The story of the Magdalen

We walked and walked and walked through Glastonbury, all the while the Tor got closer and closer like a beacon.
When we finally arrived, we started up the sort of, not so much stairs, as far spaced helping steps, set in the hillside.
The Kids and Brother just did the Patti Smith Horses thing and “didn't waste any time just climbed right up”. I started up and was just moseying along completely unsuspecting when about one third way up I was suddenly nailed by something, I still don’t know quite what, and dropped to my knees. I was dizzy, nauseous, head spinning and short of breath.
I kept looking up the hill at the receding figures of my people who didn’t even notice anything wrong. I kept thinking to myself, I have to get up that Tor, I will never have this chance again in life and if I don’t do this I will hate myself forever.
But simultaneously I was just about to heave my guts up.
I just somehow steeled myself and ignoring the tourists stares, started crawling on my hands and knees up the Tor.
After just a very little ways the whole sickness just started lifting off. It was as if I had moved through a barrier wall of miasma about 10 feet thick.
I felt better, I was able to become more and more upright, my head cleared and soon I just walked up to the top and acted like every other tourist, and took a bunch of photos of the fantastic view and the kids at the tower of St. Michael.

We walked down and I started in about the chalice well. I just had to find the chalice well. Well, we walked all over, up hills, down hills, looking for that thing and never found it. So I’m standing there at the White Spring gift shop where there's a grotto on a rock face. It’s all bedecked and bedewed with offerings and candles and such. And water everywhere. So I get the idea to go in and get some water, any water, I’m so thirsty and I want water from this place inside me.
When I walk in the water is running in a stream right across the floor! I say to the woman “I would like to drink this water” and she gives me a funny look and says “right, the glasses are right there” and nods her head towards a rack of glasses. So I drink and leave a little offering.
Then I go outside, across the lane is a pipe coming from the wall spouting water so I start splashing my face. I was so red and hot.

There are a lot of people sort of hanging about in various attitudes, costumage and presenting various aspects of Avalon worshipping druidy pagans. One of the most disreputable looking of these detaches himself and comes over where my 14 year old niece and I are standing, waiting for my brother who has gone to fetch the car.
He says something to the effect of “yer wanting the water then?” and I say “yuh, I‘m that thirsty”. My niece is looking at his filthy, horned bare feet with the grotty toenails, then at me, and is getting really freaked out.
He leans in and says,
“you’ve got to have both to get it”.
I’m starting to get the alert, that this is something far more than appearances warrant.
So I say,
“Which both? What’s that mean?”
He proceeds to explain that the spout from this wall is the red spring, the water on the other side of the lane is the white and that while both will “do” One has to mix them to “get it”.
I get it all right, The niece is sort of frantically plucking at my sleeve and looking at me like, what the hell are you two on about? I turn to her and I say,
“Do me a favour and go down to the car, take my big Orangina bottle, dump it out and bring me the bottle back please?”
While she’s gone on down, he tells me that those who know from the town come up and fill their kettles and jugs from both and use this as their drinking water. He asks about my experience of the Tor, I tell him, and he suggests that it’s because I am who I am that I experienced it that way.

So that’s how I filled my belly and my Orangina bottle with the water from the mixed springs of Avalon. When it came time to take the plane home, I just put it in a water bottle and brought it in my carry on.

But in the meanwhile, back in London over the next few days and weeks I started getting these odd thoughts and plans popping in my mind. I made a connection with a muse or some new part of myself and started writing a lot more and better, and my name just changed itself from Stella Tutski to Stella Magdalen. When I told Uncle Bunny he was not at all surprised, as he knew that there is a church dedicated to the Magdalene there at Glastonbury, which I was not aware of. I wish I’d known, I would have gone.

So I can tell you that DaVinci code or no, it’s pretty clear to me that the Magdalene WAS there, in some form, at Avalon. If it was physical then it was probably with Joseph of Arimathea. Maybe she went to Gaul from there or maybe it was way later, after she’d been in Gaul, or maybe it was because a cult of worshippers sprang up there and drew her essence to a shrine there after she’d left the physical plane. The how is interesting to speculate on, but not so critical to know.