Now, in the times preceding King Arthur, the Romans had given up on finding the Holy Grail and had withdrawn from the British Isles. They gave no leadership in transition; they simply left. The people had great trial and tribulation after being subjected to the law and order of the Romans and having it suddenly removed and left in the hands of whose who had capitulated to ehir side and learned so many of their ways. With their overlords gone, they began fighting among themselves as to who should have the supreme position of domination and rule the land.
Merlin was a Spirit polarized heart person who did not see himself as welcome in the purple Jesus scenario and had been hiding out on the Isle, know known as Avalon, where he had temple involvement but had not let himself become involved in the sexuality going on there.
The Druids had taken him in because of this, but he was not a Druid. He saw what was happening when the Romans pulled out and watched with angst as pieces of the parental rage fragmentation fought about who was going to have the dominant role in governing the people then. He did not know what he was seeing there in these terms, but he was watching most of the major pieces who wanted to claim the parental position of the Father of Manifestation fight amongst themselves for that position, as though it was not something that was already decided by who actually had that position and as though he did not share this imprinting.
Merlin had his own rage at the parental pieces and did on let on he had this rage, himself. He wanted to be reasonable, appeal to them from the wisdom he felt he had there and guide the situation the way he wanted it to go, which was to put people in their right place and have the Father of Manifestation rule with the other pieces as subordinate and supporting lords of their own areas. Without his own rage in motion there, Merlin could not understand the depth or intensity of this rage or see that it was not prepared to be reasonable; expcially not reasonable according to heart.
Merlin then decided he needed to invoke some greater power they would listen to and began to present his teachings as surrounded and supported by signs and omens, mystical teachings and prophecies and anything else he thought would help support the position he wanted others to take there, including magic. Merlin was already a mysterious person of undetermined origin and age, and he decided it would be helpful to enhance his reputation there.
When he wanted to give an understanding that required reincarnational memory that others didn’t have there, he simply said he was alive then, and told them what he wanted them to know about it. When something didn’t sound quite right to others acoording to the point of view they wanted to have, he would point to the heavens and say it was right there to be read by those who could and start giving them lessons about the stars they did not really want to have until they said, “Alright, I’ll take your word for it.”
Merlin was determined to have the Father of Manifestation born ccording to plans similar to those that had been made for Jesus, including the right bloodlines to be able to take the throne away from his competitors. He had already heard the story of Jesus and felt that he knew from some place deep inside himself what had gone wrong there. He wanted to avoid that this time by moving along with his own point of view.
Merlin did not mind engineering Arthur’s parentage in many ways, including getting Igraine to go places where Uther would see her, because he felt that having the right bloodlines was only an earthly matter, when really, it was raising the Father of Manifestation to have more softness and openness toward Heart that was going to make the difference. He wanted the Father of Manifestation to be taught by Heart, in other words, namely, him.
Merlin had already succeeded in getting Arthur born by the time people began coming to him and asking him for any kind of solution, help, or advice he could give to all the fighting. He told them all that if they would wait a little while, he thought he could produce an heir to the throne that would satisfy them all. This way, they did not know his age or where they were going to find him.
It was Igraine who had given birth to Arthur and had given him up, both to protect him and because she had a rancor toward the child, Arthur, which she often spoke of to her older child who was Morgaine, a daughter who was not very favorably looked upon by the father who had taken her father’s place. Morgaine had a growing rancor toward him for that, and not being able to do anything about it with him, resolved to take it out on his son, whose whereabouts Uther did not know. The more he longed for his own son and gave little or no attention to Morgaine, the more she resolved to do it that way.
Igraine and Merlin had an old relationship together with the Celtic-Druid people. She trusted Merlin that he knew best what needed to happen there, and so gave him Arthur willingly, but she did not really like his plan and hated him, too, for giving Uther her husband’s appearance that night without telling her what he was going to do. Women had plenty of power in Igraine’s experience as a temple descendent, and she did not see why her daughter should not be given the throne she had hoped was going to be won for their family if MOrgaine was simply adopted by her new husband and declared his rightful heir.
Igraine gave the outward appearance of staying out of politics, but she was very much tuned in to the goings on and had her own opinions about how she wanted it to go there. Where she disagreed with Merlin, she had rage at him, but it did not move as rage, and Morgaine took her mother’s rage upon herself and wanted to avenge it, also. Igraine did not speak to her daughter about the deception the night of Arthur’s conception, but her daughter had beein in the room, and the child had seen.
Morgaine had indigo involvement, displaced from her mother’s purple, and she had seen this man was not her father. She could not let her mother know because she could not talk yet but she also did not want to let her mother know because she did not see how this could have helped her mother anyway, since he was so urgent and aggressive with his rage driven sex, as if he was taking revenge against Igraine’s husband this way. She hated Uther for taking her father’s place. All of these things formed in her as unspoken impressions since she did not speak yet.
She did not speak for a long time after that, either, until her mother thought she had been traumatized there, but Morgaine preferred to hold her observations as impressions she allowed to form as pictures in her mind. She was forming her own rage agenda there that even involved taking over her mother’s position if she got the chance, because she saw her mother as not strong enough there, especially when she allowed this man to move in and lord it over her that she was not his daughter. Uther wanted to find Arthur, but he knew he had to let Merlin keep him safe. He did not live long enough to see Arthur become king, and Morgaine had an unseen hand in that.
Merlin had gone to Arthur many times to educate him in the ways he wanted him educated where he was growing up in secret, but it had not gone as well as he had hoped. They had many disagreements until Merlin was not even sure he wanted Arthur on the throne when the day finally came, but he wanted to finish what he had started and was determined to see it through as best he could. The more he butted heads with Arthur, the more he was not sure if he could make any difference with him. They never tried direct emotional movement, though, only reasoning; and there, imprinted point of view was in a stand off against imprinted point of view, no matter how much of a relationship they had in other parts of themselves.
As most people already know, Arthur had no idea who he really was, until his day came and Merlin suddenly revealed that he was claimant to the throne of the king who should rule all of the other fighting lords. Arthur was overwhelmed by how many fighting, and powerful looking, lords there were. He had felt like a man, but now he suddenly felt like a boy there in their presence and not a boy who was very well respected or welcomed. He saw himself through their eyes and feared they were right. He looked too weak, was only a boy and was illegitimate by birth, he now found out, which was a shock to him. He hadn’t even known his own parents were not his real parents until that moment when Merlin announced his claim to the lords who were gathered in London there, and suddenly, all around him, people were arguing about when the marriage between his parents had taken place and the other circumstances of his birth that he had never known before.
Merlin really was not a mother and did not know how this was going to affect Arthur there. He wanted to raise him to be more open of heart and then delivered a blow to his heart like that in public, where Arthur already felt that any display of emotion about it would only make him look even more weak and unprepared in their eyes.
Arthur could hardly handle the situation, and tears were having to be fought back, because he wasn’t even sure he wanted to be a king, and least of all, a king who had to fight for his kingdom. He was dependent upon Merliln for his claim, his identity and as his only ally there, since his own “father and brother” were now even seeming jealous. Merlin, who he was at odds with so much of the time, had done this to him and had not even let him know! Arthur could hardly get over it!
Arthur was not sure how he was going to fight all of these powerful looking lords to gain the throne Merlin was talking to everyone about there, but Arthur was hardly concerned about it. He was thinking about the family he had lived with all these years and what that meant now, but Merlin did not let him stay there for long. He urged Arthur to stand up and give a speech.
Arthur hardly knew what to say and only mumbled something about hoping he could be a good king. The crowd was stunned to think that now they had a boy as heir to the throne, but Merlin was not moved by any of this and kept insisting he was the correct heir to the throne.
There was quite an argument, and even some fighting, right there in London as to whether Arthur should be given the throne, but Merlin presided over it and Arthur was given the opportunity Merlin wanted to have there to prove that people in their right places could make things happen the way they needed to happen.
Arthur found, though, that many of those who opposed him would not come to the council meetings he said he was going to have. They preferred to have his decrees sent to them, so they could misinterpret them according to their own designs and claim they didn’t know they had misinterpreted them. Arthur became exasperated with them and gave the places at his council meetings to heart pieces instead, who became his Knights of the Round Table, but Merlin would not sit there.
Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table had to go out and subdue the land, because there continued to be a lot of fighting going on, but Arthur was gaining some allies and some allegiance, and his knights were able to stop many things the people did not like to have happening to them. Many of the lords stopped opposing openly, as though they were tired of fighting, but Arthur knew this was not a real allegiance and thought they were just becoming more secretive about their opposition. He was becoming a very popular king with those who were experiencing the benefits of his rule, but feeling that so much was still being hidden from him by the opposing lords, Arthur was not sure how to hold onto his throne.
Arthur still had not married and wanted to marry for love, but Merlin suggested he also try to make that be someone who would strengthen his position and his claim to the throne even more. Merlin had someone in mind, who was the daughter of an opposing lord. He thought this would help a lot because he could see this lord would be more helpful if he had some position there that was more than he already had, but Arthur did not like this daughter as much as he liked Guinevere and told Merlin he did not want to have a family that was split already. Merlin did not like this, seeing what it was going to bring Arthur in the end, but he could not oppose him any more than he did because the more he opposed it the more Arthur would not listen.
Arthur was enamoured of Guinevere’s soft sweetness there, and in less than a year’s time, they were married. They had some years then of peace and prosperity in the kingdom, during which Arthur thought Guinevere had brought him good luck and that all of his problems were solved. He thought Merlin had been wrong then and that what people needed was a sweet, gentle and loving presence to guide them in those ways and not the strong person Merlin had seen in the young woman Merlin had wanted Arthur to marry there.
Arthur was sure Merlin was not right, because he and Guinevere had good years there at first, together; enough years to build Camelot, to live the lives upon which the legends were based about how good life was there and to encourage the people to believe they could have peaceful and happy lives. Abundance began to return the land, and the people were feeling happy and joyful, as though they were continuing to celebrate the marriage of Arthur and Guinevere, whom they seemed to have taken to heart as though they were the loving, young coule through whom they could live the love and romance that was so often missing in their own lives. The only blight to Arthur’s seemingly happy life was that there was still no heir.
Arthur encouraged the people to believe that not only could they live the good life vicariously through their king and queen, they could live this life for themselves by giving them liberal tax laws that allowed them to prosper as never before. He had numerous festivals to keep the feeling of happiness going, and human rights reached a new high point, not experienced with the Romans who had been there for so long. It gave the people a taste of what it could be like if rulers were fair and really cared about their people.
But it was not that Arthur’s problems were really solved. Some did not trouble Arthur during that time because they did not want it to look like they did not give him an opportunity to create his own downfall by being naïve and overly liberal and they needed the time to rebuild their own depleted resources, because they were lords who still did not like it that Arthur was making the people feel happy and free, and the longer this went on, the less they liked it that the people were feeling empowered in these ways. They felt that they must do things to stop it or the people were not going to let them go on ruling in other parts of the kingdom in the ways they had gotten them used to believing they were always going to be ruled.
Tales of Camelot were spreading, and the people in the kingdoms of some of these lords did not like it that their own lives were not like the elaboratee tales they were hearing. When their rulers tried to tell them that these tales they were hearing were not true but would not let them journey there to find out for themselves, the people only believed the tales all the more, and the tales grew to be more and more fantastic until it began to sound like Camelot was the land of milk and honey, where food droped off the trees and the people danced and sang in the streets all day, no longer needing to work.
Unfortunately not knowing who he was for so long did not prepare Arthur to feel kingly in many of the ways he needed to be. There was competition among the heart pieces as to who had the most power there and who was the closest to King Arthur. He thought equality was the solution to competition. Athur had seated them all at a round table and tried hard to behave as though he was one of the knights and not that much different from any of them. This gave the heart pieces that were there an inflated sense of themselves that he did not really like, either, when they began to give him trouble about some of his decisions.
He felt he had grown up a lot since the days when he had first offered these positions to heart pieces and regretted not having listened to Merlin when he had advised against giving them so much power and equality of position. He felt they did not understand the depth of his consciousness in a number of ways. He did not, therefore, like telling them everything they felt they should be priviledged to know since they sat at the Round Table, and some, who were not the allies they presented themselves to be, used this position to make Arthur feel pressured to give them information they were using against him.
He had a lot of trouble over issues of how to tax the people. Some didn’t want any taxes at all, while others wanted to take way more than he needed or deemed necessary. They were beginning to havemore problems again with the invading forces of the rage fragmentation, and defending the kingdom was more expensive than Arthur thought it was going to be. He felt the most important thing was to bring peace to the land to give the people a chance to have their lives and to give the farmers a chance to grow the food they so badly needed there.
He felt they must get the raging opposition to give their allegiance to his throne and stop the infighting. He tried to get them to look to Gaul and other countries to see how inviting their shores might appear to them if it looked like they were going to go on fighting and remaining divided within, but these men were not interested in international politics; only internal squabbling, or so it appeared, until it began to look like they worked for other countries instead of for their own.
The guilt he had present there from not moving his emotions around these issues made it impossible for him to differentiate, too, without setting up rivalries and competitions that he feared would be weakening to his efforts to heal the country, and so he had to set policies that should not have included all the heart pieces that were present.
Arthur felt it was not possible to give all of the information to everyone there, especially since some had alliances with families who still directly opposed him, yet not possible to give privileged information only to some, and so some had less information than they really should have had, and some had more information than they really should have had. This gave him a problem in making policies there if they all had an equal say in matters.
King Arthur thought he might be able to turn things in his own favor if he went out into his own country and let the people get to know him instead of looking to the opposing lords and thinking that the policies they were setting were coming from him when they were not. There was a wicked agenda of taking too much from the local people and saying it was the king’s orders, not theirs. Meanwhile it was they who lived in opulence, not the king.
King Arthur’s reign was not a “citizens have the vote” situation but it was a major step forward in giving the people voice, and gaining an audience with him was not that hard. In fact, when he was traveling the land, he often sat in local pubs with the people and did not even let them know he was the king. When he made his positions clear and then revealed he was the king, many of the people would not believe him and kept insisting it could not be true!
This gave him security problems at times when others took note of his presence and decided they could assassinate him on the road later when he left after a night of drinking with the local people, and after several harrowing escapes, he felt he always had to carry a number of knights with him who would come in later to whatever place he was sitting with the ordinary people like they weren’t really with him.
Some of them would get drunk and talk in ways that made him think they were not on his side at all the way they were telling people too much, distorting things or presenting pictures of the powers and glories of court that made him cringe at the imagery of what they must think their positions really meant there.
Arthur began to think that traveling around the land talking to the local people was not really that helpful after a number of incidents like that, and he began to question who his allies really were if if he could not even trust his own knights to feel into situations enough to know when to keep their mouths shut.
He felt he was not going to be able to rule his land if he did not get the people’s support somehow, and he did not know how to do this when there were local lords constantly troubling the people with policies they said were the king’s policies when they were not. He decided to try to accomplish the same thing by just continuing with the festivals and tournaments that would get people to come together outside of their own local area and see that it was not the same everywhere. Then they might see that some lords actually followed the king’s policies and that the people were happier and better off in those places. This worked to a certain extent and gave the local lords who were causing the problems a harder time saying it was the king’s policies and not their own, but there were those who were still entrenched against him and would not give in, no matter what he tried.
Arthur wanted these lords to step down, but they were not going to do it willingly. He was going to have to fight them down. He hated to give them orders to step down when he knew they would not, but at least he had a legal basis for fighting them then and a lot of knights to help him, or so he thought, but when he tried to get them to go and fight with him, many of them had lost the desire to fight anymore, and Arthur feared they had gotten too used to life in court, and other than the tournaments, did not want to go out and fight anymore. They told him he had too much ambition to try to heal the country all in one go and to give it more time. He told them they had to go out and fight, because he was not having lords oppose him anymore.
Arthur was being expecially troubled by an opposing lord in a neighbouring kingdom; the very one Merlin had wanted Arthur to forge a family tie with. He was Spirit polarized father in purple, and Merlin had originally wanted him to incarnate with Arthur there as the Spirit light Merlin saw was needed to heal the split between Body and Spirit in purple, but neither one of them could quite do it that way. They said they were going to be allies, instead, but they weren’t, and Merlin was not able to make them become allies, either. Arthur was deeply troubled by having problems next door. Merlin standing over him saying, “I told you. I tried to tell you. You wouldn’t listen,” wasn’t improving his mood, and Guinevere didn’t like hearing Merlin say the daughter from that kingdom should have been Arthur’s wife.
By this time, Guinevere was not loving Arthur any more the way he wanted her to and admitted to Arthur that she loved Lancelot instead. Arthur was devastated. Now he felt he had no one in whom he could confide. He had taken Lancelot in as his best friend, and Guinevere was his wife.
Arthur did not even know there was any problem with the way they loved each other and still did not understand it, because he had no comparable experience to theirs of his own, other than what he saw between Guinevere and Lancelot, which broke his heart. He had so little experience with “love” when he had taken her as his wife and so little experience with love in his life there, really. He had experienced kindliness from the family that raised him and thought that was what love was.
Kindliness was what he was looking for when he married Guinevere, and that was what they had together, but she did not share his passion for sex, nor could she track his consciousness everywhere he wanted her to go with him, and now, in watching her with Lancelot, he could see that there wasn’t the passion they had in his marriage with Guinevere.
Passion was something he feared in his imprinting, and he had wanted to find something that didn’t stir it rather than something that did, because he had it associated with his rage. Feelings moving was not something he felt often there. He feared it, in fact, and judged against this heavily. Instead, he was becoming physically sick over what was happening to the life he had been so loving not that much earlier.
Merlin saw that this was happening to him, but he did not know how to help him much, because he could not give Arthur the life he wanted anymore; too many things had gone wrong, subtly and otherwise, for Merlin to feel like there was any possibility of it turning out the way he had wanted it to. Arthur didn’t see that yet.
Lancelot was making Arthur feel like he had somehow interfered with the possibilities for Guinevere and Lancelot by getting there first, and Arthur did not like this reflection from Lancelot, either.
Arthur tried not to express any feelings he had of jealousy and rage, because he had judged that not to be a loving response. He tried to make it be all about them and consideration about how they felt there, but he did not like it when they did not seem to be equally considerate of him and were letting the love between them become so obvious to the court that it was endangering his reputation. He felt that all the love and happiness in his relationship with Guinevere was drained out of his life when Lancelot appeared, and as much as he loved him, he also hated him. When he could not take any more of seeing his public image being as damaged as his private life already felt, the most he could do there was heated rage in his tone of voice.
He felt frightened for his reputation, because his hold on the kingdom was so tenuous that it seemed the opposition could use any little infraction to open giant inroads through the lack of support he was already experiencing there. Even though he had faced opposition from the beginning, it was intensifying so much that when he looked back, those times seemed like pleasant times to him compared to what he was experiencing now. Now he felt dismal and hopeless most of the time. Brooding, he gave long hours to feeling his devastating heartbreak and grief there in his private chambers, but gave these feelings very little outward expression, except as actions he tried to take.
Guinevere had been taking herself farther and farther into Christianity or, more specifically, the Roman Catholic Church. The longer this went on, the more it really disturbed Arthur, who had had a Celtic upbringing. It was triggering deep and old imprints that God was a limiting, judgmental disciplinarian. Guinevere was making him feel backed down in guilt and the vehicle she was using to do this was Christianity. He felt he could find no solution, but then, among the many things she was telling him in her attempts to convert him, she told him about the cup used at the last supper.
She was trying to appease the situation there by giving up sex altogether. This meant that Arthur was getting no sex at all, except for one night he did not understand. He kept asking her about it, and she did not remember it. He thought maybe it was the wine they had at dinner that night and tried to get her to repeat that, because they had not produced an heir yet, but she only drank wine for the sacraments now, and he could not get her to drink with him anymore, no matter how many how many times he told her marriage was a sacrament and so was its consummation in sex. She guiltily refused him, and he always feared it was Lancelot, but it was not only Lancelot; it was his speaking of things that were not within the dogma of the Church she was embracing that was frightening her more and more also and was causing her to view him more and more as some sort of bestial, evil, sacrilegious pagan.
He feared there was no opening for him to have sex the way he wanted it anymore, and he was openly longing for it, as he had been the night it had seemed to him that she had opened her legs to him in the ways he had always wanted her to. Now he had heard that Morgan le Fey, as she had taken to calling herself, had a son and this was even more threatening to him since he had no heir. He feared that this son might not have the bloodline that could take over the throne, but not quite, because he did not have his bloodline. He did not know who the father was yet. Morgan had not told him, and he feared illegitimacy in the family again and how that was going to look to the people who were converting to Christianity, but Morgan did not care about them and said so openly.
He did not know yet that it was his own son from that night, or that she actually hated him so much and was actually cunning enough that she had tricked him by drugging them both that night. She acted sweet in his presence, even sweeter than Guinevere at times.
“As long as she gets what she wants.” Merlin had said. “If she doesn’t, then you’ll see how unsweet she is,” but he had trouble seeing that. He was starved for love and took in kindness as love over and over, failing to see the guile behind much of it. She had put a spell on him, too, which was in the potion of drugs she put in the wine, hallucinogenics, while Guinevere’s was a sleeping potion. And hadn’t she helped her ever so kindly to bed that night and sat with her until she was deeply asleep!
Arthur was longing for Guinevere so much that night that he actually saw her face when Morgaine had slipped into bed with him when she thought he must, by then, be so drunk and drugged that he wouldn’t notice in the dark. She had gotten him involved so fast sexually, too, that he had orgasmed almost before he knew it. He felt it rock his body and fell asleep so fast in an ecstasy that he had not felt for so long that he actually wept when it happened and begged Guinevere to please love him and to come to him more often like this.
Morgaine said everything he wanted to hear that night and did not mean a word of it. She was after only one thing; to steal his son the way she felt her mother’s son had been stolen from her, and in the way she knew was best to do it, because then she could raise him herself and make sure he had the attitudes she wanted him to have. Her mother had had other sons, but they were not the same, because the first one was the heir to the throne. Even though they had protested it, saying they were legitimate because their father had married their mother by then, they did not succeed, because his father had not disowned him, which counted for something in that half Celtic world.
All alone in his chambers at night, Arthur mused over this night so many times in his anguish and heartbreak that he finally went to Guinevere one more time and told her all about it, begging her to remember it. She gave him only excuses such as she had had too much wine that night and did not remember what had happened. They got into a fight in which he insisted that it had to be her and that she must remember it. “Guinevere,” he said, “you used to love me in that way. Can you honestly say you don’t love me that way anymore?”
“I do not love you in that way, and I never have,” she said, “although I did not know it until I met Lancelot, but now that I know Lancelot, I cannot have sex with you when it is him that I love in that way. It could not have been me; it must have been another woman.”
Arthur was devastated and begging her to help him here, because he was afraid he was losing his mind. It was then that she said Morgaine was sitting close by and had noticed when she arose from the table that night that she had had too much wine. She had been kindly enough to help her to her bed so that no one else would notice that the queen had gotten drunk in public. “She is my witness that I did not go to your bed that night but to my own, as my chambermaids are a witness, too!”
Arthur did not need to question the chambermaids. He knew now what had happened or feared that he did. He left Guinevere’s chambers in a frightened rage and rode all the way to Morgaine’s without stopping that night. He rode all of the next day, too, only changing his horse when he had to. When he arrived he was not fit to be greeted by his half-sister, but he insisted on seeing her anyway. He demanded to know who the father of her child was, and when she would not tell him, he demanded to see the child. He was just of the age he would have been if it had been her that night, and he told her he suspected her of this.
“And if it were to be true? She said. “What are you going to do about it now, Arthur? Ah, sweet, guileless Arthur.” She was facing away from him when she said this and turned toward him suddenly, startling him, because she looked like a witch. “You had it coming, Arthur! Oh, how you had it coming! Now the tables are turned! Now it’s another person trying to gain the position of the bloodline by any means necessary!”
Arthur was devastated for the third time in as many days. He had nothing to say to her. What could he say? He thought of saying, “But Morgaine, did it have to be like this?” only he could not. There was no openness toward him there. She was cold toward him; so very cold!
He got on his horse and rode away, facing two days back with no food, since he had brought nothing with him but his sword. He feared for his own life now and tried to ride as fast as he could, but his horse was tired, and he could only lose himself in the woods, hoping he would be hard to follow that way. He wandered for days, lost in what seemed like a hostile wilderness of brambles and thickets until his horse’s flesh was so ripped up he was not sure if they were going to make it or not.
During that time, it was as if he was lost in the wilderness of his own soul. He feared he was going crazy because he was having thoughts of having to kill his own son, feeling his heart heavy, because he did not think he could really do that, but he was hearing voices say, “He could do that to you, and will, unless you kill him first.” He had many voices telling him many things there, but he could make little sense of it and was afraid that it was all too much for him and that he was taking sick because he could not hold his body together under the weight of it all.
He finally made it back to Camelot, so bedraggled, dirty, scratched and downhearted that he was almost unrecognizable as their king at first. He had found nothing but brackish water for so long that his first cry was for help getting down from his horse, and the second was for water. If his was not such a hospitable castle, they would have turned him out and never looked to see who he really was.
He got to his chambers and never recovered really. He feared he had caught some kind of fever in the swamps, and it never seemed to go away after that. He had no heart for living, but he did not know what to do with his heartbreak; it seemed to be too huge. As time went on and Arthur was not recovering, he called his knights to him over and over, telling them he saw no hope but to somehow recover the Holy Grail, because he was not going to live much longer without it. He became fixed on this as something that could help him there. Some did not want him to live, and did not look for it, but others tried their best and still did not find it.
He said a lot of disjointed things in his deliriums that frightened them, but the more he said things about having no hope without the Holy Grail and about having to kill his own son, the more frightened Guinevere and the knights became. The Church told Guinevere Arthur was becoming possessed, and many of the knights believed it when she told them this.
Merlin was watching all this, feeling less and less received by Arthur when he tried to advise him about anything, but he said nothing more there. He simply told Arthur he was going away and might not return, with a sort of “resigned to fate” presentation that was going to let Arthur interpret it as implying whatever Arthur was going to take it to mean there. Arthur did not know if this meant Merlin was going to die, or what it meant, but it gave him another feeling of abandonment and withdrawal of help and advice, right when he felt he most needed it, and he blamed Merlin for it.
Arthur certainly hadn’t always agreed with Merlin and didn’t like it when Merlin tried to override him. Arthur also did not like it when Merlin wasn’t there, but their blueness, and the other ways in which they were polarized, seemed to be making it too much for either of them to bridge the gap they had there.
Arthur responded to Merlin first by imploring him not to leave that way, and then, when Merlin did not respond to this with anything Arthur wanted to hear there, with the hardened heart they had allowed to form between them there. Arthur told Merlin, “Go ahead and go then. You have not been giving me very good advice for a long time now anyway, or I would not be where I am!”
Merlin did not like feeling blamed by Arthur in this way and responded with, “You never listened to any of my advice or implemented in the way I meant for it to be implemented, so how do you know where you might be if you had listened to me!”
There was some arguing back and forth about who did not listen to who, and then Arthur turned away from Merlin, and Merlin walked away from Arthur and removed himself from Camelot.
Guinevere removed herself to a convent, not able to face what was becoming of her husband and began to pray fro him, which she could not do in his presence anymore, because he was so furious over her disapproval of his Celtic ways. She regretted having hurt Arthur like this, but she could not bring herself to do differently, she could not embrace his Celtic ways along with her Christianity, she could not have sex with him when she did not love him in that way, and she could not make herself love him in that way. She was watching her husband be destroyed and watching his kingdom fall with him, but rather than thinking she could help by coming out of the Church and giving him the divorce he needed there, she believed it when the Church said it was all because he was a not really a Christian.
It would have been a simple matter if they were both Celtic, and this, Arthur could not understand. How had he gotten himself so entangled in a foreign Church that did not even serve his needs, equated his beliefs with paganism, enslaved and imprisoned him sexually and, in so many other ways, made his own life and the lives of so many other people so miserable that he began to think that ignorance was bliss, since the Church said he was living in ignorance before.
When they had talked about divorce, Guinevere had said there was no way, once she had taken the vows of the Church, to come out of it without being an excommunicated woman whose soul would then go to hell for all eternity. Arthur could not understand how the loving God they talked about could treat people like this, and besides, what had happened to reincarnation?
They had all talked about this and believed in it before. What about that now? Didn’t she believe in this anymore? She said only that the Church mentioned it but that they did not place any importance on it anyway, because the most important thing was to become free of sin and go to heaven. “Wherever that is,” he would say to her. “Ascend from Earth, I mean,” she would say back.
This troubled Arthur very much, because he was trying to bring heaven on Earth in the sense of trying to bring a good life there that would be as pleasant as anyone could imagine. It was his goal in uniting the kingdom, in trying to bring peace, in building Camelot and in everything else he had done or tried to do.
It was extremely perturbing to him to see a religion taking over his people that was shunning Earthly existence and the Body and calling all the pleasures they had previously enjoyed as natural and a celebration of physical existence, sin; one in which his own religion was being called the cause of sin and one in which his queen was participating more and more to the point of withdrawing from him, from her position as his queen and from her own kingdom to the extent of retreating into a convent, giving nothing to him anymore or to her people. She gave no balance of leadership. There was no more mother presence; only an aura of sin, withdrawal and shame at Camelot now.
It was too much for Arthur along with his heart sickness over his own child being born the way he was instead of with Guinevere and all the rest of it. He had not even felt able to tell Guinevere about it, but others did, and she then trusted Arthur even less, not knowing what to trust or how this had happened since they weren’t speaking to each other with trust anymore.
Arthur began to withdraw his essence from that lifetime and to wither at a rather young age into and old man with the feeling that he had failed everyone, failed at everything he had tried todo there, and failed himself, most of all. He was very hard on himself there, and in his deliriums, he made many journeys towards My light, asking Me what he should do there, what he could do there and even begging for my help.
He was quite pitiful, and I wanted to help him, but there was not much I could do, because he was not ready to understand the complexities of the situation he was finding himself trapped in. They were too many and too big.
He was hearing the increasing bad news of Mordred’s attitude toward him and felt sure his mother had poisoned him against him irreparably. In the state of mind he was in, there was no rest or peace, and he was becoming more haggard day by day. He had lost his desire for life and all his dreams. He did not know what to trust or how to sort out what he was seeing and hearing in his deliriums, except his own inner feelings that kept returning him to the idea of finding the Holy Grail and saving his people that way. It had become an obsession with him now and only his caring for the people that made him try to keep going, but it seemed like even they did not want him anymore.
He had wanted, more than anything on Earth, to have the life he really wanted to have and did not like all of the movement of rage around him that was making this so difficult. This went on for many long years, during which time he was receiving increasing reports of the land withering around Camelot. They had had such a period of peace and prosperity in Camelot when he and Guinevere felt like they loved each other. Why couldn’t this have lasted! He did not know what was causing this, but the people were becoming as disheartened and depressed as he was.
There had been too much fighting for them to be able to farm adequately. Their houses had been destroyed too many times for them to feel like rebuilding anymore. They had had too many years of not enough good food or comfortable shelter because of this. They had had two generations grow up knowing almost nothing but strife in their homeland. They were losing heart in themselves and their faith in King Arthur’s ability to heal these problems.
They were being taken over by another religion that was telling them their own ways weren’t any good and that they were such sinners that they feared they deserved this and more, but even more than that, many people had a strange illness like Arthur’s that many of the Celtic people were waying was because the Romans had started draining the marshlands there and had disturbed something in the natural balance of things.
The land’s water table sank slowly when the Romans began to drain it, and there were many dead bodies decaying in the open air, yetkept continually damp; things that had lived there when there was more water and could not live there anymore. The land had been covered with shallow sea water and marshlands and was now only brackish. It no longer supported the rich marshland fish and bird population, nor could it bring forth crops. There were many carrion eating birds circling in the air, which was further disheartening and frightening, and even they did not want to eat much of this flesh, because there was too much of it. There was disease coming forth from this and from people who had died from the fighting in the marshlands and were not buried.
Truly the dark ages that have been described as descending in the aftermath of Rome’s withdrawal were descending upon the people in spite of King Arthur’s attempt to make it better than it had ever been under the Romans. Since many of these problems were not so vividly apparent until after the Romans withdrew, Arthur’s opposition tried to say it was all a result of his poor leadership and convinced many of the people this was true.
They made his problems with Lancelot into a scandal and used it against him, instead of having any heart towards Arthur’s pain there, even saying the king was impotent. They hoped to goad him into saying Mordred was his son so they could have a further scandal.
The Church played a role in telling Guinevere that she should not have sex with Arthur anymore, because they did not like his non-Christian leanings. They did not say it that way though. They said it was not right to have sex with him unless he became a Christian. This brought a lot of pressure to bear on their marriage that was not necessary, except that the Church was playing a manipulative role there, and even when Arthur did finally “become a Christian”, they did not accept him, and Guinevere did not have sex with him anyway.
The Church had an agenda, which was to use Guinevere to cast him in the light of a sinner in fron of the people and make them see him as the cause of their problems and the cause of the blight upon the land. Then they could discredit him, unseat him and put another in his place; one who would be more compliant with where they wanted things to go, which was back toward Roman ways more than Arthur liked.
Mordred was only fourteen when Morgaine, having already given Mordred the training she wanted him to have, felt it was the time to attack Arthur because he looked so weak to her. Mordred wanted to just leave his father to die and then claim “his throne,” as his mother had always told him it would be, but Morgaine still wanted her revenge and wanted Mordred to kill Arthur for her.
When Mordred tried to oppose her, she would not listen. She gave Mordred many pieces of information designed to incite him into a fury of hatred toward his father and then pushed him out to do battle with him when Arthur was the most ill and the most forlorn over everything that was crumbling in his kingdom. Mordred’s fury was sure he hated his father, but he was not sure at the same time, and when he delivered his blow, it was a blow of divided intent that did not kill his father outright on the battlefield.
Although many of his knights had left him by then, the ones who were still loyal to Arthur managed to get him to the Isle of Avalon, where they hoped the healing arts that were known there could save him still, but Arthur never recovered. His heart for living was gone. His skull was cracked and his brain damaged. They did what they could for him there, but after a long period of uncertainty as to whether he should leave that life or not, he gave it up and was buried there at Avalon.
Mordred was never taken seriously as a possibility for king there and never had been. He was declared illegitimate by the standards of the new religion, the Roman Catholic Church, which Morgan le Fey refused to recognize for the power it had to take over the land and sweep away the old Celtic ways. She tried to make Mordred be the one to save the old ways for her.
She did not recognize Arthur as having realized that Christianity could not be stopped there, and Arthur had not realized that the Church was going to be so intolerant of Celtic ways. Morgaine blamed him for allowing this to happen through Guinevere.
Morgaine had told Mordred he could save the old ways for her by killing Arthur, but the old ways could not be saved unless more people recognized the importance of having both sides of these seemingly opposing viewpoints, as both sides of the gap, find the balance needed between them to really make the bridge between the two worlds that needed to happen there. Green is that bridge between the upper and lower chakras, and this needs to happen now.
