Amesbury
(redirected from Amesbury Priory)Amesbury
, town, EnglandAmesbury
, city, United States)
Amesbury
(religion, spiritualism, and occult)The town of Amesbury, located about eighty miles west of London, England, lies in an area of ancient and continued holiness. Nearby, on the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, is Stonehenge, one of the most ancient megalithic structures. A little to the north is the Avebury stone circle, scene of a religious tradition going back some four thousand years.
Welsh historians believe that during the Middle Ages, a monastery was located in Amesbury, but a consensus seems to have developed that in the time of Ambrosias Aurelianus, uncle to the fabled King Arthur, it was a garrison for troops, and the place was named Ambrosiani after Ambrosias.
In the Arthurian legends, it was in Amesbury that Guinevere, after her affair with Lancelot and banishment following Arthur's death, became a nun and lived out her days. Although modern writers more than earlier scribes seem to emphasize the importance of Amesbury in the Arthurian legends, John Masefield, in his poem, "Gwenivere Tells," has Guinevere remembering:
Anon I made profession, and took vows As nun encloistered: I became Christ's spouse, At Amesbury, as Abbess to the house. I changed my ermines for a goathair stole, I broke my beauty there, with dule and dole, But love remained a flame within my soul.
Thus at Amesbury we find a curious but fairly common occurrence. One religious tradition, in this case the stone-building culture of prehistorical Stonehenge, is superseded by a completely different religious tradition. In this case, it is the legend of King Arthur's court and the search for the grail from Christ's last supper—the legend marking the transition from paganism to Christianity.