Lords of the Castle
Archetypes #5: Kings and Servants
I’m very fond of stone buildings, particularly those medieval fortress-type ones. Something primal stirs in me at the thought of men (and it was mostly men doing the heavy lifting here) building boundaries, even if they’ve long-since crumbled (often under the ill-advised weathering of centuries of men taking a leak onto them). Construction sites are still largely a place of testosterone; quite different to the tribal rondavels made of mud, traditionally by women, that children could get involved with. Stone is heavy, hard, dangerous. And the king – the duke, the earl, the emir, the local feudal lord – needed protection with the best castles power could buy.
The lord is a jumped-up warrior taking on airs and graces as he tears into a leg of mutton (mouton, Anglo-French, a word to distinguish it from sheep, the animal the conquered Anglo-Saxon paysans looked after), and catcalls a passing female from on high. Ultimately, however, he’s valuable property himself, even as he perambulates across his lands to allow the peasantry a glimpse: worth protection. Kings on a chessboard, of course, move slowly, steadily, vital for the strategic tasks of the game, which ends not when any warrior pawns or knights or castles or even bishops are given up but when the king himself is trapped. We know this: turning the abstract concept of the state into a real head of state is one step away from deification... Even as that ferocious queen is the one actually sweeping up whatever comes in her path. We see presidents in camo gear and don’t believe a word of it: they’re not seriously putting themselves in any danger these days. Though some followers still like the field-martial image these leaders are tapping into, for sure.
The king is thus in many ways a still point. Crazy warrior tyrants like that typically violent Roman, Gaius Octavius, effortlessly mutate with age into imperial Augustan providers of the stability that the public ultimately craves. Revolutions that chop off these fictional ‘heads of state’ are followed by worse dictators, often, wearing jackboots. But ultimately all this kingly politicking is about robber barons getting airs and graces. Kings of those two robber baron nations, England and France, were once held up as holy curers of scrofula (a kind of mild form of TB); givers of miraculous touch. Somewhere, surely, there must be something spiritual about the King, especially with Christians claiming their version of God as a King of Kings. He’s a mythical figure, this Higher Power to whom we kow-tow, crawling eyes down, in recognition surely that we can never truly know Him. This emperor, perhaps, and yet also this ruler of a secular domain, here and now.
Kingship clearly has a lot to do with individual legacy, and operates with an awareness of the future – which perhaps is why our most potent images of this archetype of one-man kingship come from the historical past, or the fantastical Tolkien-Game of Thrones offshoots of that past, remembered by those of us from their future. Once there were Pharaohs and Alexanders, perhaps, and then the tribes rose against those empires and inevitably became themselves led by noble (warrior) chiefs and kings. Though likely the empires were just the most extreme aberrations from the norm. The stories and legends of these chiefs and kings in turn drive us: and we ultimately recognise that the most holy Arthurian-type aspects of individual kingship must be aiming at creating round tables full of equal kings. Lifting each other up by our bootstraps. I wrote many years ago about how one well-known organisation tries to do that; in events containing a fair number of paraffin-quaffing latter-day African Vikings, but a lot of beauty too. Each One Teach One, as the principle goes.
For somehow there is something double-helix about the relationship between kingship and wisdom, between temporal power – tied to time and place, and often birth, as kings are – and sacred power, gained with experience and insight and grace and only then wisdom. At the dawn of patriarchy, pharaohs, I’ve been told, could only rule once they’d spent a night learning the deeper mysteries with the High Priestess. Perhaps this is because a king is the closest to a watchful mother that a man, keeping the hearth alive, constantly aware in multiple directions, can get to be. Millennia later, as we’ve seen, Christ is the image of a priest-king, alongside John the Baptist, the shamanic voice of truth (his birth celebrated at the exact opposite point of the year to Christ), bringing humility and wisdom to his kingship stripped bare. It might seem that there’s something unlikely about our questing for this in ourselves; but quest we must, as the Grail King would tell us. Enquire, don’t just sit on the throne. Sit on the throne and feel it all. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi used to tell his meditative devotees that the best way to be is not to keep going to the bank to fill up on money/juice/power/love/peace. It’s to sit in the bank itself and watch it all arising for us; right there at the source. And there we are again: money at the heart of it – the material reflection, ultimately just a metaphor for what power truly is and what we’re supposed to be up to here.
When that late medieval Queen Margaret of Denmark became sole ruler of three kingdoms she might have been cheered on by proto-feminists but they were still kingdoms, not queen-doms. Women have been pushing into this male mould for quite some time now (I was seven when Britain got not just the queen who’d just celebrated her jubilee but, for the first time, a female prime minister). The queen on the chessboard, though obviously powerful, is a deputy. She’s the visible power of the state and its wrath, but she’s not the ultimate on which the whole body politic rises and falls. And perhaps you’ve also noticed that the king can have two queens operating for him at once, if a pawn plays its moves right. From that perspective, obviously a medieval woman would be right to aim at kingship, to compete with the men in the ultimate position, not just deputy/consort. Still, real ancient matriarchs might well have seen Margaret as accepting something less, far more constrained by politics, far less open to the sacred powers of the natural feminine, than they had had access to. Kings need to actively be lifted above the grubbiness of power in this world.
Of course, there’s still never been a female king of the good ol’ USA. And there I go again, retreating into the Americanised zeitgeist, with an election that has nothing to do with me just having passed. Where does political power in this moment really lie? One of the places it really lies, of course, is in the agreements we’ve collectively made about it. The awareness that presidents wielding real power need to be limited in their terms in office. Ten years or so in office is still a hell of a long time to mess things up with no right of recall, and democratic checks and balances are everywhere under threat, probably because the kind of states we have in the modern world are just so impossibly large compared to anything from ancient times. The mediocre people in political power can’t possibly be called to account like an old African chief was, or like women famously did to the male rulers of the Iroquois. The king is no longer known personally, and hides behind a stone wall of media dissimulation. (“The queen may or may not be embroidering a handkerchief, standing on one leg”, as her Envoy announces in Genet’s brilliant Le Balcon.)
Even in much more manageable communities than nation states, selfish wielders of authority rise up, and do their best to hold onto power, to dominate with ideas. Ratepayers associations and school boards. A true king, by contrast, is trying to shine the light onto others so that they might take his place. We need to recognise and find this aspect of ourselves, just as we become aware in our communities of where his shadow might show up. Communities that claim ‘flat structures’, round tables, need to be particularly wary of this, because the power shadow will be present, often in a way that is more dangerous for being unacknowledged. We all know that actually power and authority is held by something rather more than legal entitlement: it has its own energy. Sometimes that is the deep, dangerous, fiery potency that we call charisma. But at other times it’s basic high-status entitlement: both would share lots of space on the Venn diagram. Our own South African rulers of the last thirty years have sullied themselves by taking jam from the treasure chest, quite as much as any European examples from the past. Temporal power and our numerical quantification of it – money – warp and weave through the spheres of human consciousness and riff our actions into algal blooms.
Somehow the true king needs to gain a bigger picture. Stillness, again, helps. Planting the feet on the earth. Listening to the gut. Breathing in the elements. Gaining a sixth sense for what lies on the borders. And starting, carefully, to break down those walls. There’s a real masculine drive to be the king of the castle against the dirty rascal, which I remember singing and playing even as a playgroup toddler, that is exciting and dynamic; Warrior-like. The real King is further down the axis. Confident, humble, selfless. We know, really, what the King should be. The one who stands up for his people; who serves them with his gifts, acknowledges his faults and his shadows, but is not swayed by them. The one who knows already that borders are birthed to be crossed, even as they appear impenetrable. Who makes sure to see far and try to understand what’s beyond. The one who has mastered his craft with long diligent hours on either side of the border. Perhaps a young king is possible, that humble essence shining through in one who has clearly been here before; but usually kings are older, battle-scarred, their key essence being that life has taught them stuff. And therefore, a real king is wise, of course, and not just in the odd moments when the double helix crosses. History and current affairs are littered with bad men who think they’re kings, while stables quietly witness the birth of the unsung ones.
There is, obviously, a deep relationship between kingship and fame, because that one-man-at-the-top-of-the-pyramid-Pharaoh thing leads to a deep focus of everyone else onto those who have this status somehow. Above all, what a king needs to be is accountable for his actions, and able to demonstrate that his actions are in service of the greater good as he sees it. What fame brings is usually a flattened public image; gossip, conspiracy, half-truths manipulated by the communications team. It might just be for fifteen minutes, or seconds in the TikTok age. When we talk of individual legacy, history shows us kings on a windmill-tilting drive to keep the tide back of human forgetting, often more than actual projects of service that might last. Norman castles had ‘oubliettes’ at the bottom for those who fell out of favour or lost their right to lord it: dungeons to rot in, out of sight and mind, perhaps forever. Yet how future generations remember you is never something that can be controlled, as the king’s fool knows; and in today’s world of ‘searching for positive male role models’, stories can be twisted to fit any narrative necessary. Just like they have been forever: Shakespeare’s pro-Tudor and Stuart propaganda is only the most famous example in English history. Kings always love to try and control present-day narratives but it seems we only get further from the truth of who they really are; they’re too often either impossible gods or impossible demons. We may never know the truth about who were the men (and kingly women) acting with integrity and honour in the political or cultural sphere. Without Judas there’s no story. Projections of kingly goodness might be valuable stories for our youth, or even our collective consciousness, yet too often the media shapes easy, lazy narratives about the individual kings at play, when I heartily believe they know no more than the rest of us. Those we put on pedestals often have, as I mentioned, charm, charisma, oozing viscerally across all but the most resistent. Kings can be stars, perhaps with plenty of notches on their bedposts; the confidence to get their own way, knowing how alluring they can be. Oh, I know, there are plenty of pathetic examples of kings for whom the crown on the head just showed up the uncertainty below; but there are others who looked born for its burden and its sparkle.
King Shaka International Airport and the water play park of Shakaworld shine their glitz across the Zulu lands but have nothing to do with the damaged psychopathic leader that forged that nation. (One psychopath among many in the history of ‘great leaders’ of course. Violent and drunk on power; their confidence born of a will to be listened to, and do what needed to be done to scare those around them, not seduce them. Not what you’d call good listeners. Yawn.) I have often felt that King Moshoeshoe would be a far more interesting and relevant leader to be remembered and turned into an iconic role model. But then we come down to tribal insecurities, because everyone wants their great leader to be remembered in a good light, be it Napoleon or Richard the Lionheart or George Washington or Shaka Zulu. Ironically Moshoeshoe’s Basotho brilliance in diplomacy and peacemaking; the relative respect his state showed to outsiders, to women, to elders; as inspired by his teacher, the philosopher and thinker Chief Mohlomi; is now remembered primarily in what is - for most people looking at the globe - an anachronism. The state of Lesotho, its independence preserved in borders that also now cut it off from the flow of the bigger ‘democratic South Africa’ around it.
Of course, that’s not to say that our own borders are the right ones. Or that Moshoeshoe’s legacy hasn’t already served quite enough of its purpose, to allow the ancestor king to rest in peace. When I crossed that border a quarter century ago it was to a land still holding some honourable heritage, in spite, I felt, of the mess of being this strategic nation, a football for international developers, surrounded for so long by apartheid and its predecessor regimes. My friends were building highways, engineers for South African companies. Lesotho sits in the heart of South Africa, and holds some magical, spiritual, sacredness, a little out of plain sight. The borders are up in the beautiful ancient mountains, on dirt tracks off the main Saffrican drag. When I stayed in Ladybrand in the Free State a second time, last year, the Lesotho government was insisting that contractors to their nation stayed overnight within the country rather than travelling over the border into Maseru, the capital, on a daily basis, as had been the way forever. Anything to stand up to multinational power-creep; surely a major task of community leaders trying to regain the initiative from the globalising Machine. Holding the lines on the maps these days, perhaps, since that’s where imperial history has decreed the state ends and begins. In other cultures, kings were kings of peoples, not of territories; they had a relationship with the land, with the waters that ran through it, but did not own it with a legal line arbitrarily crossing kloofs and peaks. Tribal remnants are seen too in the perambulations of medieval kings and queens, royal courts roaming to meet the people rather than staying in some stultified official capital.
Really, the King has to imbibe the Lover enough to let go; then the true legacy, paradoxically, might arise. The temptation of knowing one’s power, one’s sacred energy while holding leadership, is where we also have to selflessly face down our demons. To do what needs to be done, in service to now, and in service to those who will come after. It’s about thinking of the seven generations ahead and what can be done now for them, who will probably never remember who we were. And it’s about stepping out of the way. When the younger generation rises up to fight the old men there’s something rather primal about it; witness the interest of young men in Mike Tyson versus Jake Paul. Fresh moves. When the king holds on too long there’s something corrosive about it: corruption is of course just a step away. So we try, as good men, to do what needs to be done when we hold the leading role, just long enough, while also training up for the next generation who will come and change the legacy, and likely forget what we did for a while.
Or perhaps they’ll turn it into another fairy tale. Indian kings in the old stories take on dragons and serpent gods as much as human battles: History, held onto so tightly in the Western way, is acknowledged in the Indian tradition as impossible to grasp as simple linear truth, so you might as well tell good mythological truths and keep your audience’s interest. Better the impossibly true National Enquirer than dubious fact-checkers everywhere, perhaps. Western tradition wants our kings to be active, to do stuff. To change things. Other cultures have of course seen this as our basic dis-ease.
Sovereignty has become a big buzzword in recent years. We are all free and libertarian kings, monarchs of our own domain, different fractal points of consciousness, different aspects of god. Stuck in the middle with me. There’s a particular rabbit hole called Common Law which purports to encourage us to stand up, rebelling righteously against the Machine that sees every aspect of us all as materialist property. Nothing new there: the whole point of advanced feudalism was that everything could be written down in a Domesday Book, everything ultimately ‘borrowed’ from the King, old customs notwithstanding, as (English example again) Guillaume the Bastard became William the Norman Conqueror. Yet peasants were often freer in practice, in their day-to-day customs, beliefs, choices, than the constrained nobility who had to show a particular face to the world. The logical conclusion of today’s Common Law fightback is a kind of legal anarchism, the precise opposite of monarchism, “taking back sovereignty”. Inspired by Vikings: those petty tyrants in my genes and perhaps yours, who imbibed the power of the ancestral regal Bear and thus sometimes went as Ber-serk as Bjorn, Norsemen until the Victorians came along and called them the V word (clearly a sound that resonated in their colonial shadow depths); and amidst all this, developing the first real Parliament along the way.
Inspiring in some ways, and of course it’s an aspect of where we’ve got to be heading: if we’re ever to ‘take back control’ from the uber-state, it has to look a little like the Vikings’ messy anarchism with many gods all eternally about to die. Yet what we know of their example has plenty of red flags about it. In the Icelandic home of one-man-one-vote-no-king, a we-know-best-already mentality led to the overuse of the soil, and a forced conversion to Christianity which was Norway’s price for selling them wood for ships now that they had no trees; Jared Diamond’s Collapse also has a great analysis of the way Viking Greenland and Vinland fell apart in their violent individualism and ecological ignorance. Literate, peace-loving monks in easy-prey coastal outposts were perhaps not the right people to give us the best and least partisan picture of pagan warriors, yet some of those first-hand reports – murders carried out shamelessly during cathedral services, conquests, rape and butchery, crystallising ultimately in the new kings themselves, should give any would-be anarchist pause for thought. Guillaume’s machismo Normans were descendants of Vikings themselves, and in a few generations that Viking blood would be slaughtering for Christ in the Holy Land. Anarchy might meet some other central drive in us, the Rebel archetype in full effect, but without wisdom it perhaps inevitably becomes grotesque, drives from the dark Son to the dark Father, towards absolutism and potentially deadly irreverence. How do we find freedom for ourselves within our communities, but still keep the orcs in our hearts out?
Principles for communal living. Radical Love. Listening. It’s not easy, this messy task of humanity, when we all have this potent, potentially kind, sometimes petulant king inside. I like to take a break from it all, stand and sing and pretend to hold back the waves. I also like to trust them enough to dive in; part of another kind of kingdom where I can’t possibly be in charge.