It was a truly awesome and splendid thing that we did…” wrote Caitlín Matthews on a May morning thirty-five years ago, after the Whitsun weekend of 1981, when, in the presence of a few dozen kindred souls at Hawkwood College, we had evoked, almost to visible appearance, some of the archetypal figures of Arthurian legend.
As far as I was concerned, this magical lightning strike on a Pentecostal Sunday came in a completely unexpected manner. After two days of lectures on the roles of Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Gawain, and Mordred in the breakup of the Round Table Fellowship, I had thought a fairly cultured marrying up of literature with occultism might be an appropriate and genteel way of winding down the weekend.
I aimed simply to read a piece of narrative poetry in the form of a directed visualization in an attempt to reproduce the effects of a minstrel upon an assemblage of people—which in medieval times would have been the means of passing on or even creating these living legends. And a bit of Victorian poetry seemed innocuous enough; to wit, a section of Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur read by candlelight to an assembled company sitting in a circular formation, being perceptively present when Arthur and the sole surviving Round Table knight, Bedivere, arrive at the lake after the last battle.
The king is mortally wounded and commands Bedivere to cast his sword, Excalibur, into the lake. After twice failing to do so for plausible but specious reasons, Bedivere finally does so. An arm rises up and takes the sword, and as if this were a signal, a barque with three mourning queens arrives to take the wounded king to the Isle of Avalon. The sequence ends at the point where Bedivere, as sole remaining knight, holds within himself the whole Round Table. The last words of the king are to ask that Bedivere should pray for him.
As soon as I said this, it became plain to me what I should do. I asked all present to identify themselves with this last remaining representative of the Round Table and also to pray for the king.
At this point I took a hunting horn and blew three long blasts on it. Don’t ask me why I did it or even what I was doing with a hunting horn on my person or what I expected to happen. It was entirely intuitive. But what happened, happened all right!
To the eyes of vision, great doors opened in the west, together with a waft of sea air and even spray. The mighty figure of the king came through the doors, crowned, with short golden beard, robed, and with the great hilt of the sword Excalibur very prominent, impressive with its jeweled work and in its mighty runed scabbard. With the king came Queen Guinevere, Lancelot, Gawain, Tristan, and all the knights and ladies. Larger than life, they took up their positions about the Table Round. In the center rose a column of incense smoke with astral rainbow colors manifesting the powers of the Grail, the Cauldron, Merlin, and Nimue.
As soon as they did so, I became aware that a great Round Table had formed on the imaginative level within the hall, or possibly even the etheric, for it seemed almost palpable and extended out to the very seats of all present. The power within the room was intensely strong, so much so that the small table altar with the two candles and thurible upon it seemed to be wavering up and down as in a heat haze.
As Caitlín went on to remark in her report:
The power which we invoked was both visible and perceptible to every sense; the candles on the altar shimmering with a radiance greater than their own. None of us wanted to leave; we were gripped, not by fear, but by longing to remain. One by one the company dispersed to bear into the world the substance of what we had experienced, and to continue the work of the Round Table within our own sphere of life.
Never mind intellectual theories about possibilities of mass vision or hallucination or whatever. This final remark about continuing the work is significant. It would be possible to follow through with an account of what happened in this respect in the lives of a number of those who were present, for a number have made their presence known as writers and teachers. It would make up to a very long book indeed! The present tome covers only two!
The point is that the whole Arthurian tradition is intensely fertile. You hardly have to go searching for archetypes or ideas—they will come out searching for you! Which is rather after the fashion of the ladies associated with the Table Round, who can be every bit as important as the knights. Time and again we find it is a maiden who lures a knight out onto a quest, guiding him on the way, overseeing his various tests and being quite sharp tongued about it too on occasion. They can be awakeners, initiators, testers, guides, and faery companions.
Nor is the scholarly side of Arthurian legend a sealed and definitive book. I was recently invited to attempt a new translation of the so-called Elucidation of Chrétien de Troyes’s romance Conte du Graal, a thirteenth-century French poem that has lain virtually forgotten since its discovery in the mid-nineteenth century and that contains some of the most powerful and revealing clues to the nature of the Grail. Within the seven branches of the story, we learn the cause of the Wasteland, of how the maidens of the wells were violated by the anti-Grail King, Amangons, and the attempt to restore them by the quests of King Arthur’s knights through the seven guardians of the story.
To go with my efforts, Caitlín and John Matthews, under the title of The Lost Book of the Grail: Restoring the Voices of the Wells, have provided the first full-length study of the Elucidation to appear in any language, in fulfillment of the text’s own words “that the good that the Grail served will openly be taught to all people.”
And so the work goes ever on, as is plainly apparent from the contents of the book before you. All you have to do is to plunge into the magic lake of enchantment that the Matthews’s have conjured before you.
And you really are spoiled for choice—enchantments of the land, enchantments of the otherworld, enchantments of love, the mysteries of the Grail—the ways laid out by a transformative set of signposts that lead ever more deeply into the heart of the myths, all of which embody the theme of the quest, of the desire to break out from the ordinary and to enter a world of wonder.
Welcome to Avalon.
Gareth Knight
author of The Secret Tradition in Arthurian Legend,
Merlin and the Grail Tradition, and The Faery Gates of Avalon, among others