This does not apply to all rights. But it does apply to the queen. The portrait technique naturally done by Leonardo Da Vinci has been used with her to great effect. But almost 60 years of encountering this face by chance on coins, pound notes, in newspapers, on commemorative posters, in schoolwork or on television, is slowly turning a face into a tradition. That was why it had a magical effect on people. It had that effect on me. Whenever I met her I was always impressed by her special aura. I remember being invited to Buckingham Palace as part of a celebration of arts and culture. A small party of us, consisting of William Boyd, Sheridan Morley and myself, joined her. She asked us questions about our art, and I ventured a possible joke and was rewarded with her unforgettable burst of laughter. And her laugh made us all laugh. Not enough is said about her, but she had a great sense of humor. It was enlightening to watch this result in lines of important men and women waiting to be introduced to her. The effect celebrities have on people is not like that. Celebrities bring out in people some sense of experiencing the improbable existence of a material event, something seen in a medium that now exists in the flesh. But to watch a line of some of the most powerful people in the world waiting to be introduced to the Queen was to watch something unreal, the visible form of the moon’s magnetic power on the tides. People struggled to compose themselves before they were announced. Animation or sometimes panic would creep into their features. This could be seen with both republicans and royalists. The reason for this was more than the monarchy itself. It was one of Queen Elizabeth’s own secret achievements. The source of this achievement is that it is a fixed part of the nation’s subconscious. And the subconscious of a nation is a particularly difficult place to enter, especially one as steeped in history as Britain. It is this strange fact that accounts for the nervousness he was afraid of when he left the transition. This is what explains the anxiety, the terror of a void. It’s not just this nation that feels it. This is also felt by the nations associated with Britain through history, colonial history transformed into Commonwealth history. The nations of the Commonwealth held her in the highest regard. This was partly due to the respect she showed to their leaders and the appreciation she had for their traditions, as well as her many visits to these countries. On visits during the early years of her reign, thousands of people eagerly followed the tracks of her horseman in rapturous greeting. Many of these nations will feel it slipping away. But the fear of instability in her death is illusory. Some Commonwealth nations may consider this time to no longer have the British monarch as their head of state, and adjustments may need to be made to the monarch’s role as head of the Commonwealth, but the core of this relationship should remain. The monarchy will continue in Britain, meandering, in its strange, seemingly unwieldy, mixed-up existence. Monarchs have died before, but there is something special that Queen Elizabeth has done that makes it harder for the nation. She blurred the lines between her reign and the kingdom. She was a Queen that was hard for republicans to reject, hard to protest successfully for those who are against the monarchy. It was a great advertisement for the monarchy because it did better in recent times what great monarchies do for centuries to their people, they became part of their soul. She did it so well that in a way to think badly of her was to think badly of herself. It is the way kings and queens through the ages have ruled and made their people feel the legitimacy and inevitability of their rule. Queen Elizabeth ruled at a time when the world’s spiritual energy was moving from a male-centric universe to one that desperately needed feminine energies. After two world wars, after the toxicity of Nazism, which was male energy at its wildest and most insane, what the world really needed, at the subconscious level, was a female force, a steady, balanced, presence. This meditation is not about the right or wrong of monarchy here. It is an observation about why Queen Elizabeth was particularly successful. Deeply what the world needed after the vicissitudes of wars and the violence of empire and the unbridled capitalism that harms and diminishes humanity was the touch of the high mother. It is the same reason that in times past, in ancient civilizations, certain goddesses came into prominence to compensate for particularly bloodthirsty times. This is why in many ways the Queen Elizabeth phenomenon differs from Elizabeth herself. But to her credit she knew how to let Elizabeth’s face be the vehicle for the subconscious phenomenon that was Queen Elizabeth. How many people know how to let myth work within them, elevating their position and their presence, exerting a power and an influence on the world far out of all proportion to their person? Many years ago, Prince Charles, in an interview, lamented the difficulty of the common man understanding the concept of the divine right of kings. This fight was fitting. It is difficult, even impossible, to get people to understand this concept. It is difficult these days to get people to understand the divine right of anything—unless it is the divine right of liberty, the divine right of life itself. Everyone wants to be independent, stand on their own two feet, look up to no one, feel inferior to anyone by birth, color or sex. Everywhere people are fighting for freedom. This does not mean that deep down people do not need a mother or a father and do not want to return to these archetypes. But we have entered a new era. The gods have fallen. Nietzsche claimed that God was dead. The church is struggling. People lose their faith and beliefs every day. This might make us porous. And in this inner porosity, this gap between two periods, a transition from an old world to a new world, the figure of Queen Elizabeth was exactly what was needed. The nation drew her into its soul for refuge and stability in a world where empires were crumbling and great reliable structures were being toppled one after another. Hence the power of this iconography, that calmness and Leonardo’s enigma, that stability in a world where the leaders of nations turn out to be comic figures and tinkers, psychopaths and monumental narcissists. Much has been said about the monarchy, but not enough has been said about its place in the soul of the nation. Who will psychoanalyze this nation in terms of its need for kings and queens? Therein lies the true conundrum of Britain. When men and women of power adjusted their faces as they waited to be presented to the little old lady who was their queen, who fixed each with a piercing and sympathetic gaze, we got a glimpse of the secret of this ancestral spell. , the source of one of the greatest magics in history.
