Future Shock - Aeneas in the Underworld (1)

After the women went wild and the ships were burnt, I called out to Jove and he answered my prayer, sent down the rain and rescued one of my vessels. And that one ship was all I needed in the end.

I didn't even try to get to sleep that night. I sat on the high rocks and looked out to sea, my mind full of scorpions. The episode had made it plain that most of my companions wished to remain in Drepanum, even though they knew full well what my mother Venus had told me - that our destiny lay not on these Sicilian shores but northwards in Latium.

I blamed myself. I had failed to convey the vision; failed to imbue them with faith in the future. Death and despair had trailed in my wake all the way from Troy to Sicily. If I had any honour I would throw myself into the waters and bring an end to this cascade of errors. Then, just as this demonic counsel took hold, my father Anchises appeared to me, standing on the last tuft of grass between the cliff-edge and my feet. In his hands were the icons of the same Trojan gods - Diana, Venus, and Apollo - that he had salvaged from our home on the night the city fell.

'Aeneas,' he said. 'Banish these thoughts of self-slaughter. See this as an opportunity instead - a chance to restart and rebuild. It is good that those who prefer comfort to hardship are left behind. Bring with you only men who are hungry for glory and war, for you will have plenty of both. First though, sail north to Cumae and speak with the Sibyl, Apollo's prophetess. Ask her to lead you to Hades, for I long to see you there as I have much more to tell you and also to show you. What you will see will transform you into who you were meant to be - a leader of men, a father to a people, and the archetype of all the kings and emperors to follow.'

So it transpired. Acestes, King of Drepanum, gladly accepted those who no longer wished to accompany me, while I set sail for Cumae with those few who did. For two days and one night the going was easy, the sea calm and the sky blue. But in the third watch of the second night I was awoken by a chaos of voices and an air of disorientation. The ship was spinning in senseless circles. I raced to the poop where the crew were trying to set her right but the tiller and part of the stern were missing and Palinurus, our helmsman, was nowhere to be seen. Between us we cobbled a makeshift tiller together and got the ship moving again. Then I dismissed them and steered by myself until we reached Cumae. I couldn't understand what had happened. Palinurus was an experienced seaman and a good-hearted, hopeful fellow. He would never have fallen asleep at the wheel, still less slipped overboard or thrown himself off. I blamed the gods. I wanted to curse them publicly but I knew better by now than to provoke their wrath, especially Juno, whose rage against us was as fathomless as it was senseless. But the loss of Palinurus struck me as the the type of thing they would do - the kind of pointless deal they would strike. 'We'll let him get there safely as long as one of his men dies on the way.' As petty and vindictive like that.

We arrived at Cumae shortly before sunrise. Some of the men began setting up camp while others set out foraging for food and supplies. But I took Achates my lieutenant with me, and started climbing the rocky slopes towards the temple of Apollo. When we got there and looked down from the portico, the beach was a distant band of gold and the ship a brown speck on the edge of a cobalt blue sea. The only sound we heard (aside from the gulls), faint and far-off, was the refrain our trumpeter Misenus always played when we set up camp in a new land. Despite the disasters which habitually befell us, he always placed great trust in the gods and in the unfolding future. 'The future calls us forward,' he often remarked. His faith was unshakeable and infectious. Like a beacon at sea.

The temple itself was silent and deserted. I sent Achates to have a look around the perimiter, to see if he could find the Sibyl. I stayed where I was, in front of the door, studying a carving of the famous Cretan labyrinth, the black minotaur crouching ominously in the centre.

Then Achates returned with the Sibyl beside him. She was a portly woman, somewhere between forty and fifty, clad in a robe of winedark red. But there was a note of command in her voice that put me on my mettle straightaway. 'Do not waste your time sightseeing, Aeneas, son of Anchises. Pray to Phoebus instead. Pray like your life depends on it.'

The Sibyl opened the door and beckoned us us to follow. We passed through a small courtyard, then down a flight of five stone steps, and out into a wide cavern, the sun slanting down through the casing of rock in arrow-like slits. 'Now pray,' she ordered. So I stepped forward, closed my eyes, knelt on the ground, and begged Apollo to move heaven and earth and everything in-between to bring us to Tiber's banks. I asked for his permission to seek out my father in Elysium below, and my prayer was unfinished when the Sibyl started speaking in a voice not her own, a tone not just of command but of real authority and might. This was the sound, I realised with a start, of Phoebus Apollo himself. I did not dare to turn and look. The gulls were hushed as the oracle resounded around the cave:

'Aeneas, son of Venus, you will indeed lay the foundation stone of the city and empire to come, but you will suffer and sweat for the prize and Tiber will foam with much blood. As for your wish to traverse Pluto's Halls and visit your father, let me tell you this. The road to Dis is easy to find. Harder it is to return with body and mind intact. There is no hiding place there. You will be tested and exposed you come face to face with the depths of your wretchedness and sin. Yet if you win through, the rewards are incalculable. Is this what you want?'

'Yes,' I said.

'Good. Now listen. Your first task will be to bury a companion who, since you left camp this morning, has been sent to the Underworld by Triton, son of Neptune. Then you must find and take the golden bough that lives in secret among the firs. This will be hard - impossible without divine help. But there is no other way. Charon will not ferry you across Acheron without it. If you succeed, show it to the Sibyl, then hold it before you all the time you are in Avernus as a sign that despite your grudges and doubts you have the backing of the gods.'

Silence ensued. Tension dissolved. The gulls resumed their call and response. I turned and saw the Sibyl crouching low behind me, writing on the ground with her finger. She looked shattered - hollowed out and exhausted. 'Go,' she said. 'Do as he says,' So Achates and I bowed, then left the temple precincts.

'I think it is Misenus who is dead,' said Achates as we scrambled down the mountain. 'Triton is a musician, just as he is. He blows on the conch shell. Not particularly well, so I hear. Misenus was a first-rate trumpeter. Triton is known for his jealousy. It all adds up in my mind.'

'Mine too,' I replied, leaving it there for the moment though Achates was clearly keen to hear more. The thought of losing another good man in such a nonsensical fashion felt too tragic to bear. But alas, when we returned to the beach, we saw that it was indeed Misenus who had fallen. The men had covered him in a white groundsheet and they stood around him in a sorrowful knot, hands folded in prayer. His silver trumpet lay in the sands, a little way off to the right. 'What happened?' I asked.

'We don't know,' said Corynaeus. 'No sooner had Misenus sounded his salute than he was flung through the air by an invisible force. His head was dashed against a boulder. We ran across, but he was already dead.'

I shook my head, and felt the urge again to rage and rail against the gods. But I held my tongue and checked my thoughts, recalling the words of Apollo and remembering that at least two of them - him and my mother, probably Diana, maybe more - supported my cause and argued my case before Jove. 'Let us give him the burial he deserves,' was all I said, and we set about the task with reverence, dignity, and pride in one of the best of Trojans, a servant first of Hector, then myself, and an incarnation of everything good about Troy. He deserved a better end, but the ways of gods, as I was swiftly discovering, are far from the ways of men.

As I was brooding on this, two doves swooped down and circled three times around my head. As a boy, I had seen my mother talking to doves like these. She saw them as messengers and friends. 'I'll be back,' I shouted, and ran off after them, up to the fir-lined slopes on the eastern side of the temple mount. Unerringly, they led the way, to a bough like all the others but gold instead of green. I pulled it off and another sprang forth to replace it at once. The birds departed, cooing happily, and I returned to the shore, just in time for the funeral rite. 'I've got it,' I whispered to Achates, before focusing my mind on the prayers I had to recite. When all was done, I cast my own purple cloak over the earthen mound. It was a needless gesture, and I had cause to miss that cloak later, but it was the least I could do for this prince among men, a link with the city we all knew and loved before war and catastrophe ground us to dust. Oh, how I wish we were all still there! How I wish none of this had happened! But it isn't up up to me. There are greater powers at play. Destiny draws me on. The future, whether I want it to or not, calls me forward. So I left Achates in charge of the camp and set out on my way again, up the rocks and scree, golden bough in hand, towards the temple of Apollo.

Adapted from Books V and VI of Virgil's Aeneid. Part 2 will appear on this blog no later than Sunday May 2nd.

No Mean City - Aeneas and the Fall of Troy

A dense stream of coloured rockets now began to mount from the haze among the battleships, emptying on the sky their brilliant clusters of stars and diamonds and smashed pearl snuff-boxes with a marvellous prodigality ... The very sea seemed to tremble. I had had no idea that we were so near, or that the city could be so beautiful in the mere saturnalia of a war. It had begun to swell up, to expand like some mystical rose of the darkness, and the bombardment kept it company, overflowing the mind. To our surprise we found ourselves shouting at each other. We were staring at the burning embers of Augustine's Carthage, I thought to myself, we were observing the fall of city man.

Lawrence Durrell, Clea

*

I never gave up; never stopped believing. I passed like flame with my men through the night, dispatching as we went a host of enemy souls to Tartarus. We thought we were on top; saving hearth and home. But numbers were against us and the Greeks in truth were pinning us down, boxing us in for a futile last stand. They pushed us back inside the palace. I looked, I saw, and the reality of our defeat was shockingly clear. The roof was shot through with holes. Fires raged everywhere. We stumbled over fallen pillars, coughing in the smoke and on our guard for walls and ceiling caving in on us. A detachment of Greeks surrounded us. We fought for our lives in Vesta's colonnade. I did what I had to do and did it well, but out of the side of my eye - in the courtyard, at the High Altar itself - I beheld foul and sacreligious deeds that cry out to Heaven for vengeance still. 

Hecuba, our Queen, sat huddled with her daughters on the Altar steps. King Priam stood beside them, donning his ancient armour. 'Do not deceive yourself, old man,' chided Hecuba. 'You cannot turn the tide. Your place is with us at this sanctuary. The gods will protect us here.' But Priam was resolute and continued to arm himself. Then the horror began. Polities, their youngest son, came sprinting into the courtyard from the opposite colonnade, mouth agape and eyes agog, for behind him was that great Greek brute Pyrrhus, savagery inscribed on every line of his bestial face. The monster flung his spear. It pierced the boy in the back of the neck and Polites fell face-down with a clatter. He twitched and writhed and then lay still, blood soaking the ground. At this, Priam threw his own spear. It was a good throw and Pyrrhus only just lifted his shield in time. But the shaft was deflected and the behemoth bore down on the King. Priam spoke quickly: 'Achilles, whom you presume to call your father, would never have committed such an impious act. He gave me the body of Hector, my eldest son, when I pleaded for it, but you have slain my youngest at my feet and at the High Altar to boot.'

These were Priam's last words. Pyrrhus ripped off the old King's helmet, grabbed him by his fleecy hair and hauled him up the steps, our sovereign slipping in his own son's blood as he was dragged along. 'Tell Achilles,' roared Pyrrhus, 'when you see him in Hades, how disappointed you are in his son. He will laugh you to scorn, for he longed for this night and fought and died to make it happen. Now despair and die.' And with that he slew Priam with his sword, stabbing him in the heart, then severing his head from his trunk. At a signal from Pyrrhus a squadron of Greeks appeared and took hold of the women and children - who were shaking in silence, too numb to scream - leading them off into the shadows. Then Pyrrhus abandoned the scene and marched out of the courtyard. I wanted to follow him and avenge this unholy slaughter, as my battle was over and I had nothing now to detain me. Our enemies lay dead at my feet. It must have been a harder fight than I had thought for I was completely alone. My own comrades too had either fallen lifeless to the ground or else slinked silently away.

I had no fear of Pyrrhus. He was a one-dimensional fighter and I had outclassed him more than once during the course of the war. I had already set off in pursuit when I saw Helen herself, lit up by the light of the Moon, kneeling in prayer in the colonnade, her back towards me, just to my left at the statue of Vesta. Her body heaved. violent sobs coursed through her, and my mind was overwhelmed with bitterness and hate. 'Now, here's a better target for revenge,' I reasoned, 'for he is just a thug and ape, a slave to his barbaric nature, while she is the source and author of  our downfall. So why in the name of justice should she return to Sparta and live the life of a Queen while our own Queen, Hecuba, is sold into slavery? No, it shall not be.'

I reached for my sword, determined to strike, but before I could touch it my mother Venus stood before me in a vision of unparalleled beauty, surpassing both Sun and stars in radiance and glory. Helen's fabled allure, even in good times, was the feeblest of flames in comparison. 'Aeneas, my son,' she said. 'Do not waste your energy on senseless vengeance. Troy is doomed. The gods decree it. You need to go home now, leave the city, and take with you your father, wife and child. I have cast a protective shield around your house but the charm will not last and the Greeks will soon arrive and the same fate which befell Priam, Hecuba and Polites will fall upon your family too. So make haste now. I will guide you.'

My blessed mother led me out of the palace and through Troy's blazing streets and squares. Dead bodies, both Greek and Trojan but mainly Trojan, lined the roads. The smell was rank. The fighting continued. I could see and hear it all around, but it was happening in small, isolated pockets now. The resistance was almost crushed. The Greeks had won and it broke my heart to witness it and not be able to change it. Twice, as we walked, a phalanx of soldiers passed by and I expected to be attacked and drawn back into the fray. But it never happened. We moved as if invisible. Despite my mother's brilliance, no-one saw us. Their eyes were held fast.

'I blame myself,' I said at length. 'I knew in my heart that there was something wrong with that horse. Signs and omens were given, yet I pushed them from my mind and now our fate is sealed.'

'Blame neither Helen nor yourself,' replied my mother. 'A strong delusion came down upon you all. It was ordained by the gods. Look, I will show you.' And she pulled back the veil which conceals from us the deeds of the immortals. I saw them at work - huge shapes of dread and awe - Minerva, flying above the city, whipping the Greeks into a frenzy of destruction; Juno, standing atop the South Tower, guiding their ships into the bay; Neptune roaring in and ripping down the defensive wall that he himself had built; and Jove watching on serenely from above, as if it was all part of his plan, something that had to happen in this and no other way.

I looked away and shook my head in sorrow and dismay. Venus clasped my hand consolingly. 'This is no mean city,' she said, 'even in its fall. But Troy is not your destiny, my son. Jove, your grandfather has declared it. You are called to sail the seas and bring to birth a city and an empire that will know no end. So make haste now. The future draws you on.'

With that she left me, and before long I found myself outside our house. There was great relief and joy when I stepped inside from both my family and the servants. But I had no time to waste. I sat down with Anchises, my father, Creusa, my wife, and Ascanius, my infant son, and urged them to join me without delay and leave their home and city. 'My mother has appeared to me,' I said. 'She told me it is not my destiny to stay ... that I must sail away and found another city ... I don't know where or how ... that I must bring you all with me.'

I stumbled over my words. My story seemed out of place - it sounded so strange in that homely, familiar place. I worried that they wouldn't believe me, though Creusa certainly did. She nodded her head vigourously as I spoke but Anchises glowered and banged his hand down on his arm-rest. 'Never,' he said. 'Never will I leave Troy. This is my home - where I was born, where I have lived and where I will die. I stood my ground the first time the city fell. I will not abandon her now. I will not turn tail and flee.'

I got down on my knees. 'But father,' I implored, 'we have to,' and I went through the story again, repeating everything the goddess had said. But he was unmoved. I was beginning to think I had done all I could and that my mother would not want me to leave without Anchises whom she had once so loved. 'I will stand outside the door,' I said to myself, 'and fight to the death to preserve my loved ones and my house.' I stood up and opened the door. 

Then Creusa said to Anchises: 'Reverend father, if you do not do as Aeneas urges then you are abandoning this little one' (she meant Ascanius) 'to death or slavery, depriving him thereby of the future Venus must have in mind for him.' There was a short silence. I surveyed the dismal scene outside. Then Creusa called out, 'Look Aeneas, look!' I turned and saw little Ascanius standing between my wife and father. Small tongues of fire were dancing and flickering around his face and hair yet they singed him not and there was no smell of burning. At first I thought they were reflections of the thousand fires engulfing Troy that night. Then I came closer and saw that they were real. I felt their heat. So must have Ascanius but the flames were a source of wonder and joy to him. He laughed and smiled, eyes twinkling in delight.

My father's eyes shone too. He leant forward in his chair. First he looked at Creusa, then at me, then at the smoking night sky behind my head. 'O most high and holy Venus,' he intoned. 'You who loved me once and bore me this son. If these darting fires are a sign that I should leave my home then send another portent that I should know beyond all doubt.' At this there came a thunder-clap that shook the house and seemed to move the very earth. But Anchises leapt straight up, as if young and vigourous again, and pointed to the door. Creusa, Ascanius and I turned to look. A ball of blue and white light streaked across the sky from right to left, a trail of golden sparks following on like a pennant in its wake. 

Now this could, I suppose, have been a flare sent from the Greek ships or some sort of rocket attack on the city. But I knew in my heart and mind that it wasn't. Whence then the thunder? Whence the instant response to my father's supplication? Like him, I took it as a sign - confirmation of everything I had seen and heard when my mother appeared to me. For though she had looked so real and her voice and bearing carried such authority, I had struggled to shake off the sense that it had been an illusion caused by the stress of the situation. But now I knew that my vision was true. I began again to have hope for the future and the loss of the city weighed less heavily on me. 

Creusa and the servants made up a basket of food and drink, while my father gathered up the icons of the Trojan gods - Apollo, Diana and Venus. 'I'll carry these,' he told me. 'Your hands are too blood-stained to hold anything sacred.' Anchises was too old to walk quickly so I bore him on my back while I took Ascanius by the hand. Creusa closed and locked the door, then we arranged with the servants that they would go one way to the rendezvous - the ruined temple of Ceres by the Eastern Gate - and we would go another. The fewer we were in number, the less conspicuous we would be. So off we went, Creusa following a pace or two behind. A knot of Greeks loomed up at one point and we had to make a detour through the alleys, so that by the time we reached the ruins the servants were already there waiting for us.

It was then that I realised that Creusa was missing. Sick with anxiety, I left my father in charge and retraced my steps back to our house. But it was already ablaze and there was no sign of Creusa anywhere. I was out of my wits with panic and fear. 'Creusa! Creusa!' I cried, not caring any more about the Greeks discovering me. They could all go to Hell. No answer came though, and I turned around to face the way I had come, not knowing what to do.

Then I saw her in front of me. 'Thank Heaven,' I exclaimed, and ran to put my arms around my her but there was nothing to hold onto save the empty air. My arms went right through her. Then I knew that the worst had happened and that what I was looking at was not the wife I had known and loved for all these years but only her shade. Then it spoke: 'Aeneas. My love. Do not mourn me overmuch, for it was fated tonight that I should stumble and fall and so depart this world. I saw your mother, as soul split from body, and she told me this and more. She said that you must spend the winter building ships in the forest high above the city. Italy is your final destiny, and you will marry again there - marry into royalty - and become the first in a never-ending line of kings.'

A horn blew far away, somewhere down by the bay, and as if in response the image of Creusa disappeared and I was left all alone in a maze of burning houses. Sorrowful beyond measure, I made my way back to the camp. When I got there I was astonished to find that twenty or thirty townsfolk had joined our little group. I had no idea how they had learned about our escape and I still don't. I had no time to ask, for from that moment on we were busy day and night following the instructions Venus had given me through the voice and image of my beloved wife. 

Dawn was breaking as I led my platoon up the winding path to the mountain-side forest. The night of horror was over. I did not realise it fully then - I would not have dared to think such a thing possible - but the time of revelations had already begun.

Adapted from Book II of Virgil's Aeneid. 

Computer Problems / Our Lady and The Aeneid

The computer I use to write these posts is broken. My retelling of the end of the Second Aeneid is written and ready to go but I can't access it. I've no idea at the moment when it will be fixed. Could be days, could be weeks. I just don't know. I'll post the story as soon as I'm able.

Just while I'm here I'd like to point out briefly that there are numerous proto-Christian elements in Virgil's account of the fall of Troy and also in The Aeneid as a whole. The Medievals knew this well. I've tried to draw these out a wee bit in my version. There's no doubt in my mind, for instance, that just as it's Aeneas's divine mother, Venus, who leads him out of the ruined city and imbues him with a higher destiny, so it will be our blessed Mother - Our Lady, The Theotokos - who will save us from the burning marl of our collective auto-da-fe and point us towards the future - a future who is also a person, of course - Christ the Lord.

A Note on The Aeneid and Two Upcoming Posts

I've been reflecting a lot about The Aeneid this past year, especially in relation to the great spiritual and cultural darkening currently descending on the West. Three aspects in particular stand out - (1) The collapse of a civilisation - Troy for Aeneas, Christendom/Europe/America/The West for us, (2) The need to recognise what's of value in that civilisation, salvage it from the flames, and bring it with us into the future,  the old finding new expression in a new and Divinely-appointed dispensation (Rome in Aeneas's case), and (3) - a corollary of (2) - the need to have faith in the future and to trust in the promptings of the gods.

Those are the master themes of Virgil's poem for me, with reference, as I say, to the civilisational car crash playing out around us. So with this in mind, I intend to post two retellings from this foundational text over the next month. The first, due on Sunday 28th all being well, is my take on the end of Book Two - Aeneas's flight from Troy. The second, which will hopefully appear towards the end of March, is a retelling of Book Six - Aeneas's encounter with the Cumean Sybil and his trip to Hades and the Elysian Fields. 

There may be one or two shorter posts in the interim but this is where my imaginative focus will be between now and Holy Week. These acts of piety to a writer I and many others consider a prophet of Christ will, I hope, in their own small way, serve as a statement of intent in this dark time - an act of ressourcement - a return to the source and wellspring of European tradition, the aboriginal calamity of the fall of Troy, which yet bore fruit, according to legend, not only in the foundation of Rome but of Britain too. But that's another story!

So a nice way, perhaps, to mark (I won't say celebrate!) the one year anniversary of Covidworld's dismal eruption into our lives.

Private Eyes

I like to listen to music on YouTube while doing the dishes in the evening. Last night a song popped up on my playlist which I hadn't 'cued up' or expected - 'Private Eyes' (Disco Purrfection Mix) by Hall and Oates. I was glad to hear it. It's been a while. It's a smashing tune. Have a listen here.

I last heard this song in May 2018 in The Circus Tavern on Portland Street in Manchester. I remember walking in one evening and hearing it on the jukebox. Then I noticed a man standing at the bar. He looked a bit like the older Yeats but reminded me instantly of Alfred the Great (above). He had the same air of Kingship, you see - natural, inherent, unforced - the type that people are drawn to and follow. In palaces or in marshes. It makes no difference.

We didn't make eye contact. I saw him; he didn't see me. But I knew straightaway, without a shadow of a doubt, that he would one day rule this island, as King or Emperor or possibly both. It's only a matter of time before I see his face again, first in the media, I expect, and then once more in person.

He's gathering his forces right now, I believe, regardless of this silly lockdown. On Salisbury Plain maybe, or at the back of a retail outlet on the outskirts of Leeds. It makes no difference. 

The King is on his way again, make no mistake. All we have to do is know him when he comes. As the old song has it -

Yes, this I can tell

That all will be well
When the King enjoys his own again.

Walking Through Fire - The Byzantine Poems of Charles Williams and W.B. Yeats

And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

Apocalypse  21: 2

*

For both Charles Williams (1886-1945) and W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) the city of Byzantium was a key poetic symbol. Two of Yeats's most evocative poems, Sailing to Byzantium (1927) and Byzantium (1930) are devoted to it, while for Williams the city acts as the centre and focal point of a restored, expanded Roman Empire. His two collections of Arthurian poems, Taliessin Through Logres (1938) and The Region of the Summer Stars (1944), though primarily set in Britain (or Logres, as Williams calls it) are infused with the spirit of Byzantium throughout. Its presence is palpable from first word to last.

For Williams, Byzantium is an active city. It as a motor - a dynamo - which propels events, makes things happen, and builds and maintains the Empire in its own sacred image. As Taliessin, Williams's poetic alter-ego, observes on his pilgrimage there:

... the logothetes run down the porphyry stair

bearing the missives through the area of empire ...

And ...

Chariots and galleys sprang from the shores;

the messengers were borne over sea and land.

(The Vision of the Empire)

It is in one of these galleys that Taliessin returns home to begin his vocation as Poet (and also Captain of Horse) to the new king, Arthur. His voyage to Byzantium has shown him the greater reality, which, as a raw, unformed youth, he had dimly sensed but not yet experienced:

... for the Lord God had not yet set him at liberty,

nor shown him the doctrine of largesse in the land of the Trinity.

(The Calling of Taliessin)

We are not told what happens to Taliessin in Byzantium. Was there an initiation he had to pass through to arrive at the wisdom he brought back to Logres? Did he have a vision? A flash of transformative insight exposing the nature and essence of the Empire's various realms and how they all, in their own unique way, reflect and embody the glory of the centre - Byzantium itself?

This metropolis is no remote abstraction - bloodless and aloof. It is a living presence, symbolised by its Emperor, who represents, and in a way incarnates, not just the Empire, but Christ Himself - Christos Pantokrator - the Master of the Universe. This Emperor looks after his own. In Taliessin's Return to Logres, he seems to watch over the young poet from on high, like a guardian angel or tutelary spirit, protecting both his servant and his servant's homeland from malign influences:

The seas were left behind;

In a harbour of Logres

lightly, I came to land

under a roaring wind.

Strained were the golden sails,

the masts of the galley creaked

as it rode for the Golden Horn

and I for the hills of Wales.

In a train of golden cars

the Emperor went above,

for over me in my riding

shot seven golden stars,

as if while the great oaks stood,

straining, creaking, around,

seven times the golden sickle

flashed in the Druid wood ...

Byzantium, for Williams, is an incarnational city, imprinting itself on the minds and imaginations of lands both near and far. It touches the provinces of the Empire and makes them holy, drawing them up into its own archetypal pattern. In Yeats, the emphasis is different. In both his Byzantium poems the city has nothing to do with the material world around it. It stands apart, above and beyond that which the poet, in Byzantium, dismisses as the 'fury and the mire of human veins.'

Byzantium, for Yeats, does not go forth into the world. The seeker goes in search of it, and this is the theme of Sailing to Byzantium. The poet has become dead to the world - this world, that is - the world of what he calls 'those dying generations,' where:

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long 

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies,

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

The poet has reached the end of the road. The round of daily life - getting, spending, building, striving - has nothing more to offer him. He needs to step off the wheel, escape 'that sensual music' and be born anew - transfigured and remade - in the crucible of God's salvific fire. So he sails the seas to the 'holy city of Byzantium' and prays to those who have come this way before him:

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

In the sequel to this poem, Byzantium, we see where this invocation leads. Sailing to Byzantium focuses on the Lesser Mysteries - finding one's way to the sacred city - but Byzantium is concerned the transformation wrought when one is there - the Greater Mysteries. 'The unpurged images of day recede,' declares the poet in the first line. The great dome of Hagia Sophia stands out clear and distinct in the night air, far removed in its solemn majesty from the 'complexities' of worldly life:

The unpurged images of day recede;

The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;

Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song

After great cathedral gong;

A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains

All that man is,

All mere complexities,

The fury and the mire of human veins.

It is worth noting here that these 'human veins' are, for Williams, made participants in the Divine life by the blessing of the Emperor and what he calls the 'acts of the Empire.' Contrary to secularist misconceptions, there is nothing in orthodox Christianity which makes it despise or disdain the suffering and pain inherent in human life. Quite the contrary. It rolls up its sleeves, 'gets its hands dirty,' and drinks like all of us from the mixed chalice of quotidian life. In doing so, it makes itself vulnerable, as both the crucifixion of Christ and the fall of Byzantium in 1453 show. It acts on, in and through our earthly joys and sorrows. As with the gifts of bread and wine in the Mass, it sanctifies them and makes them holy. This is the whole raison d'être of Williams's Byzantium. It is the more purely Platonic city of Yeats's imagination which keeps us at one remove (at least) from the hurly burly of the everyday.

When we reflect, however, on what Yeats is doing in these poems we see how essential a degree of distance from the world is. To die to self and be reborn is no easy thing. In fear and trembling one realises that the world is not enough. Something deeper calls and pulls us out of our habitual orbit. Mount Purgatory, in Dante's Purgatorio, for instance, is situated on an island in the Southern Hemisphere far from the known world. This allows time and space for reflection and repentance as souls are prepared the hard way for the ever-brightening, ever-deepening light of Paradise  And this is exactly what Byzantium is - a burning purgatorial experience of shattering intensity:

At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit

Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,

Not storm disturbs, flame begotten of flame,

Where blood-begotten spirits come

And all complexities of fury leave,

Dying into a dance,

An agony of trance,

An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

Is this the purgation that Taliessin went through on his pilgrimage to Byzantium? Was this the transmutative fire that he walked through? Is this behind his change from callow teenager to Bard of Britain, Herald of the Grail, and poetic bridge between those two Italian champions of Empire, Virgil and Dante?

It is unlikely that we will ever find out. Such information is not contained in Grevel Lindop's recent exhaustive biography (Charles Williams: The Third Inkling, 2015), probably because  there isn't any. Williams and Yeats certainly knew of each other, and Williams wrote a favourable review of Yeats's symbolic masterpiece, A Vision (1937), which was appreciated by the Irish poet. But they never physically met and were in no sense collaborators. They arrived at their differing yet complementary understandings of Byzantium independently. Like the twin-headed eagle of the Byzantine flag (see below) they look in opposite directions - Yeats inward, Williams outward - yet they fit together like a pair of gloves on the hands of the same master.

Is it at all significant, I wonder, that these poems were written at roughly the same time - the years leading up to and including the Second World War? Was Byzantium in some sense speaking through these two men or did their ritualistic, pattern-seeking minds conjure it into poetic being?

What, after all, is Byzantium? Where do we find it? Is it a hidden archetype, like the Grail, which our materialistic worldview has occluded from our vision? The city 'fell', remember, at the dawn of the Early Modern era when the West's attention was shifting from the eternal realm to the temporal. Or is it rather the case that the flat historical record is true and that Byzantium, like any other city, had its day in the sun and was then conquered by a rival civilisation and assimilated into its narrative? Maybe it is a wholly fictional construction - one of Italo Calvino's 'Invisible Cities' - created and maintained by the myth-making faculties of the endlessly fecund human mind? Or could it indeed be the 'bride of God' referred to by St. John in his Apocalypse, coming in the clouds with glory alongside Christ the King on the day of the Parousia?

I ask these questions because we need Byzantium and what it stands for more than ever at this time. We are adrift on a sea of relativism, tossed around by surging emotion, wide open to manipulation and frankly ripe for conquest. We are hemmed in by darkness, and it is the wrong kind of darkness too. It is the fertile darkness of Yeats's Byzantium we are desperate for right now, where those 'unpurged images of day recede.'

It is from such darkness - this 'dessication of the world of sense,' as T.S. Eliot has it in Burnt Norton - that all great works of the spirit proceed, and that applies to cities as much as to religion, literature and art. In Byzantium a civilisation of the inner worlds came into being for the first time in Europe, a 'sinking in upon supernatural splendour,' in Yeats's memorable words. And the soul of this city was the vision of the Christos, the power of the Imagination to call forth the miraculous fire.

The time has come, I feel, to acknowledge as a society - as a civilisation - that we have come to the end of the road. We cannot go on as we are. Let us therefore don our Lenten clothes, put on sackcloth and ashes, and sail the seas to the holy city of Byzantium. There, on the Emperor's pavement, we will be burned clean, so that next morning those 'golden smithies' - laboratories and oratories of the spirit - can get to work on us, guiding us to the throne room of the Emperor. On the marble mosaic of his dancing floor are inscribed the ancient patterns that transform chaos and disintegration into the rhythms and structures of the Great Dance:

Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood,

Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood,

The golden smithies of the Emperor!

Marbles of the dancing floor 

Break bitter furies of complexity,

Those images that yet

Fresh images beget,

That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

Yes. This is how it is. This is how it will be. The gong sounds. Spirit calls unto spirit. We rise up like the phoenix, restored and renewed, ready to return, à la Taliessin, to Logres. We will find our Arthur waiting for us there, and we will work beside him, like the 'golden builders' of Blake's imagination, building up the New Jerusalem, that 'fresh image', of which Byzantium itself is but a copy and reflection, on the hallowed turf of our very own green and pleasant land.

The best essay I've read on 'That Hideous Strength' ...

 ... is this one by Mihai Marinescu on the Kali Tribune website - www.kalitribune.com. It was written in September 2017 but it's so relevant to the world of January 2021 that it could have been written this morning. I'm thinking here about what it says about the demonic intelligences ('Macrobes' as Lewis calls them) who dictate so much of the agenda in That Hideous Strength. I don't really need to emphasise the extent to which these dark powers are active in today's world. But the Devil plays all sides, and the writer is also astute in his (her?) exposure of the limitations of 'conspiratorial' thinking, as well as the lies purveyed by the mainstream media, of course. 

There's a better way to be taken, and that is the path chosen by Ransom and the Company he gathers around him at St. Anne's-on-the-Hill. We don't know the how and the why behind the facade of surface phenomena. We can guess and surmise but our points of view are always partial and we'll never be able to 'join the dots' in the coherent, comprehensive manner we often crave. Tuning into the Divine Will is what it's all about and then making ourselves receptacles for that Will to act in the world. When it comes to current events, we need to move beyond our obsession with facts - 'What are the facts behind the smokescreen presented to us? What's really going on? - and look for the archetype which is expressing itself through the event. Only then do we start to look the right way through the lens and begin to get a sense of where God is in all this and what He might be asking us to do.