So here’s a funny thing:

The mantra of our age, the sentiment that is both liberational creed and the essential marketing sentiment for every product, is some version of “be yourself”. Hence our culture’s secret admiration of the Narcissistic Psychopath. That Dude is Killing It.

But how do you know if the self your being is a self worth being?

You might have heard the mantra expressed like so, on the more enlightened channels: Don’t ask what the world needs, but what makes you come alive. Because what the world needs is more people who have come alive.

But what is it to come alive? Is it just the indulgence of your own desires, including a desire to be significant?

Fame, as Hamilton put it, is the ruling passion of the Great Soul. But in an age of information, fame is as full of sound and fury as it is significant of nothing.

Perhaps it is, though, that there is a real mirror within the Hall of Mirrors that is the Age we live in. The issue, then, remains how we distinguish between our genuine reflection and all the rest?

Whom Does the Grail Serve?

It’s such a fascinating question, now that I think of it, because of the two meanings of both “grail” and “serve”, and how these two separate meanings take together sketch out what we might call a whole world, a reality in four dimensions.

Grail is both a cup and sang rael, holy blood.

So who are the Holy? Those who have truly come alive.

This, incidentally, is the meaning of kingship and queenship, the metaphysical underpinning of royalty. The royals, this theory goes, are those people who have properly come alive. Their blood is the bloodline, the breeding society, that gives life by coming alive, and by coming alive, gives life.

The double meanings serve to create a single complex image. The blood is the cup that serves the Royal House of Water. This image contains within it the traditional human notion of humanity as the blood line that serves refreshment to the Divine. Feeding the Holy, as the Maya call it (I’ve heard).

The Royals are those people who are doing it right. That’s what it means, or what it is that people originally understood by the idea that the royal line was descended, by whatever ancestor, from Heaven.

Democracy, as conceived in the Enlightenment, was exactly the generalization of this divine connection. That’s why it flowed naturally from Monarchical Republicanism in the Atlantic world. This pre-Democratic Republicanism aimed to redeem and restore the original meaning of royalty. And so King George III, who would later be vilified as a tyrant, conceived of himself as the true servant of his nation, even if he was only a recent royal immigrant. The emergence of Monarchical Republicanism laid the groundwork, so to speak, for the democratic revolutions that swept the Atlantic world.

This groundwork was the principle of the individual human as ‘royal’, which is to say, the true servant of the divine. Democratic Republicanism simply generalized this idea, asserting that all people, freed from the oppressive perversion of monarchy, could naturally assume the role of manifestation of the divine on Earth. These were Jefferson’s imaginary yeoman farmers, who – given land and the peace and freedom to till it – would naturally bring heavenly virtue into existence.

Hamilton, by contrast, never bought into this view of the common man. He instead retained the old faith in the aristocracy, or at least in the possibility of an aristocracy of virtue, which could cunningly corrupt the aristocracy of fortune, and in so doing render the people as a whole virtuous in the body of the nation, the so-called Heroic State.