Medieval Romance and Arthurian Legend
The Old (Iron Age) Religion of Britain: an attempt at understanding
Eleusinianm stands for Eleusinian Mysteries, a secret religious brotherhood (and sisterhood) that thrived in classical Greece in the fifth century BC (Iron Age in Britain) and could trace its roots, we now know, into the Bronze Age of Mycenaean Greece.
This entire project stems from the reading of two books in 1998, when my attention should probably have been directed elsewhere. One of them was a Penguin Classics edition of Chrétien de Troyes' Arthurian Romances in English translation. The other was a reprint of an old Victorian work called Arthurian Legends of the Middle Ages by George Cox and Eustace Jones.
Previously I had been assured by another fascinating modern reprint of a Victorian book on Celtic religion, that the Celts believed in life after death in an Otherworld only for the most noble amongst them and that there was no evidence at all for a belief in reincarnation. I remember this since I had a vague recollection at the time that Julius Caesar had indicated otherwise somewhere and it began to puzzle me that all the most interesting books that I could find on the subject (and I did not at this time have access to a very large library nor a completely up-to-date book list) were often reprints of Victorian works. But in Arthurian Legends of the Middle Ages I could see a theme that seemed to be repeated over and over again in these Medieval tales, and it intrigued me. I joined the Early English Text Society, discovered the website of the Camelot Project at the University of Rochester, USA, and began setting down these old Middle English stories in my own words, since I found that I could more easily absorb a tale and all its detail in this way. And as I did so I became even more intrigued.
Even those authors and scholars, as I subsequently discovered, whose work had, long before my pitiful efforts, led them to guess and subsequently to demonstrate the mythological nature of the Arthurian world and its antiquity— scholars whose studies have led them painstakingly to prove now beyond all possible doubt the fundamentally pagan nature of these myths of Arthur—even these writers seem to retain a curious reluctance to explore one particular theme.
Then Quintin was conceived, and thoughts followed in earnest. ∩
