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Dear friends
Our first short course here at The Art of Enchantment begins September 12, with a recorded lecture sent out to premium subscribers by email (and as always, available to visit/ revisit here on the web in the ‘short courses’ section of the home page), and our first live session takes place on September 19. In this year’s Myth Summer School we celebrated women in the Arthurian tradition, and as a follow up, for the next six months I’m going to be focusing in on the Grail stories that provide the foundations of our rich native mythology. We’ll be looking at what the stories tell us about the the archetypal masculine (the Grail Hero and the Grail King/ Fisher King), and we’ll be talking about what these tales might tell us about the archetypal feminine (with the gloriously feisty Grail messengers, Grail bearers and beyond). We’ll also be exploring what the Grail symbolises, and the nature of the Grail quest and what it might represent for us today.
Please note that this course will replace our usual rather more meandering schedule of monthly Myth and Fairy Tale Salons for its duration. Here’s what the course will look like (though it might be subject to some small shifts as we go along). Although we’ll be approaching the subject from a proper scholarly perspective (I have an M.A. in these subjects) I promise you it’ll be far from dry. We’ll be bringing the old texts to life in the context of my long work with the mythic imagination, and even if you’re already familiar with the better-known Grail story – that of Perceval – I can promise you a good few surprises along the way.
There will be one course module each month, and the format will be as follows: the first week I’ll provide some background material for you, in informal video lecture form; the following week, we’ll have a live Zoom discussion. (Please also find the dates for all these live sessions on the Calendar page as usual.) All sessions take place between 4pm and 5pm UK time.
All sessions will be recorded, and the entire course will be available in the ‘Short Courses’ section of The Art of Enchantment’s home page, so if you’re a premium subscriber you’ll be able to revisit the material at any time during your membership.
September 12/ 19: the Arthurian background: who was Arthur, and how did the Grail quest happen?
October 10/ 17: the nature of the stories; the wider body of Grail literature
November 21/ 28: the Celtic origins of the Grail; what does the Grail symbolise?
January 2/ 9: (please note that we always take a break from our monthly live sessions in busy December) the archetypal feminine and the Grail (the Grail Heroine; the Grail Messengers; the Grail Bearers)
February 6/ 13: the archetypal masculine and the Grail (the Grail Hero; the Grail/ Fisher King)
March 13/ 20: what does the Grail quest mean for us today?
… And then?
Next year, I propose to carry on with the British mythology theme, and introduce premium subscribers to some other little-known stories that form part of our rich and remarkable mythic and folkloric inheritance.
So please do stick around, and I look forward to sharing it all with you.
Sharon
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