You and the Land are One

original theatrical trailer

Perceval in despair.

 

I love the puzzlement on the knights' faces. What on earth is the king talking about?

Lost in the wasteland, Perceval is attacked by a mob led by an old friend who has gone made. But look what Lancelot throws at him (apologies for poor quality of clip).

The only way this makes sense in a Christian way to me is that the figure he is addressing is Christ. When he says "you are Arthur," he means "You are present in Arthur, who, in a rightly ordered kingdom, must act as Your regent on Earth." 

The Grail is the Divine Feminine, which has been lost to the kingdom through Arthur's actions, having been forced by his own law to banish his queen.

Arthur drinks from the cup and is revived (a scene that recalls Tolkein's depiction of Theoden's miraculous recovery in The Lord of the Rings). Yet the kingdom is not yet saved. The final battle lies ahead.

The battle is tense, and bloody, and at one point seems lost. Then at the bleakest moment, Lancelot, having recovered his wits but barely cleaned up from his madness, returns, fighting like a berserker with the strength of a dozen men,  and turns the tide of the battle. His line here, "it is the old wound," was mysterious to me as a young man. It is no longer mysterious to me at all.

"Guinevere, is she queen again?" This is all Lancelot wants to know before he expires.

The battle is won but the king is mortally wounded. He needed to die that the kingdom would be restored. But now the sword is too powerful. This scene makes a lot more sense to me years later. Arthur is sparing Perceval the burden of being king. His pulling the sword from Mordred's corpse is a degraded and profane echo of the divine moment Arthur pulls the sword from the stone. The look of temptation on Perceval's face is unmistakable. King Perceval will rule! Being king s not a duty any man can take upon himself, except by supernatural power.

The Lady of the Lake, like the Holy Grail, is the Divine Feminine, but a different aspect of it. She is Divine Justice, the intervention of God's mercy by the delicate hand of woman when the powers of men have failed them and nothing else can save them. At that moment, she bestows great power on men, so that they can (temporarily) do what needs to be done to restore order and justice. That it comes from a woman is significant in that in a sense, they are granted God's approval ahead of time, through His mercy. Such a weapon granted this way can never fail.

There are many retellings of the Arthurian stories. The 1981 movie Excalibur remains my favorite. I saw it as a high school student in 1981, twice when it first came out---I think it was playing at the CSU theater on campus as part of their semester film program. It is campy, flawed, and at times uneven. It crams a great deal of material into two hours, compressed for purposes of the story. In many ways it is a typical medieval fantasy genre of that era, when we saw such films at the drive-in. It has scenes of gory violence that can turn one's stomach, as well as raunchy almost explicit sex scenes between witches and knights. But there are few movies that have stayed with me over the years like this one, including the lines I have quoted above. I went looking for them again recently and found these clips.  It is little surprise to me that despite its flaws, it has become a cult classic.

Making Perceval the hero of the story was brilliant. That he initially fails the last task Arthur gives him, He began as lowly commoner, a page, and winds up being the hand by which Excalibur is returned to the Lady. In that way, the story is very democratic, and, fittingly, very American, even though it is a British film.

Here perhaps is the entire movie in one scene, where Guinevere, now betrothed to God, furnishes the missing puzzle piece of redemption.  Arthur pulls the sword one last time, this time from the swaddling cloths of a child---perhaps the holy ones of the infant Christ. 

"In the hereafter of our lives...It is a dream I have." They will not meet again on Earth.

The great power here is that Guinevere is not the Divine Feminine. She is a mortal woman. 

Some say Guinevere was a Pict. My people!