Maltwood's Glastonbury Cosmogeography as Crystallising Experiences and Perceptions of Self and Cultural Transformation

Centripetal and Centrifugal Mandala:Opon Ifa Cosmogram and Maltwood's Glastonbury Cosmogeography

Maltwood interprets the Glastonbury landscape in terms of astrological and Arthurian imagery. Her work represents the landscape as delineating images that derive from these cultural forms.

Her interpretation of the Glastonbury landscape could be understood as correlating a number of elements in Western thought. It integrates conceptions of terrestrial and celestial correlation with ideas of the transformation of the self within the framework constituted by such a unified understanding of the universe. Her focus is on astrology whose adherents could be understood as relating the spatial and temporal limitations and coordinates of their terrestrial existence with the expansiveness represented by the celestial locations and cosmic motions of the celestial bodies, and, thereby, to a degree, at least, overcoming or transforming the finitude to which they are confined within the limitations of space and time.

Her ideas also integrate notions of transformation of self depicted in the Grail motif from Arthurian legend, where pre-Christian motifs such as the chalice of the Irish goddess Ceridwen are fused with the Christian motif of the chalice from which Christ drank at the Last Supper to create the image of the Grail, a transformative object which is capable of transforming a person who perceives or holds it into a more than human state of being.

Intra and Intercultural Transformations Dramatised by Katherine Maltwood's Glastonbury Mandala

Katherine Maltwood's Glastonbury Mandala

This drive towards new forms of meaning by increasingly larger groups of people has led to the development of new methods of discovering and relating with the sacred, of conceiving the world and of navigating within what has been described as a “re-enchanted” universe . Some of these efforts are efforts to re-discover or recreate endogenous pre-Christian world views and technologies of fundamental meaning, of which the sacred is an inclusive category.

It is in the latter effort of develop these conceptions of meaning in terms of pre-Christian conceptions of nature and the human and their interrelationship that the convergences between the ideas developed by Wenger and Maltwood, in Nigeria and in England, respectively, converge. These correlations also demonstrate their distinctive achievements as aspects of larger cultural movements which have been catalyzed by changes in European society which have impacted on Africa.

Wenger’s history, therefore, could be said to dramatise the confluence of Europe and Africa in a particularly visceral form as a European whose vocation in Africa not only represents par excellence the efforts of many Africans to rediscover and recreate in relation to the changing Weltanschaaung in African emerging from the encounter of African world views with other world views, but also the efforts of Europeans to develop newer forms of meaning that bypass or are not limited to Christianity, reclaim the realm of the subjective and the magical in nature from both Christianity and modern science and technology.

With time, these movements, in both Europe and Africa,developed into efforts to achieve these goals through the development, rediscovery or recreation of ways of conceiving the human being, the cosmos and their interrelationship that are pre-Christian and are often materially embodied while emphasizing on the material as representing only one pole of being.

With time, these movements, in both Europe and Africa,developed into efforts to achieve these goals through the development, rediscovery or recreation of ways of conceiving the human being, the cosmos and their interrelationship through methods that are pre-Christian and are often materially embodied while emphasizing the material as representing only one pole of being.

This trans-materiality is often expressed in terms of human embodiment and the capacity for consciousness; agency and the embodiment of modes of being that go beyond the material in nature. It is also demonstrated in the capacity of the human being to relate with and shape their individual universe, and even participate, to a degree, in the shaping of the larger cosmos through such action.

In the development of these categories of being and of human agency in relation to them, the movements to which Wenger and Katherine Maltwood belong to could be understood as belonging to could be said to demonstrate significant points of convergence, and their divergences could be understood to highlight their similarities.

These developments are represented in the West by such movements, among others, as Paganism, magic and Wicca. These possibilities of thought are crystallised in Maltwood’s correlation of astrology, Arthurian literature and the esoteric undertones of the Grail Legend, in interpreting the Glastonbury landscape in terms of conceptions of meaning and purpose that transcend the limitations of Western high culture as it has emerged since the circumscription of the character of reality and, correspondingly, the development of a scale of valuation in the assessment of human pursuits that emerged after the seventeenth century Scientific Revolution.