The Geminid Reality Three: Chapel Perilous
Chapel Perilous enters the Western imagination in the mid 1400s with Thomas Malory’s grail cycle Le Morte D’Arthur(6.14-15). The tale is worth heeding.
Launcelot in his quest encounters a black brachet—a female hunting hound—by a pool of blood in a deep forest, and follows it through a marsh, over a feeble bridge, to the hall of an old manor, where a dead knight lies. As the hound licks the corpse’s wounds, a lady appears, disconsolate, saying that Launcelot has brought her sorrow. He replies that he had nothing to do with the death of her husband, Gilbert the Bastard, and says the lady understands that, and the knight who killed him is still wounded and will never heal his own wounds incurred from the fight. Launcelot’s role is yet to be revealed.
Back in the forest Launcelot encounters a damsel who knows him, awaits him, and asks his help. Her brother, Meliot de Logres, that day slew Gilbert “in plain battle”, but sustained a wound in the fight. The sorceress Hellawes of the Castle Nigramous is preventing his healing until a knight enters Chapel Perilous, and takes Gilbert’s sword and a piece of the silk wrapping cloth from his corpse to heal Meliot’s wound. Launcelot recognizes Meliot as a fellow Roundtabler, and follows the highway to the chapel, tying his horse at the gate.
In the churchyard there are many knight’s shields turned upside down; some that Launcelot recognizes. Blocking the entrance stand thirty giant knights, a yard taller than any he’d ever seen. They were armed in black with swords drawn. He knows he is in for it, and in dread draws his sword and charges them. But instead of fighting they all simply scatter and give way, and he enters the Chapel Perilous. There in dim lamplight he finds a knight laid out. How Gilbert the Bastard’s corpse is suddenly transported there from his manor is not remarked upon. He cuts away a piece of the silk wrap and the earth quakes a bit. He grabs Gilbert’s sword and warily departs.
Outside, the thirty knights challenge him to drop the sword or die, whereupon he says he doesn’t fight with words, charges, and “passe(s) throughout” them. In the churchyard he meets a fair damsel who also asks him to drop the sword, and he again refuses. She tells him had he relinquished it, he never would have seen Guenever again. She then requires Launcelot to kiss her but once, which he refuses. The sorceress Hallawes then reveals herself, and tells him had he kissed her, he would have died, but that she loves him so much that she would have embalmed his corpse and kiss and “clip” him daily (clipping is an old word for an embrace, and here likely a euphemism for what amounts to necrophilia). He departs this Lady of Castle Nigramous (black-ness?), and she dies a fortnight later.
Launcelot returns to Meliot and his sister. He touches the sword to the wounds, then applies the cloth there also, and the healing is instant and whole. Gilbert’s sword that created the wound is needed to heal it.
Let this tale percolate for now….
Geminid Reality Part 2: The Ablution has been made, but not yet the Offering, is about the inversion of the traditional cleansing of a spiritual sacrifice currently going on, with the pervasive injunction to wash our hands. At the time written the offering had not been sacrificed. Now it has, with the death of George Floyd. We are all in Chapel Perilous.
What is Chapel Perilous? Robert Anton Wilson wrote a description in his Cosmic Trigger:
“Chapel Perilous, like the mysterious entity called “I,” cannot be located in the space-time continuum; it is weightless, odorless, tasteless and undetectable by ordinary instruments. Indeed, like the Ego, it is even possible to deny it is there. And yet, even more like the Ego, once you are inside it, there doesn’t seem to be any way to ever get out again, until you suddenly discover that it has been brought into existence by thought and does not exist outside thought. Everything you fear is waiting with slavering jaws in Chapel Perilous, but if you are armed with the wand of intuition, the cup of sympathy, the sword of reason and the pentacle of valor, you will find there (the legends say), the Medicine of Metals, the Elixir of Life, the Philosopher’s Stone, True Wisdom and Perfect Happiness . . . if you go into that realm without the sword of reason, you will lose your mind, but at the same time, if you take only the sword of reason without the cup of sympathy, you will lose your heart. Even more remarkably, if you approach without the wand of intuition, you can stand at the door for decades without realizing you have arrived.”
Chapel Perilous is multivalent: it is a place of illusion; a testing ground; a dark knight of the soul; a manifestation of fear; a hall of seductive temptation; a graveyard of failed attempts; a room where both dark and numinous spiritual light-beams penetrate; a karmic field testing sanity, valor, resolve, mettle, heart, wisdom and perspicacity. It is where paranoia and anti-paranoia paradoxically don’t cancel out. Paranoia clinically states that everything in your experience meaningfully refers back to you, from birds to TV ads—all contain a message; and anti-paranoia being a meaningless selfless cosmos that is unknowable. You can be inside its walls for decades or minutes; it plays out big and small.
Small: In their endless wisdom, our county commissioners decided last week to ease some restrictions to local businesses, while simultaneously forcing mask-wearing in all public indoor spaces and shops. (Even they are not retarded enough to force mask wearing inside restaurants while eating. Yes, I wrote “retarded”.) So, because we have taken an oath not to don a mask, we kept putting off going to the supermarket and hardware store because we felt we had to “armor up” to battle this ordinance. But like Launcelot we had a resolve to hold to our vow. We had the knowledge of which stores are run by SJW’s and which by locals, we had the intuition of when to go, and admittedly, a little weak on the cup of sympathy part. We charged in like Launcelot only to find the doors already open, the mask wearers scattered, the only giant adversarial knights manufactured from our thoughts. Even though we were of the mere 5% not wearing masks, nobody seemed to care. Or at least express it.
Large: There is nothing that is not the distorted mirror hall of Chapel Perilous now. The Chapel covers the entire sky like the Egyptian goddess Nut, the Geminid/Hermes trickster reflecting back inversion after inversion. You may remember the experiment with “upside down glasses”, people got comfortable wearing spectacles that inverted vision, and were able to navigate their world fairly easily. At least on the surface. Only now the inverters are fooled into thinking they see reality, forgetting their possibility of actual direct perception.
This inversion is containing a dark ritual, overseen and implemented by sorcery-wielding Black Castle dwellers, who only want us to drop our swords, and have just one little prurient kiss. We must stay true to our own path, avoid these temptations—and thus avoid the fate planned for Launcelot in Chapel Perilous—because we will be dead, enshrouded, embalmed, and still raped by the demons. Zombies are real, and easy to spot by the look in their berserker eyes behind the mask.
The ablution of this inverted ritual is the hand washing tic; the complicit mask-wearing and social contact tracing create and hold the space for the ritual to take place within, vast as it is; the actual sacrifice is the death of George Floyd—irrespective of how problematic that event is, the effect upon the Thuggees is the same. The result of the sacrifice—which originally was designed through sacred chant to keep community literally connected to its divine origin—runs full opposite into divisive violence, looting from one’s own neighbors, condescending, shouted ignorance, inane chants, bizarre forgiveness-begging, atheist socialist ideology with full corporate orchestration, as the sorcerers are the techno-corporate-martial-media deities who indeed morph and wither under the slightest scrutiny. And these useful idiots are merely the puppets of the real darkness in this spiritual war.
Yet the sword that generates the wound can heal it. The wound bleeds ignorance, and the sword of reason cuts both ways. It is thought, thought forms, and egregores that create the fearful chimera of Chapel Perilous. But the same ability to reason, under the guidance of spiritual clarity, unshakable resolve, and dispassionate sense of self that subsumes its activity to the necessity of the task at hand, detached from any desired outcome, allows you to brandish the sword with honor. All we have to do is hold it and the illusion dissipates.
The final illusion of Chapel Perilous is the reified mirage of independent selfhood. Famously, the great Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset, when confronted with the conundrum of “who am I?”, responded with the maxim, “I am I plus my circumstance and unless I save my circumstance I cannot save myself.”
But for now, anyone capable of at least following Ortega y Gasset into realizing the I = I + my circumstance equation, that is, who you are and what you do with your experience are one and the same.
Those are deserving of Knighthood, by the True Queen.
Steve Crimi, copyright 2020
