Originating as a Christian compromise with earlier pagan rites of royal investiture, it would become in time a Protestant compromise with Britain’s Catholic past, while also referencing Britain’s growing role as an imperial power. The coronation is an intriguing composite rite that reaches back into England’s deep past, expressing the aspirations of its later rulers.
Whatever people in the United Kingdom and beyond may think of a coronation in the twenty-first century, there is no escaping the deep strangeness of this ancient rite, which only two nations on earth still perform-the other being the Pacific island nation of Tonga. Neither have I forgotten that there has been old abuse of the thing in practice that many, wishing only to gain the sanction and reverence of antiquity for doctrines and inventions of their own, have tried to twist the fables of the poets into that sense and that this is neither a modern vanity nor a rare one, but old of standing and frequent in use that Chrysippus long ago, interpreting the oldest poets after the manner of an interpreter of dreams, made them out to be Stoics and that the Alchemists more absurdly still have discovered in the pleasant and sportive fictions of the transformation of bodies, allusion to experiments of the furnace." - Summary from Bacon's Prefaceįor further information, including links to online text, reader information, RSS feeds, CD cover or other formats (if available), please go to the LibriVox catalog page for this recording.įor more free audio books or to become a volunteer reader, visit ,” “anachronistic,” “outdated,” “a magic hat ceremony.” These are just a few of the uncomplimentary terms that some have chosen to describe tomorrow’s coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla.
Not but that I know very well what pliant stuff fable is made of, how freely it will follow any way you please to draw it, and how easily with a little dexterity and discourse of wit meanings which it was never meant to bear may be plausibly put upon it.
"Now I suppose most people will think I am but entertaining myself with a toy, and using much the same kind of licence in expounding the poets’ fables which the poets themselves did in inventing them and it is true that if I had a mind to vary and relieve my severer studies with some such exercise of pleasure for my own or my reader’s recreation, I might very fairly indulge in it. LibriVox recording of The Wisdom of the Ancients, A Series of Mythological Fables by Francis Bacon.
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