One of my earlier works has recently reappeared in a
new edition, namely The Secret Tradition in Arthurian Legend. There is an involved and fascinating history
to this book and to its origins. It was first published in 1983 following a
quite remarkable workshop I conducted at Hawkwood college in 1981. As Caitlín Matthews, who was there at the
time, reported – “It was truly an awesome and splendid thing that we did.
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.” The whole event is
reported in somewhat more detail in my esoteric autobiography I Called It
Magic.
This
series of workshops was part of an initiative based on the principle of the
Externalisation of the Hierarchy to take into the public domain certain
techniques that I had learned in the Society of the Inner Light, and from
working with the occultist W.G.Gray in the late 1960’s, (whose biography, by
the way, The Old Sod, by Marcus Claridge and Alan Richardson is a
remarkable insight into the ways (and peccadilloes) of an earlier occult
generation).
However, the theme of this
particular Arthurian weekend, and much of the power behind it, was largely
based on a Society of the Inner Light script called The Arthurian Formula. This
had originated as a series of trance communications received by Dion Fortune
between April 1941 and February 1942, assisted by her old Golden Dawn mentor,
Maiya Tranchell-Hayes, and later supplemented by her remarkably gifted successor
Margaret Lumley Brown. The script had formed the basis of the inner work of the
Society for the following twenty years in a project known as the Redemption of
the Archetypes. Although all was highly secret in those days, in 2006 I was
able to edit a published edition of The Arthurian Formula, with an
amount of supplementary material on Atlantean and Faery traditions.
But when it comes to the
matter of revisiting Camelot, a lot depends on what route one is taking to get
there. We need to bear this in mind to avoid being confused by what may appear
to be direct contradictions in interpretation. Atlantean? Faery? Celtic?
Malory? Mabinogion? Chretien de Troyes? Lancelot/Grail?
The Arthurian Formula, and by extension, The
Secret Tradition in Arthurian Legend is largely based on Le Morte
d’Arthur of Sir Thomas Malory, a classic of early English literature
published in 1485, and upon which Atlantean theories were grafted by Dion
Fortune and Margaret Lumley Brown and their inner contacts.
Atlantean speculations had
their heyday in the 1920’s, the ground having been laid in 1892 by a retired
American politician Ignatius Donnelly with Atlantis: The Antediluvian
World as part of a serious scientific proposition. That is to say whether
such a catastrophe as a lost continent was geologically likely or possible,
along with comparisons of flora and fauna and human culture on both sides of
the Atlantic . Theories were taken seriously enough for the British Prime
Minister, Mr Gladstone (unsuccessfully) to seek government funds to send a ship
to test some of them out, and for the explorer Colonel Fawcett (also tragically
unsuccessfully) to seek remains of a civilisation antedating ancient Egypt in
the Amazon jungle. The respected occult researcher Lewis Spence published a series of works on the subject
during the 1920’s and Dion Fortune was familiar with all of these, so that the
outlines of the tradition were replicated in The Esoteric Orders and their
Work (1927). The more esoteric strands stemmed from Madame Blavatsky’s Isis
Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), the clairvoyant
researches by W. Scott-Elliot in The Story of Atlantis (1893), and
Rudolf Steiner’s Atlantis and Lemuria
(1911).
Most of the scientific theories
seem to have been sunk by more recent oceanographic
studies and the theory of tectonic plates, but the tradition of a lost
continent lives on as a scenario that appeals to the popular imagination, and
in a way has resurfaced with J.R.R.Tolkien’s evocation of Numenor in The
Silmarillion. Not published until 1977 but which may have been written as
far back as the early 1920’s, not that Tolkien seemed to rely on anything
beyond his own mythopoeic imagination – and nothing wrong with that! And it is
quite possible to build a workable Mystery tradition upon them.
Dion Fortune’s long term
interest in the matter of sexual polarity as exemplified in her novels and in
her early psychological work is also plainly shown in The Arthurian Formula
in an analysis of the domestic problems experienced by Arthur, Guenevere and Lancelot,
and in which the king’s half sisters Morgan and Morgawse play a questionable
role.
Wendy Berg, however, has
set a number of other hares running with remarkable pair of books, one theoretical
the other practical, Red Tree, White
Tree and Gwenevere and the Round Table, with the suggestion
(buttressed by at least a couple of respectable academic works) that the main
problem at the court was not that King Arthur fancied faery women to humans,
but that the queen herself was a faery. And following up on this suggestion, my
own researches into the first Arthurian romancer, Chrétien de Troyes, have
convinced me that faery elements played a major role in Arthurian legend, and
that far from the emphasis being on chivalrous knights rescuing human damsels
in distress, the damsels were more likely to be feisty faery women initiating a
mortal knight into inner world planes and adventures. Such is my theme in The
Faery Gates of Avalon.
The routes to Camelot
taken by Wendy Berg and myself were, respectively the early 13th
century Lancelot/Grail cycle, and the late 12th century romances of
Chrétien de Troyes. Not that Sir Thomas Malory was ignorant of this material,
for his Le Morte d’Arthur was a free translation of much of it. But he
was a down to earth English knight with an outlook influenced by the culture of
his day, that celebrated 14th century codes of chivalry as
exemplified by Henry V, the hero of the battle of Agincourt in 1415.
Quite a natural tendency
one has to say, for each generation is likely to see ancient material in its
own light, and he certainly tells a good story, if a somewhat prolix one at
times. Fast forwarding for some four hundred years we find the 19th
century Idylls of the King by Lord Alfred Tennyson tends to feature the
Camelot ladies as languorous Pre-Raphaelite maidens and the knights as decent
Victorian chaps whose characters could
well have been formed on the playing fields of Eton .
Nonetheless, before one
gets too patronising it should be said that the most powerful working of that
1981 Hawkwood weekend was based upon a reading straight out of Tennyson!
Our cultural attitudes
today might well be characterised by a neo-Celtic influence. When The Secret
Tradition in Arthurian Legend first appeared, it did attract some criticism
for being largely based on Malory rather than more direct Celtic material such
as The Mabinogion. But although the Mabinogion was translated by Lady
Charlotte Guest as far back as 1838-49 there was not a lot of esoteric
commentary on it at the time of the publication of The Secret Tradition in
Arthurian Legend.
However this was soon put
to rights by the end of the decade with major works by Caitlín Matthews Mabon
and the Mysteries of Britain (1987) and Arthur and the Sovereignty of
Britain (1989); John Matthews on Gawain – Knight of the Goddess (1990);
The Grail Seeker’s Companion (1986) by John Matthews and Marian Green; and
R.J.Stewart’s The Mystic Life of Merlin and The Prophetic Vision of Merlin
(1986) drawing upon Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth century History of the
Kings of Britain and Vita Merlini.
Most if not all of these writers were present at that Arthurian weekend – not
that I lay claim to inspiring them, but simply that we were all part of a
current that began to flow strongly in the 1980’s. And if there is one thing I
have learned about practical occultism it is that, like small boat sailing, it
is all a question of learning how to go with the winds and the tides – inner or
outer. How to pick them up, use them to best advantage, and not be wrecked by
sailing too close to the wind!
Looked at in this way, revisiting
Camelot is like a voyage to a mystical island through a network of various shoals and
channels, deeps and shallows, that each are navigable with a bit of luck and
skill, as long as you don’t stop en route to argue the toss as to which way
might be the one and only true. For the best compass is your own character,
motivation and intuition.
On that memorable occasion
in 1981 when, upon impulse from I know not where, I took up a hunting horn and
blew three long blasts at the end of an evocative reading, I had no sooner done
so than it seemed as if great doors opened in the West bringing a waft of sea
air, and even spray. A 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 jewelled work, in its mighty
runed scabbard. With the king came Queen Guinevere, Lancelot, Gawain, Tristram
and all the knights and ladies. Larger than life they took up their positions
about the Table Round. In the centre rose a column of incense smoke with astral
rainbow colours manifesting as the powers of the Grail, the Cauldron, Merlin
and Nimuë. The rest can be read up in Chapter 15 of I Called It Magic.
All images that could well
come out of illustrations by Arthur Ransome rather than what any historical 5th
century Arthurian dux bellorum might have been like. But like Atlantis, these
images well up from the universal mind, rather than any physical historical
scenario. For there are many interconnecting spheres that we inhabit, beyond
the physical one we are currently anchored to in our outer lives.
And such images from them,
once experienced, are never forgotten. But you need to have been there when the
gates were opened, to experience the power. Although those gates have by no
means since been shut. As was announced at the time from an inner plane source “A
light has been rekindled tonight that has for too long been extinguished.” It still shines if you go and look for
it.
Likewise: “The sword is
unsheathed and should be kept on the altar in that way.” It too is still
there, if you know how to find your way
to the mystic chapel. By the crystal boat of the magical imagination.