To my cloud of gentle readers and evergrowing public, I extend my heartfelt appreciation for the numberless notes of concern on my extended absence, but I was not ill or distracted, except by concern for the dauntless Perceval and his world. If he is the double, he nevertheless dwells on the other side of the mirror. And since it is in the nature of the mirror that it moves, we must first of all define the land – establish the map – for the world in which Perceval travels and acts.

            Perceval is the Knight of the Lance, not of the Grail. The wonderful text doctors tell us that the ‘graal’ was a large salver, more appropriate, for example, for a whole large salmon – one of the divinity-presenting animals of Albion – than for a single host. The focus of the ‘Grail procession’ is actually the Lance that Bleeds. At the same time, the original salver presents the bloody, severed head of a youth, perhaps the annual sacrifice covenanted by the conquest of the devastated land.

            Therefore our beloved Chrétien is already corrupting the text toward the ecclesiastical. For Perceval is the embodied prophetic spirit of Albion at the transition between the late druidic and the peculiar spiritual hybrid arriving as the new insight, the new light. The frontier breaks all hybrids down into their original species, and the species here are church and gnosis. The druidic favors the gnostic. But gnosis, as it arrives, carries the core force of prophecy, extending beyond the oracular power of the indigenous priests, and offering the priestly power of self-witnessing in time to all who find the thread of gnosis.

            The story of Perceval, from the first, is a jumble. The only cogency is his spontaneous recognition of knighthood. When his father and six elder brothers are killed in knightly feats, his mother takes him away, presumably as an infant, to their Welsh fortress in the wilderness. And she ordains that he shall never know aught of knighthood. Yet at his youthful play in the woods, casting his handmade javelins, he is accosted by knights, and, after mistaking them for Angels, immediately recognizes his vocation and rides off to Arthur’s Court.

            [Further readings: the Mabinogion and Chrétien de Troyes.]

            But Perceval is a prophetic story in itself. Each fragment in the jumble seems to point to a complete prophetic possibility. But the objectification of the prophetic, the overturning of the prophetic as vocation – personal prophecy – while completed in a moment historically, beginning what we call the common era, the emergence of personal prophecy as a formalized and cognized process had to await the peculiar expression of prophecy, to wit, science.

            Now we can tell Perceval’s story. But, of course, Perceval’s story is the story of anyone who has found the thread of vocation, now that vocation itself becomes an objectified and cognized typology and potentially a taxonomic sequence of experience. At some point, we automatically pick up Perceval’s story, consciously or otherwise.

            Cursed as I am with the residues of the modern, I can no longer tell the smooth allegory. Ah, for the Tennysonian eyeball and spelled tongue, to run the story down through a lush world that only whispers abstractions. But today we have to see the machinery: not only the raw struts exposed here and there, but hourly guided tours of the guts as well. At best, I can only make it a virtue, since I have already spent twenty-seven years in the rocky monastery transcribing the unwritten texts of the future, a superstructure of the analytical, wheels of Five proliferating through substance and cause to return us to the very analytical moment, the mirror in which Perceval rides.

            If I have said that I spent the last twenty-seven years transcribing the texts of the future in which Perceval rides, why, my gentle reader asks, did I have to take the break for which I more or less apologized? Gentle reader, I was born into a hard world of science, a rocky country of blocks shaped by engineers, a land of plumbing and high pressure lines, of electric lights and electric fences. Purity can only follow the edge. The color of the country is gray with black lines. Tiny framed windows open out onto ‘nature’ – something, finally, to be stamped out.

            One has to work backward from the hard form to the living flesh. These first books disassemble the machine, and show how the mirror stands at beginning and end. Wheels of Five wheel through each other, finally returning the world to the Eye, the worlds of Sixes and Sevens – the double world of Six, where cause and spirit play yin and yang, and the world beyond number at Seven, the world of value.

            But, while they open the way, still these books stand upright and march with a measured tread. Perceval, however, rides in the palimpsest day, the world of our world, where all is simultaneous.

            God bless the green world that opened the Eye of the mirror. In the deep forest, the forest dwellers prepared the mash, lit the sacred fires, lay down to witness the god. Therefore we know that Perceval himself rode to India. The sacred homa fire still burns on the hearth, reminding us of the seven sacred fires in the forest when the forest dwellers wrote their books – especially the singer’s book, with its songs and rituals, and the book of blue darkness, where we welcome the dawn.

            But our crowning book is a book from our lineal past; a book from the time of Perceval himself, at least in its deepest parts, a shimmering history, gathering its prophetic meanings in the arc from Albion, where those called Celts held their ground in the last island mountains, to the southern hill, beyond islands, where the priest folk died by fire, rather than recant, while their brothers who escaped eastward turned to the true mountains and wrote their text in a jongleur’s trick, a Deck of Cards.

            In that wasteland of willed futurity I fell into by my birth, I found the secret science of the line, the science of the word – ancestor land for my vocation, the plainstyle heritage of the double light. But only the Cards could rescue me from the topsy-turvy of prediction and predication, of science and the play of gods and Angels – to spread the green Earth before me, the discerning world of the journey, and unfold the sky and Stars, the guiding thread of days spent in the search for that which is only one’s self and the gifting powers for one’s self.