As I have done before with other books I give here a modified extract of the first few pages of my book The Grail Mystery, which is published today by Lulu Books. Just go to www.Lulu.com as usual and put 'Douglas Buchanan' in the Search box, or click on “Buy this book" on the blog page. Here is the extract:

This magical sentence of Jesus from the Oxyrhynchus papyrus found in the 19th Century, and in the Gospel of Thomas, found in 1947, seems to resonate in some deep inner place with every seeker, whatever their path. The truth it conveys is so much greater than the words, that both simple and learned alike feel it like a blow to the heart.

Among those who look inwardly for the eternal reality, the Grail legends and traditions have a similar effect. No matter whether the Grail appears in the story as a platter, a chalice, a stone, or a book, the same inner resonance occurs. If Arthur is involved it makes no difference whether he is buried in Glastonbury or in Scotland, whether he was a sixth century king who fought along Hadrian’s Wall or a ruler over Wales and Cornwall, the history doesn’t seem to matter.
The Fisher King legend has tremendous archetypal power whoever tells the story.

The Castle of the Grail has been placed in many geographical areas from Scotland to the Pyrenees, as well as in the inner landscape of the Quester.

The flood of books that has recently appeared along the lines of The Mists of Avalon or The Forever King continue the tradition of Malory and his predecessors in energizing again whatever it is that makes a Grail enthusiast need to read the next book, the new theory, the deeper explanation of this or that minutiae.

The Celtic contribution to the legend has fervent advocates and the Knights Templar/Shroud of Turin/Cathar connections have taken the story in modern times back to the Languedoc region of France where Joseph of Arimethea and the Magdalene planted the seed from which this wonderful plant has grown, with every country claiming it to be a native and every magical tradition finding inspiration in it.

The SangReal as the pun SangReale, the Royal Blood, is a myth of archetypal power that sustained monarchs throughout European history. The divine right of kings, and the power that a king who is willingly sacrificed gives to his land, has been exemplified in British history from the ritual slaying of the Norman king William Rufus in the New Forest, to the execution of Charles 1st, and France has the Merovingian connection and the sacrifice of the king substitute in the person of the Maid of Orleans.

The British, French, and German esoteric traditions are inseparable from the Celtic mythology and the Mystery of the Grail. One of the greatest influences on the recent British tradition, apart from the four women of the Order of the Golden Dawn, was the magician Dion Fortune and her School of the Inner Light.

Her Mystical Kabbalah is still one of the finest introductions to the subject, and certainly the best written. But even here there was a Celtic influence at work.
Her husband was a magician with the ritual name of Merlin. She was Welsh by birth, and the Welsh seem to be born with an affinity to some misty and distant past. Much of her Inner Light work was based on unpublished, received material tracing the Arthurian legends back to Atlantis. This is clear in her novels such as The Sea Priestess.

Dion Fortune’s received material was also used as a basis for the work of one of her Inner Light initiates, Gareth Knight, another Celt, in his book The Secret Tradition in Arthurian Legend. The power of Knight’s famous works on Tarot and Kabbalah seems to derive from the the same source as the undoubted power of the work of Dion Fortune; from an initiatic connection to the far past.

The extraordinarily successful book, The Mists of Avalon, the Arthur story from the viewpoint of the women in it, was written just as though the author Marion Zimmer Bradley had studied the unpublished papers of Dion Fortune.

Since her success, the bookstores have been filled with books whose titles and contents contain the magical names: Guinevere, Taliesin, Merlin, The Lady of the Lake, Morgan Le Fay, Excalibur, Lancelot and so on. What is it that gives these books their success?

Movies such as The Once and Future King, Merlin and plays such as Camelot have played extensive runs to full houses in sophisticated modern cities. What is the appeal?

Why are people in the computer/atom bomb age interested in mediaeval stories about knights and a Quest for a mythological object?

It is thoughts on this universal appeal of the Grail story, and some experiments in magickal pathworking that form the subject matter of this book.

The basic attraction of the Grail legend seems at first sight to be the human need for a fine story. It seems likely that the Grail legends were too popular for the Church authorities to reject them so, as was common practice, they were turned into tools for teaching the current theology.

Playing with legends of such power, however, is like playing with a double edged sword. Everyone was affected by them, including those who thought to use them for their own ends.

Caesarius of Heisterbach, in his Dialogue on Miracles, tells of a Cistercian abbot who was disgusted at his monks for their inattention and general spacey attitude. He began his lesson with the words “There was once a king called Arthur...” and immediately had the full attention of a totally wide awake audience.

The Grail has never been assimilated into the Christian theology as an article of faith, but hasn’t been denied either. The story seems to pull together far distant times with contemporary events in a way that only a universally true mythology could do.

On my eighth birthday in Britain, during the days of the Great Depression, I was given by six people, independently of each other, six different books of the stories of King Arthur and His Knights of the Table Round. The sheer availability of so many different Arthur books at such a difficult time, and the fact that six different people agreed as to the value of these stories to a young boy, seems significant enough to report it as data.

At that time I was reading my mother’s 1894 edition of Malory's Morte D'Arthur with the Beardsley illustrations and all those wonderful old words, so the birthday presents were used more as resources to illustrate the stories than as sources of the story line itself.

The stories acted as role models of a wonderful code of chivalrous behaviour for both boys and girls, and the power of the story of Arthur and the Quest undoubtedly contributed to Britain’s extraordinary, and apparently irrational, resistance to the forces of darkness symbolized by the Nazi threats, coming at the end of the Depression.

When I went to live in South Wales as an evacuee, the feeling of “any moment now” was palpable. Even in the taverns someone mentioning Arthur the King could produce a respectful pause in the conversations. I lived near Carmarthen town, which was once called Caer Myrddin, the town given to Merlin, Myrddin as he is called in Wales.

Everybody in my village, even the Calvinist Methodists, took for granted that somewhere in the Black Mountains, a few miles away, the Lord Arthur was sleeping in a cave, with his knights, awaiting the summons to return to save the realm. We all knew exactly what to do if we found the cave, what the password was, and how to ring the bell. This was a certainty more real than the ephemeral matters of daily life.

Every market day I was in the town of Llandeilo, and could visit the cave in Dynevor Park where Merlin gave out his prophecies in Spenser’s Fairie Queene (1590).

Myrddin’s Oak was the point from which all directions were given in Carmarthen because everyone knew it. The oak at that time was reinforced with concrete and steel because of Merlin’s prophecy that when the oak fell so would the town. The twentieth century Welsh were not taking any chances with a prophecy from Merlin himself. The Round Table and its folk were like a part of the atmosphere, taken for granted.

When magical investigations took me as a young man to the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea, I found other versions of the story just as firmly embedded in the psyches of the inhabitants. I was shown Merlin’s Tower just off from the town of Peel. I was told about Douglas being the site of one of the twelve great battles of Arthur’s reign. From the top of the mountain Snaefell in the centre of the Island, one can see the kingdoms of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales on a clear day, and the feeling that here was a hub of influence from time immemorial was palpable, even to some tourists.

It was this Island that Gerald Gardner chose to house his Witches’ Museum when the repeal of the Witchcraft Act by the unsuspecting British Parliament in the 50’s opened the way for the Goddess in various forms to crash like a torrent into the unbalanced psyches of Europe, and eventually the States.

Acting as secretary to the director of this museum was one of the greatest magicians in the world: Idries Shah. He is a great scholar, a Prince by inheritance in the Moslem world, a direct descendant of the Prophet, and the Sheikh of a branch of the Sufis. His followers include some of the richest Arab sheiks in the world who would feel honoured to give him anything whatever that he wanted. Yet there he was at the start of the cycle of the empowerment of the feminine consciousness, right on the island that was never conquered by Rome and whose priestesses were famous before the heretics of the Roman Church debarred women officiators at the rites.

Whatever he saw there that caused him to act temporarily in this apparently menial position is a mystery, but the explosion of mythology of the Goddess in every form, aided to an enormous extent by the rebirth of the Witches as children of the Goddess, is a fact and has had a direct and undeniable effect on the treatment that modern writers have given to the women of the Grail story.

It was the Sufis who gave the Mediterranean region the nine foot circle that the ritual magicans use, the words Sabbat and athame, and also the circle dance used by many varieties of Wiccans. When Geraint, the Celtic author of the Gates of Horn Newsletter was asked about the source of the word ‘athame’ he showed that it came from the Arabic for ‘lancet’ or ‘blood letter’ and mentioned the Sufis as the basis for much of the Western magical work.

At about the time Idries Shah was on the Island, I was acting as a temporary interpreter to a group of French students working on farms in England. To my surprise, one of them understood me when I dropped into Welsh as a joke. She was from Brittany and told me that Merlin used to live not far from her home and had been instrumental in laying down the famous megaliths in the area. All the fishermen she knew could communicate with the Welsh fisherman because they still knew enough of one of the oldest of languages to understand each other.

A truck driver, who gave me a lift to Scotland, was sure that Arthur was a Scot and that he lived somewhere around Carlisle.
Everybody seemed to know and claim Arthur, or Merlin as their own, with great respect. And so it is now. Geoffrey Ashe excavates Camelot in Somerset. Geoffrey Russell sees the Tor at Glastonbury as part of a maze that, like the maze of the Minotaur, was part of a religious ritual involving a quest. Visitors to the Abbey at Glastonbury can be shown the place where Arthur and Guinevere were supposedly buried.

The worshippers in the church at Arthuret, which dates back to the year 800, hold a flower procession in honour of Arthur and the death of Merlin from September 12th to the 15th each year. The church is in Carlisle, the old Romano-British city of Luguvallium, founded about the year 75 A.D. It is about 9 miles south of the present Scottish border and almost athwart Hadrian’s Wall. Everyone in the area knows that Carlisle was Camelot. and that Merlin died at the time of the eclipse he forecast would happen in the second week of September. The stained glass windows of the church portray the Knights of the Round Table.

The same certainty and affection for one part or other of the story could be duplicated in Europe, in the Languedoc in the Montségur area in the South of France, visited by Richard Wagner before he wrote Parsifal, taking the name not from the French Perceval, but from the Arabic Fal (fool) and Parsi (pure). It is reported that his direct inspiration for writing Parsifal dated from his seeing the ancient wooden Nanteos Grail supposed to have been brought to the Nanteos mansion in Aberystwyth, North Wales, by the monks of Glastonbury.

The Grail itself has appeared in many forms. In one version of the story it was a cup made from an emerald that Michael knocked from the crown of Lucifer. In another version reported by René Guénon, Seth finds his way back to Eden to fetch some of the Water of Life for his dying father, Adam. An angel with a fiery sword stops him entering but gives him the Grail—a cup which would in future times become the Cup of Sorrows and the Cup of Sacrifice through which would come a new future for humanity.