Several of my Wiccan friends place a lot of emphasis on the stories about King Arthur and his times. Is there anything of any importance in these stories to someone who doesn’t think Arthur was real, or are they true?
The Early Christians knew what consummate allegory in their tradition was, and what was historically true. The later pack of scoundrels took out anything that decreased their power and insisted that the allegories were historical facts. Since the so-called history was spurious the spiritual reality of Christianity was obscured because faith was required of the devotees instead of knowledge that came from experience.
You seem to be in some danger of the same syndrome. The real and the true are not two different words with the same meaning. What is real for one person may not be real for another, or true, in the objective sense for either. Is the energy of your circle true or real? You see how limiting such a question is. There’s a lot more to it than just true or real as if they cover all bases.
The most important figure in the Arthurian stories for Celts like you, in my opinion, is the Lady of the Lake. In the later stories she bestows kingship, makes magical swords, weaves great magic and heals the wounded king.
She was not original to the 12th century Welsh stories because she is a lot older than Celtic Christianity. She is the Irish goddess Brigid and the Welsh Cerridwen and several other Ladies of the Depths. She is the primal Dark Mother Goddess, the Ur-Mother, the matron/patron of all Celtic shamanism.
Let’s have a look at her in shape-shifter mode. She turns up all over the Arthurian stories and not merely as one person. In most of the early stories her name is Morgan or Morgaine. The later French material that introduces Lancelot also calls her Elaine and Vivianne.
In her twin aspects as Morgan Le Fay, she is first of all the enchantress who seduces Arthur for her long range plans and thus arranges for his downfall. Fay, sometimes spelled Fey comes from the Old English Fae. It means Fairie: one from the enchanted realm. Later on she is the one who takes him away at the end to be healed.
As Lady of the Lake she holds out Excalibur for Arthur when the sword he drew from the stone is broken in battle, and Myrddyn or Merlin suggests that it is time to get a new and unbreakable magickal sword.
Please note that in spite of all the movies and pictures you have seen, the old stories say that the sword drawn from the stone was Merlin’s magickal trick to ensure Arthur’s rise to the throne. A sword drawn from a stone was the sign of Sovereignty. That sword was not Excalibur.
Morgaine as the Lady Vivianne learns magick from Merlyn and imprisons him in a tree, and not just any old tree as I shall mention later, if I remember. In the cross tradition version as Nimue she shuts him up in a crystal prison after taking all his magick from him.
This story is important because of the crystal and what it means in magick. The famous Mary Stewart books cover this part of the story in a standard fashion but the Forever King points out the more occult meaning of the situation, showing how Myrddyn was actually shielded from harm by her borrowing his magick for agreed purposes while she remained incarnate.
There’s a great many strands there that I hope to weave together for you so try to keep them in mind. As Elaine she is the mother of Galahad the Grail knight. As Morgan she is the mother of Mordred, Arthur’s son, who brings about the downfall of the Round Table.
Note the power of the words in these names. They touch old roots in every English speaking person. Anyone can guess that Mordred is a bad guy just by knowing his name. It’s like Tolkien’s choice of Mordor for the realm of the evil one. Your subconscious mind and memory recognizes the echo of the Old English word for murder.
The Lady also turns up in places as the Guardian of the Grail. The problem for the Christians who tried to put these stories together was that she was good and evil at the same time. From the Christian concept that God is all good, whatever the evidence to the contrary, she could not be both good and evil, so she splintered into many parts and roles in the Christianized versions.
The explanation of all these apparent contradictions as I mentioned a few moments ago is that she is actually much older than the Arthur stories. She is Brigid and Cerridwen.
In Ireland, and in the rest of pre-Roman Britain there was a trinity of goddesses, Brigantis or Brigid. Brigid was the goddess of poetry, and her two sisters, with the same name were goddesses of healing and smithcraft.
You may look upon the three as rather like the Three Fates of the Greeks, or the Three Norns of the Norse shamans. The Anglo-Saxons had the Three Wyrd Sisters who wove the web of Wyrd. This Three in One business was not an unique Christian innovation, nor was it difficult for pagans to understand.
When the Romans in Britain finally encountered Brigid they recognized her at once. They knew her as Minerva, the bestower of Sovereignty, wisdom and skill in crafts. Brigid as goddess of poetry and song was intimately connected with Celtic shamanism because poets, shamans and magick were all intimately related. The very word enchant contains the word chant, to do with poetry, songs and spells.
The Irish word for poet was anciently used to mean prophet. In all the shamanic cultures, including the Celtic, the shaman receives incantations during his or her trance state that are useful to the community being served.
The shamans of Siberia wore cloaks made of feathers to symbolize the flight they took into the spirit world that they took during their magickal work. The Irish shamans did exactly the same.
Now, Brigid was the goddess of poetry, and therefore of incantation and therefore of the trance state. Poets would start their recitations with an invocation to Brigid who was, in their view, the entity creating the song through the medium of the body and mind of the bard.
There was nothing of the ego about such work. Brigid got all the credit, just as the ancient alchemists would sign their work with the name of the inspirer of it, Hermes. The copyright involved modern readers of such works would instantly call it forgery instead of recognizing the humility involved.
Brigid, as you all know is also the goddess of fire, and what crafts involve it. Even after her incredible piece of shape-shifting when the Temple at Kildara became a convent, and the vestal virgins became nuns, the fire was kept alight following the tradition of the goddess Brigid, now called Saint Brigid. When the convent was persecuted the nuns sent the fire to Norway where they understood such things and there it was kept alight until quite recently it was returned to the convent. The flame there has not been extinguished for many, many centuries. The current set of nuns understand what they are doing.
As goddess of the eternal flame Brigid was the goddess of the hearth, as Hestia was for the Greeks. But Brigid was a major deity. A very special fire that concerned Brigid was the fire of the forge. The Yakuts of Siberia have a proverb that the smith and the shaman came from the same nest.
Some Yakut deities initiate their shamans by tempering them as though they were being beaten by a smith and crafted into tempered steel. The archaeological historian Brian Bates relates such an initiation in his magnificent book The Way of Wyrd which is required reading for all Ragnar’s rune students. Through Brigid the shamans and the smiths were connected in the Celtic world.
In an old version of the Arthur stories the sword Excalibur is forged by women in Avalon, the Isle of Apples. A-f-a-l in Welsh is pronounced aval and means apple.
Brigid also had an apple orchard, and her bees would come to it from the cardinal directions to take the special nectar back to the world of men.
Let’s note in passing, just in case I don’t get all this put together that it was the sword that gave Arthur sovereignty over the kingdom. The sword from the stone made him the worldly king and Excalibur from the Lady made him Lord of Logres, the name of the spiritual Britain.
It was the apple in the common version of the Adam and Eve legend that gave them knowledge of good and evil, wisdom and consciousness and made it impossible for them to remain as part of the plant and animal specimens in Yahweh’s little private zoo in Eden.
I made many buttons for rebels like yourselves that said “Eve Chose Consciousness.” Just remember that it was women who forged the magick sword, it was women to whom the knights went for their final training in ruthlessness and hand to hand combat, and it was the woman Eve, who presented the sword of the discriminating consciousness to a rather dim male representative of the up and coming human race.
In the Biblical story there is absolutely no mention of what the fruit of the Tree actually was. It is the common wisdom that called it an apple. Maybe from the story of Brigid and her apples of wisdom. Remember the Greek story of the golden apples. You all know that if an apple is cut crosswise that the center shows a pentagram, a magickal symbol used by all those of the Older Religion. Even the first Christians used it as a symbol of the five wounds of Christ. It was the Inquisition and their lies that made it anathema to unthinking Christians.
So we may now be used to the concept that Excalibur was the Inner Realm symbol of the Sovereignty of Arthur, on loan to him while he was worthy of it, and liable to be returned to the Lady of the Lake. She is the goddess of the shadow of Sovereignty, the mother of kings and heroes. She is both hideous (evil) and beautiful (good), and as an enchantress gives good and bad things sometimes simultaneously, rather like our jokes that begin I’ve got good news and bad news. Which do you want to hear first? The Wise ones knew that every front has a back, and the bigger the front, the bigger the back.
Brigid like the Lady of the Lake was the guardian of sacred wells, and just as a drink from the well of Brigid turned an ordinary man into a king, so a drink from the Welsh goddess Cerridwen, the Lady of Lake Tegid, turned an ordinary man into a bard.
Most of you are Celts and know this story in detail so I’ll just summarize for the others. Cerridwen lives by the lake Tegid and has a son Morfran, which in Welsh means Big Crow. He is so ugly that Cerridwen knows that he isn’t going to make it in noble society unless he has extraordinary talents, such as supernatural wisdom and the gift of prophecy.
So she brews an elixir to produce this effect and the boy Gwion looks after it for the magickal year and a day, and gets the benefit of it by accident. Cerridwen is furious and goes for him. Using his new powers he changes into a hare and she into a greyhound and they have a spectacular shape changing contest involving earth, air, and water until he finally becomes a grain of wheat in a huge pile of wheat and she becomes a hen and eats just that one grain.
The baby she eventually bears is the transformed Gwion. She can’t bring herself to kill him after bearing him for the sacred nine months so she sets him afloat in a coracle. This is a circular boat made of woven grass and twigs. They are still used in Wales because they are so light that a man can carry them any distance to get to his fishing waters. They are the devil to control for beginners who just go round and round in circles.
Anyway, the coracle gets caught on a salmon weir and the boy is rescued by a man whose bad luck is proverbial among the tribe. But the amazing boy changes all that and grows up to become Taliesin of the Radiant Brow, a subtle way of saying that his third eye was blazing with light. He was the greatest of Welsh bards and a teacher of Myrddyn.
Note that he was thrice born…once from the cauldron, once from the womb of the goddess and once from the coracle. The old stories of Myrddyn sometimes call him the thrice born. This succession of birth, death, rebirth is typical of shamanic initiations and of the initiations of all the Ancient Mystery Schools, including the one at Bethany run by the Master Jesus, I might add.
The original gospel story of Lazarus being raised from the dead has recently been shown to have been an account of an initiation. The current version was intentionally garbled after non initiates found out about the incident.
Shapeshifting is a necessary skill for the shamanic healer, or for the Merlins and Taliesins of the magickal world. They often have to travel to far distant inner worlds to do their work. This is where a knowledge of a person’s guardian animal is important. The animals provide the necessary spirit, body and skill for the shaman to use to get to the inner destination.
Many a shaman has used his eagle or hawk body to go vast distances at great speed. Sometimes a spirit horse was helpful. The animal doesn’t have to be huge or strong, a small but very wise owl would be a helpful companion on a journey where wit and wisdom were essential. Check out some of the animals in the myths, fairy stories and Grail encounters, and think twice.
Taliesin became a bard, a prophet as well as a magician. The two went together in Celtic shamanism. Myrddyn was as famous for his prophecies as for his magickal powers. I used to live in Wales, near Carmathen, whose name is the Anglicised version of Caer Myrddyn. Caer means a fortified town. The name says that it belonged to Myrddyn.
When I was there the town center had an old oak tree. It was embedded in concrete and strengthened with steel girders because Myrddyn once said that when that tree fell so would the town. The people who live there know about Myrddyn’s other prophecies and they aren’t taking any chances.
The new man, magician or prophet was symbolic of the new life produced by the initiation of the Cauldron or the Grail. It’s all part of the same awareness of the meaning of initiation.
In the old Welsh poem Preiddeu Annwfn it is Arthur himself who goes into the underworld, Annwfn, to retrieve the magic cauldron which like the Grail is an inexhaustible generator of food.
The Irish of course have an equivalent story about the same process as happened to Taliesin. Demne is a boy who becomes apprentice to a wizard bard. He is sent to fish for a magickal salmon who eats magickal hazel nuts that fall into a magic pool. The wizard wants it because anyone who eats that salmon will acquire great wisdom.
Demne catches the fish and is cooking it for the wizard when some fat spits out from the roast and he sucks it from his thumb. Immediately he gets all the benefit of the magick. The Irish magician doesn’t get all bent out of shape about it though and gives Demne a new name in true initiatory fashion. He calls him Fionn which by a standard Gaelic consonant shift is the equivalent of Gwion in Welsh.
By my roaming all over the map like this I hope it is becoming clear to you that the Arthurian stories contain within them all sorts of jewels that seem to be haphazardly scattered over the crown, so to speak.
The sacred wells and waters of Brigid which have healing powers have their analogue in the Chalice Well at Glastonbury and other sacred wells all over Britain. Given that the Grail was once the Cauldron it is clear that a drink from the Grail would heal the sick or revive the dead as the Cauldron of Cerridwen did.
Cerridwen lives by a lake and is the keeper of the Cauldron of Rebirth. Morgan, also a Lady of the Lake, takes the dying Arthur to Avalon, the garden of Brigid.
Brigid’s Temple in Kildara is called the Temple of the Oak. This is not just a nice name. The Oak for the Celts was the World Tree, just as Yggdrasil, the World Ash was the World Tree for the Norse. The word derwin means oak tree in Welsh and the priest of the oak was derwydd, meaning druid or wizard. The oak is the tree most often struck by lightning in Britain and so became the symbol of the flash of inspiration that inspired the bards, prophets and magicians.
In Saxon England the Midsummer fires were filled with oak leaves because they have an hallucinatory property that enables the shaman more easily to leave his body on an astral journey.
In many cultures the shaman seems to climb a tree to get into the next world. All we have left of this in our own tradition is the garbled version of it called Jack and the Beanstalk, but it is enough for an initiate.
When the accomplished magician Vivian, another name for the Lady of the Lake, binds Myrddyn into a tree, it could represent an initiation process by a high priestess, concerning the magical World Tree.
The story of Myrddyn being trapped in the Crystal Cave is another initiation story showing that Myrddyn had mastered the Celtic magick and was entering into that of the powerful Northern wizards whose sacred object was the quartz crystal and their mysteries those of its geometry and optical powers.
You can see from this meander how the Lady of the Lake can appear in many different guises and is finally the Lady of the Stars who guides the initiate when she breathes stars over him, or lifts her dark cloak and shows the path to the stars that then became visible. She did that for the bard Taliesin, and does it still for those who follow his lineage today. Her name for such travelers is Arianrhod, meaning Silver Wheel, the name given to the Milky Way by the ancients. The inner meanings of the stories that hover around Arthur and his realm of Logres still have a place in the Celtic magic of today.
Arth means bear in Welsh and the advent of Arthur, the bear cub, is connected to the changes in the sky when Thuban, once the Pole Star in the constellation of Draconis, the Dragon was relegated to a secondary place when our current Polaris became Pole Star in the constellation of the Great Bear. The leader of men in Logres became the Pendragon, the chief dragon. His bard Taliesin stated flatly “My origin is the region of the summer stars.” And in those days that meant the Pleiades, where Arianrhod lived. The stories of the ways in which the stars are involved in the story of Arthur is for another time. But it is a fascinating tale, and still embodied in the mountains of North Wales.
