A Tintagel mystery-centre whose knights read the elemental spirits over the sea and carried the pre-Christian Sun-Christ across Europe.
In Steiner's spiritual science, King Arthur's Round Table is the mystery-centre on the Cornish cliff at Tintagel where twelve knights gathered to read the play of light and air over the sea. There, before the Mystery of Golgotha, they received the Sun-Christ through their etheric bodies and sent messengers across barbarian Europe to purify and civilise the astral nature of its peoples.
King Arthur's Round Table in Anthroposophy is the Tintagel mystery-centre that Rudolf Steiner describes in his Karmic Relationships lectures (GA 240, given at Torquay in August 1924). On the rocks above the sea, twelve knights schooled in the Mysteries of the Zodiac learned to read the interplay of Sun-born and Earth-born elemental spirits in the waves, foam, and reflected light, much as one reads a book rather than staring at it. Through this they drew in the pre-Christian Sun-Christ and carried that impulse, as messengers, across the European peoples to civilise their wild astral forces. Steiner calls this the Arthur stream, the pagan or etherealised Christ-current moving from west to east, which he sets beside the Grail stream that bore the historical Christ through the blood after Golgotha. The two streams met in 869 A.D. He names the Arthur impulse a Michael stream, kindled from the Hibernian Mysteries.
In Steiner's Own Words
Up to that time Christ had been a Sun Being, had belonged to the Sun. Before the Mystery of Golgotha had come to pass, the Knights of King Arthur's Round Table stood on these rocks, gazed at the play between the Sun-born spirits and the Earth-born spirits, and felt that the forces living in this play of nature-spirits poured into their hearts and above all through their etheric bodies. Therewith they received into themselves the Christ Impulse which was then streaming away from the Sun and was living in everything that is brought into being by the Sun-forces.
What it Means Today
For most of the twentieth century, scholars treated Tintagel as a medieval invention, the romantic backdrop Geoffrey of Monmouth gave Arthur's conception around 1136. That assessment changed in July 1998, when a team from the Archaeology Department of Glasgow University, led by Professor Christopher Morris and working for English Heritage, lifted a broken slab that had been reused as a drain cover on the site's Middle Terrace. Cut into it, in sixth-century Latin, was the inscription PATERN COLI AVI FICIT ARTOGNOU, now known as the Artognou stone. The find did not prove a historical Arthur, and the Celticist John Koch has cautioned against reading the name as one. What it did establish is concrete: Tintagel in the centuries just after Rome was a high-status power-centre, occupied, literate, and connected by trade to the Mediterranean, exactly the window Steiner places his Round Table knights in.
That archaeology and Steiner's reading do not compete; they describe different layers of one site. The excavator recovers post-Roman pottery and a cut name; Steiner, working from spiritual perception, describes what the place was for, a school where the human being learned to read nature as a script of the spirit. Thalira synthesis: the Artognou stone and Steiner's Sun-Christ knights meet on a single point, that Tintagel was a centre where reading itself was sacred, whether the text was a Latin inscription in stone or the play of light and water on the sea. For a reader today, the Arthur stream marks the older, nature-borne approach to Christianity that flowed from west to east, distinct from the inward Grail stream, and gathered again under the Michael impulse Steiner saw renewing since the 1870s.
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