A kid once threw a clod of earth at my dad, after my dad told the kid to stop throwing mud at the car. Dad had got out of the car and had his thunderous face on. The kid didn’t care, and got him on the side of the head. I wanted to kill that kid. I wanted to kill him dead. I feel the same when people take pops at Prince Charles.
You just know the Queen would rather die than relinquish the throne to Charles. She’ll hang on grimly to her handbag and her title until William psyches himself up. But do you know why? Not because Charles is potty, talks to plants and got a divorce. No, it’s because Charles is a menace to modern society. Just hunt out some of his lesser-known speeches.
In an introduction to the Sacred Web Conference at the University of Alberta in 2006, Charles sings his praises for the biannual magazine devoted to theosophy and the study of Tradition and modernity, Sacred Web, and then offers his theories on the same.
Watching a Royal – arranged, as ever, in front of a fireplace – speak in metaphysical terms is a surreal, slightly eerie experience. Charles talks of mystics, of the oneness of all life, and how it is only achieved by tapping into the Divine. I feel like I’m watching an alien invasion flick, in which the President is forced to address the nation about impending doom.
He warns that the human race is on the brink of extinction, and calls for a rejection of modernism, of an age where every man is an island, and a return to Traditionalism – in which perennial wisdom is handed down from generation to generation; kept alive and revered. He references royal astronomer Martin Reese, who wrote Our Final Hour: A Scientist’s Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind’s Future In This Century, On Earth and Beyond, but says in his more optimistic moments he hopes it may not be too late for a mass awakening that will allow mankind to take the planet into its next, transcendent cycle.
While Charles’s commitment to environmental causes and sustainability is well reported, his spiritual and philosophical side (he is is Patron of the Temenos Academy – ‘for education in the light of the spirit’) is not humoured in the media. Last year he published a book, Harmony, written with environmentalist Tony Juniper and BBC broadcaster Ian Skelly. There was an accompanying doco. Oh – you missed it?
True enough, some of his theories would make Dan Brown blush, but his dismissal in the British press was so thorough that The Guardian commissioned three reviews that made personal attacks. Giant lizards, much?
Guardian review 1) Discovering the same organic patterns everywhere you look is a familiar symptom of paranoia. In the prince’s case, however, it represents an insight into the fundamental rhythms of the universe. If you press your face on a large piece of paper on a wall, he tells us, and let your arms describe natural arcs with a couple of pencils, you would find yourself creating certain cosmically symbolic circles. He forgets to add that you would also look a complete prat.
Guardian review 2) If I’ve learned one thing in the more than 30 years I’ve been faffing around waiting to be king, it’s that we have to listen to Nature … So this book, which has been dictated to me by Tony Juniper-Berry, Peter Penstemon and Diana Daffodil, is Nature’s plea to us to save the world before it is too late.
Guardian review 3) He knew he was right all along.
In his speech for the Sacred Web Conference, Charles irritably acknowledges the ridicule he’s suffered for decades, but he might expect nothing more in an age of superficiality. He quotes TS Eliot: “Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
New Age Guinea Pig 