“In the absence of The King the Warrior becomes a mercenary, the Magician becomes a sophist (able to argue any position and believing in none), and the Lover becomes an addict.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine

Image: King Leoric by Richi Marella

“They began the year with December 25, the day we now celebrate as Christmas; and the very night to which we attach special sanctity they designated by the heathen mothers’ night — a name bestowed, I suspect, on account of the ceremonies they performed while watching this night through.”
― Saint Bede, The Reckoning of Time

Notes: We are somehow supposed to believe that these prior pagan celebrations falling on the exact same day (now shifted over the centuries) as the birth of the Hebrew ‘messiah’ is simply a ‘coincidence’ rather than evidence to suggest the dating of Christmas (by Pope Julius I in the 4th century) was decided upon largely for Machiavellian reasons. The Church decided it would be easier to convert Pagans in Europe through a process of co-opting and gradual assimilation leading them away from Paganism by reinventing their customs as Christian ones.

For more information on ‘Christmas Before Christ’, check out this excellent video by Fortress of Lugh.

Image: Yule Spirits by Sam Flegal

“Pope Gregory I (in 601) laid the church’s strategy out quite plainly. As he wrote to Mellitus, his missionary in England, “[Do] not…stop such ancient pagan festivities…adapt them to the rites of the Church, only changing the reason of them from a heathen to a Christian impulse.”
― David Kyle Johnson, The Myths That Stole Christmas: Seven Misconceptions That hijacked the Holiday

Image: Pope Saint Gregory I by Mattia Preti

“To those Romans December twenty-fifth was the birthday of the sun. They wrote that in gold letters in their calendar. Every year about that time, the middle of winter, the sun was born once more and it was going to put an end to the darkness and misery of winter. So they had a great feast, with presents and dolls for everybody, and the best day of all was December twenty-fifth. That feast, they would tell you, was thousands of years old- before Christ was ever heard of.”
― John G. Jackson, Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth

Image: The Chariot of Apollo or Phoebus-Apollo by Gustave Moreau

"Oh, Greatest Of Kings, indulge me in this friendly Christmas game. Let whichever of your knights is boldest of blood and wildest of heart step forth, take up arms, and try with honor to land a blow against me. Whomsoever nicks me shall lay claim to this, my arm. It's glory and riches shall be thine. But thy champ must bind himself to this. Should he land a blow, then one year and Yuletide hence, he must seek me out yonder, to the Green Chapel six nights to the North. He shall find me there, and bend the knee, and let me strike him in return. Be it a scratch on the cheek, or a cut on the throat, I will return what was given to me, and then in trust and friendship we shall part. Who, then, who is willing to engage with me?"
― Anon, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Image: The Green Knight by Herbert Cole

"When religion becomes artificial, art has a duty to rescue it. Art can show that the symbols which religions would have us believe literally true are actually figurative. Art can idealise those symbols, and so reveal the profound truths they contain."
―Richard Wagner

Image: Parsifal by Jean Delville

“The misleading effect of books like George Orwell's 1984 is to project into the future a state of affairs that already exists.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, 1951

Image: 1984 by Jonathan Burton

“I believe that as we look toward the end of this century (20th), this Grail mystery will become more important in public awareness, becoming identified with the living esoteric body of the Earth planet itself.”
― Adam McLean, Alchemical Transmutation in History and Symbol, At the Table of the Grail

Image: The Round Table experiences a vision of the Holy Grail by Évrard d'Espinques (c. 1475)

Additional notes on Gnosticism and the Mystery of the Grail

Gnosticism and the Mystery of the Grail

The Grail mystery is often falsely placed inside a heavily Christianised framework. However, the myth itself can be said to have been Christianised rather than beginning as a Christian myth. Julius Evola in his book ‘The Mystery of the Grail’ is clear that The Grail is not a Christian story but a Hyperborean mystery that deals with an initiatory rite.

The Grail myth has been influenced by a range of sources; Christian legend (at least in the later period), Celtic folklore and the eleventh book of Apuleius's Metamorphosis (which describes ‘the opening of the way’ in the Isis Mystery), as well as the Corpus Hermeticum. The myths cited origins range from the Western world to the Islamic and Persian East.

One thing appears to be certain; the myth of the Grail does not deal with mere fantasies in a purely aesthetic-poetic sense.

Within the myth, it is always men who go off in search of the Grail, because women, by nature, already possess it. Therefore in all versions of the myth women are referred to as carriers of the Grail.

Within Gnosticism, the Grail myth serves a unique purpose removed from the relic-oriented Christianised mythos which frames The Grail as a physical object to seek for in the exterior world. The Gnostic understanding also rejects the Jungian psychological analysis of the myth in which The Grail is simply a psychological state that must be discovered within. Gnosticism while rejecting both of these premises actually fuses these concepts together. The Grail is very much a physical object and a necessary psychological transfiguration is required to encounter it yet it is purely neither one nor the other.

Joseph Campbell said that the Grail Legend presents, “the earliest definition of secular mythology that is today the guiding spiritual force of the European West” (Creative Mythology, p.564). As the West can be said to determine the fate of the global community this also then applies to the entire planet. Given its great importance, I highly recommend you familiarise yourself with this text; I recommend the Wolfram von Eschenbach edition translated by Cyril Edwards.

The Grail is a vast topic that I intend to cover in more detail, hopefully, this serves as a taster to excite the imagination for the new year ahead.

Happy New Year one and all.

ᛣ

“In Wolfram's story of Parzival, the Grail Castle is situated in the Wasteland, la Terre Gaste. This is a powerful metaphor for modern Western culture with its dead-end narcissism, going hand in hand with the wholesale devastation of the natural world. In Where the Wasteland Ends, Theodore Roszak applied the same metaphor in his lucid critique of "how the urban-industrial revolution generated an artificial environment, and what style of politics and consciousness has followed from that environment." Artificial is the operative word here. The Wasteland of the 12th Century was not, of course, the one we are facing today, within and without. In that time and setting, the artificial environment was the lifestyle of the top stratum of the feudal hierarchy, the Nobility.”
― John Lamb Lash, An Alternative History of the Grail

Image: Lohengrin, The Swan Knight by Ernst Fuchs

“The waking share a common world; sleepers meanwhile turn aside, each into a darkness of their own.”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

Image: Consumption by Miko Maciaszek

“Observe the persistence, in mankind’s mythologies, of the legend about a paradise that men had once possessed, the city of Atlantis or the Garden of Eden or some kingdom of perfection, always behind us. The root of that legend exists, not in the past of the race, but in the past of every man. You still retain a sense—not as firm as a memory, but diffused like the pain of hopeless longing—that somewhere in the starting years of your childhood, before you had learned to submit, to absorb the terror of unreason and to doubt the value of your mind, you had known a radiant state of existence, you had known the independence of a rational consciousness facing an open universe. That is the paradise which you have lost, which you seek—which is yours for the taking.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Image: Mercury by Nick Gaetano

“It is undeniable that the political influence of the Church has been harnessed on almost every occasion to be used against the traditionalist worldview, whether by supporting mass migration or providing aid to peoples far beyond our shores. The reason for this is that, at the heart of modern Christianity, the doctrine of universalism has been placed on a pedestal above all other values; and universalism is in actuality simply a euphemism for the total equality for which atheism advocates. It is for this reason that flocking back to our local Church will neither enlighten us nor shield us from the ravages of modernity; it will merely grant legitimacy to another tainted, destructive force and add voices to the deafening chorus demanding more equality, more nothingness.”
― Veiko Hessler

Image: Christ Washing Peter’s Feet by Ford Madox Brown

"Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted upon them from birth through social conditioning. They begin sensing that something is amiss and start looking for answers. Inner knowledge and anomalous outer experiences show them a side of reality others are oblivious to, and so begins their journey of awakening. Each step of the journey is made by following the heart instead of following the crowd and by choosing knowledge over the veils of ignorance."
― Henri Bergson

Image: Divine by Josh Pierce

“You cannot be a hero unless you are prepared to give up everything; there is no ascent to the heights without a prior descent into darkness, no new life without some form of death. Throughout our lives, we all find ourselves in situations in which we come face to face with the unknown, and the myth of the hero shows us how we should behave. We all have to face the final rite of passage, which is death.”
― Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth

Image: Valkyrie and a Dying Hero by Hans Makart

“The Goddess in all her manifestations was the symbol of the unity of all life in Nature. Her power was in water and stone, in tomb and cave, in animals and birds, snakes and fish, hills, trees, and flowers. Hence the holistic and mythopoeic perception of the sacredness and mystery of all there is on Earth.”
― Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess

Notes: Marija Gimbutas was a Lithuanian archaeologist and anthropologist known for her research into the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of "Old Europe" and for her Kurgan hypothesis, which located the Proto-Indo-European homeland in the Pontic Steppe. Gimbutas also virtually single-handedly recovered the lost goddess-oriented societies of precivilization which provide the prehistorical background of the Sophianic vision.

Image: Goddess Ostara by Helena Nelson

"The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal
society.”
— Aldous Huxley

Image: Sick Mood at Sunset, Despair by Edvard Munch

“Because the unity of life is the central phenomenon of the situation of psychic origination, every disturbance of this unity – the felling of a tree, the killing or eating of an animal, and so on – must be compensated by a ritual offering, a sacrifice. For early man all growth and development depend on man’s sacrifice and ritual activity, precisely because man’s living bond with the world and the human group is projected upon nature as a whole.”
― John Neumann

Notes: The meaning of the word ‘sacrifice’ in Latin is ‘to make whole or sacred’ – sacer facere – and this seems to have been interpreted in the sense of restoring to the whole something that has been lost in order to allow life to continue. It’s also interesting to note that the word ‘holy’ and ‘whole’ both derive from the same PIE root, *kailo- (whole, uninjured). Therefore in its original sense ‘holy’ and ‘holiness’ literally meant to be ‘whole’.

Image: Druids Cutting the Mistletoe on the Sixth Day of the Moon by Henri Paul Motte

“The gigantic stones of the Megalithic culture strewn across Europe stand as a visibly unanswered question in any attempt to reach back into the past with a modern mind. As [Mircea] Eliade observed, ‘Desacralization pervades the entire experience of the nonreligious man of modern societies’, and this makes it increasingly difficult for us to ‘rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man in the archaic societies’. What we have lost is their understanding that the life of the cosmos and the life of humanity are one life. So we can approach the intention of these people only by trying to see through their eyes: experiencing the ground they walked on and the air they breathed as belonging to a world that was wholly sacred. Even now, few people can look upon stones like those of Callanish for example, without being deeply moved by them.”
― Anne Baring, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image

Image: The Lights of Lewis by Artisan Felt Studio

“When we look to the character of Robin Hood, we see an archetypal woodsman who lives by an ancient primal code of honour. Rather than confronting the ruling class on their turf, he chooses to step outside of their matrix all together. He removes himself from economic dependence on the ruling class by living independently off the land, doubling down on the Teutonic ethnic traditional way of life. But he is not a lone-wolf, as it were. His ‘band of merry men’ remind us that while many of us today feel alone, we are not. There are others who see the tyranny, the social engineering, and who oppose it. Therefore we, too, can step outside of the matrix of these things and create our own communities based on shared values. We too, can take from the rich to feed the poor by way of choosing how we spend our own coin. If we begin to see our brethren as ‘folk’ once again, we can turn our eyes upon our own community building."
― Carolyn Emerick, Nothing New Under the Sun

Image: Robin Hood and his Merry Men by N.C Wyeth

“If you put fleas in a shallow container they jump out. But if you put a lid on the container for just a short time, they hit the lid trying to escape and learn quickly not to jump so high. They give up their quest for freedom. After the lid is removed, the fleas remain imprisoned by their own self policing. So it is with life. Most of us let our own fears or the impositions of others imprison us in a world of low expectations.”
― John Taylor Gatto

Image: Confined by Lyndsey Vu