Two castles – crystal, shining, illumined from within by the light of a glorious King. Each has seven appearances. Outside are venomous monsters. 

Two journeyers – a nun and a warlord. One goes to marry the King, one to kill Him.

The Vision

Theresa

She is gifted a vision of a ‘beautiful crystal globe’ ‘in the shape of a castle’ ‘containing seven mansions, in the seventh and innermost’ ‘the King of Glory, in the greatest splendour, illuminating and beautifying them all.’ (1)

‘A castle made of a single diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in Heaven there are many mansions… some above, others below, others at each side; and in the centre and midst of them all is the chiefest mansion where the most secret things pass between God and the soul.’ (2)

Outside ‘foul, dark, infested with toads, vipers and other venomous creatures’. (3)

Arthur

He hears rumours of ‘the Glass Fort’ (4) ‘a tower of glass’ ‘in the middle of the sea’ (5). ‘Amid the land a castle tall’, shining as ‘crystal’, a hundred towers lighting the sky, ‘of diamond… battled stout’, lit from within, sparkling with ‘unearthly light’. Jewelled stones shining forth a light ‘like sunbeams.’ (6) The King glistening so bright, shining so hot none can gaze upon him. (7)

‘The fairest castle’ with ‘the best appointed troops,’ ‘minstrels,’ ‘music,’ comely youths, elegant maidens, in the midst ‘the king sitting in a golden chair’ offering ‘every dainty and delicacy’, ‘every drink and liquor,’ ‘every luxury of courtesy and service, of banquet and of honourable entertainment.’ (8)

Outside ‘a great scaled beast’ with ‘a hundred heads’, a battalion ‘beneath the root of his tongue’ and ‘in each of his napes’. ‘A black forked toad’ with ‘a hundred claws’. ‘A speckled crested snake’ torturing a hundred souls in her flesh. (9)

The Fortress of Impediment

Teresa

She goes with her sisters and tells them not to fight against the ‘snakes and vipers and poisonous creatures’ who ‘prevent the soul from seeing the light.’ She tells them they are nothing but dust in their eyes obscuring their vision. (10)

Here the soul is deaf and dumb. The ears must be opened, the tongue loosened. ‘The door of this castle is prayer’. (11) Not just vocal prayer, but mental prayer, ‘for if it is prayer at all, it must be accompanied by meditation. If a person does not think Whom he is addressing, and what he is asking for, and who it is that is asking and of Whom he is asking it, I do not consider that he is praying at all even though he be constantly moving his lips.’ (12)

Teresa and her sisters open the door with their prayers and are guided in.

Arthur

He takes ‘three loads of Prydwen’ and storms ‘Hell’s gate’ without a prayer. (13) Taliesin, with ‘two keen spears’ ‘from Heaven’ from ‘the streams of Annwn’ (14) pierces the monsters (15) but they do not die. They grow more heads and form a dark fog swelling like motes in the corners of every eye.

Battle-weary at last they find, or are found by, the glass fort, ‘six thousand men’ ‘standing on its wall’, its uncommunicative watchman. ‘Covered with men, to whom they often spoke, but received no answer.’ (16) Who is deaf and dumb?

Arthur and his warriors fight and break their way through the fortress door. 

The Four-Cornered Fortress

Teresa

Teresa and her sisters still find it hard to speak yet can hear. ‘These souls’ ‘understand the Lord when He calls them; for, as they gradually get nearer to the place where His Majesty dwells, He becomes a very good Neighbour.’ ‘He calls them ceaselessly, time after time, to approach Him; and this voice of His is so sweet that the poor soul is consumed with grief at being unable to do His bidding immediately’ so ‘suffers more than if it could not hear Him.’ (17)

It seems to come from all four corners of the fortress and Teresa’s sisters rush from one to the next in longing and she is forced to still them, tell them to listen. She reminds them their King is in the centre, the midst, infinitely patient. ‘His Majesty is quite prepared to wait for many days, and even years, especially when He sees we are persevering and have good desires.’ (18)

Arthur

A song is heard ‘in the four quarters of the fort revolving to face the four directions’. (19) Arthur tells his men to put their hands over their ears, to ignore its sweetness, the seductive music of the minstrels, the pipes and harp.

‘A song is heard in the four quarters of the fort, stout defence of the island.’ (20) The calling of the King is ceaseless and Arthur’s men rush from corner to corner, until Arthur takes the middle, tells them ‘I am King’, ‘hear no more.’

The Petrification Fort

Teresa

They spend ‘long periods of aridity in prayer’ (21) learning to be ‘humble’ not ‘restless’ (22). They face the testing of when His Majesty ‘withdraws His help’ (23)

It’s cold, so cold, in the Petrification Fort, they are tempted to close their hearts. To make them hard and solid as ice when their prayers are not fulfilled. 

They progress at a slow pace by penance and renunication of themselves.

When all their desires have run dry they hear the flow of fresh water mixing with jet and know their petrified hearts are melting and opening to the source.

Arthur

Cold and hard the fortress. Cold and hard the walls. But not cold and hard as the hearts of Arthur and his warriors who have slain a hundred witches and giants.

They listen not. They pray not. When ‘fresh water and jet are mixed together’ (25) they hear it not. When servants dressed in blue and red arrive to set ‘sparkling wine their drink’ ‘in front of their battalion’ (24) they slaughter them.

Blood and wine run crimson through the frozen corridors of the fort. 

The Fortress of the Silver-Headed Beast

Teresa

Teresa and her sisters ‘are now getting near to the place where the King dwells, they are of great beauty and there are such exquisite things to be seen and appreciated in them that the understanding is incapable of describing them’ ‘without being completely obscure to those devoid of experience.’ (26)

‘The water comes direct from its source, which is God, and, when it is His Majesty’s will and He is pleased to grant us some supernatural favour, its coming is accompanied by the greatest peace and quietness and sweetness’. (27) It enlarges the heart and dilates the soul. No effort is needed ‘for the Lord gives when He wills and as He wills and to whom He wills.’ (28)

The thaw is complete and the water rushes through the veins of the nuns. Teresa perceives a vision of the Lord as a silver-haired child riding a beast with a silver head and He laughs and He whispers to her the answers to the riddles about which day He was created and the mysteries of His birth at noon.

Arthur

Arthur’s frustrated, Taliesin too, at being ‘stuck with pathetic men, with no go in them.’ (29) The fortress is still cold, his warriors bent, buckled, as old men. Their joints creak, there is snow in their hair, hoar frost coats their beards.

A voice mocks ‘those who don’t know on what day the Lord was created, when, at noon, the ruler was born, what animal they guard with his silver head’. (30)

When finally they reach the centre of the fortress and kill the guards they find nothing but a bishop’s crozier, a silver-headed crook, the head of a cold old man.

The Fortress of God’s Peak

Teresa

A lovely land of water-meadows, aurochs grazing, horses on the green hills. A surprise the arrows shooting from the fortress as if from the bow of a Hunter.

Each nun is wounded by an ‘arrow of fire’ not ‘where physical pain can be felt, but in the soul’s most intimate depths. It passes as quickly as a flash of lightning and leaves everything in’ their ‘nature that is earthly reduced to powder.’ (31)

‘The soul has been wounded with love for the Spouse and seeks to be alone.’ (32) ‘It has completely died to the world so that it may live more fully in God.’ (33)

The nuns are prepared for their deaths for, like silkworms, they have fed well on the ‘mulberry leaves’ of prayer and meditation. Now they find their twigs, ‘upon which, with their tiny mouths, they start spinning silk, making themselves very tight cocoons, in which they bury themselves. Then, finally the worm, which was large and ugly, comes out… as a beautiful white butterfly.’ (34)

Teresa and her nuns take flight as white butterflies to the Fortress of God’s Peak.

Arthur

Taliesin’s still cursing the ‘pathetic men with their trailing shields, who don’t know who’s created on what day, when at mid-day God was born, who made the one who didn’t go to the meadows of Defwy.’ (35)

‘Those who know nothing of the Brindled Ox, with his stout collar and seven score links in its chain,’ (36) he berates them as they approach the majestic beast.

Arthur claims the Brindled Ox and sends his men to round up all the cattle – Yellow Spring, Speckled Ox, Chestnut, the Brothers from the Horned Mountain. (37)

From on high a rain of arrows from the bow of the Hunter and His huntsmen. Arthur and his men throw up their shields refusing the blows to pierce their souls.

“Attack!” They scale God’s Peak. ‘Shields shattered, spears broken, violence inflicted by the honoured and the fair’ to the ‘sorrow’ of the fair King. (38)

The Fair Fort

Teresa

They enter the fortress, filled with treasures of the soul, glittering more brightly than gold. Bright, so bright, but none so bright as the throne of the Lord.

‘God suspends the soul in prayer by means of rapture, or ecstasy, or trance.’ (39) It’s as if they’re in chains, blue-grey chains, yet in chains they are more free. ‘When the soul is in this state of suspension the Lord sees fit to reveal to it certain mysteries, such as heavenly things and imaginary visions.’ (40)

The doors of the fortress slam shut and He enters without need of a door with a brilliance ‘like that of infused light or of a sun covered with some material of the transparency of a diamond, if such a thing could be woven. This raiment looks like the finest cambric.’ A ‘terrible sight’  ‘because, though the sight is the loveliest and most delightful imaginable, even by a person who lived and strove to imagine it for a thousand years, because it so far exceeds all that our imagination and understanding can compass, its presence is of such exceeding majesty that it fills the soul with a great terror. It is unnecessary to ask here how, without being told, the soul knows Who it is, for He reveals Himself clearly as the Lord of Heaven and earth.’ (41)

Arthur

They storm into the fair fortress where they see the glistening spoils. Before them, in ‘the heavy grey chain’ is the ‘loyal lad’, ‘Gwair’, ‘singing sadly’. (42)

He’s in an ecstasy, a trance, a rapture, his soul suspended, rapt by a vision.

What could inspire his song, so sad, so beautiful it could melt the heart of the hardest warlord and bring a tear to the eye of one never broken by war?

“Listen not.” Arthur tells his men. “It is a spell. We must free the prisoner.”

None can break the chains, none can break the trance, but another Lord.

“Leave him be,” the voices of nuns, ‘until Doom our poetic prayer will continue.’ (43)

The Fortress of the Feast

Teresa

“These fortresses lie deep within our souls,” Teresa explains to her sisters. “In this seventh fortress we will enter our Spiritual Marriage one and all.”

‘Our Lord is pleased to have pity upon this soul, which suffers and has suffered so much out of desire for Him, and which He has now taken spiritually to be His bride, He brings her into this Mansion of His, which is the seventh, before consummating the Spiritual Marriage. For He must needs have an abiding-place in the soul, just as He has one in Heaven, where His Majesty alone dwells: so let us call this a second Heaven. (44)

‘This secret union takes place in the deepest centre of the soul, which must be where God Himself dwells… the soul remains… in that centre with its God.’ ‘This little butterfly has died’, ‘found rest,’ within her lives the Lord. (45)

They are married. He is their feast, their wine, their bread. They enter Heaven.

Arthur

Arthur and his warriors rush into the hall and bring an end to the feast. In the centre is ‘the cauldron of the Head of Annwn’ ‘kindled by the breath of nine maidens’ ‘with its dark trim and pearls’. ‘It does not boil a coward’s food.’ (46)

“Will you join me for meat?” asks the sovereign. “Bread?” “Wine?” “Mead?”

“I will not eat the flesh of the dead or drink the blood of devils!” 

“That’s no way to speak at the most sacred of weddings.”

“Kill him,” orders Arthur, “kill them all.” Arthur cuts off the King’s head. Lleog thrusts his ‘flashing sword’ into the cauldron and it is left ‘in Lleminog’s hand’. ‘Save seven, none’ return through ‘Hell’s gate’ where ‘lamps burn’. (47)

When he returns with the spoils of Annwn Arthur realises he is in Hell.

~

This prose piece is reconstructed from St Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle and ‘The Spoils of Annwn’, which documents Arthur’s raid on the Otherworld, and supporting medieval Welsh texts. It attempts to draw out the contrasts between prayerful reverential and exploitative disrespectful approaches to the treasures and rulers of the ‘interior’ realms. Annwn has been translated as ‘inner depth’ and might be seen as a world within and without.

REFERENCES

1. Saint Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, (Dover Publications, 2012), p2
2. Ibid. p15 – 16
3. Ibid. p2
4. Haycock, M. (transl), ‘The Spoils of Annwn’, Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin, (CMCS, 2007), p436
5. Nennius, History of the Britons, (Book Jungle, 2008), p14
6. Hunt, Edward Eyre, Sir Orfeo, (Forgotten Books, 2012), p19 – 20
7. Ibid. p22
8. Guest, Charlotte, ‘St Collen and Gwyn ap Nudd’, The Mabinogion, https://www.maryjones.us/ctexts/collen.html
9. Haycock, M. (transl), ‘The Battle of the Trees’, Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin, (CMCS, 2007), p175 – 176
10. Saint Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, (Dover Publications, 2012), p25
11. Ibid. p14
12. Ibid. p18
13. Haycock, M. (transl), ‘The Spoils of Annwn’, Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin, (CMCS, 2007), p435 – 6
14. Haycock, M. (transl), ‘The Battle of the Trees’, Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin, (CMCS, 2007), p183
15. Ibid. p175
16. Nennius, History of the Britons, (Book Jungle, 2008), p14
17. Saint Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, (Dover Publications, 2012), p29
18. Ibid. p29
19. Haycock, M. (transl), ‘The Spoils of Annwn’, Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin, (CMCS, 2007), p435
20. Ibid. p436
21. Saint Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, (Dover Publications, 2012), p38
22. Ibid. p39
23. Ibid. p40
24. Haycock, M. (transl), ‘The Spoils of Annwn’, Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin, (CMCS, 2007), p436
25. Ibid. p436
26. Saint Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, (Dover Publications, 2012), p53
27. Ibid. 49
28. Ibid. p47
29. Haycock, M. (transl), ‘The Spoils of Annwn’, Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin, (CMCS, 2007), p437
30. Ibid. p437
31. Saint Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, (Dover Publications, 2012), p141 – p142
32. Ibid. p86
33. Ibid. p65
34. Ibid. p44
35. Haycock, M. (transl), ‘The Spoils of Annwn’, Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin, (CMCS, 2007), p437
36. Ibid. p437
37. Davies, S. (transl.), The Mabinogion, (Oxford University Press, 2007), p195
38. Hill, G. (transl.), ‘The Conversation between Gwyn ap Nudd and Gwyddno Garanhir’ https://awenydd.weebly.com/the-conversation-between-gwyn-ap-nudd-and-gwyddno-garanhir.html
39. Saint Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, (Dover Publications, 2012), p104
40. Ibid. p105
41. Ibid. 132 – 133
42. Haycock, M. (transl), ‘The Spoils of Annwn’, Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin, (CMCS, 2007), p435
43. Ibid. p43
44. Saint Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, (Dover Publications, 2012), p146 – 147
45. Ibid. p151 – 152
46. Haycock, M. (transl), ‘The Spoils of Annwn’, Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin, (CMCS, 2007), p436
47. Ibid. p436

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Davies, S. (transl.), The Mabinogion, (Oxford University Press, 2007)
Haycock, M. (transl), ‘The Spoils of Annwn’, Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin, (CMCS, 2007)
Hill, G. (transl.), ‘The Conversation between Gwyn ap Nudd and Gwyddno Garanhir’ https://awenydd.weebly.com/the-conversation-between-gwyn-ap-nudd-and-gwyddno-garanhir.html
Nennius, History of the Britons, (Book Jungle, 2008)
Saint Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, (Dover Publications, 2012)