Once upon a time ‘Chapel Perilous’ was only reserved for grail knights and unwary seekers.
A dangerous enclosure that somehow descends and envelops; It’s role, to test, tempt and confound.
As with ‘the zone’ in Tarkovsky’s ‘Stalker’ :
“It is a very complicated system of traps, and they’re all deadly. I don’t know what’s going on here in the absence of people, but the moment someone shows up, everything comes into motion. Old traps disappear and new ones emerge. Safe spots become impassable. Now your path is easy, now it’s hopelessly involved. That’s the Zone. It may even seem capricious. But it is what we’ve made it with our condition. It happened that people had to stop halfway and go back. Some of them even died on the very threshold of the room. But everything that’s going on here depends not on the Zone, but on us!”
In the far distant memory of mankind, life proceeded, untroubled by the quest; lifetimes upon lifetimes, consolidating; A slow laying of sediment, unhurried growth across the aeons.
But now, an acceleration; A raising of the stakes. ‘Chapel perilous’ has descended.
We are in the territory, whether we are aware of it or not.
RA Wilson spells it out.
“Chapel Perilous, like the mysterious entity called “I,” cannot be located in the space-time continuum; it is weightless, odourless, tasteless and undetectable by ordinary instruments. Indeed, like the Ego, it is even possible to deny that it is there. And yet, even more like the Ego, once you are inside it, there doesn’t seem to be any way to ever get out again, until you suddenly discover that it has been brought into existence by thought and does not exist outside thought. Everything you fear is waiting with slavering jaws in Chapel Perilous, but if you are armed with the wand of intuition, the cup of sympathy, the sword of reason, and the pentacle of valour, you will find there (the legends say) the Medicine of Metals, the Elixir of Life, the Philosopher’s Stone, True Wisdom and Perfect Happiness.
That’s what the legends always say, and the language of myth is poetically precise. For instance, if you go into that realm without the sword of reason, you will lose your mind, but at the same time, if you take only the sword of reason without the cup of sympathy, you will lose your heart. Even more remarkably, if you approach without the wand of intuition, you can stand at the door for decades never realizing you have arrived. You might think you are just waiting for a bus, or wandering from room to room looking for your cigarettes, watching a TV show, or reading a cryptic and ambiguous book. “Chapel Perilous is tricky that way.”
