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Has the Queen died?

Monarch Butterflies​

At the Black Jacobin, Ralph Leonard opines on reactions to the Queen of England’s death, offering a critique of monarchy and the response of many people in Britain to monarchy––what he calls an “orgy of maudlin sentimentality and zealous adoration” that “has been nauseating and unbearable.”

He writes:

This has always been one of the more bizarre practices of our culture. Only when the subject of monarchy and royalty is mentioned, do the British abandon every remnant of our supposedly typical stoicism, modesty, humour and reserve. We find it hilarious when North Korea invents fantastical tales of supernatural miracles around the life of their ‘Dear Leader’. Yet, the sight of clouds supposedly resembling the late Queen and rainbows being spotted over Buckingham Palace are widely reported as if it was a sign from the divine himself … We react with repulsion and mockery at other countries—usually dictators—where the hysterical veneration of mediocre individuals is part of official culture. Yet, we don’t recognise how unhealthy, how morbid the unwholesome cult of The Windsors is, in, for instance, the ubiquity of images of the late Queen wherever we may go, maintaining the precedence of the monarchy being the nation’s favourite fetish.
Even in countries with constitutional monarchies such as Norway, Holland and Spain, you do not see this level of collective psychosis colonise a culture. Alas, you can’t tell someone they’re not in love when they are. You can’t argue with someone’s faith and the intensity of feeling it arouses.
The monarchy, in our very secular society, more or less functions as a quasi-civic religion. A remnant of the sacred, of magic, of mystique, of tradition, of taboo, that many are desperate to cling onto in such a disenchanted world. It seems like a symbol of honest public service against the cynicism of mainstream politics. The flipside of this is a thin skin towards even the mildest criticism towards the monarchy and our society’s relationship with it, as demonstrated by the disgraceful arrest and jailing of a woman for simply holding a sign that read: Abolish The Monarchy!”, for breaking decorum in these sensitive of times.
Click to expand...
Writing on the same subject at the Weekly Dish, the British-born Andrew Sullivan mounts a formidable defense of Queen Elizabeth:

You can make all sorts of solid arguments against a constitutional monarchy—but the point of monarchy is precisely that it is not the fruit of an argument. It is emphatically not an Enlightenment institution. It’s a primordial institution smuggled into a democratic system. It has nothing to do with merit and logic and everything to do with authority and mystery—two deeply human needs our modern world has trouble satisfying without danger. The Crown satisfies those needs, which keeps other more malign alternatives at bay.
No one has expressed this better than C.S. Lewis:
“Where men are forbidden to honor a king, they honor millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead; even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.
The Crown represents something from the ancient past, a logically indefensible but emotionally salient symbol of something called a nation, something that gives its members meaning and happiness. However shitty the economy, or awful the prime minister, or ugly the discourse, the monarch is able to represent the nation all the time. In a living, breathing, mortal person.”
The importance of this in a deeply polarized and ideological world, where fellow citizens have come to despise their opponents as enemies, is hard to measure. But it matters that divisive figures such as Boris Johnson or Margaret Thatcher were never required or expected to represent the entire nation. It matters that in times of profound acrimony, something unites. It matters that in a pandemic when the country was shut down, the Queen too followed the rules, even at her husband’s funeral, and was able to refer to a phrase—“we’ll meet again”—that instantly reconjured the days of the Blitz, when she and the royal family stayed in London even as Hitler’s bombs fell from the sky.
Every Brit has a memory like this. She was part of every family’s consciousness, woven into the stories of our lives, representing a continuity and stability over decades of massive change and dislocation. No American will ever experience that kind of comfort, that very human form of patriotism across the decades in one’s own life and then the centuries before.
Click to expand...
 
“Where men are forbidden to honor a king, they honor millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead; even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison."

That is them though, and it is infantilising and regressive.
 
Humberto said:
“Where men are forbidden to honor a king, they honor millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead; even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison."
Click to expand...

So what was Prince Andrew's excuse?
 
RD2003 said:

Monarch Butterflies​

At the Black Jacobin, Ralph Leonard opines on reactions to the Queen of England’s death, offering a critique of monarchy and the response of many people in Britain to monarchy––what he calls an “orgy of maudlin sentimentality and zealous adoration” that “has been nauseating and unbearable.”

He writes:


Writing on the same subject at the Weekly Dish, the British-born Andrew Sullivan mounts a formidable defense of Queen Elizabeth:
Click to expand...

Unfortunately both ignore the power of the mass media, which was born at the beginning of the 20th century.

Andrew Sullivan is the worst, because he gives the impression that the monarchy always had such an image in society.
It’s a primordial institution smuggled into a democratic system.
Click to expand...

Totally absurd. It was the crown, as in Germany, which managed to accomodate the middle class aspirations while still staying in the saddle. Ironically, it was the Kaiser who was more democratic than us, from the point of view of the worker, up until the end of WW1.

The Crown represents something from the ancient past, a logically indefensible but emotionally salient symbol of something called a nation, something that gives its members meaning and happiness.
Click to expand...

Now you can see the romanticism, which really took off in latter Victorian times.

We don't have a social history going back so far, but even the state history shows the nonsense in the above remarks. "Ancient Past"? Hmm? Certainly not the times upto the Normans - when we went off and on between many kngdoms and temporarily united until Canute and then the Normans - oh, how romantic they were! When? Under Tudors with religious persecutions depending on the period? How about the Stewarts with a couple of Civil Wars.

The guy's on drugs!

It's about myth making, like the american dream, with people getting their dreams and narratives from paintings then films, books and music.

“Where men are forbidden to honor a king, they honor millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead; even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.
Click to expand...

No, not drugs, simply lying. People, of course, are not forbidden to honour the king - and never have been as long as there was a king. And getting spiritual needs from the king - when was that?


The guy is making this up.

Gangsters - and what are Kings? - have been glamourised by the media, just as kings have been. Film stars because people see them as the roles they play, the image they project - which is all a matter of directors, scriptwriters and publicity.

The media is the church which has killed the enlightenment and provides the myths and the narratives to justify the actions of our rulers.
 
I think they’re just trying to outdo each other now aren’t they.

The most important event the world will ever see….
How much time do they have to come up with something faintly plausible within context. Does the competition end when she’s in the mausoleum or can we extend it to Chuck’s coronation? It’ll have to end before he dies because nothing, nothing ever will top this. The mourning for Charles will be a fart in deep water compared to this.

The most significant event in human history
Unparalleled impact on all of humanity
Seismic event
…?
 
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I went up to Green Park and walked around last week. Day after the coffin arrived, whenever that was. (I went up to Kensington Gardens and walked about there when Diana died too. I did wonder how many people were there to gawp at the strangeness, not there for the respects.)

And it was interesting to see how sharp and complete was the change from “here we are mourning the queen” to “here we are going about our normal day” once I stepped away from the queen-queue-zone. In my own world, this place here is talking about it more than anywhere else. I’ve barely heard mention of the entire thing from death to queue anywhere, except for comment on how odd it all is.


But.
I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I think there’s something interesting happening here and I don’t think it has much to do with Elizabeth 2 herself. I think it’s about archetypes and other stuff going on deep below the horizon.

It’s a chance for people to connect as wider community after the atomised experience of 2 years of lockdowns. A chance to express sorrow and sadness collectively for what we all experienced during the pandemic. Not just our personal griefs but the collective grief of seeing the world so fragile and our place in it so perilous. I think that experience has had deep and seismic effects on us all. The only people who were gathering in numbers during the pandemic were those who were refusing to wear masks etc. in other words people who didn‘t express or demonstrate care for the wider community. I think the death of the queen and the chance to gather in large numbers has triggered a kind of riposte to that.

In modern secular society we don’t have a lot of opportunity to work with the archetypes in a public or collective way. If we accept that archetypes exist and that they need to be expressed, then how and where do we do this work? Well the telly does a lot of it for us, but that’s very passive and it’s not the same as when we are involved. Watching the archetypes on a light box, however large the screen, however flashy and emotive the story-telling, doesn’t meet our need for active involvement. The Queen is an important archetype, and one that doesn’t get ample expression in normal society, largely because it’s squashed and distorted by the patriarchy. (Similarly The King is also distorted by the patriarchy but is not squashed down in the same way… which will, I think, make it much harder for Charles to be held up and loved as monarch, even if he were a decent chap, which he clearly isn’t). When an archetype doesn’t get proper expression in our own personal life or very close by in our community, we necessarily project it elsewhere.

Probably, most of the people feeling moved to come to London to stand about and queue for days didn’t have any daily thought for Elizabeth 2, probably didn’t pay much attention, may have had some vague feelings of niceness towards her but nothing stronger. So why does the young pharmacist say she feels “waves of grief, I have never felt this for any other death”? She’s as puzzled as I am by her reaction. So what’s going on? Why did the young Brit fly over from Canada to stand in the street? He says he wants to feel “connected”; does he not feel any connection elsewhere in his life, and if so why does he think this will fill that gap? What about the woman who brought her mum‘s ashes? Is she doing something mad and stupid or is she acting from a place of chthonic impulse to honour something deep within her, something otherwise unexpressed and even inexpressible.

Any definition of the archetype of The Queen is obviously going to vary in detail from time to time and place to place. I can’t find a good example that would cover what I mean to say here. This post can’t cover everything I would like to say.


Whether or not Elizabeth 2 actually embodied the qualities of the Queen archetype is irrelevant. And it’s got nothing at all to do with the realities of the monarchy. Her well-kept habit of not giving opinions etc. made her the perfect screen onto which The Queen archetype can be projected, even more so now that she’s dead.

Elizabeth 2 is very probably the only Queen any of us alive will ever see on the throne. That’s not unimportant, and it does have some kind of impact. I think, as the patriarchy is being questioned and challenged, as the #Metoo movement slips into the past, as the ongoing issues with the Met remind us of the death of Sarah Everard, the death of this powerful matriarch is being noticed and felt on a deep level by individuals and by society. And because we don’t have any way to talk about these feelings without either being mocked and jeered, or by recourse to increasingly hagiographic nonsense, the complex unspoken feelings of the individual, and of the group, press out to be expressed in other ways.

As it turns out, travelling to London to stand in a moving line of people so that you can bow to a box has evolved and developed to be the thing that people can do and therefore want to do. And that is enabled by not only the media, but also by the ceremonial aspect of the whole thing. Ceremony provides a context and framework, a vessel, for this kind of expression. However brief and meaningless that may appear to disinterested observers, it’s an accessible and fairly simple way for people to achieve what they feel some need for. The effort of getting to London is local and unique. Once here, they can have a shared experience, one that is separate to and private from those who don’t feel the same way. (Although wierdly, because of the live feed, every single one of those brief private personal experiences is being broadcast live to the world and will be preserved for as long as digital information exists.)

I also agree with the idea that The Queue is a kind of pilgrimage (was that said by Justin Welby?). The Pilgrim is another archetype, and one that definitely doesn’t get much chance of expression in our modern world. The loss /lack of The Pilgrim is, I think, the source of significant angst and emotional malaise. Again, this is a simple way it can find expression.

The Vigil of the Princes is a fairly recent invention, but it feels and looks like something ancient. I’d suggest that it serves another archetypal need and may have developed from that need and the loss of some older rite. Seeing the children, and then the grandchildren, of the dead queen standing in silence, heads bowed, that’s a powerful image. That made Elizabeth 2 something further or other than Queen. It highlights her standing as another archetype, the Matriarch. And in any life, any culture, any time and place, the death of the matriarch is a shattering event. And again, in our modern secular world we don’t have sufficient rites of expression for processing these things. Doubly so with the pandemic horrors of our loved ones dying in isolation, having to grieve through the screen. Those impoverished experiences didn’t just go away, they went deep inside us. Not knowing the facts and details, what we can observe here is the death of a beloved family member, an Elder, a Matriarch, dying peacefully at home surrounded by the best care available, her family well taken care of, all present at her bedside, and now gathering to honour her properly. And their own grief is being properly witnessed by others. The tragedy here isn’t the death of Elizabeth 2, it’s that so few of us get this experience of being properly honoured and properly witnessed. Of course there is anger about this injustice, but there is also grief and sorrow that we don’t have it. And that grief and sorrow needs acknowledgement recognition and expression too.


The killing of Chris Kaba is like a looking-glass version of the queen’s death and accompanying rigamarole . Black man shot in the street by a man sworn to uphold the law. (If you look at the Police Oath, it looks like something a monarch would also swear to.) People gathering and marching for Justice for Chris Kaba mistaken for some kind of queen gathering is a looking-glass type thing. People gathering outside Scotland Yard - which is less than 400 metres from where the queen is lying in state - calling for justice within hearing of those coming out of Westminster Hall after parading past the coffin. The very clear and obvious difference in demographics between the two sets of people.


As an aside from the above but I think of central importance here…
The vast majority of the queen crowds is white. When I was up there, almost every single person on security detail was Black and Brown. The volunteer marshals were a mix of white and Black and Brown. The police were exclusively white. And I bet you anything you like that the people tasked with clearing up the mess of dead flowers will be Black and Brown people on zero hour contracts. Colonisation and unequal power dynamics innit.



If I were to write some kind of essay or study of all this, these would be my starting notes.
I fully expect the mocking and jeering from a majority of other posters. There will also be a heap of critique about the details of what I’ve noted here (eg there’s no such thing as archetype etc). I also suspect that some on here will agree with some of what I say.
Anyway. That’s pretty much where I am with this now. There‘s plenty more where that came from but essentially that’s my thoughts on the matter.

And for the avoidance of doubt, I am not a monarchist.
 
Last edited:
story said:
I went up to Green Park and walked around last week. Day after the coffin arrived, whenever that was. (I went up to Kensington Gardens and walked about there when Diana died too. I did wonder how many people were there to gawp at the strangeness, not there for the respects.)

And it was interesting to see how sharp and complete was the change from “here we are mourning the queen” to “here we are going about our normal day” once I stepped away from the queen-queue-zone. In my own world, this place here is talking about it more than anywhere else. I’ve barely heard mention of the entire thing from death to queue anywhere, except for comment on how odd it all is.


But.
I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I think there’s something interesting happening here and I don’t think it has much to do with Elizabeth 2 herself. I think it’s about archetypes and other stuff going on deep below the horizon.

It’s a chance for people to connect as wider community after the atomised experience of 2 years of lockdowns. A chance to express sorrow and sadness collectively for what we all experienced during the pandemic. Not just our personal griefs but the collective grief of seeing the world so fragile and our place in it so perilous. I think that experience has had deep and seismic effects on us all. The only people who were gathering in numbers during the pandemic were those who were refusing to wear masks etc. in other words people who didn‘t express or demonstrate care for the wider community. I think the death of the queen and the chance to gather in large numbers has triggered a kind of riposte to that.

In modern secular society we don’t have a lot of opportunity to work with the archetypes in a public or collective way. If we accept that archetypes exist and that they need to be expressed, then how and where do we do this work? Well the telly does a lot of it for us, but that’s very passive and it’s not the same as when we are involved. Watching the archetypes on a light box, however large the screen, however flashy and emotive the story-telling, doesn’t meet our need for active involvement. The Queen is an important archetype, and one that doesn’t get ample expression in normal society, largely because it’s squashed and distorted by the patriarchy. (Similarly The King is also distorted by the patriarchy but is not squashed down in the same way… which will, I think, make it much harder for Charles to be held up and loved as monarch, even if he were a decent chap, which he clearly isn’t). When an archetype doesn’t get proper expression in our own personal life or very close by in our community, we necessarily project it elsewhere.

Probably, most of the people feeling moved to come to London to stand about and queue for days didn’t have any daily thought for Elizabeth 2, probably didn’t pay much attention, may have had some vague feelings of niceness towards her but nothing stronger. So why does the young pharmacist say she feels “waves of grief, I have never felt this for any other death”? She’s as puzzled as I am by her reaction. So what’s going on? Why did the young Brit fly over from Canada to stand in the street? He says he wants to feel “connected”; does he not feel any connection elsewhere in his life, and if so why does he think this will fill that gap? What about the woman who brought her mum‘s ashes? Is she doing something mad and stupid or is she acting from a place of chthonic impulse to honour something deep within her, something otherwise unexpressed and even inexpressible.

Any definition of the archetype of The Queen is obviously going to vary in detail from time to time and place to place. I can’t find a good example that would cover what I mean to say here. This post can’t cover everything I would like to say.


Whether or not Elizabeth 2 actually embodied the qualities of the Queen archetype is irrelevant. And it’s got nothing at all to do with the realities of the monarchy. Her well-kept habit of not giving opinions etc. made her the perfect screen onto which The Queen archetype can be projected, even more so now that she’s dead.

Elizabeth 2 is very probably the only Queen any of us alive will ever see on the throne. That’s not unimportant, and it does have some kind of impact. I think, as the patriarchy is being questioned and challenged, as the #Metoo movement slips into the past, as the ongoing issues with the Met remind us of the death of Sarah Everard, the death of this powerful matriarch is being noticed and felt on a deep level by individuals and by society. And because we don’t have any way to talk about these feelings without either being mocked and jeered, or by recourse to increasingly hagiographic nonsense, the complex unspoken feelings of the individual, and of the group, press out to be expressed in other ways.

As it turns out, travelling to London to stand in a moving line of people so that you can bow to a box has evolved and developed to be the thing that people can do and therefore want to do. And that is enabled by not only the media, but also by the ceremonial aspect of the whole thing. Ceremony provides a context and framework, a vessel, for this kind of expression. However brief and meaningless that may appear to disinterested observers, it’s an accessible and fairly simple way for people to achieve what they feel some need for. The effort of getting to London is local and unique. Once here, they can have a shared experience, one that is separate to and private from those who don’t feel the same way. (Although wierdly, because of the live feed, every single one of those brief private personal experiences is being broadcast live to the world and will be preserved for as long as digital information exists.)

I also agree with the idea that The Queue is a kind of pilgrimage (was that said by Justin Welby?). The Pilgrim is another archetype, and one that definitely doesn’t get much chance of expression in our modern world. The loss /lack of The Pilgrim is, I think, the source of significant angst and emotional malaise. Again, this is a simple way it can find expression.

The Vigil of the Princes is a fairly recent invention, but it feels and looks like something ancient. I’d suggest that it serves another archetypal need and may have developed from that need and the loss of some older rite. Seeing the children, and then the grandchildren, of the dead queen standing in silence, heads bowed, that’s a powerful image. That made Elizabeth 2 something further or other than Queen. It highlights her standing as another archetype, the Matriarch. And in any life, any culture, any time and place, the death of the matriarch is a shattering event. And again, in our modern secular world we don’t have sufficient rites of expression for processing these things. Doubly so with the pandemic horrors of our loved ones dying in isolation, having to grieve through the screen. Those impoverished experiences didn’t just go away, they went deep inside us. Not knowing the facts and details, what we can observe here is the death of a beloved family member, an Elder, a Matriarch, dying peacefully at home surrounded by the best care available, her family well taken care of, all present at her bedside, and now gathering to honour her properly. And their own grief is being properly witnessed by others. The tragedy here isn’t the death of Elizabeth 2, it’s that so few of us get this experience of being properly honoured and properly witnessed. Of course there is anger about this injustice, but there is also grief and sorrow that we don’t have it. And that grief and sorrow needs acknowledgement recognition and expression too.


The killing of Chris Kaba is like a looking-glass version of the queen’s death and accompanying rigamarole . Black man shot in the street by a man sworn to uphold the law. (If you look at the Police Oath, it looks like something a monarch would also swear to.) People gathering and marching for Justice for Chris Kaba mistaken for some kind of queen gathering is a looking-glass type thing. People gathering outside Scotland Yard - which is less than 400 metres from where the queen is lying in state - calling for justice within hearing of those coming out of Westminster Hall after parading past the coffin. The very clear and obvious difference in demographics between the two sets of people.


As an aside from the above but I think of central importance here…
The vast majority of the queen crowds is white. When I was up there, almost every single person on security detail was Black and Brown. The volunteer marshals were a mix of white and Black and Brown. The police were exclusively white. And I bet you anything you like that the people tasked with clearing up the mess of dead flowers will be Black and Brown people on zero hour contracts. Colonisation and unequal power dynamics innit.



If I were to write some kind of essay or study of all this, these would be my starting notes.
I fully expect the mocking and jeering from a majority of other posters. There will also be a heap of critique about the details of what I’ve noted here (eg there’s no such thing as archetype etc). I also suspect that some on here will agree with some of what I say.
Anyway. That’s pretty much where I am with this now. There‘s plenty more where that came from but essentially that’s my thoughts on the matter.

And for the avoidance of doubt, I am not a monarchist.
Click to expand...
Thanks for sharing this. I wasn’t having these thoughts myself at all, but I was having some (less well-explored) parallel thoughts about societal rituals and practices, particularly those that have been suppressed by post-industrial rationalist consumer-capitalism. Your archetype approach was an angle on the same underlying idea that was very interesting to read.
 
kabbes said:
Thanks for sharing this. I wasn’t having these thoughts myself at all, but I was having some (less well-explored) parallel thoughts about societal rituals and practices, particularly those that have been suppressed by post-industrial rationalist consumer-capitalism. Your archetype approach was an angle on the same underlying idea that was very interesting to read.
Click to expand...

Yes. The ritual stuff kinda underpins everything else I have been pondering on. It was I suppose the starting point. I guess I forgot to mention it cos it was self evident to me, so thank you for flagging it up,
 
While we’re on the topic, the death of Diana and the public response struck me as about The Maiden being cut down in her prime. Persephone stolen away just as she was on the threshold of initiation into self-hood. I think the public expression of pain and the depth of feeling and woundedness around her death was about that.
 
Orang Utan said:
My council has set up a condolences page and it’s nauseating reading. People calling themselves obedient servants and all sort of other mawkish forelock-tugging. Wtf is wrong with people? Makes me feel so detached from the rest of humanity when they behave like this
Click to expand...
This does not sound as if you are particularly validating their grief.
 
Pissed off with his old band mates, John Lydon rushes to release his new solo single, Monarchy in the UK.

"
🎶
Right now boo, hoo, hoo
I've got an anal cyst
I am a monarchist
I know what I like
But I hate Meg 'n' Harry
I'll publicly shag the Union Jack
'Cause I want to be an MBE.



(From facebook - Attila the Stockbroker introduces . . . )
 
AmateurAgitator said:
Pissed off with his old band mates, John Lydon rushes to release his new solo single, Monarchy in the UK.

"
🎶
Right now boo, hoo, hoo
I've got an anal cyst
I am a monarchist
I know what I like
But I hate Meg 'n' Harry
I'll publicly shag the Union Jack
'Cause I want to be an MBE.



(From facebook - Attila the Stockbroker introduces . . . )
Click to expand...
You've clearly never heard of jonny rubbish

 
All this queuing up shite, wouldn’t it be better to stick the corpse on an open top bus and let it do a tour.

If anyone is interested n helping the Country getting over the death me and some mates are gonna do a charity single for the English to the tune of The Heat is On called ‘ The Queen is Gone’ hit up our Patreon dead old bat to donate.
 
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