Alternative takes on the Coronation of King Charles: a different Oath, the power of ritual, and why we should celebrate Chuck the Weird
“image of the mythic and symbolic green man, the face at the centre is Prince Charles, super-realistic” Prompt to Midjourney
Our editorial this week will grapple with both the Coronation and the local election results - but we thought we’d bring you some of the more lateral takes we’d found. First up, and above, the Unitarians came out with an alternative Oath - if not to the King, then at least to society and the planet.
Secondly, we were struck by sections of this long and thoughtful thread by the Scottish academic theologian (from a Church of Scotland tradition) Doug Gay, on how progressives underestimate the power of national ritual and the Monarchy at their peril:
There are political and anthropological reasons to watch the coronation and its aftermath, even if not live. Public ritual matters. Here's a very long thread on why we should start tomorrow to plan for reform of what was done today. It's relevant to both monarchists and republicans.
Ritual dramatises the meaning and significance of our public relationships and actions. It works both to illustrate and to legitimise key aspects of our civic and political life. It claims and displays authority and moral sanction. It also sorts and differentiates social roles.
We are bad at reforming public ritual. Church people are bad at it because of our deference, laziness and fear, our lack of imagination and our desire to protect vested interests and established roles.
The atheist/humanist republican left are bad at it because they lack the ritual confidence and the multiple literacies required and rarely think its worth investing time and imagination in. They prefer scorn, satire and invective or studied neglect to working on alternatives.
The coronation matters because the themes given ritual expression go right to the heart of our political system and culture and what passes for our constitution…
Drawing on sources as far back as the Declaration of Arbroath, a coronation ritual could express a much more conditional offer of the crown and relate it explicitly to God acting 'through the people' and their democratic agency. That it doesn't is a (feudal) choice.
We can see how a revised coronation ritual or a ritual for a new republic does the powerful work of naming the very basis of political authority, of sourcing its legitimacy. It also relates political authority to moral authority and holds it accountable…
The crucial thing in a reformed monarchy or new republic would be to assert the sovereignty of God/Good in some way. Basic law, written constitutions and Charters of Human Rights are all ways of expressing this. Church of England Archbishops are optional and should not have a monopoly. (This might be the role of a parallel polis (ref) for example)
Although they could still have a role alongside other figures. The current ritual is too opaque, which means it has also begun to fail as effective public ritual. People watching no longer make effective connections between the ritual actions, and what they are meant to express…
The overloading of the monarch also leads to an under-ritualising of areas of public life where substantive power is exercised. This is particularly important when it comes to the state's claims to exercise coercive power over its people and on their behalf…
“image of the mythic and symbolic green man, the face at the centre is Prince Charles, super-realistic” Prompt to Midjourney
More here. And finally, a quirky piece from Unherd, urging us to value “Charles the Weird”:
Consider Charles’s much-analysed choice of the Green Man as his symbol on the Coronation invitations. What does it tell us about our new king? What makes it so fascinating is not that it is a submerged pagan symbol buried beneath Christian decoration — a popular claim modern folklorists reject — but rather the very knowing ambiguity of the Green Man, a Christian symbol of rebirth that gains its power from the winked suggestion of older, deeper roots.
It is a symbol so intentionally rich in opposing meanings, so downright weird, that no settled meaning can ever be found: it was created to be puzzled over, argued about, and in doing so to uncover hidden truths. It is time for the Green Man to run riot in SW1, for Charles to enrich British public life with his own fertile ambiguities.
How, for example, would our Green Man king bridge the gap between Palace Green’s eco-protesters, fearful of what they believe to be an apocalyptic near-future, and the opposing political tendency, fearful of what they believe to be a dawning age of eco-austerity?
In an age where our dependence on Russian energy and neglect of nuclear power has driven ordinary families into financial difficulty, the argument that Britain’s antiquated housing stock requires better insulation has been widely adopted by urban yimby commentators, evidence of one path through a divided political sphere.
King Charles, tireless promoter of traditional craftsmanship, could make the still-little-known case to the public that it is precisely because Britain’s housing stock dates from before the 20th century, and was built with traditional breathable materials such as lime, that insulation with modern impermeable materials, as Insulate Britain promote, would worsen the problem.
This simple truth, well-known to heritage professionals, has been entirely neglected. And who could have a better pulpit to make the case for a better way forward? For if Britain’s largely Victorian houses could be insulated using traditional materials by a scaled-up, newly-trained workforce of high-skilled, high-wage craftsmen, a major political and economic problem could be resolved according to the methods Charles has spent a lifetime promoting.
Similarly, the recent collapse of much of Britain’s intensive agriculture model has heightened the growing clash between those who believe it is the way to food security, and those who believe it is despoiling Britain’s fields, forests and waterways; nor does it keep the nation fed and healthy, nor our farmers in business.
As a longstanding advocate for the small family farm, King Charles can bridge this gap: instead of lecturing the nation on how to do better, he could show how the best nature-friendly farming systems work by converting Buckingham Palace’s 40 acres of private gardens into a working small farm. Imagine a rural oasis of hay meadows and rippling fields of grain in the centre of the capital, a haven of wildlife watched over by our benign farmer king.
Through taking action, the king can become a living bridge between the capital and the countryside, the old ways and the new.
While ideas like these may seem trifling and eccentrically small-scale to both the eco-modernists, enraptured by grand geoengineering projects, and to large-scale rewilders alike, it is their pure simplicity that grants them power.
While fate has planted him at the nation’s apex, the abiding characteristic of our new king is his genuine love and affection for the humble and vernacular, even if only expressed in an occasional holiday from the super-rich luxuries of his permanent existence.
It is a rare head of state who mends hedges and sleeps in peasants’ cottages and monasteries for relaxation (even if his personal lodgings are more those of abbots’ quarters than monks’ cells); he can now share the same powers of regeneration these simple pleasures must bring to him with the nation as a whole.
It is only through converting the advocacy of the Prince of Wales into the necessary labour of showing and doing that our Green Man King can make himself and the monarchy a central, guiding presence in British public life. To heal the new divisions of the coming age, and make the coronation a genuine period of national rebirth, there are worse options than embracing the sheer Weirdness of Charles III.