David Breeden is speaking all week about the psychological images that become embedded in talking about how the mind works..

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. And this is coffee and Wisdom. We’re starting a new theme this week called Dancing in the Chapel Perilous. What is that? This is a series of images that occur in literature, but they become psychological images that are then in some way embedded in talking about how the human mind works. The chapel perilous being one of the older ones that occurs back in the fourteen hundreds. So we’ll take a peek at that first. Here’s something you can find on the Internet. Lewis says, by my chapel, perilous insurance it insures against unsightly psychic scars, character armoring, reality tunnels, superfluity, involuntary free association, fraudulent insurance and excessive force of Feyenoord. Should give you a clue. Those of you who were joining in when I was talking about religions that are maybe kind of joking and there is one called Scorpion ism and indeed for does occur in discourse pianism. A final word is a word that makes you forget that you’ve ever seen that word. So something is up with this, but we’ll have to wait to see where it goes. But we do have a definition of what Chappell perilous means. As a matter of fact, Chappell Peerless is an occult term, referring to a psychological state in which an individual cannot be certain whether they have been aided or hindered by some force outside the realm of the natural world, or whether what happened to be appeared to be supernatural inference was a product of their own vivid imagination.So it’s a moment at which we reached this point and say, wait a minute, was that supernatural or is that just a product of my own imagination? And so you can see how the the the Chappell idea could be wrapped up in some other kinds of ideas that then become all, you know, Dan Brown ish in some way. But we’ll have to wait and see about that. But, you know, there we got all this occult stuff going on and then there Sir Lancelot and the witch Healthways. That doesn’t look very scary, does it? And of course, the chapel perilous is part of the Grail legend, the Holy Grail. That’s not scary and that’s not a cult. Or is it? And that’s what we need to look at this week. Now, chapel, perilous as a term, first appears in Lammert Darter, written and compiled by Mr. Thomas Mallory. And it was published by London’s first printer, William Caxton, in fourteen eighty five. Did the image exist in earlier manuscripts? We really don’t know. Thomas Mallory, the author, is very upfront about the fact that he is looking at manuscripts that came out of older traditions, most of them from France.And so it could be that the chapel perilous exists somewhere else. And he did get it. But we don’t know that because we don’t know any other sources that still exist, although they may have been around in fourteen eighty five. Now, who was there, Thomas Mallory? There are several candidates for him. There were several Sir Thomas Mallory’s living at that time, but the most likely candidate is a guy who lived from fourteen fifteen to fourteen seventy one. So right in that time period he fought in both on both sides of the War of the Roses and he was imprisoned at Newgate Prison in London. Therefore, we know that this author is writing out of the prison. He says so Caxton says so. So this is probably the guy, although we really don’t know. He was a member of parliament at one time, again, going back and forth during this civil war that’s going on.