Trumping the Lord of Misrule
ROBIN HOLTOM muses on medieval customs that he believes are being unwittingly aped by the incoming incumbent of the White House
It is a curious coincidence that the storming of the US Capitol by Trump supporters four years ago took place on Twelfth Night, January 6th. Just a fortnight after that date this year, Donald John Trump will be sworn in as the 47th President of the United States.
Twelfth night was traditionally a day when a Lord of Misrule was chosen and social roles were disrupted and reversed. Anyone see a parallel? In Mediaeval times, the Lord of the Manor would temporarily become servant, for example, and excess was briefly the order of the day. The ceremony was a welcome compensation for accepting a rigid social order for the rest of the year. The customs probably predate Christianity. Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night explores the beginning of the suppression of this traditional catharsis by the Puritans. In the play, Sir Toby Belch anticipated the suppression when he asked the Puritan, Malvolio, “Dost thou think that because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?”
The very same extravagantly virtuous Puritans were the founding fathers of the United States of America, where the well-tried social safety valve of the Lord of Misrule and such festivals as Twelfth Night were prohibited and replaced by the puritanical and sanctimonious rationalism which – in some areas – is still very much part of American life centuries later. The compensatory shadow of this overconfident rationalism manifests from time to time in ugly individual American behaviour such as school shootings. The storming of the Capitol on Twelfth Night was another example of this compensatory shadow erupting into a kind of collective psychosis.
In 1936 Carl Jung observed how the pre-Christian, Germanic god Wotan broke through the brittle veneer of bourgeois Christian society to emerge as Nazism. “Wotan is a restless wanderer who creates restlessness and stirs up strife.” He was transformed by Christianity into the devil, a sinister one-eyed character sometimes represented with horns. Jung suggests, however, that he is an essential part of the German character, although this was painful to absorb into contemporary German life recovering from defeat in the First World War. So the wandering, tricky qualities were projected with the help of Nazi propaganda onto the Jews. “In other words, the motif of the wanderer who has not accepted Christ was projected onto the Jews, just as we always rediscover our own psychic contents which have become unconscious, in other people.”
The unconscious, inner restlessness and self dissatisfaction of apparently settled and virtuous people can easily be diverted into blaming less settled populations. In Britain it is currently projected onto refugees and migrants seeking entry by crossing The Channel in small boats. In Nazi Germany it was the Jews. In America this restlessness is currently projected onto immigrants from Mexico as Trump prepares to carry out the “largest deportation operation in American history.”
Trump and his billionaire promoter Musk have families that have themselves been restless travellers from Germany and South Africa. Donald Trump’s father was arrested at a large Ku Klux Klan demonstration – though he denied being a racist. Musk’s grandfather claimed that apartheid South Africa was leading the “White Christian Civilization” against the “International Conspiracy of Jewish bankers.” It was not an accident that during the spectacular and disruptive storming of the Capitol, the media focused on the image of the horned Jacob Chansley, the QAnon shaman embodying Wotan.
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