The Quest for the Holy Grail
Kenneth Knight
from Glastonbury – Ancient Avalon, New Jerusalem, ed Anthony Roberts, 1977.
Most contemporary students of Glastonbury lore have heard of the Temple of the Stars existing in the environs of the Isle of Avalon. It is a supposedly prehistoric Zodiac said to be hidden within the countryside and to have been carved out of the living soil over 4000 years ago. This claim was first made by a Canadian lady in 1929 when she published a book of the title above quoted. She tentatively dated the Zodiac to 2700 BC, but how she was able to determine such a date is quite impossible to say. Her claims were received with mixed feelings.
Archaeologists generally appear to have been hostile: zodiacs of such a nature were taboo, for one thing, and the site lacked any stone circles suggesting possible astronomical associations. Research has since uncovered that a series of stone circles similar to Stanton Drew may have once stood on St Edmund’s Hill and also along the northern slopes of Glastonbury Tor. Such stones were in place as recently as 1880 but, alas, for the most part they have completely disappeared. The Zodiac, according to Katharine Maltwood, author of the book in question, was about ten miles in diameter and thirty miles in circumference, with the church of St Leonard at Butleigh marking a centre line with Park Wood. Fountain’s Wall to the north of Glastonbury, Queen Camel to the south, Compton Dundon to the west, and Pilton to the east, covering an area of some one hundred square miles, represents the landscape of the Temple of the Stars. Whatever proof is lacking, there is little doubt that the idea is interesting. It has opened up a new avenue of thought in the whole question of the Somerset legends associated with King Arthur, his Round Table and his Quest for the Holy Grail.
Parallel with Mrs Maltwood’s study, an interesting book on the astronomical alignments of Stonehenge and other prehistoric monuments in Britain was published by the late Sir Norman Lockyer in 1901. It was entitled Stonehenge and Other Ancient British Monuments Astronomically Considered. This clearly indicates that all stone circles were orientated to particular points of the horizon, and for the most part, faced the sunrise at the equinoxes and solstices. Other circles were orientated to the opening of the four seasons when the Pleiades rose or set at the time the sun rose or set. The myth associated with the disappearance of the continent of Atlantis became part of a Christianised version of King Arthur being ferried to the west, to the Isle of Avalon, on his healing voyage to the underworld.
Sir Norman revealed that the siting of many monuments created a regular geometrical pattern in the form of a rhombus. This system of landscape arrangement and orientation as well as linear proportion is common to all temples, whatever time in the history of man they may have been built. The measurements are all found to be solar/lunar in intent. The diameter of Stonehenge in its inner circle corresponds to the length in English feet of the choir at Bristol Cathedral for instance, ie. 104 feet.
Glastonbury Abbey has long enjoyed the reputation of being the first Christian church in Britain, reputedly being founded as early as 37 AD by Joseph of Arimathea. Not until the eleventh century, however, do we hear anything of King Arthur and his knights emerging as historical personages, and still after, of King Arthur being buried in the choir of the great church. This event was observed by King Edward 1 in 1278 when he re-buried the earlier excavated bones of ’Arthur’ at the high altar amid great pomp and ceremony. There is little doubt that Edward’s action was tinged with dynastic and political overtones. At this time the ancient Order of the Knights of the Round Table was still in existence but it was not until 1349 that the order was transferred to Windsor Castle by Edward III under the title of the Most Noble Order of the Garter.
There is a span of some 600 years between the historical Arthur and the multifarious Arthur of legend. The Arthur of history is associated with the time of the Roman departure from Britain and the incoming Saxons’ eventual victory over the indigenous Celts. But like other men of great stature in our past history, Arthur then became a heroic god. Similarly, in Bristol there is a mythical memory that the twin gods Belin and Bran established the city. Belin and Bran as historical figures lived in the first century BC, but their earlier personifications as gods flourished about 700 BC. Thus a reversed dual analogy may be drawn.
Bran and Belin, being in the first instance nature gods, had the Druids as their priests. The Druids were well informed in subjects such as astronomy, geometry, mathematics, astrology, etc., and accurately interpreted the motion of the heavens through their rituals. Not until the sixteenth century was any further attempt to interpret architecture and its relevant proportions ever seriously considered. Sacred architecture as an image of the universe presented innumerable mystical propositions, all exceptionally difficult to unravel. It may not have occurred to the layman that far from being haphazardly built on any piece of ground which happened to be handy, temples and the like were carefully sited and orientated in relation one to another. Local legends and folklore became an indirect system of preserving them. Local legends around Wedmore are as relevant to the greater Arthurian cycle as are the legends woven around Wells Cathedral, the Tor, or Glastonbury Abbey. Again, Cadbury Hill, more commonly known as the ’Castle of Camelot’, has its quota of myths and legends which are relevantly astronomical in intent, and always in an Arthurian context.
Temples, churches and cathedrals all possess measurements which form careful ratios and are in fact microcosms of the macrocosm. In other words they are by design and proportion a scale of the solar system as well as of solar lunar time-cycles, marking the planets’ passage through the twelve signs of the zodiac over specified periods of time.
Computations were made as to the regularity of these motions, the conjunctions of some or all the planets and the prediction of eclipses. Capping this there is one particular date which has been the basis of all modern astronomical calculations since, and that is midnight of the autumn equinox, with the full moon resting between the horns of the bull (Taurus) at 4004 BC. This date falls within the zodiacal age of Taurus the Bull and is also of vital importance as a mystical foundation point in Christian chronology.
Although it has been known for a very long time that sacred temples were a miniature copy of the solar system, the measurements of which are to be found in the British metrological system, the means of determining these measures had never been made public knowledge. This was due chiefly to difficulties in communication. Everything had to be written by hand, for one thing, making education on a nationwide scale impossible. Even if it were possible, knowledge was considered sacred, or secret – not to be divulged to the common man or the unenlightened. Although this attitude is unacceptable nowadays, there is an element of wisdom in the opinion, ’a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’. Not everyone is qualified mentally or intellectually to cope with the mysteries of higher mathematics which are necessary to understand the science of flights into outer (or inner) space. That is really what the Quest for the Holy Grail is all about!
A book published in 1897 by an anonymous author was probably the first architectural study of modern times to attempt an understanding of the involved writings of a famous Roman architect, Vitruvius, who lived in the first century. An attempt had been made in the sixteenth century by an Italian architect, Caesariano, who translated his predecessor’s book into Latin, but Vitruvius’s writings still remained obscure. The original book has apparently long-since disappeared.
In the nineteenth century, William Stirling, a friend and patron of William Morris, spent a great deal of time on architectural research, having to undertake mountains of calculations in order to prove his point. In essence, he showed that there was a link between the seasons, the motion of the heavens, the distances of the planets from the sun, earth and moon, and that their respective cycles around the sun had some significance in all architectural proportion and measurement. Furthermore, he also showed that myths and legends often concealed important celestial events, such as the end of a major eclipse, or a conjunction of planets in a particular part of the heavens. The birth of Christ was heralded and recorded in the temple at Jerusalem in this manner. Moreover he discovered that the finger width, palm width, length from finger-tip to elbow, as well as length of arm from finger-tip to arm-pit, all had some source of sacred measure. The length of the pace and step also had some bearing on calculating the length of the lunar and solar months in days, the average pace being slightly more than twenty-nine inches, corresponding in this instance to a lunar month.
The rhombus was discovered to be the key to the mysterious medieval sign of the Vesica Piscis, the sign of the fish. This was found to be derived from the cube unfolded, producing the sign of the Cross with the three horizontal and four vertical bars, which when cubed, produce twenty-seven and sixty-four. All other numbers in ratio are found in the square of seventy-four, the circle of 231, and a rectangle of 37 x 64. Such is the external measure of the Lady Chapel at Glastonbury Abbey – 37 feet by 64 feet. This was the site of the first ecclesiastical building to be erected there. Architecture down the ages, in all climes, through all races and civilisations, conforms to one set of rules only, and indicates the basic Unity of God and therefore of all religions. It is canonical and eternal and its interpretation has always been recognised in a metaphysical context.
We have now to consider two important facts:
a) Architectural proportions are the same throughout all civilisations.
b) These proportions are to be understood as the means of interpreting astronomy and astrology through various myths.
It is interesting to note that the knowledge which the ancients possessed coincides with the knowledge of the solar system and universe we have today. This knowledge has been gained through use of the most scientific instruments and is of such a complex nature that even now it has not been fully interpreted. How this knowledge was obtained before is a mystery, but the ancient astronomers knew the distances of the planets from the earth and sun and also the time it took them to move round the sun. They computed the planet Pluto (apparently) even though it was not visible to them. They also computed Saturn and Jupiter as well as how often they conjoined and in which sign of the zodiac they lay.
It takes Pluto 248 years to move through the twelve signs of the zodiac. The length of the nave to the high altar in Bristol Cathedral is 248 feet. The height of the central tower of Wells Cathedral is given at about 164 feet. It takes Neptune some 164 years to pass through the twelve signs. There are eighteen periods of thirty-seven lunar eclipses which total 666 years and are called a ’saros’. The overall length of Glastonbury Abbey was 666 feet. This number is also associated with the ’magic square’ of the sun.
Although I have not carried out an on-the-spot survey of the parish church of St Mary at Wedmore, nevertheless a rough estimate may be attempted that the overall length of the church will be in the region of 222 feet. This is also the measure of St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, whose spire is also about 222 feet in height. The correspondences might appear vague but they are correspondences. The system adopted by the antique architects appears to have been called the ’Canon of Proportion’, which relates all the seven sciences of the ancients and interprets them through use of the Hebrew grammar. Hebrew is a very old tongue and was in reality the sacred tongue of the Church until it was removed and Latin adopted in its place. The Hebrew alphabet, like the Latin (and Greek for that matter), has numerical values for each of the letters. When a group of letters are placed together they give a total which in turn, when grammatically considered, produce a word or a phrase. Such a system is known as ’gematria’. Only consonants are considered; they give the root-origin to a word or a phrase. When transferring such words and phrases to the heavens it is of some significance to discover that the main star groups are mentioned in Hebrew and to this day many retain their original Hebrew names. Astrologically of course yet another system or canon develops and this in turn reveals that stars not only changed their names but their nature, according to the time of year and day in which they moved across the sky. This is where the renewable nuances of myth enter the picture.
The Hebrew root-origin of ’King Arthur’ is MLKARTh with a gematric value of 691. Transferring this to the heavens, it corresponds with the number of diameters of the earth in the earth’s orbital path round the sun. In the light of the Hebrew Cabbala (upon which the whole basis and system of the seven sciences or arts collectively depends) Arthur becomes an earth-related wanderer across the starry firmament. In Hebrew the word ’cabbala’ means ’to receive’, in the sense that what can be related by the seven sciences one to another is acceptable in the method of interpretation. Thus we find that King Arthur, by veiled allusion, is, in the cabbalistic sense, a figure symbolising the sun as well as in some instances the king of the earth. The tenth Sephiroth on the cabbalistic Tree of Life is called ’Malkuth’ (which is a derivative of ’Malkurth’).
It is to Glastonbury and the Isle of Avalon that the wounded king is taken, and long before the Christian era the area was known to the Celts as the Isle of the Dead (or Blessed). A book written about 1200 at the library of the Abbey was presented to King Edward I on his visit there in 1278. This book has been preserved and was popularised in the early part of this century when it was published under the title of The High History of the Holy Grail. It is so obscure and full of symbolism that only one acquainted with subjects such as astronomy, astrology, grammar, architecture, etc., could hope to get even a glimmer of its inner meaning. However, this glimmer reveals a series of ancient initiation rites always in a cyclical, zodiacal context.
There is an indirect reference to an actual zodiac which is only seen through the mind’s eye, in other words through the power of inner perception. The legends associated with Cadbury Castle, not far from Glastonbury [20km SE], also suggest that there is a zodiac in the immediate vicinity. There is reference to buried treasure and anyone who tries to dig for it will never find it because it will only sink deeper into the ground the deeper they dig. The celestial inference is obvious. Although there is visible evidence of what the Round Table looked like at Winchester, yet, in its deeper aspects at Cadbury, the table, being also a pattern of the heavens, sinks from view. One does not have to look to tangible evidence in order to understand its purpose and function. Thus it is with the legends as a whole: the real understanding comes on the mental plane. The late Carl Gustav Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist, appreciated the true sense of the Cabbala and the psychic function of the Arthurian legends, for he had divined their intimate interrelation as symbols.
According to an ancient Egyptian tradition, when the soul of the departed had to undertake its long journey to the Land of the Blessed, a guide book was presented to it so that the journey would be more tolerable. Called The Book of the Dead, it was in fact a book of initiation into the mysteries of death, as the Morte d’Arthur indicates. As the Great Pyramid in Egypt was the same theme in stone, revealed by its hidden symbolism, so too The High History of the Holy Grail had its counterpart in the dimensions and proportions of Glastonbury Abbey as a whole. The High History is but a copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. It is a cultural counterpart, bridging the gateway of death.
Despite the apparent circuitry contained in the theme of this writing, it is hoped that the subject as a whole may stimulate a wider interest. Much work has still to be undertaken and this particular approach to archaeology has yet to be accepted as an integral part of future diggings. Careful work needs to be done when noting the site’s axial direction and points on the horizon and the distances between different buildings and their respective angles. What is lacking at the moment is the interpretation of these ancient buildings and monuments, particularly Glastonbury Abbey and Wells Cathedral. Only when this becomes an accomplished fact will historians be able to present a true picture of the purpose and intention of such sacred buildings. The Quest for the Grail continues.
|
|
Recommended Books
Ashe, Geoffrey. Camelot and the Vision of Albion. Panther, 1975.
Bord, Janet and Colin. Mysterious Britain. Paladin, 1974.
Evans, Sebastian, trans. The High History of the Holy Grail. Everyman.
Maltwood, K E. A Guide to Glastonbury’s Temple of the Stars. James Clarke, 1964.
Stirling, William. The Canon Garnstone Press, 1974.
Treharne, R. F. The Glastonbury Legends. Abacus, 1975.