As King Charles III was crowned in Westminister Abbey Saturday, viewers worldwide got a chill, or a chuckle, out of an unexpected sight. Right after the king’s guards processed into the abbey, a lone figure wearing a black hooded robe and holding a long stick that could have been a scythe walked by the abbey’s open door. Had the Grim Reaper made an appearance at Charles’ coronation? Was it an omen? A prankster? A warning? Part of the ceremony? An AI deepfake? No one knows for sure, and speculation was rife. Some even said it was the ghost of Charles’ celebrated late wife Diana. But whoever or whatever he was (and gosh, Grim, big apologies if I’m misgendering you), he was a welcome sight for reasons that have been insufficiently appreciated.
Moment 'Grim Reaper' appears at Westminster Abbey during the coronation pic.twitter.com/udmkkRfIHp
— The Sun (@TheSun) May 6, 2023
We live in a remarkably superficial age, in which a man can put on a dress and a wig and not only proclaim that he is a woman, but demand that everyone else pretend that he is a woman as well. The self-appointed but nonetheless extremely powerful (because they control the primary means of communication) guardians of acceptable opinion join in that demand and can destroy an individual’s professional and even personal life for dissenting. The fact that no amount of surgery and hormones can make a man into a woman or a woman into a man is immaterial; the superficial appearance, however unconvincing, is all.
And that’s just one aspect of the superficiality of our age. Most people complacently assume that life has always been pretty much the way it is now, and always will be, or that we have attained a greater enlightenment than that of our ancestors, and have nothing to learn from them. The past, if it is thought of at all, is a shameful period of racism and oppression from which we are now struggling to free ourselves.
In this shallow and unthinking cultural atmosphere, the coronation looked (and many said explicitly that it was) comical, irrelevant, and wasteful of British taxpayer money. The Grim Reaper walking by was just one more absurd Monty-Pythonish element of a ceremony that was packed with them. It was on par with the 800-year-old practice of the city of Gloucester of giving the newly crowned monarch a lamprey pie. Lampreys are disgusting blood-sucking eels; as these delicacies have become somewhat scarce, Charles’ lamprey pie substituted (rather insensitively for Charles’ Muslim subjects, whom he has courted so assiduously) pork.
The whole thing, however — the elaborate ceremony with its explicit and unapologetic Christian character and splendid regalia, the ancient traditions (including the lamprey pie), and even the strange appearance of the Grim Reaper — was a salutary reminder that things have not always been the way they are now, and will change again. This is just what we need to remember now, because it is being intentionally obscured by those who would have us believe that their sensibilities represent an objective human standard to which all must conform.
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And I do mean all. The Left is working hard to impose its vision of the world not just upon all of us who are alive at the moment, but upon the past as well. Books are being rewritten to bring them into line with woke sensibilities. Statues of former heroes are being torn down because of the unacceptable failure of figures from centuries past to reflect the attitudes and assumptions of modern-day Leftists.
Amid all this, the sight of the Grim Reaper walking by at the coronation served as a memento mori, a reminder that those who are living will one day die as well, and that neither their presence on earth nor their most cherished assumptions are permanent. Meanwhile, the coronation itself was filled with reminders that, contrary to the Left’s best efforts, there are other ways to look at the world, other ways to think, other ways to live. At a time when that simple fact, which bursts so very much of the Left’s bubble, is being systematically obscured, it was an extremely salutary reminder.
Americans are, in a certain sense by definition, not monarchists, and King Charles is himself insufferably woke. Britain faces deep crises that could conceivably even result in this being the last coronation, or the last one in a time of peace for a good while. For the moment, however, the Grim Reaper and the lamprey pies and the Archbishop of Canterbury and all the rest of it brought us out of the hypnosis of the present moment, and that was all to the good.
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