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Waking from the Abrahamic Nightmare

You live in the City of the Goddess, a world wholly pagan. One night, you fall asleep. When you awake next morning, you find yourself instead in a place entirely Christian, the Lady's temples desecrated.

One day, the West fell asleep and awoke to find itself changed. Into this world poet Robert Graves was born; but, sensing from the beginning that something was missing, he set out on a quest to find it: the Quest for the Goddess.

(One thinks of the Quest for the Holy Grail: Christendom's ongoing and persistent sense that, deep in its core, something vital and utterly intrinsic is lacking. The Quest for the Holy Grail is none other than the Quest for the Divine Feminine, what Goethe called die Ewig Weibliche, “the Eternal Womanly.”)

Graves tells the tale of his spiritual quest in In Dedication, the poem which (in later editions) prefaces his magnum opus The White Goddess. (The reader will not fail to note the title's multiple applications: the poet's dedication both to his quest and to its goal, the book's dedication to that selfsame Muse.) In it, he presents himself as a spiritual explorer in the mold of “19^th” century Britain's world explorers. As Graves sees it, he too is exploring a New World:

It was a virtue not to stay,

To go my headstrong and heroic way

Seeking her out at the volcano's head,

Among pack ice, or where the track had faded

Beyond the cavern of the seven sleepers:

Whose broad high brow was white as any leper's,

Whose eyes were blue, with rowan-berry lips,

With hair curled honey-colored to white hips.

Since knowledge of the Goddess has been lost in the West, he searches the rest of the world for her: from the tropics (“at the volcano's head”) to the poles (“among pack ice”). His quest leads him not only through place, but also time: “beyond the cavern of the seven sleepers.” To find the Goddess, he travels into the deep past, before the beginning of the West's Abrahamic nightmare.

A lesson that I keep on learning in life is that even the worst things usually have some sort of benefit to be wrestled from them with skill, patience, grace, or often luck. One such blessing was my ability to fulfill an adulthood-long dream to attend some of the Glastonbury Goddess Conference this year. Due to social distancing and travel restrictions and all, this was one of many annual events that transitioned to fully virtual. Sure, not everything works as well. Yet, some things work even better. I sat in (zoom) circles with women and men from Germany, Sweden, Portugal, Belgium, Australia, England (of course) and more to discuss everything from the loss of children to owning our power--writing sacred stories and manifesting peace. Of course, it awakened my own past meanderings through my internal isle of Avalon, where (doubly of course) everything is vegan like me! Here's the apple isle as I see it. If you read to the end, you will see that I've solved the riddle of that infamous quest, "Who does the Grail serve, and what is its purpose?" Read ahead at your peril. (JK there's no peril).

The good news: there's finally a good (i.e. historically trustworthy) book about the Grail.

The bad news: if you're looking for deep pagan mysteries, there aren't any. The Grail is entirely a product of the Christian imagination.

To put it differently: in the seething cauldron that is the human imagination, Grail lore is a stew made from Christian ingredients, with only the merest hint of pagan seasoning.

In medievalist Richard Barber's masterful The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief, Barber traces the origin of the Grail, term and motif, from its entirely orthodox Christian beginnings in late 12^th century northern France to its transubstantiation into a secular (and, latterly, new pagan) symbol in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. It's a fascinating ride.

Arthurian tales tell us of the Holy Grail, not the cup of Christ, but a sacred vessel, a symbol of the goddess at the heart of the land, the sacred womb which sits in the centre of Annwfn- ‘the deep place’ of Welsh myth.  In earlier tales it was a cauldron as mentioned in Preiddeu Annwn ‘The spoils of Annwn’, a poem by Taliesin as a great vessel at the heart of the land which was ’kindled’ by the breath of nine maidens, or priestesses. Here we find the sacred source, the well of Segais in Irish myth, the place where life and wisdom spring eternal and renewed. A sacred place at the centre of things.

 (Rant Alert)

Och, have we all been brain-raped by Sigmund Freud?

Has our worldview become so simplistically sexualized that we've lost the ability to see the plain sense of things?

As pagan dogmas go, it doesn't get much more dogmatic.

Cauldron = female. Cunny. Womb.

Period.

 As a quick glance at mythology demonstrates, the ancestors knew a rather more nuanced world.