William Wildblood's Yeatsian Vision of the End

My ex-Albion Awakening colleague William Wildblood (that's not him above but W.B. Yeats) has written a scorching piece on his blog about the descent of the Western world into madness and shapeless anarchy. A phrase popped into my head as I was reading it - 'the veil of the temple was torn in two' - and I had the strong sense of masks (ironically) being pulled off and the writer coming face to face with the horror, vacuity and sheer ennui of the great collapse unfolding around us. What he is describing, with clarity and feeling, is nothing less than the end of the world, not like some 'fancy dan' aesthete musing on Wagner's Götterdämmerung, for example, but in the real-time manner of St. Augustine of Hippo (whose feast day falls this Friday) reflecting on the fall of the Roman Empire in his monumental and always-influential Civitas Dei. 

Here's the link and here's part of the first paragraph as a taster: 

'How long can you keep pointing out that humanity is on course for global civilisational collapse which is always what happens when the impetus that gave rise to a new culture has dissipated and there is no creative energy left? How many times can you say that when the spiritual world is denied as it is now human beings go literally, yes, quite literally mad and start engaging in self-destructive behaviour? Their minds descend into a kind of anarchic mess, antipathy for the other increases and the most mentally perverted become the most passionate in defending and promoting their perversions.' 

There is something very reminiscent to me of Yeats (1865-1939) in these words. One recalls, for instance, these famous lines from The Second Coming (1920): 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre 
The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 
The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 
The best lack all conviction, while the worst 
Are full of passionate intensity. 

Yeats was one of a number of early to mid-twentieth century writers and thinkers who were fascinated by what they felt to be the imminent dissolution of our era and the emergence of a new and very different order in its wake. The French metaphysician René Guénon (1886-1951) is another name which springs to mind in this context. His cosmological oeuvre revolves around the ancient Hindu concept of succeeding ages (or Yugas in Sanskrit) - Gold to Silver to Bronze to Iron (or Dark), back to Gold again, and so on. Yeats calls them gyres, and while Guénon was certain that this current Dark Age (Kali Yuga) will soon cede place to a new Golden Age (Satya Yuga), Yeats, thanks largely to the last stanza of The Second Coming, has usually been seen as somewhat more ambivalent in his prognostications. 

He was totally unambivalent, however, in his denunciations of modernity and the type of individual post-Enlightenment conditions tend to breed. 'Scorn the sort now growing up,' he wrote in his last major poem, Under Ben Bulben (1939), 'All out of shape from toe to top.' Or these lines from The Statues (1938): 

We Irish, born into that ancient sect 
But thrown upon this filthy modern tide 
And by its formless spawning fury wrecked ... 

The 'rough beast' at the end of The Second Coming, who 'slouches off to Bethlehem to be born', seems to indicate that Yeats had grave forebodings not only about the present but about the future too that he did not share Guénon's faith in an inevitably returning Golden Age. But his thoughts on the matter are in reality much more complex. I'm over-simplifying things massively in this post and the place to go for a full exposition of Yeats's cosmology is his astonishing prose work, A Vision, first published in 1925. With this in mind, I would like to end this post with all three stanzas of another late Yeats poem, The Gyres (1936-37). Here we see a bold and confident vision of the age to come and a complete disregard - an insouciance and disdain even - for the death rattle of this one. The best this world could offer, as the poet knows, belonged to former times anyway. 'A greater, a more gracious age is gone,' as he says. But 'What matter? Heave no sigh, let no tear drop.' For 'Out of cavern comes a voice, and all it knows is that one word 'Rejoice!' 

I have known this poem for a long time but up until very recently I would not have said that it has particularly informed or inspired me. I came across it again by chance in early May, I think, when looking for a quote from another Yeats poem - I forget which now - to include in an email to a friend. I would never have guessed that by August The Gyres would have become the most compelling and insistent poem in my life, my 'go to poem' if you like, for this discombobulating spring and summer we are living through. 

So why is this? To be honest, I think it's because the poem gives a 'two fingered salute' to the forces of disintegration and disorder which seem so dominant at the moment. Hope is too weak a word for what Yeats conveys here. There's a real strength and vitality imbued in these lines, a spiritual swagger, which has been in short supply, to be honest, too often for too long in too many mainstream churches. It isn't faith either - that's too tepid again. What we're talking about is a deep Platonic mystery, a rock-like certainty, and a sure and hard-earned knowledge of how aeons come and go and how time and eternity interact. 

No pearl clutching here then. No laments for the way things used to be. Yeats doesn't give a fig for 'all our yesterdays.' Nor is he cowed by the darkness rampaging everywhere, blotting out the light wherever it can. He has no time or respect for it. It's irrelevant to him. Kids stuff. Not worth bothering about. Not when the world is about to be regenerated. No way.

This led me to reflect that maybe the 'beast' of The Second Coming is only 'rough' and slouching because our age (which is 'perishing' anyway as St. Paul reminds us) has become so degenerate and effete - 'all out of shape from toe to top' - that a necessary purging and renewal can only appear to us as something threatening and unwelcome - 'bestial', in short. Because what Yeats foresees in The Gyres is not at all the hegemony of savages, but actually it's opposite - the return of archetypal, primal human types, men and women who, you might say, have the mark of reality stamped upon their foreheads, individuals who have been and continue to be marginalised under the current, decaying dispensation. They are symbolised in the poem by the figures of the horseman, the lover, the workman, the noble and the saint - the kind of company we would all like to keep, if we're honest, and maybe the kind of person, in one form or another, we would all like to be if only the world hadn't gone off the rails so much and was now orbiting away at a million miles an hour from anything true and real, whether in Heaven or on Earth. 

These figures will come again. Yeats had no doubt. And this will be so because they incarnate and embody reality and truth, and reality and truth always have the last word. Their coming may be closer than we think. And the world of falsehood and illusion will not be able to withstand them. Babylon will sink into the sea and the princes of this world will weep and mourn and hide beneath the mountains, but we will stand with Yeats and those 'sages standing in God's holy fire' he evoked in Sailing to Byzantium (1928) and shout out loud for everyone to hear, 'Babylon has fallen. What matter? Rejoice! Rejoice!' 

'Why should not old men be mad?' as he asked in another poem. There is madness in The Gyres indeed, but it is a madness that exalts us and leads us on, as Beatrice led on Dante, up to the realm of the gods. This lies at the antipodes of the madness William describes in his piece, which dismembers us spiritually, drags us down and makes us fodder for demons. The madness of The Gyres is the madness which heals. It is the madness which saves. It is the madness we need ... 

The gyres! The gyres! Old Rocky Face, look forth; 
Things thought too long can be no longer thought, 
For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth, 
And ancient lineaments are blotted out. 
Irrational streams of blood are staining earth; 
Empedocles has thrown all things about; 
Hector is dead and there's a light in Troy; 
We that look on but laugh in tragic joy. 

What matter though numb nightmare ride on top, 
And blood and mire the sensitive body stain? 
What matter? Heave no sigh, let no tear drop, 
A greater, a more gracious time has gone; 
For painted forms or boxes of make-up 
In ancient tombs I sighed, but not again; 
What matter? Out of cavern comes a voice, 
And all it knows is that one word 'Rejoice!' 

Conduct and work grow coarse, and coarse the soul, 
What matter? Those that Rocky Face holds dear, 
Lovers of horsemen and of women, shall, 
From marble of a broken sepulchre, 
Or dark betwixt the polecat and the owl, 
Or any rich, dark nothing disinter 
The workman, noble and saint, and all things run 
On that unfashionable gyre again.

Saint Alban - British Protomartyr

Orthodox icon of the Martyr St. Alban at his Martyrium. 

If you are the writer of this icon please do contact me and I will gladly credit you. 

Thank you for the wonderful image.

I have been reflecting a good deal recently on the life and death of Saint Alban, Britain's first martyr. The rising tide of anti-Christian sentiment in the West is making me wonder if a wave of physical persecution, such as Alban and many others endured in the pre-Constantinian Roman Empire, might be close at hand.

Alban was a respectable Romano-British gentleman, liked and admired by all sections of society, who lived in Verulamium (modern day St. Alban's) a few miles north-west of London. The date of his execution has not been precisely established but it seems likely that it took place sometime in the late third century. 

Alban, so the story goes, found a ragged, exhausted-looking old man lying half-unconscious in his porch one day. Alban took him in, bathed him, fed him, and looked after him for several days. The old man, whose name was Amphibalous, told him that he was a Christian priest fleeing the authorities, who had embarked on another of their periodic, no-holds-barred attempts to stamp out the faith. 

Alban was deeply wedded to Roman custom and belief and he was shocked at Amphibalous' testimony. He asked him why he had come to his house, and the old man replied that it was Alban's reputation for goodness and his renowned kindness to the poor and needy that had led him to his door. 

As the days passed and Amphibalous grew stronger, Alban began to question him more deeply about his Christian faith. He was greatly struck by the old man's love for his god - a love so deep and true that he was willing to die to stay loyal to Him. This tells us much about Amphibalous' closeness to Christ and the quality of holiness which clearly emanated from him. It also reveals Alban's serious-minded nature, the sincerity of his spiritual search, and the great capacity for faith which this encounter opened up in him. 

Alban was so impressed with his guest that he asked him to baptise him and make him a Christian. Then, when word arrived that the Romans had learned he was harbouring a priest, Alban took off his robe and gave it to Amphibalous, before bundling him out the back door and dressing himself in the old man's clothes. So when the soldiers came and saw a man in the garb of a Christian priest kneeling in prayer, their surprise when they pulled back the hood and found Alban looking back at them, was great indeed. 

He was taken to the magistrate, an old friend of Alban's father, who did everything he could to release him. He would gladly forgive this one-off folly, he said. All Alban needed to do was make the customary offering to the Roman gods and that would be that. But this was precisely what Alban could no longer countenance. He was a Christian now, he told the magistrate, and unable to honour any god but Jesus Christ. Those present begged him not to forfeit his life over a technicality, but Alban was adamant and the magistrate was left with no other option but to sentence him to death. 

So the soldiers marched him off to the place of execution. They shoved him into a river, forcing him to wade across, but when Alban lifted up the wooden cross he was carrying the waters dried up and he walked along the river bed on dry land. At the spot where he was to be beheaded he asked for a drink, and a spring of water gushed up spontaneously from the ground. When the executioner saw this he refused to take part in the murder of such a self-evidently holy man. So the Captain of the Guard took it on himself to kill both Alban and the executioner. Amphibalous too was hunted down a few days later and martyred in his turn. 

What I find particularly interesting about this story is that it was not all that long after Alban's martyrdom - a few decades at the most - that the Empire became Christian and persecution ceased. Christianity, during Alban's lifetime, was rigourously oppressed by the Roman State, yet it grew in strength and numbers all the time, eventually becoming the religion of the Emperor and his family.

Today in Britain, the situation is almost the opposite. Christianity is officially tolerated by the State. We are, in fact, still a nominally Christian country, yet the dominant trends in culture and society are dragging us away from our Christian heritage and from any sense of a shared, collective relationship with Christ. 

So will this spiritual amnesia, this 'refusal to inherit', as the late Sir Roger Scruton put it, inevitably segue into the future imprisonment and execution of Christians? All we can say with certainty at the moment, I think, is that when it comes to Christianity there is no such thing as a benevolent 'liberal neutrality' or a disinterested, impartial State. A genuinely Christian nation needs a governing class willing and able to act as a positive advocate for the Faith. That is far from the case today, and it does make one somewhat uneasy as to where the direction of travel might be taking us. 

What then does the life and death of St. Alban teach us about effective, meaningful witness in a fundamentally anti-Christian age? It shows us, in my view, how to keep our focus on the Lord; to acknowledge that, despite appearances, He is present and active in the world; to realise that He has plans and intentions which we cannot comprehend, and not to become angry, resentful or overly-dismayed at the wretched state of things. Easier said than done, I know. Nor, on the other hand, should we let ourselves be seduced by spurious, head-based schemes and strategies for Christian renewal - 'roadmaps for recovery', 'programmes for revival', and so forth. What we need to do is something much more radical and also very simple - to open up to the grace which pours down constantly upon us from beyond the confines of this chequered world. That way something real can start to act in us and make itself manifest in society. This, and this only, is what will attract, compel, and potentially change others. We will become transparent, as was Amphibalous, who had 'got himself out of the way', as they say, and become a conduit for the presence and sanctifying action of the living God. 

What Alban saw in Amphibalous and what the executioner saw in Alban was not actually a 'what' but a 'who' - namely Christ Himself. It is not his or her own individual light which the saint casts out into the world, but the light of Christ. 'Say your prayers and keep your will fixed in the will of Maleldil', as Ransom tells Dimble in That Hideous Strength. And this is what is demanded of us today - dedication, humility, focus and simplicity. This is the path of sanctity, the wooden cross we hold up, à la Alban, to the foaming torrent of liquid-modernity and our would-be oppressors. Anything else, anything less, however well-intentioned, is to collude with the Father of Lies, who seeks to blot out from our souls that Life which, to paraphrase St. John, is the 'light of men; the light that shineth in the darkness, though the darkness comprehendeth it not - the true light, which enlightens every man who cometh into the world.'

Confiteor

I became involved in an altercation on a train last week concerning the wearing of masks. I was 'anti', my fellow-passenger 'pro' and, let's just say, heated words were exchanged. I would like to think that I had truth on my side but I did not, to be frank, conduct myself in a manner worthy of a representative of the truth. I was far from cogent or congruent in the approach I took and the words I used. Much pent up frustration at the willingness of so many to embrace authoritarian solutions - and then insist on them for others - came spilling out. I lost more than I gained in short.

What this farrago underlined for me, however, is the truly apocalyptic nature of the Coronavirus era. I use the 'a' word here in its original Greek sense of Apokalypsis - an unveiling or a showing forth of what has always been there but has previously remained hidden. The virus and our reactions to it are telling us so much about ourselves, both individually and collectively. From this perspective we can perhaps see the present moment as a time of mercy and illumination, with the onus on ourselves to make the most of what is being shown us before the door of spiritual opportunity slams shut again.

What I saw in garish neon lights last Thursday was that I am technically 49 years old yet in no way have I outgrown the raw, spiky and vulnerable teenager I was in the mid-1980s. I still am that boy. He remains my deepest, most essential reality. Everything I've done since - in thought, word or deed - is a sham, a veneer, a pretence. I am not who I think I am. That explains why I had the odd sense during the argument that I was wearing my old petrel-blue High School jumper, even though that would have been impossible and of course I wasn't.

Later that evening, while reflecting on the matter, I saw very clearly why it is that two novels in particular - Alan Garner's Elidor (1965) and William Golding's Free Fall (1959) have become such foundational texts for me. I carry these books around in my heart. I relate to them in a very intense, very personal way, and that is because the protagonists in both - Roland Watson in Elidor (above, front) and Sammy Mountjoy in Free Fall - are archetypal teenage figures, railing and raging against a world of straight lines and hard edges that refuses to see them, refuses to recognise them, rejects the qualities they possess, and repudiates their dreams and visions. Roland (who might actually be a bit younger than thirteen) invests everything he has, spiritually and emotionally, in the parallel world of Elidor. He wants to save it, needs to save it, pours his heart and soul into it, and believes in it with such ferocity that his siblings, who are less enraptured by the adventure and its repercussions, find him almost impossible to handle.

"Elidor! Elidor! Elidor! Have you forgotten?"
"OK," said David. "We don't want the whole road to hear."
"But you're pretending it doesn't matter ... Didn't it mean anything to you - Malebron and the Treasures, and that golden castle, and, and - everything."

Roland's visceral, deeply-embedded loyalty to Elidor and its fugitive king, Malebron, pushes him to the brink of madness and possibly beyond. The book does not tell us what happens to him afterwards. Sammy Mountjoy, in Free Fall, is driven past the point of mental endurance and emerges on the other side with a transformed, transfigured understanding of the world and his place in it. But it is a hard won vision. Sammy, a successful artist who hangs in The Tate, is emotionally wounded to a profound degree and is compelled to write his book by the need to find that moment when, as he puts it, 'I lost my freedom' - the ability to think and act from the centre of his being and not be pulled around by unconscious forces and other people's agendas. As a teenage boy he transposes this drive for pattern and coherence onto his contemporary, Beatrice Ifor, with long-term results that are the opposite of Dante's life-enhancing, fructifying relationship with his own Beatrice. He learns the hard way that you cannot project the most essential part of yourself onto someone else. Roland's experience vis-a-vis Malebron is similar. What they see as signposts to Heaven are in fact just pointers to different parts of Plato's cave. They are still stuck in the world which oppresses them. They have failed to transcend it, and the original wounds which propel them like Furies remain unacknowledged and unhealed.

Later in life, during the Second World War, Sammy is flung into solitary confinement in a German prisoner of war camp. There, in the darkness, he senses the presence of something soft and slimy in the centre of the room - a horrible monster, he supposes, which will sniff him out, crawl all over him and perform all kinds of unspeakable acts on him. The terror of this prospect 'fast-tracks' him to a place beyond thought and reason - the edge of insanity which Roland approaches at the end of Elidor. But instead of a breakdown and subsequent disintegration, Sammy achieves a breakthrough and a radical restructuring of the mental and spiritual categories which had hitherto framed his life in a series of one-dimensional, self-sabotaging ways.

'Therefore,' he reflects, 'when the commandant let me out of the darkness he came late and as a second string, giving me the liberty of the camp when perhaps I no longer needed it. I walked between the huts, a man resurrected but not by him. I saw the huts as one who had little to do with them and the temporal succession of days that they implied. So they shone with the innocent light of their own created nature ... Beyond them the mountains were not only clear all through like purple glass, but living. They sang and were conjubilant. They were not all that sang. Everything is related to everything else and all relationship is either discord or harmony. The power of gravity, dimension and space, the movement of the earth and sun and unseen stars, these made what might be called music and I heard it ... Standing between the understood huts, among jewels and music, I was visited by a flake of fire, miraculous and pentecostal; and fire transmuted me, once and forever.'

Sammy's 'monster' is wet and slimy. Mine is hard and splintery. Yours may be different again. When the commandant releases him, light pours into the cell, and Sammy sees that what he has been so terrified of is only a sponge left behind by a forgetful orderly. He is able now to see the evil that torments him in its true form - small-scale and insignificant - like the hunched and shrunken figure of Satan in Dante's Inferno. But he is only able to perceive its essence because the 'dark night' of solitary confinement has stripped away illusions and wishful thinking and forced him into a direct confrontation with the deepest, darkest aspects of himself - everything about him he has been running away from; everything within him he has been pretending (and hoping) does not exist.

Even then, Sammy's epiphany is only a voyage to a beginning. It is a start - a base camp - nothing more. It is only after this that that he can begin to see where his freedom was lost, make reparations for his many wrongs, and commit his insights to posterity. What matters is that he is facing the right way at last - towards the Sun; not away from it as before.

What then if this is the deepest, most essential element to keep in mind in our reaction to Coronavirus and its aftermath? What if the various political and social evils we see gathering momentum in its wake are in fact distractions and red herrings aimed at diverting us from 'the one thing needful' which the virus has perhaps been sent to offer us - an illumination of conscience, an awareness in our lives of unacknowledged wounds and deep-seated patterns of sin which keep us far from God and stop us shining like the beacons of light and goodness we need to be at this hour? Only then, in truth, can the decks be cleared, the dross purged, the gold revealed, and that Metanoia which Christ calls us to in the Gospels - that total, 360 degree reorientation of our spiritual compass - begin its vital work of salvation and renewal.

Maybe this is what is meant to happen at this time. After all, there are enough demons active in the world right now, and we cannot hope to overcome them without seeing and bringing to God those festering inner sores - so securely established, so craftily hidden - which poison our wellsprings, stymie our growth, and steer our actions, however well-intentioned, down paths dictated by the Evil One. In the words of the Anglican priest and mystic, Father Gilbert Shaw (1886-1967):

'Foremost must come penitence - for ourselves, for we are part of the failure of the Church. If we are to pray for unity, not only of the Church, but all mankind, it will be through acknowledgement of failure, praying in penitence, that God will fulfill his purpose through our self-emptying ... It will be out of penitence for the past and in the acceptance of the day of judgment that the patient endurance of the saints will give life and new meaning to the new age which is in the throes of its birthpangs.'

Beyond the Ruins (Announcement)

I had originally conceived this story as having no more than three episodes. It has grown and expanded considerably in my mind and I now find it no longer suits the format of posting a chapter fortnightly on this blog. So I'm going to go away and give it the time and attention it needs away from the self-imposed pressure of needing to 'get something out there' every two weeks. I will continue to post here on other matters.

Thanks and all the best,

John.

Beyond the Ruins (VI)

Dindrane paused and inclined her head to the right, towards the dome of St. Andrew's. The wind had dropped, the night was still, and it felt like the stars themselves, hoping to hear her better, had drawn in closer to the tower. And I saw her then as I'd seen her when I first picked up the coin two days before - the noble set of her jaw, the lips parted as if on the brink of speech or song, and the deep wellspring of emotion visible in the one eye I could see. I felt in my pocket. The coin was still there. Then she turned to us again and carried on with her story.

'We sat down together on the fallen sandstone, Merlin facing me and Brisen beside me. I noticed a chipped marble laurel wreath lying on the ground at my feet. I picked it up and turned it around in my hands as the High King's enchanter spoke.

'"Princess Dindrane," he began. "You will have heard how Joseph of Arimathea brought the Holy Grail to Britain after the death and resurrection of Our Lord. You will also have been told how he settled in the Island of Apples and built a chapel there, which over time became a church and then an abbey, watched over by the Grail King, a descendent of Joseph, and by his spiritual counterpart, the Grail Priest, Nasciens, who, for a crime committed long ago against the Arimathean, was given the penance of living hundreds of years beyond his natural span, until he who is destined to take the titles of both Grail Priest and King comes into his maturity."

'Merlin probed me with his eyes - testing me out, I thought. They were as black as his hair - as black as coal. I coolly returned his gaze. "Yes," I said. "I know that story." Most people did, in truth.

'"Eighty years ago," he continued, "when the Romans left these shores, my master Blaise made the Grail realm disappear, so that it exists now more in the Otherworld than here. He wanted to hide it from the Saxons, so that is why one cannot find it now as one would find Venta, Eboracum or Deva, by walking, riding, or studying maps. Blaise did not, however, separate it wholly from this world and nor did he wish to, for that would be to deprive our land of a matchless grace and beauty. And so it is that now and again a man or a woman might stumble upon this in-between place, as Balin of Tyneside, one of Arthur's lieutenants did three years ago. But Balin failed to perceive the mystery, and in his confusion wounded the Grail King, Pelles, with a spear he had no right to bear, let alone throw. Instantly the Grail lands became waste and desolate, the abbey collapsed into ruin, and only the tower which houses the chapel itself remained intact. Pelles lies on his litter now, racked with pain, in a room adjoining that chapel, awaiting the advent of he whom I told you of, he who will hold both crook and flail and will let loose the waters and cause the trees and flowers to blossom again in that parched and barren land."

'As I say, I had heard this tale, or variants of it, in the streets and squares of Venta and elsewhere. I was intrigued by it, as were we all to an extent, but the thought of visiting Carbonek (as the Grail realm was commonly called) or being in any way involved with it had never crossed my mind. Until my friendship with the Lord Taliessin I had never envisaged any other future than taking vows at Almesbury. But what Merlin told me set my thoughts in a different direction, towards an incredible, almost inconceivable possibility. And what if ...? Then Brisen - as soft and golden as her brother was dark and angular - placed her hand on my knee and said soothingly, as if reading my mind, "How and when this prince is to be born and who his parents will be is not your concern, Princess Dindrane. Merlin and I will take the matter in hand. But he will not be able to be brought up by his mother and father. The boy will need someone else to raise him, and we can think of no-one better, no-one purer, no-one more devoted to the holy and the beautiful than you. All we ask for now is that you take some time to reflect on what his coming might mean, both for Britain and for yourself. I will be honest. A sword shall pierce your heart - yes, more than one sword too - yet you will find in this vocation the deep and lasting joy your heart has always cried out for."

'I was shocked beyond measure at these words. There was shame as well, for I had hoped that they would ask me to be the child's mother, as the angel Gabriel had asked Our Lady to bear Christ in her womb. I told them to stay where they were while I went for a walk to clear my mind and beg God's forgiveness and help. I handed the marble laurel wreath to Brisen - I have no idea why - and stepped outside into the fresh sea air, with the white cloud above me and the shouts of workmen and soldiers ringing around. I stood at the foot of the old Roman Pharos and gazed up at the mighty stone tower, with its beacon brazier, recently relit by Arthur himself, blazing away on top as it had blazed for so long in the days of the Empire. Then I returned to the storeroom and asked, "If I accept can I still be a sister at Almesbury?" And when Brisen said, "Yes," my heart leapt in my breast, for I had seen in those flames what my true calling was and how everything else, even this weighty responsibility, would revolve around that.

'I told the Lord Taliessin in the lamp-lit Praetorium later, and there was sorrow and joy in the time we had together that evening. And so it was that some four and a half years later, on an ice-cold Wednesday night, I was sat at the door at Almesbury, listening for visitors, while the sisters sung Compline in the chapel. I heard a snuffling outside, so I undid the latch and beheld a white wolf with coal-black eyes and a new-born babe in swaddling clothes on his back, tied with scarlet bands.

'The wolf looked up and I smiled and went to the cupboard to fetch the knife. "Merlin and I will take the matter in hand," Brisen had promised. Indeed so. I cut the scarlet bands and held the babe up to the light. His eyes were green and translucent and his hair the colour of vivid flame, the same shade and tint, I recalled, as the burning brazier at Rutupiae. I glanced down but the wolf was already gone, a vanishing speck against the empire of ice. The sisters came rushing up and the babe began to cry, and we blessed and welcomed him and gave thanks to God for the unprecedented gift He had bestowed upon our house.

Beyond the Ruins (V)

'I was with the Logos in the light and silence of the Blessed Trinity before time and space began. With your assistance, I made his vision reality at the foundation of the world and was with Him again when He took on flesh and blood and lived among us. Like Marcus, I am known by more than one name and have been active in many times and places - from the Persian mountains to the walls of Troy - and on all these occasions I have had very little notion, almost until my dying day, of who I truly am in the mind of God. So it is for all of us on this turret when we are asked to engage with this world. The memory of our heavenly home never leaves us but it comes in hints and flashes only. And we would do well to pay attention to these. Anamnesis, the poets call it. Remembrance. Recollection. Until the day dawns when the truth breaks in on us and we see and feel things in the round again.' 

I felt sure, in my youthful naïveté, that the truth she spoke of was already breaking in on me and would never depart. I had no conception of how far I still had to fall and how deeply I would forget - and worse than that - to deny to myself, though mercifully not to others, that these events had taken place. But I knew no better at the time. What I did know was that her words were true. They had the mark of authenticity. It wasn't just the evidence of my senses - the hunger in my belly (because, of course, I was now very late home for my tea), the cool evening air, the breeze whipping her hair across her face. It was more than this. It was that sense of homecoming again, that consciousness which had been growing ever since Marcus beckoned me over, of being in the right place with the right people - my place, my people. 

'I was last on Earth in Arthur's time,' she continued. 'My name is Dindrane. I have been nearly fifteen hundred years in the sacred city of Sarras, which is invisible to human eyes and will remain so until the day of the Great Unveiling. Upon my return, two nights ago, I found the Empire more shattered and broken than ever I could have imagined. Not so much in its physical form, which is ephemeral and far from essential, but in spirit and imagination. So much has been lost; so much forgotten. And we have brought it on ourselves. Neither Saxon nor Turk could have wrought such inner havoc. To forget is the gravest sin of all, both for an individual and a civilisation. And that is why I have been sent - to kindle the fire of anamnesis and to guide and inspire you as we rebuild the Empire, first as a counterpoint to the darkness and then as its conqueror. 

'I was born in Dumnonia, in the far South-West. My father, Gerren the Fleet Owner, was King there, and my brother, Percivale, as is well known, later supped from the Grail with Galahad and Bors. There was no High King in Britain at that time. Vortigern, who had last claimed that title, was dead and gone, duped by the Saxons he had hired to keep the Picts at bay. The country was a chaos, a smoking ruin, a formless, pirate-riven mess. Our father mourned the Romans' departure and hoped that Brittania would one day return to the Imperial fold. But there was very little of the Empire left after Vortigern's death, so he swore allegiance instead to the young Romano-British prince Ambrosius Aurelianus who was quietly gathering his forces in the mountain fastnesses of northern Cymru. And when the call to arms came, my father's ships harried the enemy so effectively in the Channel that the campaign was already half won before the cavalry routed the Saxons at the Durobrivae Bridge. Then Ambrosius became High King and ruled southern Britain from Venta Belgarum for fifteen years, while Arthur, the Dux Brittaniorum, pushed the barbarians back in the North and East as far as the Antonine Wall. 

'I was just three when our father sent us to live with Ambrosius at Venta. Gerren had an eye on our education, for the High King had a passion for learning and had invited scholars from Hibernia and Gaul to teach Latin, Greek and Divinity to the children of rich and poor alike. Ambrosius was a slight, dark man with clear grey eyes that glimmered with a soft and secret golden light. He was unmarried and childless and treated us as his own offspring. We loved him greatly and sorrowed deeply when he died, gouged on the antlers of a royal stag while hunting in the woods one frosty Friday morning.

'So Arthur was crowned High King in his place, and with his magus Merlin beside him extraordinary things started to happen. Camelot was built and Caerleon remade. Churches sprang up across the land and the flames of countless votive shrines were lit along the Roman roads and our ancient British trackways. Arthur consecrated his realm to the Mother of God in a solemn Mass at Canterbury, and there was joy and expectation everywhere, a sense that we were standing on the brink of something wonderful and unprecedented. 

'Arthur was like the Sun. Like Christ. With his brown hair and beard he reminded me of the icons of the Saviour at the convent at Almesbury. Ever since coming East, I had wanted to join the sisters there and spend my life in silent adoration. And now I was seventeen, with just a year left before I was deemed old enough. But I became very close at that time to the Lord Taliessin, the King's Poet and Captain of Horse. I see him now. I see him always - thin and intense, with wide blue eyes and a shock of wild blonde hair. I came alive in his presence in ways I had thought impossible, and my heart and mind were torn. I would accompany him sometimes on various official trips, and on one of these, to the Roman fortress of Rutupiae on the Isle of Thanatus, my fate was decided in a singular and unexpected fashion. 

'It was an August afternoon, the sun concealed behind banks of high white cloud. Taliessin had gone with Bors to inspect the new sea defences and I was left alone to wander the jetties, with the cries of gulls and the hammers and saws of the stone-mason's yards and the boat sheds ringing in my ears. Then, in a quiet place I had found to pray in - an ancient store room lined with sandstone blocks of fallen vaulting - I beheld, as if waiting for me there, Merlin and his sister Brisen, both tall and slender, he with hair as black as a raven's pinions, her as bright and golden as Venus herself. I could tell by the intensity of their gaze that they had come to tell me something serious, but I had no idea that after fifteen hundred years in Sarras and with the weight of eternity behind me that it would be only now - this very night on this very tower - that I would start to sense the full import of the request they made. I am only glad that I said yes. It has been a cross as well as a joy, but I know how easy it is to miss a vocation and I am grateful to have had my destiny shown me so clearly. Not once but twice, as it turned out.

'My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my saviour.'

Beyond the Ruins (IV)

We met her in the middle of the hall, half way between the dais and the door. As we approached, I observed a slender golden chain attached to the cross she was holding. She handed this to Marcus, then lowered her head as he placed both chain and cross around her neck. Then she passed him the bowl and he raised it to his lips and drank from it. When he looked up it was as if a shining jewel had been fastened to his brow. His already noble face was lit with a new and princely light. Marcus gave the bowl to me and I drank too, then passed it to the companion on my left, whose name was Adam, a portly gent with white hair and tweeds, whom I yet remembered as a mighty force of nature at the beginning of the world, a titan of ice and fire who fashioned the poles with his bare hands and fixed the extremities of heat and cold from North to South and East to West.

The drink was cool and invigorating, and laced, I felt, with a secret, subtle power. My mind felt clear and my body sharp and alert. The woman in red and gold was standing in front of me, the bowl back in her hand. She had such a compelling presence that it was hard to look elsewhere, but my eyes, nonetheless, were drawn more to the picture of the purple staircase behind her on the wall. I felt like Edmund and Lucy at the start of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader when the painting of the ship comes alive and they see the sails billowing and feel the wind and spray on their cheeks. I had no idea why or how but it seemed that the purple stairs were standing out somehow from their golden backdrop and inviting us to take the first step up.

So when the woman said, 'Come, let us ascend to the top of the tower,' it came as no surprise. She led us to a corner of the hall, to an alcove beside the dais and a plain wooden door which she opened with her foot, not even breaking stride. A stone staircase swept upwards before us, curving around from right to left. We followed in her wake and started to climb.

The stairs were surprisingly broad, and we were able to walk two or three abreast. It was, however, rather dim. What light there was seemed like a blend of the torches in the hall below and the moon and stars above. There were little slits of windows every twenty paces or so and I paused at the third one and looked out at the poplar trees waving in the breeze. Beyond them, on the other side of the disused railway, I could see the brick façade of the laundry and the corrugated gleam of the old air raid shelters.

I became convinced, as I resumed my climb, that I had called the tower into being, albeit unwittingly, through my contemplation of the purple stairs. I was sure I hadn't seen a tower when I'd stood up on my pedals before to look at the transformed ruins, though admittedly the light had been weak and there were lots of trees about. And what, I asked myself, if my eyes had focused on another image - the eagle, for instance, or the book? Would that have become the focal point for the adventure instead? I recalled Malebron's remark to Roland in Alan Garner's Elidor on the power of the imagination: 'What appears only fleetingly in your world is here as real as swords.'

The staircase, I noticed, was starting to feel brighter, as if it had its own source of light after all. Then, as we turned a corner onto small, square landing - more like a platform really - we saw where it was coming from and we stood stock still before it, spellbound and amazed. It was a door, thick and sturdy and carved from the same grey stone as the slabs surrounding it. A round, iron handle tempted me momentarily, but deep down I felt neither the need nor desire to go inside. The same could be said for all of us, I think. It was enough to stand outside and let the silver light that streamed out from the gaps between the door and walls work its magic on our hearts and minds.

I say 'silver' because that's the closest approximation I can find, but in reality it was like no other colour I've seen before or since. No words can do it justice. It was like the sun and moon and stars all rolled into one. That silver fire brought me so much peace and joy - as if the Holy Spirit was holding and caressing me - that I have searched for it ever since, in all the wrong places usually, and will remain forever restless until I meet it face to face again.

There was a smell as well, a mingled scent of daffodils and incense. I heard bells and voices too - a high angelic chant - the same song we had sung around the blessed throne before the dawn of time. Then Marcus spoke, cutting through the rapture and bringing me back to the ground beneath my feet and the round solidity of the tower. 'Friends,' he said, 'the time will come again, when this work is done, to enter in and sing once more the liturgy God gave us long ago, the Solemn Mass that brings the Dark Age to a close and baptises the returning Golden Age. But that is for the future. Tonight we have our mission to receive. Let us climb higher and hear the story Dindrane has returned to tell us.'

I don't know how long after that it took us to reach the top. I had lost all track of time to be honest. But when we got there the woman Marcus had called Dindrane was waiting for us, as tall and straight as a spear-shaft against the scudding clouds and sparkling stars of Orion's Belt. To her right, above the trees and beyond the railway and my house and street, loomed the Byzantine-style dome of St. Andrew's RC church. To her left, past the bowling green and the hedge and across Wilmslow Road, the spire of the Anglican Shrine of King Charles the Martyr pointed up to the quarter-full moon. And it seemed auspicious to me that we should be standing on this mysterious turret - this thin place, this place both in and out of time - exactly midway between these two great symbols of local Christianity.

The bronze bowl each of us had drank from in the hall stood perched between two battlements on Dindrane's right. She picked it up and drank from it, and the cross on her chest appeared to glow with a fiercer, more insistent light. She put the bowl back and I saw in her eyes, like summer lightning , the same silver, Pentecostal fire that had given us its blessing on the parapet below. Then she started to speak ...