Queen Guinevere: Medusa, Blood-letting, and the Cult of the Severed Head

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Camelot Chat! I’m your hostess, Shannon Watson, and today, we’ll be talking about Queen Guinevere... and whether queen was really her only title.

Many strange symbols and stories are associated with the queen known as Guinevere, Gwenhwyfar, Guanhumara... and even Wanders. George R.R. Martin, author of The Song of Ice and Fire series, calls these symbols sigils; and most of the great houses in his books, some of which were based on medieval chivalry, have them.

The people of Dark Age Britain had them, too, although the forms their sigils took were more primitive, being more on the line of totems than heraldry. For instance, instead of a picture of a running wolf on a flying pennant, one might see a feral-looking warrior wearing a wolf pelt. Or, a heavily-tattooed Pict of the Orcs, or Boar Clan, might use the tusk of a wild boar in lieu of a dagger.

They used human remains as totems, too. Mummified hands. Saints’ bones. Embalmed severed heads.

The Cult of the Severed Head was a thing back then. Take, for example, the Ui Cennselaigh tribe of Ireland. Cennselaigh means “Headhunters.”

In fact, one story about Queen Guinevere shares that she liked to ride about with the embalmed severed heads of her enemies dangling from the pommel of her saddle.

Was Guinevere an early psychopath? I doubt it.

It is much likelier that this practice was a part of the warlike, totemic, superstitious fifth-century world to which she belonged. A world that believed that power resided in the head. Therefore, to take one’s enemy’s head was to take his–or her–power.

Guinevere nearly lost her own head any number of times, so heads may have been doubly precious to her... but that’s mostly just a little gallows humor from me.

Dark Age symbols had different classifications. They might be a secular cypher: a crown, an axe, a spear, a hawk. They might be a sacred icon: a salmon, an ox, a cross, a dove. They could be a family emblem: both Gawain and Lancelot were given silver rings as infants, rings that were later used to identify them as members of a royal dynasty. They could be a tribal totem: boars, hounds, lions, and dragons all show up in Arthurian imagery. Or they could be a personal badge: a form of primitive medieval heraldry reflecting the individual’s birth name, secular association, or sacred affiliation.

Guinevere had a number of these. For today, let’s discuss the emblems that pertain to her sacred role. Doves. Water. Blood. And the metal, copper, along with its gem form, malachite.

As a highly-educated woman, born into a royal and possibly also sacred bloodline–or two–educated in Avalon by a holy woman, certain things must have been expected of Guinevere. She appears to have lived in a time and place where she would have practiced some form of Christianity. Whether that was an orthodox form–like Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy–or some long-lost deviation–like the many that ravaged Western Europe at the time, including the Arian, Pelagian, and Manichaean heresies–we cannot be sure. The latter theory, however, seems likely, based on the Grail texts.

In my book on the subject, The Wanderer and the Wolves, I postulate that the Grail Company–the congregation by whom the young Queen Guinevere was raised and educated–practiced a combination of Celtic Christianity mixed with Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and yes, heretical, beliefs. That will play out later in her story.

Whatever they were getting up to back then, Guinevere seems to have been not only literate but highly educated, for her dowry stipulated that she would write her husband, Arthur’s royal annals. When she married Arthur, four other queens carried Guinevere’s totem down the aisle before her: the dove, the classic Christian symbol of holiness.

Which begs the question: Was Guinevere a holy woman before marrying Arthur? Had she some other vocation than queen? It has been suggested that theirs was a marriage-by-capture, so common in the Dark Ages.

Many wealthy royal women in those days fled the confines of enforced marriage, seeking refuge in the Church and bequeathing their great riches to Rome. These two seemingly disparate practices–abduction and abdication–resulted in the rapid rise of the Catholic Church during the fifth century.

Perhaps, marriage to Arthur was not Queen Guinevere’s first choice of profession...

Guinevere was also associated with the comb-and-mirror. At first glance, this appears to be an odd choice, at least, from a twenty-first-century point of view.

But the comb-and-mirror symbol is depicted on many a Pictish standing stone. What seems an oddity to us, obviously meant something to them.

One suggestion is that the comb-and-mirror was a priestess cypher. Priestesses in ancient times wore their hair long and loose, unpinned and uncombed. They remained virgin. So, Rapunzel’s prince’s request that she “let down her hair” is a later sexualizing of a much-earlier tale.

A good example of an ancient goddess/priestess is the Neolithic Medusa, with her wild snake-locks. So powerful was she that her gaze turned men to stone. Medusa was likely once represented on earth by a human priestess, who practiced a snake cult and wore her locks wild and unbound.

The Arthurian scholar, Norma Lorre Goodrich, suggested that when Guinevere, abducted by Meleagant, left her comb and mirror on the edge of a fountain for Lancelot to find, she was not just leaving a sign for him that she had passed that way. She was signaling to her old friend that she was departing this world for the Otherworld: the realm of the sacred. She was abandoning, however temporarily, her role as queen for her earlier role as priestess.

Medusa shared a second cryptogram with Guinevere: water. Associated with priestesses from ancient times to the present day–mermaids, anyone?–water is traditionally a woman’s provenance. Priestesses tended sacred springs all over the British Isles in Guinevere’s day.

And even earlier. Medusa, the Libyan snake-goddess, was born on Thera. One representation of this early African queen shows her wearing the fluted skirt of the Minoans––which is covered in geometrical zigzags: the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for water.

As a water-priestess, it may have fallen to Guinevere to perform the rite of baptism. Christianity was still in its infancy, especially in the far West; and many people converted and were baptized in adulthood, or even on their deathbeds. The Emperor Constantine the Great, just one century earlier, is one such.

Additionally, a blessing with holy water may have provided comfort and possibly even been a rite following penance. Warriors may have requested a blessing before battle. We know the battlefields of Bannockburn and Culloden were blessed by Catholic priests in the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, respectively.

Why not a priestess in the fifth century? In fact, legend has Guinevere walking the battlelines in her bare, white feet and blessing the battlefield, alongside her ancient holy sisters.

Which leads us to yet another sacred cypher: blood. One of the stranger episodes of Guinevere’s life sets the queen in an unexpectedly exotic temple, alongside Lancelot. Medieval French chroniclers loved to couch this as a sex scene, prominently featuring a bed, or lit in French. A bed with blood on it.

However, in a sacred context, “bed” was another word for “altar”. Which renders: an altar with blood on it. Blood, as in sacrificial blood.

Now, we’ve strayed from the bedroom into the chapel!

In this setting, Lancelot is about to do battle with Meleagant for the queen’s person, so it makes sense for him to perform some sort of penance, unloading as many of his sins as he can, in case he falls in the fight. The inclusion of blood in this scene, however, may indicate that the pair are practicing the ancient Celtic purgation rite: a blood-letting, or phlebotomy, to rid the body of “evils,” both symbolic and literal. Therefore, Guinevere and Lancelot as represented in this scene are not lovers, but rather priestess and acolyte.

Two more of Guinevere’s unusual symbols appear in this scene. They are copper and its gemstone form, malachite. Guinevere’s waist is girded by a copper belt. She leans upon a great, green pillar. A strange copper giant guards her temple.

These symbols harken back again to the East, where we encounter, in the far northern Ural Mountains, a series of fairy tales about the powerful Mistress of the Copper Mountain. In an earlier form, the Mistress is known as the girl, Azovka, and she has gleaming, blue-black hair, worn in a single plait down her back, and piercing green eyes. She is a queen. She is a goddess. She is gorgeous. She is powerful. The miners on her mountain all go in terror of her, but she is their champion as well. Loved and feared, in equal measure.

Goodrich envisions Guinevere the same, and it is hard not to follow suit. Every chronicler has described the queen as incomparably beautiful.

But Guinevere was undeniably powerful as well, her emblems and the various roles she performed–walking the battlefield and dispensing penance and blessings to her champion and the warriors who fought for her–marking her as a personage of tremendous prestige and power.

In next week’s episode, we will begin to dig into Guinevere’s secular functions. What was expected of her? What did she receive in turn? Did she have offspring?

Did she fight? If so, when and how?

If not, why not? And who fought in her stead?

Above all, when the chroniclers called her queen, what did they mean? And what did it mean to be a queen in Guinevere’s violent, mysterious, menacing Dark Age world?

Find out next week.

If you get tired of waiting for the next episode, you will find my book, The Wanderer and the Wolves, on Amazon.com. I have included the link below. And be sure to check out my author page at ShanavereStudios.com.

Until next week: People who read live in many worlds. Books are the surest portals to those other worlds. So, keep living, keep reading, and keep dreaming... till we meet again.