By Paul Begg

Is Glastonbury a giant zodiac created in the distant past and linked to King Arthur’s Quest for the Holy Grail?

The notion of the Glastonbury Zodiac is perhaps the most remarkable of the many beliefs about the special nature of this area. As conceived by its modern discoverer, the Glastonbury Zodiac is a circle 10 miles across and 30 miles around with the Tor at its center. The 12 signs of the zodiac are marked out on the ground as huge figures, in the same order in which the zodiacal constellations appear in the heavens. The giant effigies are shaped by roads, tracks, earthworks, rivers, pools and similar components. These are partly natural and partly fashioned by the ancients to fill in the details.  According to Anthony Roberts in his book, Glastonbury: ancient Avalon, new Jerusalem:

“The key to the secrets of  Glastonbury and the whole Avalonian complex lies within the contour of the landscape … Millennia before the advent of the Celtic Druids (c. 550 BC) there existed a race of men who shaped the whole terrain to form mystical and astrological patterns. In the mid 1920s these patterns were rediscovered through the single-minded researches of a brilliantly intuitive woman. Katherine Maltwood.”

Katherine Maltwood’s book on the subject, A guide to Glastonbury’s temple of the stars, was published in the 1920s, but she was not actually the first to make such a connection. A zodiac was discovered in Glastonbury over 300 years earlier by John Dee, a scholar, magician and astrological advisor to Queen Elizabeth 1. In his biography of Dee, Richard Deacon says that Dee was interested in the  ‘prehistoric earthworks of the Glastonbury area and he had diagnosed that these objects when carefully mapped represented the signs of the Zodiac  and the stars.’ In his diary Dee noted:

The stars which agree with their reproductions on the ground do lye onlie on the celestial pathe of the Sonne, moon and planets … thus is astrologie and astronomie carefullie and exactly married and measured in a scientific reconstruction of the heavens which shews that the ancients understood all which today the lerned know to be factes.

ZODIACAL

Like Dee, Katherine Maltwood attached an astronomical significance to the Glastonbury Zodiac, but she added a new dimension. She related the figures to incidents in the Arthhurian Grail Romances. “It is around these archaic nature giants that the Arthurian legends accumulated”, she says. 

Mrs. Maltwood did not seem to have a clear idea how the zodiac was used, although she certainly believed that it had a function in pagan ceremonies of the Celtic Britons.  She saw it in some way related to the seasons and the positions of the stars and planets, and she suggested that it might have been constructed in the hope that, through sympathetic magic, the heavens could be realized on Earth. In pre-Christian Britain,  she says, stories were told about the figures of the Glastonbury Zodiac. But with the coming of Christianity, those who had been initiated into the mysteries, ‘were obliged to couch their secret knowledge in romance … the pre-Christian stories of the stars were adopted by later chroniclers and interwoven with the Christian Grail legend.’

Katherine Maltwood became interested in Glastonbury in 1925 through an assignment to illustrate The high book of the Grail, which had just been translated into English from the French. Asked to draw a map of the itinerary of the Arthurian Grail Quest she began to travel and study the terrain around Glastonbury (Avalon) - she came up with startling theory about the Zodiac and its relationship to the Grail. Indeed she herself says that Glastonbury zodiac, "would never have been found had it not been for this history." In French the book is titled Le haut livre du Graad: Perlesvaus and was written by an unknown author at an unknown date believed to be in the first quarter of the 13th century.  The author claims it was translated from a  Latin record kept "in the Isle of Avalon" in a holy house of religion that standeth at the head of the Moors Adventurous, there where King Arthur and Queen Guineverre lie." This has been interpreted in the light of Avalon-Glastonbury indentification to mean Glastonbury Abbey. Through such interpretation of other material in the book, Katherine Maltwood came to believe that the unknown author possessed an intimate knowledge of the Glastonbury region and the zodiac.

Accordingly, Katherine Maltwood visualizes the Zodiac as the original Round Table. Seated around it in the form of the zodiacal figures are Arthur, Gawain, Lancelot, Perceval, and other characters from the Grail legends. And within the figures are some of the places where various adventures of the Grail quest take place.

ARTHURIAN

The doubters: Other writers have expressed serious doubts about the Glastonbury Zodiac. Geoffrey Asche, a specialist in Arthurian studies, cites the enormous and incredible labor involved in contructing earthworks more than a mile long. Colin Wilson, an expert on the occult, expresses another reservation, " ... the mere demonstration that the configurations of the land could be signs of the zodiac is no convincing proof. I would need to be told precisely how the worshippers used the configurations in their religious ceremonies."

The pagan content of the Arthurain and Grail legends dates back to a collection of myths that were linked into a broad system of belief. But this does not extend to anything as specific as stories about the figures of the Glastonbury Zodiac. To link the Zodiac with the Grail Quest, we must believe that Perlesvaus, far from being a romance, is historically accurate as a record of very particular pagan beliefs. If the Grail connection is eliminated, the Glastonbury Zodiac is left without a function.  Can we accept the ancients would have carried out such a grand design for no purpose?

There are those who point to Dee’s discovery as substantiating evidence of the Glastonbury Zodiac, saying Katherine Maltwood rediscovered his zodiac. But this is not strictly true, for we do not know if Dee’s zodiac  is the same one as Mrs. Maltwood’s. Nor do we know  why or how Dee worked out a zodiac in Glastonbury in the first place. Answer these puzzles and a new light may be shed on the whole business. After all, Dee’s zodiac may have been different from Katherine Maltwood’s and Glastonbury with two zodiacs is more than anybody can accept.

Resource: Mysteries of Mind, Space and Time pgs.1240-1242