I4 § The Land of the Sun
A mong the localities, often difficult to identify, which play a part in the legend of the Holy Grail, certain people attach a very special importance to Glastonbury which they consider to be the place where Joseph of Arimathea settled after his arrival in Britain and where, as we shall see, they are inclined to locate many other things. Doubtless, there are more or less questionable assimilations in all this, and some of them imply real confusions; but nevertheless it may be that there are, even in the confusions themselves, one or two justifications which are not without interest from the point of view of 'sacred geography' and of the successive locations of certain traditional centres. This appears to be implicit in the remarkable discoveries described in an anonymous work published recently, [1] some points of which may perhaps call for reservations (for example, the interpretation of place names which are probably of quite recent origin); but the essential part, with the supporting maps, could not be easily dismissed as pure fantasy. At a very remote prehistoric time, Glastonbury and its immediate Somerset surroundings would seem to have constituted an immense 'stellar temple', defined by tracings on the ground of giant figures representing the constellations arranged in a circular pattern which is like an image of the celestial vault projected onto the surface of the earth. A whole combination was there of works which call to mind those of the mound-builders of North America; the natural disposition of rivers and hills could have suggested this plan, which would indicate that the site was not arbitrarily chosen but was selected rather in virtue of a certain 'predetermination'. It is none the less true that in order to complete and perfect the design, 'an art founded on the principles of Geometry' [2] was necessary. If these figures have been preserved in such a way as to be still recognisable today, it is presumably because the monks of Glastonbury, up to the time of the Reformation, carefully maintained them; and this implies that they must have preserved the knowledge of the tradition inherited from their distant predecessors, the Druids, and no doubt still others before them; for if the deductions drawn from the represented positions of the constellations are exact, the origin of these figures dates back almost three thousand years before the Christian era. [3]
In its totality, the circular figure in question is an immense Zodiac which, so
as the author maintains, is the prototype of the Round Table; and in fact, this Table, around which sit twelve principal personages, is well and truly bound up with a representation of the zodiacal cycle. But this does not mean that these personages are nothing other than the constellations, which would be a much too naturalistic interpretation. For the truth is that the constellations themselves are only symbols; and it is also worth recalling that this zodiacal constitution is to be found quite generally in spiritual centres corresponding to diverse traditional forms. [4] Thus, it seems to us very doubtful that all the legends concerning the 'Knights of the Round Table' and the 'quest of the Holy Grail' could be nothing more than a 'dramatised' description of the stellar effigies of Glastonbury and of the topography of that region. But that they correspond to these figures is all the less to be doubted in that this correspondence is quite in conformity with the general laws of symbolism. Nor is it even surprising that this correspondence should be so precise as to be verifiable even in the secondary details of the legend, which, moreover, we do not propose to examine here.
The Zodiac of Glastonbury has several characteristics which, from our point of view, can be considered as marks of its authenticity. First of all, it seems that the sign of the Scales [Libra], is missing. Now, as we have explained elsewhere, [5] the celestial Scales were not always a sign of the Zodiac: at first they were polar, the name having been applied primitively to the Great Bear, or to the Great Bear and Little Bear together-constellations to whose symbolism, by a remarkable coincidence, the name of Arthur is directly attached. It may be admitted that the Glastonbury tracing, at the centre of which the Pole is marked by a serpent's head (which is clearly to be referred back to the 'celestial Dragon'), [6] must be assigned to a period that preceded the transfer of the Scales into the Zodiac. On the other hand, and this is a particularly important consideration, the symbol of the polar Scales is related to the name Tula, given originally to the Hyperborean centre of the Primordial Tradition, that centre of which the 'stellar temple' in question here was doubtless one of those images that were constituted, in the course of time, as seats of spiritual power emanating or derived more or less directly from this same tradition. [7]
On another occasion, [8] in connection with the use of the word 'Syrian' to denote the 'Adamic' language, we mentioned primeval Syria, the name of
which means literally 'the land of the Sun'. Homer speaks of it as an island situated 'beyond Ortygia', which precludes its identification with anything other than Thule or the Hyperborean Tula. 'There' he says, 'are the revolutions of the Sun', an enigmatic expression which naturally can be related to the 'circumpolarity' of these revolutions, but which, at the same time, can also be an allusion to a tracing of the zodiacal cycle on the land itself-which would explain why such a design had been reproduced in a region destined to be an image of this centre. We touch here upon the explanation of those confusions mentioned at the outset, for they may well have resulted, as it were in the normal course of things, from treating the image of the centre as if it were the original centre itself; and in particular there would seem to be a confusion of this very kind in the identification of Glastonbury with the isle of Avalon. [9] Such an identification is indeed incompatible with the fact that this island is always considered as an inaccessible place; and it also contradicts the much more plausible opinion that sees, in the same region of Somerset, the 'Kingdom of Logres' which is, in fact, said to be situated in Great Britain. This 'Kingdom of Logres', which would have been regarded as a sacred territory, may well have taken its name from the Celtic Lug, which evokes both the idea of 'Word' and that of 'Light'. As to the name Avalon, it is clearly identical with that of Ablun or Belen, that is, of the Celtic and Hyperborean Apollo, [10] so that the Isle of Avalon is yet another designation of the 'solar land', which at a certain time was transported symbolically from the North to the West, in correspondence with one of the chief changes that have occurred in the different traditional forms in the course of our Mahā-yuga. [11]
These considerations lead us to others that are perhaps still more strange: an idea that seems at first inexplicable is that of attributing the origin of the Glastonbury Zodiac to the Phoenicians. It is true that we are in the habit of giving them the credit for many more or less hypothetical things, but the very affirmation of their existence at such a remote time appears to us still more questionable. None the less, the Phoenicians inhabited the 'historical' Syria. Could the name of the people have undergone the same transfer as that of the country itself? What makes us think so is its connection with
the symbolism of the Phoenix. In fact, according to Josephus, the capital of the primaeval Syria was Heliopolis, the 'City of the Sun', the name of which was later given to the Egyptian city of On; and it is to the first Heliopolis, not to that of Egypt, that the cyclical symbolism of the Phoenix and its rebirths must really be related. According to Diodorus of Sicily, one of the sons of Helios or of the sun, Actis by name, founded the city of Heliopolis; and it happens that this name Actis exists as a place name in the neighborhood of Glastonbury, in conditions which place it in precise relation with the Phoenix, into which according to other allusions this 'prince of Heliopolis' had himself been transformed. Naturally, the author, misled by the multiple and successive applications of the same names, believed that it was the Egyptian Heliopolis that was involved here, just as he believed that he could speak literally of the historical Phoenicians, which is all the more excusable in that the ancients of classical times had already made mistakes of the same sort often enough. Only the knowledge of the real Hyperborean origin of these traditions, which he seems not to suspect, makes it possible to re-establish the real meaning of all these designations.
In the Zodiac of Glastonbury, the sign of Aquarius or the Water-bearer is represented in a rather unexpected way by a bird in which the author rightly thinks that he recognises the Phoenix; this bird carries an object which is none other than the 'cup of immortality', the Grail itself, and the comparison which is made with the Hindu Garuda is certainly quite right. [12] On the other hand, according to an Arab tradition, the Rukh or Phoenix never comes to rest on the earth at any point other than on the mountain Qäf, which is the polar mountain; and in the Hindu and Persian traditions it is from this same 'polar mountain' (also designated by other names) that soma [13] comes, soma which is identical with amrita or 'ambrosia', the draught or food of immortality. [14]
There is also the figure of another bird which is more difficult to interpret exactly, and which perhaps takes the place of the sign of the Scales, though in any case its position is nearer to the Pole than to the Zodiac, as one of its wings even corresponds to the stars of the Great Bear which, after what has already been said, can only confirm this suspicion. As to the nature of this bird, there are two hypotheses: that it is a dove, which in fact could have some relationship with the symbolism of the Grail; and that it is a goose, or rather a swan brooding over the World Egg, that is, an equivalent of the Hindu Hamsa. This last interpretation is in fact much to be preferred, the symbol of the swan being closely linked to the Hyperborean Apollo; and it becomes even more preferable in the context of our theme, in that according to the Greeks Kyknos was the son of Apollo and of Hyria, that is,
of the Sun and of the 'land of the Sun'; for Hyria is just another form of Syria, so that it is always the 'sacred isle' that is in question, and it would be somewhat surprising if the swan did not figure in its representation. [15]
Many other points of interest could be dwelt on, as for example the name 'Somerset' with that of the 'country of the Cimmerians' and with different names of peoples, the likeness of which very probably indicates not so much ethnic kinship as a community of tradition. But that would lead us too far afield; and we have said enough to indicate the extent of a field of research that still remains almost completely unexplored, and enough also to give some idea of the conclusions that might be drawn about the bonds between different traditions and their filiation from the Primordial Tradition.