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, senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. This is coffee and Wisdom. And this week we have been looking at some ideas from depth psychology, if you will, that at least go in to that direction after coming out of various literature and mythology. And I’m calling it dancing in the Chapel Palace. Now, yesterday, I did cover the idea that this idea of the chapel perilous has gone on into some new areas. And I want to trace how that got there. In occult terminology, Chapel Perilous is 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, something supernatural or whether what appeared to be supernatural interference was a product of their own vivid imaginations. Now we know where the the humanists among us are going to come down on this. But for a lot of people, this is a very difficult thing to kind of suss out. And so we want to look at how this works. So how did this a cult and, you know, looks kind of scary.How did that develop out of something that looks fairly mundane and kind of peaceful and even pastoral? Here are pictures from the original Assyrian tales as redone during the Victorian era. Sir Lancelot and the Witch. There’s the Holy Grail here. We have the round table and here is the Holy Grail in the middle of it with some kind of halo rainbow effect going on there. As I mentioned yesterday, all of this is developed out of a book called Limor Darker by Thomas Mallery. And it’s a compilation of French and English theory and tales from the early to late medieval period. The book coming out in fourteen eighty five. So how did we get from there to here in which the chapel perilous occurs in all sorts of science fiction and fantasy? Why did it cross that line, which doesn’t at first appear to be a very logical leap? Well, the first step was to say Eliot’s the wasteland at the chapel, pyrolysis mentioned in the wasteland. And we know that because T.S. Eliot told us so in the footnotes to the book, he says this.These blinds are from his idea of the chapel, peerless in this decayed hole among the mountains in the faint moonlight, the grass is singing over the tumbled graves. About the chapel, there is the empty chapel. Only the wind’s home. It has no windows and the door swings. Dry bones can harm no one. Well, now, that’s kind of cryptic if we want to talk about it. But we do see the outlines of the chapel perilous appearing in this. So how do we get there? Well, we have to trace it back to Eliot’s source. And he has this to say in his footnotes, not only the title, but the plan. And a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem. The Wasteland were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend from ritual to romance, indeed, so deeply am I indebted? This Westons book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do, and I recommend it apart from the great interest of the book itself. To any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble to another work of anthropology, I am indebted in general, one which has influenced a generation profoundly. I mean the Golden Bough I have used, especially the two volumes Adonis, Attisso, Syrus, anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognize in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies. So vegetations ceremonies is where Elliott is going with this. We’ll get there. But first off, let’s stop off to look at Jessie LWR book.