Armed With Madness полностью

The legend of the Holy Grail, the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper, was developed in a body of early medieval romances. The cup is associated with St Joseph of Arimathea, who is said to have caught blood in it from the wound in Christ’s side made with his spear by the Roman soldier Longinus at the Crucifixion (hence the significance in Armed With Madness of the cup having been fished out of the well with a spear). Joseph brought the cup to Britain, where he founded the abbey at Glastonbury which became the Grail shrine. The Grail was lost and became the object of holy quest: to restore purity, the Christian Knight must journey through the desolate world in search of it. The romances vary in their telling of the story but depend in one form or another on: the terrible loss (“what they wanted had been lost out of the world,” Scylla tells Carston; adding, “Might have been any time, the Middle Ages, or the day before yesterday”); the strife that befalls the land bereft of the sacred object; and the perilous adventures entailed by the quest. Carston gives a very Buttsian summary for the purposes of Armed With Madness: “There had been a story . . . of a king, a comitatus called Arthur, whose business had been divided between chasing barbarians and looking for a cup. A kind of intermezzo in history, in a time called the Dark Ages, which had produced a story about starlight. Suns of centuries had succeeded it, while the story had lived obscurely in some second-rate literature, and more obscurely, and as an unknown quality, in the imaginations of men like Picus and Scylla, Felix, Clarence and Ross.”

The Grail and its legend were a focus of interest in the years preceding and surrounding the writing of Armed With Madness and had been a source for literary and artistic creation (Wagner’s Parsifal (1882) and Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) being outstanding examples of this). In From Ritual to Romance (1920) the anthropologist Jessie Weston, inspired by The Golden Bough, had argued that the Grail story was “the confused record” of a much earlier ritual, that of a fertility cult: the original ritual has passed into the romance elaboration of the Grail legend, whose main features—for example, the barrenness of the world from which the Grail has vanished—are exactly those of such a cult. The Christianization of the story is purely external to its fundamental meaning, no more than new trappings for the old ritual.

Such an account of the Grail story as the record of a purely pagan legend into which Christian symbolism subsequently intruded was opposed in the period, notably in the work of A. E. Waite and Arthur Machen, both of whom Butts read. Waite, contrary to “the pagan school”, emphasized the Christian force of the story and its deep spiritual sense; it deals in “high symbols”, presenting “figurations to which the soul confesses on the upward path of its progress”. Machen, who saw Waite as wrongly playing down the Celtic elements of the story, was concerned to present it as “the glorified version of early Celtic Sacramental Legend”. Machen’s insistence on a Celtic origin comes with the idea of an early Christian Church that had its own Eucharistic rite and a closeness to a world beyond this one, experienced magically through numinous places, sacred trees and other such things. “To the Celt, and to those who have the Celtic spirit,” wrote Machen, “the whole material universe appears as a vast symbol.”

Butts is close to this. Celtic magic and the Celtic church play a large part in her imagination. For her, too, behind the Grail lies another consecration of the Eucharist, a Church which precedes and stands outside the establishment of the Roman Church in Britain that will then oppose it. When Ross in Armed With Madness offers as the association with the Grail legend that immediately springs to his mind “A mass said at Corbenic . . . a different mass which may have been the real thing”, it is precisely to this supposed original Eucharistic rite that he refers, as so often does Butts herself; Corbenic being the castle or church of the Grail where Lancelot witnessed this other mass. Corbenic was, in Machen’s words, “scarcely on earth” and the way to it was charted “only on maps of the spirit”. It is for its expression of this that the Grail legend is important to Butts. What is at stake for her is “an incident, a not yet exhausted event, in the most secret, passionate and truthful part of the spiritual history of man”.