The Grail Effect
Ancestral Pathways to Self Exploration
The myth of Perceval is part of a larger tradition of stories about young heroes who are brought to a test or trial. The hero has to take the correct action or make the correct response instinctively. Passing the test may bring a kingdom, riches or some gift; failing the test may bring death or exclusion. Usually, the hero only gets one chance. The unasked Question is the opposite of a riddle and therefore a more difficult test. n the medieval Grail romances, the hero (Perceval, or Peredur or Parzival), visits the Grail Castle twice. On the first occasion, the boy remembers that he has been taught not to ask unnecessary questions, and so does not ask a necessary question. As a result, he fails and the land becomes, or at least continues to be, a waste land. By the time he finds the Grail Castle again, the hero has achieved enlightenment and is able to ask the Question and so bring healing.
n Chrétien's account, the necessary Question is: Who is served by the grail?. A possible answer would be: The old king, whose heir you are.
In itself, deliverance as the result of the right kind of question is a universal, i.e. an archetypal, motif. Indeed, in fairytales it is usual for the hero who wishes to acquire the treasure to have to fulfil one or more special conditions, on the correct execution of which the result depends. One such condition is the question. There is often a prohibition on asking, as for instance in the legend of Lohengrin where it is a matter of guarding a mystery. The mystery is generally that of the hero's descent which, most frequently, is miraculous. With Perceval the matter stands differently. Excepting in Wolfram, and in Wagner where a pure fool, through pity wise becomes the quintessence of Parsifal's character, the question is not based on compassion. [Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz, The Grail Legend.]
n Chrétien's account, the necessary Question is: Who is served by the grail?. A possible answer would be: The old king, whose heir you are.
In itself, deliverance as the result of the right kind of question is a universal, i.e. an archetypal, motif. Indeed, in fairytales it is usual for the hero who wishes to acquire the treasure to have to fulfil one or more special conditions, on the correct execution of which the result depends. One such condition is the question. There is often a prohibition on asking, as for instance in the legend of Lohengrin where it is a matter of guarding a mystery. The mystery is generally that of the hero's descent which, most frequently, is miraculous. With Perceval the matter stands differently. Excepting in Wolfram, and in Wagner where a pure fool, through pity wise becomes the quintessence of Parsifal's character, the question is not based on compassion. [Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz, The Grail Legend.]
Willy Pogany - illustration for Wagner’s opera “Parsifal.”
The scene changes:
It appears that the audience, in this case me, joins in during the last act.
One must kneel down as the Good Friday service begins:
Parsifal enters-slowly; his head covered with a black helmet.
The lion skin of Hercules adorns his shoulders and he holds the club in his hand; he is also wearing modern black trousers in honor of the church holiday.
I bristle and stretch out my hand avertingly, but the play goes on.
Parsifal takes off his helmet.
Yet there is no Gurnemanz to atone for and consecrate him.
Kundry stands in the distance, covering her head and laughing.
The audience is enraptured and recognizes itself in Parsifal.
He is I.
I take off my armor layered with history and my chimerical decoration and go to the spring wearing a white penitent's shirt, where I wash my feet and hands without the help of a stranger.
Then I also take off my penitent's shirt and put on my civilian clothes.
I walk out of the scene and approach myself-I who am still kneeling down in prayer as the audience. I rise and become one with myself. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Pages 302-303.
It appears that the audience, in this case me, joins in during the last act.
One must kneel down as the Good Friday service begins:
Parsifal enters-slowly; his head covered with a black helmet.
The lion skin of Hercules adorns his shoulders and he holds the club in his hand; he is also wearing modern black trousers in honor of the church holiday.
I bristle and stretch out my hand avertingly, but the play goes on.
Parsifal takes off his helmet.
Yet there is no Gurnemanz to atone for and consecrate him.
Kundry stands in the distance, covering her head and laughing.
The audience is enraptured and recognizes itself in Parsifal.
He is I.
I take off my armor layered with history and my chimerical decoration and go to the spring wearing a white penitent's shirt, where I wash my feet and hands without the help of a stranger.
Then I also take off my penitent's shirt and put on my civilian clothes.
I walk out of the scene and approach myself-I who am still kneeling down in prayer as the audience. I rise and become one with myself. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Pages 302-303.
The most famous Grail romance is Parzival, written sometime between 1195 and 1216. The author was Wolfram von Eschenbach, a Bavarian knight. In his tale Wolfram tells us about a heathen by the name of Flegetanis who is scholarly. He is descended from Solomon and was an Israelite until he was baptized. The origin of the story apparently comes from Toledo, Spain, which was the Judaic and Muslim center for esoteric studies. Flegetanis said that while watching the constellations he could see how man's affairs and destiny were connected. He also saw what he called the Grail and said that it was left on earth by angels. [12]
Since that time only baptized men who were chaste were allowed to guarded it.
This tale, when taken with all the information already presented, including the arrival of the Anunnaki, the lowering of kingship from heaven and the struggle to maintain the royal blood, begs the question - why was a story about the Grail being told by a baptized Israelite. Why was this story made available to infidels when Christians were unaware of its existence?
We have always been told that the Grail Quest was a tale about finding the chalice of Jesus or of finding the blood of Jesus. What if this assumption is wrong. Perhaps the Grail Quest is a Ring Quest: maintain the purity of the royal bloodline of the original kings and queens. The bloodline began with Adam, continued to David and was passed on to Jesus, always through the female of the family.
Since that time only baptized men who were chaste were allowed to guarded it.
This tale, when taken with all the information already presented, including the arrival of the Anunnaki, the lowering of kingship from heaven and the struggle to maintain the royal blood, begs the question - why was a story about the Grail being told by a baptized Israelite. Why was this story made available to infidels when Christians were unaware of its existence?
We have always been told that the Grail Quest was a tale about finding the chalice of Jesus or of finding the blood of Jesus. What if this assumption is wrong. Perhaps the Grail Quest is a Ring Quest: maintain the purity of the royal bloodline of the original kings and queens. The bloodline began with Adam, continued to David and was passed on to Jesus, always through the female of the family.
Finally there is the Grail. What is it? The universe cannot contain it, but it shines like a star to guide us on our way. How do we win it? By asking the Question. If it is that simple, why doesn't everyone have it? Because we are Parsifal the foolish knight. How do we become wise? By seeking the Grail. Why must we seek it? Because we are in the Waste Land. What restores the Waste Land? The Question. On the Tree, the Grail is on the path of Saturn and brings both Peace and War. The Grail must be sought in the heart of the seeker.
"Parsifal"
http://www.sightswithin.com/Johann.Heinrich.Fussli/Page_5/
Parcival befreit Belisane von den Zaubereien des Urma (1783)
Parcival befreit Belisane von den Zaubereien des Urma (1783)
Popular Arthurian Traditions edited by Sally K. Slocum
Prince Arthur and the Fairy Queen (c. 1788)
The Grail legend captures the personal imagination.
The story is fairytale material. The Grail—a mysterious, life-preserving and sustenance-dispensing vessel—is guarded by a king in a castle that is “difficult to find.” The king is either old or suffering (different versions of the same story) from some mysterious wound and his kingdom is devastated. The king can only be restored to health if a knight of conspicuous excellence finds the castle and, seeing what goes on there, asks a certain question. Perceval thinks himself up to the task and sets out on the quest. He fails to ask the question “about the origin of evil, the king’s wound, and about the Grail’s meaning” the first time he encounters the Grail Castle and the Grail. As in all fairy tales and myths, there is a second chance. Perceval prevails. The Grail Castle, “the castle difficult to find,” is the timeless dimension, concealed from view – for our authors, an archetypal concept of the unconscious.
The Grail, available only to one worthy to share in what it offers, is thought by some to be the vessel which held the Christ’s blood (his essence, his soul substance), hidden by Joseph of Arimathea after the Christ’s death. This vessel, for Jung, “signifies the whole psychic man as a realization of divinity reaching right down into matter”. She identifies this, in Jungian terms, as the Self—that inner guide that is God’s voice, “the hidden disposition to wholeness which slumbers in the depths of the unconscious of each person.”
The Grail story is itself a projection of the Self as an inner center, unrealized by and inaccessible to those trapped in the medieval mindset. “The story of Perceval anticipates psychic problems reaching so far into the future that it could not be wholly comprehended by the medieval attitude.”
The medieval world, represented by the ailing king in our story, suffered from a “one-sided insistence on the light side of the God image (in the Christ figure) and so cast off its shadow – the Anti-Christ, its individual inner opposite – outwardly onto barbarian opponents instead of being able to integrate it.”
Arthur’s knights led a life of “high virtue” which led to pride and was perverted into evil.
There was a “too intense, one-sided spirituality of the feminine found in the Cult of the Virgin,” without a balanced genuine relationship with the actual women in their personal lives. “There was a drifting apart of the opposites of spirit and world, of spiritual matters and worldly matters, choosing holiness instead of humanity.”
This problem of opposites and the failure to recognize and integrate the shadow were responsible for the king’s sickness (the king representing the dominant collective consciousness).
The old king had to die, or the ailing king had to be restored, redeemed, before the land could be freed from its present state. “It is as if the dark aspect of divinity had attacked him in order to awaken him to a more conscious religious attitude.”
Until he grappled with the dark divinity—like Jacob and Job before him—he could not come to a realization of the totality of the God-image. The Grail “signifies a stage of development of the human spirit, when man is no longer satisfied with the materialistic view or with the effectiveness of working things, but goes beyond this and endows the concrete with a symbolic meaning.” This requires the ability to reflect, to discern, to place value. In this respect, the Grail can be compared to the Feeling Function, our ability to discriminate between good and evil that reaches beyond the world’s perspective of these.
It means rediscovering the soul of nature, the incarnate God.
It would be misleading not to mention that Perceval went on many a misguided adventure, lost many battles, made wrong turns in the woods, and, certainly, didn’t ask the question – suffered from his own wounded Feeling Function – when he had the chance.
All of these adventures are explored and given their true place. The journey is not a straight line. We all know about that. The Grail, says Jung, is the principle of individuation available within each person.
“As threads of fabric are woven into a pattern, so the Self as a living garment of divinity is woven out of the many decisions and crises, in themselves possibly insignificant, by which we are affected in the Individuation comes one person at a time, not to the collective, “for only in the individual are opposites reconciled and united.” I take from this that I, personally, cannot wait for the collective to come to an awareness of what is important to heal our earth, to come to consciousness, to discover the truth behind the illusions we worship.
Percival’s quest, spiral though it was, was that of “redeeming the Spirit of God in matter, under the guidance of the Self, the ‘inner Christ’ . . . . to discover the form in which
the essential psychic life of Christ continues to exist and what that means.”
This Grail is concerned with “carrying on Christ’s effectiveness in this world,” as a vessel through which the divine can have its way. But Perceval had to ask the question, discern the value and importance of what he saw around him. “To whom is the Grail brought?” and “Whom does the Grail serve?” seem to be the archetypal tipping point of the story.
The Grail is brought to the Old Grail King; the goal of the quest is death to the old king (not just finding the Grail) – death to the dominant collective consciousness of the day and to the one-sided god image it maintains. With the secret words spoken and Perceval’s royal ancestry revealed, the Grail is placed in his care.
In the story’s version with the ailing King, the ailing King, along with his kingdom, is temporarily restored. Jung points out that Perceval didn’t himself complete the arch. He remained at the Grail Castle and did not choose to take the Grail back to Arthur’s court.
Is not the hero supposed to return with the boon?
Because of this, the Grail disappeared with his death, went back into concealment.
For our authors, this means that the archetypal Grail remains in the unconscious of each living person, available as an inner guide, the voice of the divine, inviting each of us to our individual completeness. “Individuation, when seen from the ‘other’ (archetypal) side actually depicts the process of the incarnation of the divine.”
To ask the question, “Whom does the Grail serve?” is to ask, perhaps, Whom does the Self serve? Does the Self serve that ultimate Wholeness of which we each participate? Does the Self come in the service of that numinous experience we each encounter once or twice in a lifetime that feeds our hunger for deeper connection with life? Is the Self available to continue the incarnation of the divine in whatever form it happens to be evolving in the universe?
Encountering the Grail imposes a question on the beholder, say our authors, it does not impart direct knowledge.
The Grail “gives us an emotional readiness to receive,” a numinous experience of our inner center, the Self. I remember Carl Jung, in Memories Dreams, Reflections, speaking of life addressing a question to him: “Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed to the world, and I must communicate my answer; otherwise I am dependent on the world’s answer.” The Self asks a question of us unique to our personal destiny or daimon.
Our authors use the characters of Perceval and Gauvain to urge us to listen to our own inner nature and not to be distracted by what the world thinks we ought to be doing.
Perceval, the Introvert, gets dazzled and distracted from his mission by Arthur’s court and the colorful knights: “An unreflective Perceval (not asking the question, not accessing his Introverted Feeling Function) is a Perceval cut off from the true source of his inner being.”
His extroverted activity, without reflection on the true value of what he experienced, drains and weakens him.
Gauvain, the great Christian hero and Extrovert, fights unreflectively in the story for what is recognized by the community to be right. He falls asleep when the time comes for him to use his Feeling Function, reflect on what is happening around him.
Eventually, Perceval “hangs back, seeks the ‘lost God’ and his own soul,” gets back in touch with his Introverted Feeling Function and can ask the question. I, too, get out of sorts when I do not make time for my inner life, if I am too danced around by the colorful extroversion of the outer world.
Jung and von Franz make the distinction between “the uninterrupted chain of outer events versus making time to reflect on one’s experiences” as vital for both introverts and extroverts in the process of individuation.
I have only scratched the surface here of Emma Jung’s life endeavor and Marie-Louise von Franz’ generous contribution to Jungian thought. Their book has an entire exploration of the doctrine of the Trinity and their transformation of it into a quaternity – Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and Mary (The Grail) and the Feminine Feeling Function.
They introduce a section on Merlin as the image of the whole man, as the one who points to the unconscious and past it to the wholeness beyond opposites.
http://doczine.com/bigdata/2/1367411307_4a9b155d4d/winter06-the-grail-legend.pdf
Image: "How Sir Galahad Sir Bors and Sir Percival were fed with the Sanc Grael; But Sir Percival's Sister Died by the Way," watercolor, by the English artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti
The story is fairytale material. The Grail—a mysterious, life-preserving and sustenance-dispensing vessel—is guarded by a king in a castle that is “difficult to find.” The king is either old or suffering (different versions of the same story) from some mysterious wound and his kingdom is devastated. The king can only be restored to health if a knight of conspicuous excellence finds the castle and, seeing what goes on there, asks a certain question. Perceval thinks himself up to the task and sets out on the quest. He fails to ask the question “about the origin of evil, the king’s wound, and about the Grail’s meaning” the first time he encounters the Grail Castle and the Grail. As in all fairy tales and myths, there is a second chance. Perceval prevails. The Grail Castle, “the castle difficult to find,” is the timeless dimension, concealed from view – for our authors, an archetypal concept of the unconscious.
The Grail, available only to one worthy to share in what it offers, is thought by some to be the vessel which held the Christ’s blood (his essence, his soul substance), hidden by Joseph of Arimathea after the Christ’s death. This vessel, for Jung, “signifies the whole psychic man as a realization of divinity reaching right down into matter”. She identifies this, in Jungian terms, as the Self—that inner guide that is God’s voice, “the hidden disposition to wholeness which slumbers in the depths of the unconscious of each person.”
The Grail story is itself a projection of the Self as an inner center, unrealized by and inaccessible to those trapped in the medieval mindset. “The story of Perceval anticipates psychic problems reaching so far into the future that it could not be wholly comprehended by the medieval attitude.”
The medieval world, represented by the ailing king in our story, suffered from a “one-sided insistence on the light side of the God image (in the Christ figure) and so cast off its shadow – the Anti-Christ, its individual inner opposite – outwardly onto barbarian opponents instead of being able to integrate it.”
Arthur’s knights led a life of “high virtue” which led to pride and was perverted into evil.
There was a “too intense, one-sided spirituality of the feminine found in the Cult of the Virgin,” without a balanced genuine relationship with the actual women in their personal lives. “There was a drifting apart of the opposites of spirit and world, of spiritual matters and worldly matters, choosing holiness instead of humanity.”
This problem of opposites and the failure to recognize and integrate the shadow were responsible for the king’s sickness (the king representing the dominant collective consciousness).
The old king had to die, or the ailing king had to be restored, redeemed, before the land could be freed from its present state. “It is as if the dark aspect of divinity had attacked him in order to awaken him to a more conscious religious attitude.”
Until he grappled with the dark divinity—like Jacob and Job before him—he could not come to a realization of the totality of the God-image. The Grail “signifies a stage of development of the human spirit, when man is no longer satisfied with the materialistic view or with the effectiveness of working things, but goes beyond this and endows the concrete with a symbolic meaning.” This requires the ability to reflect, to discern, to place value. In this respect, the Grail can be compared to the Feeling Function, our ability to discriminate between good and evil that reaches beyond the world’s perspective of these.
It means rediscovering the soul of nature, the incarnate God.
It would be misleading not to mention that Perceval went on many a misguided adventure, lost many battles, made wrong turns in the woods, and, certainly, didn’t ask the question – suffered from his own wounded Feeling Function – when he had the chance.
All of these adventures are explored and given their true place. The journey is not a straight line. We all know about that. The Grail, says Jung, is the principle of individuation available within each person.
“As threads of fabric are woven into a pattern, so the Self as a living garment of divinity is woven out of the many decisions and crises, in themselves possibly insignificant, by which we are affected in the Individuation comes one person at a time, not to the collective, “for only in the individual are opposites reconciled and united.” I take from this that I, personally, cannot wait for the collective to come to an awareness of what is important to heal our earth, to come to consciousness, to discover the truth behind the illusions we worship.
Percival’s quest, spiral though it was, was that of “redeeming the Spirit of God in matter, under the guidance of the Self, the ‘inner Christ’ . . . . to discover the form in which
the essential psychic life of Christ continues to exist and what that means.”
This Grail is concerned with “carrying on Christ’s effectiveness in this world,” as a vessel through which the divine can have its way. But Perceval had to ask the question, discern the value and importance of what he saw around him. “To whom is the Grail brought?” and “Whom does the Grail serve?” seem to be the archetypal tipping point of the story.
The Grail is brought to the Old Grail King; the goal of the quest is death to the old king (not just finding the Grail) – death to the dominant collective consciousness of the day and to the one-sided god image it maintains. With the secret words spoken and Perceval’s royal ancestry revealed, the Grail is placed in his care.
In the story’s version with the ailing King, the ailing King, along with his kingdom, is temporarily restored. Jung points out that Perceval didn’t himself complete the arch. He remained at the Grail Castle and did not choose to take the Grail back to Arthur’s court.
Is not the hero supposed to return with the boon?
Because of this, the Grail disappeared with his death, went back into concealment.
For our authors, this means that the archetypal Grail remains in the unconscious of each living person, available as an inner guide, the voice of the divine, inviting each of us to our individual completeness. “Individuation, when seen from the ‘other’ (archetypal) side actually depicts the process of the incarnation of the divine.”
To ask the question, “Whom does the Grail serve?” is to ask, perhaps, Whom does the Self serve? Does the Self serve that ultimate Wholeness of which we each participate? Does the Self come in the service of that numinous experience we each encounter once or twice in a lifetime that feeds our hunger for deeper connection with life? Is the Self available to continue the incarnation of the divine in whatever form it happens to be evolving in the universe?
Encountering the Grail imposes a question on the beholder, say our authors, it does not impart direct knowledge.
The Grail “gives us an emotional readiness to receive,” a numinous experience of our inner center, the Self. I remember Carl Jung, in Memories Dreams, Reflections, speaking of life addressing a question to him: “Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed to the world, and I must communicate my answer; otherwise I am dependent on the world’s answer.” The Self asks a question of us unique to our personal destiny or daimon.
Our authors use the characters of Perceval and Gauvain to urge us to listen to our own inner nature and not to be distracted by what the world thinks we ought to be doing.
Perceval, the Introvert, gets dazzled and distracted from his mission by Arthur’s court and the colorful knights: “An unreflective Perceval (not asking the question, not accessing his Introverted Feeling Function) is a Perceval cut off from the true source of his inner being.”
His extroverted activity, without reflection on the true value of what he experienced, drains and weakens him.
Gauvain, the great Christian hero and Extrovert, fights unreflectively in the story for what is recognized by the community to be right. He falls asleep when the time comes for him to use his Feeling Function, reflect on what is happening around him.
Eventually, Perceval “hangs back, seeks the ‘lost God’ and his own soul,” gets back in touch with his Introverted Feeling Function and can ask the question. I, too, get out of sorts when I do not make time for my inner life, if I am too danced around by the colorful extroversion of the outer world.
Jung and von Franz make the distinction between “the uninterrupted chain of outer events versus making time to reflect on one’s experiences” as vital for both introverts and extroverts in the process of individuation.
I have only scratched the surface here of Emma Jung’s life endeavor and Marie-Louise von Franz’ generous contribution to Jungian thought. Their book has an entire exploration of the doctrine of the Trinity and their transformation of it into a quaternity – Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and Mary (The Grail) and the Feminine Feeling Function.
They introduce a section on Merlin as the image of the whole man, as the one who points to the unconscious and past it to the wholeness beyond opposites.
http://doczine.com/bigdata/2/1367411307_4a9b155d4d/winter06-the-grail-legend.pdf
Image: "How Sir Galahad Sir Bors and Sir Percival were fed with the Sanc Grael; But Sir Percival's Sister Died by the Way," watercolor, by the English artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Grail Lineage: the King & the Land Are One
Beyond history, our ancient heritage contains a welter of symbols, myths and themes, each of which can lead to greater awareness and self-understanding. While these mythemes may mean something much different than they did to our ancestors, some of whom were immersed in them, they offer a Way toward Gnosis, direct experiential knowledge or revelatory understanding.
The Holy Grail and its Quest remains a powerful transformative force. As a symbol, the powerful and mysterious vessel is ephemeral. But for those intimately linked by pedigree and embodiment to this bloodline, the Grail is a psychophysical imperative, found deep within our many genes and ancestors. It is a guiding narrative, and very personal mythology. We are created in the image of the gods. In the Grail legend, the divine King stands for spirit while the Land for matter, so this is another way of saying "As above, so below."
But, as our kingdom is not of this world, it is a path of cultivating inner power -- personal sovereignty -- true personal freedom. Ultimately, we each have only as much sovereignty as we can demonstrate. The Grail is a powerful story, still it represents only one part of a much, much older royal line of God-Kings. originating in sacred rites and breeding programs in Sumeria, and earlier matrilinear neolithic goddess cultures. The Grail Bearer is a mediatrix of the contents of the unconscious, with both human traits and archetypal qualities. The omnipresence of the Grail motif in all civilizations, as far back as there is any record, attests to its universal significance.
The Grail is a life-theme for those born into its genetic vortex. The sub-themes are foundational: 1) Sacred Life; 2) Sacred Bonds; 3) Sacred Growth. The Grail mediates our fate by weaving events into our lives. The Grail emerges as a challenging counter-myth to our ordinary awareness. Confronting the existential reality of our ancestors initiates an internal dialogue that rewrites our idea of who we are and where we are going. The Grail manifests in several different modes simultaneously, depending on the perception or level of consciousness of the seeker.
Your lines are your Book of the Holy Grail, the book of your descent -- like a descent into the underworld -- with all its terrors and miracles. When we integrate it, the Grail ideal becomes our conscious direction and translates into real life settings. Through consciousness journeys which liquify our rigid notions of self and world, we re-create the adventures of the hero or heroine. The theme is the loss and recovery of identity. Genealogy and genetic genealogy become a medium of deep self-exploration.
We carry an intimate tangible connection to the collective unconscious. To the extent we actively engage with it, we are psychic. For our ancestors, the veil between the worlds was thin. Being psychically gifted doesn't mean you talk to dead people, but that the imaginal mindscape of your psyche is as palpably real as the external world yet as deep as the Cosmos. There is an irresistible drive to seek meaning and meaningful self-expression. Such an archetypal drive is often felt as a burden, defect, alienation, or woundedness.
Personal Mythology
Joseph Campbell described the mythic cycle as The Hero's (or Heroine's) Journey. Its stages from "the Call to Adventure" though initiatory trials and tribulations, to securing the boon and the Return are summarized here: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/smc/journey/ref/summary.html
The Hero's main feat is to overcome the monster of darkness; it is the long-hoped for and expected triumph of consciousness over the unconscious. Day and light are synonyms for consciousness, night and dark for the unconscious. The coming of consciousness was probably the most tremendous experience of primeval times, for with it a world came into being whose existence no one had suspected before. "And God said: "Let there be light!" is the projection of that immemorial experience of the separation of the conscious from the unconscious. Even among primitives today the possession of a soul is a precarious thing and the "loss of soul" a typical psychic malady which drives primitive medicine to all sorts of psycho-therapeutic measures. Hence the "child" distinguishes itself by deeds which point to the conquest of the dark. ~Carl Jung; The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious; Page 167. Stan Krippner describes personal mythology as "... an approach to personal transformation using the development of participants' personal stories about existential human issues for self healing and personal growth. There are also cultural, institutional, ethnic, and familial myths which influence our personal myths. We use our stories as personal myths. They can be found through our dreams, where we are often informed long before we know intellectually."
Four factors influence personal myths: biology, culture, interpersonal experiences, and how we relate to transpersonal experiences. We can identify, evaluate, and transform dysfunctional myths, beliefs, and worldviews by working with them. Playing in the Elysian fields of our ancestors is one way of doing so. It roots us in deep time.
Beyond history, our ancient heritage contains a welter of symbols, myths and themes, each of which can lead to greater awareness and self-understanding. While these mythemes may mean something much different than they did to our ancestors, some of whom were immersed in them, they offer a Way toward Gnosis, direct experiential knowledge or revelatory understanding.
The Holy Grail and its Quest remains a powerful transformative force. As a symbol, the powerful and mysterious vessel is ephemeral. But for those intimately linked by pedigree and embodiment to this bloodline, the Grail is a psychophysical imperative, found deep within our many genes and ancestors. It is a guiding narrative, and very personal mythology. We are created in the image of the gods. In the Grail legend, the divine King stands for spirit while the Land for matter, so this is another way of saying "As above, so below."
But, as our kingdom is not of this world, it is a path of cultivating inner power -- personal sovereignty -- true personal freedom. Ultimately, we each have only as much sovereignty as we can demonstrate. The Grail is a powerful story, still it represents only one part of a much, much older royal line of God-Kings. originating in sacred rites and breeding programs in Sumeria, and earlier matrilinear neolithic goddess cultures. The Grail Bearer is a mediatrix of the contents of the unconscious, with both human traits and archetypal qualities. The omnipresence of the Grail motif in all civilizations, as far back as there is any record, attests to its universal significance.
The Grail is a life-theme for those born into its genetic vortex. The sub-themes are foundational: 1) Sacred Life; 2) Sacred Bonds; 3) Sacred Growth. The Grail mediates our fate by weaving events into our lives. The Grail emerges as a challenging counter-myth to our ordinary awareness. Confronting the existential reality of our ancestors initiates an internal dialogue that rewrites our idea of who we are and where we are going. The Grail manifests in several different modes simultaneously, depending on the perception or level of consciousness of the seeker.
Your lines are your Book of the Holy Grail, the book of your descent -- like a descent into the underworld -- with all its terrors and miracles. When we integrate it, the Grail ideal becomes our conscious direction and translates into real life settings. Through consciousness journeys which liquify our rigid notions of self and world, we re-create the adventures of the hero or heroine. The theme is the loss and recovery of identity. Genealogy and genetic genealogy become a medium of deep self-exploration.
We carry an intimate tangible connection to the collective unconscious. To the extent we actively engage with it, we are psychic. For our ancestors, the veil between the worlds was thin. Being psychically gifted doesn't mean you talk to dead people, but that the imaginal mindscape of your psyche is as palpably real as the external world yet as deep as the Cosmos. There is an irresistible drive to seek meaning and meaningful self-expression. Such an archetypal drive is often felt as a burden, defect, alienation, or woundedness.
Personal Mythology
Joseph Campbell described the mythic cycle as The Hero's (or Heroine's) Journey. Its stages from "the Call to Adventure" though initiatory trials and tribulations, to securing the boon and the Return are summarized here: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/smc/journey/ref/summary.html
The Hero's main feat is to overcome the monster of darkness; it is the long-hoped for and expected triumph of consciousness over the unconscious. Day and light are synonyms for consciousness, night and dark for the unconscious. The coming of consciousness was probably the most tremendous experience of primeval times, for with it a world came into being whose existence no one had suspected before. "And God said: "Let there be light!" is the projection of that immemorial experience of the separation of the conscious from the unconscious. Even among primitives today the possession of a soul is a precarious thing and the "loss of soul" a typical psychic malady which drives primitive medicine to all sorts of psycho-therapeutic measures. Hence the "child" distinguishes itself by deeds which point to the conquest of the dark. ~Carl Jung; The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious; Page 167. Stan Krippner describes personal mythology as "... an approach to personal transformation using the development of participants' personal stories about existential human issues for self healing and personal growth. There are also cultural, institutional, ethnic, and familial myths which influence our personal myths. We use our stories as personal myths. They can be found through our dreams, where we are often informed long before we know intellectually."
Four factors influence personal myths: biology, culture, interpersonal experiences, and how we relate to transpersonal experiences. We can identify, evaluate, and transform dysfunctional myths, beliefs, and worldviews by working with them. Playing in the Elysian fields of our ancestors is one way of doing so. It roots us in deep time.
Jung and others speak of the ubiquity of personal mythology as an impelling force in our psychic lives. Rollo May taught that "the underlying function of psychotherapy is the indirect reinterpretation and remolding of the patient's symbols and myths. . .The individual must define his or her own values according to personal myths." We discover them in dreams, in anomalous experiences, in altered states, and woven into our very being and daily life. Dreams are the mirrors of change. Personal myths subconsciously shape the way we live. The mythic dimension is transpersonal.
The Universal Wound
An encounter with something greater than our limited ego, what Jung calls the Self, is always a wounding experience for the ego. The Self is the center of the total personality, including the conscious and the unconscious. Our wound, our personal struggle is THE archetypal wound, embodied in the sick King. Our wound or dysfunction is simultaneously personal and universal. Our wound introduces and connects us with the transpersonal dimension of our being, whose realization, amazingly enough, initiates the transformation and potential healing of our wound.
Simultaneously containing both the pathology and its own medicine, our wound is a higher-dimensional event which has manifested in the flat-land of our three-dimensional life. Our wound is not separate from the psyche experiencing it. The way we interpret our wound, the meaning we place on it, and the story we tell ourselves about it has an actual effect on how our wound, ourselves, and the world manifests in each and every moment.
Such wounding is initiatory, catalyzing a healing process requiring our active engagement. The ancestors represent our indwelling potentiality, which may or may not be expressed. No matter how many others may share your particular ancestors, they are yours, your ancestral grandparents. As psychophysical "descendants" we find ourselves challenged to consciously descend into the depths of personal and global history, into a cosmic spiritual struggle, into the mythic dimension, and into the primordial depths of our being back to our very roots in pre-history. The Grail is often associated with a Spear. You are the tip of that sacred spear, reaching all the way back to the beginning.
What has penetrated us initiates a deeper dynamic of psychic re-organization and potential transformation. Freedom from the dichotomy of wounded / not-woundedness requires transcendence. It heals our dissociation from self, others and world. Recollecting the ancestors and "re-membering" is an intrinsic part of this process for grail bearers which leads to stepping into our deeper identities as "god-kings," or realizing the Self.
Karl Kerenyi describes the wounded healer as a psychological capacity "to be at home in the darkness of suffering and there to find germs of light and recovery with which, as though by enchantment, to bring forth Asklepius, the sunlike healer." Consciously facing our experience and going deeper into our wound and pain we receive its blessing. We embrace the mysteriously painful place in ourselves where the wound is leading us, allowing us to be healed. Our wounding is a "numinous" event that is transpersonal and archetypal. Our wound is the Way by which the divine makes contact with us, beyond our own personal contrivance.
Our transpersonal wound functions as a "portal", teaching us something about ourselves that effects a holistic re-patterning. Going through our wound means realizing we will never again be the same once we emerge from this initiatory process. All forms are dissolved in the underground stream, the rushing stream of consciousness, in a baptism or healing immersion in the vast ocean of deep consciousness. We ride the dragon on the backs of our ancestors to the realm of the Unborn, returning to the pure creative energy of the cosmic womb for the mystery of alchemical rebirth.
The primary nature of consciousness is revealed. Pure consciousness, the fundamental luminosity, is the ground state of unborn form. The generic purpose of ego death is to liberate our embodied being, precipitating communion with and re-patterning by the Whole. When all forms finally dissolve into unconditioned consciousness, the ground state of the natural mind is revealed as the mystic Void, the womb of creation. http://ionamiller.weebly.com/universal-solvent.html
Going through our wound is a genuine (ego) death experience, as our old self "dies" in the process, while a new, more expansive and empowered human potential is born. Thus, the Grail is not only about birth, it is about catalyzing transformational rebirth into a nonlinear, nonlocal expanded sense of self beyond mere ego inflation. Self-actualization or self-realization implies the grounding of the spiritual fruits of inner exploration. This is gnosis.
Marie-Louise Von Franz, said "the wounded healer IS the archetype of the Self (our wholeness, the God within) and is at the bottom of all genuine healing procedures," resulting in a more open-ended and expansive sense of who we think we are, and who we imagine others are in relation to us. The wound is not only a personal experience, but a doorway, a hyper-dimensional portal into the transpersonal / archetypal realm, which is a higher order (in terms of freedom) of our being.
We recognize our individual suffering is a personalized reflection or instantiation of the collective suffering that pervades the entire field of consciousness. Our personal wound is, in condensed and crystallized form, the footprint and signature of the collective wound in which we all share and participate. It is liberating and healing to step out of pathologizing ourselves and re-contextualize our personal conflicts, problems and wounds as part of a wider transpersonal pattern enfolded throughout the global field of human experience.
Our particularized consciousness becomes panoramic. Formerly unconscious resonant energies are stimulated within us. There is a synchronistic co-respondence, mirroring and fundamental inseparability between what is going on within our psyche and what is happening in the outer world. We enter the mythic/archetypal dimension by fully incarnating, in a full-bodied way, our personal process in our life. And for grail bearers, the ancestors are an intrinsic part of that transpersonal process. Kinship felt-sense is deeply connective and can even function like a virtual time machine for our expanded awareness.
The personal process is the doorway which introduces us to the deeper archetypal dimension of our being. Our "gateway" ancestors help us step into experiencing the myth-like, time-less dimension of our situation. The wound is healed in a dimension of our being in which the past, our wound, the world and ourselves do not literally, concretely, and objectively exist in and over time in the way we had previously imagined. We recognize that our wound is the archetypal wound. Healing allows life to flow in new, creative patterns.
We see, like Jung did, that our "suffering is archetypal and collective. It is a sign that we no longer suffer from ourselves, but rather from the spirit of the age." What is being reborn in the bloodline is the new Spirit of the Age. To the extent we embody and creatively express the spirit of the age from which we are suffering with consciousness, we become the "medium" through which the spirit of the age reveals itself to us, to potentially transform itself, ourselves, and the world around us.
Our wound becomes an expression of our wholeness, Cosmic Sovereignty, reminding us precisely who we are. The Self and our embodiment are One. It means actively living within a mythic mindfield that extends into the mists preceding the birth of civilization as we know it. We paradoxically step into being a genuinely autonomous, independent being, at the same time realizing our interconnectedness, interdependence, unity and ultimate inseparability from the world and each other. The energetic expression of this realization is compassion.
We embody the Grail.
Robert Johnson concludes, "We have to finish it. We have to carry it on. Even though we don't talk about grails and castles and enchanted maidens, still it is our myth to be completed in our lives. The myth has taken us to exactly the point where modern people are now. Collectively speaking we are stuck at the point where the French poem ends. So if you want a quest, if you want something meaningful for your life, pick up the grail myth where it now lies in you."
In Hymn to an Unknown God, Sam Keen says, "The voice that calls us forth and inspires us to undertake the journey is always specific. So long as we respond to the needs of our world by offering both our compassion and our skill, we will not fall into despair at the overwhelming quantity of need. The spiritual life is based on a refusal to despair that arises from concerned action and humble agnosticism. We don't know enough to despair. Despair is hidden arrogance -- I have seen the future, and it doesn't work. Hope is rooted in trust in the Unknown God. We do not know the final destiny of the individual soul or the commonwealth of beings; therefore we work, wait, and hope. and it is enough."
Campbell echoed this sentiment: "The adventure of the Grail -- the, quest within for those creative values by which the Waste Land is redeemed -- has become today for each the unavoidable task." Drinking from the Grail
Our own ancestors are the fractal representations of holographic archetypes -- fractal nonlinear resonance. Because of their collective role, royals are cast in virtually pure archetypal roles in history, with nobles playing lesser exemplars, reflecting on the common population as a whole. Our relationship to the Underground Stream is that of the particle to the field. The field is sole governing agency of the particle. The Grail governs the process not only of royal descent, but of psi expression and other grail traits. The collective aspects of the Grail function like a meta-consciousness in awakened grail bearers.
When the Grail quest grabs you, it becomes obsessive. The Grail is our personal bloodline alive within us passed down in each generation. Some societies retain and can name their ancestors as a means of keeping their spirits alive. In today's world an explosion in the hobbies of genealogy and genetic genealogy serves the same function. The more people participating in open-source genealogy, the sooner the archetypal Tree of Life will be revealed as the holographic image of our collective unconscious. Many forces drive such a search for the Self in the Many.
The DISTAFF LINE is an old Craft term, the Mother's Line, as opposed to the Father's Line (called the Spear Line). The Matrilineal bloodline contains the spiritual, true essence of a person's "self", by which the spirits of the departed leave the Unseen world and re-enter into their families on earth. The Old Dame, as the Mother of Creation and the Supreme Being, and the Spinner of Fate, holds the "Distaff" by which she Spins the threads of creation. Since all ‘lines’ or threads begin with her and return to her, the Mother's Line is called the "Distaff Line". Mitochondrial DNA remains strong, persisting in the cells of both sexes longer than nuclear DNA.
The pathology of the modern self is alienation and fragmentation. One means of seeking wholeness is through the modern pursuit of genetic genealogy. Re-collection of one's lost ancestors creates a tremendous influx of energy that produces an inflation in the psyche, now overflowing with ancestors recently reawakened to consciousness. The totality of this ancestral brood is not different from Jung's notion of the Self, the totality of the collective unconscious.
In the Grail legends, Parcival is the archetypal seeker, the most well-meaning yet naive figure. He follows his own haphazard yet synchronistic path.
One day, Percival comes to a castle in the midst of a desolate wasteland, "ruin and chaos. The ground is spent and sere, the crops no longer grow, nor do the waters flow, and a darkness has descended on the hearts of the people." Percival enters the castle, and is brought to a room where a king lies bleeding from an enchanted wound. In British/Celtic mythology, a ruler is connected through his or her very body to the body of the land.
This is the quality of mystical Sovereignty, the connection of our physical being with all life on earth. Because the king is one with the land, as he lies wasting away in sickness, so the land and all in it sicken as well. All that is needed for the healing is for one person to say, "What ails thee?" Through this act of spontaneous compassion, the wound – and thereby, the land – would be healed. Symbolic of the wounded parts of society or the individual psyche, the Wounded King's main characteristic is passivity, waiting to be healed by love, in this case represented by Percival. The Bloodline & the Underground Stream
Grail lore is a Mystery so great that even beginning to think or write about it sends the psyche diving into fathomless waters. The many versions conflict, adding characters, adventures and symbols to suit the storyteller's point of view. In Celtic legend, the goddess of Sovereignty gives three drinks from her chalice: the white drink of mothering, the red drink of love, and the dark drink of forgetfulness. (1)
Versions of the Grail story overlay a Christian interpretation on this great Mystery. The Grail becomes the cup Christ used at the last supper and/or the cup that caught his blood at the crucifixion. This is perhaps a later interpretation blended with older myths, where only the purest of souls may approach the Grail and be blessed with its virtues, as is the idea that Mary Magdalene herself was the Grail, the vessel that contained the blood of spiritual rebirth. In the Christian grail-seeking stories, it is typically only saints who have access to the Grail, "leaving nature, man, history, and all womankind except baptized nuns, to the Devil." (2)
The stories of the Grail offer us many characters from whom we can derive archetypal imagery for our own inner quest. My explorations began with familiar Arthurian symbols and myth, myths that branch off into realms of diverse wonder. In wandering these realms, I found my own interpretation, my own watery view of the Mystery. I offer it to you now, as a mere dipping of the fingers into the great ocean that is the Grail.
Our telling of the tale begins with Percival, the first of the characters with whom we will identify on our quest for the Grail mystery. Unlike most other characters of Arthurian or Celtic lore who have definite male or female traits, Percival is androgynous, merely symbolic of anyone who undertakes a life-changing quest. This seems almost intentional on the part of the various tellers of these tales, as if we are meant to picture ourselves as this character, whether male or female. Percival is like the Fool in the Tarot deck – the one who instigates the journey to spiritual wholeness.
A simple soul, seeking life's lessons, he rides with the reins slack on his horse's neck, letting nature's spirit guide him. When the knights of Arthur's court ride forth to seek the Grail, which has appeared to them in a vision, Percival goes as well. Each knight enters the forest at a different place, a place where there is no path. One day, Percival comes to a castle in the midst of a desolate wasteland, "ruin and chaos. The ground is spent and sere, the crops no longer grow, nor do the waters flow, and a darkness has descended on the hearts of the people." (3)
Percival enters the castle, and is brought to a room where a king lies bleeding from an enchanted wound. In British/Celtic mythology, a ruler is connected through his or her very body to the body of the land. This is the quality of mystical Sovereignty, the connection of our physical being with all life on earth. Because the king is one with the land, as he lies wasting away in sickness, so the land and all in it sicken as well. All that is needed for the healing is for one person to say, "What ails thee?" Through this act of spontaneous compassion, the wound – and thereby, the land – would be healed. Symbolic of the wounded parts of society or the individual psyche, the Wounded King's main characteristic is passivity, waiting to be healed by love, in this case represented by Percival.
As often in the case with magic, the one who is to break the enchantment does not know it is his task, but must come upon it through the spontaneous act of a loving heart. Percival, who lets the forces of nature be his guide, is such a natural healer and magician. But because of his training in the rules of society, which tell him it is not "knightly" to ask personal questions, he stifles the impulse that fills him with pity and love. The question that comes to his heart cannot come to his lips. And so his quest fails. It is five years of searching and challenge before Percival has gained enough wisdom to judge for himself what is knightly – to ask the question, to heal the wound, to restore the Wasteland to bloom. It is then that he discovers that the Wounded King is also the Guardian of the Grail. Percival becomes the new Guardian, able to offer its blessings to other seekers.
So what does it all mean? What is the Grail, and why would we seek it? I see the seeking of the Grail and the achievement of the Grail as two separate symbols. The Arthurian quest to find the Grail begins with a vision of a veiled chalice floating above a company of friends. It comes at a time when those gathered have expressed desire for an "adventure" – in other words, asked for personal growth experiences.
Each sees the chalice differently, each is given food and drink that he or she loves best, and the hall is filled with music and flowery perfume. Their hearts overflow with a feeling of unity and love for each other and all creation. The Grail in this vision is the symbol of the Divine Feminine, who nourishes each of us in the way we love best, "an inexhaustible vessel of the tides of life," (4) blessing us with visions of beauty and love. Gwenhwyfar (Guinevere) in The Mists of Avalon, perceived it thus:
Through the sweet scents and joy, the angel was before her and the cup at her lips. Shaking, she drank, lowering her eyes, but then she felt a touch on her head and looked up, and she saw that it was not an angel but a woman veiled in blue, with great sad eyes. There was no sound, but the woman said to her, "Before Christ ever was, I am, and it was I who made you as you are. Therefore, my beloved daughter, forget all shame and be joyful, because you too are of the same nature as myself." (5)
When given a taste of joy, it is natural to seek more of the same. The knights, who symbolize that part of us that seeks out spiritual experience, set forth to find the Grail, unveil it, and look within for the source of their joy. They are, in a very literal sense, following their bliss.
The seekers leave in a group but soon go their individual ways, as each person�s path to bliss is unique. Indeed, those knights who took a path that others had followed were soon lost or overthrown. As each received different nourishment from the Grail vision, so the quest for the ultimate spiritual fulfillment must be unique. "Better is one's own dharma, imperfectly performed, than the dharma of another, performed to perfection." (6)
Each knight had his own set of trials along the way, as each was brought face to face with the particular challenges that would make him whole. For Lancelot, the greatest of Arthur's knights, the challenges lay in forgiving himself his own failings, as time and time again he was cast away from attaining the Grail, time and again he was humbled and abandoned. In accepting the blessing of these defeats, he attained an inner peace that served him far more than the achievement of the Grail itself would have done. He tells Arthur and Guinevere of his failure, saying, "I knelt down ... and I thanked God for the adventure." (7)
Each of us, in our search for the wellspring of joy that brought us first to spiritual awakening, is following this knightly quest. The challenges are what take us to the next level, and may be looked on as tests of our valor and our commitment to the path. So, in this light, the seeking of the Grail is the important thing, rather than the achievement of it. By acknowledging that and giving thanks even for our defeats – as Lancelot did – we live with our blissful vision before us. "A thousand obstacles intervene to halt us on the Way, or to lead us into by-paths, often to blind us to the seeing of the Castle of the Grail before our eyes. We are ourselves enchanted, lost in the thicket of our own bewilderment. But the Grail is ever there." (8)
The quest for the Grail is the quest for the awakened and aware spiritual consciousness. If the myth of seeking the Grail is the story of facing challenges as you follow your bliss, the myth of the attainment of the Grail has a different significance. We have successfully undertaken the first few steps of our perilous journey, learned enough about ourselves to go deeper within. Now we enter the Wasteland. Now we come to the source of our life challenges. We are now face to face with the Wounded King – the Wounded Self. Now is the time to take on Percival's task, with its mysterious question, "What ails thee?" Like Percival, we may find it hard to look at our Wounded Self honestly enough to ask this question. From my own journal:
What would keep Percival silent? The natural urge to open the heart and care about another – why does he suppress it? What were the trials he had to endure before he could have another chance? What are my own trials? Have I closed down my natural impulse to love? If I can't see what the wound is in my own heart, I can never win the Grail, can never offer it to others. What ails me?
The first step is to have the courage to look at the Wounded King/Self. This is also the Grail Guardian, the one who holds the waters of compassion and healing, which the seeker must release if the Wasteland is to be restored. For most of us, there comes a time when we are in the Wasteland of the spirit. Whether because of an ancient wound or a new one, our land no longer blooms, and sorrow abounds. There are many myths that deal with the causing of a wound. With the Grail, we have a myth that deals with the courage to look at the wound and not be concerned with its cause, only with what is happening in the present moment.
Remember, the question is not, "What happened to you?" or "Who did this to you?" The question – "What ails thee?" – is more profound, more frightening. To look at what is ailing us right now, without shame and with compassion, is a courageous task indeed. For it is then that we begin to look forward with self-responsibility, rather than backward with blame, and are thus able to help others come to that place of compassion toward their own wounds. We are, in fact, learning to become Grail Guardians.
The Percival version of the Grail myth is primarily a story of a failed opportunity to bless. If we lack the courage to look at our wounds and see the desolation around us, our quest for spiritual fulfillment will fail. When we can look at the Wounded Self and ask the questions that begin to heal us, we are blessed with the vision of the unveiled Grail, the deep love of the sacred that nourishes the soul. It is the lessons of our wounds that make us strong. "No one whose beauty is from birth ever equaled that of the Grail Guardian coming out of his sickness." (9)
We generally have the compassion to look at the ills of others and to help them if we can. It is asking the question of ourselves that is hard, and that, I think, is the meaning of this myth. There is a fear that comes over us, like the deeply ingrained "thou shalt not" that kept Percival from asking his instinctive question at first. We instinctively know that we have to look at our pain – indeed, we must touch it, embrace it – in order to heal it, but it is far easier to look away, to refuse the adventure.
Why would we not look within? Again, we look to the myths for guidance. Different versions give us different reasons for Percival's failure. The seeker simply fell asleep before he could ask – mundane exhaustion may keep us from taking on the kind of honest inner searching that could heal us. The seeker fell into a trance – perhaps we are numbing ourselves with drugs or distractions rather than facing our wounds. The seeker was placed in a trance by the Wounded King himself – perhaps we are not in a good place to confront the causes of our inner Wasteland; perhaps we need to gain more wisdom through other trials first. "It is death to touch the holy things unprepared..." (10)
In most versions, when the seeker fails in the quest, there is no blame laid on him. Indeed, the seeker usually does not even know there was a test happening at all, or that the Grail was within reach. So we come unknowing to places in our lives where we have a chance for breakthrough. Perhaps entering the soul's Wasteland can be seen as a sign that we are near the Grail. Perhaps our grief and pain can only carry us so far, back to pain's home, and then we must surrender to the path of bliss. When Percival has achieved his task, he is told, "In youth you courted Sorrow... Joy will now take you from her." (11)
The theme of sorrow runs all through the Grail myths, "the persistent recurrence in these stories of a weeping maiden or maidens, the cause of whose grief is never made clear." (12) This is not a rollicking adventure of knights and their valiant deeds. Each obstacle is a blow to the ego, the heart or the soul. Each task undertaken in the search for spiritual wholeness will challenge to the very depth of our beings.
At the beginning of their bliss-quest, the knights entered the forest at its most mysterious point, because what was known well to them was obviously not the source of spiritual breakthrough. On our own quest for healing, we must also look where we haven't explored before. We are each the Wounded King. We must have the courage to expose our wounds that they may be cleansed and healed. And we are each Percival. We must follow through on the instinctive generosity of a loving heart that cares for others, and care for ourselves with the same gentle compassion. We must dwell in the castle of the Wounded Self, the place where compassion joins courage, and the waters of the Grail are bestowed.
The quest for the Grail is not a quest to win love, but a quest to give love. This is the message of all cups – to give. A cup may have water poured into it, but only holds it until it may again be bestowed. Each of us guards the Grail; as we heal our Wounded Selves with the waters of compassion, we add to the healing of the Wasteland that threatens all creation. Seek the Grail within you, and carry its waters to those in need of its blessing. The Wasteland will be transformed by your courage and your love.
1 Caitlin & John Matthews, Hallowquest
2 Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology
3 Jean Houston, The Hero and the Goddess
4 Campbell
5 Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon
6 The Bhagavad Gita
7 T.H. White, The Once and Future King
8 Matthews
9 Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival
10 Bradley
11 von Eschenbach
12 Weston
Other sources: Jean Markale, Women of the Celts
Baring and Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess
John Matthews, Gawain: Knight of the Goddess
Funk & Wagnall’s Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend
Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
Paul Levy, Wounded Healer
The Universal Wound
An encounter with something greater than our limited ego, what Jung calls the Self, is always a wounding experience for the ego. The Self is the center of the total personality, including the conscious and the unconscious. Our wound, our personal struggle is THE archetypal wound, embodied in the sick King. Our wound or dysfunction is simultaneously personal and universal. Our wound introduces and connects us with the transpersonal dimension of our being, whose realization, amazingly enough, initiates the transformation and potential healing of our wound.
Simultaneously containing both the pathology and its own medicine, our wound is a higher-dimensional event which has manifested in the flat-land of our three-dimensional life. Our wound is not separate from the psyche experiencing it. The way we interpret our wound, the meaning we place on it, and the story we tell ourselves about it has an actual effect on how our wound, ourselves, and the world manifests in each and every moment.
Such wounding is initiatory, catalyzing a healing process requiring our active engagement. The ancestors represent our indwelling potentiality, which may or may not be expressed. No matter how many others may share your particular ancestors, they are yours, your ancestral grandparents. As psychophysical "descendants" we find ourselves challenged to consciously descend into the depths of personal and global history, into a cosmic spiritual struggle, into the mythic dimension, and into the primordial depths of our being back to our very roots in pre-history. The Grail is often associated with a Spear. You are the tip of that sacred spear, reaching all the way back to the beginning.
What has penetrated us initiates a deeper dynamic of psychic re-organization and potential transformation. Freedom from the dichotomy of wounded / not-woundedness requires transcendence. It heals our dissociation from self, others and world. Recollecting the ancestors and "re-membering" is an intrinsic part of this process for grail bearers which leads to stepping into our deeper identities as "god-kings," or realizing the Self.
Karl Kerenyi describes the wounded healer as a psychological capacity "to be at home in the darkness of suffering and there to find germs of light and recovery with which, as though by enchantment, to bring forth Asklepius, the sunlike healer." Consciously facing our experience and going deeper into our wound and pain we receive its blessing. We embrace the mysteriously painful place in ourselves where the wound is leading us, allowing us to be healed. Our wounding is a "numinous" event that is transpersonal and archetypal. Our wound is the Way by which the divine makes contact with us, beyond our own personal contrivance.
Our transpersonal wound functions as a "portal", teaching us something about ourselves that effects a holistic re-patterning. Going through our wound means realizing we will never again be the same once we emerge from this initiatory process. All forms are dissolved in the underground stream, the rushing stream of consciousness, in a baptism or healing immersion in the vast ocean of deep consciousness. We ride the dragon on the backs of our ancestors to the realm of the Unborn, returning to the pure creative energy of the cosmic womb for the mystery of alchemical rebirth.
The primary nature of consciousness is revealed. Pure consciousness, the fundamental luminosity, is the ground state of unborn form. The generic purpose of ego death is to liberate our embodied being, precipitating communion with and re-patterning by the Whole. When all forms finally dissolve into unconditioned consciousness, the ground state of the natural mind is revealed as the mystic Void, the womb of creation. http://ionamiller.weebly.com/universal-solvent.html
Going through our wound is a genuine (ego) death experience, as our old self "dies" in the process, while a new, more expansive and empowered human potential is born. Thus, the Grail is not only about birth, it is about catalyzing transformational rebirth into a nonlinear, nonlocal expanded sense of self beyond mere ego inflation. Self-actualization or self-realization implies the grounding of the spiritual fruits of inner exploration. This is gnosis.
Marie-Louise Von Franz, said "the wounded healer IS the archetype of the Self (our wholeness, the God within) and is at the bottom of all genuine healing procedures," resulting in a more open-ended and expansive sense of who we think we are, and who we imagine others are in relation to us. The wound is not only a personal experience, but a doorway, a hyper-dimensional portal into the transpersonal / archetypal realm, which is a higher order (in terms of freedom) of our being.
We recognize our individual suffering is a personalized reflection or instantiation of the collective suffering that pervades the entire field of consciousness. Our personal wound is, in condensed and crystallized form, the footprint and signature of the collective wound in which we all share and participate. It is liberating and healing to step out of pathologizing ourselves and re-contextualize our personal conflicts, problems and wounds as part of a wider transpersonal pattern enfolded throughout the global field of human experience.
Our particularized consciousness becomes panoramic. Formerly unconscious resonant energies are stimulated within us. There is a synchronistic co-respondence, mirroring and fundamental inseparability between what is going on within our psyche and what is happening in the outer world. We enter the mythic/archetypal dimension by fully incarnating, in a full-bodied way, our personal process in our life. And for grail bearers, the ancestors are an intrinsic part of that transpersonal process. Kinship felt-sense is deeply connective and can even function like a virtual time machine for our expanded awareness.
The personal process is the doorway which introduces us to the deeper archetypal dimension of our being. Our "gateway" ancestors help us step into experiencing the myth-like, time-less dimension of our situation. The wound is healed in a dimension of our being in which the past, our wound, the world and ourselves do not literally, concretely, and objectively exist in and over time in the way we had previously imagined. We recognize that our wound is the archetypal wound. Healing allows life to flow in new, creative patterns.
We see, like Jung did, that our "suffering is archetypal and collective. It is a sign that we no longer suffer from ourselves, but rather from the spirit of the age." What is being reborn in the bloodline is the new Spirit of the Age. To the extent we embody and creatively express the spirit of the age from which we are suffering with consciousness, we become the "medium" through which the spirit of the age reveals itself to us, to potentially transform itself, ourselves, and the world around us.
Our wound becomes an expression of our wholeness, Cosmic Sovereignty, reminding us precisely who we are. The Self and our embodiment are One. It means actively living within a mythic mindfield that extends into the mists preceding the birth of civilization as we know it. We paradoxically step into being a genuinely autonomous, independent being, at the same time realizing our interconnectedness, interdependence, unity and ultimate inseparability from the world and each other. The energetic expression of this realization is compassion.
We embody the Grail.
Robert Johnson concludes, "We have to finish it. We have to carry it on. Even though we don't talk about grails and castles and enchanted maidens, still it is our myth to be completed in our lives. The myth has taken us to exactly the point where modern people are now. Collectively speaking we are stuck at the point where the French poem ends. So if you want a quest, if you want something meaningful for your life, pick up the grail myth where it now lies in you."
In Hymn to an Unknown God, Sam Keen says, "The voice that calls us forth and inspires us to undertake the journey is always specific. So long as we respond to the needs of our world by offering both our compassion and our skill, we will not fall into despair at the overwhelming quantity of need. The spiritual life is based on a refusal to despair that arises from concerned action and humble agnosticism. We don't know enough to despair. Despair is hidden arrogance -- I have seen the future, and it doesn't work. Hope is rooted in trust in the Unknown God. We do not know the final destiny of the individual soul or the commonwealth of beings; therefore we work, wait, and hope. and it is enough."
Campbell echoed this sentiment: "The adventure of the Grail -- the, quest within for those creative values by which the Waste Land is redeemed -- has become today for each the unavoidable task." Drinking from the Grail
Our own ancestors are the fractal representations of holographic archetypes -- fractal nonlinear resonance. Because of their collective role, royals are cast in virtually pure archetypal roles in history, with nobles playing lesser exemplars, reflecting on the common population as a whole. Our relationship to the Underground Stream is that of the particle to the field. The field is sole governing agency of the particle. The Grail governs the process not only of royal descent, but of psi expression and other grail traits. The collective aspects of the Grail function like a meta-consciousness in awakened grail bearers.
When the Grail quest grabs you, it becomes obsessive. The Grail is our personal bloodline alive within us passed down in each generation. Some societies retain and can name their ancestors as a means of keeping their spirits alive. In today's world an explosion in the hobbies of genealogy and genetic genealogy serves the same function. The more people participating in open-source genealogy, the sooner the archetypal Tree of Life will be revealed as the holographic image of our collective unconscious. Many forces drive such a search for the Self in the Many.
The DISTAFF LINE is an old Craft term, the Mother's Line, as opposed to the Father's Line (called the Spear Line). The Matrilineal bloodline contains the spiritual, true essence of a person's "self", by which the spirits of the departed leave the Unseen world and re-enter into their families on earth. The Old Dame, as the Mother of Creation and the Supreme Being, and the Spinner of Fate, holds the "Distaff" by which she Spins the threads of creation. Since all ‘lines’ or threads begin with her and return to her, the Mother's Line is called the "Distaff Line". Mitochondrial DNA remains strong, persisting in the cells of both sexes longer than nuclear DNA.
The pathology of the modern self is alienation and fragmentation. One means of seeking wholeness is through the modern pursuit of genetic genealogy. Re-collection of one's lost ancestors creates a tremendous influx of energy that produces an inflation in the psyche, now overflowing with ancestors recently reawakened to consciousness. The totality of this ancestral brood is not different from Jung's notion of the Self, the totality of the collective unconscious.
In the Grail legends, Parcival is the archetypal seeker, the most well-meaning yet naive figure. He follows his own haphazard yet synchronistic path.
One day, Percival comes to a castle in the midst of a desolate wasteland, "ruin and chaos. The ground is spent and sere, the crops no longer grow, nor do the waters flow, and a darkness has descended on the hearts of the people." Percival enters the castle, and is brought to a room where a king lies bleeding from an enchanted wound. In British/Celtic mythology, a ruler is connected through his or her very body to the body of the land.
This is the quality of mystical Sovereignty, the connection of our physical being with all life on earth. Because the king is one with the land, as he lies wasting away in sickness, so the land and all in it sicken as well. All that is needed for the healing is for one person to say, "What ails thee?" Through this act of spontaneous compassion, the wound – and thereby, the land – would be healed. Symbolic of the wounded parts of society or the individual psyche, the Wounded King's main characteristic is passivity, waiting to be healed by love, in this case represented by Percival. The Bloodline & the Underground Stream
Grail lore is a Mystery so great that even beginning to think or write about it sends the psyche diving into fathomless waters. The many versions conflict, adding characters, adventures and symbols to suit the storyteller's point of view. In Celtic legend, the goddess of Sovereignty gives three drinks from her chalice: the white drink of mothering, the red drink of love, and the dark drink of forgetfulness. (1)
Versions of the Grail story overlay a Christian interpretation on this great Mystery. The Grail becomes the cup Christ used at the last supper and/or the cup that caught his blood at the crucifixion. This is perhaps a later interpretation blended with older myths, where only the purest of souls may approach the Grail and be blessed with its virtues, as is the idea that Mary Magdalene herself was the Grail, the vessel that contained the blood of spiritual rebirth. In the Christian grail-seeking stories, it is typically only saints who have access to the Grail, "leaving nature, man, history, and all womankind except baptized nuns, to the Devil." (2)
The stories of the Grail offer us many characters from whom we can derive archetypal imagery for our own inner quest. My explorations began with familiar Arthurian symbols and myth, myths that branch off into realms of diverse wonder. In wandering these realms, I found my own interpretation, my own watery view of the Mystery. I offer it to you now, as a mere dipping of the fingers into the great ocean that is the Grail.
Our telling of the tale begins with Percival, the first of the characters with whom we will identify on our quest for the Grail mystery. Unlike most other characters of Arthurian or Celtic lore who have definite male or female traits, Percival is androgynous, merely symbolic of anyone who undertakes a life-changing quest. This seems almost intentional on the part of the various tellers of these tales, as if we are meant to picture ourselves as this character, whether male or female. Percival is like the Fool in the Tarot deck – the one who instigates the journey to spiritual wholeness.
A simple soul, seeking life's lessons, he rides with the reins slack on his horse's neck, letting nature's spirit guide him. When the knights of Arthur's court ride forth to seek the Grail, which has appeared to them in a vision, Percival goes as well. Each knight enters the forest at a different place, a place where there is no path. One day, Percival comes to a castle in the midst of a desolate wasteland, "ruin and chaos. The ground is spent and sere, the crops no longer grow, nor do the waters flow, and a darkness has descended on the hearts of the people." (3)
Percival enters the castle, and is brought to a room where a king lies bleeding from an enchanted wound. In British/Celtic mythology, a ruler is connected through his or her very body to the body of the land. This is the quality of mystical Sovereignty, the connection of our physical being with all life on earth. Because the king is one with the land, as he lies wasting away in sickness, so the land and all in it sicken as well. All that is needed for the healing is for one person to say, "What ails thee?" Through this act of spontaneous compassion, the wound – and thereby, the land – would be healed. Symbolic of the wounded parts of society or the individual psyche, the Wounded King's main characteristic is passivity, waiting to be healed by love, in this case represented by Percival.
As often in the case with magic, the one who is to break the enchantment does not know it is his task, but must come upon it through the spontaneous act of a loving heart. Percival, who lets the forces of nature be his guide, is such a natural healer and magician. But because of his training in the rules of society, which tell him it is not "knightly" to ask personal questions, he stifles the impulse that fills him with pity and love. The question that comes to his heart cannot come to his lips. And so his quest fails. It is five years of searching and challenge before Percival has gained enough wisdom to judge for himself what is knightly – to ask the question, to heal the wound, to restore the Wasteland to bloom. It is then that he discovers that the Wounded King is also the Guardian of the Grail. Percival becomes the new Guardian, able to offer its blessings to other seekers.
So what does it all mean? What is the Grail, and why would we seek it? I see the seeking of the Grail and the achievement of the Grail as two separate symbols. The Arthurian quest to find the Grail begins with a vision of a veiled chalice floating above a company of friends. It comes at a time when those gathered have expressed desire for an "adventure" – in other words, asked for personal growth experiences.
Each sees the chalice differently, each is given food and drink that he or she loves best, and the hall is filled with music and flowery perfume. Their hearts overflow with a feeling of unity and love for each other and all creation. The Grail in this vision is the symbol of the Divine Feminine, who nourishes each of us in the way we love best, "an inexhaustible vessel of the tides of life," (4) blessing us with visions of beauty and love. Gwenhwyfar (Guinevere) in The Mists of Avalon, perceived it thus:
Through the sweet scents and joy, the angel was before her and the cup at her lips. Shaking, she drank, lowering her eyes, but then she felt a touch on her head and looked up, and she saw that it was not an angel but a woman veiled in blue, with great sad eyes. There was no sound, but the woman said to her, "Before Christ ever was, I am, and it was I who made you as you are. Therefore, my beloved daughter, forget all shame and be joyful, because you too are of the same nature as myself." (5)
When given a taste of joy, it is natural to seek more of the same. The knights, who symbolize that part of us that seeks out spiritual experience, set forth to find the Grail, unveil it, and look within for the source of their joy. They are, in a very literal sense, following their bliss.
The seekers leave in a group but soon go their individual ways, as each person�s path to bliss is unique. Indeed, those knights who took a path that others had followed were soon lost or overthrown. As each received different nourishment from the Grail vision, so the quest for the ultimate spiritual fulfillment must be unique. "Better is one's own dharma, imperfectly performed, than the dharma of another, performed to perfection." (6)
Each knight had his own set of trials along the way, as each was brought face to face with the particular challenges that would make him whole. For Lancelot, the greatest of Arthur's knights, the challenges lay in forgiving himself his own failings, as time and time again he was cast away from attaining the Grail, time and again he was humbled and abandoned. In accepting the blessing of these defeats, he attained an inner peace that served him far more than the achievement of the Grail itself would have done. He tells Arthur and Guinevere of his failure, saying, "I knelt down ... and I thanked God for the adventure." (7)
Each of us, in our search for the wellspring of joy that brought us first to spiritual awakening, is following this knightly quest. The challenges are what take us to the next level, and may be looked on as tests of our valor and our commitment to the path. So, in this light, the seeking of the Grail is the important thing, rather than the achievement of it. By acknowledging that and giving thanks even for our defeats – as Lancelot did – we live with our blissful vision before us. "A thousand obstacles intervene to halt us on the Way, or to lead us into by-paths, often to blind us to the seeing of the Castle of the Grail before our eyes. We are ourselves enchanted, lost in the thicket of our own bewilderment. But the Grail is ever there." (8)
The quest for the Grail is the quest for the awakened and aware spiritual consciousness. If the myth of seeking the Grail is the story of facing challenges as you follow your bliss, the myth of the attainment of the Grail has a different significance. We have successfully undertaken the first few steps of our perilous journey, learned enough about ourselves to go deeper within. Now we enter the Wasteland. Now we come to the source of our life challenges. We are now face to face with the Wounded King – the Wounded Self. Now is the time to take on Percival's task, with its mysterious question, "What ails thee?" Like Percival, we may find it hard to look at our Wounded Self honestly enough to ask this question. From my own journal:
What would keep Percival silent? The natural urge to open the heart and care about another – why does he suppress it? What were the trials he had to endure before he could have another chance? What are my own trials? Have I closed down my natural impulse to love? If I can't see what the wound is in my own heart, I can never win the Grail, can never offer it to others. What ails me?
The first step is to have the courage to look at the Wounded King/Self. This is also the Grail Guardian, the one who holds the waters of compassion and healing, which the seeker must release if the Wasteland is to be restored. For most of us, there comes a time when we are in the Wasteland of the spirit. Whether because of an ancient wound or a new one, our land no longer blooms, and sorrow abounds. There are many myths that deal with the causing of a wound. With the Grail, we have a myth that deals with the courage to look at the wound and not be concerned with its cause, only with what is happening in the present moment.
Remember, the question is not, "What happened to you?" or "Who did this to you?" The question – "What ails thee?" – is more profound, more frightening. To look at what is ailing us right now, without shame and with compassion, is a courageous task indeed. For it is then that we begin to look forward with self-responsibility, rather than backward with blame, and are thus able to help others come to that place of compassion toward their own wounds. We are, in fact, learning to become Grail Guardians.
The Percival version of the Grail myth is primarily a story of a failed opportunity to bless. If we lack the courage to look at our wounds and see the desolation around us, our quest for spiritual fulfillment will fail. When we can look at the Wounded Self and ask the questions that begin to heal us, we are blessed with the vision of the unveiled Grail, the deep love of the sacred that nourishes the soul. It is the lessons of our wounds that make us strong. "No one whose beauty is from birth ever equaled that of the Grail Guardian coming out of his sickness." (9)
We generally have the compassion to look at the ills of others and to help them if we can. It is asking the question of ourselves that is hard, and that, I think, is the meaning of this myth. There is a fear that comes over us, like the deeply ingrained "thou shalt not" that kept Percival from asking his instinctive question at first. We instinctively know that we have to look at our pain – indeed, we must touch it, embrace it – in order to heal it, but it is far easier to look away, to refuse the adventure.
Why would we not look within? Again, we look to the myths for guidance. Different versions give us different reasons for Percival's failure. The seeker simply fell asleep before he could ask – mundane exhaustion may keep us from taking on the kind of honest inner searching that could heal us. The seeker fell into a trance – perhaps we are numbing ourselves with drugs or distractions rather than facing our wounds. The seeker was placed in a trance by the Wounded King himself – perhaps we are not in a good place to confront the causes of our inner Wasteland; perhaps we need to gain more wisdom through other trials first. "It is death to touch the holy things unprepared..." (10)
In most versions, when the seeker fails in the quest, there is no blame laid on him. Indeed, the seeker usually does not even know there was a test happening at all, or that the Grail was within reach. So we come unknowing to places in our lives where we have a chance for breakthrough. Perhaps entering the soul's Wasteland can be seen as a sign that we are near the Grail. Perhaps our grief and pain can only carry us so far, back to pain's home, and then we must surrender to the path of bliss. When Percival has achieved his task, he is told, "In youth you courted Sorrow... Joy will now take you from her." (11)
The theme of sorrow runs all through the Grail myths, "the persistent recurrence in these stories of a weeping maiden or maidens, the cause of whose grief is never made clear." (12) This is not a rollicking adventure of knights and their valiant deeds. Each obstacle is a blow to the ego, the heart or the soul. Each task undertaken in the search for spiritual wholeness will challenge to the very depth of our beings.
At the beginning of their bliss-quest, the knights entered the forest at its most mysterious point, because what was known well to them was obviously not the source of spiritual breakthrough. On our own quest for healing, we must also look where we haven't explored before. We are each the Wounded King. We must have the courage to expose our wounds that they may be cleansed and healed. And we are each Percival. We must follow through on the instinctive generosity of a loving heart that cares for others, and care for ourselves with the same gentle compassion. We must dwell in the castle of the Wounded Self, the place where compassion joins courage, and the waters of the Grail are bestowed.
The quest for the Grail is not a quest to win love, but a quest to give love. This is the message of all cups – to give. A cup may have water poured into it, but only holds it until it may again be bestowed. Each of us guards the Grail; as we heal our Wounded Selves with the waters of compassion, we add to the healing of the Wasteland that threatens all creation. Seek the Grail within you, and carry its waters to those in need of its blessing. The Wasteland will be transformed by your courage and your love.
1 Caitlin & John Matthews, Hallowquest
2 Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology
3 Jean Houston, The Hero and the Goddess
4 Campbell
5 Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon
6 The Bhagavad Gita
7 T.H. White, The Once and Future King
8 Matthews
9 Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival
10 Bradley
11 von Eschenbach
12 Weston
Other sources: Jean Markale, Women of the Celts
Baring and Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess
John Matthews, Gawain: Knight of the Goddess
Funk & Wagnall’s Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend
Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
Paul Levy, Wounded Healer
Polygenic pathways
Polygenic inheritance is the inheritance of quantitative traits influenced by multiple genes. Alleles refer to different versions of the same gene. So a single gene can have multiple alleles. Alleles are different versions or forms of ONE gene. A polygenic trait refers to any inheritable trait that is controlled by multiple genes, and each of these genes can have multiple alleles. For example, eye color in humans is a polygenic trait. There are at least three different genes, each with multiple alleles, that determine eye color in humans. Polygenic traits don't follow patterns of mendelian inheritance.
So in summation the difference is multiple alleles refers to different versions of one gene and polygenic traits refers to a single trait which is controlled by multiple genes (each with multiple alleles). Polygenic traits are the result of the interaction of several genes. Multiple alleles are different forms of the same gene...that is the sequence of the bases is slightly different in the genes located on the same place of the chromosome. In polygenesis there is more than one gene involved and their may be multiple alleles of the multiple genes...which is far more complex...involving potentially a number chromosomes.
Complex expression patterns of alleles do not contradict the ideas and conclusions of Mendel, rather they reveal that genes and their products can interact and/or be expressed in complex ways. In all cases, these genes are still transmitted from generation to generation on chromosomes that segregate independently during meiosis. The differences lie in how the gene product behaves within the cell, and the number of such products that contribute to a given character trait. Some alleles can show incomplete dominance.
The heredity of complex characters are determined by a large number of genes, each one usually having a relatively small effect. A single characteristic can be controlled by two or more genes. Each allele of a polygenic character often contributes only a small amount to the over all phenotype. This makes studying the individual alleles difficult. In addition environmental effects smooth out the genotypic variation to give continuous distribution curves.
Polygenic inheritance refers to inheritance of a phenotypic characteristic (trait) that is attributable to two or more genes and can be measured quantitatively.
The ritual healing theory is a hypotheses for genetics researchers. Geneticists seek to define phenotypes, observable characteristics resulting from the interaction of the environment and collections of genes (genotypes). If a phenotype is validly defined, researchers can locate families with a high frequency of the characteristic. They then compare DNA from family members having the phenotype to members who lack it; through replication among different ethnic groups, this method allows identification of alleles associated with the phenotype. Once alleles are identified, researchers can uncover the mechanisms by which these alleles affect phenotypes, a process termed reverse phenotyping. This results in more precise definitions of each phenotype (Schulze & McMahon 2004).
The ritual healing theory predicts that alleles governing dissociation, absorption, hypnotizability, and other variables
have been selected by shamanic healing. These alleles could be identified using existing genetics paradigms. Cross-cultural studies can reveal the degree that present psychological scales coincide with valid phenotypes.
Scales hypothesized to be associated with shamanism include:
Tellegen Absorption Scale (Tellegen & Atkinson 1974),
Transliminality Scale (Lange, Thalbourne, Houran, & Storm 2000).
Dissociative Experience Scale (Bernstein & Putnam 1986),
Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility, Form A (Shor & Orne 1962)
and other hypnosis scales, standardized scales measuring childhood difficulty and trauma, scales measuring mental health, and scales measuring incidence of schizotypal and anomalous experience. The theory argues that childhood stress and trauma turn on genes associated with these variables, causing them to be correlated with each other. Data from community surveys should reveal correlational clusters of variables, providing clues regarding underlying genotypal architecture. Such studies would facilitate definitions of phenotypes, contributing to identification of susceptibility alleles. Reverse phenotyping would reveal the elements within hypothesized scales that pertain to valid phenotypes. Resulting findings could allow clinicians to design therapy strategies matching biological propensities.
The ritual healing theory allows testable hypotheses regarding universal features within anomalous experience, correlations between variables related to shamanism, and the benefits of shamanic hypnotic and placebo processes.
An anthropological approach
To entertain the possibility that visions can involve communication from the ‘grandfathers’ [spirit messengers], we have to assume that the ‘grandfathers’ do, indeed, exist. When confronted with the difficulties such an assumption presents we can use the Jungian explanation that the ‘grandfathers’ and ‘grandmothers’ exist in our own collective unconscious, like the archetypes. Therefore a message from the ‘grandfathers’ is not a supernatural event but a prompting from a deeper level of intuitive understanding. In other words, a vision is a way of bringing to consciousness something that is already known unconsciously.
An interpretation such as this gives us a toehold in difficult conceptual terrain. But it does not really solve the problem of whether dreams and visions can serve as communication devices. It is just as difficult to verify that the source of a ‘message’ in a dream or vision is the collective unconscious as it is to verify that ‘grandfathers’ (conceived of as spiritual entities with a separate ontological existence) communicate with human beings. Despite the difficulty of dealing scientifically with communications from ‘entities’ such as ‘grandfathers’ and ‘grandmothers,’ it should be possible, in principle, to obtain evidence relating to the possibility of communications from other people in dreams and visions.
http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/jse_17_1_richards.pdf
Problems also occur with the biological explanation that inbreeding causes genetic damage. The idea that natural selection favors societies that taboo incest is not as likely as it may seem. First, mother-son sexual relations are the only ones universally prohibited; other relatives are not prohibited sexual choices, and some that we regard as too close are actually encouraged or required in some societies. Second, recent biological research shows that firstcousin marriage does not significantly increase the risk of birth defects. I do not know why it took biologists so long to figure that out, because first-cousin marriage has been practiced for generations in some small societies with no apparent biological harm. After all, for inbreeding to cause genetic damage, harmful genes have to be present in the first place. It is at least possible that inbreeding in small societies, before the onset of modern medicine, eliminated any lethal genes rapidly, therefore making marriage with close relatives less damaging.
Polygenic inheritance is the inheritance of quantitative traits influenced by multiple genes. Alleles refer to different versions of the same gene. So a single gene can have multiple alleles. Alleles are different versions or forms of ONE gene. A polygenic trait refers to any inheritable trait that is controlled by multiple genes, and each of these genes can have multiple alleles. For example, eye color in humans is a polygenic trait. There are at least three different genes, each with multiple alleles, that determine eye color in humans. Polygenic traits don't follow patterns of mendelian inheritance.
So in summation the difference is multiple alleles refers to different versions of one gene and polygenic traits refers to a single trait which is controlled by multiple genes (each with multiple alleles). Polygenic traits are the result of the interaction of several genes. Multiple alleles are different forms of the same gene...that is the sequence of the bases is slightly different in the genes located on the same place of the chromosome. In polygenesis there is more than one gene involved and their may be multiple alleles of the multiple genes...which is far more complex...involving potentially a number chromosomes.
Complex expression patterns of alleles do not contradict the ideas and conclusions of Mendel, rather they reveal that genes and their products can interact and/or be expressed in complex ways. In all cases, these genes are still transmitted from generation to generation on chromosomes that segregate independently during meiosis. The differences lie in how the gene product behaves within the cell, and the number of such products that contribute to a given character trait. Some alleles can show incomplete dominance.
The heredity of complex characters are determined by a large number of genes, each one usually having a relatively small effect. A single characteristic can be controlled by two or more genes. Each allele of a polygenic character often contributes only a small amount to the over all phenotype. This makes studying the individual alleles difficult. In addition environmental effects smooth out the genotypic variation to give continuous distribution curves.
Polygenic inheritance refers to inheritance of a phenotypic characteristic (trait) that is attributable to two or more genes and can be measured quantitatively.
The ritual healing theory is a hypotheses for genetics researchers. Geneticists seek to define phenotypes, observable characteristics resulting from the interaction of the environment and collections of genes (genotypes). If a phenotype is validly defined, researchers can locate families with a high frequency of the characteristic. They then compare DNA from family members having the phenotype to members who lack it; through replication among different ethnic groups, this method allows identification of alleles associated with the phenotype. Once alleles are identified, researchers can uncover the mechanisms by which these alleles affect phenotypes, a process termed reverse phenotyping. This results in more precise definitions of each phenotype (Schulze & McMahon 2004).
The ritual healing theory predicts that alleles governing dissociation, absorption, hypnotizability, and other variables
have been selected by shamanic healing. These alleles could be identified using existing genetics paradigms. Cross-cultural studies can reveal the degree that present psychological scales coincide with valid phenotypes.
Scales hypothesized to be associated with shamanism include:
Tellegen Absorption Scale (Tellegen & Atkinson 1974),
Transliminality Scale (Lange, Thalbourne, Houran, & Storm 2000).
Dissociative Experience Scale (Bernstein & Putnam 1986),
Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility, Form A (Shor & Orne 1962)
and other hypnosis scales, standardized scales measuring childhood difficulty and trauma, scales measuring mental health, and scales measuring incidence of schizotypal and anomalous experience. The theory argues that childhood stress and trauma turn on genes associated with these variables, causing them to be correlated with each other. Data from community surveys should reveal correlational clusters of variables, providing clues regarding underlying genotypal architecture. Such studies would facilitate definitions of phenotypes, contributing to identification of susceptibility alleles. Reverse phenotyping would reveal the elements within hypothesized scales that pertain to valid phenotypes. Resulting findings could allow clinicians to design therapy strategies matching biological propensities.
The ritual healing theory allows testable hypotheses regarding universal features within anomalous experience, correlations between variables related to shamanism, and the benefits of shamanic hypnotic and placebo processes.
An anthropological approach
To entertain the possibility that visions can involve communication from the ‘grandfathers’ [spirit messengers], we have to assume that the ‘grandfathers’ do, indeed, exist. When confronted with the difficulties such an assumption presents we can use the Jungian explanation that the ‘grandfathers’ and ‘grandmothers’ exist in our own collective unconscious, like the archetypes. Therefore a message from the ‘grandfathers’ is not a supernatural event but a prompting from a deeper level of intuitive understanding. In other words, a vision is a way of bringing to consciousness something that is already known unconsciously.
An interpretation such as this gives us a toehold in difficult conceptual terrain. But it does not really solve the problem of whether dreams and visions can serve as communication devices. It is just as difficult to verify that the source of a ‘message’ in a dream or vision is the collective unconscious as it is to verify that ‘grandfathers’ (conceived of as spiritual entities with a separate ontological existence) communicate with human beings. Despite the difficulty of dealing scientifically with communications from ‘entities’ such as ‘grandfathers’ and ‘grandmothers,’ it should be possible, in principle, to obtain evidence relating to the possibility of communications from other people in dreams and visions.
http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/jse_17_1_richards.pdf
Problems also occur with the biological explanation that inbreeding causes genetic damage. The idea that natural selection favors societies that taboo incest is not as likely as it may seem. First, mother-son sexual relations are the only ones universally prohibited; other relatives are not prohibited sexual choices, and some that we regard as too close are actually encouraged or required in some societies. Second, recent biological research shows that firstcousin marriage does not significantly increase the risk of birth defects. I do not know why it took biologists so long to figure that out, because first-cousin marriage has been practiced for generations in some small societies with no apparent biological harm. After all, for inbreeding to cause genetic damage, harmful genes have to be present in the first place. It is at least possible that inbreeding in small societies, before the onset of modern medicine, eliminated any lethal genes rapidly, therefore making marriage with close relatives less damaging.
The Myth of Parsifal
Parsifal, a simple, poor, and naive boy, is dazzled by the sight of five knights. Wishing to join, he follows them to the court of King Arthur against the wishes of his mother. He is told he can be a knight if he slays the evil Red Knight. Parsifal kills him and then puts on his armor. But he soon learns that knighthood is arduous and is attained only after much valor and noble work. He must learn a great deal and be versed in knightly arts of battle, learn to live by certain social rules and rituals, and learn as well that it is childish to ask too many questions. He eventually becomes a good knight, defeating others and sending them to serve King Arthur. One day he enters the Grail Castle and meets the wounded Fisher King whose kingdom has become a Waste Land. "The cattle do not produce; the crops won't grow; knights are killed; children are orphaned; maidens weep; there is mounting
everywhere - all because the Fisher King is wounded" [Johnson 1989, 1]. Parsifal sits at a banquet and sees the Fisher King sitting before the Holy Grail. If Parsifal can ask the question, "whom does the Grail serve?" the king will be healed and the kingdom will again flourish. He does not ask and is expelled. He later slays many dragons and defeats many knights until finally, in his middle age, he again earns the right to re-enter the Grail Castle and ask the question. In some versions of the story, he does, the kingdom is rejuvenated, and he takes the place of the Grail King (or Fisher King) as guardian of the Grail.
The Grail symbolizes life, spirituality, youth, health, joy, purity, creativity, the unconscious, and generativity [Jung and von Franz 1970, 114]. It harmonizes the conflicting opposites of male-female, rationality and emotion, dark and light, good and evil, etc. [Jung and von Franz 1970, 194]. The conflict of opposites in Parsifal's psyche needed to be discovered for him to get back into the Grail Castle. He needs to expand his consciousness and travel, psychologically speaking, far beyond the naive fool, to find the Grail Castle and discover himself, to be conscious of and reconcile the opposites in his psyche.
The Fisher King, or the Grail King, represents a limited consciousness, one who is too rational and is incapable of solving the real problem his kingdom faces [Jung and von Franz 1970, 212]. The successor who will free him was prophesied to be a wholly innocent fool who would ask a specific question. "The myth is telling us that it is the naive part of a man that will heal him and cure his Fisher King wound. It suggests that if a man is to be cured he must find something in himself about the same age and about the same mentality as he was when he was wounded" [Johnson 1989, 11].
Although Parsifal must transcend his naivete to re-enter the Grail Castle, it will be his innocence and compassion that inspires him to ask the healing question. His long psychological journey is actually a journey to rediscover his youthful innocence, which he repressed when he failed to ask the question. The second time he enters the Grail Castle, he will know that he is part fool, but he will not be afraid to look foolish by asking questions.
Parsifal moves from a lower to a higher level of consciousness. He slowly becomes more aware of the conflict of opposites within himself but suffers much because of his low level of consciousness.
His quest starts in covetousness, by envying and wanting to be like the knights, and ends in finding the Grail. The Knight symbolizes a higher, more conscious man [Jung and von Franz 1970, 54]. By leaving his mother, he takes his first step toward consciousness, a "male" consciousness of rational thinking and outward achievement that is often alienated from the natural world [Jung and von Franz 1970, 45]. It dominates Parsifal's life.
The Red Knight represents Parsifal's shadow, "the sum of emotion and barbaric thoughtlessness which Parsifal must overcome before he can become a Christian Knight" [Jung and von Franz 1970, 56]. The shadow "brings the energy to live as a human being" and "consists of those aspects of your character that belong to you but that have not been given any conscious place in your life" [Johnson 1991, 59]. Parsifal grows by killing the Red Knight [Jung and von Franz 1970, 57]. The Red Knight's armor becomes his persona, or mask [Jung and von Franz 1970, 59]. He now controls his shadow and can use its energy [Johnson 1989, 24].
After the Red Knight battle, Parsifal meets Gournamond, his figurative godfather. He learns more about knighthood from him but leaves to see his mother. While travelling, he comes upon a castle besieged by an evil knight. He defeats him and falls in love with the mistress of the castle, Blanche Fleur. She represents the anima in his psyche, the animating principle that inspires his knight errantry.
As a knight, Parsifal was expected to help women in distress. He often does, but only to compensate for his overly masculine consciousness [Jung and von Franz 1970, 64]. The women in the story represent different aspects of Parsifal's anima, the creative and feeling part of his psyche. He often decides to leave a woman after only a short stay, symbolizing his difficulty with expanding his consciousness to include this aspect of life [Jung and von Franz 1970, 270]. Rather than seeing women as ends in themselves and as equals, capable of their own contributions and capable of teaching Parsifal, his consciousness is too masculine to see them as anything but a prize to win [Jung and von Franz 1970, 184].
His failure to ask the important question in the Grail Castle was a result of a lack of consciousness. He had not adequately integrated his anima so he could not ask a compassionate, healing question [Jung and von Franz 1970, 181]. He is not capable of assessing what happened and therefore does not understand why he is expelled from the Grail Castle [Jung and von Franz 1970, 182]. He no longer understands himself and is cut off from his inner being. He fails also because he worries too much about his reputation and fears the ridicule of his peers instead of being guided by his heart [Campbell 1976, 454].
Parsifal later learns of the spiritual nature of the Grail from a hermit, someone more focused on the inner world [Jung and von Franz 1970, 222]. The hermit expands his consciousness to include his anima. Around middle age, he sheds a homespun garment worn under the armor of the Red Knight (this represents his mother complex or desire for the world to take care of him) and again can enter the castle to ask the Grail question, a question about raising consciousness and caring about something larger than himself [Jung and von Franz 1970, 292].
Parsifal, a simple, poor, and naive boy, is dazzled by the sight of five knights. Wishing to join, he follows them to the court of King Arthur against the wishes of his mother. He is told he can be a knight if he slays the evil Red Knight. Parsifal kills him and then puts on his armor. But he soon learns that knighthood is arduous and is attained only after much valor and noble work. He must learn a great deal and be versed in knightly arts of battle, learn to live by certain social rules and rituals, and learn as well that it is childish to ask too many questions. He eventually becomes a good knight, defeating others and sending them to serve King Arthur. One day he enters the Grail Castle and meets the wounded Fisher King whose kingdom has become a Waste Land. "The cattle do not produce; the crops won't grow; knights are killed; children are orphaned; maidens weep; there is mounting
everywhere - all because the Fisher King is wounded" [Johnson 1989, 1]. Parsifal sits at a banquet and sees the Fisher King sitting before the Holy Grail. If Parsifal can ask the question, "whom does the Grail serve?" the king will be healed and the kingdom will again flourish. He does not ask and is expelled. He later slays many dragons and defeats many knights until finally, in his middle age, he again earns the right to re-enter the Grail Castle and ask the question. In some versions of the story, he does, the kingdom is rejuvenated, and he takes the place of the Grail King (or Fisher King) as guardian of the Grail.
The Grail symbolizes life, spirituality, youth, health, joy, purity, creativity, the unconscious, and generativity [Jung and von Franz 1970, 114]. It harmonizes the conflicting opposites of male-female, rationality and emotion, dark and light, good and evil, etc. [Jung and von Franz 1970, 194]. The conflict of opposites in Parsifal's psyche needed to be discovered for him to get back into the Grail Castle. He needs to expand his consciousness and travel, psychologically speaking, far beyond the naive fool, to find the Grail Castle and discover himself, to be conscious of and reconcile the opposites in his psyche.
The Fisher King, or the Grail King, represents a limited consciousness, one who is too rational and is incapable of solving the real problem his kingdom faces [Jung and von Franz 1970, 212]. The successor who will free him was prophesied to be a wholly innocent fool who would ask a specific question. "The myth is telling us that it is the naive part of a man that will heal him and cure his Fisher King wound. It suggests that if a man is to be cured he must find something in himself about the same age and about the same mentality as he was when he was wounded" [Johnson 1989, 11].
Although Parsifal must transcend his naivete to re-enter the Grail Castle, it will be his innocence and compassion that inspires him to ask the healing question. His long psychological journey is actually a journey to rediscover his youthful innocence, which he repressed when he failed to ask the question. The second time he enters the Grail Castle, he will know that he is part fool, but he will not be afraid to look foolish by asking questions.
Parsifal moves from a lower to a higher level of consciousness. He slowly becomes more aware of the conflict of opposites within himself but suffers much because of his low level of consciousness.
His quest starts in covetousness, by envying and wanting to be like the knights, and ends in finding the Grail. The Knight symbolizes a higher, more conscious man [Jung and von Franz 1970, 54]. By leaving his mother, he takes his first step toward consciousness, a "male" consciousness of rational thinking and outward achievement that is often alienated from the natural world [Jung and von Franz 1970, 45]. It dominates Parsifal's life.
The Red Knight represents Parsifal's shadow, "the sum of emotion and barbaric thoughtlessness which Parsifal must overcome before he can become a Christian Knight" [Jung and von Franz 1970, 56]. The shadow "brings the energy to live as a human being" and "consists of those aspects of your character that belong to you but that have not been given any conscious place in your life" [Johnson 1991, 59]. Parsifal grows by killing the Red Knight [Jung and von Franz 1970, 57]. The Red Knight's armor becomes his persona, or mask [Jung and von Franz 1970, 59]. He now controls his shadow and can use its energy [Johnson 1989, 24].
After the Red Knight battle, Parsifal meets Gournamond, his figurative godfather. He learns more about knighthood from him but leaves to see his mother. While travelling, he comes upon a castle besieged by an evil knight. He defeats him and falls in love with the mistress of the castle, Blanche Fleur. She represents the anima in his psyche, the animating principle that inspires his knight errantry.
As a knight, Parsifal was expected to help women in distress. He often does, but only to compensate for his overly masculine consciousness [Jung and von Franz 1970, 64]. The women in the story represent different aspects of Parsifal's anima, the creative and feeling part of his psyche. He often decides to leave a woman after only a short stay, symbolizing his difficulty with expanding his consciousness to include this aspect of life [Jung and von Franz 1970, 270]. Rather than seeing women as ends in themselves and as equals, capable of their own contributions and capable of teaching Parsifal, his consciousness is too masculine to see them as anything but a prize to win [Jung and von Franz 1970, 184].
His failure to ask the important question in the Grail Castle was a result of a lack of consciousness. He had not adequately integrated his anima so he could not ask a compassionate, healing question [Jung and von Franz 1970, 181]. He is not capable of assessing what happened and therefore does not understand why he is expelled from the Grail Castle [Jung and von Franz 1970, 182]. He no longer understands himself and is cut off from his inner being. He fails also because he worries too much about his reputation and fears the ridicule of his peers instead of being guided by his heart [Campbell 1976, 454].
Parsifal later learns of the spiritual nature of the Grail from a hermit, someone more focused on the inner world [Jung and von Franz 1970, 222]. The hermit expands his consciousness to include his anima. Around middle age, he sheds a homespun garment worn under the armor of the Red Knight (this represents his mother complex or desire for the world to take care of him) and again can enter the castle to ask the Grail question, a question about raising consciousness and caring about something larger than himself [Jung and von Franz 1970, 292].
(c)2013-2015; All Rights Reserved, Iona Miller; Sangreality Trust
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Fair Use Notice
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.