Courts of Joy: Healing the Arthurian Mysteries

The Matter of Britain is not finished.

The story ends at Camlann in ruin: the court divided, the knights dead, the King borne away, and not one wound healed nor one relationship mended. Every telling since has faithfully preserved that ruin, as though embalming a wound were the same as honouring it.

A magician reads that ending differently. Not as a tragedy to be admired, but as a condition to be treated.

What was left unhealed at the level of the archetypes can be healed at the level of the archetypes, and the healing changes what flows down from there into the world. That is not a theory. It is what Andy Cooper and the late Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki, former Director of Studies of the Servants of the Light, spent the better part of a decade doing. At Tintagel and in West Wales, in a sequence of great ritual workings, they freed Merlin from his tower, reforged the broken sword, and at the last restored the Courts of Joy themselves.

This is the record of that work, and an invitation to continue it.

Part field report, part working manual, The Courts of Joy sets out what was done, what it cost, what came of it, and how you may take up the same work yourself. It is written by a practising magician who promises to teach nothing he has not lived.

Inside you will find:

• Why the Arthurian cycle ends unhealed, and what that costs the land and the people of these islands
• The road from Atlantis to Avalon, and how the Matter of Britain became the native mystery tradition of these islands
• Sovereignty and the Wasteland: the wound at the root of the whole story
• The four Hallows, a chapter each: the Sword, the Stone, the Spear and the Grail
• Merlin and the Ladies, and why the one locked room had to be opened first
• The Round Table, and how to find your own seat at it
• How ritual drama actually works, and the discipline of carrying a part and putting it down safely
• The Restoration of the Courts of Joy, and a practice by which you may enter it for yourself

For readers of Dion Fortune, Gareth Knight, W. E. Butler, and John and Caitlín Matthews, and for anyone who has ever suspected that the Arthurian legends are not merely stories.

A word on what this book is not. It is not a history, and it is not a collection of performable scripts. Degree material is described in general terms only, for three reasons: copyright, safety, and the deepest one, that a script on a page is no substitute for genuine initiation. What is given here is the understanding, the method, and practices you can undertake safely on your own.

Camelot is not a memory. It is an appointment, and you are expected.