Twelfth Night and the Death of the King

The Lord of Misrule

I spent much of the Holy Nights revisiting a brace of books I haven’t read for decades, Jessie L. Weston’s anthropological excavation of the Grail literature, From Ritual to Romance, and the book that inspired it, James G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Toward the end of Advent I watched (most of) director David Lowery’s The Green Knight (it stinks), and I write about the Grail in my most recent book, Sophia in Exile. In addition, I’ve taught college courses on Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur and on the Holy Grail as a cultural icon (Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, The Pre-Raphaelite preoccupation with the Grail, John Boorman’s Excalibur, Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King, Monty Python and the Holy Grail—none of which stink—and so forth), so I have considerable personal experience and investment in this mythos and its intertwining with folklore, folk magic, literature, and religion. But why did it come back to haunt me now, like a literary Jacob Marley shaking its bookish chains at me in The Age of the Crown known as Corona?

Then it dawned on me: the last (first) time I read these works was during my first Saturn return (when Saturn finds its way back to the place where it was at one’s birth—about 29 years or so). Well, here I am at my second Saturn return (do the math). As any astrologer would tell you, a Saturn return is, in general, NOT FUN, and Covid aside, it still has not been a fun year. But it hasn’t been all bad. On the other hand, this all occurred to me during what used to be the ancient Roman time of the Saturnalia. I love coincidence.

I first started reading Frazer and Weston after my initial encounter with T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece The Wasteland. Eliot (who, incidentally died 27 years ago today—darned close to a Saturn cycle)drew on both works for his poem. He published the poem in 1922, having recently undergone both his first Saturn return (he was born in 1888) and lived through the horrors of World War I. We have also been moving through a sort of Wasteland, a time when, as Eliot describes in the poem:

He who was living is now dead We who were living are now dying With a little patience

At this time of the year, at least where I live, death is everywhere. Nothing grows. We exist between in-breath and out-breath at the still point. We require regeneration.

Regeneration, among other things, is precisely what happens at the celebration of Twelfth Night. My family celebrates it every year, complete with poetry and song, wassail and cake, the election of the King of the Bean, and chalking the door in anticipation of the arrival of the Three Kings (who arrive on Epiphany, the Twelfth Day of Christmas, of course). William Shakespeare, at the request of Elizabeth I, wrote his play Twelfth Night, or What You Will, to be performed at the royal Twelfth Night festivities in 1601/02. The play is a subtle representation of figures and notions of the celebration of the festival—a veritable feast of fools, it features a cadre of motley fools, a butler who assumes himself elevated to royalty, and a brother who (seemingly) returns from the dead, not to mention a wealth of extraordinary (though often melancholy) songs Shakespeare wrote for his clown Robert Armin to sing (trivia: when I was a Waldorf teacher and directed the play, I wrote tunes for Shakespeare’s words—so I can officially say the two of us were collaborators. One example from my treatment, recorded with Corktown Popes, can be found below).

According to both Frazer and Weston, such rituals as the election of the King of the Bean, are remnants of earlier agricultural rituals which tied the vitality of a god or king (or god-king) to the fertility of plants, animals, and humans. As Frazer, connecting Twelfth Night to the Roman Saturnalia, writes,

“We have seen that in Italy, Spain, and France, that is, in the countries where the influence of Rome has been deepest and most lasting, a conspicuous feature of the Carnival is a burlesque figure personifying the festive season, which after a short career of glory and dissipation is publicly shot, burnt, or otherwise destroyed, to the feigned grief or genuine delight of the populace. If the view here suggested of the Carnival is correct, this grotesque personage is no other than a direct successor of the old King of the Saturnalia, the master of the revels, the real man who personated Saturn and, when the revels were over, suffered a real death in his assumed character. The King of the Bean on Twelfth Night and the medieval Bishop of Fools, Abbott of Unreason, or Lord of Misrule are figures of the same sort and may have had a similar origin.” [1]

Rene Girard’s theory of the scapegoat was deeply influenced by his reading of Frazer. I’m not exactly sure the symbolic sacrifice was really grounded in ritual murder—I think the ancients could handle metaphor—nevertheless, it makes for some fascinating speculation and forays into theory. This sacrifice motif is treated in the camp classic of British B-horror, 1973’s The Wicker Man, which ends with the immolation of a nosy and Puritanical police officer. But the film is an otherwise wonderful treasure chest of British folklore and folk-magic custom. My middle child (the middle of nine, poor boy) saw the film a while ago. When I asked him what he thought, he said, “It’s basically our house...but without the human sacrifice.” Progress!

Weston connects the death of the King to the death and resurrection of St. George in the Mummer’s Play, often performed at Twelfth Night—a theme also found in the medieval tale of Gawain and the Green Knight. I like the connection of the flourishing of the land to the vitality of the king, especially as a literary device, and I love the way this is illustrated through the Grail romances in the image of the Fisher King and in Boorman’s Excalibur (more profoundly influenced by Weston than even his alleged source, Malory), but I think Frazer and Weston both miss the significance of resurrection in this mythos. Coming back from the dead—and not a replacement by a substitute (rather a Robin, the Hooded Man or Doctor Who approach to things), as if contract negotiations didn’t work out—is the key that unlocks the magical door here. And this is what makes these stories so profoundly Christian and fit to be connected with the feast of Twelfth Night.

I love the combination of the holy, the mythic, the folkloric, and the atmosphere of conviviality and carnival that colors the Christmas season—but why twelve days? I’m not sure anybody really knows, lost as these traditions are in the mists of time and observation. Nevertheless, one would not need to dig too deeply to see the correlations between the Twelve Days, the months of the year, the Twelve Tribes of Israel, and the twelve Apostles—not to mention the twelve signs of the zodiac (and don’t even get me started on the mysterious connection between Jairus’s twelve-year-old daughter and the woman who had an issue of blood for twelve years). Number symbolism is very important in the Christian tradition.

So raise a glass this Twelfth Night; have a slice of cake. Maybe you’ll get the bean. Maybe the Green Knight will pay a visit. Enjoy your resurrection.

And so, in conclusion, I can think of no better envoi than that of Robert Herrick, my patron saint and Lord of Misrule Emeritus:

TWELFTH NIGHT: OR KING AND QUEEN

NOW, now the mirth comes

With the cake full of plums,

Where bean's the king of the sport here;

Beside we must know,

The pea also

Must revel, as queen, in the court here.

Begin then to choose,

This night as ye use,

Who shall for the present delight here,

Be a king by the lot,

And who shall not

Be Twelfth-day queen for the night here.

Which known, let us make

Joy-sops with the cake;

And let not a man then be seen here,

Who unurg'd will not drink

To the base from the brink

A health to the king and queen here.

Next crown a bowl full

With gentle lamb's wool:

Add sugar, nutmeg, and ginger,

With store of ale too;

And thus ye must do

To make the wassail a swinger.

Give then to the king

And queen wassailing:

And though with ale ye be whet here,

Yet part from hence

As free from offence

As when ye innocent met here.

An episode from great BBC documentary series Tudor Monastery Farm

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine.

1. James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, abridged edition (New York, 1927), 586.

Ship of Fools

All aboard!

Well, it’s about time.

I was very pleased recently when my spiritual soul-brother Paul Kingsnorth finally came out in a series of blogposts and interviews that he thinks the world is sinking precipitously toward totalitarianism through the advent of the v@ccine passports and mandates that become more alarming by the minute, especially in Germany, Austria, and the Great Ahriman, Australia, but also in Ireland (where the Brit Kingsnorth makes his home) and a bewildering array of other countries, states, and municipalities such as California and New York. Enough, argues Kingsnorth in his own inimitable way, is enough.

Even Rod Dreher has finally come around and seen fit to comment on this concerning development. He did it using Kingsnorth’s epiphany as a screen in a recent post, though I don’t think he’s entered this fray heretofore. At least not that I’ve found. Must be a slow news week in Hungary.

I honestly don’t understand why it’s taken them so long.

I saw this coming from the proverbial mile away, as early as spring of 2020. It was not hard to predict—and many I know, even good friends, told me I was being paranoid and that such things could never happen. They’re happening. My astounding insight (jk) was not the product of anything remotely resembling spiritual vision, but due to the fact that I’ve been an English professor teaching students the ABCs of rhetoric and its evil stepsister propaganda for twenty-some years. Using texts from Plato’s Gorgias to Huxley and Orwell to to the novels of Philip K. Dick to Adam Curtis’s eye-opening Century of the Self series (and so many things besides) throughout my academic career I’ve been asking students to examine the toxic environment of words within which we are constantly saturated and bombarded. But solid teaching, it seems, is no match for the technocracy. Technocracy is here, and its winning.

I suppose it is a poet’s curse. As a poet and songwriter, I am keenly attuned to language and meaning, to text, context, and subtext. I’m attentive to the hypnotic cadences of lines and the insidious ways messages insert themselves into our awareness—and into our subconscious. I am sure you, gentle reader, could rattle off any number of advertising jingles from your earliest childhood without making a mistake—I was born in the early 60s, and I’m sure I could drop dozens without coming up for air. Political speech operates in the same register: “Just say no,” “I believe in a place called Hope,” “Change has come to America,” “Believe women,” “Make America Great Again,” and let’s not forget the New World Anthem, “Build Back Better.” None of these slogans mean a damn thing; their only quality is how they inject a feel-good soporific into the body politic while the social engineers and technocrats proceed apace in toward their goal of total control, a goal nearing its realization, as governments everywhere, but especially in the “democratic West,” move ever closer to the digital promised land of a social credit system.

People may wonder what this has to do with Sophiology. Everything, actually. As anyone familiar with my work would know (minuscule though that coterie is), my claim is that technocracy is the anti-Sophia (Kingsnorth calls it “The Machine”). It is (as I’ve written) completely Ahrimanic (a term I do not use in a dogmatic anthroposophical sense—so spare me the complaints). Simply put, my vehemence on this subject is a direct outgrowth of my Sophiology—for I see an inverse relationship between the sophiological and the technocratic: the more technocratic the world grows, the less room is there for Sophia to appear.

I felt this technocratic specter rising long ago, far earlier than my earliest attempt at capturing this in writing when I wrote about Blade Runner and transhumanism almost twenty years ago. I’ve been watching it approach and wrote my sophiological works at least in part as a way to alter that trajectory. I’ve failed, obviously, though I take some strange comfort in knowing that the technocrats see my work as enough of a threat to quash traffic to my various internet platforms. Maybe this is why Kingsnorth and Dreher (among others, certainly) have been so reluctant until now to speak up. I hope others join them.

I suspect things may come to a head on or around the twenty-fourth of this month, when Saturn and Uranus form a hard square from Aquarius to Taurus. This square suggests a breaking down of power structures and a tension between authority and technology. I remember, as you might, when the internet was a much more democratic digital environment—and not the Thought Police of the World Archons it is now. Saturn and Uranus were conjunct in 1989—the year the Berlin Wall fell and Eastern Bloc Communism started to crumble. I remember how hopeful I was (my eldest son was born that year) that the world would be a better place. What a chump I was! Communism somehow became cool! When Saturn and Uranus were square in 2000, the world was in a financial crisis (remember Enron?) accompanied by the Y2K panic (computers). When the planets were in opposition—2008—finance and technocrats were in full-on “screw the proletariat” mode with the housing crisis and the tanking of the global economy. I fully expect a financial component to this one (Taurus), but there is also the possibility of something new coming into being (Aquarius). It could get ugly for a minute, but—and this depends on people of good will—that ugliness could turn to beauty.

If my life has taught me anything, it is that the Archons—at whatever level—may be clever, but they’re also entirely lacking in wisdom, which is to say stupid. This is nothing new, of course. Originating in Plato in the Republic, but very popular from the medieval through the early modern periods, the emblem of “The Ship of Fools” has born witness to the incredible folly of the human race, and especially of those assuming the reins of power. Here is Plato’s telling:

“There’s the shipowner, larger and stronger than everyone in the ship, but somewhat deaf and rather short-sighted, with a knowledge of sailing to match his eyesight. The sailors are quarrelling among themselves over captaincy of the ship, each one thinking that he ought to be captain, though he has never learnt that skill, nor can he point to the person who taught him or a time when he was learning it. On top of which they say it can’t be taught. In fact they’re prepared to cut to pieces anyone who says it can. The shipowner himself is always surrounded by them. They beg him and do everything they can to make him hand over the tiller to them. Sometimes, if other people can persuade him and they can’t, they kill those others or throw them overboard. Then they immobilise their worthy shipowner with drugs or drink or by some other means, and take control of the ship, helping themselves to what it is carrying. Drinking and feasting, they sail in the way you’d expect people like that to sail. More than that, if someone is good at finding them ways of persuading or compelling the shipowner to let them take control, they call him a real seaman, a real captain, and say he really knows about ships. Anyone who can’t do this they treat with contempt, calling him useless. They don’t even begin to understand that if he is to be truly fit to take command of a ship a real ship’s captain must of necessity be thoroughly familiar with the seasons of the year, the stars in the sky, the winds, and everything to do with his art. As for how he is going to steer the ship—regardless of whether anyone wants him to or not—they do not regard this as an additional skill or study which can be acquired over and above the art of being a ship’s captain. If this is the situation on board, don’t you think the person who is genuinely equipped to be captain will be called a stargazer, a chatterer, of no use to them, by those who sail in ships with this kind of crew?” (Book VI)

The past twenty-some months clearly bear this out. People haven’t changed all that much.

Hopefully, those who survive the coming madness (not to mention the current madness) will be able to bring wisdom back into the center of human striving and flourishing. We’d be fools not to.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine.

The Wisdom of the Stars: Thoughts on Astrology

People often ask me if I “believe in astrology,” a question I really don’t know how to answer. Of course I don’t. Asking people if they believe in astrology is pretty much like asking if they believe in the ocean or in snow or in food or something. It’s a dumb question. Even a more precisely articulated question, such as “Do you believe the stars influence us?” rather misses the mark.

A better question would be “Do you believe that we are part of the cosmos and that the cosmos is part of us?” To this one, much in the spirit of James Joyce’s Molly Bloom, I would answer in an ebullient and whole-hearted “Yes.” In fact, as I have proposed in all of my books, I think most of the problems we now face—environmental degradation, rapacious capitalism, adolescent socialism, isolation, a lifeless preoccupation with cyberspace—are precisely due to our having been estranged from the cosmos. The absurd assumption that we are somehow separate from the world which René Descartes inflicted on the West in the seventeenth century—a disorder that jumped into hyperdrive with Judith Butler and others in the twentieth—has done unbelievable harm to our humanity (and our planet and those with whom we share it). Nominalism and its inheritance, let me say (again), is complete bullshit.

As a biodynamic farmer, I plant by the sun, the moon, and the stars (a motif richly permeating the language of fairy-tales). In general, I plant leaf vegetables when the moon is in a water sign (Pisces, Cancer, Scorpio), roots in an earth sign (Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn), flowers in air (Gemini, Libra, Aquarius), and fruits in fire (Aries, Leo, Sagittarius). It gets a little more complicated than that, but that’s the idea.

It’s also pretty clear that animals respond to movements in the cosmos—breeding patterns, for example, responses to tides—but when it comes to human beings things become more complex. Here I hold to the maxim (variously attributed to Aristotle, Plotinus, and so forth) that “The stars incline, they do not compel.” The reason for this, is that we humans, due to our having an ego, have freewill: we can choose. The less liberated our thinking is from our emotions and our wills, however, the less freewill we have, which renders us closer to plants and animals in the degree to which the stars might influence us (especially for ill). I came to this insight not through reading, but from an actual study of astrology going back over thirty years. I am not at the moment a practicing astrologer (though I was once upon a time), though I do keep my eye on the stars.

Some people, especially my more orthodox Christian friends, may be aghast at such a confession. But astrology has a rich history in both Christianity and in Judaism (particularly in the Kabbalah). The Christian antecedents, obviously, begin with the Star of Bethlehem and the astrologers (magi, three kings, wisemen, whatever), but span the last two millennia, sometimes in the underground, sometimes out in the open. In fact, you wouldn’t believe how many traditionalist-leaning Catholics have emailed or messaged me about astrology—though they admit they’d never announce so publicly, as they fear it would decimate their traddie street-cred. (The same goes for Sophiology, incidentally.)

One of astrology’s “out” periods was during the Renaissance. Many a Christian humanist practiced astrology, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Kepler, Robert Fludd, and Marsilio Ficino among them (a comprehensive list could probably fill a small volume). In a letter to the great patron of the Florentine Renaissance, Lorenzo de Medici, Ficino, spiritual head of the Plato Academy as well as a Catholic priest, had this to say.

26 September 1480

“Lorenzo, today and also tomorrow, be on your guard; for Mars, passing into Capricorn, your ascendant, is seen to look with square aspect, today at Saturn and tomorrow at the Sun. Besides this, Saturn himself, the lord of your ascendant, has not quite passed through the rays of the Sun. For this last reason I, too, should take care.”1

Ficino, translator of Plato and the Corpus Hermeticum among many other contributions to scholarship, was no naive dummy. He knew very well the problems inherent to placing too much trust in an interpretive art and in 1477 wrote Disputatio contra iudicium astrologorum (Disputation against the Judgments of Astrologers) calling into question the practice of astrology. Then as now, unscrupulous practitioners of any art—medicine, finance, and politics no less than astrology—were plentiful enough to remind any potential customer that caveat emptor.

Of course, with the Reformation (and the Tridentine reactionarianism of the Counter Reformation) all of that slowly came to a halt, though it persisted in subterranean streams forever after denigrated as “occultism” or “esotericism.” As Ioan Couliano has written,

“In response to Luther and to Puritanism, the Church embarked on its own reform…. Far from consolidating the positions assumed by Catholicism during the Renaissance, this movement severed itself completely from them and went in the same directions as protestantism. It was along the lines of severity and harshness that the Reformation developed, from the Protestant as well as the Catholic side.2

I think it’s time to recapture a healthy relationship to the cosmos. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we need to subscribe to a heedless and superficial approach to astrology. But we do need to heal our relationship to this blessed Creation in which we live and move and have our being. We need to disrupt our sense of alienation from our own home. And the heavens are part of this home, as Blake so eloquently writes in The Four Zoas:

Thus were the stars of heaven created like a golden chain

To bind the Body of Man to heaven from falling into the Abyss.

And “abyss” is precisely the correct word.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses.

1 Meditations on the Soul: Selected Letters of Marsilio Ficino (Inner Traditions, 1997), 166.

2 Ioan Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 1987), 194.