C. Arthurian Roots, Astrological Visualization and Scriptural Parallels in Maltwood’s Interpretation of the Glastonbury Landscape

Maltwood was inspired by her observation of correlations between the journeys of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in their quest for the Grail and the topography of the English countryside to conclude that these relationships were not accidental but represented fundamental expression of primordial realities. She worked out this interrelationship between Arthurian myth and the English landscape in terms of patterns of astrological symbolism marked out through forms created by geographical features in the landscape, both manmade and natural. She perceived these forms as representing the character of Glastonbury and its surrounding landscape as a natural temple, which reflects cosmic patterns in a manner similar to Wenger’s conception of the Oshun forest as a giant, organic mandala. She interpreted the landscape in and around Glastonbury as being a geographically structured microcosm of the astrological patterns formed by the stars and planets, a pattern that, in unity with the form of the Arthurian narratives, constitutes a spiritual progression..

Maltwood’s interpretation of the Glastonbury landscape, therefore, could be seen as correlating the Arthurian narratives and astrological symbolism through hermeneutic principles which could be related to the principles of linguistic hermeneutics developed by Noam Chomsky’s transformational-generative grammar in which relationships between sign systems are discerned, not only in terms of their obvious formal configurations or surface structures, which might be dissimilar, but in relation to their underlying similarities of meaning, or deep structures, which might not be obvious at the level of surface structure. Along these lines, Maltwood perceives the narrative character and imagistic forms of the Arthurian narratives as demonstrating harmony at the level of deep structure with the iconography of the Zodiac as realized in the geographical formations in and around Glastonbury.Figures 5 to 8 are representative of this hermeneutic exercise.10

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10 Chomsky developed these ideas in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Massachusetts: The M.I.T Press, 1965) It provides a framework that helps explain interpretive and cognitive abilities in a broad range of fields, including language acquisition theory and philosophy. Maltwood tried to explain this unusual development in the relationship between landscape and human ideas in various ways. Pennick evaluates one of these perspectives in which she saw the Zodicac as an “enshrinement in the earth of an archetypal set of myths, originally pre-Christian, from which the tales associated with King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table were derived…after the discovery of several more terrestrial Zodiacs, the theory seems less than tenable. Perhaps the legends were a religious enactment of scared history which took place at the appropriate point and time in each Zodiac”. Ivakhiv looks back at Maltwood’s earlier ideas on the question as well as other interpretations and evaluates them: “Maltwood’s now discredited theory proposed that Sumerian metal traders constructed the “Temple of the Stars” some five thousand years ago. Others have suggested variations on this theme: building by a race of astronomer priests or survivors from ancient Atlantis. With Maltwood’s later idea that they were formed spontaneously by the earth itself, two major interpretations exist, which suggest that the earthworks were either constructed by an ancient civilization of have emerged from the earth’s natural constructive force. Ivhakif observes that these explanations are problematic not only on account of the immense height from which they can de seen properly, in spite of the countering explanation of extraterrestrial involvement, shamanic flight which allows a bird’s level sight or unique technology that made such elevated vision possible as well as the fact that the humanly created structures certainly not as ancient as the natural ones, which collectively with the natural ones constitute the Zodiacal formations, so how come that the ancient natural formations and the human structures cohere to create a coherent form? Finally, striking at the heart of what Cornelius describes as the imaginative element in the form of perception involved it “all comes down to looking at a map or aerial photograph and judging for oneself: what shape appears here?” (Nigel Pennick, The Ancient Science of Geomancy: Man in Harmony with the Earth (London; Thames and Hudson, 1979,p. 75;Adrian Ivakhiv, Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona (Bloomington:Indiana,2001,p. 111-113). Geoffrey, Cornelius, The Moment of Astrology: Origins in Divination (Bournemouth; The Wessex Astrologer,2003).Figure 5:This map shows the Glastonbury landscape as interpreted by Katherine Maltwood and her successor, Mary Caine. The interrelationship of various topographical features, both natural and human constructed, in the formation of the perceived figures evokes the question of the degree to which they are endogenous to the landscape and the degree to which they are mental constructions of minds responding to associations evoked by the landscape.The question of imaginative perception in relation to these figures becomes graphically evident when one looks closely at these shapes, particularly since some of the Zodiacal forms have to be interpreted in terms of patterns different from their conventional Zodiacal attributions if the conception of a complete Zodiac is to be sustained (Janet and Colin Bord,1977,p.222-223).The Glastonbury Zodiac is pictured as forming a wheel, one of the characteristic forms of a mandala, the other being a square. At the top of the wheel is Glastonbury and enclosing the Tor (the hill crowned by the ruined tower of the church of St.Michael, perceived as the spiritual center of Glastonbury) is the sign of Aquarius, here a phoenix, rather than the conventional image of the water bearer, thereby suggesting spiritual regeneration, in relation to the act of regeneration implied by committing oneself to a spiritual path, as the knights who swore themselves to the quest for the Grail may be said to have done. One recalls also that Lancelot is reputed to have died on seeing the Grail. That death could be interpreted as a physical death but a spiritual rebirth since, in Christian terms, he had died in state of grace (Janet and Colin Bord, 1977,p. 218;Molyneux and Vitebsky,2000,p.35 ).Gemini is perceived as resembling the giant form created by the constellation of Orion, encapsulating large sections of the community of Dundon, with “hands raised above head in an attitude of supplication” suggesting a “Christ-like figure” thereby reinforcing a dominant conception of coherence between astronomical and Christian imagery (Janet and Colin Bord, 1977,pp. 219-220).Libra is visualized in terms of a dove (instead of the conventional image of scales) flying over Barton St David. This formation suggests a correlation between geography and visual symbolism on account of the fact that the emblem of St David is the dove suggesting “the balancing power of holy wisdom” (Janet and Colin Bord, 1977,p. 220) Virgo is pictured as a slender, feminine figure, with one hand held out holding a cone, interpreted as one of the symbols of the Queen of Heaven, and, here and wearing a billowing skirt. Her profile and front are outlined by the River Cary. The feminine image suggests associations between the feminine figure of Virgo and earth mother figures of ancient goddess symbolism. At the point where the figure’s breast would be is the mound Wimble Toot. The geographical, visual, and, this time, cultural and etymological correlations again evoke symbolic associations which reinforce the earth mother connotations, since, according to Janet and Colin Bord, the Toot or moot hill was the point where people from all over the locality gathered to meet and receive spiritual nourishment. The lexical relationships of the word toot, which “equates with teat, as maybe does the Welsh maeth, which means nourishment” are invoked as validating these interpretations (p.220). One wonders, however, whether the Bords might not have allowed their enthusiasm for these ideas to make them overeager to justify these associations, on account of the suprising precision of their description of ancient British spirituality. As Bradley’s observation suggests a necessary caution “Any attempt at recapturing the ancient religion of the British Isles has been made conjectural by the determined efforts of their [Christian] successors to eliminate all such traces”(1993,p.viii).Scorpio, associated with Arthur’s killer Mordred in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, is represented by a scorpion whose tail is poised above Arthur’s horse. Arthur is visualized in the sign of Sagittarius not as a centaur but in terms of a similar horse-man image, as a horseman being pulled from his horse by a monster outlined by the Rivers Brue and Old Rhyne. The horse’s rump encloses Pennard Hill while West Pennard is within its right leg. The warrior figure, evokes a constellation of narratives and images within the framework of Hermetic associations, such as the mounted warrior symbol of the Kabalistic sphere of Geburah, which stands for divine justice and Horus, the Egyptian deity who avenged his father Osiris’s murder by Set. The warrior figure, therefore, in relation to the constellation of Sagittarius which is conventionally perceived as aiming its arrows at the constellation of Scorpio, crystallize narratives and related ideas in connection with notions of divine justice and power in response to regicide and deicide, all associations that emerge in relation to the murder of King Arthur and, according to legend, his eventual return in the time of England’s greatest need (Janet and Colin Bord, 1977,pp.220-221; Regardie,2001,p.131;Fortune,1997,173).The details shown of the images representative of the figures visualized as the sign of Aquarius (Figure 6) and of Gemini (Figure 7) suggest the fundamentally imaginative character of the Zodiacal associations. The potential for suggesting different possibilities of interpretation, or, even none at all, demonstrated by the spatial distribution of the geographical forms that constitute these shapes suggest that the interpretive process favored by the landscape Zodiac theorists is one in which the mind is encouraged to create images out of imaginatively congenial aspects of landscape formations. This suggests not only the imaginative dimension that Cornelius describes as the essence of divinatory interpretation but the notion, that, even if these associations are most controversial in terms of their objective significance (another problematic expression) they are nevertheless valid as imaginative exercises that may inspire an intuitive experience in the spirit of the imaginative interpretation of such heroic journeys as the quest for the Grail, in which “the journey [is] interpreted as a metaphor for the process of individual spiritual development, in which the varied landscapes traversed by the heroic figures stand for different aspects of the human psyche” (Molyneaux and Vitebsky,2000,p.35). The Zodiacal signs then become stations in a rite of passage, in which like in a conventional mandala, they could be seen as suggesting aspects of the quest for the grail. The Zodiacal signs could either symbolize the qualities cultivated by the knights in their quest or the constellation of qualities necessary for the finding of the grail. These interpretations of the Round Table as representative of the qualities that either constituted the constellation of the Knights of the Round table or those qualities necessary for the finding of the grail becomes even more striking in relation to ideas that describe the Knights of the Round Table as actually queen Guinevere’s knights, thereby suggesting correlations between the Queen and the powers of the earth represented by the terrerestial/lized Zodiac.In sum, Pennick’s description of the significance of the Glastonbury Zodiac could be seen as inclusive of its various levels of significance: “A synthesis of divination, survey and landscape engineering subtly links the natural forms of the earth’s surface with the artificial forms of the human consciousness to create a total geomantic landscape-the aim of geomancers throughout the world” (p.74). The powerfully evocative quality of the Glastonbury landscape is suggested by Figures 8 and 9 (Deveroux, 2000,10;Griffin, 2000,136-137) incarnating as they do a sense of the Sublime and Other which illuminates graphically the tendency of particular landscapes to stimulate the mind to imaginative associations with the sacred.