As Associate Professor of Architecture Bodvar Schjelderup has correctly and very nicely both stated and illustrated, "the intricately complex and undeniably clear connections in evidence between phenomena belonging to different periods in time and to quite distinct cultural traditions can only be explained in terms of a potential insight behind the screens of history, a movement from possibility and chance conditions to consequences and fulfilment in process at a much higher level of survey than that of human genius and skill."
According to ARNOLD MINDELL, The Dreambody in Relationships (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987): "In the global dreambody - (1) The whole is patterned. (2) Each part contains the whole. (3) Each part is related to all other parts causally and non-causally. (4) The whole creates and heals itself. (5) The whole can destroy or make itself ill. (6) The whole has mythical characteristics. (7) The whole has a flip-flop occupation rule. (8) The whole has a human character. (9) The whole is the goal of human development."
Stan Rosenthal concurs, but expresses himself somewhat differently, cf. A New Concept of Self(ISBN 0 906145 04 X), p.19, §7.7.7: "In the 'fully functioning person' the quintessential metaconscious archetypes of the Selbstgestalt perform their rightful function of transcending modal discrimination. They thus integrate subjective, objective and quintessential meanings so that the Selbstgestalt has no need of any proof of its own existence, other than the experience of its functioning as an interactively interdependent aspect of a total situation. This continuing situation is the internalization of the Umwelt into the continuously developing structural pattern and content of the Selbstgestalt, which is the symbiotic and only genuine manifestation of self."
by Joan Chittister - ISBN 0 8245 2503 5 (pages.24-5):
"The Door stands open; the Way is clear - the Choice is yours!"
Thirty-two years ago now, during the weeks immediately prior to my removal from Orbel Street, Battersea, to Kingsmead Road, Streatham Hill, in 1970, and for several weeks thereafter, once each week I shared my understanding of the method of theology with a group of student-nuns then resident at the Maria Assumpta Training College in the buildings in Kensington Square which are now used by Heythrop College and known as the Maria Assumpta Centre.
It was also there that less than four years ago, on Saturday, 16 May 1998, I attended a meeting introduced by Mr Michael Walsh, the then Chairman of the Subcommittee for Church Libraries and Archives Librarian at Heythrop College.
In mid-morning the President of the Pontifical Commission for the Cultural Heritage of the Church, Archbishop Francesco Marchisano, made his own presentation in excellent English.
The Secretary of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, Dr Christopher Kitching, then shared with the meeting some of his own thoughts about the present rôle of Catholic archives.
Mr Bernard Naylor, a Member of the British Library Board and himself Librarian to Southampton University, helpfully discussed the rôle of Catholic libraries.
Lunch came next, to be followed, in the afternoon, by our first dividing into small groups for our own discussions of how we saw the Church in relation to Culture, Archives and Libraries, and we then reported back at a plenary session, which concluded with an open forum.
In the small group I had joined, we explored five questions:
"1. Do you see any practical way in which the Catholic community can provide for the study of Roman Catholicism in this country?
2. Are you concerned about the disappearance abroad of material essential to the study of English Catholicism? If so, what could be done?
3. Is there an argument for the establishment of a central archive/library - such as exists in Scotland?
4. Does the proposal of a nation-wide survey of Catholic archives meet with your approval?
5. Are there ways in which a central committee on Libraries and Archives, as established within the Bishops' conference, could be of assistance to you?"
Your own experience of life, the relative brevity of that meeting and, I believe, even the very wording of those five questions may suffice to clarify that, because the amount of expertise, energy, time and resources available to any researcher are always, perforce, limited, prioritization of one kind or another is not only desirable but even inevitable - otherwise, one gets nowhere. You will, therefore, I hope, readily appreciate that all that follows can be no more than the briefest of summaries of whatever needs to be said about the particular issues I here seek to address.
Although a Roman Catholic, such as I, is not in the ordinary course of events expected to make himself familiar with all the ins and outs of non-Roman-Catholic religious history, today many might feel - and I would certainly be inclined to agree, that the ongoing course of events is, and I believe this is in most respects a good thing, no longer ordinary.
Ten years ago, at 7.30 p.m. on Tuesday, 22 January 1991, I took part in a service that was held in Exeter Cathedral to mark the inauguration of a Devon Ecumenical Council and to witness the official signing by the General Superintendant of the Baptist Union (South Western Area), the Church of England's then Bishop of Exeter, the Chairman of the Methodist Church (Plymouth & Exeter District), the Roman Catholic Bishop of Plymouth, the South West Divisional Commander of the Salvation Army, and the Moderator of the South Western Province of the United Reformed Church of this Ecumenical Covenant:
"We rejoice in our growing partnership of trust as we have shared at a personal level in worship and consultation.
We recognise that we have in common many similar responsibilities, joys, problems and hopes, and that we have much to offer and receive from each other in the rich diversity of our traditions, which complement each other.
We believe that we are being led by the Holy Spirit and that G-d the Father, through our Lord Jesus Christ, is calling us to greater sharing in His mission to the world.
We undertake within the legal framework and procedural requirements and traditional practices of our several denominations:To encourage local co-operation and the setting up of Local Ecumenical Projects wherever appropriate.
To confer together over pastoral appointments and buildings which affect the mission and ministry of the church where we consider the circumstances call for such co-operation.
To act together on social issues wherever need and opportunity arise.
We invite our congregations to support this covenant to which we now commit ourselves, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen."
Max Heindel, author of Freemasonry and Catholicism - an exposition of the Cosmic Facts underlying these two great institutions as determined by their occult investigation (Mount Ecclesia, Oceanside, CA: The Rosicrucian Fellowship, 1931), wrote:
"The term Catholicism as used in this work does not refer to the Roman Catholic Church alone, but Catholic is taken in the sense of Universal, so that the term includes all movements inaugurated by the Sons of Seth, the Priestcraft."
St. Augustine of Hippo had already explicitly stated that the Christian religion we have received I+N Christ Jesus crucified and risen is not a contradiction of, but rather is in some sense identical with the true religion of Adam & Eve. Hence, it is in the best sense truly 'catholic' and not merely "Catholic". Cardinal Ratzinger, moreover, has recently reminded us that G-d's original covenant with our first parents has never been revoked.
Reproduced from K.E. Maltwood, The Enchantments of Britain (1944).
"Few can doubt," writes Mrs. Maltwood (op.cit., p.91), "that here in Somerset is indeed 'the first Church of Britain', as has so often been stated but never properly understood, and at the same time 'a Heavenly Sanctuary on Earth'… J.F. Alberts remarks in regard to this zodiacal circle - 'It has been said that the Church of England is the oldest religion in the world. This may be one of those strange occult sayings that somehow preserves itself in spite of its apparent contradiction. That there is a church in England that is the oldest in the world could be possible, for "church" comes from the same root as does "circle" - circe, which we find in several languages'."
The Glastonbury Zodiac, which Queen Elizabeth I's Astrologer Doctor John Dee already knew about, was painstakingly researched in detail early in the last century by Katherine Maltwood and again, towards its close, by Mary Caine, herself a Druid, who has also researched a very similar Zodiac at Kingston. There are also several others, and all of these are, I suggest, intrinsic elements in our human family's potentially infinite Catholic heritage (and cf. Pius XII, Haurietis Aquas); certainly, when Hubert & Jan van Eyck painted L'Agneau Mystique, which is now regarded as the most valuable painting on Earth, for 6 May 1432, they were not only evidently well acquainted with the mysteries of both Glastonbury and Hamdon Hill but also with their relationship to both Jerusalem and the Great Pyramid at Giza as well.
As well as the Glastonbury of history, then, another 'Glastonbury', as Violet Firth has noted, has come down to us, and may, as A. E. Waite also appreciated, quite properly be accorded its own imaginary and symbolic reality as a feature of the twinned mystery-legends of Cup and Grail Violet loved so well - and which De Santillana & Von Dechend refer, as they also do Robin Hood and his famous Arrow, first of all to somewhere within our present Zodiac, so much in evidence not only in the sky above Glastonbury but, in earthly guise, also in each of its near London New Jerusalem fields so beloved of William Blake - and from time immemorial a feature of mystic Albion's perennial hymn of silent praise to G-d Most High.
CHRISTOPHER E. STREET has now brought out a second and enlarged edition of Earthstars - The Visionary Landscape: Part One, London - City of Revelation (Hermitage Publishing, 2000). Although the first paperback edition, with its one-word title, has in other respects been superseded by this superbly produced hardback, only that first edition includes John Michell's Foreword about "psychic archæology", the truth of which was also attested to for me by my own Glastonbury experience, as reported above.
Christopher Street provides a photograph of the Parish Church of St. Mary The Virgin, Monken Hadley, which he relates to the poet and mystic, Charles Williams's location of Camelot: "Through Camelot, which is London in Logres, by Paul and Arthur's door" - possibly at Camelot Moat, a mere two miles away, where Street himself once experienced a brief but impressive vision of Isis-Mary as an approximately 60'-tall "white lady" in the skies; others are inclined to associate the possibility of such an occurrence, no matter how precisely it may be explained, with buried megaliths, water and particular times of year. The Christian monks who later came to Monken Hadley may have been continuing a tradition of sacred use for that site which is of much more ancient origin, and St. Martha's Convent-School is well located.
Notwithstanding my own preference for brevity, tidiness and simplicity, I have long been aware of the correctness of Sigmund Freud's dictum to the effect that, even in our quest for simplicity, honesty and integrity, the situation actually existing and the circumstances actually prevailing will always compel us, eventually even if only very reluctantly, to accept at least seeming complexity. Without much patience, no good results.
Professor Robert Eisenman, Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies and Director of the Institute for the Study of Judeo-Christian Origins at California State University, says: " 'Joseph of Arimathea' is another name with no historical substance whatsoever, and the place his sobriquet is supposed to represent has never been identified." (James, the Brother of Jesus, ISBN 1-84293-026-5; Watkins, 2002, p.456.)
Eisenman's richly documented and fascinating study is, however, methodologically flawed from the outset by its author's failure to appreciate that in those days verbal links based on homophony were often held to be more meaningful than etymological relationships, and by his notable tendency to subordinate oral history and authentic folk-tradition to whatever fragments of 'knowledge' may be gleaned from surviving literary and other documentary sources. It is, I feel, particularly in respect of these latter that Dom Anselm Atkins famously remarked, in reference to 'the deposit of Faith' -
"A synonym for 'deposit' is 'sediment'."…
In the 4th century Bishop Clement of Alexandria recommended: "Even if they should say something true, one who loves the truth should not, even so, agree with them. For not all true things are the truth, nor should that truth, which seems true according to human opinions, be preferred to the true truth, that according to the Faith." Although Clement used the word "say", what he was discussing, it is important to note, was, in fact, "writing". The relationship between Scriptural Truth and historical fact is too important to discuss briefly, and needs much fuller treatment than there is space for here.
I emphatically agree with Roger Scruton (An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture, London: Duckworth, 1998), p.2:
"The high culture of our civilization contains knowledge which is far more significant than anything that can be absorbed from the channels of popular communication. This is a hard belief to justify, and a harder one to live with; indeed, it has nothing to recommend it apart from its truth."
In the words of the one time Prebendary of Wells Cathedral & Rural Dean of Taunton (1903-1927), D. J. Pring, M.A., late of Exeter College, Oxford, and an excellent historian: "Whether the Faith was brought to these shores by Eastern traders who had been converted to the Truth, or was disseminated through the influence of Christian soldiers in the Roman Legions, or was brought to Britain directly through the teaching of Christian missionaries, or in part by all these means, cannot now be ascertained." (op.cit., p.2.)
Reverend C. L. Marsons writes (Glastonbury - The Historic Guide to the "English Jerusalem", London: George Gregory, 1909, pp. 7-10):
Even if St. Paul & Simon Zelotes did visit Joseph of Arimathæa in what is now Glastonbury, his was no more than "a rushlight mission" surrounded by darkness… The life-style of those disciples of The Lord in that area then, persons whom we in retrospect may identify as 'Christians' or 'Celtic Christians' or 'Pelagians', like that of Pelagius (Morgan) himself, would have been condemned by the urbanely cultivated but pastorally (in the root sense of that term) ignorant St. Augustine as "heretical" because "Pelagian" because, as Marson expresses it, they "denied heredity and the social nexus" - obviously, without ever having or needing any such concepts… When St Patrick arrived in Glastonbury he found only twelve orthodox Catholics in residence there.
William of Malmesbury, whose account dates back only to 1120, and whose "Glastonbury" (or rather, Glastonia) may never have been in Somerset at all, alleges that Joseph of Arimathea died "on July 27th, AD 82."
Yet already in 1520 R. Pynson's Life of Joseph of Arimathea had reproduced for us the text of the apocryphal Testament of Nicodemus - the same Nicodemus who had come to Jesus "by night" and who had then, later, provided the tomb for his burial.
According to this account, Mary, after the death of Jesus, lived with Joseph of Arimathea for fifteen years, and it was only after the completion of her earthly life that Joseph was commissioned by the Apostle Philip to head a delegation to Britain, Mary Magdalene and her son Josephenes being the only ones among its other twelve members who were, strictly speaking, of the Sang Réal (the so called Holy Grail being, in this context, certain specific persons - and not the well known "Nanteos cup").
This is said to have happened in AD 69, just before the Jewish uprising in AD 70 and the Romans' consequent sacking of the Jerusalem Temple.
Confirmation of the credence that was once given to this particular version of the legend may be found in the details of a story that is recounted on a stained-glass window in the Church of the Holy Cross in Bordeaux, which was founded by Clovis. In this latter account, Joseph and his party arrive in Somerset on Easter eve, 31 years after the death of Jesus.
Yet no signs of any early Christian community's having settled or even been able to settle that early in Glastonbury have ever been found. King Arthur's Glastonia in Wales is now acknowledged to be the real Glastonbury of some of the legends.
The particular "Church founded" in Glastonbury "by Christ Himself" is believed to have been a wattle-and-daub structure, not a community. Some say it was sixty feet in length and twenty-six feet wide."
As Archbishop of Canterbury, Doctor George Carey, when Bishop of Bath & Wells, wrote in October 1990 in his Foreword to F. Vere Hodge's well known Glastonbury Gleanings: "Any visitor to Glastonbury will feel the pull and 'magic' of this special place. Although noted for its legend relating to 'Avalon' and Joseph of Arimathea, the real story of Glastonbury is located in the broken, cast-down Abbey."
Glastonbury in Somerset features on a valuable map based on the information kept in the Venerable English College in Rome which we have already discussed, and which I have also highlighted by making it feature prominently on our Home-Page. Although not there shown, links between Glastonbury, Stonehenge, Avebury and the Cydonia region on Mars are, as we have seen, also highly significant.
But please keep your own feet on the ground. Lady Florence Caroline Mathilde Antrobus reports that on 19 April 1904 Mr. Justice Farrell gave judgment in favour of her husband, the then owner of the land on which Stonehenge still stands, and against the Ministry of Works and Sir Flinders Petrie in the High Court (Chancery Division, 1904/A/No.335) in a case about the public's then mistakenly alleged right of access to Stonehenge.
Mr. Farrell's obverved that the Ministry and Sir Flinders ought never to have introduced that case at all; in his judgment, a footpath simply leading to a known designated spot is never a "right of way" through it. Keep that in mind.
Ecclesial disputes about episcopal jurisdiction at Glastonbury are unlikely to arise, I think, since the deceased Avalonian author, Violet Firth, and the one time Prebendary of Wells Cathedral & Rural Dean of Taunton (1903-1927), D. J. Pring, M.A., late of Exeter College, Oxford, wisely as well as learnedly arrived at their own conclusions, which still stand.
Reverend Lionel Smithett Lewis's often reprinted St. Joseph of Arimathea at Glastonbury or the Apostolic Church of Britain is a convenient summary of traditional legends. I refer here to a 1964 reprint of the 7th and much enlarged 1955 edition; some earlier editions were better illustrated, and more recent editions are also available. Several legendary authorities mention Joseph as coming to what is now Glastonbury and as bringing Christianity with him, but not a single one of these ever refers to Joseph as a bishop, let alone a bishop "of Glastonbury".
The Greek Church commemorates the martyrdom in Britain of Jesus's disciple, St. Simon Zelotes, on 10 May, A.D. 44. Cardinal Baronius agrees with that date, and Hippolytus, who was born about A.D. 160, listed this St. Simon as "Bishop of the Britons." The claim behind all this is that Christianity reached the West Country and, specifically, what is now Glastonbury in A.D. 37, i.e., before St. Peter first arrived in Rome where, according to this account, Christians from Britain made him welcome.
Hence, of course, no bishop today tracing back his own apostolic succession merely to St. Peter could thereby establish any title to being a bishop "of Glastonbury" as an "ancient see".
In those far off days, what is now Glastonbury was no more than a very muddy lake village; it might indeed, at least in the winter months, have been "a sea", scarcely, however, "a see"! If St. Simon was the "Bishop of the Britons", he will have been very much itinerant, without fixed abode - certainly none in Glastonbury.
According to Smithett Lewis: "It seems that our early British Church was founded by St. Joseph of Arimathea, that then St. Simon Zelotes the Apostle came, and was martyred, and then St. Paul sent Aristobulus, said to be the brother of St. Barnabas - and thought by some to be of the family of Herod - to be our first Bishop, and that he, too, was martyred." (p.26). Here, clearly, by "first" is meant "first after the Apostle" - the unavoidable implication being that Joseph of Arimathea, if, indeed, he ever existed, was neither.
In 1996, pursuant to a concession granted towards the end of the nineteenth century to the English Benedictines by the Holy See, Glastonbury had its own titular Abbot. He wasn't a bishop, but a monk of Downside without jurisdiction, viz., the Right Reverend Dom Aelred Watkin, M.A., F.S.A., F.R.Hist.S., F.R.S.A. His use of a coat-of-arms, if any he bore, would not appear to lie within the scope of the Papal Secretariat of State Directive n.364118 of 7 January 1956, since paragraph 5 of the relevant Memorandum leaves all such determinations to "local usage and the internal Constitutions of each Order," but the schedule of insignia attached to the Earl Marshal and Hereditary Marshal of England, the Duke of Norfolk's related Warrant, signed and sealed on 17 July 1967, assigns to Abbots: above the arms, a mitre, or a black hat having three tassels pendent on either side, and behind the arms, a golden crozier either in pale or in bend. Titular abbots are, however, not individually mentioned in the schedule.
There is no Anglican Abbot of Glastonbury, and the only Metropolitan of Glastonbury mentioned in the 1996-97 edition of the UK Christian Handbook is His Grace Abba Seraphim of the Orthodox Church of the British Isles (Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate). His office, far from being "ancient" dates back only to 1866.
Sensitively concerned by present circumstances and keenly aware of the urgent pastoral necessities of our rapidly changing world, I am pleased to have been able to share at least some relevant information here. Face-to-face discussions and Internet chat-rooms can also help, as may radio and television. Love, it is clear to me, is as I have already quoted Roger Scrutton as pointing out, always the question. As regards answers, naturally it is no part of my task to arrive at your conclusions; I do, however, emphatically recommend that you read what Adrian Gilbert, Alan Wilson and Baram Blackett have to say about King Arthur (I & II) in history, as distinct from legend, in their The Holy Kingdom (Corgi Books, 1999).
In the Symposium, sections 201-12, Plato (429-347 B.C.) reports his teacher Socrates as having had Diotima of Mantineia…
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