The most sacred and mystical place in Great Britain is considered to be Glastonbury Abbey. There is a legend that in his youth this place was visited by Christ, accompanied by Joseph of Arimathea.
According to legend, Joseph of Arimathea went to the British Isles on the instructions of Philip, the first bishop of Jerusalem, founded a small abbey there and built a church. It was believed that Joseph brought with him sacred relics (the holy grail and the spear of the centurion Longinus).
During the Middle Ages, monks at Glastonbury erected a magnificent monastery named after St. Michael.
The Book of the Last Judgment, compiled by the associates of William the Conqueror in 1086, mentions this amazing structure. The church quickly becomes a place of pilgrimage, crowds of people flock here.
The abbey towered over the surrounding marshes and was nicknamed the Avalonian Island. Under this name, it is often mentioned in the chronicles of the court of King Arthur.
According to legend, the city of Karlion was Arthur's residence. It was considered the sacred center of the world. In the royal palace of Camelot, a Round Table was established, at which 12 knights were seated.
The table symbolized Time. Arthur also had a magic cauldron, which he obtained during a trip to the otherworldly world of Annon.
Since the XII century. Glastonbury Abbey became famous as the final resting place of King Arthur and his wife Guenever. At the very end of the XII century. King Henry II ordered a search for the burial place of his legendary ancestor.
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In 1190 the grave was found, about which a detailed account has been preserved in the archives of the abbey. (At the end of the 20th century, English archaeologists uncovered the grave of King Arthur.
A medical examination of the remains confirmed that their age corresponds to the 5th-6th centuries, i.e. when the legendary king lived.)
By the time of King Henry VIII's reign, Glastonbury Abbey was in a sorry state. The greedy autocrat squeezed everything out of him, and then all his buildings were barbarously blown up. The collection of a unique library was scattered throughout the district by ignorant robbers.
It would seem that the grandiose structure, which existed for almost a millennium, perished forever. But even lying in ruins, it still attracts the attention of all those who are looking for clues to the mystical secrets kept by it.
So, it is considered the place where the Holy Grail is kept. People were looking for her, wishing to join the innermost secrets of human existence. Indeed, according to legends, the Holy Grail is not a material object.
This is Knowledge. It is very changeable and ambiguous: it can be reincarnated into the Cup of Christ, which he sipped at the Last Supper, or maybe - in the so-called. crystal well of wisdom.
In Britain, the Holy Grail is called the well of Christ. In the XX century. his search was taken up by the English writer Robert Graves (1895-1985) - the author of the book "The Moon Goddess", which, according to his own statement, was dictated to him in 1944 by … Mary Magdalene herself. She also told him that the Grail would be found in the sacred land of England, near Glastonbury.
Since the search expedition required a lot of money, Graves needed to profitably publish his book. And it was here that the uniform devilry began. The first publisher called Graves' work "parapoetic trash" and soon died of a heart attack.
Another once allowed himself to notice that the goddess had the manner of a maiden from a den, and unexpectedly hanged himself, having previously put on a woman's dress. The wonderful lyricist T. S. Eliot took his colleague's work more seriously. As a result, the book was published in a decent print run and sold out instantly. The author himself received a prestigious award - the Order of Merit.
At night, after the banquet for the award, the poet dreamed of the Moon Goddess, who repeated several times that she was the keeper of the Holy Grail.
The expedition organized by Graves lasted only a week. It was as if the poet was guiding him to the places where it was necessary to dig. According to legend, the Grail was supposed to be in the grave of King Arthur. The well was found in a completely different place, 100 miles west of the alleged primary burial.
This is how the poet himself described his miraculous find: “The colossal crystal purple funnel is completely empty, but gives the impression that it is filled with thick blood. Breathing in the fumes of the well - the aromas of honey and flowering heather - you involuntarily begin to understand that this most perfect creation of the Almighty can both ward off madness, and bring it closer to it, and bring death, and grant immortality.
But above all is insight. Contact with the Grail allows you to know everything about everything, but this knowledge is carried away by the lightest breeze, as soon as the illusion of omniscience is born in the soul. I cannot measure the time of my possession of the Grail."
Graves instructed the diggers to fill up the well so that it would become inaccessible to others. However, he himself later claimed that he did not know where this cherished place was. The poet lived a long life.
When he was dying, he bequeathed that his manuscripts should be read only five years after his death. Everyone was expecting a sensation, but they read this: "It's not difficult for me, for the gifts of truth come from above."
But the story of Glastonbury Abbey will be incomplete if one does not remember the events that occurred earlier than the Graves excavation. In 1907, when the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey were purchased by the state, the English archaeologist and church architect Frederick Bligh-Bond undertook excavations on the territory of the monastery.
He wanted to establish the location and size of two chapels that once existed there: in honor of Edgar the Martyr and in honor of Our Lady of Loretta. No one knew where they used to stand or what they looked like, since these buildings were only mentioned in early descriptions of the abbey.
So the archaeologist did not have a starting point for excavations, and searches in the ancient archives did not yield significant results. Without specific information, there was no point in starting excavation work, and then Bly-Bond, as an experiment, decided to recruit his old friend Captain John Bartlett, an extraordinary and mysterious man with phenomenal spiritual abilities, to work.
The captain claimed that, plunging into a trance, he was able to receive and record in writing information from the past. Moreover, Bartlett supposedly could influence the events he described by the power of his will.
And on November 7, 1907, Bly-Bond invited the captain to his Bristol office, where a unique experiment was carried out. The architect asked John to take a pencil, after which he himself lightly touched its tip and turned to the invisible respondent with the question: "Can you tell us something about Glastonbury?"
There was no answer. Desperate friends began to just talk, when suddenly a pencil in the captain's hand scribbled an uneven line: "All knowledge is eternal and accessible to the sincere thoughts of the mind."
The friends were surprised and puzzled by this short message. Should they seek the answer themselves or keep asking questions? We decided to ask. And received a variety of messages in Latin and Old English. Particularly important was the message on the so-called. vulgar Latin, which was used many centuries ago.
It said that the chapel to Edgar the Martyr was erected by Abbot Beer. Then it was rebuilt. John's hand then slowly began to draw a contour map of the top of the abbey. A strange figure appeared on the diagram. Instinctively, Bly-Bond sensed that this was one of the objects of his search.
He asked: "Isn't this a chapel?" Very slowly, letter by letter, pencil in the hands of the captain wrote the answer: “Yes, this is the chapel of Edgar the Martyr, long destroyed and lost. Entrance through a partition to the back of the altar, 5 feet, the chapel stretches 30 yards to the east, stone masonry, horizontal, fan-shaped vault, transom windows and blue glass."
A mysterious informant from the underworld called himself Guillelmus Monacus (William the Monk). Of course, an archaeologist might have dismissed these semi-legible records as an odd joke. However, further events confirmed the seriousness of what was happening.
Using the instructions of a mysterious monk, workers soon unearthed the remains of a 90-foot-long structure in the eastern part of the monastery grounds. Its location was fully consistent with the automatic recording. But was it the chapel of Edgar the Martyr?
Further excavations provided answers to all questions. Marks of masons were found on the remains of the masonry. All coincided, the type of fan-like vault was exactly what the medium described it.
Then the workers dug up a door with a threshold, a polygonal altar and a crypt. And around there were fragments of blue glass, as if the barbarians who had destroyed the abbey were rampaging here yesterday.
After this find, Bly-Bond was considered a genius of archeology. And he decided to find out the location of the second chapel in the same way. This time he received messages in English at the beginning of the 16th century. Excavations have confirmed the accuracy of the information received.
Friends turned to automatic writing for 10 years. During this time, they received hundreds of similar messages, which they carefully dated and analyzed.
I was struck by the extraordinary detail of the information - the data was given out to within an inch. This was probably due to the fact that the informants were monks who lived for a long time in the abbey.
The earliest entry in Bartlett's notebook was written by a certain Askold of Saxony. He reported that long before the abbey was erected on the same hill, he had built a strong wooden house, which later became part of the monastic domain.
In a precisely indicated place and without much difficulty, the remains of a wooden frame, hidden from prying eyes by a thousand-year-old masonry, were discovered.
The authorities were delighted with the work of the successful archaeologist: Bly-Bond accomplished a scientific feat - he discovered a long-lost abbey, discovered parts of unique structures, the existence of which was not even suspected! However, later the authorities learned that Bly-Bond had resorted to such dubious sources of information as an automatic letter, the existence of which no one wanted to admit. And although the merits of the archaeologist were generally recognized, in 1922 he was removed from work.
In 1933, retired Bly-Bond wrote the book "The Gates of Memory", where he described all the messages of the mysterious informants - both he tested during excavations and those that still had to be verified.
Subsequently, an official archaeological search for the remains of the abbey fully confirmed everything that he wrote about. So the charges against him turned out to be unfair, as well as the automatic writing. By the way, a similar phenomenon - psychographics - has long been familiar to scientists.
True, from a scientific point of view, a person acting as a "receiver" of otherworldly signals looks unconvincing. It is believed that the subjective factor is too strong here, and therefore it is impossible to accurately determine the address of the source of information: is it our subconsciousness, or “a single information field,” or maybe the afterlife?
Or maybe this is another confirmation of the religious postulate of the "immortal human soul", and there is still something beyond the border?