When William Married Kate

At heart, I’m a Bolshevik. For me royalty is not just an anachronism that serves no obvious purpose in the 21^st century, but an institution that continues to represent elitism, colonialism and class privilege.

So at first I tried to quarantine myself from the media hype about The Wedding. I knew the wave of adulation and hyperbole was rising and I tried to skip news services in the days before Friday’s nuptials between Prince William and Kate.

Alas, on the day (or night over here) I couldn’t help myself. Any phenomenon that carries broad public appeal should at least be investigated and its force understood.

One reason why so many people seemed to care about the whole thing in Britain was the atmosphere of economic gloom over there. Maybe people just needed a grand and happy spectacle to take their minds off unemployment, rising food prices and welfare cuts; an excuse to celebrate and have a party.

I think the real heart of why something like a royal wedding has timeless mass appeal is its enormous symbolic content. The media, which taps into the heart of mass consciousness, continually gushed during Friday’s live coverage about the “fairytale” nature of the event. Television commentators described it as “a fairytale comes true” and “the stuff of dreams”. Indeed one commentator described the occasion as a “mixture of magnificence and the ordinary – that’s why they (ordinary people) identify with it.” Another said it was “everyone’s party”.

The power of a symbol is that it is ultimately mysterious and not real in the conventional material sense. The members of royalty – kings, queens, princes, dukes etc – carry a kind of symbolic aura that has nothing to do with them as real people. It’s what Carl Jung described as “mana”, a projection of an archetypal image from the mass unconscious.

Why are fairytales important to people? Why would someone camp overnight to get an ecstatic glimpse of the newlywed royal couple? Fairytales are essentially dreams, and dreams emerge from the unconscious. There is a non-rational side to the psyche that is an important component of what it means to be human, and this has not been banished despite the dominance in our times of rationalism and secularism.

A royal wedding is an ancient and powerful symbol of wholeness. It is a representation of the sublimeness of oneness, the union of opposites. Love unites and binds that which is separate. By watching the wedding, people participate vicariously in a magical process that relates deeply to their own lives.

Strangely enough, modern technology and media has assisted this magical connection. Through the internet and media coverage of the royals we get some sense of them as human beings – in many ways they are shown to be just like us – and that keeps the link to the mass public alive that allows the “mana” process to occur.

As always, however, a projection is just a projection. A symbol can have no lasting effect unless it leads to concrete action and transformation in a person's life. After the sleeping bags near Buckingham Palace are rolled up and the crowds go home, after the partying is over and the televisions are turned off, how can the spirit of love and unity be held so that its presence continues to inspire?