The Red Spring

“When visitors came to the Isle of Avalon, they entered a sacred landscape. Coming by boat across the calm waters of the marshy inland sea, or crossing the causeway from the mainland to the east, they passed through a boundary that left the ordinary world behind. They came to a symbolic world centre: a place where the Tor as axis mundi, a world axis, joined the ordinary world with regions above and below. Around this cosmic axis turned the heavenly constellations, whose imprint, some traditions say, was made upon the surrounding land.”

In Chalice Well Gardens, Glastonbury, “an extremely complex subterranean system provides the water which rises under pressure in the spring at Chalice Well. The spring has a high iron content. The archaeological evidence suggested that the source of the Red or the Blood Spring once flowed in a vivid red stream beside a large grove of yews.” Many yews still stand in the gardens, while the wellhead is covered by a beautifully carved wood and wrought iron vesica pisces.

For me, the red and white springs which rise in Glastonbury represent the dualities of life, of the masculine and feminine, light and dark, the sun and moon. While at the heart of the symbol of the vesica piscis lies “a yoni or almond-shaped gateway.” This may be seen as the still point in the turning world, a visual representation of the resolution of all dualities, of the field which Rumi wrote about, which lies beyond right and wrong. The 20th-century poet T.S.Eliot also wrote of this still point in his poem Burnt Norton:

“Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.”

Quotes from The Red and White Springs of Avalon by Nicholas R. Mann.