it is the appointed date. we’ve been at Stonehenge all night and now the sky is growing pale. we stand in a circle inside the stones watching the horizon behind the heel stone. the stone is heavy on the bottom, pointed on the top, quivering in the air. the light grows until the sky is shaking with it. then a sudden flash in a notch on the planet’s edge. light splinters on the heel stone. i look at my companions’ faces and each facets like a jewel, many faces lie there, depth upon depth. i look at rhiannon and see a kindly housewife and a jolly schoolboy and an old wise woman. i look at merlyn and see a medieval scholar and an elfin girl and a powerful king. as ariel always was so each of us is now. then enlarging each member of the company as the flame enlarges the wick is a figure too bright to look at. our true selves greet one another with secret smiles (o yes we’ve known all along) then reach out hands to join in the dance. at the center blooms a new figure, many faceted, many faced. for the transparencies of faces are endless and deep, so many many individuals braided into the whole. the figure grows, towers . . . as one we look at the stars. as equals the stars greet us. there is no need to go anywhere. we are one, we are home at last.
This passage is the end of “The Company of Thirteen” which was a fantasy story I was playing around with, and decided to use in the left-hand pages of The Feminine of History is Mystery. There were thirteen characters, with names from Celtic mythology, Shakespeare’s Tempest, Tolkien, and other sources. Each character was described with a short piece of their story and also an image which was similar to a Tarot card. One of the characters, Ariel, was neither male nor female and constantly changing what they looked like. At first the characters are separate, then they begin to find each other, and gather into two groups. Each group is looking for the ship they left on the shore, can’t find, try to build. Finally the two groups meet. They are surprised by the meeting, and recognize each other. Some old memory is activated. One says “Now we can build the ship!” Ariel says “A ship to take us to the stars.” And to return to their home planet, which they have remembered once they connected. Then Cirdan, the shipwright, realizes that their technology is beyond that of a physical ship, they need a “transporter” to translate their bodies somewhere else. He says they need a “condenser and focus” and draws part of a circle open to a spot at a distance. They determine that there is only one position on land that has the right latitude and longitude for such a thing to work. It is the position of Stonehenge, and they recognize the condenser in the still standing part of the circle, and the focus in the Heel Stone. They have to wait for a particular date, and then they will be able to return to their home planet.
I don’t know what I imagined would happen. Somehow the company would be transported to their home planet. But that’s not what my hand wrote. I realized that the oneness was more satisfying, and that it also fit an unacknowledged theme of the book. That’s the idea of reuniting the separated fragments into a whole.
An earlier statement of that theme appears in a passage about Glastonbury, and the Chalice Well. This is slightly rewritten to fit my Audio-visual presentation “Sacred Sites of Ancient Keltia.”
Below Glastonbury Tor there is a spring, flowing with iron-rich water, the blood of the earth – the menstrual blood of the Great Mother, who is called Annis, Danu, Ishtar, Belili. Her blood is gathered in a great silver bowl, chalice of inspiration, cauldron of rebirth. And through the magic of time, by which all things change yet nothing is ever lost, the Cup of the Last Supper, and the Cauldron of Kerridwen have coalesced, run together like drops of quicksilver, and become that mystical vessel and chalice, the Holy Grail – that offers to each a very personal nourishment, that brings to each the possibility of reuniting the scattered fragments and being reborn as a whole person.
The “personal nourishment” is the idea that the Grail, when it appeared to Arthur’s Court, offered each person what he liked best to eat. One of the stories connected with the Cauldron of Kerridwen/Cerridwen was that the cut up pieces of a child were put in it and stirred, and the child came back together. Words used to describe both the cauldron and Cerridwen are “rebirth” and “regeneration.” For myself, the image of something that has been fragmented coming back into a whole being relates to my efforts to heal from trauma, which I had no conscious awareness of at the time I was writing this book. The image of the merging of the cup of the Last Supper, a Christian symbol, and the Cauldron of the pagans, is something else that came to me, I don’t know if any scholars have suggested it.