The Courts of Joy: Why the Arthurian Story Was Never Meant to End in Ruin


A new book from the Helios School. On the ending we have all accepted without noticing, what the oldest Grail texts say the quest was actually for, and what a company of us did about it across a decade of workings at Tintagel and in West Wales.

Every telling of Arthur ends the same way.

The court divides. The knights kill one another at Camlann. The king is carried off across the water, wounded and not dead, and the land he held is left without him. The Grail is achieved by three knights and then withdrawn from the world altogether, and the fellowship that went looking for it is broken by the going. Not one wound is healed. Not one relationship is mended.

We have been retelling that ending for a thousand years, and we have grown so used to it that we no longer notice it is an ending at all. We treat it as the shape of the story rather than as something that happened to the story.

The ending nobody chose

Ask anyone in the world who knows nothing else about these islands, and they will know three things: the sword in the stone, the round table, and the love between Lancelot and Guinevere that brought the whole thing down. The Matter of Britain will not lie down. It is retold in every generation, in poetry and novels and films and children's books, and no retelling exhausts it. Something in this body of story refuses to become the past.

That is worth sitting with. The Matter of France is now the province of scholars, and the ordinary person could not name one of Charlemagne's twelve peers if their life depended on it. The Matter of Rome survives as history and as school-book. Only the Matter of Britain is still alive, still working on people, still producing new tellings in a language its first tellers would not recognise.

And it is alive in a particular condition. It is alive as a wound.

What the quest was actually for

Here is the thing most of us were never told, and it changes the whole picture.

The oldest Grail texts are perfectly clear about what the quest was for, and it was not a cup. The quest was to restore the Courts of Joy: the condition of a land whose inner and outer worlds are aligned, whose wells flow, whose people and whose sovereignty are one. When the Grail king is maimed by the Dolorous Blow, the land goes waste with him. The waters stop. The fields fail. The country and its king are not two things, and the wound in one is the wound in the other.

The quest, then, is a healing operation. It is undertaken to mend a bond that was severed, and the Wasteland and the Courts of Joy are not two places but one place under two conditions.

The name is not mine, and I want to be clear about that. It comes from the work of Caitlín and John Matthews, and it is used here with their blessing. When we were looking for a phrase that named what all of this was actually for, theirs was the one that fitted, and no other would do.

Mending is not vandalism

There is an objection to be met here, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a clever one.

Some will say that to take a fifteen-hundred-year-old story and set out to change how it ends is a kind of vandalism. I understand the objection, and I honour the love of the old tales that stands behind it. But I would ask one question in return. Which shows the greater reverence: to keep a beloved thing broken because it was broken when we received it, or to mend it?

The physicians of the soul do not preserve wounds.

And the tradition itself is on the side of the menders. That is what the oldest texts say the quest was for. A myth is a living thing, and a living thing that ends unhealed goes on aching, and the ache of this one is in the land and the people of these islands still, in the broken bond between a nation and its own deep story.

What was done about it

In the autumn of 2007, across a table in Jersey, my teacher Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki named the myth as unfinished. The insight was hers. What grew from it we tended together, with a company of others, in a connected cycle of great ritual workings begun in 2003 and brought to their close at Tintagel in 2010.

There was a workshop, run twice, at Taliaris in West Wales and again in California. There was a working at Tintagel in 2008 in which Merlin was freed to his rest, and the most hated figure in the whole Matter was brought in from the cold. There was a second working at Tintagel in 2010, in which the broken sword was made whole again, and the fractured bond between the worlds with it.

I will not set out the rites here, and the book does not reproduce them either. A script gives you the form of a thing and withholds everything that matters about it, and there are duties of copyright and of safety besides. What the book does instead is teach the shape and the meaning: what the archetypes are and why they are alive, what the four Hallows train in a working magician, what the Round Table is when it is understood as a working lodge, and how the great method of this current actually works, in which a living man or woman carries a living archetype for a bounded while and then lays it down.

And now

The Courts of Joy: Healing the Arthurian Mysteries is published this month by the Helios School of Esoteric Science, in paperback, hardback and Kindle.

It is not a history of the legends, because the historians have that work well in hand. It is not a survey of the lore, because John and Caitlín Matthews have given us that more richly than anyone. It is not a symbolic map, because Gareth Knight drew that map definitively and I still hear his voice across my own dinner table when I open his books.

What it is instead is a working manual and an honest field report: written from the inside, by someone who was there, about work that was done and what it cost and what it is for. Every chapter closes with a practice you can take up yourself. It was the hardest of my books to write, and it is the truest, and even so it falls short of what happened on that headland.

It is dedicated to Dolores, who died this year, and to Gareth. Between them they drew the map and lit the road.

The Matter of Britain is not finished. Your part in it is not finished either.

Buy the book on Amazon

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