Seeking the Grail

Healing the Inner Camelot

The king is the land. When the king is sick, so is the land. Only the Grail can heal them both and restore the right ordering of creation.

And so it is in our lives. The king is our soul, the land is our lives, the knights are our strivings. We all live out our own little microcosm of the alchemical Grail quest. Camelot lives in all of us. What our kingdom’s fate will be… well, that is the question, isn’t it?

This is the question of King Arthur and the Round Table, of Excalibur, of Merlin the wanderer. The question of the Grail and the Fisher King and the Sword in the Stone. The question of Camelot. The question of Eden.

The primordial question. The only question.

Is the sickness spreading throughout the land going to bring about our ruin, or will we uproot it and see a new dawn? Will we defeat death?

Do you have the courage to pull the sword from the stone, young boy? Are you willing to face the dragons and traitors lurking within you? Can you break past the threshold of your fears and your ego and step into Mirkwood? Can you descend into hell and look your shadow dead in the eye? Can you bring what you find in those depths back to the world of the living and use it to make the land whole again? And will you do this again, and again, and again?

Who cares what you went through before, how you felt back then, what you feel like you deserve. Did you think the solstice would last forever? That you could rest on your little laurels? No, the wheel is going to turn again and again. You weren’t ready? The dragon comes rampaging anyway. The land will always suffer a new sickness, the king will always suffer a new wound, and if you want to be the hero you will have to heal it over and over again.

The land is only as strong and pure and joyful as the king. You wish for good years, you wish to see the happy times? Then clear your soul of dragons, make safe the roads, do what needs doing. Have you felt it, the ticking clock, the slow dread? You know the sickness within, you know what evil haunts your kingdom, even if you cannot look it in the eye.

Create life or die. That is the lesson of Camelot. What did you think the story of Arthur and Guinevere was all about? A childless marriage, barrenness, infertility. An inability to bring the inner kingdom into harmony, to direct life’s energy into creation. Where there is no harmony, no creation, no flow, that is death.

But this quest feels so impossible. Who can defeat the dragon? Who has ever conquered the rot of sin? Who can escape the grave?

The doom of Camelot is the great tragedy, the primordial tragedy. The doom of all mankind. Unfulfilled promise. Broken hopes. Unrealized potential. The barrenness of life. Visions of what could have been. The same damming curse, plaguing us all, forever and ever. What purpose has man ever had that came to fruition? What has ever gone unmarred? When has Camelot ever been more than a dream?

What do we do? What can we do? It’s all so dammed hopeless, isn’t it? Everything young grows old and and every spring turns to autumn and everything beautiful fades. All of our youthful hopes turn to bitter disappointment.

But there is one thing we can do. The only thing man can do. Seek the Grail.

This is it, our only hope. But what is it? What is the mystery of the Grail?

It is this. We cannot heal ourselves, so we must seek the power that is beyond us. We must seek communion with God. Only by it can we transmute all that was dark and broken within us into shining light. Only it can break the cycle of death and decay. Only communion can take the evil of the soul and turn it to good, making it but a part of the greater tale. The Grail is the cup of Christ.

“O Death, where is thy sting?”

The sickening land must be revitalized, the king must be made whole again. The king must drink from the Grail to heal his wound. The Grail breaks the curse. It fills what was empty, makes fruitful what was barren. To find the Grail is to drink of the living water. Our soul can only overcome the gloaming darkness by communing with the divine light. But how, how can we find this Grail, how do we solve this riddle?

The mystery of the Grail is solved by courage and humility and becoming like a little child. Only those pure in heart like little children may partake. King Arthur wept at the rot that had infected Camelot, that had ruined his innocent dreams, and so must weep at our own sins. The Grail mystery is not solved by raging or fighting or screaming or begging. The soul is made pure through tearful repentance. Those worthy of the Grail are those who know they are not worthy.

Give everything for the Grail. Sacrifice it all. Without the Grail, all the riches in the world are worthless. But with the Grail, the most humble things are worth their weight in gold. Give your very life if need be, follow the king to Avalon. Death holds no terror for those that have sipped from the chalice.

If we can solve the mystery of the Grail, then the Spirit flows through the land and the flowers bloom and the king is healed and the queen bears children.

Then there is Camelot, then there is heaven on Earth.

Then it is spring in Logres.