In the mid nineteen thirties, Michael Ashman walked across a Europe pregnant with calamity and imminent collapse. His autobiography, Beautiful Swimmers, starts as a travelogue, but after hurrying through France, Southern Germany, and Austria, it is in Central Europe and the Balkans that his story becomes more than remarkable.

The history of Europe is replete with kingdoms and principalities that have come and gone, their former glories visible in castles and cathedrals, ruins and place names. During the thirties, Europe was awash with displaced peoples and there were many who claimed to be a down-on-his-luck Duke of Galicia, or Aragon, or even Byzantium. These lost kingdoms could still be found, even if to most people they were merely tales and ghosts of memories, the supposed historical source for folk customs and rituals, holidays and heroes. Historical facts, maps and records, castles and cathedrals. But Ashman slowly became aware that not all that was lost left such a footprint in the present, certainly not so physical at least. He began at first to suspect, then to search for, and eventually to feel he was being revealed, the absence and the substance of The Lost Kingdom of Coeur.

In the toe of Austria at the confluence of three borders, with Magyar and Slovak heard on streets, amongst dancing bears and gypsies, Ashman had his fortune told. A young girl, all hollow collar bones and tiered skirt, used the Etteilla deck, and in his spread, Ashman saw a card that he had never seen before and was to never see again: a deserted Romanesque courtyard. Placing her right index finger on it, the gypsy girl said, “Ici le Coeur”. From then on, Ashman travelled as a man possessed, searching for traces, for evidence, for the truth of the Coeur.

His book is full of enigmatic and recondite passages; 
“Listen for it along the sounding board of history.”
“By now it is only a whisper, an event implicit in the way other events are organised, less an event, in fact, than what rhetoricians might call a gap. We can never be sure to have found the Coeur except by its absence.”
“[the Coeur] is in the shape of a ripple in the sand, the position of an empty cardboard box on a building site, the angle of a woman’s head as she turns joyfully to listen to three notes of music, a playing card king seen in a sidelong light.”

Ashman did discover some historical, almost verifiable facts. The Kingdom of Coeur was a city state, destroyed at the end of the 15th century after a siege by a combined force of Albanians and Serbs, who finally scaled the walls on ladders of their own dead. The kingdom’s last ruler, Gallica XII Hierodule, was slaughtered, yet her bright armour still shone unstained. Stories say her ‘death’ should read as ’transformation’ and that, when the gates were thrown open, the conquering kings found a city that had been in ruins for a thousand years, plants growing through the pavements and trees in the fallen basilica.

Ashman’s theory was that the Coeur was an emanation of the Pleroma, the Gnostic fullness that is the Kingdom of the One, into this corrupted world, the world of the demiurge. “For a time it blesses us all, then fades away, corrupted or diluted by its contact with the world. Consequently, we can detect its presence as a kind of historical ghost. The myth of the Coeur is centred on its fall.”
“The fall has two opposing trajectories; even as we watch the city recoil from the world and back into the Pleroma, we interpret this movement as a fall”.

Michael Ashman disappeared in Central Europe after the Second World War. An attempt at the end of the 20th Century to retrace his steps and search for the Coeur by former academic and Ashman’s biographer, Lucas Medlar, ended similarly as Medlar disappeared in Eastern Croatia.

It should be said, at this juncture, that the Coeur is a fiction. Ashman and Medlar are fictions. They feature in M. John Harrison’s amazing weird Gnostic novel, The Course of the Heart. It is, alongside Arthur Machen’s Hill of Dreams, my favourite novel. All the quotes above are from The Course of the Heart. I urge you to read it.

But then again, maybe the Coeur is a fiction but maybe not. What is certain is that the more you look for it, the less you see, yet the more you feel. Maybe after all, the Kingdom of the Coeur is, rather neatly, the divine spark in all our hearts.