The Fox's Prophecy

This is a chapter from my book about the End Times 

It is not just in the great myths and religions of the world that the end times are foretold. The Fox’s Prophecy is an English poem written in about 1870 by a Mr D.W. Nash about whom not much seems to be known. The scene is set on a beautiful crisp November morning in the Cotswolds when “the diamonds of the hoar-frost were sparkling in the sun” and “the varied tints of autumn still lingered in the wood”. A huntsman becomes separated from his hounds and turning to look for them he is suddenly “struck by an aged fox that sat beneath a tree”. Surprise turns to astonishment when the fox fixes his “sparkling eye, which shone with an unearthly fire” on the huntsman and addresses him “like a Christian man”. The talking fox says that as the last of his race he has been given the power of prophecy, and he proceeds to unfold a vision of the future which is not a happy one. 

 

The fox is clearly no ordinary beast but a supernatural being, and the fact that he is the last of his race tells us that the supernatural is on the point of being chased away from the everyday world and to its great detriment because without some contact with the supernatural we fall into complete materialism, as indeed we have. Materialism does not just mean that the spiritual is no longer regarded as real. It means that everything is sacrificed to the utilitarian and the monetary, hence the modern obsession with the economy and the destruction of beauty unless it can be made economically viable.

 

The fox first predicts the end of hunting, but he says he regrets this because the end of hunting means the end of traditional rural life, of community and living according to the seasons of nature. He says that “not upon these hills alone, the doom of sport shall fall: O’er the broad face of England creeps, The shadow on the wall.” Thus, he equates the demise of foxhunting as going along with a more general decline. It doesn’t cause that decline but the state of mind that ends hunting has other much broader effects as well. “Hedgerow and copse shall cease to shade the ever-widening field” is a prediction that has certainly come true.  But then he says that “The manly sports of England shall vanish one by one;…The manly blood of England in weaker veins shall run.” England was the first nation to industrialise and reap the benefits of a reduction in infant mortality through such things as improved sanitation and healthcare. In 1800 the infant mortality rate was 33%, in 1870 when the poem was written 26% of children died before their fifth birthday, but now the figure stands at 4%. On the face of it this is an unmitigated good, but nothing is that simple. What is happening in this case is that the weaker are surviving and adverse genetic mutations that would have been weeded out of the stock by natural selection are carrying on and spreading. Forget the moral issues for the moment. On a purely pragmatic level the consequences are what they are, and the fox was right. Moreover, these adverse genetic mutations (and the vast majority of mutations are adverse) do not just have an impact on physical well-being but affect the brain even more as 84% of the genome is active in that organ, more than any other part of the body. This will potentially lead to personality disorders, problems with mental health and even decline in intelligence. All predicted by the fox in a couple of pithy lines and again further on when he says, “Degenerate sons of manlier sires to lower joys shall fall”.

 

The fox goes on with his tale of woe as the ancient landmarks sink under the waves of progress, time-honoured creeds go down and traditional faith becomes a joke though there arise a swarm of new self-made religions. Education is dominated by utilitarians who do not teach how to think but what to think. “The only god is gold” needs no comment, and the fox then predicts the ravages wrought by feminism when he says, “The homes where love and peace should dwell, fierce politics shall vex, and unsexed woman strive to prove herself the coarser sex.”

 

Politicians become useless demagogues, and the army and navy are cast aside as too costly to maintain. The wise fox even predicts the mass immigration of recent years. “The footsteps of the invader then England’s shore shall know”, and the country becomes “disarmed before the foreigner ….and yield(s) the treasures she lacked the wisdom to defend”.

 

All is not doom and gloom, however. The fox foresees a restoration when “purged by fire and sword, the land her freedom shall regain”, and “taught wisdom by disaster” with “the greed of gold departed….Old England’s sons again shall raise the Altar and the Crown”. At this point the cry of the hounds breaks in on the scene and the fox vanishes leaving the huntsman alone to shake his head in wonder as indeed he might, given that the numinous has just broken in on his everyday world. No one is ever left the same after such an experience.

 

When I first read this poem I was reminded of the Prophecy of Hermes which is a very different but at the same time similar work from around 300 A.D. Contained in the Book of Asclepius, it describes the downfall of ancient Egypt when it abandons the gods. It is different because it is much more religious in tone, but it is similar in that it predicts the tragedy of cultural loss through human ignorance, egotism and materialism. In the Egyptian case there is a spiritual restoration when God “cleanses the world from evil, now washing it away with water-floods, now burning it out with fiercest fire, or again expelling it by war and pestilence”. This is proper end times, conclusion of the cycle stuff. The fox’s version is simpler and humbler though it too includes a purging by fire.

 

The fox’s view is simpler because it is a peasant’s or countryman’s version of the end time scenario that is more concerned with national than spiritual loss though there is an overlap. Don’t forget the fox may be a supernatural being but he is still a member of the animal kingdom. His prophecy is written not from grand metaphysical insight like the Egyptian one and others, but a deep instinct that comes from being in tune with the environment and a sensitivity to changes which do not arise organically. It lacks the spiritual awareness of more sophisticated versions but makes up for that by its sympathy with the natural and the traditional which serve as guides to right thought and behaviour. The fox realises that the modern world is abandoning these things to go its own way, and sees it as being very much the loser by that. He speaks from an awareness of natural rhythms and cycles, and knows that when human beings turn their back on nature and act on egotism they fall into materialism and greed which lead to disaster. But he has no real understanding of the spiritual processes involved behind all that so the restoration he foretells is of a much more elementary nature. His prophecy is accurate as far as it goes but it doesn’t go far enough.