... is not confined to the knighthood of Christian Europe during the Middle Ages. It can be found in institutions as diverse as the patrician caste of ancient Sparta, the Red Branch of pre-Christian Ulster, the warrior fraternities of such tribes as the Sioux and Cheyenne in the American West, the Samurai in Japan -- and the Sicarii or Zealots of Jesus's time. All these institutions were regulated by a code which was not just ethical or moral, but cosmological -- a code intended to place human activity in harmony with the order of the cosmos. They involved not just a social and a military discipline, but a spiritual discipline as well. By virtue of this discipline, the adherent was held to function in accordance with divine law.

... If it is packaged effectively -- packaged, that is, in such a way as to assuage anxieties and elicit trust -- chivalry can make a potent appeal to the modern mind. It can offer ritual, colour, pageantry and spectacle, to a world increasingly denuded of those things and increasingly haunted by their absence. It can offer a sense of continuity to a world which feels cut off from the past and rootless. It can offer dignity and grandeur to people ever more oppressed by the conviction of their own smallness and insignificance. To individuals chafing against their helplessness, loneliness and isolation, it can offer the prospect of belonging, of community, of participation in a lofty fraternal enterprise. It can cater to most people's secret desire to partake of an '�lite', unfashionable though that word itself may currently be. It can offer a hierarchy of values and a code of conduct which are not arbitrary or haphazard, but which rest on a hallowed traditional foundation -- a foundation held to reflect some intimation of a divine pattern or plan. It can offer a ritualised, and so sanctioned, channel for emotional expression. Thus chivalry can be made to constitute a principle of coherence and a repository for trust and meaning. In the appropriate circumstances, trust can be reposed in it, and meaning obtained in return. The potency of a resurrected chivalry was illustrated during the Second World War by Japan, where the Samurai code of Bushido imparted a governing principle to an entire culture, culminating in what, to Western eyes, seemed the terrifying 'fanaticism' of the kamikazes."

Baigent, M, Leigh, R, Lincoln, H, 1986, The Messianic Legacy, Jonathan Cape Ltd, London, pp 320-1

Since the First World War and the fall of most of Europe's ruling dynasties, republican democracy has become the established norm in Western society. As we have seen, however, monarchy has not lost either its archtypal appeal or its purely functional utility. During the Second World War, Churchill, together with many others, regarded the collapse of the monarchical system as one of the primary factors conducing to the rise of totalitarianism and, especially, to the phenomenon of Nazism. In secret discussions, he and Roosevelt are reported to have concurred that monarchical restoration was the best means, not only of holding the shattered shell of post-war Europe together, but also of ensuring there would be no resurgence of the tendencies which had culminated in the Third Reich.

ibid, p 325