The Anathemata
Mabinog’s Liturgy (continued)
that shall make of the waiting creatures, in the vessels on the board-cloths over the Stone, his body who said, DO THIS
for my Anamnesis.1
By whom also this column was.
He whose fore-type said, in the Two Landsa
I AM BARLEY.2
It was fortunate for the innate boneddigion3 of Britain that when at the prayer Qui pridie4 she was bound as they to raise her face, she as they, faced the one way, or else when the lifted Signa shone they had mistaken the object of their Latria;b to add to the taint of the Diocese of Britain an impulse more eccentric from the New Mandate than is the innate bias of the heresiarchs of Britain. c
David Jones notes
1 Anamnesis. I take leave to remind the reader that this is a key-word in our deposits. The dictionary defines its general meaning as ‘the recalling of things past’. But what is the nature of this particular recalling? I append the following quotation as being clear and to the point: ‘It (anamnesis) is not quite easy to represent accurately in English, words like “remembrance” or “memorial” having for us a connotation of something absent which is only mentally recollected. But in the scriptures of both the Old and New Testament anamnesis and the cognate verb have a sense of “recalling” or “re-presenting” before God an event in the past so that it becomes here and now operative by its effects’. Gregory Dix, The Sbape of the Liturgy, p. 161.
2 ‘We find an Egyptian king claiming in his coffin-text his identification with Osiris and adding “I am barley”.’ Eliot Smith, Human History, p. 281.
3 boneddegion, bon-eth-ig-yon, th as in nether, accent on penultimate syllable, from bonedd, descent. The term is borrowed here from the Welsh laws of the early middle ages, it meant free-born men, and is often qualified by the adjective cynhwynol, innate. Today it has the less precise meaning of gentlemen.
4 Qui pridie, the opening words of the prayer of Institution in the Mass ‘Who, the day before he suffered, etc.’ It is during this prayer that the words of consecration are said, followed by the showing of the sacrament to the people.
additional notes
a Two Lands: The Upper and Lower Kingdoms of Egypt.
b had not all eyes been turned to the elevated body of Christ, those present would have paid to Gwenhwyfar the worship (Latria) which is proper to God alone (Hague).
c i.e. to add to the heresy of the British monk Pelagius who denied the doctrine of original sin (known as the Pelagian or ‘British heresy’ the further heresy of regarding a human being as a fit object of latria. To do this would be an even more eccentric reading of the New Mandate (the Maundy of Maundy Thursday): ‘mandatum novum do vobis: ut diligatis invicem, sicut dilexit vos’ — ‘A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you’ (John 13:34). (Hague).
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