I have a dear and very old friend who’s prone to regular existential meltdowns, and who is always asking me why I’m not. How is it that I always seem (at least, to the average observer) to just sail on through, whether I’ve just been diagnosed with and am navigating treatment for an aggressive lymphoma in the middle of a global pandemic, or recovering from fracturing my back in four places after I launched myself down a steep slope on the publication day of my most recent book!

The answers to that question are inevitably complex, but in large part I’d put it down to two key things. (Or maybe three: the third being that I’m very good at hiding my turmoil!) First, a difficult childhood that in my case nurtured the development of resilience and self-reliance (as well as a few colourful dysfunctions, but that’s another story, some of which I’ve written about in my books). And second, a sense of duty, of responsibility but also of deep joy: a sense that I have something to do or be in this funny old life and I need to just get on and do or be it, and trust in whatever unfolds along the way. Because the angel (or daemon) within is very persistent, time is short, and even when the night is dark and full of terrors, you still have to put one foot in front of the other and keep walking. You have to show up in the story you’re in.

Nevertheless, there are still times in any life of purpose when you suddenly come to a full stop. When little seems to be working out quite as you had hoped or planned. When energy deserts you for no especially good reason, or you just lose the will to churn out another book and feel the need to hold off for a few months, no matter how compelling your argument in the fledgling book proposal might be. I resist those times with all my strength, but sometimes even I have to give myself over to the ebbs and flows of life. And right now, I’m riding an ebb-tide. It’s not the first time, and I’m confident it won’t be the last – but this one is certainly compelling. I know full well that it won’t last forever, or even probably for very long. But I need to let it happen, because those apparent pauses, those times between stories, the unwanted but all-too-urgent forays through the bardos, are usually in the end the most revolutionary and revelatory periods of all. They happen to us for a reason, and if I’ve learned anything it’s that we don’t choose them – they choose us.

So I feel as if some divine mother cat has opened its sharp-toothed jaws wide, picked up the silly little kitten that I am by the scruff of my neck, given me a good shake, and gently set me down on the ground again with a snarled instruction to JUST STOP IT. Slow down. Pay attention. Read. Think. Let what wants to emerge, emerge. Stop managing it. And the truth is, resilient and focused though I’ve always been, I am also finding the world just a little bit too hard right now. Just a little bit too mad. So there’s something in me that’s only to happy to withdraw from it for a bit.

That’s why, disillusioned with the times, I’m going back in time. I’m going back to the literature that transformed me and fired me up during my early teenage years. The literature that fed into the passions that still drive me today. Not to D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, or Albert Camus’ l’Étranger, or the other plays and novels that shook me to the core during studies for ‘A’ levels when I was sixteen and seventeen, but the rich and beautiful literature of the Middle Ages that we were fortunate enough to study for a full five years before that. (When it came to literature, I went to a remarkable school.) Because, along with the myths and fairy tales that I devoured of my own accord during my childhood, these were the texts that captured my heart and that have haunted my imagination ever since. The titles alone are like spells, incantations. Maybe even prayers. And I’ve learned over the past couple of decades that sometimes, stepping out of the linear imperatives that the culture forces on us and circling – or rather, spiralling – back around, is exactly the life medicine you need.

Why the Middle Ages, and why now? Clearly not because life was any easier, back in the day! – but because there was so much genuine grappling with the big questions. So much searching for truth and beauty in a world that didn’t yet profess to have all the answers figured out. I find so much (not all!) of modern fiction shallow, whiny, utterly self-obsessed, full of soul-sapping, self-referential, tired-of-life irony. So I want now, just as I wanted when I was around thirteen years old, to immerse myself in the compassionate but decidedly ‘get a grip’ instruction that Lady Philosophy provided to the doomed Boethius in The Consolation of Philosophy. I want the visionary, dreamlike pilgrimage of Piers the Ploughman. The mysteries of the Green Chapel in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The Otherworldly, image-laden Lais of Marie de France.

The small piles below constitute less than 50% of my vast and growing reading list for the rest of the summer, as well as autumn and winter. And I suspect I’ll be writing here, along the way, about the images and ideas in these beautiful old texts that I find especially transformative, and especially relevant to the times we find ourselves in.

There are some Arthurian-focused texts that have fed into recent obsessions here at The Art of Enchantment; there are others that will feed into my forthcoming series here on the Grail. And on that subject …

In this year’s Myth Summer School we’ve been celebrating Arthurian women, and next week will be the third of the three months we’re devoting to that subject. But, as I indicated in last week’s newsletter, for the next six months I’m going to be focusing, during our monthly Myth & Fairy Tale Salons for paid subscribers, on the Grail stories that constitute so much 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 exploring what the Grail symbolises, and the nature of the Grail quest. We’ll also, inevitably, be talking about what these tales might tell us about the archetypal feminine (with the gloriously feisty Grail messengers, Grail bearers and beyond).

And so, because I didn’t know when I launched this year’s Myth Summer School that I’d be wheeling straight into a series on the Grail, I’m going to need to change the story that we focus on in month three, because the stories I’d originally planned to cover, those of Dindrane and other Grail Heroines, will fit much more neatly into our deep foray into the body of stories around the archetypal feminine in the context of the wider Grail literature. We’ll come to those stories now in December (see the schedule below).

Next week, then, for our third month of celebrating Arthurian women, I’ll be focusing on two other much-neglected but hugely interesting female characters: Ganieda, sister of Merlin, and Grisandole.

Then, we’ll move into our series on the Grail, and here’s what that will look like (though it might be subject to some small shifts as we go along). Please bear in mind that although we’ll be approaching the subject from a proper scholarly perspective, 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.

The format will be roughly the same as that for Myth Summer School: one week I’ll provide some background material for you, this time in informal video lecture form; the next week, we’ll have a live Zoom discussion during our scheduled Myth and Fairy Tale Salon. Please find the dates for all these live sessions on the Calendar page as usual.

September 19: the Arthurian background: who was Arthur, and how did the Grail quest happen?

October 17: the nature of the stories; the wider body of Grail literature

November 28: the Celtic origins of the Grail; what does the Grail symbolise?

January 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 13: the archetypal masculine and the Grail (the Grail Hero; the Grail/ Fisher King)

March 20: what does the Grail quest mean for us today?

Next year, I propose to carry on with the British mythology theme, and introduce paid 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.