FRIDAY 13 OCTOBER

A Stone from Heaven:
The Grail, Alchemy and the Reconciliation of Opposites

7.30pm
NOA Community Centre (Ferry Centre)
Summertown, Oxford

Writing of Wolfram's Parzival, Ted Hughes said, 'This immense poem shaped the colliding and fermenting inexhaustible mix of materials and religious passions that coursed through Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.' Affirming compassion as the value through which a possible reconciliation may be reached between the masculine and feminine principles, between civilization and wilderness, and even between the Christian and Muslim worlds, the poem also speaks with startling relevance to the personal and cultural crises of our own time. Imaginative rather than scholarly in its approach, this talk will consider how the narrative opens up alchemical insights to illuminate aspects of the psyche where our lives remain most racked by contradictions.

Lindsay Clarke is the author of six novels including The Chymical Wedding, which won the Whitbread Fiction Prize, and most recently The War at Troy (2004) and The Return From Troy (2005). His radio play based on Wolfram's Parzival was broadcast by the BBC over three hours on Easter Saturday, 1995. An adaptation of the narrative to novel form, his book Parzival and the Stone From Heaven was published in 2001.

£6.00 (Friends £3.00)