The King’s Death

Mark Jenkins | 14th September 2022 | Comment
KC3

The funeral service for Her Late Majesty will take place at Westminster Abbey, after which her mortal remains will be taken to St George’s Chapel Windsor for burial. St George’s Chapel is the Chapel of the Order of the Garter, founded in the fourteenth century. The Order’s Patron Saints are St George and the Blessed Virgin Mary, symbols of the ideals of Knighthood and Womanhood.

Garter Knights are encouraged to revere the spiritual principle represented by womanhood as the completion of the masculine principle within themselves. St George and the Blessed Virgin Mary conjure up a picture of knights overcoming the dragon of their lower selves and being rewarded with spiritual bliss. The Order’s glorification of woman as the spiritual principle culminated two hundred years later in the reign of Elizabeth the Virgin Queen, arguably the greatest monarch in the history of England.

A successful engagement with the spiritual self can only come after a struggle, a death to the lower self, a crucifixion of the ego and the idea off death to self and has been central to the coronation rite of this country’s kings and queens since ancient times.

The late Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh was present at the coronation of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 in Westminster Abbey, and he later described how Her Late Majesty was brought into the Abbey by two bishops, and “went forth consciously to the Altar of the Living God, to be a living sacrifice, like the daughter of Jephthah – to die to herself, in order to live with and or her people…the young Queen did not prepare her heart for a feast, but for a consecration.”

At the heart of rite of coronation there lies the idea of death, a difficult idea for modern, western man to grasp because modern, western man …

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