Loreena McKennitt honoured, met with Queen Camilla

Loreena McKennitt meets her majesty Queen Camilla at Clarence House in London, England. McKennitt was there to be honoured by the Scheherazade Foundation in a proceeding which recognized the transformational power of words and stories. 

Earlier this month, award-winning Canadian singer/songwriter Loreena McKennitt was one of the honoured guests at two back-to-back events in London, England recognizing the transformational power of words and stories, with reminders of their potential to elevate the human condition and bridge cultures.

On Nov. 4, McKennitt was introduced to her majesty Queen Camilla during a reception for about 30 people at Clarence House, the private residence she shares with King Charles III. Hours earlier, she was honoured during a ceremony at the Athenaeum, a prestigious 200-year-old private club in London devoted to intellectual debate and pursuits. There, McKennitt was presented with a gold medal and the title of Honorary Life Patron by the London and Casablanca-based non-profit Scheherazade Foundation, founded in 2020. She was also made Honorary Fellow of the non-profit Hoopoe Share Literacy Fund which provides books in 27 languages, believing stories have more power when read in one’s own language.

Queen Camilla’s reception was held to recognize the first anniversary of the World Story Bank, launched by the Scheherazade Foundation to create a global treasury of multicultural stories that impart universal values like kindness, courage and justice to children and adults alike. Queen Camilla, who is patron or president of over 100 charities, places a strong emphasis on promoting literacy and hence her hosting of the event. The global treasury of books will come from all corners of the world, based on the belief they are more than mere entertainment, akin to instruction manuals to the world.

“Loreena was selected by our awards committee, comprised of youth in 30 countries, because of the way she bridges cultures,” explained author, filmmaker and the foundation’s executive director Tahir Shah, who works alongside his daughter Ariane. He is also the son of the late Idries Shah, an Afghan author, thinker and teacher in the Sufi tradition.

“The Scheherazade Foundation was established to bridge cultures in unusual ways and to harness the knowledge we believe is in folklore and traditional stories the world over. We see it as the marrow within the bones of society,” said Shah. “We’re working to recalibrate the human condition at a time when the human condition is under threat from social media, AI, mass urbanization and other forces.”

British-Canadian physicist and 2024 Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, known as “the godfather of AI,” was also honoured by the Scheherazade Foundation and appointed Honorary Life Patron, recognized for warning people of the potential risks with AI. He too was at the Queen’s reception and shared a conversation with Loreena.

“It is a great honour to be recognized as someone who has collected cultural rituals and brought them through my music into the public sphere,” said McKennitt. “A lot of people at the receptions were aware of my music, which was both lovely and surprising. And it was such a privilege to meet Queen Camilla. I thanked her for all her work in children’s literacy.”

McKennitt and Hinton now join the impressive list of the foundation’s other gold medal recipients, which include Nelson Mandella, Annie Leibowitz, Chris Hadfield, Joan Baez, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Isabelle Allende, Gloria Steinem and 25 others. Life patrons and gold medal winners, explained Shah, “are people who have inspired and touched us and made us understand where as a community and a world we need to be going.”

McKennitt has known Shah personally for roughly 10 years and they’ve met on several occasions. She dined with him and his family when she was recording her 2018 album Lost Souls at Real World Studios in Bath, England. Shah is also aware of her philanthropic endeavours, such as the family- and children-focused Falstaff Family Centre in her home base Stratford and Loreena’s Stolen Child Project, devoted to examining the contemporary child’s experience and the impact of social media.

It was in the 1990s that McKennitt was introduced to Idries Shah’s book The Sufis and she credits it with having a significant impact on her thinking, not from a religious standpoint, but “as a way of processing life,” something she references in the notes to her 1994 live recording of The Mask and Mirror. It was also through his book that she was introduced to the concept of “polishing the mirror of your soul,” an idea she has referenced many times since then.

As she explained in her 1996 documentary, No Journey’s End, “I've a belief that voice is the instrument of instruments in so far as it is connected to the human being, and it has a great range of articulating and expressing ideas and feelings. The Sufis have an expression of ‘polishing the mirror of your soul,’ and perhaps my voice becomes that polishing aspect: that it is a vehicle of expressing things in a very primal and instinctive way, and I think that is part of the strength of what I do. You try not to have any barriers. You've opened your soul; you've opened yourself up.”

The Scheherazade Foundation is named after the wise heroine and principal storyteller in A Thousand and One Nights, a collection of teaching-stories and folktales, the oldest known version being a 9th-century Arabic manuscript. After finding his wife unfaithful, King Shahryar beheads her and every subsequent bride the day after they’re wed – until Scheherazade comes along. Night after night she tells the King stories, stopping at critical points, creating a cliffhanger so the king will spare her another day in order to hear the rest of the story. As the foundation explains:

“Weaving a fantastical world of imagination over months and years, Scheherazade finally brings peace to the kingdom by freeing the king from his ire, saving the lives of the hundreds of young women he might otherwise have slain.

“The Scheherazade Foundation takes its inspiration from Scheherazade’s example. By learning from her out-of-the-box thinking and the wisdom within storytelling, we aim to bridge cultures and to resolve divisions within society. In this way, we believe it is possible to find fresh solutions to universal problems – by learning from humanity’s most precious resource: the stories we tell.”