One of the biggest news stories in the United Kingdom this year has been that of the extraordinary case of Jason Arday. He was a man who, like most graduates, obtained degrees which he didn’t deserve. But there was clearly something astute about him. In an age governed by shallow emotion, he successfully confected a personal biography that—though displaying very little resemblance to reality—was finely calculated to pull at heart strings. He was disadvantaged, disabled, disenfranchised, black, and yet he ran countless marathons, saved South American villages from starvation, and became a full professor … though only the last of those achievements seems to have actually occurred.
Arday was enabled by those who ought to have known better, but association with a black rags-to-riches story just made them feel and look so good. It was irresistible. And whilst his talent remained only in his remarkable capacity for trickery, as noted he utilised that talent so effectively as to obtain a chair at one of the most elite universities in the world, Cambridge. But like the central adventurer in an old-fashioned cautionary tale, the lies caught up with him and instead of facing the music, he apparently killed himself.
What I have found most interesting about this narrative, however, is what happened next. An odd amnesia about his trickery was fostered by the media that hitherto hounded him, encouraged as the appropriate response to all of Arday’s deception and undermining of academia’s residual dignity. And his death has since been roundly discussed by that regime-media as proof that Britain is indeed a systemically racist land. Here, we are told, a black man can’t even get away with lying and plagiarising without having to die seemingly at his own hand, ergo we live under white supremacy. (The careful reader will detect a few logical leaps in the prior sentence, but if so, that should likely be interpreted as further indication of the racist culture of the West.)
A Jason Arday memorial event was held at Trafalgar Square days after his death, during which something very striking was declared by the ethnically Caribbean Labour MP Dianne Abbott, who has a track record of making anti-white remarks. She said, in reference to the ongoing media reporting about Arday’s history of deception: ‘This was a vicious campaign; but it wasn’t just a campaign against a professor, it was a campaign against all of us! All of us! All of us!’
When I heard these remarks of the Right Honourable Lady of the Lower Chamber, I thought to myself, who is she including in the word ‘us’? We people of the West have grown accustomed to terms being concocted to distinguish us from the rest of the world. “BAME” (Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic) has no meaning whatever unless you’re simply trying to come up with a term for “non-white” without being so blunt about it. In fact, “Ethnic” itself is commonly used in this way, as is “Indigenous”, for you can be an indigenous Kenyan or Indian or Japanese, but it’s high risk to speak of indigenous English or French or German. (If you ask why this is the case, you’re clearly a racist, so I’m told.)
Meanwhile, indigenous Europeans are told by the likes of Kehinde Andrews and Anthony Reddie, respectively ‘academics’ of Black Studies and Black Theology, that Europeans are possessed by ‘white pathology’ and ‘white psychosis’. One would think that talentless individuals obsessing over white people and trying to build entire careers on that obsession is the very epitome of ‘white psychosis’. In reality, these men are beneficiaries of the culture they simultaneously hate; they are the definition of biting the hand that feeds.
Finally, discomfort is rising in the UK, a once pleasant and mild land. Its inhabitants are growing impatient with the country being turned into a third-world ghetto, largely by the importations of cultures that have never achieved anything we would historically identify with the word ‘culture’. British towns and even entire cities are unrecognisable, dangerous, and dirty. Just a couple of weeks ago, the streets of Cornwall’s quiet capital of Truro, with its gentle population of just 22,000, was the scene of a machete fight thanks to decades of ‘diversity is our strength’.
The threat to our land rises each day due to the importation or invasion of barbarians, and meanwhile the native British are themselves imploding. At present, we are wrecking our landscapes by building vast estates of aesthetically displeasing and badly constructed housing across our once celebrated countryside. Given that the native population is undergoing a demographic collapse, one may reasonably wonder who these houses are for … our new arrivals, perhaps? And our custodians of those landscapes, especially the farming and hunting communities, are actively being quashed by new policy from Westminster.
We ourselves have buckled. The traditional classes of British society are, willingly or no, being destroyed: the landed classes have been kicked out of the Upper House and also are largely unlanded now; the middle classes are taking their businesses elsewhere due to our poor economic policies and appalling taxation impositions, and the working classes—who are now more or less the unworking classes—have had their work snatched by the new slaves of the ‘Boris wave’, and thus have resigned themselves to living off a diet of fast food and dope at the remaining tax-payers’ expense, and watching Netflix unto death.
Perhaps what has caught me by surprise is the speed with which Afro-American culture has become the universal culture of the modern world. We have taken what is almost certainly the most degenerate culture on earth, and replaced everything with it. Not long ago, I visited a town in the Home Counties, and I walked my dog at a local park. There, I passed a group of young men standing around a hatchback, from which clouds of marijuana smoke streamed, polluting the country air with that revolting stench. They were listening to rap music, whose content I could determine was mainly about murdering people with knives and guns, dealing drugs, and the overseeing of an extensive prostitution racket known as ‘pimping’. These young men, with their oversized sports shoes, tracksuit bottoms, hooded jumpers, and baseball caps were Bedfordshire lads whose ancestors two or three generations ago were probably farmhands on the surrounding arable fields. For all intents and purposes, however, they had been turned by modernity into the most unsavoury members of the Afro-American community and transplanted to a Bedfordshire market town.
We people of the West no longer know that we are the great inheritors of Hellenic wisdom, Roman law and politics, the tradition of nations, and the assumption of that great civilisational and sapiential achievement by the grace of True Religion. We no longer grasp that the awe-inspiring material culture of that civilisation, of which we remain the heirs, is our very birthright. Instead, we have opted to make our own the most debased cultural expressions on earth. Whether you’re in London, Paris, Berlin, or Rome, if you’re fortunate enough to find an indigenous European, he will very likely be, practically speaking, an Afro-American in his cultural attachments.
Down the centuries, an historical process unfolded during which the hearts of nations were changed, causing their members to privilege law, learning, beauty, and above all, agape. This transformation characterised the nobility and glory of the European. God became man that men might become gods was the fundamental teaching of our religion, and thus its content became the ideal of the European. The European hence became a god upon the earth. And the byproduct of his transfiguration was his civilisation, which it seems everyone else on earth wishes both to come and enjoy and simultaneously eradicate.
How is it, though, that such a collapse of our civilisation—which is observably preventable, or at least mitigable—is apparently something we are utterly powerless to do anything about? Is it simply that our politicians are evil? Is it they, for example, who are insisting that the financially foundering Church of England send millions of pounds in reparations for the 19th-century transatlantic slavery that Africans themselves would have keenly perpetuated if the British hadn’t banned it? Is it the politicians who are also forcing the established Church to convert its cathedrals into nightclubs while the faithful abandon its creed? No, it is the Church itself that seeks out its own destruction, just as Britain’s population at large is doing the same, as Britain’s town centres are turned into the dens of thugs and gangsters. Are the British people forced to live on a diet of fried chicken and dope? No. They have willingly opted to adopt such a lifestyle.
A few days ago, I was in Oxford. Come evening, I walked to the station as it approached ten o’clock. From a side alley a man of swarthy complexion appeared and stuck his hand out, exclaiming, ‘Shake hand’. I nodded to him and said good evening but did not shake hands with him. I had, as it happens, been informed of this trick: a thief sees that you have a laptop bag on your shoulder, he asks to shake hands, you instinctively do so, and then he pulls you towards himself, snatches the bag by the shoulder strap, and is gone before you’ve understood what’s happened. So, I walked on. The man then got in front of me on the pavement and said, ‘Shake hand’, preventing me from continuing on my way. I asked, ‘Is your English good?’, to which he replied in heavily accented tones, ‘Yes, English good’. I then raised my fists and told him that if he did not get out of my way, I would punch him until he was unconscious. He appeared to be hiding one of his hands, which likely held a blade, but he nonetheless thought the better of it and walked away. The experience was unsettling. Welcome to the new Oxford; welcome to the new Britain; welcome to the new West.
This is what we are all living with now, but the question is: why can we not do anything about it? Why is this corruption of our civilisation so unstoppable? As I come to terms with the plundering and wrecking of all I love, oddly I keep thinking of an event that took place in 1593, and I wonder if so much of this social, even cosmic, unravelling can be traced back to that moment…
There is at present an entire revisionist historiography being developed which explains Henry VIII’s break from Rome not by reference to his desire for a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, but to his failure to secure for himself the Imperial throne of the Holy Roman Empire at the election in 1519. Instead, Charles Habsburg was elected, becoming Emperor Charles V, and Henry was intensely bitter about it. He thought he should be Emperor of Christendom, especially as he had demonstrated that he was a most loyal son of the Church amid the rise of Protestantism, even receiving from the pope the title ‘Defender of the Faith’. When he broke with Rome fifteen years later, he was already talking about his kingdom not as a region of a wider civilisation called Christendom, but as its own island empire over which he was both supreme temporal and spiritual lord.
It took the courtier, spy, and wizard John Dee to explain to Henry’s daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, that having broken with that great empire of Christendom, the Kingdom of England (which also included Wales and Ireland) had before it two possible futures: it could fizzle out into obscurity, or it could expand across the seas and make for itself its own empire, a counter-empire if you will. This counter-empire would expand across the whole world. It would be based not on the baptism of nations in fulfilment of the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19), but rather on the demands of Mammon. Dee came up with a name which would be lasting: he coined the term ‘the British Empire’.
Dee and the warlock, scryer, and speaker of the secret Enochian language Edward Kelly travelled through Europe. Together they stayed for considerable lengths of time at the Imperial court and other royal courts, uncovering the spiritual and temporal sources of the empire with which Dee’s future creation would compete.
Kelly claimed—and I have no reason to disbelieve him—to have been led by what he described as a ‘spiritual creature’ to a container of red powder hidden in the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey. From this powder, he made a tincture which gave him power to alchemically transmutate base metal into gold without any need of the Philosopher’s Stone. Kelly demonstrated the potency of this tincture on numerous occasions, and by it he deeply impressed Dee.
Throughout the Middle Ages, spiritual and practical alchemy had been revered, but what Dee saw in Kelly’s demonstrations was a sign of what the world could be: the base metal of the barbarian nations could be turned into English gold. Dee always signed his letters to the queen with ‘007’. The two 0s symbolised spectacles, indicating that he saw all things; the elongated 7 was the alchemical sign for mercury, the god of communication, travel, trickery, and wealth. In one since lost letter, Dee asked Queen Elizabeth if she wanted him to conjure the British Empire ex nihilo. She answered in the affirmative.
What followed is known among occult historians as the Mudchute Ritual. In May of 1593, Dee travelled to the Isle of Dogs, which at the time was more or less marshland beyond London. A number of important persons were present, including the playwright Christopher Marlowe, who some say was sacrificed that evening by Dee’s hand, with the story of his death in a pub brawl being fabricated thereafter to cover up his sacrificial murder.
Mudchute Park sits on the crossing of two important ley lines, which is why it is believed to have been a significant location for druidic rituals two millennia ago. Ley line crossings are places where the veil between the corporeal world of our experience and the aeviternal realm of angelic operation and energy is especially thin. And of course, not all angels are benign. The specific lines in question link the financial centre at Canary Wharf with both Sir Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s dome and the naval centre at Greenwich. For obvious reasons, spiritually binding the Bank of England, the Church of England, and the Royal Navy was essential for creating the British Empire. There is still a stone circle, called the ‘Omphalos’, at Mudchute Park which is not of ancient origin, and may have been constructed at the request of Dee for the ritual in question.
All through that springtime night Dee and his collaborators performed their dark ritual, so the story goes. It is said that they called into the heart of London a host of demons that would, at a price, go out to every corner of the world in fiendish imitation of the Apostles, and construct the British Empire.
Within a few years, the state-funded piracy of Drake and others was dismantling the international Catholic empire of Philip II. By the 1610s Elizabeth had colonies across north America and the Caribbean. By the mid-17th century, Britain was indirectly governing India. After a century, it had Oceania. Finally, it emerged supreme in the 19th-century scramble for Africa. It pulled a fragmenting and apostatising Europe into a mad financially-based frenzy to build empires across the world, the ultimate consequence of which was the mass slaying of the baptised by the baptised in World War I, which was ultimately the obliteration of the Christendom ideal.
The Anglosphere by that time had been fully established, based upon the demands of Mammon, and it was now that its ideology had to battle with those of other demons, conjured by Russian and German occultism respectively. The conflict of rival egregores ensued in the next world war, but the slave settlement of infinite production, consumption, utility, and mass subordination of everything to the basest impulses of appetite rose as an unbeatable juggernaut. The name of that invincible political monster was The Global Rules-Based Liberal Order. As we Europeans crawled out of the rubble of a worldwide political attempted suicide, we learned that John Dee’s international settlement was the only way we could all enjoy peace and freedom.
Africa, for millennia, was thwarted by its own witchcraft, cannibalism, and mass slavery. The Middle East had long ago replaced the deep wisdom of Mesopotamia and Egypt with the war-mongering and sexual licence of Islam. And both lands were now sufficiently destabilised by the money-lust of the Anglosphere to burst their parameters and they flooded Europe.
In anticipation of the new Europe, Europeans themselves started to mutate. Thus, they have become violent, appetitive, religiously chaotic slaves. They have given up their august birthright for a measly bowl of pottage. The proof is the new European: a sickly, blue-haired, pierced, tattooed gorgon, fat yet undernourished, arrayed in tracksuit and baseball cap, surviving on a diet of fried chicken and dope, listening to rap music and desperately searching for meaning and distraction at once in the hours of doomscrolling on his mobile phone. He has ceased to be a European. He has become the universal man of modernity.
I want to suggest that there’s only one way out, and that is to undo the curse by which John Dee bound Britain, and by extension by which he bound the world, nearly four and half centuries ago. It is possible to argue compellingly that much of Britain’s history since that year has been marked by various attempts to undo the curse: the Romanising efforts of the Stuarts, the music of Byrd and the poetry of Dryden, the Grand Tours of the 18th century and the Jacobite rebellions of that era, the Oxford Movement and the so-called ‘Second Spring’. All such moments of British history may be interpreted as endeavours to reunite these sacred and magical Isles with the universal empire of the Church in both its temporal and spiritual dimensions, that is, the empire called Christendom. That, perhaps many intuited, was the only way to undo the hex of John Dee.
Truth be told, I have my own attachment to the British Empire. We Morellos have been British subjects since 1704 when the Royal Marines captured Gibraltar and permitted us to stay because we were of Genoese and not Spanish origin. Thereafter, we practically ran civic life there. My family flourished under the Empire, mainly trading in coffee and tobacco. I personally have lived in many Commonwealth countries, and I have seen the civilising effects in faraway lands of English manners and industriousness, the common law, and loyalty to the Crown. We Morellos are true children of the British Empire, and it is impossible for me to drink a G&T or an IPA and not long for the Cape Colony or the Raj.
Nevertheless, as I see the United Kingdom flooded with people who ought not to be here, as I watch towns and entire cities transform into squalid third world slums, as I see African tribalism and Islamic militarism tyrannise once peaceful English communities, as I watch indigenous Englishmen and women imitate the worst decedents of America’s emancipated slaves, I cannot help but wonder. I wonder whether those demons with which the Royal Magus John Dee made a pact that spring night, as he plunged his sacrificial dagger into the chest of Christopher Marlowe, have now returned to these isles to claim their reward.
Anyone who has studied the manifold rituals by which one may enter a diabolical pact for worldly success, knows that the repayment expected from fallen angels is the eternal destination of the temporal beneficiary. Basically, they claim the soul. Well, if such a thing can happen to an individual person, it may also happen to a corporate person. Perhaps, then, my country looks like it’s going to hell in a handbasket … because it is.
The United Kingdom doesn’t ultimately need a new economic policy, or a new patriotism, or new remigration legislation, however much such things might help to mitigate the challenges it faces. What the United Kingdom likely needs is an exorcism, removing it from the hex, and placing it back under the jurisdiction of Jesus Christ. Basically, this land, ‘this happy breed of men, this little world, this precious stone set in the silver sea’, as Shakespeare put it, must return home. It must become once again the Church’s most loyal child and servant. The alternative is now fully on display for us all to see.
If you are so inclined, please say the following prayer for my unhappy country:
O Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God and our most gentle Queen and Mother, look down in mercy upon England thy Dowry and upon us all who greatly hope and trust in thee. By thee it was that Jesus our Saviour and our hope was given unto the world; and He has given thee to us that we might hope still more. Plead for us thy children, whom thou didst receive and accept at the foot of the cross. O sorrowful Mother! intercede for our separated brethren, that with us in the one true fold they may be united to the supreme Shepherd, the Vicar of thy Son. Pray for us all, dear Mother, that by faith fruitful in good works we may all deserve to see and praise God, together with thee, in our heavenly home. Amen.
Bracing, hard-hitting, imaginative, bold. Sebastian's most potent piece of short-form writing in my view. It rings true. I've not dwelt much on John Dee before but I never felt drawn to him and always saw him as an architect of some vague kind of evil. I might have to revise my historiography. Up till now I've seen the roots of Britain's fall in three key, infernal events - a triptych of Satanic acts spanning just over 150 years: (1) The Dissolution of the Monasteries, (2) The Regicide of Charles I, and (3) The defenestration of James II. Taken together, these three assaults on the royal and sacred essence of the land let loose those tremendous, titanic energies that consecrated the nation to Mammon and forged the British Empire. But the cost was the country's soul, and now that those energies have run their course there's no spiritual ballast remaining to stop or even slow the collapse. Only a god, as Heidegger said, or only an exorcism, as Sebastian suggests here, can save us now.
That was a banger, my brother. I wrote a chapter in my dissertation on Dee--we need to talk.