace... Well, when not at work at any rate! It's been a refreshing time of harvest and transformation at the Foxhole, so, with nothing more pressing to occupy my mind, I thought I'd sit down and crack one out before Mass, so to speak...

In one of my warblings around midsummer day last month I mentioned that the time to come would be one of reaping in the efforts sown in the previous parts of the year. As in most things, in this the fruits of the outer world and the that of the inner world coincide. This is the beginning of harvest time. The corn is ripe and golden in the fields and the roads are buzzing with columns of farm traffic under a steady sun and stifling air. It is a time of joyous, untroubled labour, frantic and urgent, yet somehow detached and focused.

I've been glad to enjoy some of the first fruits of the Foxhole Centenary Garden. Somehow our own onions and beetroots taste so much better than those we buy from the green grocers. Maybe the added seasoning of smug satisfaction. We also harvested nearly 4 kg of blackcurrants last weekend, which I have been banned from making wine from... More of that later.

Yesterday was a beautifully hot day and it was one of those moments when, in the midst of my usually hectic life, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror of memory... I realised with a slight smile the changes wrought on me by the steady tide of years, a process to which I am often blind. Many things have gradually transformed the sleek city fox of years past, with my flash job, city apartment and garish clothes, not to mention my hedonistic obsession with sex, food and alcohol. Well, some things don't change at any rate! I took a look at myself yesterday and saw a proper hillbilly country fox. Where did that come from?! Perhaps it was there along under all the garbage I robed myself in? There I was, scrumping broad beans in swimming shorts and broken old shoes, whiling away the time while my cornbread finished cooking!

Life is a mystery indeed.

The World Is Not a Stage

2008-07-16T11:00:00.000-07:00

Strange words, one might think, for someone whose blog is so full of theatrical allegories? Most people with an interest in tradition and the movements that have sprung up to defend it ie the various traditionalisms, will be aware of the bewildering variety of traditionalists out there. One of the rhetorical questions I posed in the editorial to issue one of The Initiate was what, if anything do the diverse groups of traditionalists have in common? What is this common thread, if it exists, and, more importantly, what are the issues and attitudes that divide them? What, for instance does a radical traditionalist "Integrist" Catholic have in common with a Tyr style radical traditionalist of the Odian school? What points of principle divide the spiritual seekers of the Guenonian school from the Middle England traditionalist supporters of Monarchy and established church? Ok, those examples were pretty obvious, but at the root of it all I think much of what divides traditionalists is a subtle alignment of attitude.

I started thinking about this during the upsurge of traditionalist awareness within the Temple of Set in Europe that eventually led to the schism of 2007. Leaving aside for a moment the obvious faults of the Temple of Set and other similar occult organisations, it is interesting how they occasionally serve as incubation pens for traditionalist activism and renewal. This boils down to the sad fact that many of our most devoted and spiritually minded young people are lured into these blind alley organisations by the gaping hole left in the soul of the West by the disappearance of traditional culture. In another century, the membership lists of the Temple of Set, Rune Gild and OTO may have been that generation's Jesuits, reformers and lay sisters? With this in mind, it's no real surprise that those initiates who are driven to pursue their spiritual path within the occult world, beyond the first flush of teenage rebelliousness, will be drawn to a restoration of the tradition whose absence is at the heart of their yearning and alienation.

What prevents these newly awakened traditionalists from fully breaking free of their occult chains is the persistence of modern attitudes within their spiritual quest. This, I believe, is the primary division between advocates of traditionalism. During the heady days of rebellion against the Temple of Set it was common to hear talk of "radical traditionalism" and of "living by a rad-trad script". Living by a radical traditionalist script... Think about it. This very simple statement of idealism lies at the heart of the problem. To live according to any script, "rad-trad" or otherwise, assumes a certain view of the world which is incompatible with genuine tradition. To live according to a script visualises life as a clear stage. The actor, the individual ego, is naturally at the centre of the stage in this cosmology. Additionally, the use of the script metaphor implies both complete individual sovereignty of the nature of the script used and also the assumption that the script can be changed at will, and that no one script is necessarily better than any other. There may be some that are more enjoyable, inspiring or aesthetically pleasing for instance, but none that are qualitatively better. This impeccably post-modern attitude is rooted in the very liberal individualism that has been consistently undermining Western civilisation since the "Enlightenment". It reduces tradition and traditionalism to yet another lifestyle choice. Try as they may, our occult based traditionalist crowd will make no impact whatever on the decline of the west unless this talk of scripts goes into the philosophical dustbin. It doesn't matter how many blacksmith courses you take, folk festivals you attend or micro-brew kits you buy. A lifestyle choice does not a traditionalist make!

To be a traditionalist means living life in harmony with the traditions of one's people. Those who follow a traditional path do things not for their aesthetic appeal or even their initiatory value but because that is the way things are done. At the centre of their stage is the organic continuity and cultural context which empowers their lives as living embodiments of tradition. Catholicism beautifully describes this concept as the Communion Of saints, the idea that living and dead are joined in an unbroken community with free inter communication between past and present. This attitude fosters an awareness of the numinous and intimacy with tradition that informs the lives of its members. This idea predates Christianity and is one of the few established facts about the religious lives of our English ancestors we can be fairly sure of.

The world is not a stage. The radical discontinuity embedded in the idea of the continual tabula rasa is the standard that divides the postmodern "traditionalist" movements from the genuine struggle to defend and restore our precious cultural heritage.

Praying For Rain

2008-07-15T05:31:00.000-07:00

Today, cast your gaze to the heavens and keep a watchful eye on the lurking clouds. If it rains today, tradition has it that we will have forty days of consistently soggy weather. Such, anyway, is the legend of St Swithun’s day!

In life and death Swithun was one of the heavyweights of the English Church, arousing a pastoral devotion which lasted from before his death on 2nd July 862 until the cataclysm of the Deformation in the 1530s. A pious man of obscure origins, Swithun gained a reputation as an ascetic and miracle worker when still operating as an itinerant priest in and around the royal capital of Winchester. Impressed by the stories, and maybe wanting to contain the anti-property undertones in the popular mendicant’s teachings, King Egbert invited Swithun to the royal court to become tutor to his son Prince Athelwulf. On his accession to the throne of Wessex in 852, Aethelwulf rewarded his old friend with the See of Winchester and appointed him as overseer of spiritual matters in the Kingdom. Swithun seems to have been an active Bishop, spearheading the royal drive to restore a church which had fallen into decadence and decline since the turn of the ninth century. Many new churches were built and old ones restored, and ten percent of royal demesne land was earmarked for Church use. Swithun also revived that anti-authoritarian streak noticeable in some earlier church stalwarts such as Martin of Tours. This may explain the rapid explosion of his popular cult among the common folk of Wessex. He held regular banquets for the poor of Winchester, events to which the movers and shakers of the city were often ostentatiously uninvited. Among his many miracles Swithun was said to have restored a peasant’s basket of eggs maliciously broken by workmen constructing one of Winchester’s new bridges. As his last days approached, the otherworldly prelate insisted on a simple burial outdoors in an unmarked grave so that the “sweet rain of heaven” might fall on his final resting place. So it was done…

However, as the years passed by, the monastic canons of Winchester Old Minster became more and more reluctant to turn down the chance to cash in the burgeoning saint’s cult which had grown up around the local holy man. Accordingly St Swithun’s mortal remains were transferred to a grand shrine in the restored Minster at Winchester (newly rededicated to St Swithun) on 15th July 971. Oh boy did the sweet rain of heaven fall! The horrified ascetic showed his divine displeasure by visiting the transfer ceremony with the most cataclysmic storm known to English history. Or, if you believe another tradition, the ceremony was postponed due to forty days relentless rainfall. I can only imagine what calamities would have befallen our ancestors had the celestial grapevine leaked word of the dismemberment of the saint’s body to fuel the relics trade. An item claimed to be the saint’s mummified head was certainly recorded in Canterbury. An arm was also recorded as being housed in Peterborough Abbey. Thus the legend was born, or was it? Contemporary records of St Swithun’s life and afterlife are scarce. Beyond a mention of his death in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle and the rededicated of Winchester Old Minster in 971, the notes are pretty scarce. The main source we have for the details of Swithun’s life is an often sensational Vitae Swithuni written down about 1000 AD more for entertainment purposes than historical veracity. This tale makes no mention of the rain legend for which St Swithun later became famous.

The aptly named scholar James Raine (no joke I swear!) traces the weather legend to the tremendously wet summer of 1315, whose unnatural deluge was presaged by a violent storm on St Swithun’s day. His source for this is the Durham chronicle. Other writers have pointed to William of Malmesbury’s recording of Swithun’s burial wish as evidence that the saint was centre of a weather cult as early as the twelfth century. Who knows indeed? In any case, St Swithun is not alone in his patronage of rain. The association of several saints in France and Flanders with almost identical legends (St Gervase, St Medard, St Protais and St Godelieve) points to a common cultural theme in the folk religion of Europe’s western fringe.

Sursum Corda

2008-07-07T03:30:00.001-07:00

The Western, Catholic Church has a glorious musical heritage stretching back as far as it’s incorporation as the Roman state religion by Emperor Constantine. The sublime chants of the Gregorian canon are early examples of a wonderful tradition that has included the polyphony's of the fourteenth century , medieval folk carols and the celestial dramas contained in Requiem masses by Mozart, Faure and others. The schismatic churches of Northern Europe have also produced a heritage of achingly beautiful liturgical music, which points to this being a true European tradition of transcendence through music. For examples of this sample the unbroken choral tradition preserved by English Cathedral chapters throughout the violent tumults of the deformation, the emotional hymns of the eighteenth century Church of England and the splendour of court composers such as Georg Handel.

Why then have so many Catholic churches become havens for the sort of banal liturgical warbling that seem more appropriate to the most shallow and nontraditional outcrops of Protestantism? For me an important part of the order of mass is the exultation “Sursum Corda!” lift up your hearts… This one phrase sums up the urgent yearning for the divine that fuels the sacrifice of the Mass. Accordingly, liturgical music needs to be both uplifting and inspiring. In short, the music needs to be symbolic of the raising of the mind and heart towards heaven. Much modern liturgical music simply doesn’t do this. The example I came across yesterday was the “Burntwood Mass”, a monstrosity of quasi folk chords wrapped around a distorted liturgical script, written down in the late 1970s. Looking through the Catholic “Hymns Old and New” will yield many similar cringe worthy examples of late twentieth century innovation.

I have no intention of criticising the musicians and choir who put their all into the music yesterday, nor the many in the congregation who no doubt got great enjoyment from the performance. These people are not “liberals”. They are devout mainstream Catholics following the Zeitgeist current in the Church. Those at fault are the Church leaders and lay committees who have allowed and encouraged such a gross distortion of the precious legacy of sacred music bequeathed to us by tradition. It was quite obvious yesterday that the presiding Priest (who was not the usual parish incumbent) was getting increasingly frustrated at the irritations of the sung liturgical elements and after a while made no effort to join in with them. It’s a shame priests like that have lost their authority in the face of modernising Bishops.

I myself was tempted to follow the precedent set by the great Tolkien. The author’s grandson recalls going to mass with his Grandad in the early 1970s, shortly after the introduction of the Novus Ordo mass. Whilst the congregation were quietly mumbling the English responses from their new missals, JRR ostentatiously persisted in belting out the traditional latin propers, much to the embarrassment of his young companion…
Remind me to bring my “ghetto blaster” and Mozart CDs next weekend! ;-)

Great Englishmen

2008-07-05T18:02:00.000-07:00

I desire to live a worthy life and leave a memory after myself in good works.

There are three types of men in society, those who work, those who fight, and those who pray...

-Alfred, Called the Great, King of England.

Alfred the Great is a hero for our age. Gentlemen of the English Orthodox Church are prominent in agitating for the recognition of Alfred The Great as a saint of the Universal Church. With good Reason... With justification, Alfred of Wessex can be seen as the founder of the united English Kingdom, the first Englishman... He inherited a kingdom that was on the verge of being overcome by both internal and external threats. Externally, foreign heathen pirates had overrun much of mainland Britain. Internally, English cultural and spiritual life had reached a new low of decadence. Education had virtually ceased, farming had reverted to subsistence and monastic discipline had disappeared. It was reckoned at the beginning of Alfred's reign that there was not one clergyman in the south of England who could reliably translate a paragraph of liturgy from Latin to English.

As his response, Alfred halted and turned the tide of the Viking invasions, refounded English monastic life, rationalised political and military infrastructure, founded the glorious navy and revolutionised the quality of English education.

Twelve hundred and more years later, Alfred is justly remembered as Alfredus Magnus. His achievements and struggles are a fitting reminder of the potential of the Englishman amid the storms of adversity.

What a guy!

Tradition

2008-07-05T17:58:00.001-07:00

In a certain sense we always feel the past ages as human, and ourown age as strangely and even weirdly dehumanised. In our own time thedetails overpower us; men's badges and buttons seem to grow larger andlarger as in a horrible dream. To study humanity in the present is likestudying a mountain with a magnifying glass; to study it in the past islike studying it through a telescope.

G.K Chesterton

Folkish Revolution?

2008-07-02T08:56:00.001-07:00

One of the indirect things I’ve noticed about the current economic downturn in the UK is the effect it’s had on making people reconsider their lifestyles. The rise in prices and cost of living has made economising necessary for all families and has sadly placed some in dire need. What is interesting is the fairly common occurrence of people going further in their lifestyle adjustments than that which would be considered necessary for “belt tightening” measures. Ideas and practices begin to have a social impact when they start gaining an influence outside the “Good Life” crowd of traditionalists, bumpkins and romantics. I’ve spoken to three female colleagues recently about such things, women who are in all other respects typical 21st century women obsessed with shallow materialist concerns. One of the colleagues in question has taken considerable trouble to convert their garden into a vegetable patch recently. Of the other two, one has recently bought chickens and the other is contemplating the same move. One of them was even seriously contemplating a limited bee keeping exercise! As the rules of crapitalist economics dictate, this period of relative instability will pass within the next couple of years at most. It will be interesting to see if any of the “folkish revival” initiatives that are gradually becoming more mainstream will influence any longer term social change, or if they will fade away with the passing crisis?

High Summer

2008-07-02T03:49:00.000-07:00

The solstice has come and gone, the days are balmy and the evenings are long… It must be July! This is high summer, although this time last year our green and pleasant land was suffering an unprecedented deluge. At this point it was unseasonably cold, there had been torrential rain on most days since the end of April, crops were rotting in the flooded fields, leaves were taking on a depressingly autumnal hue on some trees, and large swathes of the West Country were under water. The economic effects of farmers, as well as the ecological damage caused to bird populations still cannot be properly measured. All I can say is that last summer there were a good dozen bird’s nests in and around the Foxhole. House Martins nested under the eaves of the guttering, there were wrens and bullfinches in the border hedges, chaffinches in the Apple tree, Dunnocks and mistle thrushes in the Ash and Pigeons in the Lilac and Polycanthus. This year there have been only three nests. The erratic pigeons are still doing well in the lilac tree. The Dunnock and Thrush nests have been sadly abandoned for reasons I can’t determine. I’m not going to take a position on global warming or climate change, although its fairly obvious we’re going through an erratic through years weatherise. Since the turn of the century we’ve had two of the most blisteringly hot summers on record, as well as last year’s “Tambora Summer”, that never really kicked off. Whatever the long term implications of this (if any) it all seems strangely reminiscent of the decade of erratic weather at the beginning of the fourteenth century that led to the five hundred year “mini ice age” in Western Europe. One can but dream…

I celebrated the beginnings of July by putting down a couple of gallons of last minute elderflower champagne and sinking a few pints with fish and chips at the Colston Bassett Cricket Club summer social. The beginning of July may not be a big number in the liturgical calendar, but it’s as good an excuse to have a drink or two as any other!

Away with the Faeries

2008-06-29T09:17:00.000-07:00

The distance between the Foxhole on the edge of Colston Bassett and the village of Cotgrave is about three and a half miles by road. The straight and well used lane runs through Colston Bassett village before bypassing Cropwell Bishop (another Stilton town) and heading over a rise into Cotgrave, at the outer edge of the wide, shallow glacial valley we call the Vale of Belvoir. On a pleasant Sunday morning it is my habit to walk to Cotgrave and back on the way to Mass. Today was one such morning. The sun was blisteringly hot but tempered by a cooling breeze, and the currents of air made swirling patterns on the fields of green wheat along the route. This Sunday and last I have been trying to piece together an alternative route which allows me to avoid the roadway for most of the journey. I am an avid walker and know the local area well. I also pored extensively over an OS map before departing, as the labyrinth of pathways and byways criss-crossing rural Nottinghamshire can be bewildering.

Why was it then that I got completely lost this morning? Taking what was at first an obvious and well marked path, I eventually found myself entirely disorientated and ploughing through overgrown rape fields and past abandoned farm buildings in an atmosphere of eerie silence. My path took me out onto the murderously busy A46, a good mile away in the opposite direction to where I should have bisected the road. With no real means of walking alongside the thoroughfare, I had to cut through a patch of scrub woodland and forge a path through fields of mocking wheat and broad beans before emerging on the wrong side of Cotgrave.

Nothing like a quaint mini adventure on a Sunday morning. Apart from arriving at Mass, sweaty, grass stained and ten minutes late, the whole thing was very enjoyable. A similar thing happened when walking the Pembrokeshire coast path earlier this month. This time, Afagdu and I become hopelessly lost in a wilderness of six foot high nettles and swampy woodland so damp that tree branches crumbled when we tried to grab them for support in the mire. This was despite careful consultation of both a map and compass. It got to the stage when I started doubting the accuracy of the compass! This must be what people throughout history have been referring to when they speak of being pixie-led. One of the fields I passed through today was a fallow meadow littered with broken pieces of flint, an unusual occurance in this landscape of dense clay soil. I smiled at the synchronicity of it... Traditions across Britain once confused manufactured flint tools with "elf-shot". When the elves got you with their mischevious arrows, an episode of pixie leading was bound to follow!

I like HP Lovecraft's metaphor of human consciousness and it's fragile civilisation being likened to a tiny island battered by the vast ocean of the unknown universe. other writers compare our conscious world to the thin film of water on the edge of the almost unfathomable depths of the subconscious mind. One of the great lessons the Trickster has to teach us is not to take our world for granted. Even the most familiar of landscapes, both inner and outer, can become bewildering and frightening when treated with complacency.

Against The Rainbow

2008-06-27T04:40:00.001-07:00

It’s sad that something as personal and intimate as sexuality has become the touch paper for determining support of, or opposition to, the modernist project. This has indeed become the case though, at least in the West. Here, the development of a ludicrous “Gay culture” steeped in hedonism and liberalism has enshrined the homosexual agenda at the centre of the liberal-modernist ascendancy. This completely artificial culture, with its effeminate pastiche of affected voice, dress and lifestyle, is a degenerate mix of shallow materialism and sexual promiscuity. Homosexuality is itself an abomination that needs to be strongly discouraged by society, although a study of the natural world will reveal some latent levels of homosexual practice in many species, including our own. This being said, to be gay is very different to being homosexual. To be gay means buying into the big business “scene” of tacky clubs, reality TV shows, mincing and stupid fashions. It takes one aspect of the human personality, in this case sex, blows it up into the overriding factor of human identity and then fashions it into a consumerist gimmick with a political axe to grind. “Gay rights” is a nonsensical concept, as although the human race has been aware of homosexual acts since its inception, self conscious “gays” are simply a fleeting product of post-modern Europe and America. The object of the Gay Lobby is nothing less than the complete levelling of the natural distinctions between human beings. Whilst this is of course only possible in a limited, cultural sense, the ultra-liberal agenda of gayness makes it one of the most dangerous solvents eating away at the fabric of our society. It must be opposed.

This makes it all the more sad to watch the steady encroachment of the Gay Lobby into the Church of England over the last two decades. The result has been the near eclipse of the Church under a dust storm of liberalism. Female priests, plummeting attendance figures and insipid modern liturgies are just some of the symptoms of this social cancer. It is glad to see that, finally, there is a growing backlash within the church against the onslaught of liberalism. Today, over three hundred traditionalist Bishops gathered for the Global Anglican Future Conference in Jerusalem, to discuss a response to modernist malaise afflicting their Church. The crisis has now become so bad that some prominent traditionalist Bishops are planning to boycott the Church’s ten yearly Lambeth conference next month. Notable among these prelates is the influential Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali. Typical of the noisy assault of the crass, brazen gay brigade, the arrival of the traditionalists in Jerusalem was blighted by a march through the city centre of three thousand Jewish faggots taking part in a “gay pride” march. It shows we have a long way to go before we succeed in turning the tide, but at least the church is now taking stock of its internal illnesses.

I’ll conclude with the words of Rev Melvin Tinker, one of the delegates to the Anglican Conference, which also sum up my views on the issue quite succinctly:

"I find it strange - the fact it has to take place demonstrates that it is out of sync with the rest of society. You'd think it was odd if we had a sort of 'marriage pride' march,"

The struggle continues…

A Voice Crying In the Wilderness

2008-06-24T04:56:00.000-07:00

Today is the feast of the Nativity of John the Baptist, the traditional date for the celebration of midsummer in England. John the Baptist is an interesting character. Taking the big picture of the (deliciously paradoxical) portrait of Jesus’ life given by the four canonical gospels, John the Baptist is one of Jesus’ three initiators. I do not currently have the theological muscle to understand the breadth of the different interpretations of JBap’s role and legacy so I won’t bore you with amateurish rambles. I'll just give you a tantalisingly brief snapshot of the Baptist's legacy, and retrun to the theological battlefield when I have the appropriate equipment :-) It is generally accepted that former disciples of the Baptiser were instrumental in establishing the movement that centred on Jesus and later grew into early Christianity. What is more ambiguous is the relationship between both John and Jesus and between their two distinct though overlapping movements. To start with, despite its validity as a piece of poetic myth, it is highly unlikely that Jesus and John were cousins. Though the baptism of Jesus by John may well have taken place, the gospels (especially the Gospel of John) show John the Baptist having grave doubts about the messianic claims put forth by the Jesus party. The relationship between the two groups of activists may not have all been a bed of roses either. The first century “John Book” of the Mandaens, an Iraqi Gnostic group who with some justification claim direct lineage from John the Baptist, depicts Jesus and his followers as charlatans. This text is available online through the Gnostic Society archive and, combined with the commentary by GRS Mead, gives a useful examination of John’s own conscious use of symbolism. Regardless of the theological positions that solidified as Christianity established itself, all interpretations recognise John as the forerunner of Jesus’ ministry. As such he is important as a mythic link between what developed into the Christian tradition and the religious traditions which had shaped Mediterranean cultures for centuries. Some sects read more into this than others. The early Christian community generally described as Johannine put great emphasis on the traditional continuity between John the Baptist, Jesus and John, the Beloved Disciple. Later writers have embellished this myth to hypothesise a link between Jesus’ esoteric teachings and the initiatory tradition of Egypt. I smell bullshit here. When the “esoteric legacy” of the Knights Templar became fashionable amongst French Freemasons it became modish to posit a “johannine succession”. This hinged on the idea that Jesus had bequeathed a corpus of esoteric ideas to posterity through a direct lineage originating with the Beloved Disciple mentioned in the Gospel of John. This lineage was picked up during the crusades by the (yawn) Knights Templar and was continued through their succession of Grand Masters. It gets better… After the suppression of the Templars in the early fourteenth century the organisation went underground, passing on their wisdom through an unbroken line of “Pontiffs” until the early 19th century. All this was revealed by Bernard Fabre-Palaprat, an eccentric freemason who attempted to refound both the Templar Order and a “Johannite Church” in Napoleonic France. Accordingly he produced a “Charter of Transmission” that purported to list every Grand Master of the Order of the Temple from the immolation of Jacques De Molay until 1801. In Palaprat’s mythology, the legendary grail was none other than the plate used to present the head of John the Baptist to Herod’s wife, and the infamous Baphomet was the mummified head of the great man himself. Needless to say, the Charter of Transmission is almost universally agreed to be a forgery no older than the mid eighteenth century, if indeed it did not spring from the pen of Palaprat himself. Interested readers will still be able to see this document, as it is on display at Mark Mason’s Hall in London. In general, Palaprat and his ilk say more about the collapse of traditional culture in France (and indeed throughout Europe) after the French Revolution than the reemergence of hidden esoteric knowledge, although the idea of Johannite Succession still hangs on with adherents in some modern Gnostic Churches, mostly in America…

Gone to the Dogs

2008-06-23T03:47:00.000-07:00

Right, time to face facts. The Foxhole Brewery’s fine ale, Trusty: Fighting Dog Bitter, is no longer fit for man nor canine. At six months old, it is beginning to lose its light malt flavour and is taking on the distinct undertones of stagnant rainwater. In fact, its almost as bad as Black Sheep Ale. Not great for drinking but all is not lost. The ten pints or so I’ve got left can be given a new lease of life in the Foxhole’s kitchen. Yesterday, I used it to make one of the best loaves of bread I’ve ever made. So high was my regard for this creation, (as indeed is my regard for you, my gentle theatre-goers) that I have decided to scribble down the recipe for posterity, rather than rely on the normal guesswork that accompanies my bread making endeavours.

Fighting Dog Bread

350 grams Stoneground wholemeal wheat flour
150 grams Rye flour
50 grams mixed seeds and rye husks
350 ml Trusty: Fighting Dog Bitter
25 ml milk
1 tbsp brown sugar
1 tsp salt
25 grams butter

Serve with thick slices of Colston Bassett Stilton!

The Twilight of the Gods

2008-06-22T15:56:00.000-07:00

This post is really meant as a comment on "The Pagan Problem" which appeared on The Shattered Realm on Friday. What we see developing here is probably the most audacious development within the Radical Traditionalist school since the publication of the "Tyr Manifesto" at the beginning of the century. If you haven't read it yet, I suggest you stop reading this post for a moment, go and read it and then come back :-)

Afagdu touches upon some very pertinent questions for anyone interested in the traditionalist project, ones that cannot easily be ignored. To make my position clear from the outset, I stand shoulder to shoulder with Afagdu in his rejection of neo-paganism. As a traditionalist, I see the line of cultural and social continuity we call 'tradition' to be our greatest reference point for determining cultural validity. This makes it a very difficult thing to accept any of the various neo-pagan offshoots as having any traditional legitimacy, seeing that there is not one of them that is more than a century old (Most are far younger) and that none of them have an unbroken line of succession to the ancient traditions they claim to represent.

Religious truth is inseparable from cultural and historical context. As wonderful as the great Roman, Egyptian and Greek religions undoubtedly were, these cannot be meaningfully recreated even if their old adherents had left a detailed "Our religion for dummies" guide for the curious of future generations. These religions were intimately connected to the state and society, both of which are lost in the irretrievable mists of history. We may choose to mourn their passing, but that's about the best we can do. For examples such as the ancient Germanic religion, where there is scant evidence that it even existed in an organised form, the task of reconstruction is even more dubious. All these just amounts to a waste of time for traditionalists genuinely concerned with Europe's heritage.

The bottom line is that the various neopagan and occult movements that have sprouted in European soil since the late nineteenth century are no more than a cancerous pseudo-mysticism, a modern weed growing from the decadent ruins of our civilisation. Our myths, our old tales of gods and heros, our customs and traditions: these are our birthright, a common treasury to be defended, nurtured and passed on to our children. They are a cultural womb, not a religious truth.The various traditional festivals and saints days, our historic architecture, literature and sagas, monuments and institutions are the living matrix of an organic society. Why would we want to turn the clock back to an idealised past golden age? Tradition is all about interpreting and transmitting our inheritance. It is the sacred link that joins the dead and the unborn in communion with the living. This cultural corpus of living lore is the true paganism (literally, the "beliefs of the country folk"), and one that is worth fighting for. The fact that well meaning people are inspired to create fake religions out of all this shows just how far we have become alienated from our traditional culture.

The great Anglo-Saxonist, story teller and linguist JRR Tolkien understood this well. He was a firm traditionalist, and a devout Catholic to boot. I remember having a vexed and drunken conversation with my Father about eight years ago. His advise to me was that I had to "nail my colours to the mast" I didn't understand this at the time, but now I recognise that he was right. The eclecticism of my personal quasi-pagan gnosticism lead me not to enlightenment but further into confusion and initiatory blindness. Now, as a recovering apostate, I would like to point out that the Catholic tradition not only offers a rich and varied initiatory environment that has grown from Western soil, but that the Catholic Church is the only institution that has consistently defended European culture against all foes for over a millenium. It is an unbroken connection to the spiritual depths of antiquity, an organic body which our ancestors have built as a pathway to truth. It is the one, authentically traditional bastion against the high tide of modernism and relativism overwhelming our world. We ignore her at our peril.