The Arthurian Quest: Living the Legends of Camelot (Llewellyn's Celtic Wisdom Series) download epub

I will start this by saying that I am not an expert on Medieval history like some of the reviewers here. However, even I can tell that this book is woefully inaccurate historically.

However, that is not my main objection to this writer. In reading this book, two points were painfully obvious. First, is that this book contains no actual spellwork, ritual, invocations or magic. It is only a series of guided visualizations through a fantasy, Disneylike new age version of Camelot. There are no glimpses of a darker side of the Middle Ages, nor even any unpleasant images. Everyone is happy and honorable, even the humorous asides in the visualizations do not hurt anyone or anything.

The correspondences are reasonably well documented and obviously reqired some amount of thought and planning. The system of mists, tides, etc. is also original, and that I do respect. However, I find the use of modern altered crystals, especially artificial ones such as aqua aura quartz a bit incongruous in this fantasy Medieval setting. We will not even mention the use of perfectly polished stones and crystals, which were nearly impossible using the lapidary techniques of the time, or the use of expensive, color matched clothing by everyone.

There is a huge emphasis on New Age imagery, such as dolphins, rainbows and jewelry and clothing described in painstaking, distracting and to me, somewhat tedious detail. I really could do without a half page description of every single robe everyone wears, not to mention the jewelry that would not have been available in this time and place. Everything seems to center around crystals, glowing stones, and light and happiness.

While this is fine for those who feel they need more light in their mental craft, I find the lack of any sort of challenge or even anything that is not beautiful to be unbalanced. Nature is not just fluff and sparkles, and the wolves in nature do not sit idly by while their tails are set on fire, as in one of the visualizations. The lack of any sort of shadow or challenge to me makes these visualizations lack depth or usefulness for any sort of real magic outside of daydreams.

Perhaps this book will serve well those who are afraid to let the slightest shadow cross their path. However the Middle Ages and earlier era were a time of shadows in my opinion, which is what makes the Arthurian legends endure, as a mythical piece of order, honor and beauty in an ugly, diseased, unjust and harsh time. Take away those shadows and you get a cartoon caricature of a time period and legend. Take away all flaws from all the characters and you do not even have a two dimensional image that stands on its own. It is contrast that makes mythology have impact, not flat, stale, one dimensional characters and archetypes. The humanity, with its flaws, that the Arthurian archetypes have is, to me at least, part of their appeal. When it is removed, I am left feeling like I need an insulin injection to counter the overabundance of sweetness and light.

Light cannot exist without shadow, and Nature creates ugliness, pain and disease to give meaning to compassion, beauty and wholeness. Without one, the other loses meaning and depth. To me, this book has become a caricature, its pages filled with arguments about how no character in Arthurian myth is REALLY bad, or even does evil or underhanded deeds without remorse. An entire chapter is devoted to assuring the reader that Merlin never had a dark thought and making excuses for his every action and word to seemingly prove his perfection. Don't even get me started on the rest of the archetypes.

All in all, I found this a waste of time save for the correspondences. I was bored silly and had to force myself to finish this book, and was very relieved when I did so.

I've owned this book for years, but only read it just now, and am very impressed. It is an exhaustive source of exercises for leading yourself or others through guided imagery using the Arthurian legends, with accompanying lists of the symbols and characters, and their meaning. These meditations she has written make the listener a part of the time, with the images, smells, materials, etc. that one would experience. I can see it being useful in workshops to guide students to an open state of mind, and also in psychotherapy, with patients who enjoy these stories. She goes into more detail than I myself am interested in, in her lists, but I plan to just use those parts that could be useful to me. I'm also surprised at the historian reviewer who didn't like the book. I've read so many contradictory opinions about that period in history and given the plentitude of stories about Arthur that I hardly believe that one person can be considered an "expert" in anything but the historical contradictions!

As a student of mysticism and the occult myself I am consistantly astounded by the western mind's inability to integrate the use of the creative, mythic and dynamic imagination with the intellectual capacity to reason.
Those who have given this book a poor review, in my opinion, haven't one whit of experience in magick or pathworking. Pathworking requires trust in subjective expeirence while at the same time taking cues from history and "myth". It isn't one or the other. To make it only imaginal is akin to a daydream while to make one's journeys purely historic is to lose the symbolism and meaning of the "essense" of the material.
The Arthurian Quest by Amber Wolfe is quite good and is a pathworking and magickal system, NOT A HISTORICAL, ACADEMIC WORK! It contains valuable and insightful uses for the myth cycle in a shamanic and magickal manner and merely provides tools, doorways in a manner or speaking, to contacting the currents or powers behind the symbols and stories.
The power of the Arthurian tales (pre-christian celtic) is in the messages and power between the words and what is gained from the pathworking or ritual experience. Without the validation of experience and commitment to the work, the tales are just tales and useful for nothing more than a good story on a cold evening.
There are plenty of speculative "historical" works on the Legends of Arthur and Camelot, but the fact is that they are all speculative. Keep this in mind. Enjoy the tales, do the pathworkings, rituals and visualizations with the mind of a mage or even an Archmage and they won't only make sense, they will get profound results.
In Light and Love.

I was really looking forward to this book but I have to say I am slightly disappointed in it, only
because it is so confusing in its layout and structure.
Reading the previous reviews I'd say its half academic and half mystical.
I wish it had been a bit more simply presented like some of Llewellyn's other titles.
I know the author says that the Arthurian quest is not linear and the book reflects it but it was so confusing I can't really use this book in the way it is intended at all, but there are gems within it!
- lovely Arthurian pathworkings/meditations and beautiful descriptions of the
mystical power of Avalon and how to attune to it..
There are not many places you can read about such things..
I love AW's other books and I wish she could write another Arthurian book, slightly simpler and just as magickal.