Holy Grail
“The key to the Grail is compassion, 'suffering with,' feeling another’s sorrow as if it were your own. The one who finds the dynamo of compassion is the one who’s found the Grail.” --Joseph Campbell
We cannot slay death, as we have already taken all life from it. If we still want to overcome death, then we must enliven it. Therefore on your journey be sure to take golden cups full of the sweet drink of life, red wine, and give it to dead matter, so that it can win life back. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Liber Primus; Page 244.
We cannot slay death, as we have already taken all life from it. If we still want to overcome death, then we must enliven it. Therefore on your journey be sure to take golden cups full of the sweet drink of life, red wine, and give it to dead matter, so that it can win life back. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Liber Primus; Page 244.
Arkady Ostritsk
For Joseph Campbell (arguably the greatest mythographer of our age), the Grail myth was the beginning of Europe. The unprecedented sense of yearning and striving towards an unknown end, not knowing what to look for or how to look for it, while at the same time believing that whatever is to be discovered must be found inside the seeker’s own heart - this inaugurated the characteristically Western living of life which we inherit. The age-old theme of the quest had now turned irrevocably inwards; the inspiration, motive, direction and guide are for the first time wholly individual and utterly unique. There is no authorized way or teacher to be followed, for all ways already found, known and proven, are wrong ways, since they are not the person’s own.
In the thirteenth-century legend La Queste del Saint Graal, when the vision of the veiled Grail appears to the knights in Arthur’s banquet hall to summon them each to their quest of unveiling it, the knights decide to ride forth singly, for to go in a group would have been shameful. This is the point which Campbell - the greatest mythologist of this century - holds up as testimony to a new moral initiative that is of the essence of European spirituality. When all the knights had put on their arms, attended Mass and expressed their gratitude to their king, they ‘entered into the forest, at one point and another, there where they saw it to be thickest, all in those places where they found no way or path ...’ (his italics) (CM, 540). So they start their journey as individuals, each trusting to their own authority and to the mysterious power of their calling. As it transpired, though, in this story written by a Cistercian monk, there was finally only one way to be followed, the ‘straight path to Paradise’, and so the orthodox Christian opposition of the spiritual and the physical worlds - the world of God distinct from the world of nature - remained unchallenged. The Grail is revealed as a symbol of a supernatural grace dispensed by way of sacraments, not a blessing upon the choice and persistence in the dark and lonely path.
http://www.julescashford.com/campbell.html
The Household of the Grail, Edited by John Matthews, The Aquarian Press, 1990.
Chapter 12, JOSEPH CAMPBELL AND THE GRAIL MYTH
by Jules Cashford
Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival was the book which inspired Campbell beyond all the other stories of the Grail. For him it was not only the greatest book of the Middle Ages, beyond even Dante, but also ‘the first sheerly individualistic mythology of the human race’. (CM, 553) It is Wolfram’s achievement to have taken a Christian symbol - with all the customary associations of an historical and literal interpretation - and to have opened it out to its universal and psychological meaning, so becoming the first example in world literature of a consciously developed secular Christian myth. (CM, 476)
The crowning moment is Parzival’s failure. He honours the code and he dishonours his heart, and thus a new ethic is disclosed. As Campbell tells the tale in his book Creative Mythology (the last of four volumes of his monumental work The Masks of God ), Parzival is the one figure through whom this crucial distinction between individual and collective can be worked out. Like the meaning of his name ‘right through the middle’, he is destined to get to the centre of things. For he has been brought up in the country by a mother, disillusioned of the court, who wanted her son to know nothing of its elaborate rules and codes of conduct. His life is lived in terms of the dynamic of his own natural impulses, and when he first sees three knights riding by on their prancing horses he falls to the ground on his knees imagining they are angels. Leaving his home, he comes across an old knight called Guernemanz, who is to be his first teacher. Guernemanz instructs him in the skills and virtues of knighthood and the civilities of court - never to lose the sense of shame, to be compassionate to the needy, not to ask too many questions, and so on - and when he has mastered these Guernemanz then offers him his daughter in marriage. But Parzival says, ‘No, I must earn a wife, not be given a wife,’ passing the first spiritual test of both Wolfram and Campbell.
Having later earned his true bride, whom he loves, he rides to the next test a married man, and is eventually conducted to the Castle of the Grail. There he sees the Grail resting on its deep green cloth of gold-threaded silk and he shares the cup of its infinite sweetness with his suffering and melancholy host who, resting on a litter unable to sit or stand or lie, tells him God has maimed him. And Parzival thought, remembering Gurnemanz: ‘He counselled me, in sincerity and truth, not to ask too many questions.’
‘For that I pity him,’ Wolfram comments, ‘and I pity too his sweet host, whom divine displeasure does not spare, when a mere question would have set him free.’ (CM, 446)
Parzival’s fault was not to act on his impulse of compassion. He was moved to ask, ‘What ails you, Uncle?’ But he quells his spontaneous moment of sympathy, the natural opening of the human heart to another human being, believing it to be more important to obey the rule of courteous restraint given to him by his teacher who had helped him come this far. Yet his question was an expression of compassion, and as a truly individual human feeling could not fall under any general notion of society. It was not curiosity - ’another’ question - not one of ‘too many’; it was the Question, his question.
Parzival does not fully understand what he has done wrong until, poised for the glory of acceptance at the Round Table of King Arthur, the summit and consummation of knightly virtue, he is shamed before the meal begins by the dog-nosed, boar-tusked Cundrie, who curses him for his empty heart. She shames him because, Campbell explains, she is the messenger of a deeper sphere of values and possibilities than was yet sensed or understood by his socially conscious mind, but which, in the dreamlike, visionary image of the Castle of the Grail, had appeared to him as the first sign of a kingdom still to be earned, beyond the sphere of the world’s flattery, proper to his own unfolding Life. (CM, 454) It was his own inward knowledge, but he did not yet know it. Parzival takes up Cundrie’s challenge: ‘I am resolved to know no joy until I have seen again the Grail,’ he declares, in defiance now of the rule that proclaims there are no second chances. Then, in answer to Gawain’s gentle wish that God would give him good fortune in battle, he makes this momentous reply:
Alas, what is God? Were He great, He would not have heaped undeserved disgrace on us both. I was in his service, expecting His grace. But I now renounce Him and His service. If He hates me, I shall bear that. Good friend, when your own time comes for battle, let a woman be your shield. (CM, 452)
Parzival’s denunciation of God, or of what he takes to be God - the god-image ‘up there’ reported by his mother and the knightly code - marks, Campbell says, ‘a deep break in the spiritual life not only of this Christian hero, as a necessary prelude to his healing of the Maimed King and assumption of the role without inheriting the wound, but also of the Gothic age itself and thereby Western man.’ (CM. 452) For Parzival has now to confront directly the void without and within, where, as Nietzsche tells, the dragon of ‘Thou Shalt’ is to be slain. By saying No to the social, collective morality, and No to the image he takes to be God, he casts himself into the wilderness where he wanders desolate for five years, but in so doing he frees his own authentic experience, since that has become the only thing and everything he has.
Only the Grail can redeem the Wasteland, yet what is the Wasteland but the absence of the Grail? Before this, Parzival lived in the Wasteland, but did not suffer it; now he experiences the anguish of that life and so takes on symbolically the wound of the Grail king whose maiming is the expression of the Wasteland. For only when Parzival has healed himself will he be able to heal Anfortas and take upon himself the role of king. But what is the Wasteland? For Campbell it is simply the inauthentic life, a state of being which is barren of the truth of who you are.
Wolfram could see it all around him in the twelfth century, but it belongs to any age or person who lives a life handed down by society and does not take up the challenge of his or her own destiny. In practice, this means that you put what (you think) is expected or required of you (the social ‘ought’) before the impulse of your own heart, wherever it may lead. This is exactly parallel to Jung’s radical distinction between the individual and the collective life, which is the life you inherit-the ideals, beliefs, perspectives-you have not yet made your own. The appeal of the collective sensibility is clear with Parzival: why should he be blamed, he protests, when he only behaved courteously, as any true knight would? And in Wolfram’s ironic aside, he had indeed been ‘true to the dictates of good breeding’. But the often beguilingly reasonable claims of the society are never valid, Campbell insists. To be persuaded that they are is the third temptation of the Buddha-‘Perform your Duty to Society’. Your duty to society is no good, he persists, unless it is you. First, you have to be an individual, and it takes a hero to be one.
In 1949, Campbell wrote a book called The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which is a book not just to learn from but one which lives and grows as the reader’s own understanding of its meaning and implications deepens. There, the world of myth comes brilliantly alive:
Throughout the inhabited world, in all times and under every circumstance, the myths of man have flourished; and they have been the living inspiration of whatever else may have appeared out of the activities of the human body and mind. It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. (H, 3)
The images and symbols of mythology are not, therefore, manufactured; they are natural phenomena, born out of and rooted in the human imagination.
They cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bears within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source. (H, 4).
How, then, are the images of myth different from the images of a dream?
Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problems and solutions shown are directly valid for all mankind.
(H, 19)
The essential drama of mythology is the visionary quest which is the myth of the hero. The particular function of the hero myth is to carry the human spirit forward, offering the model and guide by means of which people may be assisted across ‘those difficult thresholds of transformation that demand a change in the patterns not only of conscious but also of unconscious life.’ (H, 10) For while the passage of the mythological hero may be overground, incidentally:
Fundamentally it is inward-into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world. (H, 29)
All heroes follow a characteristic path. Whether Prometheus, Jason, Theseus, Odysseus, Aeneas, the Buddha, Jesus or Parzival, they all fall into the same pattern of Separation-Initiation - Return. The first task of the hero is to turn away from his society - the false, restrictive consciousness entranced with the infinitely various and bewildering spectacle of phenomena. So, dying to the world, he must venture bravely forth into the lonely realm of night - the belly of the whale, the underworld, the descent to hell - a region, typically, of supernatural wonder where fabulous forces are encountered. Suffering first the trials and then the victories of initiation, often with the unsuspected assistance that comes to one who has undertaken his proper adventure, the hero is reborn into his own true nature, and thereby into the nature of the wonder of being. Finally, he returns once again to the society he had originally to leave behind, bearing now his gift of a vision transformed.
Campbell calls Parzival the Grail Hero, and here his immense range of study into the mythologies of the world allows him to discern the universal dimension within the specific cultural ideas of medieval Europe. It was essential, he taught, to distinguish the ‘ethnic’ or ‘folk ideas’ of a particular time and place from the ‘elementary ideas’, (in Bastian’s term), or the ‘archetypes of the collective unconscious’, (in Jung’s term), which are the mythic motifs common to all human beings. For a recognition of the two aspects, a universal and a local, in the constitution of sacred stories everywhere - whether called myths, religion, literature, or even history - prevents the fruitless debate on which one is ‘right’. Mythology, he declares, ‘is psychology, misread as biology, history, cosmology.’ (H, 256)
Parzival’s separation from Arthur’s Court and his refusal of the courtly God marks, then, the first stage of the hero’s solitary journey to fulfilment, that lonely dangerous quest, which is the only way to an individual life. As a boy, he was first ‘called’ away from his childhood by the knightly messengers - ’angels’, as he thought. Later, a knight himself, after his loving marriage to Condwiramurs and his unwitting visit to the Castle of the Grail, he was ritually conducted to Arthur’s Table by the gentlest knight of all, Gawain, the only one who understands his gazing at the drops of blood upon the ground to be the trance of love. The second messenger who summons him, this time away from the rewards of his worldly goal, and sets him irrevocably on the inward, visionary quest, is no angel of light but the dark apparition of the Loathly Damsel, Cundrie, richly arrayed and ugly as a hog.
The Loathly Damsel or Ugly Bride is a familiar figure in Celtic legend and fairytale, a maiden who is seen as ugly by the wicked and as fair by the good, and whom a loving kiss can transform from ugly to beautiful in an instant. (Compare the Russian tale of the Toad Bride, Beauty and the Beast, and also the play on this motif by Papagena in Mozart’s The Magic Flute.) In the Celtic folktale, this mythic figure appears as the daughter of the King of the Land of Youth, who was cursed with the head of a pig, but, when boldly kissed, became beautiful and granted her saviour the kingship of her timeless realm. Here, buried in the image of Cundrie’s boar tusks, is a vital clue to the nature of the Kingdom of the Grail, and one, furthermore, that would most likely be overlooked without the kind of mythic reach that Campbell offers. For, he argues, the Kingdom of the Grail is such a land as is suggested by this image: ‘To be achieved only by one capable of transcending the painted wall of space-time with its foul and fair, good and evil, true and false display of the names and forms of merely phenomenal pairs of opposites.’ (CM, 455) Consequently, the image prepares us for a passage beyond the known bounds and forms of space, time and causality to a domain of vision, where time and eternity are at one: in Parzival’s case, the Grail Castle, and in Gawain’s - summoned at the same time, as though they were soul brothers - the enchanted Château Merveil.
Entering, then, the Wasteland of their own disoriented lives, the next stage of trial begins in the enchanted underworld, and here the story passes to Gawain who, having lifted the spell on the enchanted castle, then meets the Lady Orgeluse, sitting by a spring. Seeing in her the reflection of the moving principle of his life, his lifelong service to love in general is irreversibly transformed into a service to that particular love. His spiritual test is now to hold to that one experience in loyalty and love beyond both fear and desire for distraction, the model already established in the Buddha’s holding to the ‘immovable point’ beneath the Bodhi Tree, which neither fear nor desire could move. Again, the mythic resonance is necessary to transform our perception of the image: ‘The sense of such a female by a spring is of an apparition of the abyss: psychologically, the unconscious; mythologically, the Land below Waves, Hell, Purgatory or Heaven. She is a portion of onself, one’s destiny.’ (CM, 489) The larger point being made here, and one which is essential to an understanding of the meaning of the Grail, is that ‘initiations transpire through the revelations of chance, according to the readiness of the psyche.’ (CM 484) Campbell frequently refers to James Joyce’s Ulysses as a parallel contemporary myth, comparing Stephen Dedalus and Parzival as the solitary introverts moved by a sense of purpose, and Bloom and Gawain as love-questing extroverts. So similarly, Joyce writes of Dedalus: ‘He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible.’ (CM 197) Since, in the case of both Gawain and Parzival, their trials were proper to their own lives, they were consequently their match. And so the second heroic stage of Initiation was achieved.
What then, finally, is the Holy Grail? Campbell did not leave the symbol vague and general, in the bafflingly opaque terms of the cup of transformation which would grant eternal life. In all the Grail stories, the Grail is the supreme spiritual value, but which one? Since, also, ‘it is a law of symbolic life that the god beheld is a function of the state of consciousness of the beholder’, (CM 566) it is a matter of some consequence which author is doing the beholding. In the monastic version of the Grail story (La Queste del Saint Graal ), the Grail is exclusively associated with Christ’s passion, as it is in Wagner’s opera Parzival and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King: The Grail is the chalice of the Last Supper and the chalice that received Christ’s blood when he was taken down from the cross. Thus the reference of the symbol remains enclosed within the Christian orthodox tradition, dependent on the dualistic opposition of spirit and nature, and on belief in the sacraments as administered by the Church. Here the source of the Grail’s gift is imagined as coming from outside nature, so nature is still inherently fallen, or cursed, not itself, even potentially, divine. So the reawakening to nature that was springing up everywhere in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was, in this work, reversed, and the supernatural reimposed as the proper authority, leaving, as Campbell characteristically puts it, ‘nature, man, history, and all womankind except baptized nuns, to the Devil’. (CM, 566)
It is hardly surprising that one who was not just a comparative mythologist but who practically ‘invented’ comparative mythology as an independent study should place the claims of psychology beyond those of any particular theology. Campbell’s criterion for evaluating the different Grail myths was always their relation to the archetypal order. Does the local, specific image become translucent to a universal truth? Is it a statement about the nature of humanity, valid for the whole human race? For the ultimate reference of mythology is to the human being as human. So it was to Wolfram’s Parzival that he again turned for an understanding of the Grail as a symbol of a metaphysical truth. Wolfram tells a story of the origins of the Grail in which it was once carried from heaven to earth by the angels who had remained neutral when Satan opposed God and there was war in heaven. These were the angels in the middle, between the warring factions, and so the Grail here stands for that spiritual path that is between pairs of opposites, between fear and desire, black and white, good and evil (hence the meaning of Parzival’s name). As he says at the beginning of his tale: ‘Every act has both good and evil results.’ Between these opposites, where the Grail is to be found, is the spontaneous natural impulse of a noble heart.
The Grail, as Campbell describes it, drawing on the meaning of Wolfram’s image, is then the inexhaustible vessel, the centre of life continuously coming into being, energy pouring into creation, energy as creation, out of which civilizations arise, mountains are formed-the unquenchable fountain of the source. If we relate that image to ourselves, it is the place in us where life comes into being inside us - ‘the still point of the turning world’, as T.S. Eliot calls it in The Four Quartets - which is a place before or beyond desiring and fearing, just pure becoming. This is an image which emerges in very different cultures separated by time and space, and so must be a reflection of certain powers or spiritual potentialities in the psyche of every one of us. Furthermore, by contemplating this and other mythic images, we evoke their powers in our own lives.
In Celtic mythology, for instance - the immediate origins of all Arthurian Romance - there was not a chalice but a cauldron of plenty in the mansion of the god of the sea, Manannan Mac Lir, himself the Northern Celtic counterpart of the Roman Neptune and the Greek Poseidon, who in turn was the Occidental counterpart of the Oriental Shiva. Beneath the waves, Manannan served the flesh of pigs that, killed today, were alive tomorrow, and an ambrosial ale which bestowed immortality on all his guests, enacting, in the ceaseless ebb and flow of the tides of the sea, the continual filling and emptying of the celestial cup of the moon above. These are the images that point, in turn, to the distant roots of the mythology of the Celts in the most ancient native European mythological tradition: that of the old Megalithic, Bronze Age Goddess of many names, mother of all creation - gods and humans - and the immanent power of all nature: the earth, not as dust (as it became in the Judeo-Christian tradition), but as the source, the living body which was herself, out of whom all things proceed and to whom they return at peace.
Nearer to Celtic myth, in place and time, was Germanic myth. And there, similarly, the life-giving vessel is central. Odin (Wotan) gave an eye for a sip from the Well of Wisdom at the foot of the World Ash, Yggdrasil, where it was guarded by the dwarf, Mimir; while high above in Valhalla, the warrior dead drank a mead, served by the Valkyries, which restored them to life and joy. The late Classical Orphic sects (themselves rooted in the earlier Bronze Age Mother Goddess cultures of Mesopotamia, Crete, Egypt and Old Europe), also conducted their mystery rites through the drinking of liquid from sacramental bowls, though the symbols there were read in the inward anagogical way that is proper to symbols, not reduced to a literal sense and referred outward to supposed, actual or possible historical events. These cults were carried by the Roman armies as they advanced into northern Europe in the Gallo-Roman period, when at the same time the native Celto-Germanic gods which they encountered in the lands they occupied were identified with their Greco-Roman counterparts, allying, thereby, the classical mystery tradition with local Celtic myth and ritual.
Wolfram linked his central symbol to both these traditions - the Celtic and the Classical - and their ancient sources, as well as extending its reference to include Islam. For in his work, while the Grail acts like a vessel - in its presence whatever anyone stretched out their hands for it was waiting for, food and drink alike - it was actually a stone, the ‘Wish of Paradise’, called ‘lapsit exillis’, the name of the Philosophers’ Stone of the alchemists, but also suggesting the Ka’aba of Islam. The Grail, which ‘was the very fruit of bliss, a cornucopia of the sweets of this world and such that it scarcely fell short of what they tell us of the Heavenly Kingdom’, (P, 127) was a symbol which unified the different, even warring, traditions in a new image of the human being released from any one ecclesiastical authority, serving the world through individual love.
In his television conversations with Bill Moyers, entitled The Power of Myth, and in the book of the same name in which many of these conversations are recorded, Campbell interprets these myths of the vessel, bowl and cauldron, or the Grail stone as cornucopia, as meaning that it is out of the depths of the unconscious that the energies of life come to us, the bubbling spring from which all life proceeds. And not only the unconscious of the race - the collective unconscious, as Jung calls it - but also the vale of the world. It is not just the psyche and it is not just the world; it is from the depths of both that life comes irrepressibly forth, since one is the reflection of the other. There had been other images of the inexhaustible source of creation, but no myth before this had linked that image to the spontaneous outpouring of an individual heart, rendering the outward Grail consubstantial with the inward point of becoming life in the human being.
Then how is the Grail attained? Wolfram’s answer, conveyed first through Parzival’s failure and then through the terms on which he and Gawain finally succeed, is that it is won through the act of compassion that comes spontaneously out of an individual who lives his or her own authentic life. The Maimed Grail King, Anfortas, had not earned his castle or his throne; they had come to him as a gift, and for this reason he could not withstand the lance of the pagan, the Muslim knight, who rode at him in the woods. The Grail King’s lance kills the pagan, but the pagan’s lance castrates the Grail King. What this means, Campbell explains, is that ‘the Christian separation of matter and spirit, of the dynamism of life and the realm of the spirit, of natural grace and supernatural grace, has really castrated nature ... The true spirituality, which would have come from the union of matter and spirit, has been killed.’ (PM, 197) For the pagan represents the natural man, and yet, astonishingly, the word ‘Grail’ was written on the head of his lance: ‘That is to say,’ he continues, ‘nature intends the Grail. Spiritual life is the bouquet, the perfume, the flowering and fulfilment of a human life, not a supernatural virtue imposed upon it.’ (PM, 197).
This battle is in a sense reenacted between Parzival and the pagan knight, his half-brother Feirfiz, whose nobility (and compassion) in fighting (throwing away his sword when Parzival’s had broken) allows a recognition to take place between them, after which Cundrie appears to summon Parzival to heal the King and receive the Grail along with his wife and son. When the moment arrives, Feirfiz cannot see the Grail but only the eyes of her who carried it, the Queen Repanse de Schoye, and he was urged to be baptized and to renounce his gods if he would marry her (Parzival’s aunt, as it turned out). In a lecture that he gave on the Grail myth which was taped, Campbell, telling the story to a room already resounding with laughter, expostulates at this point: ‘Good God, I thought, is Wolfram going to let me down here at the end of the story?’ But it was all right; Wolfram played with the idea of baptism and the one true god. Feirfiz asks: ‘Is your god her god? “Yes,’ says Parzival. ‘Then for the sake of your aunt’s god, let me be baptized,’ says Feirfiz with much enthusiasm. (CM, 563)
Courtly love, Campbell explains, is exemplified in this idea of putting the loved person before any other authority in utmost particularity. For it is not the two impersonal relations of Eros and Agape - earthly and spiritual love, neither of which require a personal relationship between two unique people - but Amor, the specific, discriminating love that both Parzival and Gawain achieve for the one person who could be no other, and who is loved for who she is. One of Parzival’s tests was at the marriage of Gawain when he chose to leave the scene of festivities because of his love for Condiramors - she who leads him to love. His pagan brother simply loves the god in his lady, whoever it is.
Now when the newly baptized heathen sees the Grail with his own eyes, he sees written upon the Grail a hitherto unprecedented statement of compassion extended to the political world: ‘If any member of the Grail Company should, by the grace of God, be given mastery over a foreign folk, he must not speak to them of his race or of his name, and must see to it that they gain their rights.’ (FG, 221)
In the lecture, and in many places in his books, Campbell turns to Schopenhauer for an understanding of the power and meaning of compassion. In The Foundation of Morality, Schopenhauer asks the question: How is it that a human being can so participate in the pain and danger of another that, forgetting his own self protection, he moves spontaneously to the other’s rescue? How is it that what we think of as the first law of nature - self-protection - is suddenly dissolved and another law asserts itself spontaneously? Schopenhauer answers: this is the breakthrough of a metaphysical truth - that you and the other are one, and that separateness is a secondary effect of the way our minds experience the world in the frame of time and space. At the metaphysical level, we are all manifestations of that consciousness and energy which is the consciousness and energy of life. This is Schopenhauer:
The experience that dissolves the distinction between the I and the Not I ... underlies the mystery of compassion, and stands, in fact, for the reality of which compassion is the prime expression. That experience, therefore, must be the metaphysical ground of ethics and consist simply in this: that one individual should recognize in another, himself in his own true being ... Which is the recognition for which the basic formula is the standard Sanskrit expression, ‘Thou are That’, Tat vam asi. (CM, 75)
When Parzival can ask ‘what ails you?’ he has experienced the other in himself. If this is the impulse which wins the Grail, then the Grail, in its widest implication, is an image of the unity of creation-the reality of which compassion is in humanity the prime expression.
* * *
Campbell’s own life could itself be seen as an enactment of the Grail myth. His whole life is marked with the passion of the hero on his visionary quest, and, retrospectively at least, the events of his life would seem to fall into the imaginative pattern of the hero’s journey of transfiguration and return for the enlightenment of the human tribe. He lived his own description of the hero as ‘the one who, while still alive, knows and represents the claims of the superconsciousness which throughout creation is more or less unconscious’. (H, 259)
Mythology was the way that was most truly his own. It was not simply a lifelong study of a subject which he also taught; it was a profound religious position, one that refused the doctrine of a divinity transcendent to nature: ‘The great realization of mythology,’ he said, ‘is the immanence of the divine.’ (OL, 32) He often quoted the saying of Jesus from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas: ‘See the Kingdom of Heaven is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.’ By contrast, religion, in the orthodox sense of unilateral belief, was best defined as ‘a misinterpretation of mythology’, where ‘the misinterpretation consists precisely in attributing historical references to symbols which properly are spiritual in their reference’. (OL, 79) The mythic image is here, now, and always; myths are great poems which render insights into the wonder and miracle of life. Though they are deeply meaningful, they do not offer meaning or answers so much as delight and the longing to participate in the mystery of this finally inscrutable universe. As a union of psyche and metaphysics, myths put you in touch with your hearts.
Later in his life, in conversations on TV and taped dialogues, Campbell was often asked how to live the authentic life of an individual, how even to begin to try. To this he had one answer which remained constant throughout his life: ‘Follow your Bliss.’
I feel that if one follows what I call one’s bliss-the thing thatreally gets you deep in the gut and that you feel is your life-doors will open up. They do! They have in my life and they have in many lives that I know of.
(OL, 24)
If you follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid ... (PM, 120)
He came to this idea of bliss, he explains, because of three terms in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world: Sat, Chit, Ananda. Sat means being; Chit means consciousness; Ananda means bliss or rapture, and these terms represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence. ‘I thought,’ he said, ‘I don’t know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to my rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being.’ (PM, 120)
Yet it is not always easy to hang on to your rapture, and here the hero myth, and specifically the Grail myth, offers a guide. If the Call comes - the feeling that there is an adventure there for you - the risk must be taken. In An Open Life, a compilation of taped interviews with Michael Toms from 1975-85, Campbell speaks from the experience of an idea he has personally tested: ‘When I wrote about the Call forty years ago (in The Hero with a Thousand Faces), I was writing out of what I had read. Now that I’ve lived it, I know it’s correct ... These mythic clues work.’ (OL, 26) Elsewhere, he adds: ‘I always tell my students, go where your body and soul want to go. When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don’t let anyone throw you off.’ (PM, 118) When you follow your bliss, you come to bliss. But how to find your bliss, if it has not called you? ‘We are having experiences all the time which may on occasion render some sense of this, a little intuition of where your bliss is. Grab it. No one can tell you what it is going to be. You have to learn to recognize your own depth.’ (PM, 118)
When still at an early age, Campbell had to take on the challenge of seeing things differently from those around him. While he was brought up in the Roman Catholic faith, which he took very seriously, he was at the same time going with his father to see the Museum of Natural History with its rooms of totem poles, learning about the American Indians. So he was comparing virgin births, deaths and resurrections in both mythological systems at an early age. When he was a kid, he said, he never let anyone push him off course, and in this his family always supported him.
In his university years, he studied the literature of the Middle Ages and classical mythology, finding the same images which occurred in the Christian tradition, but inflected towards the more universal point of view. Graduate work in medieval literature took him first to Paris, in 1927, where he discovered James Joyce, and also modern art - particularly, Picasso and Klee. Then, in 1928-9, he went to Germany, to the University of Munich to study philology - the history of language - which brought him to Sanskrit, and introduced him to the whole world of the Orient. He had met Krishnamurti by chance (or synchronicity) on a boat to Europe in 1924, and had been given a book on the life of the Buddha, which prepared him for his later translating and editing of the Upanishads and The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna with Swami Nikhilananda.
In Germany he discovered Thomas Mann, and also Freud and Jung who opened up for him a new psychological dimension in the field of mythology. When he wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the two men were equal in his thinking, Freud relating to (what Jung calls) the personal unconscious and Jung to the collective unconscious. But in the years following, Jung became more and more eloquent for him: ‘Freud tells us what myths mean to neurotics. On the other hand, Jung gives us clues as to how to let the myth talk to us in its own terms, without putting a formula on it.’ (OL, 121) Jung’s Symbols of Transformation was ‘one of those things that sends all the lights up in all directions.’ (OL, 50) Campbell and Jung both saw mythology as the expression of the collective unconscious (though Campbell was more interested in diffusion than Jung was), and when they met, years later, it was as co-editors of the work of Heinrich Zimmer, the great Indologist and interpretor of symbols, whom Campbell regarded as ‘supplementary to Jung’. (OL, 120) It was Zimmer who, beyond anyone, gave him the courage to interpret myths out of what he knew to be their common symbols. There’s always a risk in such an interpretation, he added, pointing us to the operation of the hero myth at any moment of our lives, whatever we are doing.
When Cundrie appears to Parzival at Arthur’s Table, she disrupts the vision he had of how his life would be, and he got up and left it all behind. Campbell describes an experience in the little garden of Cluny in Paris, in which he was similarly struck by an impulse to change the course of his life, one that he, like Parzival, immediately followed. He was sitting in the garden, having put some years of study into his Ph.D., when:
It suddenly struck me: What in heaven’s name am I doing? I don’t even know how to eat a decent nourishing meal, and here I’m learning what happened to vulgar Latin when it passed into Portugese and Spanish and French. So I dropped work on my Ph.D. On my return I found a place in upstate New York and read the classics for 12 hours a day. I was enjoying myself enormously, and realized I would never finish my degree because it would have required me to do things I had already outgrown. In Europe, the world had opened up: Joyce, Sanskrit, the Orient, and the relationship of all these to Psychology. I couldn’t go back and finish up that Ph.D. thesis; besides, I didn’t have the money. And that free-wheeling maverick life gave me a sense of the deep joy in doing something meaningful to me. (OL, 125-6)
Like Parzival, he spent five years without a job! He came back from Europe in 1929, just three weeks before the Wall Street crash, which meant there were no jobs to be had, so he found a retreat up in Woodstock, New York, in ‘a little chicken coop place’, with no running water, and here he did most of his basic reading and work: ‘It was great. I was following my bliss.’ (PM, 120) When, after five years, he was invited to teach at Sarah Lawrence College, it was on his own terms: ‘I would not have taken a job otherwise, just as I wouldn’t take the Ph.D.’ (OL, 126)
He was to stay at Sarah Lawrence College from 1934 until he retired as Professor Emeritus in 1972, pursuing his own vision, and offering it back to the many students and friends who have found his life an inspiration. He makes it sound easy, but he once shared with a friend something of what it had asked of him. They were in front of some statue, and Campbell was bringing the mythic resonances of the image to life by comparing it with similar images in other cultures, and - to temper somewhat his friend’s appreciative enthusiasm - Campbell said: ‘Yes, but think of all the hundreds of hours spent reading, all the days, all the parties missed ...’
The image of courtly love also played through his relationship to his wife, Jean Erdman, the dancer and choreographer, to whom he was married for 49 years. Marriage, he said, was a sacrament in which you give up your personal simplicity to participate in a relationship, but you give not so much to the other person as to the relationship. In 1984, towards the end of his life, he was perhaps speaking of his own experience of Amor: ‘What a beautiful thing is a life together as growing personalities, each helping the other to flower, rather than just moving into the standard archetype.’
Jean Erdman writes of his work: ‘Throughout his long career, Joseph Campbell endeavoured to communicate his understanding of myth-his passion. And he tirelessly pursued the task he had set himself. Besides his books and lectures, there were workshops and interviews, which he eagerly welcomed because he believed scholarship should not mean isolation.’ (OL, Foreward)
Before The Hero with a Thousand Faces was published in 1949, which took four years to write, he had already edited the posthumous works of Heinrich Zimmer-Philosophies of India and The Art of Indian Asia-as well as six volumes of the papers from the Eranos conferences set up by Jung to explore the issues around analytical psychology, called the Eranos Notebooks. Next came The Flight of the Wild Gander (1951), which, as he wrote in his introduction, ‘occupied, or rather punctuated, a period of twenty-four years, during the whole of which I was circling, and from many quarters striving to interpret, the mystery of mythology.’ (FG, 3) There followed his unique discussion of the world’s archetypal images of divinity in their historical contexts, called The Masks of God, which was published over a period of 12 years as four separate but related books: Primitive Mythology; Oriental Mythology; Occidental Mythology; and Creative Mythology (1959-1968). He also wrote A Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake, and edited The Portable Jung and The Portable Arabian Knights. Myths To Live By (1971) was a selection of talks on mythology delivered in New York City between 1958 and 1971. In 1975, The Mythic Image was published by Princeton University Press after 10 years in preparation, a book which, incidentally, sets a standard for the right relation of text to image that has never subsequently been met. In 1983, The Way of the Animal Powers was published as the first volume of the Historical Atlas of World Mythology, followed in 1988 by the second volume, The Way of the Seeded Earth. In 1986, a record of various lectures in San Francisco, given between 1981 and 1984, was published under the title of The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion. Since then, in 1988, his conversations with Bill Moyers on TV (collected in The Power of Myth) and with Michael Toms on the ‘New Dimension’ tapes (compiled in An Open Life) have shown how profoundly he lived his own myth. His great gifts of storytelling and scholarship were offered to his students and readers that they also might engage in the call of the age:
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; for, as there is no more any fixed horizon, there is no more any fixed center, any Mecca, Rome, or Jerusalem. Our circle today is that announced, c. 1450, by Nicolas Cusanus (1401-64): whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere; the circle of infinite radius, which is also a straight line. (OC, 522)
The study of mythology was for Campbell a truly sacred task because it allowed a move out of the dogma of formal religion and into the spontaneous nature of one’s own inward drama and vitality of being. It is inevitable, then, that his life might seem to us to be the mythic image that he taught us how to understand, for mythology and the way of his life were one. If the Grail represents, as he said, ‘the fulfilment of the highest spiritual possibilities of the human consciousness’, (PM, 197) then his lifelong quest of the Holy Grail may indeed have been rewarded.
ref. http://www.julescashford.com/campbell.html
Abbreviations
H - The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell.
FG - The Flight of the Wild Gander, Joseph Campbell.
OC - Occidental Mythology, Joseph Campbell.
CM - Creative Mythology, Joseph Campbell.
PM - The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell.
OL - An Open Life, Joseph Campbell.
P - Parzival, Wolfram von Eschenbach. trans. A.T. Hatto (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1980).
Bibliography
The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Bollingen Series XVII (Princeton Univ. Press, 1949).
The Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimensions (Gateway Edition, 1951).
The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (New York: Viking Press, 1959).
The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology (New York: Viking Press, 1962).
The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology (New York: Viking Press, 1964).
The Masks of God: Creative Mythology (New York: Viking Press, 1968).
Myths To Live By (London: Bantam, 1972).
The Mythic Image, Bollingen Series C (Princeton Univ. Press, 1974).
The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion (London: St James Press, 1986).
Historical Atlas of World Mythology:
Vol. 1, The Way of the Animal Powers (London: Times Books, 1984).
Vol. 2, The Way of the Seeded Earth (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).
The Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers, from transcripts of the TV series (New York: Doubleday, 1988).
An Open Life. In Conversation with Michael Toms. (Compilations of Interviews from 1975-85) (Larsons Publications, 1988).
The Grail Tapes of lecture given in 1982 (Living Dharma Tapes).
Completed and edited the papers of Heinrich Zimmer: Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, The King and the Corpse, Philosophies of India, and The Art of Indian Asia.
Translated and edited, with Swami Nikhilananda, The Upanishads and The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna.
Edited Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks (6 vols.), Myths, Dreams and Religion, The Portable Jung, and The Portable Arabian Nights. Co-authored, with Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake.
For Joseph Campbell (arguably the greatest mythographer of our age), the Grail myth was the beginning of Europe. The unprecedented sense of yearning and striving towards an unknown end, not knowing what to look for or how to look for it, while at the same time believing that whatever is to be discovered must be found inside the seeker’s own heart - this inaugurated the characteristically Western living of life which we inherit. The age-old theme of the quest had now turned irrevocably inwards; the inspiration, motive, direction and guide are for the first time wholly individual and utterly unique. There is no authorized way or teacher to be followed, for all ways already found, known and proven, are wrong ways, since they are not the person’s own.
In the thirteenth-century legend La Queste del Saint Graal, when the vision of the veiled Grail appears to the knights in Arthur’s banquet hall to summon them each to their quest of unveiling it, the knights decide to ride forth singly, for to go in a group would have been shameful. This is the point which Campbell - the greatest mythologist of this century - holds up as testimony to a new moral initiative that is of the essence of European spirituality. When all the knights had put on their arms, attended Mass and expressed their gratitude to their king, they ‘entered into the forest, at one point and another, there where they saw it to be thickest, all in those places where they found no way or path ...’ (his italics) (CM, 540). So they start their journey as individuals, each trusting to their own authority and to the mysterious power of their calling. As it transpired, though, in this story written by a Cistercian monk, there was finally only one way to be followed, the ‘straight path to Paradise’, and so the orthodox Christian opposition of the spiritual and the physical worlds - the world of God distinct from the world of nature - remained unchallenged. The Grail is revealed as a symbol of a supernatural grace dispensed by way of sacraments, not a blessing upon the choice and persistence in the dark and lonely path.
http://www.julescashford.com/campbell.html
The Household of the Grail, Edited by John Matthews, The Aquarian Press, 1990.
Chapter 12, JOSEPH CAMPBELL AND THE GRAIL MYTH
by Jules Cashford
Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival was the book which inspired Campbell beyond all the other stories of the Grail. For him it was not only the greatest book of the Middle Ages, beyond even Dante, but also ‘the first sheerly individualistic mythology of the human race’. (CM, 553) It is Wolfram’s achievement to have taken a Christian symbol - with all the customary associations of an historical and literal interpretation - and to have opened it out to its universal and psychological meaning, so becoming the first example in world literature of a consciously developed secular Christian myth. (CM, 476)
The crowning moment is Parzival’s failure. He honours the code and he dishonours his heart, and thus a new ethic is disclosed. As Campbell tells the tale in his book Creative Mythology (the last of four volumes of his monumental work The Masks of God ), Parzival is the one figure through whom this crucial distinction between individual and collective can be worked out. Like the meaning of his name ‘right through the middle’, he is destined to get to the centre of things. For he has been brought up in the country by a mother, disillusioned of the court, who wanted her son to know nothing of its elaborate rules and codes of conduct. His life is lived in terms of the dynamic of his own natural impulses, and when he first sees three knights riding by on their prancing horses he falls to the ground on his knees imagining they are angels. Leaving his home, he comes across an old knight called Guernemanz, who is to be his first teacher. Guernemanz instructs him in the skills and virtues of knighthood and the civilities of court - never to lose the sense of shame, to be compassionate to the needy, not to ask too many questions, and so on - and when he has mastered these Guernemanz then offers him his daughter in marriage. But Parzival says, ‘No, I must earn a wife, not be given a wife,’ passing the first spiritual test of both Wolfram and Campbell.
Having later earned his true bride, whom he loves, he rides to the next test a married man, and is eventually conducted to the Castle of the Grail. There he sees the Grail resting on its deep green cloth of gold-threaded silk and he shares the cup of its infinite sweetness with his suffering and melancholy host who, resting on a litter unable to sit or stand or lie, tells him God has maimed him. And Parzival thought, remembering Gurnemanz: ‘He counselled me, in sincerity and truth, not to ask too many questions.’
‘For that I pity him,’ Wolfram comments, ‘and I pity too his sweet host, whom divine displeasure does not spare, when a mere question would have set him free.’ (CM, 446)
Parzival’s fault was not to act on his impulse of compassion. He was moved to ask, ‘What ails you, Uncle?’ But he quells his spontaneous moment of sympathy, the natural opening of the human heart to another human being, believing it to be more important to obey the rule of courteous restraint given to him by his teacher who had helped him come this far. Yet his question was an expression of compassion, and as a truly individual human feeling could not fall under any general notion of society. It was not curiosity - ’another’ question - not one of ‘too many’; it was the Question, his question.
Parzival does not fully understand what he has done wrong until, poised for the glory of acceptance at the Round Table of King Arthur, the summit and consummation of knightly virtue, he is shamed before the meal begins by the dog-nosed, boar-tusked Cundrie, who curses him for his empty heart. She shames him because, Campbell explains, she is the messenger of a deeper sphere of values and possibilities than was yet sensed or understood by his socially conscious mind, but which, in the dreamlike, visionary image of the Castle of the Grail, had appeared to him as the first sign of a kingdom still to be earned, beyond the sphere of the world’s flattery, proper to his own unfolding Life. (CM, 454) It was his own inward knowledge, but he did not yet know it. Parzival takes up Cundrie’s challenge: ‘I am resolved to know no joy until I have seen again the Grail,’ he declares, in defiance now of the rule that proclaims there are no second chances. Then, in answer to Gawain’s gentle wish that God would give him good fortune in battle, he makes this momentous reply:
Alas, what is God? Were He great, He would not have heaped undeserved disgrace on us both. I was in his service, expecting His grace. But I now renounce Him and His service. If He hates me, I shall bear that. Good friend, when your own time comes for battle, let a woman be your shield. (CM, 452)
Parzival’s denunciation of God, or of what he takes to be God - the god-image ‘up there’ reported by his mother and the knightly code - marks, Campbell says, ‘a deep break in the spiritual life not only of this Christian hero, as a necessary prelude to his healing of the Maimed King and assumption of the role without inheriting the wound, but also of the Gothic age itself and thereby Western man.’ (CM. 452) For Parzival has now to confront directly the void without and within, where, as Nietzsche tells, the dragon of ‘Thou Shalt’ is to be slain. By saying No to the social, collective morality, and No to the image he takes to be God, he casts himself into the wilderness where he wanders desolate for five years, but in so doing he frees his own authentic experience, since that has become the only thing and everything he has.
Only the Grail can redeem the Wasteland, yet what is the Wasteland but the absence of the Grail? Before this, Parzival lived in the Wasteland, but did not suffer it; now he experiences the anguish of that life and so takes on symbolically the wound of the Grail king whose maiming is the expression of the Wasteland. For only when Parzival has healed himself will he be able to heal Anfortas and take upon himself the role of king. But what is the Wasteland? For Campbell it is simply the inauthentic life, a state of being which is barren of the truth of who you are.
Wolfram could see it all around him in the twelfth century, but it belongs to any age or person who lives a life handed down by society and does not take up the challenge of his or her own destiny. In practice, this means that you put what (you think) is expected or required of you (the social ‘ought’) before the impulse of your own heart, wherever it may lead. This is exactly parallel to Jung’s radical distinction between the individual and the collective life, which is the life you inherit-the ideals, beliefs, perspectives-you have not yet made your own. The appeal of the collective sensibility is clear with Parzival: why should he be blamed, he protests, when he only behaved courteously, as any true knight would? And in Wolfram’s ironic aside, he had indeed been ‘true to the dictates of good breeding’. But the often beguilingly reasonable claims of the society are never valid, Campbell insists. To be persuaded that they are is the third temptation of the Buddha-‘Perform your Duty to Society’. Your duty to society is no good, he persists, unless it is you. First, you have to be an individual, and it takes a hero to be one.
In 1949, Campbell wrote a book called The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which is a book not just to learn from but one which lives and grows as the reader’s own understanding of its meaning and implications deepens. There, the world of myth comes brilliantly alive:
Throughout the inhabited world, in all times and under every circumstance, the myths of man have flourished; and they have been the living inspiration of whatever else may have appeared out of the activities of the human body and mind. It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. (H, 3)
The images and symbols of mythology are not, therefore, manufactured; they are natural phenomena, born out of and rooted in the human imagination.
They cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bears within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source. (H, 4).
How, then, are the images of myth different from the images of a dream?
Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problems and solutions shown are directly valid for all mankind.
(H, 19)
The essential drama of mythology is the visionary quest which is the myth of the hero. The particular function of the hero myth is to carry the human spirit forward, offering the model and guide by means of which people may be assisted across ‘those difficult thresholds of transformation that demand a change in the patterns not only of conscious but also of unconscious life.’ (H, 10) For while the passage of the mythological hero may be overground, incidentally:
Fundamentally it is inward-into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world. (H, 29)
All heroes follow a characteristic path. Whether Prometheus, Jason, Theseus, Odysseus, Aeneas, the Buddha, Jesus or Parzival, they all fall into the same pattern of Separation-Initiation - Return. The first task of the hero is to turn away from his society - the false, restrictive consciousness entranced with the infinitely various and bewildering spectacle of phenomena. So, dying to the world, he must venture bravely forth into the lonely realm of night - the belly of the whale, the underworld, the descent to hell - a region, typically, of supernatural wonder where fabulous forces are encountered. Suffering first the trials and then the victories of initiation, often with the unsuspected assistance that comes to one who has undertaken his proper adventure, the hero is reborn into his own true nature, and thereby into the nature of the wonder of being. Finally, he returns once again to the society he had originally to leave behind, bearing now his gift of a vision transformed.
Campbell calls Parzival the Grail Hero, and here his immense range of study into the mythologies of the world allows him to discern the universal dimension within the specific cultural ideas of medieval Europe. It was essential, he taught, to distinguish the ‘ethnic’ or ‘folk ideas’ of a particular time and place from the ‘elementary ideas’, (in Bastian’s term), or the ‘archetypes of the collective unconscious’, (in Jung’s term), which are the mythic motifs common to all human beings. For a recognition of the two aspects, a universal and a local, in the constitution of sacred stories everywhere - whether called myths, religion, literature, or even history - prevents the fruitless debate on which one is ‘right’. Mythology, he declares, ‘is psychology, misread as biology, history, cosmology.’ (H, 256)
Parzival’s separation from Arthur’s Court and his refusal of the courtly God marks, then, the first stage of the hero’s solitary journey to fulfilment, that lonely dangerous quest, which is the only way to an individual life. As a boy, he was first ‘called’ away from his childhood by the knightly messengers - ’angels’, as he thought. Later, a knight himself, after his loving marriage to Condwiramurs and his unwitting visit to the Castle of the Grail, he was ritually conducted to Arthur’s Table by the gentlest knight of all, Gawain, the only one who understands his gazing at the drops of blood upon the ground to be the trance of love. The second messenger who summons him, this time away from the rewards of his worldly goal, and sets him irrevocably on the inward, visionary quest, is no angel of light but the dark apparition of the Loathly Damsel, Cundrie, richly arrayed and ugly as a hog.
The Loathly Damsel or Ugly Bride is a familiar figure in Celtic legend and fairytale, a maiden who is seen as ugly by the wicked and as fair by the good, and whom a loving kiss can transform from ugly to beautiful in an instant. (Compare the Russian tale of the Toad Bride, Beauty and the Beast, and also the play on this motif by Papagena in Mozart’s The Magic Flute.) In the Celtic folktale, this mythic figure appears as the daughter of the King of the Land of Youth, who was cursed with the head of a pig, but, when boldly kissed, became beautiful and granted her saviour the kingship of her timeless realm. Here, buried in the image of Cundrie’s boar tusks, is a vital clue to the nature of the Kingdom of the Grail, and one, furthermore, that would most likely be overlooked without the kind of mythic reach that Campbell offers. For, he argues, the Kingdom of the Grail is such a land as is suggested by this image: ‘To be achieved only by one capable of transcending the painted wall of space-time with its foul and fair, good and evil, true and false display of the names and forms of merely phenomenal pairs of opposites.’ (CM, 455) Consequently, the image prepares us for a passage beyond the known bounds and forms of space, time and causality to a domain of vision, where time and eternity are at one: in Parzival’s case, the Grail Castle, and in Gawain’s - summoned at the same time, as though they were soul brothers - the enchanted Château Merveil.
Entering, then, the Wasteland of their own disoriented lives, the next stage of trial begins in the enchanted underworld, and here the story passes to Gawain who, having lifted the spell on the enchanted castle, then meets the Lady Orgeluse, sitting by a spring. Seeing in her the reflection of the moving principle of his life, his lifelong service to love in general is irreversibly transformed into a service to that particular love. His spiritual test is now to hold to that one experience in loyalty and love beyond both fear and desire for distraction, the model already established in the Buddha’s holding to the ‘immovable point’ beneath the Bodhi Tree, which neither fear nor desire could move. Again, the mythic resonance is necessary to transform our perception of the image: ‘The sense of such a female by a spring is of an apparition of the abyss: psychologically, the unconscious; mythologically, the Land below Waves, Hell, Purgatory or Heaven. She is a portion of onself, one’s destiny.’ (CM, 489) The larger point being made here, and one which is essential to an understanding of the meaning of the Grail, is that ‘initiations transpire through the revelations of chance, according to the readiness of the psyche.’ (CM 484) Campbell frequently refers to James Joyce’s Ulysses as a parallel contemporary myth, comparing Stephen Dedalus and Parzival as the solitary introverts moved by a sense of purpose, and Bloom and Gawain as love-questing extroverts. So similarly, Joyce writes of Dedalus: ‘He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible.’ (CM 197) Since, in the case of both Gawain and Parzival, their trials were proper to their own lives, they were consequently their match. And so the second heroic stage of Initiation was achieved.
What then, finally, is the Holy Grail? Campbell did not leave the symbol vague and general, in the bafflingly opaque terms of the cup of transformation which would grant eternal life. In all the Grail stories, the Grail is the supreme spiritual value, but which one? Since, also, ‘it is a law of symbolic life that the god beheld is a function of the state of consciousness of the beholder’, (CM 566) it is a matter of some consequence which author is doing the beholding. In the monastic version of the Grail story (La Queste del Saint Graal ), the Grail is exclusively associated with Christ’s passion, as it is in Wagner’s opera Parzival and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King: The Grail is the chalice of the Last Supper and the chalice that received Christ’s blood when he was taken down from the cross. Thus the reference of the symbol remains enclosed within the Christian orthodox tradition, dependent on the dualistic opposition of spirit and nature, and on belief in the sacraments as administered by the Church. Here the source of the Grail’s gift is imagined as coming from outside nature, so nature is still inherently fallen, or cursed, not itself, even potentially, divine. So the reawakening to nature that was springing up everywhere in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was, in this work, reversed, and the supernatural reimposed as the proper authority, leaving, as Campbell characteristically puts it, ‘nature, man, history, and all womankind except baptized nuns, to the Devil’. (CM, 566)
It is hardly surprising that one who was not just a comparative mythologist but who practically ‘invented’ comparative mythology as an independent study should place the claims of psychology beyond those of any particular theology. Campbell’s criterion for evaluating the different Grail myths was always their relation to the archetypal order. Does the local, specific image become translucent to a universal truth? Is it a statement about the nature of humanity, valid for the whole human race? For the ultimate reference of mythology is to the human being as human. So it was to Wolfram’s Parzival that he again turned for an understanding of the Grail as a symbol of a metaphysical truth. Wolfram tells a story of the origins of the Grail in which it was once carried from heaven to earth by the angels who had remained neutral when Satan opposed God and there was war in heaven. These were the angels in the middle, between the warring factions, and so the Grail here stands for that spiritual path that is between pairs of opposites, between fear and desire, black and white, good and evil (hence the meaning of Parzival’s name). As he says at the beginning of his tale: ‘Every act has both good and evil results.’ Between these opposites, where the Grail is to be found, is the spontaneous natural impulse of a noble heart.
The Grail, as Campbell describes it, drawing on the meaning of Wolfram’s image, is then the inexhaustible vessel, the centre of life continuously coming into being, energy pouring into creation, energy as creation, out of which civilizations arise, mountains are formed-the unquenchable fountain of the source. If we relate that image to ourselves, it is the place in us where life comes into being inside us - ‘the still point of the turning world’, as T.S. Eliot calls it in The Four Quartets - which is a place before or beyond desiring and fearing, just pure becoming. This is an image which emerges in very different cultures separated by time and space, and so must be a reflection of certain powers or spiritual potentialities in the psyche of every one of us. Furthermore, by contemplating this and other mythic images, we evoke their powers in our own lives.
In Celtic mythology, for instance - the immediate origins of all Arthurian Romance - there was not a chalice but a cauldron of plenty in the mansion of the god of the sea, Manannan Mac Lir, himself the Northern Celtic counterpart of the Roman Neptune and the Greek Poseidon, who in turn was the Occidental counterpart of the Oriental Shiva. Beneath the waves, Manannan served the flesh of pigs that, killed today, were alive tomorrow, and an ambrosial ale which bestowed immortality on all his guests, enacting, in the ceaseless ebb and flow of the tides of the sea, the continual filling and emptying of the celestial cup of the moon above. These are the images that point, in turn, to the distant roots of the mythology of the Celts in the most ancient native European mythological tradition: that of the old Megalithic, Bronze Age Goddess of many names, mother of all creation - gods and humans - and the immanent power of all nature: the earth, not as dust (as it became in the Judeo-Christian tradition), but as the source, the living body which was herself, out of whom all things proceed and to whom they return at peace.
Nearer to Celtic myth, in place and time, was Germanic myth. And there, similarly, the life-giving vessel is central. Odin (Wotan) gave an eye for a sip from the Well of Wisdom at the foot of the World Ash, Yggdrasil, where it was guarded by the dwarf, Mimir; while high above in Valhalla, the warrior dead drank a mead, served by the Valkyries, which restored them to life and joy. The late Classical Orphic sects (themselves rooted in the earlier Bronze Age Mother Goddess cultures of Mesopotamia, Crete, Egypt and Old Europe), also conducted their mystery rites through the drinking of liquid from sacramental bowls, though the symbols there were read in the inward anagogical way that is proper to symbols, not reduced to a literal sense and referred outward to supposed, actual or possible historical events. These cults were carried by the Roman armies as they advanced into northern Europe in the Gallo-Roman period, when at the same time the native Celto-Germanic gods which they encountered in the lands they occupied were identified with their Greco-Roman counterparts, allying, thereby, the classical mystery tradition with local Celtic myth and ritual.
Wolfram linked his central symbol to both these traditions - the Celtic and the Classical - and their ancient sources, as well as extending its reference to include Islam. For in his work, while the Grail acts like a vessel - in its presence whatever anyone stretched out their hands for it was waiting for, food and drink alike - it was actually a stone, the ‘Wish of Paradise’, called ‘lapsit exillis’, the name of the Philosophers’ Stone of the alchemists, but also suggesting the Ka’aba of Islam. The Grail, which ‘was the very fruit of bliss, a cornucopia of the sweets of this world and such that it scarcely fell short of what they tell us of the Heavenly Kingdom’, (P, 127) was a symbol which unified the different, even warring, traditions in a new image of the human being released from any one ecclesiastical authority, serving the world through individual love.
In his television conversations with Bill Moyers, entitled The Power of Myth, and in the book of the same name in which many of these conversations are recorded, Campbell interprets these myths of the vessel, bowl and cauldron, or the Grail stone as cornucopia, as meaning that it is out of the depths of the unconscious that the energies of life come to us, the bubbling spring from which all life proceeds. And not only the unconscious of the race - the collective unconscious, as Jung calls it - but also the vale of the world. It is not just the psyche and it is not just the world; it is from the depths of both that life comes irrepressibly forth, since one is the reflection of the other. There had been other images of the inexhaustible source of creation, but no myth before this had linked that image to the spontaneous outpouring of an individual heart, rendering the outward Grail consubstantial with the inward point of becoming life in the human being.
Then how is the Grail attained? Wolfram’s answer, conveyed first through Parzival’s failure and then through the terms on which he and Gawain finally succeed, is that it is won through the act of compassion that comes spontaneously out of an individual who lives his or her own authentic life. The Maimed Grail King, Anfortas, had not earned his castle or his throne; they had come to him as a gift, and for this reason he could not withstand the lance of the pagan, the Muslim knight, who rode at him in the woods. The Grail King’s lance kills the pagan, but the pagan’s lance castrates the Grail King. What this means, Campbell explains, is that ‘the Christian separation of matter and spirit, of the dynamism of life and the realm of the spirit, of natural grace and supernatural grace, has really castrated nature ... The true spirituality, which would have come from the union of matter and spirit, has been killed.’ (PM, 197) For the pagan represents the natural man, and yet, astonishingly, the word ‘Grail’ was written on the head of his lance: ‘That is to say,’ he continues, ‘nature intends the Grail. Spiritual life is the bouquet, the perfume, the flowering and fulfilment of a human life, not a supernatural virtue imposed upon it.’ (PM, 197).
This battle is in a sense reenacted between Parzival and the pagan knight, his half-brother Feirfiz, whose nobility (and compassion) in fighting (throwing away his sword when Parzival’s had broken) allows a recognition to take place between them, after which Cundrie appears to summon Parzival to heal the King and receive the Grail along with his wife and son. When the moment arrives, Feirfiz cannot see the Grail but only the eyes of her who carried it, the Queen Repanse de Schoye, and he was urged to be baptized and to renounce his gods if he would marry her (Parzival’s aunt, as it turned out). In a lecture that he gave on the Grail myth which was taped, Campbell, telling the story to a room already resounding with laughter, expostulates at this point: ‘Good God, I thought, is Wolfram going to let me down here at the end of the story?’ But it was all right; Wolfram played with the idea of baptism and the one true god. Feirfiz asks: ‘Is your god her god? “Yes,’ says Parzival. ‘Then for the sake of your aunt’s god, let me be baptized,’ says Feirfiz with much enthusiasm. (CM, 563)
Courtly love, Campbell explains, is exemplified in this idea of putting the loved person before any other authority in utmost particularity. For it is not the two impersonal relations of Eros and Agape - earthly and spiritual love, neither of which require a personal relationship between two unique people - but Amor, the specific, discriminating love that both Parzival and Gawain achieve for the one person who could be no other, and who is loved for who she is. One of Parzival’s tests was at the marriage of Gawain when he chose to leave the scene of festivities because of his love for Condiramors - she who leads him to love. His pagan brother simply loves the god in his lady, whoever it is.
Now when the newly baptized heathen sees the Grail with his own eyes, he sees written upon the Grail a hitherto unprecedented statement of compassion extended to the political world: ‘If any member of the Grail Company should, by the grace of God, be given mastery over a foreign folk, he must not speak to them of his race or of his name, and must see to it that they gain their rights.’ (FG, 221)
In the lecture, and in many places in his books, Campbell turns to Schopenhauer for an understanding of the power and meaning of compassion. In The Foundation of Morality, Schopenhauer asks the question: How is it that a human being can so participate in the pain and danger of another that, forgetting his own self protection, he moves spontaneously to the other’s rescue? How is it that what we think of as the first law of nature - self-protection - is suddenly dissolved and another law asserts itself spontaneously? Schopenhauer answers: this is the breakthrough of a metaphysical truth - that you and the other are one, and that separateness is a secondary effect of the way our minds experience the world in the frame of time and space. At the metaphysical level, we are all manifestations of that consciousness and energy which is the consciousness and energy of life. This is Schopenhauer:
The experience that dissolves the distinction between the I and the Not I ... underlies the mystery of compassion, and stands, in fact, for the reality of which compassion is the prime expression. That experience, therefore, must be the metaphysical ground of ethics and consist simply in this: that one individual should recognize in another, himself in his own true being ... Which is the recognition for which the basic formula is the standard Sanskrit expression, ‘Thou are That’, Tat vam asi. (CM, 75)
When Parzival can ask ‘what ails you?’ he has experienced the other in himself. If this is the impulse which wins the Grail, then the Grail, in its widest implication, is an image of the unity of creation-the reality of which compassion is in humanity the prime expression.
* * *
Campbell’s own life could itself be seen as an enactment of the Grail myth. His whole life is marked with the passion of the hero on his visionary quest, and, retrospectively at least, the events of his life would seem to fall into the imaginative pattern of the hero’s journey of transfiguration and return for the enlightenment of the human tribe. He lived his own description of the hero as ‘the one who, while still alive, knows and represents the claims of the superconsciousness which throughout creation is more or less unconscious’. (H, 259)
Mythology was the way that was most truly his own. It was not simply a lifelong study of a subject which he also taught; it was a profound religious position, one that refused the doctrine of a divinity transcendent to nature: ‘The great realization of mythology,’ he said, ‘is the immanence of the divine.’ (OL, 32) He often quoted the saying of Jesus from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas: ‘See the Kingdom of Heaven is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.’ By contrast, religion, in the orthodox sense of unilateral belief, was best defined as ‘a misinterpretation of mythology’, where ‘the misinterpretation consists precisely in attributing historical references to symbols which properly are spiritual in their reference’. (OL, 79) The mythic image is here, now, and always; myths are great poems which render insights into the wonder and miracle of life. Though they are deeply meaningful, they do not offer meaning or answers so much as delight and the longing to participate in the mystery of this finally inscrutable universe. As a union of psyche and metaphysics, myths put you in touch with your hearts.
Later in his life, in conversations on TV and taped dialogues, Campbell was often asked how to live the authentic life of an individual, how even to begin to try. To this he had one answer which remained constant throughout his life: ‘Follow your Bliss.’
I feel that if one follows what I call one’s bliss-the thing thatreally gets you deep in the gut and that you feel is your life-doors will open up. They do! They have in my life and they have in many lives that I know of.
(OL, 24)
If you follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid ... (PM, 120)
He came to this idea of bliss, he explains, because of three terms in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world: Sat, Chit, Ananda. Sat means being; Chit means consciousness; Ananda means bliss or rapture, and these terms represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence. ‘I thought,’ he said, ‘I don’t know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to my rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being.’ (PM, 120)
Yet it is not always easy to hang on to your rapture, and here the hero myth, and specifically the Grail myth, offers a guide. If the Call comes - the feeling that there is an adventure there for you - the risk must be taken. In An Open Life, a compilation of taped interviews with Michael Toms from 1975-85, Campbell speaks from the experience of an idea he has personally tested: ‘When I wrote about the Call forty years ago (in The Hero with a Thousand Faces), I was writing out of what I had read. Now that I’ve lived it, I know it’s correct ... These mythic clues work.’ (OL, 26) Elsewhere, he adds: ‘I always tell my students, go where your body and soul want to go. When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don’t let anyone throw you off.’ (PM, 118) When you follow your bliss, you come to bliss. But how to find your bliss, if it has not called you? ‘We are having experiences all the time which may on occasion render some sense of this, a little intuition of where your bliss is. Grab it. No one can tell you what it is going to be. You have to learn to recognize your own depth.’ (PM, 118)
When still at an early age, Campbell had to take on the challenge of seeing things differently from those around him. While he was brought up in the Roman Catholic faith, which he took very seriously, he was at the same time going with his father to see the Museum of Natural History with its rooms of totem poles, learning about the American Indians. So he was comparing virgin births, deaths and resurrections in both mythological systems at an early age. When he was a kid, he said, he never let anyone push him off course, and in this his family always supported him.
In his university years, he studied the literature of the Middle Ages and classical mythology, finding the same images which occurred in the Christian tradition, but inflected towards the more universal point of view. Graduate work in medieval literature took him first to Paris, in 1927, where he discovered James Joyce, and also modern art - particularly, Picasso and Klee. Then, in 1928-9, he went to Germany, to the University of Munich to study philology - the history of language - which brought him to Sanskrit, and introduced him to the whole world of the Orient. He had met Krishnamurti by chance (or synchronicity) on a boat to Europe in 1924, and had been given a book on the life of the Buddha, which prepared him for his later translating and editing of the Upanishads and The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna with Swami Nikhilananda.
In Germany he discovered Thomas Mann, and also Freud and Jung who opened up for him a new psychological dimension in the field of mythology. When he wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the two men were equal in his thinking, Freud relating to (what Jung calls) the personal unconscious and Jung to the collective unconscious. But in the years following, Jung became more and more eloquent for him: ‘Freud tells us what myths mean to neurotics. On the other hand, Jung gives us clues as to how to let the myth talk to us in its own terms, without putting a formula on it.’ (OL, 121) Jung’s Symbols of Transformation was ‘one of those things that sends all the lights up in all directions.’ (OL, 50) Campbell and Jung both saw mythology as the expression of the collective unconscious (though Campbell was more interested in diffusion than Jung was), and when they met, years later, it was as co-editors of the work of Heinrich Zimmer, the great Indologist and interpretor of symbols, whom Campbell regarded as ‘supplementary to Jung’. (OL, 120) It was Zimmer who, beyond anyone, gave him the courage to interpret myths out of what he knew to be their common symbols. There’s always a risk in such an interpretation, he added, pointing us to the operation of the hero myth at any moment of our lives, whatever we are doing.
When Cundrie appears to Parzival at Arthur’s Table, she disrupts the vision he had of how his life would be, and he got up and left it all behind. Campbell describes an experience in the little garden of Cluny in Paris, in which he was similarly struck by an impulse to change the course of his life, one that he, like Parzival, immediately followed. He was sitting in the garden, having put some years of study into his Ph.D., when:
It suddenly struck me: What in heaven’s name am I doing? I don’t even know how to eat a decent nourishing meal, and here I’m learning what happened to vulgar Latin when it passed into Portugese and Spanish and French. So I dropped work on my Ph.D. On my return I found a place in upstate New York and read the classics for 12 hours a day. I was enjoying myself enormously, and realized I would never finish my degree because it would have required me to do things I had already outgrown. In Europe, the world had opened up: Joyce, Sanskrit, the Orient, and the relationship of all these to Psychology. I couldn’t go back and finish up that Ph.D. thesis; besides, I didn’t have the money. And that free-wheeling maverick life gave me a sense of the deep joy in doing something meaningful to me. (OL, 125-6)
Like Parzival, he spent five years without a job! He came back from Europe in 1929, just three weeks before the Wall Street crash, which meant there were no jobs to be had, so he found a retreat up in Woodstock, New York, in ‘a little chicken coop place’, with no running water, and here he did most of his basic reading and work: ‘It was great. I was following my bliss.’ (PM, 120) When, after five years, he was invited to teach at Sarah Lawrence College, it was on his own terms: ‘I would not have taken a job otherwise, just as I wouldn’t take the Ph.D.’ (OL, 126)
He was to stay at Sarah Lawrence College from 1934 until he retired as Professor Emeritus in 1972, pursuing his own vision, and offering it back to the many students and friends who have found his life an inspiration. He makes it sound easy, but he once shared with a friend something of what it had asked of him. They were in front of some statue, and Campbell was bringing the mythic resonances of the image to life by comparing it with similar images in other cultures, and - to temper somewhat his friend’s appreciative enthusiasm - Campbell said: ‘Yes, but think of all the hundreds of hours spent reading, all the days, all the parties missed ...’
The image of courtly love also played through his relationship to his wife, Jean Erdman, the dancer and choreographer, to whom he was married for 49 years. Marriage, he said, was a sacrament in which you give up your personal simplicity to participate in a relationship, but you give not so much to the other person as to the relationship. In 1984, towards the end of his life, he was perhaps speaking of his own experience of Amor: ‘What a beautiful thing is a life together as growing personalities, each helping the other to flower, rather than just moving into the standard archetype.’
Jean Erdman writes of his work: ‘Throughout his long career, Joseph Campbell endeavoured to communicate his understanding of myth-his passion. And he tirelessly pursued the task he had set himself. Besides his books and lectures, there were workshops and interviews, which he eagerly welcomed because he believed scholarship should not mean isolation.’ (OL, Foreward)
Before The Hero with a Thousand Faces was published in 1949, which took four years to write, he had already edited the posthumous works of Heinrich Zimmer-Philosophies of India and The Art of Indian Asia-as well as six volumes of the papers from the Eranos conferences set up by Jung to explore the issues around analytical psychology, called the Eranos Notebooks. Next came The Flight of the Wild Gander (1951), which, as he wrote in his introduction, ‘occupied, or rather punctuated, a period of twenty-four years, during the whole of which I was circling, and from many quarters striving to interpret, the mystery of mythology.’ (FG, 3) There followed his unique discussion of the world’s archetypal images of divinity in their historical contexts, called The Masks of God, which was published over a period of 12 years as four separate but related books: Primitive Mythology; Oriental Mythology; Occidental Mythology; and Creative Mythology (1959-1968). He also wrote A Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake, and edited The Portable Jung and The Portable Arabian Knights. Myths To Live By (1971) was a selection of talks on mythology delivered in New York City between 1958 and 1971. In 1975, The Mythic Image was published by Princeton University Press after 10 years in preparation, a book which, incidentally, sets a standard for the right relation of text to image that has never subsequently been met. In 1983, The Way of the Animal Powers was published as the first volume of the Historical Atlas of World Mythology, followed in 1988 by the second volume, The Way of the Seeded Earth. In 1986, a record of various lectures in San Francisco, given between 1981 and 1984, was published under the title of The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion. Since then, in 1988, his conversations with Bill Moyers on TV (collected in The Power of Myth) and with Michael Toms on the ‘New Dimension’ tapes (compiled in An Open Life) have shown how profoundly he lived his own myth. His great gifts of storytelling and scholarship were offered to his students and readers that they also might engage in the call of the age:
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; for, as there is no more any fixed horizon, there is no more any fixed center, any Mecca, Rome, or Jerusalem. Our circle today is that announced, c. 1450, by Nicolas Cusanus (1401-64): whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere; the circle of infinite radius, which is also a straight line. (OC, 522)
The study of mythology was for Campbell a truly sacred task because it allowed a move out of the dogma of formal religion and into the spontaneous nature of one’s own inward drama and vitality of being. It is inevitable, then, that his life might seem to us to be the mythic image that he taught us how to understand, for mythology and the way of his life were one. If the Grail represents, as he said, ‘the fulfilment of the highest spiritual possibilities of the human consciousness’, (PM, 197) then his lifelong quest of the Holy Grail may indeed have been rewarded.
ref. http://www.julescashford.com/campbell.html
Abbreviations
H - The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell.
FG - The Flight of the Wild Gander, Joseph Campbell.
OC - Occidental Mythology, Joseph Campbell.
CM - Creative Mythology, Joseph Campbell.
PM - The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell.
OL - An Open Life, Joseph Campbell.
P - Parzival, Wolfram von Eschenbach. trans. A.T. Hatto (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1980).
Bibliography
The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Bollingen Series XVII (Princeton Univ. Press, 1949).
The Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimensions (Gateway Edition, 1951).
The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (New York: Viking Press, 1959).
The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology (New York: Viking Press, 1962).
The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology (New York: Viking Press, 1964).
The Masks of God: Creative Mythology (New York: Viking Press, 1968).
Myths To Live By (London: Bantam, 1972).
The Mythic Image, Bollingen Series C (Princeton Univ. Press, 1974).
The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion (London: St James Press, 1986).
Historical Atlas of World Mythology:
Vol. 1, The Way of the Animal Powers (London: Times Books, 1984).
Vol. 2, The Way of the Seeded Earth (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).
The Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers, from transcripts of the TV series (New York: Doubleday, 1988).
An Open Life. In Conversation with Michael Toms. (Compilations of Interviews from 1975-85) (Larsons Publications, 1988).
The Grail Tapes of lecture given in 1982 (Living Dharma Tapes).
Completed and edited the papers of Heinrich Zimmer: Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, The King and the Corpse, Philosophies of India, and The Art of Indian Asia.
Translated and edited, with Swami Nikhilananda, The Upanishads and The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna.
Edited Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks (6 vols.), Myths, Dreams and Religion, The Portable Jung, and The Portable Arabian Nights. Co-authored, with Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake.
The Unicorn Cup
The healing cup is not unconnected with the “cup of salvation,” the Eucharistic Chalice, and with the vessel used in divination.
Migne says that Cardinal Torquemada always kept a unicorn cup at table: “La corne de licorne preserve des sortileges” (fig. 261).
Hippolytus, in his summing up of the teachings of the Naassenes, says that the Greeks called “Geryon of the threefold body” the “heavenly horn of the moon.”
But Geryon was the “Jordan,” the “masculo-feminine Man in all things, by whom all things were made.”
In this connection Hippolytus mentions the cup of Joseph and Anacreon: The words “without him was not any thing made” refer to the world of forms, because this was created without his help through the third and fourth [members of the quaternity].
For this is . . .the cup from which the king, when he drinks, draws his omens.
The Greeks likewise alluded to this secret in the Anacreontic verses:
My tankard tells me
Speaking in mute silence
What I must become.
This alone sufficed for it to be known among men, namely the cup of Anacreon which mutely declares the ineffable secret.
For they say Anacreon’s cup is dumb; yet Anacreon affirms that it tells him in mute language what he must become, that is, spiritual and not carnal, if he will hear the secret hidden in silence.
And this secret is the water which Jesus, at that fair marriage, changed into wine.
That was the great and true beginning of the miracles which Jesus wrought in Cana in Galilee, and thus he showed forth the kingdom of heaven.
This [beginning] is the kingdom of heaven that lies within us as a treasure, like the “leaven hidden in three measures of meal.”
We have seen that the “heavenly horn of the moon” is closely connected with the unicorn.
Here it means not only “Geryon of the threefold body” * and the Jordan, but the hermaphroditic Man as well, who is identical with the Johannine Logos.
The “third and fourth” are water and earth; these two elements are thought of as forming the lower half of the world in the alchemical retort, and Hippolytus likens them to a cup.
This is the divining-vessel of Joseph and Anacrcon: the water stands for the content and the earth for the container, i.e., the cup itself.
The content is the water that Jesus changed into wine, and the water is also represented by the Jordan, which signifies the Logos, thus bringing out the analogy with the Chalice.
Its content gives life and healing, like the cup in IV Ezra (14:39-40:
Then I opened my month, and lo! there was reached unto me a full cup,
which was lull as it were with water, but the color of it was like fire.*
And I took it and drank; and when I had drunk,
My heart poured forth understanding,
wisdom grew in my breast,
and my spirit retained its memory.
The secret of the cup is also the secret of the horn, which in its turn contains
the essence of the unicorn as bestower of strength, health, and life (fig. 263).
The alchemists attribute the same qualities to their stone, calling it the “carbuncle.”
According to legend, this stone may be found under the horn of the unicorn, as Wolfram von Eschenbach says:
We caught the beast called Unicorn
That knows and loves a maiden best
And falls asleep upon her breast;
We took from underneath his horn
The splendid male carbuncle stone
Sparkling against the white skull-bone.
The horn as an emblem of vigor and strength has a masculine character, but at the same time it is a cup, which, as a receptacle, is feminine.
So we are dealing here with a “uniting symbol” that expresses the bipolarity of the archetype (fig. 264).
These assorted unicorn symbolisms aim at giving no more than a sample of the extremely intricate and tangled connections between pagan and natural philosophy, Gnosticism, alchemy, and ecclesiastical tradition, which, in its turn, had a deep and lasting influence on the world of medieval alchemy.
I hope that these examples have made clear to the reader just how far alchemy was a religious-philosophical or “mystical” movement.
It may well have reached its peak in Goethe’s religious Weltanschauung, as this is presented to us in Faust. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Pages 466-471.
The healing cup is not unconnected with the “cup of salvation,” the Eucharistic Chalice, and with the vessel used in divination.
Migne says that Cardinal Torquemada always kept a unicorn cup at table: “La corne de licorne preserve des sortileges” (fig. 261).
Hippolytus, in his summing up of the teachings of the Naassenes, says that the Greeks called “Geryon of the threefold body” the “heavenly horn of the moon.”
But Geryon was the “Jordan,” the “masculo-feminine Man in all things, by whom all things were made.”
In this connection Hippolytus mentions the cup of Joseph and Anacreon: The words “without him was not any thing made” refer to the world of forms, because this was created without his help through the third and fourth [members of the quaternity].
For this is . . .the cup from which the king, when he drinks, draws his omens.
The Greeks likewise alluded to this secret in the Anacreontic verses:
My tankard tells me
Speaking in mute silence
What I must become.
This alone sufficed for it to be known among men, namely the cup of Anacreon which mutely declares the ineffable secret.
For they say Anacreon’s cup is dumb; yet Anacreon affirms that it tells him in mute language what he must become, that is, spiritual and not carnal, if he will hear the secret hidden in silence.
And this secret is the water which Jesus, at that fair marriage, changed into wine.
That was the great and true beginning of the miracles which Jesus wrought in Cana in Galilee, and thus he showed forth the kingdom of heaven.
This [beginning] is the kingdom of heaven that lies within us as a treasure, like the “leaven hidden in three measures of meal.”
We have seen that the “heavenly horn of the moon” is closely connected with the unicorn.
Here it means not only “Geryon of the threefold body” * and the Jordan, but the hermaphroditic Man as well, who is identical with the Johannine Logos.
The “third and fourth” are water and earth; these two elements are thought of as forming the lower half of the world in the alchemical retort, and Hippolytus likens them to a cup.
This is the divining-vessel of Joseph and Anacrcon: the water stands for the content and the earth for the container, i.e., the cup itself.
The content is the water that Jesus changed into wine, and the water is also represented by the Jordan, which signifies the Logos, thus bringing out the analogy with the Chalice.
Its content gives life and healing, like the cup in IV Ezra (14:39-40:
Then I opened my month, and lo! there was reached unto me a full cup,
which was lull as it were with water, but the color of it was like fire.*
And I took it and drank; and when I had drunk,
My heart poured forth understanding,
wisdom grew in my breast,
and my spirit retained its memory.
The secret of the cup is also the secret of the horn, which in its turn contains
the essence of the unicorn as bestower of strength, health, and life (fig. 263).
The alchemists attribute the same qualities to their stone, calling it the “carbuncle.”
According to legend, this stone may be found under the horn of the unicorn, as Wolfram von Eschenbach says:
We caught the beast called Unicorn
That knows and loves a maiden best
And falls asleep upon her breast;
We took from underneath his horn
The splendid male carbuncle stone
Sparkling against the white skull-bone.
The horn as an emblem of vigor and strength has a masculine character, but at the same time it is a cup, which, as a receptacle, is feminine.
So we are dealing here with a “uniting symbol” that expresses the bipolarity of the archetype (fig. 264).
These assorted unicorn symbolisms aim at giving no more than a sample of the extremely intricate and tangled connections between pagan and natural philosophy, Gnosticism, alchemy, and ecclesiastical tradition, which, in its turn, had a deep and lasting influence on the world of medieval alchemy.
I hope that these examples have made clear to the reader just how far alchemy was a religious-philosophical or “mystical” movement.
It may well have reached its peak in Goethe’s religious Weltanschauung, as this is presented to us in Faust. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Pages 466-471.
Cessation of Outflowing ~
If thou wouldst complete the diamond body with no outflowing,
Diligently heat he roots of consciousness and life.
Kindle light in the blessed country ever close at hand,
And there hidden, let thy true self always dwell.
If thou wouldst complete the diamond body with no outflowing,
Diligently heat he roots of consciousness and life.
Kindle light in the blessed country ever close at hand,
And there hidden, let thy true self always dwell.
The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal
by Arthur Edward Waite
http://sacred-texts.com/sro/hchg/index.htm
Participation mystique, or mystical participation, refers to the instinctive human tie to symbolic fantasy emanations. This symbolic life precedes or accompanies all mental and intellectual differentiation. The concept is closely tied to that of projection because these contents, which are often mythological motifs, project themselves into situations and objects, including other persons, as readily as we project color into the objects we perceive.
Identification or resonance. Jung defines participation mystique as one of his basic definitions in Psychological Types, crediting it to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl.
PARTICIPATION MYSTIQUE is a term derived from Lévy-Bruhl. It denotes a peculiar kind of psychological connection with objects, and consists in the fact that the subject cannot clearly distinguish himself from the object but is bound to it by a direct relationship which amounts to partial identity. (Jung, [1921] 1971: paragraph 781).
Jung used the term throughout his writings after Lévy-Brühl's work was published in 1912. Jung referred to it consistently with the French terminology rather than using the English "mystical participation" until Man and His Symbols was published after his death.
The further we go back into history, the more we see personality disappearing beneath the wrappings of collectivity. And if we go right back to primitive psychology, we find absolutely no trace of the concept of an individual. Instead of individuality we find only collective relationship or what Lévy-Bruhl calls participation mystique (Jung, [1921] 1971: par. 12).
Participation mystique is a starting point for exploring ‘shared realities’. Related areas include: projective identification, negative coniunctio, reverie, intersubjectivity, the interactive field, phenomenology, neuroscience, the transferential chimera, shamanism, shared reality of place, borderland consciousness, and mystical participation. From projective identification to intersubjectivity to the mysteries of transitional space.
Jung speaks of participation mystique in terms of projection of our unconscious contents onto others and the world around us. He says: “People with a narrow conscious life exteriorize their unconscious, they are continually in participation mystique with other people… if more unconscious things have become conscious to you, then you live less in participation mystique.” (Visions, para 1184).
He also states: “Most connections in the world are not relationships, they are participation mystique. One is then apparently connected, but of course it is never a real connection, it is never a relationship; but it gives the feeling of being one sheep in the flock at least.” (Visions, p 625)
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.
Why should the Grail Knight go in search of the Grail when its gifts are supposed to be freely available upon the altar of every church in the land? This is a mystery that is uncovered at the same time as the answer to the Question is given.
Good intentions are not enough for the Grail Seeker. It is necessary to believe in the Quest itself and to exclude all other things, however honorable, from the mind. The Grail must be sought in the heart of the Seeker.
Although the Grail is a healing force, it will scourge as often as it will nourish. Those chosen few who pass its rigorous tests are transformed. But those who attempt to grasp its meaning before they are ready, are purged and often destroyed. When Lucifer fell from heaven, the emerald stone in his crown fell to earth. As it did so, it changed from Stone to Sword, then to Spear and Cup, and finally to Dish.
The Grail is usually seen as the center point of the earth and that place where the earth is joined to the sky. It is the threshold between worlds and is a source of fertility, abundance and life. It is the point from which all directions are established. This also applies to time and all times occur simultaneously.
The hidden yet obvious symbol of the Grail is the Round Table. Let us ride to Arthur's court and take our rightful place at the Table as one of the 12 knights. http://www.crcsite.org/printGrail3.htm
by Arthur Edward Waite
http://sacred-texts.com/sro/hchg/index.htm
Participation mystique, or mystical participation, refers to the instinctive human tie to symbolic fantasy emanations. This symbolic life precedes or accompanies all mental and intellectual differentiation. The concept is closely tied to that of projection because these contents, which are often mythological motifs, project themselves into situations and objects, including other persons, as readily as we project color into the objects we perceive.
Identification or resonance. Jung defines participation mystique as one of his basic definitions in Psychological Types, crediting it to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl.
PARTICIPATION MYSTIQUE is a term derived from Lévy-Bruhl. It denotes a peculiar kind of psychological connection with objects, and consists in the fact that the subject cannot clearly distinguish himself from the object but is bound to it by a direct relationship which amounts to partial identity. (Jung, [1921] 1971: paragraph 781).
Jung used the term throughout his writings after Lévy-Brühl's work was published in 1912. Jung referred to it consistently with the French terminology rather than using the English "mystical participation" until Man and His Symbols was published after his death.
The further we go back into history, the more we see personality disappearing beneath the wrappings of collectivity. And if we go right back to primitive psychology, we find absolutely no trace of the concept of an individual. Instead of individuality we find only collective relationship or what Lévy-Bruhl calls participation mystique (Jung, [1921] 1971: par. 12).
Participation mystique is a starting point for exploring ‘shared realities’. Related areas include: projective identification, negative coniunctio, reverie, intersubjectivity, the interactive field, phenomenology, neuroscience, the transferential chimera, shamanism, shared reality of place, borderland consciousness, and mystical participation. From projective identification to intersubjectivity to the mysteries of transitional space.
Jung speaks of participation mystique in terms of projection of our unconscious contents onto others and the world around us. He says: “People with a narrow conscious life exteriorize their unconscious, they are continually in participation mystique with other people… if more unconscious things have become conscious to you, then you live less in participation mystique.” (Visions, para 1184).
He also states: “Most connections in the world are not relationships, they are participation mystique. One is then apparently connected, but of course it is never a real connection, it is never a relationship; but it gives the feeling of being one sheep in the flock at least.” (Visions, p 625)
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.
Why should the Grail Knight go in search of the Grail when its gifts are supposed to be freely available upon the altar of every church in the land? This is a mystery that is uncovered at the same time as the answer to the Question is given.
Good intentions are not enough for the Grail Seeker. It is necessary to believe in the Quest itself and to exclude all other things, however honorable, from the mind. The Grail must be sought in the heart of the Seeker.
Although the Grail is a healing force, it will scourge as often as it will nourish. Those chosen few who pass its rigorous tests are transformed. But those who attempt to grasp its meaning before they are ready, are purged and often destroyed. When Lucifer fell from heaven, the emerald stone in his crown fell to earth. As it did so, it changed from Stone to Sword, then to Spear and Cup, and finally to Dish.
The Grail is usually seen as the center point of the earth and that place where the earth is joined to the sky. It is the threshold between worlds and is a source of fertility, abundance and life. It is the point from which all directions are established. This also applies to time and all times occur simultaneously.
The hidden yet obvious symbol of the Grail is the Round Table. Let us ride to Arthur's court and take our rightful place at the Table as one of the 12 knights. http://www.crcsite.org/printGrail3.htm
"Be thy Mind opened unto the Higher, Be thy Heart a Center of Light,
Be thy Body a Temple of the Rose Cross."
Be thy Body a Temple of the Rose Cross."
Parsifal and the Secret of the Grail Unveiled
http://www.parareligion.ch/2011/parsifal-franz.htm
Theodor Reuss
Parsifal et le Secret du Graal Dévoilé
I. Introduction
Fighting Spirits
Although already 32 years have passed since the festive play of Richard Wagner created July 26, 1882 Parsifal was seen in the spotlight in a theater in Bayreuth. Parsifal is a "sacred scenic festival" (known in German Bühnenweihfestspiel). It seems that now for the first time, with free access to this great work, the German people generally began to find interest in Parsifal. Contemporary with awakening the interest of the broad masses of the German people in Parsifal, a flood of newspaper articles about Parsifal began to circulate, with no trace of a deep sense of suspicion mystical intrigue and symbolizes the room is lost. The great masses of Parsifal commentators who do not have a trace of a hint of the deep mystical meaning of the Grail secret and critics of Parsifal are not even the worst enemies of Wagner and the idea of Parsifal. The actual worst, by whom I mean here, dangerous enemies of Wagner are those columnists, critics, performers, etc. - Who surely have no idea of the deep mystical meaning of Parsifal and the idea of the Grail, but go against the recognized meaning, or voluntarily change the true and only really deep sense of the idea of Parsifal in its exact opposite direction. The worst of the latter category is sexual ascetics. Because they understand very well the symbolic meaning of Parsifal, but they reversed the idea of Wagner in his exact opposite. They are those who, based on the plot of the play Parsifal and the misunderstanding of its underlying mystery, proclaim sexual abstinence German people, far and wide as the Gospel of waiver, and they knowingly lay the foundations of population decline virulent German. If it has not yet succeeded, it is time to pull the rug from under the feet of these false prophets. Blame God that these days already the envy of all contaminants for pleasure and general fled responsible for the vast majority of the German people has led to the narrowing of the birth of children, that our German people needing to develop its population. This is also a problem that sexual ascetics, in defense of abstinence from the act of procreation in total, finally reach the ears of the masses of young Germans, then the fall in the number of births in the German Reich will lead to a consequence of iron in the direct decline of the German people. (Death of State!)
One of these dangerous sexual ascetics is apparently Professor R. Guhr, the brilliant creator of the monumental statue of Wagner in Dresden, where he depicts Wagner, not as a composer, but as a missionary of a new Christianity, or as Professor Guhr called the poet-songwriter with a small promotional writing: Herald of the gospel (Guardian of the Sacred Fire). Professor Guhr had released a small private text in December 1913, "Das Gralsmysterium und der esoterische Keys zum Parsifal" [The Mystery of the Grail and the esoteric key to Parsifal], in which he declared:
"The highlight of the plot is based on the revival of the sacred spear, which at the beginning of the drama, is already described as the greatest heroic act. Because it is produced by a quitclaim deed, we have to recognize the symbol of sexual asceticism, the great passion of the seeker of God every time. We see the result of this abstinence in Parsifal in the ability to bring healing by the touch of the sacred lance with Amfortas, who lost the same . Kundry in arms using esoteric keys on the fundamental ideas of the drama submitted following the revealed mystery, valid truth for all born of the earth through sexual abstinence person controlling the pulse can convert the erotic power of his healing power in the body, which, thanks to the application can bring health, for one who does not have the power to asceticism.
This and this alone meant the conquest of the sacred spear, because here the true core of the mystery grail is to be seen that, for the blessing of humanity now becomes clearer and clearer. "
Professor Guhr is a student of the mystically very talented Valerie Gyigyi in Berlin, whose master was before Frater Merlin. Professor Guhr actually speak, so those who know and insiders. And precisely because it speaks to initiates and those who know its propaganda for sexual asceticism and must be opposed with the strongest weapons as unholy, as it is always possible to limit and control the it generated as a connoisseur, leading his knowledge in the wrong street. As an insider Professor Guhr proclaim revelation keys to the secret teachings of sexual magic, he calls valid truth born of any land in which he states through sexual abstinence person controlling the pulse can convert erotic power of his healing power in the body, which, thanks to the application can bring health, for one who does not have the power to asceticism. Professor Guhr misplaced on the wrong track, as he has profaned the secret of truth, which is only valid for and in the future there can be valid only for the priests of the Temple chosen because it has tried to apply this behavior to men and youth in the general population. Here separates the way insiders and those who know that of Professor Guhr. Since Guhr professor believes need to reveal the mystery of the Grail to mean sexual asceticism, to promote his theory of sexual asceticism (detrimental to the condition of the German people), we want to linger over it, but will reveal the true secret of the Grail, to serve the sexually mature development and courageous German people.
II. main part
The Unveiling of the Secret.
The author of this article has been the greatest privilege in his youth to personally know the immortal poet, composer Richard Wagner of having visited as a guest in the Villa Wahnfried repeatedly and for being present at all rehearsals and productions of festive piece Parsifal at Bayreuth in July and August 1882.
These circumstances, coupled with the additional privilege to be delivered to long conversations with colleagues Wagner, Parsifal and the mystical idea gave the author the first clue for the discovery of the key that unlocks the mystery of the holy grail to him. Wagner informs through the deeds in Parsifal a Healing Truth. The art of this Healing Truth will be revealed in the following lines.
Professor Guhr said completely correctly that Wagner himself studied the problem of the solution and tried to express it poetically in his compositions and especially in the festive room Parsifal. This is a fundamental error and deeply regrettable of all sexual ascetics to believe that Richard Wagner found the research to the solution in the rejection of the sexual act, that is to say, in the human forbearance of sexual intercourse with a woman and wanted to promote this view and this version of the solution in his dramatic compositions - but especially in the part of Parsifal. In reality, the opposite is the case! Wagner is not only the greatest hero, but also the greatest teacher and prophet of sexual religion of the future, based on the realization of necessary ritual sex. Already in Lohengrin he began to hint that it would build in Tristan especially later in the ring of the Nibelungen - finally improve in Parsifal: The New Gospel Hi sexual Religion! A comprehensive presentation of the case within the limits of this paper, which was originally only a private response to the article by Professor Guhr on Parsifal is obviously impossible, but we will return the following lines of Wagner's prose. In Rheingold Fafner sings: The golden apples grow in its (Freia) garden ... and in the context of those words brings to the attention that after Freia has been kidnapped by the giant as a pledge, all other gods get sick and pale ... apostasy, because, as Wagner added later to explain, they have to go without the golden apples of Freia vegetable garden that does not really incisive people, only a little courage in the process of thought, to understand the essence of these advice full of tact - meaning Wagner by the golden apples in the garden of Freias.
We express the solution with the explanation of the dinner of the Grail. This meal 'Divine' 'which, in his later years, returned under other symbols - the same as dinner Grail, Wagner wanted to convey to those who come after him.
And further: Nothung, Nothung, envious sword - which is Nothung sword, but this unbreakable legacy Siegfried, as the only son of the father, retempère in the fire of youth. What else but a symbol of primal sword (primal Phallus!) The primal primal father blocked the sword into the trunk of the primal tree, and the one that comes out this sword wins a woman with him - as his wife and sister! They are not symbols of abstinence! (sexual ascetics!) Since we started this, we want to go ahead with the explanation of the secret doctrine concealed in Parsifal. Parsifal, virgin, naive, reached the Grail region.
There he killed a white swan with his arrow as his first act. The White Swan is (according to the Nordic mystical tradition), the symbol of ecstasy, ongoing spiritual joy, who lives and dominates the heart and soul of the Grail Knight, as the highest ecstasy whose fate live all the inhabitants of the Grail region. Parsifal task to get the swan, who had stolen to seek his female to cross with her on the lake (water-symbol of the feminine principle, so there Hi wonderfully devoted to the bath with his arrow in the snow-white breast . the red blood colored the white feathers of the dead swan is therefore a symbolic representation of the naive, virgin Parsifal with his act against nature (sexual) (arrow) commander holy ecstasy which made a wound in the territory of the Grail and injury . to appease this misdeed, Gurnemanz thought to lead Parsifal Grail. the hope influenced Gurnemanz that Parsifal would be the fool who is called the Savior of the sick Amfortas. Gurnemanz is still not absolutely certain that Parsifal is pure and crazy, because it decides to lead Parsifal to the castle of the Grail, for Gurnemanz sang after the two had walked some time: now, take care and let me see if you're crazy, and if you are ... the pure! test, it is a pure fool, Parsifal arrives first in the Grail Temple! This point can not be developed further here.
However, it should specifically refer to the previous line, which has great scope of what it means for our presentation of evidence. Gurnemanz says: Now, let me take you to the devout meal, then - (here's a dash in writing), being pure, you will now eat and drink Grail! But now we see in the course of the plot in the Temple of the Grail, that (Grail celebrating the Eucharist) was not eaten and drunk by Parsifal! It follows that Parsifal was not pure enough! All weariness Gurnemanz said again to Parsifal at the end of the celebration of the Holy Grail, you are still just a fool, a fool! So: not pure - but only stupid, and the final word Gurnemanz in Parsifal at the end of the first act is, in the future leave them in peace swans here (do not disturb the ecstasy of the inhabitants of the Grail region again), but you will seek Gander goose!
These very amusing words mean: - in the future, seeks more than ecstasy, incitement to acts against nature (sexual), but looking for a woman of your own nature and the natural way and pursue sexual acts it !! In this way, these words have a lot of fun mystical meaning to them! Without our senses, they remain incomprehensible and senseless, such as Gurnemanz words: that the swan through Lake with his lady consecrated the lake as a bath Saint! Before explaining the secret hidden meaning of the second act, we must correct the error widespread in the design and direction of Amfortas's wound. The wounds of Amfortas do not symbolize divine punishment for the practice of the sexual act (played by Amfortas) on himself (which flashed naturally particularly strong sexual ascetics recommended). But the wound is the punishment for Amfortas performing the sexual act in a vain way with a woman of pleasure out obligations and therefore unholy grail rite. According to the view of sexual ascetics, after this fall from grace, Amfortas generally is more worthy of the office as King Grail and unfit to rule the unveiling of the Grail! But we see in the first act, Amfortas despite his injury was still very capable and is able, to unveil the Grail knights to drink and eat. Unlike Amfortas in the practice of his office, from when he was still recovering, and the time after the crime is only after his fall from grace, the Office of the unveiling Grail caused him terrible pain, torment and suffering! Then the Grail conducted a food and drink despite the condition, that the sinner, unworthy and wounded Amfortas he reveals. Only Amfortas prevailing in his office suffered (only for himself) by the practice of his office! So why Amfortas he suffer? !
Amfortas, after the fall in the deepest regret and feeling unworthy to perform the ritual act in the temple, fell to self tourmentassions (Masturbation!), The artificial substitute of all sexual ascetics. So the office caused the sovereign agony of soul and body pain. To understand this profound truth, solemn and mysterious, mystical Christian truth, we must understand how to properly interpret the words of the Bible, especially John the Evangelist and other places. You have to know the secret teachings of the Israelites as declared in the Zohar, and it must correctly understand the Bhagavad Gita. And the support of our production of evidence, it must be expressly mentioned here that Wagner had been charged with the secrets of the Bhagavad Gita, already at the time of his involvement with Wesendonks and Nietzsche (1852-1857).
The following lines must be observed:
St. John the Evangelist, IV, 13; VI, 27; VII, 51-58; VIII, 38; III, 14-15. Genesis 2; 3; 15, 13; 16, 2; 17, 10-14; 19; 24; 28, 18-22; 30, 2-22; 31, 30-35; 35, 1-15; 38, 13-26. Paul, Luke, John revelation, etc. Bhagavad-Gita II 17. 18; VI, 27. 28. 29; V, 5; VI, 10; VII, 8; X 39; VIII, 10; IX, 18; IV, 27. 31; V, 7. 10; XVIII, 63.
*
Later will refer again briefly to the curative effect of malice sacred power of the Grail.
Now we want to continue with the importance of the second act. Klingsor, the sorcerer (black magician in opposition to the Grail King, the white magician) is the first person to appear to us in the second act. Gurnemanz speaks of him in the first act (Kingsor) itself impotent to destroy sin, puts the ugly hand (blasphemous) on itself, now devoted to Graal - contemptuous including protective railed against it!
In these words are the strongest and most vocal repudiation of Wagner all possible attempts of sexual fanatical ascetics to confiscate his Parsifal for the special purposes of sexual asceticism.
Klingsor emasculated himself in order to become a perfect sexual ascetic, for after his misinterpretation (Klingsor) - the current design of the Grail mysteries (and the representation of the false perception of Klingsor, Wagner himself wishes to confront and lead to absurdity the false view of all sexual ascetics) alone, which usually does not end the sexual act, or after the false vision Klingsors, who can supplement it is worthy, able and called to preserve the Grail.
Wagner puts special emphasis on this fundamentally false view of all sexual ascetics, mark it as a fundamental error, and Parsifal, he uses the most sharpened words: Despising the Grail whose protector took exception to it!
*
Not only unworthy and incapable is such a sexual ascetic, to preserve the Grail, but also contemptuous the Graal refuses such sexual ascetic! But why? This someone can only discover through the study of lines, cities of the Old and New Testament of the (B) of the Bhagavad Gita and the explanation of the Knight of St. Clement Marcq, who wrote about Nature of the Eucharist, but also in Waite's commentary on Israel's secret teachings. We find the basis for not only in the New Testament, but everywhere. A clear explanation of the lines concerned, symbolic of the Old Testament, we find even in the Zohar. Finally the solution is also found in the secret teachings of the Templars and the secret teachings of the Gnostics. Professor Guhr rightly remarks: the highlight of the plot lies in the revival of the sacred spear, which is already represented as the highest heroic act at the beginning of the drama. However, the conclusion Guhr the teacher draws on these words is completely wrong when he says, because it happens by a quitclaim deed, we must recognize in it a symbol of sexual asceticism ...
So unfortunately against false conceptions Wagner had already planned and used above quoted words contemptuous the Graal to the protector who railed against her, please, exception! Really, we have in the revival of the spear, an act of renunciation, not a symbol of sexual asceticism by itself and all! The symbolic revival of the spear, represented in the second act of Parsifal, dramatically, means the following.
Lance is certainly (also from Professor Guhr This is) the symbol of the phallus. And all the same that is used for example the use of a picture (symbol) Love shoots an arrow (and it is probably a symbol of the phallus) at two lovers signifying a request and stimulation love for a sexual union of two lovers become so run the spear Parsifal means that Klingsor wants to compel him to perform an act of naked lust that even as just an act of lust even once would have been a drop in thanks!
Remembering now the pain and suffering of Amfortas, which was imposed during his insane regret over the one-act of lust, Parsifal becomes strong and resists because of the constraint attempt (seduction by Kundry) caused launched by the spear out of the sorcerer Klingsor! But Parsifal instantly recognizable thanks to the ingenuity, enlightenment and inner awareness, the saving call of the spear in the Temple of the Grail serve as a healer and Parsifal seized the lance - and himself with spear in hand path for the Grail.
Now begins the true pilgrimage: Parsifal with spear in hand! Here begins the renunciation symbol!
The lies of waiver, symbolically expressed in the words, with spear in hand! A waiver is first, then a waiver in the true sense of the word, when we do not do something that we recognized that it is desirable and wished to. The residence Parsifal with spear in hand corresponds to the 40 days that Christ must have passed in deserts. It corresponds to the trials and tribulations that all candidates of all ancient religions, all mystical secret societies, etc. had to undergo before they can become insiders. This trip also corresponds to the 40 days of fasting and abstention, which further initiates a mystical society today require their candidates as a test before they are ready to explore the mystical secret, saving, and teachings. - Wagner shows the renunciation (restraining the pulse) through this, as he shows Parsifal in the third act, after the end of his stay (pilgrimage) in sombre black armament with spear driven into the territory of the Grail. Parsifal renounced all lust and pleasure during the 40 days, the stay was symbolically represented. But also Kundry passes the 40 days, as stated in the third act, it is almost starved in her brown dress penitential under a shrub (symbol of life) in the territory of the Grail border.
As Gurnemanz Parsifal discovering he was finally arrived in the territory of the Grail, he half his spear up, wearing the black shield in front and then prayed, his impassive gaze and locked in ecstasy on the tip the spear! A profound symbol!
Only words Kundry (and the last she spoke in the whole drama) when it is returned to life after a long period of mourning, remains to serve, to serve! In these words, to serve, to serve! is expressed and contained Wagner's (and our) complete philosophy concerning the grounds of the woman in our cosmos. The woman is resolutely to serve the virile global goal (preservation of the world), it receives the seed of the primal lance and thus preserves the fabric of the world. This is the primary objective and eternal woman. This goal will serve only Kundry now! In order to symbolically show that Kundry has killed the ancient practice of inciting lust and lust of satisfaction (misuse of sexual union), Wagner left the sink and die down before the altar of the Grail; before the feet of the Grail King at the end of the story. This is of course a symbol! For in reality (in the sense of Wagner's work) Kundry serves the King of the Grail in the future in the ritual and saving union and will be the mother of the Grail knight Lohengrin! Sexual ascetics try with iron determination and persistence to outdo themselves by ignoring the facts, Parsifal, the Grail King, conceives a son - (we are talking about only the thought process of Wagner, which supports naturally his drama) Lohengrin and Parsifal - and son can not be conceived by Parsifal that through a sexual act with a woman. And the act of conception must have occurred in the time after the end of the third act of the play Parsifal. This woman may, in the territory of the Grail, only have been the kind of woman who lingered there only to serve. Then the baptized Kundry who had passed through the 40 days, so closely linked to the correct symbol for the service woman, who was the son of King Grail.
Now it only remains to show that the miracle of the highest design by looking in the greatest holy heater with it 'love food' in the sacred vessel flowing as expected by the Knights. What Watch is the Holy Grail!
But Parsifal does not ask the first act: what the Grail, Parsifal asks: who is the Holy Grail? - And why Wagner did not tell Parsifal: what what the Grail? Here lies hidden a deep mystery! So Parsifal asks (with underlying intent of the author) who is the Holy Grail? - And Gurnemanz answers quite revealing: one can not say!
Why we can not say it? It would have been easy enough to Gurnemanz, to tell Parsifal: what the Grail! Lohengrin also has a way of describing the Grail, especially in front of the congregation of King Heinrich war people.
If Wagner had no intention here of expressing a specially kept secret and deeply mystical explanation of the true nature of the Grail, he would have left Gurnemanz give Parsifal a similar explanation as Lohengrin also gave to King Heinrich.
But at the end of his life seemingly no more worldly consideration, Wagner wanted to show his favorite composition, which he had already considered in its early years (1853-1857) - the true nature of the Grail and the concept of raising the large fire sign of encouragement and rallying all insiders. Wagner has shown more clearly in the final words of the third act of Parsifal as Parsifal at the highest enchantment exhibited on the lance (erect), to the point of contemplating enthusiastically singing
Oh, what a miracle of the largest Fortune!
What may close your wound.
I see the holy blood running it.
In the nostalgia of the relative source.
Which here flows, flows in the wave of Grail!
The meaning of these words, we do not say! -can Only be known and understood - but - not spoken! In these words lies hidden the highest, most glorious, most sacred symbol of the sexual magic!
Here begins a secret teaching which is exclusively reserved for insiders.
It is known as a fact that Wagner was familiar with the Bhagavad Gita and other mystical secret teachings. Wagner also began to think about a new manifestation of Christianity, in his last years of life.
Christianity, however, was that a totally different Christianity Christianity that is usually associated with that word.
A warning to all
Narrow minded spirits, petty, or malicious, large and small! Like all of the intrigue, conspiracy, conspiracy Parsifal in the festive part of Richard Wagner's only an allegory, a symbolic representation with no real occurrence in the material world, so the above explanation of the secret Grail is not to be understood as a personal matter, literal, earthly, relative to vulgar events. But this is only to be understood as totally impersonal, symbolic and relating purely spiritual motives.
The author.
III. Practical Application
Framework of the New Temple O.T.O.
We unveiled the "secret" of the Grail and this revelation with urgent necessity submit that Wagner concerned with this new rise of Christianity, in which prophetically saw, as Guhr professor cited the heroism of Wagner and Christianity , salvation in physical regeneration, reorganization and higher development of the individual, in which humanity will look for a future salvation.
We saw it as our duty to try also the practical use of discovered truth or truths. What is art Hi, Wagner wished in his writings?
New Christianity filled with new life can not be a possible Christian asceticism in general (waiver or abstinence from sexual intercourse) it can not - and should be, while logically, a Christianity that brings salvation to the people of sin and freedom from original sin!
Professor Guhr himself says: it is therefore with him (Wagner), no dogma made it difficult for him in his swan song to establish the sacred mysteries: the secret final of humanity and the deification of solution processes (libido) -belligènes by priestly dogma or skepticism, they express the riddle of Christianity clearly in the formula. And that will be the basis of the future church. Priests of this church will be able to communicate after the example of Parsifal, the active spirit of God, the "Daimon" tamed as a saving power for his entourage.
These processes, which we fully support.
We restrict their effectiveness, however, the narrow circle of doctors-priests of the new temple OTO, which we will discuss later. It posits not only a new Christianity but also a new civilization. Our present civilization arises from the Christianity of the church fathers, who, with a mix of Paul's teachings with those pre-Christian (so-called pagan) principles and teachings today that makes the reigning Christianity. And teachings of this artificially constructed Christianity is the real truth or truths on which our civilization (and moral) is formed.
One of the fundamental teachings, one might even say, basic education, which definitely gave to Christianity its character today is to teach the doctrine of the fall from grace. This fall from grace has been established the Christian vision of the concept of shame.
The Christian church understands shame (also from shame) in a narrow, real sense as the genitals of people and their doctrine based on civil law. The Christian is taught from youth to be ashamed of these shameful parts! The natural use of these shameful parts, even the consideration of the shameful parts of a person is a sin to some extent the main feature of the Christian church and Christian countries laws. A Christian woman who uses her sex organs naturally, without concession to the church or the state, especially if the natural result of use becomes the question will be marked as a fallen woman. Earlier without fail, today in narrower circumstances, but in a certain sense, the fallen woman will be excommunicated from the community of the righteous, and will be stamped as outcast, fallen, despised.
In short: all sexuality was sin and shame and still is according to the official, in the sense of the Church and the Law!
In the pre-Christian period, it was not so. The Israelites had their own secret teachings, in which they recognized the genitals that land symbols of man's divinity. And the religious system of the East, the genitals are excited to date with divine reverence as symbols of divinity!
We no longer maintain critical false views of Christianity concerning sexuality as a moral evil, because our goal is not to analyze or to destroy, but to be constructive. Most critics have sooner only criticized, weakened and torn the Christian Church, without building.
But we want to build, rebuild a new one!
In a special part of our editorial, we present a small selection of quotes from the Bible and other sacred writings of other religious systems that provide evidence that all religions, Christianity included, have a sexual basis. So we want to demonstrate that we have no intention of founding a new religion, but we want to remove garbage that the pseudo Christianity has piled up, domed on religions of the ancient world to the ancient and true religion again resume its rightful place.
The Christian religion has hidden his sexual basis to this day in the cult of Mary, unbeknownst to the people and moderate ready. (See: "lingam-yoni or worship of Mary", etc. Schönheit Publishing, Berlin 1906 [Munich 1983]).
In our selection extrapolated following text Christian, Judaic, and Indian sacred writings proof will be preferred for the generation of organs (genitals) people of all religions as a divine attribute, as earthly organs remains the divinity of man, as comprehensible singing the divine invisible power will be rented. The worst thing for Christian moral law, the question of sin, sex is no person or - better and more rightly said - that in fact the overwhelming majority of the population does not follow the moral laws the church and the state. Each tower of a church is a symbol of the male organ; each nave and transept is a symbol of the female organ. In private life, each person is, in the context of the sexual impulse and sexual life, in direct opposition to the public proscriptions of the church and the state. This mass-hypocrisy must lead to a successful moral catastrophe. A challenge now concerns us: that, then you want to submit a morality? We wish to introduce still in its original purity and morality, which has been branded as immoral and sinful; we want to bring back a certain sanctity. This newly restored old view that the sexual organs are sacred, worthy of praise, we want to build the new, Manu proverb army only one who has understood the high teachings of the sacredness of the divine organs is truly free and saved all sins! Freedom from original sin is true freedom! We would like to establish an individual company (sexually) free, that is without sin (sexual). We want to create people who are not ashamed of their own sexuality!
In today's ruling Christian civilization, this attempt is riddled with many difficulties, but the beginning is already at hand and succeeded in a small circle. In the world the attempt can only succeed if children are raised from youth on the fundamentals of the new morality. Young people must receive from birth sex organs as sacred. The function of the sexual organs must be reported to boys and girls as holy affairs, as soon as the mother incitatrice manual of sexual power began to manifest. These lessons should be given by the parents, without obligation, at a young age and sexually mature young people in school by doctors and nurses in place of the teachers of religion of the priestly teachers who practice today 'hui in all schools. On the basis of the teachings of love doctors (priestly doctors) doctors of the soul (spiritual priests) and educate in the teachings of death. Currently, it is precisely the opposite!
*
Battery life teaching children from an early age, bequeathed religious fables which then completely broken when children begin to grow, because they recognize that the teachings do not reflect the harsh reality. This recognition is a spiritual battle that comes stirring such a person a lot of bad luck and destruction in life. Least minds, it leads to a life of lies and hypocrisy. The art a priest and parents under his leadership must teach the idea that sexual organs are "Saints"; that these bodies should be monitored closely and supported for the obligation they will present in the future. Because they have to reveal the invisible God to men, in the sense that the law is the earthly repetition of the divine act of creation reveals God in us. It is through that in practice unifies us with God again and again, and by his will and commandment "in his image" we create and productively product. If these young people raised on these fundamental principles are protected and strengthened against misuse of the sexual organs, and they start a young child, begin to understand "God" and believe in God because they recognize a connection in the act of conception, that deeply binds man with God, divinity. If the youth is mature, it will complete the first coitus under the direction and instruction of the "Matrona" [High Priestess] so ritual and as a "sacramental act".
The same will be the Virgin presented by the Matrona to the mysteries of the sexual act in the temple. As the Virgin and youth live outside the legally prescribed condition of marriage, they are bound to seek all the satisfaction of desire in the Temple. Following through a marriage is a sacramental thing - but the married couple is not bound for life. The couple may deviate from their vows without suffering lose their social status. The children will be raised by the state in this case.
Collection costs will be covered in part through some contributions that the divorced couple will have to pay and partly through the tax charges for children in general, which compares for example with the contributions of the school of all citizens will be lifted. Also partly through special penalties and partly by a tax that will be paid to any person who, for whatever reason, can not get married. Young men and women who, for whatever reason, is not subject to the planning of the race can not get married by the state. The State of Wisconsin in America has allowed a law in 1914 that triggered this fundamental right to state law. We can recognize us as followers of any comprehensive settlement of the law of the state of Wisconsin, but the basic principles have given way to this law exactly with our own point of view. Under the new law of the state of Wisconsin, all young men and women who plan to marry must first be examined by the doctor of the official statement about their health and their relevance in planning the breed. This is our principle.
For about 20 years, Dr. Urban Grulich constructed the following program for the education of a Christian community "free from sin." It states:
(1) Who is convinced of the existence of a soul in us, allowing us to become like God.
(2) Who is convinced that selfish love is the cause of all our sorrows, while in opposition, mutual non autorecherchant, sacrifice for others love is the cause of true inner happiness.
(3) The real Heaven is a condition of a blissful inner soul, only complete in a society free from selfishness, true love is the essence exceeding them - even this land can be transformed into such a paradise and should being, as we pray, "thy kingdom come and your will be done on earth as in heaven."
(4) Who recognizes that after bodily death the soul will be included in a company "after the sympathy of Law", which is similar in thought and manner in which contributions are transported and penalties. Thus person to mutual love, not selfish, impersonal nature wants to ally even must have developed this art also here on earth;
(5) Who recognizes that after leaving the body, the soul inherits the condition in the spiritual state than that on earth. Nothing unearned falls on our knees, instead, we must win and win all;
(6) Who is the recognition that life on earth is a time of evidence, educational time of transition in which we get to know the negative result of selfish love in countless examples have the opportunity, if we open our eyes and heart, to be invited to a mutual, unselfish, true love - the way to God;
(7) Who recognizes that we are men of the lost son, came to the house of the father of free will true love in the world of selfishness. He lost his divine nobility now to suffer the deepest regrets of selfishness - with only one thing that can save him return to the divine order of mutual, true love;
(8) Who is convinced that one person can not build a heaven, because unity is strength: divided joy into doubled joy, divided in half sorrow sadness;
(9) Who recognizes that before God we are all the same, every person performing the divine spirit within himself, each person carrying mostly unknown to his own God in us to awaken and thanks to the use and the teaching of this god-strength slumbering in us practice to become one with God, the Lord, the father, in mutual love and true here on earth.
(10) Who is convinced that riches spent for oneself alone does not last man because his goals are only selfish as Jesus said, it is harder for a rich person to reach heaven than to spend a ship in a needle hole; Those who rejoice in eternity to enter the bonds of our brotherhood and seeks to build, in his field, a circle of supporters, which when ready to be based on the fundamental principles of mutual interest, not selfish impersonal, free and true love - for free, Christian congregations who will love each other and support each other in good times and bad times and try to build the Kingdom of God on earth.
[Lesley (Leslie) Fry, author of the article "The Missionaries of Gnosticism" of "The International Journal of the Secret Societies," is in possession of the original manuscript of Reuss and maintains that paragraphs 11 to 17 were lost . Item 5 is missing with Frau Fry].
[18.] We will join us tirelessly to this call and make the foundation stone of the new company born-again Christians. The principles of the vocation paint the consequences of the hidden secret of the Grail.
We have nothing to add.
Anyone wishing to know and learn "more" may contact Sor. Vannah, 54 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, W, enclosing a stamped addressed envelope for the reply back.
IV. Defence and Support
Building blocks for the Temple O.T.O.
Manu said: The Lord is the secret and the key together. Who knows the key and includes use are freed from all sin. The Lord will redeem him slavery (of sin). The great secret of "Maha-Deva" (eternal God, creator of all created) is not for the masses. We can not answer or explain to someone who asks lazily without working. The wise man, though he knows the answer, preferably give the appearance as thought he was an idiot.
Waddell wrote in his book Tantra: Tantra (sexual religion) based on generation of the active ingredient, as it is manifested in the female energy (Shakti) and male manly energy (Siva). Linga (Phallus) is the most sacred form where and by whom is to be worshiped, the great Lord God (Maha-Deva).
St. Augustine [340a.d.] said that what is now called the Christian religion had already existed with the old before the appearance of Christ.
Clifford Howard said in his essay: the basis of all Religions: The compelling and invigorating pulse of all organic life is the sex instinct. In this instinct alone [bound with hunger] is the struggle of the source of all personal aspirations and serious business behind the popular [and animals] of existence.
Today when we take it as immoral to talk about the existence of the sexual organs, or write about it, silence persists sexual appetite and sexual relationships. Observing innovators can not but wonder that the majority of people have either not known or forgotten, is apparently ignored the fact that the sexual relationship between man and woman is the founding stone of our cosmic order and the world in general. This relationship arises not only personal life in general, but also all personal fortunes. If ever, the theory of Abstinence won an absolute victory in the world, the death penalty can be discussed for the future of the world. The Bible says: Omnia vincit amor - "love conquers all", the manifestation of the instinct of sex, is the true conservative in the world. -God Is love! This means: God is never fruitful creative power, which all essence primal beginning possessed and still possesses. Love is the fire that can never be extinguished at the risk of the destruction of all creation! The most sublime definition of the idea behind the concept of love finds its expression and outcome in the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Christian Savior, Jesus Christ. It is not our intention to write a theological book, but rather a physiological Treaty. We just want a lot of documentary evidence search for multiple building blocks that can be used for the construction of a temple of the religion of love.
Since the quotes from various sources, the printed proof will be preferred that not only the so-called hedonistic religion of antiquity, but also the religion of the Indian peoples and Asians. Which still has hundreds of millions of followers, as well as the Christian church can not deny the hidden phallicism.
The phenomena of nature there is no highly agitated so that the wonder and awe and worship of the people as the wonder of the conception of life of an individual with another - one generation to the other - design marvel. This wonder has existed since the world - since people have existed and despite the thousands and thousands of years that this wonder has astonished to date no solution to the generation of puzzle was found!
This wonder, this puzzle is full of mystery, if involved in maintaining a corn seed to be grounded and matures in the golden ears to carry a thousand new seed kernels. Or if it is the seed of the man who, with the female egg turns into a new person equipped with millions of new seeds and eggs. The essence.
Longinus said: Greek instructors have taught that the ecstasy of the members of the Eleusinian mysteries would be sought in a condition in which the direct flow of divinity could be received. In this state of ecstasy the personal soul passed through and beyond the limits of the body and came in direct connection and union with God. Many Greeks wise we pass on what they have learned in this state of bliss and ecstasy. For example: I saw that love was the first creation of the gods and that everything that is created has flowed out of this divine influence and impulse.
Proclus says the mysteries of Eleusis were pure worship of the phallus. The ceremonies were those of Tantric. Members of these mysteries involved in such ecstasies that freedom of the senses came to them as a natural by-product - though certainly not as a goal and goal itself!
Prof. MJ Matter (Paris) says the divine sexual excitement leading to ecstasy was induced by the woman. Especially, ecstasy was produced thanks to the influence of virgins. The priests of the Orphic cult in Thrace used it sacred virgins exclusively in their most sacred rites and ceremonies.
The secret teachings of the Gnostics (early Christians) are identical with the rites of Tantric Vamachari. [Critical History of Gnosticism, Paris 1828] Prof. Matter said in "Foreign Quartal Review": phallicism is the foundation of all theology and emphasizes the mythology of all peoples. This is the form of worship, that all people were in it together. A petition of God all designed through the manifestation of nature in its great mysteries of "Life" and "Generation".
The Phallus [in Hindu: Lingam] as a divine symbol received divine worship for thousands of years in India. Divine worship of the Phallus (lingam) dates, dating to the unknown antiquity and thousands of years before the Christian era a functional theological system was built on this cult. The "phallic cult" India is a very famous religious affair and the current rites performed are a very elaborate ceremony.
Alexander Wilder MD said: when the Spanish discovered America, they found that the cult "Phallus" reigned there. The similarity between the ceremonies and rituals practiced there, as discovered by the Spaniards, ceremonies and rituals of ancient Egypt, prompted others to take later as evidence for the view that Egypt (Africa) America had once been the same continent.
Hargrave Jennings in his famous and comprehensive book, celestial and terrestrial - hedonistic, Christian phallic, that connection with the Rosicrucians and Gnostics - gives irrefutable evidence that the basis of all religions is the phallic idea.
hallicisme says Jennings, is hidden in the insignia of the Christian church. Although we produced elements of irrefutable documentary evidence, we strongly oppose any person tempting to try to blame us for destructive tendencies against the Christian church; in opposition, our explanations should be a building block for a Christian belief; our goal is to be constructive!
Goerres said in his Christian mysticism, vol. 3: external theoretical knowledge is not to be despised; this is a help to the researcher for the true Gnosis, but the actual theosophy and knowledge of God and self-knowledge is not to be found in the teachings of evolution theories and systems, on the condition of inhabitants in the Middle East region and the heavens, and other such things spoken of. Each person reaches his own inner perception and self-knowledge of the mysteries of God in nature, in the cosmos.
Press and above and below the midpoint of the body, you will find a seed, which, through the light comes to growth. Prof. Herman said, in Vol. 3 of Genesis, p. 98: The Manicheans could never be totally uprooted by the church. Proof of this is the Adamites, a sect of the Manichaean which still existed in the middle of the nineteenth century (1850-1860), Austria and even won an equal footing with the Roman Catholic Church.
The Adamites were their names, because they celebrated in their ceremonies churches and naked parties. Their ceremonies and teachings are presented in a modern form, and correspond to those of Manichaean. Their Maria festival, especially the Maria festival during the month of May (May devotion), corresponds to the Bacchanal of the feast of Ceres Libera, orgies of Eleusis. The Adamites were believers and followers of the primal mystery generation. This generation of worship was the inexhaustible source of joy and enthusiasm for life. Above and below this cult produce religious ecstasy until the holy Maria enveloped hearts and senses and the holy Phallus in its abundance impregnated the womb fertile. In these ceremonies and festivals Adamites communism rules the women for men and youth. But communism did not extend to everyday life.
Only during the ceremonies and sacred places (Temples and groves) men and young people have the right (and duty) to complete the sexual act with one of the women present in the Temple or groves. In everyday life, women were related to their Lord and Master. But every man had the right to have several wives if its means authorized him. All children of different women are treated equally (within the society of cult members), and the father was responsible for their support, etc.
Although the church has not managed to destroy the descendants of the ancient Manichaean, the power of the state was able to persecution of members of the cult, the cult of driving out of the public life of the city. Those fleeing persecution met secretly under the protection of the night and they made secret societies after the manner of the ancients. This is how the descendants of the ancient Manichaean and members of the cult of the classical era, the old cult of the Phallus survived.
In the last ten years, they managed to surface again here in public, though under different names and in new clothes. They even created a literature and gained new members throughout the world.
Closing word
Learning to eat of the tree of knowledge and the tree of life enjoy its fruit. Looking both inside of yourself, so you recognize and know their place, you came to the highest level of the Bar of 12 steps.
Through this divine love will be awakened to that has no place in the twisted mind of men, but lingers in his heart, which gave birth to the saving power that gives us the vision of 'eternal light and destroys any falsehood.
"The eternal feminine draws us up ?!"
V. List of Founders Stones sites for Building the Temple of the OTO
http://www.parareligion.ch/2011/parsifal-franz.htm
Theodor Reuss
Parsifal et le Secret du Graal Dévoilé
I. Introduction
Fighting Spirits
Although already 32 years have passed since the festive play of Richard Wagner created July 26, 1882 Parsifal was seen in the spotlight in a theater in Bayreuth. Parsifal is a "sacred scenic festival" (known in German Bühnenweihfestspiel). It seems that now for the first time, with free access to this great work, the German people generally began to find interest in Parsifal. Contemporary with awakening the interest of the broad masses of the German people in Parsifal, a flood of newspaper articles about Parsifal began to circulate, with no trace of a deep sense of suspicion mystical intrigue and symbolizes the room is lost. The great masses of Parsifal commentators who do not have a trace of a hint of the deep mystical meaning of the Grail secret and critics of Parsifal are not even the worst enemies of Wagner and the idea of Parsifal. The actual worst, by whom I mean here, dangerous enemies of Wagner are those columnists, critics, performers, etc. - Who surely have no idea of the deep mystical meaning of Parsifal and the idea of the Grail, but go against the recognized meaning, or voluntarily change the true and only really deep sense of the idea of Parsifal in its exact opposite direction. The worst of the latter category is sexual ascetics. Because they understand very well the symbolic meaning of Parsifal, but they reversed the idea of Wagner in his exact opposite. They are those who, based on the plot of the play Parsifal and the misunderstanding of its underlying mystery, proclaim sexual abstinence German people, far and wide as the Gospel of waiver, and they knowingly lay the foundations of population decline virulent German. If it has not yet succeeded, it is time to pull the rug from under the feet of these false prophets. Blame God that these days already the envy of all contaminants for pleasure and general fled responsible for the vast majority of the German people has led to the narrowing of the birth of children, that our German people needing to develop its population. This is also a problem that sexual ascetics, in defense of abstinence from the act of procreation in total, finally reach the ears of the masses of young Germans, then the fall in the number of births in the German Reich will lead to a consequence of iron in the direct decline of the German people. (Death of State!)
One of these dangerous sexual ascetics is apparently Professor R. Guhr, the brilliant creator of the monumental statue of Wagner in Dresden, where he depicts Wagner, not as a composer, but as a missionary of a new Christianity, or as Professor Guhr called the poet-songwriter with a small promotional writing: Herald of the gospel (Guardian of the Sacred Fire). Professor Guhr had released a small private text in December 1913, "Das Gralsmysterium und der esoterische Keys zum Parsifal" [The Mystery of the Grail and the esoteric key to Parsifal], in which he declared:
"The highlight of the plot is based on the revival of the sacred spear, which at the beginning of the drama, is already described as the greatest heroic act. Because it is produced by a quitclaim deed, we have to recognize the symbol of sexual asceticism, the great passion of the seeker of God every time. We see the result of this abstinence in Parsifal in the ability to bring healing by the touch of the sacred lance with Amfortas, who lost the same . Kundry in arms using esoteric keys on the fundamental ideas of the drama submitted following the revealed mystery, valid truth for all born of the earth through sexual abstinence person controlling the pulse can convert the erotic power of his healing power in the body, which, thanks to the application can bring health, for one who does not have the power to asceticism.
This and this alone meant the conquest of the sacred spear, because here the true core of the mystery grail is to be seen that, for the blessing of humanity now becomes clearer and clearer. "
Professor Guhr is a student of the mystically very talented Valerie Gyigyi in Berlin, whose master was before Frater Merlin. Professor Guhr actually speak, so those who know and insiders. And precisely because it speaks to initiates and those who know its propaganda for sexual asceticism and must be opposed with the strongest weapons as unholy, as it is always possible to limit and control the it generated as a connoisseur, leading his knowledge in the wrong street. As an insider Professor Guhr proclaim revelation keys to the secret teachings of sexual magic, he calls valid truth born of any land in which he states through sexual abstinence person controlling the pulse can convert erotic power of his healing power in the body, which, thanks to the application can bring health, for one who does not have the power to asceticism. Professor Guhr misplaced on the wrong track, as he has profaned the secret of truth, which is only valid for and in the future there can be valid only for the priests of the Temple chosen because it has tried to apply this behavior to men and youth in the general population. Here separates the way insiders and those who know that of Professor Guhr. Since Guhr professor believes need to reveal the mystery of the Grail to mean sexual asceticism, to promote his theory of sexual asceticism (detrimental to the condition of the German people), we want to linger over it, but will reveal the true secret of the Grail, to serve the sexually mature development and courageous German people.
II. main part
The Unveiling of the Secret.
The author of this article has been the greatest privilege in his youth to personally know the immortal poet, composer Richard Wagner of having visited as a guest in the Villa Wahnfried repeatedly and for being present at all rehearsals and productions of festive piece Parsifal at Bayreuth in July and August 1882.
These circumstances, coupled with the additional privilege to be delivered to long conversations with colleagues Wagner, Parsifal and the mystical idea gave the author the first clue for the discovery of the key that unlocks the mystery of the holy grail to him. Wagner informs through the deeds in Parsifal a Healing Truth. The art of this Healing Truth will be revealed in the following lines.
Professor Guhr said completely correctly that Wagner himself studied the problem of the solution and tried to express it poetically in his compositions and especially in the festive room Parsifal. This is a fundamental error and deeply regrettable of all sexual ascetics to believe that Richard Wagner found the research to the solution in the rejection of the sexual act, that is to say, in the human forbearance of sexual intercourse with a woman and wanted to promote this view and this version of the solution in his dramatic compositions - but especially in the part of Parsifal. In reality, the opposite is the case! Wagner is not only the greatest hero, but also the greatest teacher and prophet of sexual religion of the future, based on the realization of necessary ritual sex. Already in Lohengrin he began to hint that it would build in Tristan especially later in the ring of the Nibelungen - finally improve in Parsifal: The New Gospel Hi sexual Religion! A comprehensive presentation of the case within the limits of this paper, which was originally only a private response to the article by Professor Guhr on Parsifal is obviously impossible, but we will return the following lines of Wagner's prose. In Rheingold Fafner sings: The golden apples grow in its (Freia) garden ... and in the context of those words brings to the attention that after Freia has been kidnapped by the giant as a pledge, all other gods get sick and pale ... apostasy, because, as Wagner added later to explain, they have to go without the golden apples of Freia vegetable garden that does not really incisive people, only a little courage in the process of thought, to understand the essence of these advice full of tact - meaning Wagner by the golden apples in the garden of Freias.
We express the solution with the explanation of the dinner of the Grail. This meal 'Divine' 'which, in his later years, returned under other symbols - the same as dinner Grail, Wagner wanted to convey to those who come after him.
And further: Nothung, Nothung, envious sword - which is Nothung sword, but this unbreakable legacy Siegfried, as the only son of the father, retempère in the fire of youth. What else but a symbol of primal sword (primal Phallus!) The primal primal father blocked the sword into the trunk of the primal tree, and the one that comes out this sword wins a woman with him - as his wife and sister! They are not symbols of abstinence! (sexual ascetics!) Since we started this, we want to go ahead with the explanation of the secret doctrine concealed in Parsifal. Parsifal, virgin, naive, reached the Grail region.
There he killed a white swan with his arrow as his first act. The White Swan is (according to the Nordic mystical tradition), the symbol of ecstasy, ongoing spiritual joy, who lives and dominates the heart and soul of the Grail Knight, as the highest ecstasy whose fate live all the inhabitants of the Grail region. Parsifal task to get the swan, who had stolen to seek his female to cross with her on the lake (water-symbol of the feminine principle, so there Hi wonderfully devoted to the bath with his arrow in the snow-white breast . the red blood colored the white feathers of the dead swan is therefore a symbolic representation of the naive, virgin Parsifal with his act against nature (sexual) (arrow) commander holy ecstasy which made a wound in the territory of the Grail and injury . to appease this misdeed, Gurnemanz thought to lead Parsifal Grail. the hope influenced Gurnemanz that Parsifal would be the fool who is called the Savior of the sick Amfortas. Gurnemanz is still not absolutely certain that Parsifal is pure and crazy, because it decides to lead Parsifal to the castle of the Grail, for Gurnemanz sang after the two had walked some time: now, take care and let me see if you're crazy, and if you are ... the pure! test, it is a pure fool, Parsifal arrives first in the Grail Temple! This point can not be developed further here.
However, it should specifically refer to the previous line, which has great scope of what it means for our presentation of evidence. Gurnemanz says: Now, let me take you to the devout meal, then - (here's a dash in writing), being pure, you will now eat and drink Grail! But now we see in the course of the plot in the Temple of the Grail, that (Grail celebrating the Eucharist) was not eaten and drunk by Parsifal! It follows that Parsifal was not pure enough! All weariness Gurnemanz said again to Parsifal at the end of the celebration of the Holy Grail, you are still just a fool, a fool! So: not pure - but only stupid, and the final word Gurnemanz in Parsifal at the end of the first act is, in the future leave them in peace swans here (do not disturb the ecstasy of the inhabitants of the Grail region again), but you will seek Gander goose!
These very amusing words mean: - in the future, seeks more than ecstasy, incitement to acts against nature (sexual), but looking for a woman of your own nature and the natural way and pursue sexual acts it !! In this way, these words have a lot of fun mystical meaning to them! Without our senses, they remain incomprehensible and senseless, such as Gurnemanz words: that the swan through Lake with his lady consecrated the lake as a bath Saint! Before explaining the secret hidden meaning of the second act, we must correct the error widespread in the design and direction of Amfortas's wound. The wounds of Amfortas do not symbolize divine punishment for the practice of the sexual act (played by Amfortas) on himself (which flashed naturally particularly strong sexual ascetics recommended). But the wound is the punishment for Amfortas performing the sexual act in a vain way with a woman of pleasure out obligations and therefore unholy grail rite. According to the view of sexual ascetics, after this fall from grace, Amfortas generally is more worthy of the office as King Grail and unfit to rule the unveiling of the Grail! But we see in the first act, Amfortas despite his injury was still very capable and is able, to unveil the Grail knights to drink and eat. Unlike Amfortas in the practice of his office, from when he was still recovering, and the time after the crime is only after his fall from grace, the Office of the unveiling Grail caused him terrible pain, torment and suffering! Then the Grail conducted a food and drink despite the condition, that the sinner, unworthy and wounded Amfortas he reveals. Only Amfortas prevailing in his office suffered (only for himself) by the practice of his office! So why Amfortas he suffer? !
Amfortas, after the fall in the deepest regret and feeling unworthy to perform the ritual act in the temple, fell to self tourmentassions (Masturbation!), The artificial substitute of all sexual ascetics. So the office caused the sovereign agony of soul and body pain. To understand this profound truth, solemn and mysterious, mystical Christian truth, we must understand how to properly interpret the words of the Bible, especially John the Evangelist and other places. You have to know the secret teachings of the Israelites as declared in the Zohar, and it must correctly understand the Bhagavad Gita. And the support of our production of evidence, it must be expressly mentioned here that Wagner had been charged with the secrets of the Bhagavad Gita, already at the time of his involvement with Wesendonks and Nietzsche (1852-1857).
The following lines must be observed:
St. John the Evangelist, IV, 13; VI, 27; VII, 51-58; VIII, 38; III, 14-15. Genesis 2; 3; 15, 13; 16, 2; 17, 10-14; 19; 24; 28, 18-22; 30, 2-22; 31, 30-35; 35, 1-15; 38, 13-26. Paul, Luke, John revelation, etc. Bhagavad-Gita II 17. 18; VI, 27. 28. 29; V, 5; VI, 10; VII, 8; X 39; VIII, 10; IX, 18; IV, 27. 31; V, 7. 10; XVIII, 63.
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Later will refer again briefly to the curative effect of malice sacred power of the Grail.
Now we want to continue with the importance of the second act. Klingsor, the sorcerer (black magician in opposition to the Grail King, the white magician) is the first person to appear to us in the second act. Gurnemanz speaks of him in the first act (Kingsor) itself impotent to destroy sin, puts the ugly hand (blasphemous) on itself, now devoted to Graal - contemptuous including protective railed against it!
In these words are the strongest and most vocal repudiation of Wagner all possible attempts of sexual fanatical ascetics to confiscate his Parsifal for the special purposes of sexual asceticism.
Klingsor emasculated himself in order to become a perfect sexual ascetic, for after his misinterpretation (Klingsor) - the current design of the Grail mysteries (and the representation of the false perception of Klingsor, Wagner himself wishes to confront and lead to absurdity the false view of all sexual ascetics) alone, which usually does not end the sexual act, or after the false vision Klingsors, who can supplement it is worthy, able and called to preserve the Grail.
Wagner puts special emphasis on this fundamentally false view of all sexual ascetics, mark it as a fundamental error, and Parsifal, he uses the most sharpened words: Despising the Grail whose protector took exception to it!
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Not only unworthy and incapable is such a sexual ascetic, to preserve the Grail, but also contemptuous the Graal refuses such sexual ascetic! But why? This someone can only discover through the study of lines, cities of the Old and New Testament of the (B) of the Bhagavad Gita and the explanation of the Knight of St. Clement Marcq, who wrote about Nature of the Eucharist, but also in Waite's commentary on Israel's secret teachings. We find the basis for not only in the New Testament, but everywhere. A clear explanation of the lines concerned, symbolic of the Old Testament, we find even in the Zohar. Finally the solution is also found in the secret teachings of the Templars and the secret teachings of the Gnostics. Professor Guhr rightly remarks: the highlight of the plot lies in the revival of the sacred spear, which is already represented as the highest heroic act at the beginning of the drama. However, the conclusion Guhr the teacher draws on these words is completely wrong when he says, because it happens by a quitclaim deed, we must recognize in it a symbol of sexual asceticism ...
So unfortunately against false conceptions Wagner had already planned and used above quoted words contemptuous the Graal to the protector who railed against her, please, exception! Really, we have in the revival of the spear, an act of renunciation, not a symbol of sexual asceticism by itself and all! The symbolic revival of the spear, represented in the second act of Parsifal, dramatically, means the following.
Lance is certainly (also from Professor Guhr This is) the symbol of the phallus. And all the same that is used for example the use of a picture (symbol) Love shoots an arrow (and it is probably a symbol of the phallus) at two lovers signifying a request and stimulation love for a sexual union of two lovers become so run the spear Parsifal means that Klingsor wants to compel him to perform an act of naked lust that even as just an act of lust even once would have been a drop in thanks!
Remembering now the pain and suffering of Amfortas, which was imposed during his insane regret over the one-act of lust, Parsifal becomes strong and resists because of the constraint attempt (seduction by Kundry) caused launched by the spear out of the sorcerer Klingsor! But Parsifal instantly recognizable thanks to the ingenuity, enlightenment and inner awareness, the saving call of the spear in the Temple of the Grail serve as a healer and Parsifal seized the lance - and himself with spear in hand path for the Grail.
Now begins the true pilgrimage: Parsifal with spear in hand! Here begins the renunciation symbol!
The lies of waiver, symbolically expressed in the words, with spear in hand! A waiver is first, then a waiver in the true sense of the word, when we do not do something that we recognized that it is desirable and wished to. The residence Parsifal with spear in hand corresponds to the 40 days that Christ must have passed in deserts. It corresponds to the trials and tribulations that all candidates of all ancient religions, all mystical secret societies, etc. had to undergo before they can become insiders. This trip also corresponds to the 40 days of fasting and abstention, which further initiates a mystical society today require their candidates as a test before they are ready to explore the mystical secret, saving, and teachings. - Wagner shows the renunciation (restraining the pulse) through this, as he shows Parsifal in the third act, after the end of his stay (pilgrimage) in sombre black armament with spear driven into the territory of the Grail. Parsifal renounced all lust and pleasure during the 40 days, the stay was symbolically represented. But also Kundry passes the 40 days, as stated in the third act, it is almost starved in her brown dress penitential under a shrub (symbol of life) in the territory of the Grail border.
As Gurnemanz Parsifal discovering he was finally arrived in the territory of the Grail, he half his spear up, wearing the black shield in front and then prayed, his impassive gaze and locked in ecstasy on the tip the spear! A profound symbol!
Only words Kundry (and the last she spoke in the whole drama) when it is returned to life after a long period of mourning, remains to serve, to serve! In these words, to serve, to serve! is expressed and contained Wagner's (and our) complete philosophy concerning the grounds of the woman in our cosmos. The woman is resolutely to serve the virile global goal (preservation of the world), it receives the seed of the primal lance and thus preserves the fabric of the world. This is the primary objective and eternal woman. This goal will serve only Kundry now! In order to symbolically show that Kundry has killed the ancient practice of inciting lust and lust of satisfaction (misuse of sexual union), Wagner left the sink and die down before the altar of the Grail; before the feet of the Grail King at the end of the story. This is of course a symbol! For in reality (in the sense of Wagner's work) Kundry serves the King of the Grail in the future in the ritual and saving union and will be the mother of the Grail knight Lohengrin! Sexual ascetics try with iron determination and persistence to outdo themselves by ignoring the facts, Parsifal, the Grail King, conceives a son - (we are talking about only the thought process of Wagner, which supports naturally his drama) Lohengrin and Parsifal - and son can not be conceived by Parsifal that through a sexual act with a woman. And the act of conception must have occurred in the time after the end of the third act of the play Parsifal. This woman may, in the territory of the Grail, only have been the kind of woman who lingered there only to serve. Then the baptized Kundry who had passed through the 40 days, so closely linked to the correct symbol for the service woman, who was the son of King Grail.
Now it only remains to show that the miracle of the highest design by looking in the greatest holy heater with it 'love food' in the sacred vessel flowing as expected by the Knights. What Watch is the Holy Grail!
But Parsifal does not ask the first act: what the Grail, Parsifal asks: who is the Holy Grail? - And why Wagner did not tell Parsifal: what what the Grail? Here lies hidden a deep mystery! So Parsifal asks (with underlying intent of the author) who is the Holy Grail? - And Gurnemanz answers quite revealing: one can not say!
Why we can not say it? It would have been easy enough to Gurnemanz, to tell Parsifal: what the Grail! Lohengrin also has a way of describing the Grail, especially in front of the congregation of King Heinrich war people.
If Wagner had no intention here of expressing a specially kept secret and deeply mystical explanation of the true nature of the Grail, he would have left Gurnemanz give Parsifal a similar explanation as Lohengrin also gave to King Heinrich.
But at the end of his life seemingly no more worldly consideration, Wagner wanted to show his favorite composition, which he had already considered in its early years (1853-1857) - the true nature of the Grail and the concept of raising the large fire sign of encouragement and rallying all insiders. Wagner has shown more clearly in the final words of the third act of Parsifal as Parsifal at the highest enchantment exhibited on the lance (erect), to the point of contemplating enthusiastically singing
Oh, what a miracle of the largest Fortune!
What may close your wound.
I see the holy blood running it.
In the nostalgia of the relative source.
Which here flows, flows in the wave of Grail!
The meaning of these words, we do not say! -can Only be known and understood - but - not spoken! In these words lies hidden the highest, most glorious, most sacred symbol of the sexual magic!
Here begins a secret teaching which is exclusively reserved for insiders.
It is known as a fact that Wagner was familiar with the Bhagavad Gita and other mystical secret teachings. Wagner also began to think about a new manifestation of Christianity, in his last years of life.
Christianity, however, was that a totally different Christianity Christianity that is usually associated with that word.
A warning to all
Narrow minded spirits, petty, or malicious, large and small! Like all of the intrigue, conspiracy, conspiracy Parsifal in the festive part of Richard Wagner's only an allegory, a symbolic representation with no real occurrence in the material world, so the above explanation of the secret Grail is not to be understood as a personal matter, literal, earthly, relative to vulgar events. But this is only to be understood as totally impersonal, symbolic and relating purely spiritual motives.
The author.
III. Practical Application
Framework of the New Temple O.T.O.
We unveiled the "secret" of the Grail and this revelation with urgent necessity submit that Wagner concerned with this new rise of Christianity, in which prophetically saw, as Guhr professor cited the heroism of Wagner and Christianity , salvation in physical regeneration, reorganization and higher development of the individual, in which humanity will look for a future salvation.
We saw it as our duty to try also the practical use of discovered truth or truths. What is art Hi, Wagner wished in his writings?
New Christianity filled with new life can not be a possible Christian asceticism in general (waiver or abstinence from sexual intercourse) it can not - and should be, while logically, a Christianity that brings salvation to the people of sin and freedom from original sin!
Professor Guhr himself says: it is therefore with him (Wagner), no dogma made it difficult for him in his swan song to establish the sacred mysteries: the secret final of humanity and the deification of solution processes (libido) -belligènes by priestly dogma or skepticism, they express the riddle of Christianity clearly in the formula. And that will be the basis of the future church. Priests of this church will be able to communicate after the example of Parsifal, the active spirit of God, the "Daimon" tamed as a saving power for his entourage.
These processes, which we fully support.
We restrict their effectiveness, however, the narrow circle of doctors-priests of the new temple OTO, which we will discuss later. It posits not only a new Christianity but also a new civilization. Our present civilization arises from the Christianity of the church fathers, who, with a mix of Paul's teachings with those pre-Christian (so-called pagan) principles and teachings today that makes the reigning Christianity. And teachings of this artificially constructed Christianity is the real truth or truths on which our civilization (and moral) is formed.
One of the fundamental teachings, one might even say, basic education, which definitely gave to Christianity its character today is to teach the doctrine of the fall from grace. This fall from grace has been established the Christian vision of the concept of shame.
The Christian church understands shame (also from shame) in a narrow, real sense as the genitals of people and their doctrine based on civil law. The Christian is taught from youth to be ashamed of these shameful parts! The natural use of these shameful parts, even the consideration of the shameful parts of a person is a sin to some extent the main feature of the Christian church and Christian countries laws. A Christian woman who uses her sex organs naturally, without concession to the church or the state, especially if the natural result of use becomes the question will be marked as a fallen woman. Earlier without fail, today in narrower circumstances, but in a certain sense, the fallen woman will be excommunicated from the community of the righteous, and will be stamped as outcast, fallen, despised.
In short: all sexuality was sin and shame and still is according to the official, in the sense of the Church and the Law!
In the pre-Christian period, it was not so. The Israelites had their own secret teachings, in which they recognized the genitals that land symbols of man's divinity. And the religious system of the East, the genitals are excited to date with divine reverence as symbols of divinity!
We no longer maintain critical false views of Christianity concerning sexuality as a moral evil, because our goal is not to analyze or to destroy, but to be constructive. Most critics have sooner only criticized, weakened and torn the Christian Church, without building.
But we want to build, rebuild a new one!
In a special part of our editorial, we present a small selection of quotes from the Bible and other sacred writings of other religious systems that provide evidence that all religions, Christianity included, have a sexual basis. So we want to demonstrate that we have no intention of founding a new religion, but we want to remove garbage that the pseudo Christianity has piled up, domed on religions of the ancient world to the ancient and true religion again resume its rightful place.
The Christian religion has hidden his sexual basis to this day in the cult of Mary, unbeknownst to the people and moderate ready. (See: "lingam-yoni or worship of Mary", etc. Schönheit Publishing, Berlin 1906 [Munich 1983]).
In our selection extrapolated following text Christian, Judaic, and Indian sacred writings proof will be preferred for the generation of organs (genitals) people of all religions as a divine attribute, as earthly organs remains the divinity of man, as comprehensible singing the divine invisible power will be rented. The worst thing for Christian moral law, the question of sin, sex is no person or - better and more rightly said - that in fact the overwhelming majority of the population does not follow the moral laws the church and the state. Each tower of a church is a symbol of the male organ; each nave and transept is a symbol of the female organ. In private life, each person is, in the context of the sexual impulse and sexual life, in direct opposition to the public proscriptions of the church and the state. This mass-hypocrisy must lead to a successful moral catastrophe. A challenge now concerns us: that, then you want to submit a morality? We wish to introduce still in its original purity and morality, which has been branded as immoral and sinful; we want to bring back a certain sanctity. This newly restored old view that the sexual organs are sacred, worthy of praise, we want to build the new, Manu proverb army only one who has understood the high teachings of the sacredness of the divine organs is truly free and saved all sins! Freedom from original sin is true freedom! We would like to establish an individual company (sexually) free, that is without sin (sexual). We want to create people who are not ashamed of their own sexuality!
In today's ruling Christian civilization, this attempt is riddled with many difficulties, but the beginning is already at hand and succeeded in a small circle. In the world the attempt can only succeed if children are raised from youth on the fundamentals of the new morality. Young people must receive from birth sex organs as sacred. The function of the sexual organs must be reported to boys and girls as holy affairs, as soon as the mother incitatrice manual of sexual power began to manifest. These lessons should be given by the parents, without obligation, at a young age and sexually mature young people in school by doctors and nurses in place of the teachers of religion of the priestly teachers who practice today 'hui in all schools. On the basis of the teachings of love doctors (priestly doctors) doctors of the soul (spiritual priests) and educate in the teachings of death. Currently, it is precisely the opposite!
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Battery life teaching children from an early age, bequeathed religious fables which then completely broken when children begin to grow, because they recognize that the teachings do not reflect the harsh reality. This recognition is a spiritual battle that comes stirring such a person a lot of bad luck and destruction in life. Least minds, it leads to a life of lies and hypocrisy. The art a priest and parents under his leadership must teach the idea that sexual organs are "Saints"; that these bodies should be monitored closely and supported for the obligation they will present in the future. Because they have to reveal the invisible God to men, in the sense that the law is the earthly repetition of the divine act of creation reveals God in us. It is through that in practice unifies us with God again and again, and by his will and commandment "in his image" we create and productively product. If these young people raised on these fundamental principles are protected and strengthened against misuse of the sexual organs, and they start a young child, begin to understand "God" and believe in God because they recognize a connection in the act of conception, that deeply binds man with God, divinity. If the youth is mature, it will complete the first coitus under the direction and instruction of the "Matrona" [High Priestess] so ritual and as a "sacramental act".
The same will be the Virgin presented by the Matrona to the mysteries of the sexual act in the temple. As the Virgin and youth live outside the legally prescribed condition of marriage, they are bound to seek all the satisfaction of desire in the Temple. Following through a marriage is a sacramental thing - but the married couple is not bound for life. The couple may deviate from their vows without suffering lose their social status. The children will be raised by the state in this case.
Collection costs will be covered in part through some contributions that the divorced couple will have to pay and partly through the tax charges for children in general, which compares for example with the contributions of the school of all citizens will be lifted. Also partly through special penalties and partly by a tax that will be paid to any person who, for whatever reason, can not get married. Young men and women who, for whatever reason, is not subject to the planning of the race can not get married by the state. The State of Wisconsin in America has allowed a law in 1914 that triggered this fundamental right to state law. We can recognize us as followers of any comprehensive settlement of the law of the state of Wisconsin, but the basic principles have given way to this law exactly with our own point of view. Under the new law of the state of Wisconsin, all young men and women who plan to marry must first be examined by the doctor of the official statement about their health and their relevance in planning the breed. This is our principle.
For about 20 years, Dr. Urban Grulich constructed the following program for the education of a Christian community "free from sin." It states:
(1) Who is convinced of the existence of a soul in us, allowing us to become like God.
(2) Who is convinced that selfish love is the cause of all our sorrows, while in opposition, mutual non autorecherchant, sacrifice for others love is the cause of true inner happiness.
(3) The real Heaven is a condition of a blissful inner soul, only complete in a society free from selfishness, true love is the essence exceeding them - even this land can be transformed into such a paradise and should being, as we pray, "thy kingdom come and your will be done on earth as in heaven."
(4) Who recognizes that after bodily death the soul will be included in a company "after the sympathy of Law", which is similar in thought and manner in which contributions are transported and penalties. Thus person to mutual love, not selfish, impersonal nature wants to ally even must have developed this art also here on earth;
(5) Who recognizes that after leaving the body, the soul inherits the condition in the spiritual state than that on earth. Nothing unearned falls on our knees, instead, we must win and win all;
(6) Who is the recognition that life on earth is a time of evidence, educational time of transition in which we get to know the negative result of selfish love in countless examples have the opportunity, if we open our eyes and heart, to be invited to a mutual, unselfish, true love - the way to God;
(7) Who recognizes that we are men of the lost son, came to the house of the father of free will true love in the world of selfishness. He lost his divine nobility now to suffer the deepest regrets of selfishness - with only one thing that can save him return to the divine order of mutual, true love;
(8) Who is convinced that one person can not build a heaven, because unity is strength: divided joy into doubled joy, divided in half sorrow sadness;
(9) Who recognizes that before God we are all the same, every person performing the divine spirit within himself, each person carrying mostly unknown to his own God in us to awaken and thanks to the use and the teaching of this god-strength slumbering in us practice to become one with God, the Lord, the father, in mutual love and true here on earth.
(10) Who is convinced that riches spent for oneself alone does not last man because his goals are only selfish as Jesus said, it is harder for a rich person to reach heaven than to spend a ship in a needle hole; Those who rejoice in eternity to enter the bonds of our brotherhood and seeks to build, in his field, a circle of supporters, which when ready to be based on the fundamental principles of mutual interest, not selfish impersonal, free and true love - for free, Christian congregations who will love each other and support each other in good times and bad times and try to build the Kingdom of God on earth.
[Lesley (Leslie) Fry, author of the article "The Missionaries of Gnosticism" of "The International Journal of the Secret Societies," is in possession of the original manuscript of Reuss and maintains that paragraphs 11 to 17 were lost . Item 5 is missing with Frau Fry].
[18.] We will join us tirelessly to this call and make the foundation stone of the new company born-again Christians. The principles of the vocation paint the consequences of the hidden secret of the Grail.
We have nothing to add.
Anyone wishing to know and learn "more" may contact Sor. Vannah, 54 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, W, enclosing a stamped addressed envelope for the reply back.
IV. Defence and Support
Building blocks for the Temple O.T.O.
Manu said: The Lord is the secret and the key together. Who knows the key and includes use are freed from all sin. The Lord will redeem him slavery (of sin). The great secret of "Maha-Deva" (eternal God, creator of all created) is not for the masses. We can not answer or explain to someone who asks lazily without working. The wise man, though he knows the answer, preferably give the appearance as thought he was an idiot.
Waddell wrote in his book Tantra: Tantra (sexual religion) based on generation of the active ingredient, as it is manifested in the female energy (Shakti) and male manly energy (Siva). Linga (Phallus) is the most sacred form where and by whom is to be worshiped, the great Lord God (Maha-Deva).
St. Augustine [340a.d.] said that what is now called the Christian religion had already existed with the old before the appearance of Christ.
Clifford Howard said in his essay: the basis of all Religions: The compelling and invigorating pulse of all organic life is the sex instinct. In this instinct alone [bound with hunger] is the struggle of the source of all personal aspirations and serious business behind the popular [and animals] of existence.
Today when we take it as immoral to talk about the existence of the sexual organs, or write about it, silence persists sexual appetite and sexual relationships. Observing innovators can not but wonder that the majority of people have either not known or forgotten, is apparently ignored the fact that the sexual relationship between man and woman is the founding stone of our cosmic order and the world in general. This relationship arises not only personal life in general, but also all personal fortunes. If ever, the theory of Abstinence won an absolute victory in the world, the death penalty can be discussed for the future of the world. The Bible says: Omnia vincit amor - "love conquers all", the manifestation of the instinct of sex, is the true conservative in the world. -God Is love! This means: God is never fruitful creative power, which all essence primal beginning possessed and still possesses. Love is the fire that can never be extinguished at the risk of the destruction of all creation! The most sublime definition of the idea behind the concept of love finds its expression and outcome in the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Christian Savior, Jesus Christ. It is not our intention to write a theological book, but rather a physiological Treaty. We just want a lot of documentary evidence search for multiple building blocks that can be used for the construction of a temple of the religion of love.
Since the quotes from various sources, the printed proof will be preferred that not only the so-called hedonistic religion of antiquity, but also the religion of the Indian peoples and Asians. Which still has hundreds of millions of followers, as well as the Christian church can not deny the hidden phallicism.
The phenomena of nature there is no highly agitated so that the wonder and awe and worship of the people as the wonder of the conception of life of an individual with another - one generation to the other - design marvel. This wonder has existed since the world - since people have existed and despite the thousands and thousands of years that this wonder has astonished to date no solution to the generation of puzzle was found!
This wonder, this puzzle is full of mystery, if involved in maintaining a corn seed to be grounded and matures in the golden ears to carry a thousand new seed kernels. Or if it is the seed of the man who, with the female egg turns into a new person equipped with millions of new seeds and eggs. The essence.
Longinus said: Greek instructors have taught that the ecstasy of the members of the Eleusinian mysteries would be sought in a condition in which the direct flow of divinity could be received. In this state of ecstasy the personal soul passed through and beyond the limits of the body and came in direct connection and union with God. Many Greeks wise we pass on what they have learned in this state of bliss and ecstasy. For example: I saw that love was the first creation of the gods and that everything that is created has flowed out of this divine influence and impulse.
Proclus says the mysteries of Eleusis were pure worship of the phallus. The ceremonies were those of Tantric. Members of these mysteries involved in such ecstasies that freedom of the senses came to them as a natural by-product - though certainly not as a goal and goal itself!
Prof. MJ Matter (Paris) says the divine sexual excitement leading to ecstasy was induced by the woman. Especially, ecstasy was produced thanks to the influence of virgins. The priests of the Orphic cult in Thrace used it sacred virgins exclusively in their most sacred rites and ceremonies.
The secret teachings of the Gnostics (early Christians) are identical with the rites of Tantric Vamachari. [Critical History of Gnosticism, Paris 1828] Prof. Matter said in "Foreign Quartal Review": phallicism is the foundation of all theology and emphasizes the mythology of all peoples. This is the form of worship, that all people were in it together. A petition of God all designed through the manifestation of nature in its great mysteries of "Life" and "Generation".
The Phallus [in Hindu: Lingam] as a divine symbol received divine worship for thousands of years in India. Divine worship of the Phallus (lingam) dates, dating to the unknown antiquity and thousands of years before the Christian era a functional theological system was built on this cult. The "phallic cult" India is a very famous religious affair and the current rites performed are a very elaborate ceremony.
Alexander Wilder MD said: when the Spanish discovered America, they found that the cult "Phallus" reigned there. The similarity between the ceremonies and rituals practiced there, as discovered by the Spaniards, ceremonies and rituals of ancient Egypt, prompted others to take later as evidence for the view that Egypt (Africa) America had once been the same continent.
Hargrave Jennings in his famous and comprehensive book, celestial and terrestrial - hedonistic, Christian phallic, that connection with the Rosicrucians and Gnostics - gives irrefutable evidence that the basis of all religions is the phallic idea.
hallicisme says Jennings, is hidden in the insignia of the Christian church. Although we produced elements of irrefutable documentary evidence, we strongly oppose any person tempting to try to blame us for destructive tendencies against the Christian church; in opposition, our explanations should be a building block for a Christian belief; our goal is to be constructive!
Goerres said in his Christian mysticism, vol. 3: external theoretical knowledge is not to be despised; this is a help to the researcher for the true Gnosis, but the actual theosophy and knowledge of God and self-knowledge is not to be found in the teachings of evolution theories and systems, on the condition of inhabitants in the Middle East region and the heavens, and other such things spoken of. Each person reaches his own inner perception and self-knowledge of the mysteries of God in nature, in the cosmos.
Press and above and below the midpoint of the body, you will find a seed, which, through the light comes to growth. Prof. Herman said, in Vol. 3 of Genesis, p. 98: The Manicheans could never be totally uprooted by the church. Proof of this is the Adamites, a sect of the Manichaean which still existed in the middle of the nineteenth century (1850-1860), Austria and even won an equal footing with the Roman Catholic Church.
The Adamites were their names, because they celebrated in their ceremonies churches and naked parties. Their ceremonies and teachings are presented in a modern form, and correspond to those of Manichaean. Their Maria festival, especially the Maria festival during the month of May (May devotion), corresponds to the Bacchanal of the feast of Ceres Libera, orgies of Eleusis. The Adamites were believers and followers of the primal mystery generation. This generation of worship was the inexhaustible source of joy and enthusiasm for life. Above and below this cult produce religious ecstasy until the holy Maria enveloped hearts and senses and the holy Phallus in its abundance impregnated the womb fertile. In these ceremonies and festivals Adamites communism rules the women for men and youth. But communism did not extend to everyday life.
Only during the ceremonies and sacred places (Temples and groves) men and young people have the right (and duty) to complete the sexual act with one of the women present in the Temple or groves. In everyday life, women were related to their Lord and Master. But every man had the right to have several wives if its means authorized him. All children of different women are treated equally (within the society of cult members), and the father was responsible for their support, etc.
Although the church has not managed to destroy the descendants of the ancient Manichaean, the power of the state was able to persecution of members of the cult, the cult of driving out of the public life of the city. Those fleeing persecution met secretly under the protection of the night and they made secret societies after the manner of the ancients. This is how the descendants of the ancient Manichaean and members of the cult of the classical era, the old cult of the Phallus survived.
In the last ten years, they managed to surface again here in public, though under different names and in new clothes. They even created a literature and gained new members throughout the world.
Closing word
Learning to eat of the tree of knowledge and the tree of life enjoy its fruit. Looking both inside of yourself, so you recognize and know their place, you came to the highest level of the Bar of 12 steps.
Through this divine love will be awakened to that has no place in the twisted mind of men, but lingers in his heart, which gave birth to the saving power that gives us the vision of 'eternal light and destroys any falsehood.
"The eternal feminine draws us up ?!"
V. List of Founders Stones sites for Building the Temple of the OTO
Ultimately, every individual life is at the same time the eternal life of the species.
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light
in the darkness of mere being. —C. G. Jung
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light
in the darkness of mere being. —C. G. Jung
TODAY IS THE AGE OF THE GRAIL
Grail, Gods, Genes & Memes
A Transdisciplinary Approach to Sangreal Culture & Subcultures
by Iona Miller
Grail, Gods, Genes & Memes
A Transdisciplinary Approach to Sangreal Culture & Subcultures
by Iona Miller
"The Holy Grail", color pencil on paper,
commission for a privately owned library in Holland, 1989 by LAURIE LIPTON
commission for a privately owned library in Holland, 1989 by LAURIE LIPTON
A Psychological Consideration of the Grail as Self
Deep Memories / Deep Mindedness
Deep Memories / Deep Mindedness
- The ineffable Grail contains hidden knowledge - our own true nature.
- The synergy of the Grail family is a human potential school.
- The ancient Tree of Life is its meme in graphic and artistic form.
- Gnosis is hidden because it must be experienced to be known.
- It is the ecology of the soul and spirit.
- Archetypes are organs of our essential nature; blueprints of cosmic dynamics.
- The individuation process leads to the fulfillment of the archetypes of the soul.
- The SangREAL is a genetic line and a memeplex.
- Complexes of memes tend to travel together and co-evolve.
- Culture as a meme pool consists of many different memes and memeplexes.
- Cultural memes reside in various niches – subcultures.
- Consciousness evolved with the complexity of memes.
- Transcendence is possible only with the help of the memes.
- Memes are transcendental entities.
- They transcend brains by migrating from and infecting one another.
- Through cooperating memes, genes experience transcendence.
- There are protective and pathological memes:
- A meme is "an idea, belief, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture." A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena.
- Memes are cultural analogues to genes since they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures.
- Placebo memes represent the cultural expectation of relief.
There are several types of pathologic memes:
- Memes that inhibit or attenuate the brain’s executive (ego) function, making
- Devious memes enter under false pretenses then cause disease or destruction.
- Memes that replicate virulently often bypass the executive function.
- Virulent memes that arouse passion bypass executive function.
- Memes that cause an indolent infection become virulent later.
Union of Heaven & Earth - Chalice and Blade - Womb & Phallus - Key of Life
The ANKH is a symbolic representation of both Physical and Eternal life -- the original cross of the sacred masculine and feminine.
The Loop of the Anhk also represent the feminine discipline or the (Womb), while the elongated section represent the masculine discipline or the (Penis). These two sacred units then come together and form life -- death and rebirth through the womb of Isis. Because of its powerful appeal, the Ankh was used in various religious and cultural rituals involving royalty.
Scota's Cult of the Dragon’s Breath (cult of the spirit of An, or Ankh) was a cult of the dead or ancestor worship, representing eternal life.
The ANKH is a symbolic representation of both Physical and Eternal life -- the original cross of the sacred masculine and feminine.
The Loop of the Anhk also represent the feminine discipline or the (Womb), while the elongated section represent the masculine discipline or the (Penis). These two sacred units then come together and form life -- death and rebirth through the womb of Isis. Because of its powerful appeal, the Ankh was used in various religious and cultural rituals involving royalty.
Scota's Cult of the Dragon’s Breath (cult of the spirit of An, or Ankh) was a cult of the dead or ancestor worship, representing eternal life.
Above Rene d'Anjou's painting of the Arcadian Theme - complete with tomb and 'undergound stream' (elements found in Poussin's 'Shepherds of Arcadia')
La Donna receives the song of the troubadour
Vessels & Women
Enright uses the mead-ritual as a starting point for a discussion of the queen´s political role within the warband of Germanic warrior societies. Since we are dealing only with religion and mythology, Enright´s thesis moves beyound our purposes. It is however useful to note that the idea of an offering of mead by a “gold-adorned” lady had its powerful traditions within innumerable Germanic societies from the earliest times up to the Viking Age.
Enright proceeds to showing, through an archaeological survey, that the lady with the mead cup was indeed an important and central character in Germanic societies, and that she might have originated as a prophetess or a priestess. As we shall see in this study, the mead-offering women of the Poetic Edda are supernatural characters and the offering takes place somewhere apart from the world of humankind. Enright shows how the event had its counterpart in a common and ancient ritual in the “real world”. The rite, as Enright asserts, was, besides being a repeated ritual during important gatherings, essential in royal inauguration. In fact, the queen and her “prophetess” ancestor appear to have played an important political role in royal consecration.[4] As we shall discuss further in the Bronze Age chapter, the royal inauguration ritual in Old Norse society was also closely connected to a “sacred marriage rite”, whether real or symbolic. Thus, mead-offering rituals would in such cases be accompanied by sacred marriage.
Michael Enright looks to European archaeology when trying to trace the history of the Germanic “liquor ritual” with its “lady with a mead cup” at its center. Going back as far as the fifth century B.C, Enright traces burials of great, high ranking Germanic ladies buried with wine-strainer, spoon-sieves and ladles in hand. Close to these obvious liquor- serving devices are cauldrons, cups and drinking horns. Sometimes the cauldron contains remnants of a drink, either made of barley or honey and always with a wide variety of herbs and fruits. These ladies were buried in such a way “as to suggest both her respected functions as distrubutor of drink as well as her high social status”.
http://freya.theladyofthelabyrinth.com/?page_id=654
Enright uses the mead-ritual as a starting point for a discussion of the queen´s political role within the warband of Germanic warrior societies. Since we are dealing only with religion and mythology, Enright´s thesis moves beyound our purposes. It is however useful to note that the idea of an offering of mead by a “gold-adorned” lady had its powerful traditions within innumerable Germanic societies from the earliest times up to the Viking Age.
Enright proceeds to showing, through an archaeological survey, that the lady with the mead cup was indeed an important and central character in Germanic societies, and that she might have originated as a prophetess or a priestess. As we shall see in this study, the mead-offering women of the Poetic Edda are supernatural characters and the offering takes place somewhere apart from the world of humankind. Enright shows how the event had its counterpart in a common and ancient ritual in the “real world”. The rite, as Enright asserts, was, besides being a repeated ritual during important gatherings, essential in royal inauguration. In fact, the queen and her “prophetess” ancestor appear to have played an important political role in royal consecration.[4] As we shall discuss further in the Bronze Age chapter, the royal inauguration ritual in Old Norse society was also closely connected to a “sacred marriage rite”, whether real or symbolic. Thus, mead-offering rituals would in such cases be accompanied by sacred marriage.
Michael Enright looks to European archaeology when trying to trace the history of the Germanic “liquor ritual” with its “lady with a mead cup” at its center. Going back as far as the fifth century B.C, Enright traces burials of great, high ranking Germanic ladies buried with wine-strainer, spoon-sieves and ladles in hand. Close to these obvious liquor- serving devices are cauldrons, cups and drinking horns. Sometimes the cauldron contains remnants of a drink, either made of barley or honey and always with a wide variety of herbs and fruits. These ladies were buried in such a way “as to suggest both her respected functions as distrubutor of drink as well as her high social status”.
http://freya.theladyofthelabyrinth.com/?page_id=654
Percival holds the Holy Grail while a dove descends
Parsifal, or Percival, is the original Holy Grail hero. In a poem written but not completed by Chrétien de Troyes, Percival spends the night in the castle of the Fisher King where he witnesses a procession of youths bearing a graal, or Grail — it's not yet "the" grail or the "Holy" Grail. He doesn't ask about it and is expelled. After several quests he returns and does ask as he was supposed to. Percival takes possession of the grail and a dove flies down, delivering heavenly benediction.
Parsifal, or Percival, is the original Holy Grail hero. In a poem written but not completed by Chrétien de Troyes, Percival spends the night in the castle of the Fisher King where he witnesses a procession of youths bearing a graal, or Grail — it's not yet "the" grail or the "Holy" Grail. He doesn't ask about it and is expelled. After several quests he returns and does ask as he was supposed to. Percival takes possession of the grail and a dove flies down, delivering heavenly benediction.
Approaching the Grail
The holy grail of archaeology is to discover the earliest evidence of symbolic thought in humans. Our ancient lore links the rise of symbolic thought to the antic tribes of our Sangreal heritage. Symbolic and interpretive anthropology is the study of cultural symbols and interpreting those symbols to better understand a particular society, ancient or modern.
Sangreal lore involves a huge catalog of most of the world's cultures. Each grail carrier assumes the task of integrating this material as best they can. Syncretism is an eclectic approach, involving the combining of different (often seemingly contradictory) beliefs, often while melding practices of various schools of thought. Syncretism involves the merger and analogizing the symbols, mythology and theology of several originally discrete traditions.
Give Me a Sign
Semiotics studies society and human behavior through signs and sign processes, indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication. Closely related to the field of linguistics, semiotics studies the structure and meaning of language and non-linguistic sign systems. Semiotics has important anthropological dimensions since every cultural phenomenon can be studied as communication. Social semiotics expands the interpretable semiotic landscape to include all cultural codes and social connotations, including meanings related to ideology and power structures.
In semiotics, a sign is something that can be interpreted as having a meaning, which is something other than itself, and which is therefore able to communicate information to the one interpreting or decoding the sign. Signs can work through any of the senses: visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory or taste. Their meaning can be intentional such as a word uttered with a specific meaning, or unintentional such as a symptom being a sign of a particular psychophysical condition. Signs are classified by the way they are transmitted. This process of carrying meaning depends on the use of codes that may be the individual sounds or letters, body language to show attitude or emotion, or even something as general as the clothing. Cultural codes represent the values of the culture, shading every aspect of life.
Symbolic Anthropology
Symbolic anthropology studies the way people understand their surroundings, as well as the actions and utterances of the other members of their society. These interpretations form a shared cultural system of meaning and understanding, shared among members of the same society, to varying degrees.
Symbolic anthropology studies symbols and the processes, such as myth and ritual, by which we assign meanings to these symbols. It addresses fundamental questions about human social life. We are in need of symbolic "sources of illumination" that orient us to the system of meaning of any culture, particularly past and current Sangreal culture. Symbols initiate social action and are determinable influences inclining individuals and groups to action. We can use both an interpretive and symbolic approach.
Symbolic anthropology views culture as an independent system of meaning deciphered by interpreting key symbols and rituals. Two major premises govern symbolic anthropology.
1) beliefs, however unintelligible, become comprehensible when understood as part of a cultural system of meaning. 2) actions are guided by interpretation, allowing symbolism to aid in interpreting ideal as well as material activities, such as religion, cosmology, ritual activity, and expressive customs such as mythology and performing arts. Symbolic anthropology also relates to other forms of social organization such as kinship and political organization. It helps define the role of symbols in the everyday life of a group of people.
There Will Be Drama
Social Drama is a concept devised by Victor Turner to study the dialectic of social transformation and continuity. A social drama is "a spontaneous unit of social process and a fact of everyone's experience in every human society". Social dramas occur within a group that shares values and interests and has a shared common history (Turner 1980).
This drama can be broken into four acts. 1) a rupture in social relations, or breach. 2) is a crisis that cannot be handled by normal strategies. 3) is a remedy to the initial problem, or redress and the re-establishment of social relations. 4) the final act can occur in two ways: reintegration, the return to the status quo, or recognition of schism, and alteration in the social arrangements. In both of the resolutions there are symbolic displays in which the actors show their unity in the form of rituals. In Turner's theory, ritual is a kind of plot that has a set sequence which is linear, not circular.
Interpretation & Analysis
Hermeneutics is the art and science of interpreting symbolic material and archetypal dynamics. Interpretation theories help our analysis of texts for coherent explanation. The modern use of the term is a "combination of empirical investigation and subsequent subjective understanding of human phenomena" (Woodward 1996). We use hermeneutics in our studies of symbol systems to try to understand the ways that people "understand and act in social, religious, and economic contexts".
As the experience of pleasure is genetic, but appraisal of value and meaning is memetic, different endeavors have acquired different valuations. At the fundamental level, memes are in charge of the valuations. Whatever served the memes was good; whatever served the genes more than memes was somewhat bad; whatever served only genes and not memes were very bad. Thus, spirituality, a purely meme-oriented activity, acquired the most value.
Memes & Genes
Individuals that adapted to the spirituality meme–gene coevolution may have spiritual needs that are beyond the understanding of those without the DRD4 or VMAT2 genes ("genospirituality polymorphisms") . The so-called "God gene" is a DRD4 dopamine receptor, and VMAT2 is a dopamine vesicular transporter. These genes are consistently associated with high scores on religiousness and suggestibility scales, altruism, and receptivity to spiritual experiences.
The same genes provide a blueprint for intrinsic states of happiness and ecstasy. “Vector influences” link genes, the brain, nutrition, and social behavior into a desireable, but potentially fragile experience known as “happiness.” Furthermore, it seems spirituality is also important for well-being. So far only these two dopamine genes have been identified as correlates to spirituality and self-transcendence. Inconclusive research tried to correlate a specific phenotype concerning paranormal belief with a dopaminergic gene (COMT) known for its involvement in prefrontal executive cognition and correlated with suggestibility.
http://www.brainm.com/software/pubs/brain/Genes,%20Memes,%20Culture%20&%20MI.pdf
The holy grail of archaeology is to discover the earliest evidence of symbolic thought in humans. Our ancient lore links the rise of symbolic thought to the antic tribes of our Sangreal heritage. Symbolic and interpretive anthropology is the study of cultural symbols and interpreting those symbols to better understand a particular society, ancient or modern.
Sangreal lore involves a huge catalog of most of the world's cultures. Each grail carrier assumes the task of integrating this material as best they can. Syncretism is an eclectic approach, involving the combining of different (often seemingly contradictory) beliefs, often while melding practices of various schools of thought. Syncretism involves the merger and analogizing the symbols, mythology and theology of several originally discrete traditions.
Give Me a Sign
Semiotics studies society and human behavior through signs and sign processes, indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication. Closely related to the field of linguistics, semiotics studies the structure and meaning of language and non-linguistic sign systems. Semiotics has important anthropological dimensions since every cultural phenomenon can be studied as communication. Social semiotics expands the interpretable semiotic landscape to include all cultural codes and social connotations, including meanings related to ideology and power structures.
In semiotics, a sign is something that can be interpreted as having a meaning, which is something other than itself, and which is therefore able to communicate information to the one interpreting or decoding the sign. Signs can work through any of the senses: visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory or taste. Their meaning can be intentional such as a word uttered with a specific meaning, or unintentional such as a symptom being a sign of a particular psychophysical condition. Signs are classified by the way they are transmitted. This process of carrying meaning depends on the use of codes that may be the individual sounds or letters, body language to show attitude or emotion, or even something as general as the clothing. Cultural codes represent the values of the culture, shading every aspect of life.
Symbolic Anthropology
Symbolic anthropology studies the way people understand their surroundings, as well as the actions and utterances of the other members of their society. These interpretations form a shared cultural system of meaning and understanding, shared among members of the same society, to varying degrees.
Symbolic anthropology studies symbols and the processes, such as myth and ritual, by which we assign meanings to these symbols. It addresses fundamental questions about human social life. We are in need of symbolic "sources of illumination" that orient us to the system of meaning of any culture, particularly past and current Sangreal culture. Symbols initiate social action and are determinable influences inclining individuals and groups to action. We can use both an interpretive and symbolic approach.
Symbolic anthropology views culture as an independent system of meaning deciphered by interpreting key symbols and rituals. Two major premises govern symbolic anthropology.
1) beliefs, however unintelligible, become comprehensible when understood as part of a cultural system of meaning. 2) actions are guided by interpretation, allowing symbolism to aid in interpreting ideal as well as material activities, such as religion, cosmology, ritual activity, and expressive customs such as mythology and performing arts. Symbolic anthropology also relates to other forms of social organization such as kinship and political organization. It helps define the role of symbols in the everyday life of a group of people.
There Will Be Drama
Social Drama is a concept devised by Victor Turner to study the dialectic of social transformation and continuity. A social drama is "a spontaneous unit of social process and a fact of everyone's experience in every human society". Social dramas occur within a group that shares values and interests and has a shared common history (Turner 1980).
This drama can be broken into four acts. 1) a rupture in social relations, or breach. 2) is a crisis that cannot be handled by normal strategies. 3) is a remedy to the initial problem, or redress and the re-establishment of social relations. 4) the final act can occur in two ways: reintegration, the return to the status quo, or recognition of schism, and alteration in the social arrangements. In both of the resolutions there are symbolic displays in which the actors show their unity in the form of rituals. In Turner's theory, ritual is a kind of plot that has a set sequence which is linear, not circular.
Interpretation & Analysis
Hermeneutics is the art and science of interpreting symbolic material and archetypal dynamics. Interpretation theories help our analysis of texts for coherent explanation. The modern use of the term is a "combination of empirical investigation and subsequent subjective understanding of human phenomena" (Woodward 1996). We use hermeneutics in our studies of symbol systems to try to understand the ways that people "understand and act in social, religious, and economic contexts".
As the experience of pleasure is genetic, but appraisal of value and meaning is memetic, different endeavors have acquired different valuations. At the fundamental level, memes are in charge of the valuations. Whatever served the memes was good; whatever served the genes more than memes was somewhat bad; whatever served only genes and not memes were very bad. Thus, spirituality, a purely meme-oriented activity, acquired the most value.
Memes & Genes
Individuals that adapted to the spirituality meme–gene coevolution may have spiritual needs that are beyond the understanding of those without the DRD4 or VMAT2 genes ("genospirituality polymorphisms") . The so-called "God gene" is a DRD4 dopamine receptor, and VMAT2 is a dopamine vesicular transporter. These genes are consistently associated with high scores on religiousness and suggestibility scales, altruism, and receptivity to spiritual experiences.
The same genes provide a blueprint for intrinsic states of happiness and ecstasy. “Vector influences” link genes, the brain, nutrition, and social behavior into a desireable, but potentially fragile experience known as “happiness.” Furthermore, it seems spirituality is also important for well-being. So far only these two dopamine genes have been identified as correlates to spirituality and self-transcendence. Inconclusive research tried to correlate a specific phenotype concerning paranormal belief with a dopaminergic gene (COMT) known for its involvement in prefrontal executive cognition and correlated with suggestibility.
http://www.brainm.com/software/pubs/brain/Genes,%20Memes,%20Culture%20&%20MI.pdf
Tristan & Isolde
THE HIGH HISTORY OF THE HOLY GRAIL,
by Vincent Bridges
Joseph Campbell, in his epic study The Masks of God places Wolfram's Parzival squarely on the dividing line between ancient and modern. Emma Jung, whose psychological insights are invaluable, identifies the Grail cycle as the beginning of the immanent spirituality of Christianity, in opposition to the more ancient transcendent view. Adolf Hitler considered the Hallows of the Grail to be an important component of his plan for world conquest. Sort of a psychic equivalent to a Panzer battalion.
The Grail would seem to be the ultimate slippery idea. Even the word itself has a half-dozen different derivations: from gradual, gradulis in Latin, to a wide plate or dish, gradule in Old French, to the really strange meanings such as Sang Real or royal blood. A persistent whiff of Sufism lingers on, along with traces of other arcane undercurrents, such as Goddess worship, "witchcraft," and contact with such megalithic concepts as landscape zodiacs.
To approach the Grail is to enter into Fairyland, the Magic Kingdom, but one such as Walt Disney could never have imagined. The Grail is, or becomes, all things to all seekers. Perhaps it is best seen as a state of mind, one in which the numinous exists in sharp and bright detail, while the mundane becomes charged with significance and meaning. If The Castle, or Temple of the Grail is the Garden, then the Angel of the Fiery Sword becomes a Grail Knight. And to enter one must simply ask: "Whom does the Grail Serve?" We are talking of nothing less than the redemption of the human condition, the true promise of Christianity, reneged on by the Church and forgotten by all but those who take up the Quest.
Like all great and essentially timeless ideas, the Grail is a product of a specific time and place, a specific and exact set of enabling conditions that allowed the emergence of this seminal myth. To understand the Grail, we must look first to history
Elenor of Aquitaine was in many ways the most remarkable woman of the middle ages. Indeed, she was perhaps one of the most amazing women of all time. Outright sovereign of Aquitaine, the richest and fairest province of France, she was married very young to the King of France. The saintly Louis seems never to have known quite what to do with this powerful, beautiful and headstrong woman. Elenor started the fashion of the Court of Love, which flourished throughout Europe and reached its peak at the turn of the thirteenth century. Elenor's daughter, Marie de Champagne, inherited her mother's love of Provencal troubadours and all the other trappings of the cult of courtly love.
Elenor and her court accompainied Louis the Young on his expedition to the Holy Land, known as the disasterous and ineffectual Second Crusade. Elenor returned from crusading and soon embarked on the great royal romance of the period. Henry Plantagenet, Henry II of England, swept her off her feet. He married her with the aid of large bribes and good friends in Rome. Their children included two of the most renowned and infamous characters in the long panorama of English history: Richard the Lion-Hearted and King John, the signer of the Magna Carta. With illustrious siblings as these, it is easy to lose track of a simple princess, no matter what her literary tastes.
Marie de Champagne deserves a better niche in history if only for her encouragement of poetry. She brought to her court the greatest storyteller of the age, Chretien de Troyes. Through Chretien the undercurrents of the Grail mythos surfaced into literature.
Not much is known about Chretien, his origins or his early works. He was born around 1130 and by 1170, he was famous as the author of a version of Ovid's Book of Love, now lost, and a version of the Tristan story which has also disappeared. Erec is his first medieval bestseller. This poem introduces in a formal way the Matter of Britain to the cosmopolitan audience at the court of Marie de Champagne, and from there passed throughout the courts of Europe. Erec sets the basic pattern for all Arthurian Romances, but though the splendors of the Celtic world are here on display, the Grail is not yet in evidence.
Chretien followed up his success with three more Arthurian tales. Cliges is a Roman myth with an Arthurian background. It wasn't all that popular. There are only two copies extant. But it did introduce certain key elements in the Matter of Britain. Cliges contains the first mention of the Round Table and the first specific mention of Camelot. Chretain may have picked up this name from Camulodunum, the Roman name for Colchester.
The Knight of the Cart and The Knight with the Lion are perhaps Chretien's masterpieces. Certainly Ywain or the knight with the lion with its marvels, strange adventures and courtly love, its finely drawn characters and well wrought unity is a masterpiece. The Knight of the Cart , our introduction to Lancelot, fares less well. The action is unexplained and unmotivated, requiring a broader canvas in order to give the causes and consequences of the adventure. The overall feeling is that of a piece of a larger work rather than a completed work of art in itself.
We can imagine Chretien working on just that problem of scope in the early 1180's.While Chretien produced most of the Arthurian stage dressing that would define the very concept of Romance over the next three hundred years, the Grail has yet to appear.
Chretien's last work, left unfinished at his death, was Perceval, or the History of the Grail. With this uneven masterpiece, Chretien plants the seed germ of the spiritual qualities that will, within only thiry years, become the driving force behind works as unique as Wolfram's Parzival and Walter de Mapp's Queste del Saint Graal.
While the scope of Perceval, or the History of the Grail is broad enough to encompass the entire medieval world view, it is riddled with difficulties and inconsistencies. Chretien himself claimed that he was merely reworking the material that he had found in an old manuscript. Perhaps the marvels and strange doings of his Celtic original simply proved too much for Chretien's more down to earth approach. At any rate, his version ends after Gawain's adventure of the Perilous Bed.
We can be sure that Chretien began his last work, commissioned by Phillip of Flanders, with great enthusiasm. Chretien refers to the story as the greatest ever told in any court. His opening scenes are full of color and verve. He tells of his hero's blunders and gaucheries with a keen comic sensitivity of effect. He invests the encounter with the Fisher King with just the right amount of awe and reverence mixed in with the mystery and strangeness. And Chretien is equally successful with the startling appearance of the Loathly Damsel and her violent denunicaion of Perceval, whose growth from boyish boorishness to knightly grace has been well drawn and realized.
With the shift of narrative focus to Gawain, the tale begins to unravel. By the time the story returns to Perceval, it is obvious that Chretien is deeply confused and that some important concept concerning this "graal" has been lost or misunderstood.
But the clues are there, painted in broad strokes in the Grail procession scene. To understand the mystery of the Grail, it will be necessary to have the outline of Chretien's scene in the Grail Castle firmly in mind. Our first glimpse of the Grail offers many guideposts in the tangled thickets of theological and eschatological speculations to follow. Chretien faithfully followed his original, even when he didn't understand it.
Perceval's early life echoes the boyhoods of the great Celtic Solar Heroes Culchuin and Finn. His entry to the great hall of Camelot is taken from the tale of Kulwich in the Welsh Mabinogion. After his knighting, Perceval sets out in search of further adventures and arrives at the castle of the Fisher King. The Fisher King presides over a vast, empty hall, large enough for four hundred men. An old man is seated on a couch pulled close to the central fire. The Fisher King presents Perceval with a Sword, a richly appointed weapon, a marvel that "could not break save only in one peril which no one knew save him who forged and tempered it."
A procession passes through the hall. First, a squire carries a Spear dripping spackles of blood onto the floor. Two squires with ten-branched candlesticks follow. A beautiful maiden enters carrying a "Graal" which blazes so brightly that it puts out the light of the candles and the stars. Following her is another maiden carrying a talleors, a casket or tabernacle. Perceval watches all this but fails to ask its meaning.
In the morning, the castle is empty and disappears as soon as Perceval moves across the drawbridge. He comes upon a lady holding a headless body. She informs Perceval that all could have been healed if he had only asked of the grail. She also tells him that his sword will break in a careless moment, but that it can be renewed in the lake where the smith, Trebuchet, dwells.
On the surface, this is no stranger than any other marvelous encounter in any of a dozen Celtic adventure tales. It is only when the hermit, whom Perceval visits for confession after five years of godless adventure, begins to explain and chastise that we sense that something is missing or misunderstood.
Why does the hermit rebuke Perceval so severely for not asking of the Grail when he was merely following the teachings of his chivalrous mentor? And, in any case, Perceval did not know that he should ask, or that there was any penalty for not asking. It somehow doesn't seem quite fair.
But even more disturbing is the hermit's assertion that the "Graal" carried by the beautiful maiden did not contain a salmon or lamprey as Chretien implied it should, but simply a consecrated wafer intended for the King's father. Church orthodoxy specifically excluded women from serving in such a priestly capacity. Yet the Grail Maiden passes unexplained. At any rate, a dish wide enough to hold a large fish seems a strange choice to hold a smallish wafer. And, if its purpose is simply sacramental, why does it accompany each course?
The old hermit's explanations are more tantalizing than satisfying, and suggests that Chretien found the need to alibi and cover over his religious tracks. The idea of a miraculous dish is an ancient Celtic motif. The later romances give the Fisher King the name of Bron, a close proximity to the ancient Welsh Bran, whose cauldron supplied the needs of any and everyone. Bran was wounded in the foot, echoing the Fisher King's injury, a spear wound through the thigh.
It's a mistake to assume, as does Professor Loomis and other authorities, that Chretien simply misinterpreted Bran's horn, corz, which also had miraculous abilities, as cors, or body, thereby connecting the dish and the body of Christ which accidently created the spiritually potent image of the Holy Grail. This pun is definitely a clue to the real intention, but it is hardly an accident.
And there is still the matter of a woman celebrating a form of the Mass, something unheard of in orthodox tradition. Where could this have come from?
To simply say "from Celtic sources" is to beg the point. For all the pagan influences in the Grail story, it is still almost numinously Christian. But it is a Christianity far removed from the corruption and politics of Rome. This doesn't explain the eruption of Grail literature in the thirty or so years between the major Romances. For that, a broader perspective is needed.
These thirty years, from roughly 1185 to 1215, marked, in many ways, the nadir of medieval Christianity. The papal squabbles of the mid-century, along with the general sense of discouragment after the failure of the Second Crusade, created a religious vacuum, into which more "heretical" forms of Christianity stepped. These heresies took root so quickly because of the contrast they presented with the church of Rome. These priests lived with and cared about their flock. It was common for prelates in Rome to spent their whole tenure in absentee, and the lower clergy was often as venal and corrupt as the local landowner.
The decline of the church was given an extra push in the 1160's and 70's by the wide circulation of Abelairdian rationalism. Abelaird, best remembered today for his romance with his pupil Heloise, discussed the superstitions of the church with such clear-headedness that many intellectuals agreed that change was necessary, even essential.
If the second crusade has been disaapointing, then the fall of Jerusalem in the autumn of 1187 was devastating. It was seen as a sign of God's disfavor. A crusade was proclaimed, joined by such personages as the Kings of Germany, France and England. Frederick Barbarrossa died along the way and even though Elenor's golden child, Richard I of England, pursued the crusade with all the force of his fiery personality, Jerusalem remained in the hands of the infidels.
Richard, Heart-of-the-Lion, was something of a troubadour himself and gave his own stamp of approval to the new mode of romance. He seemed to literally embody the Matter of Britain and its chivalric traditions. We can be sure that the new poetry of the grail accompanied the crusaders because Richard's nephew, Marie's son, Henry of Champagne was elected King of Jerusalem. It is tempting to envisage the poet Gautier de Danans chanting his continuation of Chretien's masterwork in the great hall of Acre, with Richard and his Queens, his sister Johanna and his wife Berengaria, nodding their approval.
In 1191, the whole of the Arthurian tradition was verified by the monks of Glastonbury. Staking their claim as the "Vale of Avalon," the good monks disinterred the body of a Bronze Age chieftain and his queen. The bodies were supposedly marked with a cross identifying them and King Arthur and Guinevere.
Naturally, this created an international sensation, and along with it, an appetite for stories about Arthur, his knights and their adventures in search of the Grail. There were several good reasons for this sudden discovery. First and foremost stands the political reason. The Plantagenet conquest of Wales was still quite recent and the nationalist guerrillas, to give them a modern appellation, believed that Arthur, rex quondum et futurum, the once and future king would rise from his rocky tomb in Gwenydd and ride to battle against the invaders. It was politically sound to produce Arthur's body, safely buried on English soil.
But, looking closer, there is something very interesting about Glastonbury's claims on Arthur and the Grail. Tradition has it that Joseph of Arimathea brought Christianity, and possibly the Virgin Mother herself, to Britain within a decade of Jesus' death. The first Christian church in the world was then the small circular wattled structure at Glastonbury.
The Celtic Church, which was responsible for bringing culture, indeed one might say even civilization, back to Europe after the fall of Rome, survived at least until the eighth century. It survived even longer in the wilds of Ireland and Scotland. We find Robert the Bruce being crowned by a Culdee bishop as late as the early fourteenth century.
Glastonbury functioned as if it were a school, or spiritual center of some sort. Its place was high on the list of Celtic Church pilgrimages and from the earliest times was associated with the Virgin Mother. Arthur was associated at an early era by his adoption of the image of the Virgin as a personal banner. (See Gildas and Geoffrey of Monmouth). If Arthur has an actual historical focus, it is the late 400's, just after the last legions were recalled to Rome and before the overwhelming wave of Saxon invasions in the early 500's. Arthur at this point is a "Restitutor" or rescuer of Roman civilization. His choice of the Virgin, rather than the crucifix of Rome, indicates that along with restoring the Empire, Arthur intended to change the focus away from apostolic Catholicism toward the more inspiration oriented Celtic Church. That he failed is perhaps the great tragedy of the Dark Ages.
At any rate, it is not hard to see the glimmers of this earlier and more spiritual form of Christianity as the undercurrent of ideas that emerged as Chretien's "graal." The connection is never made directly, accept in the later romances, but the Matter of Britain was basically a front for the Celtic Church. In this seemingly secular form, the spiritual motiffs of a truly gnostic Christianity emerged in the intellectual current of the age. The Roman Church neither encouraged nor discouraged the Grail Romances, even though it was obvious that an earlier and possibly heretical form of Christianity was being represented. As we shall see, the Church was not above persecuting heretics, but there was absolutely no attempt to discredit the Grail stories.
Perhaps the reason for this is that even the Roman Church found it hard not to believe that the origins of the Celtic Church went back to the very family of Christ. "Royal Blood," indeed.
Around 1200, Robert de Borron, following the popularity of the continuations of Chretein, produced Joseph of Arimathea, the prequel to the series the ties it all very neatly into the Celtic Church. He reveals the themes of a hidden or inner teaching given to Joseph after Christ's resurrection. These teachings appear to center around the Grail, here called a Chalice, and consitute the heart of the "mysteries." Mention is also made of a journey westward, to the "Vale of Avaron (Avalon?)" and provision is made for the future hero, Percival, who will fulfill the Quest.
There is a certain murkiness to this story, perhaps as a result of trying to tell the important part (for those with ears to hear) and still stay within certain defined limits that would allow the Roman Church to ignore the tale. Things had changed by 1200. A powerful Pope, Innocent III, had regained the upper hand in his struggles with the Holy Roman Empire and began to turn his attention to unifying the whole world under his spiritual rule. By the grace of God, of course.
And this led directly to the most disgraceful incidents in the history of the Roman Church. The Fourth Crusade and the Crusade against the Cathars were waged against fellow Christians. The Fourth Crusade ended with the sack of Constantinople. The Crusaders, tricked by those crafty and godless Venetians, fell upon the first city of Christendom and plundered and sacked with a vengence. The Knights Templars found the shroud, whose adoration would produce charges of idol worship eventually resulting in their downfall. Innocent III rejoiced in the "unification of the Church."
But not quite. A resurgence of a gnostic heresy in the south of France threatened to become the majority religion and Innocent responded in the manner he knew best: call out the troops. The extermination of heretics in the south of France would continue for half a century, long after Innocent III went to his just rewards in whatever afterlife he actually believed in.
Why exterminate the Cathars, or the Perfecti as they called themselves. Why not also attack the Celtic Church which was also active at the same time?
It boils down to a question of legitimacy. If Rome was afraid to open the question of the Celtic Church, it was because of the nagging suspicion that the Celtic Church had the greater claim to legitimacy and could just possibly prove it. There were connections between the Perfecti and the Celtic Church. By concentrating on the Perfecti, heresy could be severely rebuked as an object lesson that would force at least superficial adherence to Rome.
The Cathars became scapegoats for the whole underground current of Celtic/Grail/Gnostic Christian survivals. It seems to have worked. For by 1220, around the time the first wave of anti-cathar crusading was winding down, Grail Romances were falling out of favor. Other than Malory, whose rendition of Walter de Mapp's 1220 Queste de Saint Greal has become our story book Grail, there is only the "Elucidation" of Chretien by an anonymous author. This is a half hearted attempt to give another explanation for all these mystical goings on. It is unsuccessful and is often not included in the Grail texts.
Clearly, the Grail had a specific significance for those who listened so avidly to these stories of wonder and marvel. The grail's significance is simply its connection with the Holy Family. The Grail suggests in the strongest possible terms that another route to salvation -- one that had nothing to do with the Church of Rome -- was available around the turn of the thirteenth century.
This is most clearly seen in the two most unique of all Grail legends, that of the "Perlesvaus" and Wolfram's Parzival. Wolfram's tale is almost devoid of any mention of the clergy. His Parzival finds grace through knightly prowess in pursuit of a gnostic, or experiential faith. His Grail is the stone that fell from heaven. This "stone" would eventually become, over the centuries, the philosopher's stone of the alchemist.
The "Perlesvaus" ties the matter to Glastonbury and may even have been written there shortly after the discovery of Arthur's Tomb. This story differs somewhat from other Grail legends, but its connection with the megalithic zodiac around Glasonbury, which Katherine Maltwood identified in the 1930's from a close reading of the "Perlesvaus," suggests the area's older connection with the gateway to Anwen, the Celtic underworld where the original cauldron of Bran was hidden. There is even an ancient Welsh poem about Arthur's trip to Anwen to capture the cauldron.
The pattern is clear. Around the turn of the thirteenth century, the Grail Romances offered a direct challenge to the authority of Rome, one that Rome could not answer for fear of exposing her own shaky position. Innocent III felt strong enough, after the fall of Constantinople, to turn the iron grip of Christian chivalry on the most exposed and concentrated group of heretics hoping to quiet the lot of them. Indeed, the fear and horror of the Cathar Crusade did put the fear of the Pope back into the hearts of Christians everywhere.
And if the Celtic heresy could not be brought to the sword directly, then the land of England could be put under interdiction, a terrible form of religious coercion in which the church effectively goes on strike. It will not marry or bury or hold services while under interdiction. Innocent III, for good measure, also excommunicated King John. All of this was resolved by England becoming a Papal Fief for a few years. The Celtic Church gradually faded away over the next century.
The image of the Grail, though, did not fade away. The Matter of Britain still retained its popularity, though without the spiritual overtones. The spiritual current went underground, surfacing in the Renaissance, and then again in the Rosecrucians, and again in the nineteenth century.
Wolfram says that to know the Grail you must "learn your ABC's without the aid of black magic." Robert de Borron's Joseph is quite explicit. The mystery of the Grail is the inner teaching. Jesus taught Joseph strange words to vibrate over the cup that held the holy blood. This attempt to clear away the underbrush of the Grail texts has shown that the source of the Grail is that strange mixture of Celtic and Christian beliefs that developed in the west of England and Ireland before the Empire crumbled. It was defended by Arthur, and almost brought by him on to the stage of European history at just that juncture when the politics of the Empire would have allowed a completely new direction, a completely new version based on the inner teaching of the Christian mysteries.
By the eighth century, the time of Charles the Great, Rome had established her death grip on the religious community, and Charles, out of guilt, or through the trickery of the Pope, allowed himself to accept the Imperial Throne from the hands of the Patriarch of Rome. The fraudulent Donation of Constantine, which supported the temporal power of the Church, clinched the situation. From that point on, Rome was locked in a desperate struggle against the various gnostic survivals, some of whose claim to be the real "Church" was considerably better than Rome's. To admit any other claim was to lose the position of defender of orthodoxy; for if there were many churches, than Rome was not THE church, catholic and universal.
This power struggle would color the next seven hundred years, ending finally with Luthor's thesis nailed to the door of the seminary. That rupture could not be healed, even by the sword.
In the Grail, we see, even at this late date, the radiant quality of that early church. The importance of the Grail, for us now, as we plunge into the next cycle of spiritual evolution, lies in its symbolic nature. Within the Grail can be found a synthesis of all western mystical and magical traditions. It is the source of that underground stream of meaning that flows through the occult and esoteric teachings of the last two thousand years.
The Grail is all things to all people, and to all it is The Mystery. Omnia quia sunt, lumina sunt.
by Vincent Bridges
Joseph Campbell, in his epic study The Masks of God places Wolfram's Parzival squarely on the dividing line between ancient and modern. Emma Jung, whose psychological insights are invaluable, identifies the Grail cycle as the beginning of the immanent spirituality of Christianity, in opposition to the more ancient transcendent view. Adolf Hitler considered the Hallows of the Grail to be an important component of his plan for world conquest. Sort of a psychic equivalent to a Panzer battalion.
The Grail would seem to be the ultimate slippery idea. Even the word itself has a half-dozen different derivations: from gradual, gradulis in Latin, to a wide plate or dish, gradule in Old French, to the really strange meanings such as Sang Real or royal blood. A persistent whiff of Sufism lingers on, along with traces of other arcane undercurrents, such as Goddess worship, "witchcraft," and contact with such megalithic concepts as landscape zodiacs.
To approach the Grail is to enter into Fairyland, the Magic Kingdom, but one such as Walt Disney could never have imagined. The Grail is, or becomes, all things to all seekers. Perhaps it is best seen as a state of mind, one in which the numinous exists in sharp and bright detail, while the mundane becomes charged with significance and meaning. If The Castle, or Temple of the Grail is the Garden, then the Angel of the Fiery Sword becomes a Grail Knight. And to enter one must simply ask: "Whom does the Grail Serve?" We are talking of nothing less than the redemption of the human condition, the true promise of Christianity, reneged on by the Church and forgotten by all but those who take up the Quest.
Like all great and essentially timeless ideas, the Grail is a product of a specific time and place, a specific and exact set of enabling conditions that allowed the emergence of this seminal myth. To understand the Grail, we must look first to history
Elenor of Aquitaine was in many ways the most remarkable woman of the middle ages. Indeed, she was perhaps one of the most amazing women of all time. Outright sovereign of Aquitaine, the richest and fairest province of France, she was married very young to the King of France. The saintly Louis seems never to have known quite what to do with this powerful, beautiful and headstrong woman. Elenor started the fashion of the Court of Love, which flourished throughout Europe and reached its peak at the turn of the thirteenth century. Elenor's daughter, Marie de Champagne, inherited her mother's love of Provencal troubadours and all the other trappings of the cult of courtly love.
Elenor and her court accompainied Louis the Young on his expedition to the Holy Land, known as the disasterous and ineffectual Second Crusade. Elenor returned from crusading and soon embarked on the great royal romance of the period. Henry Plantagenet, Henry II of England, swept her off her feet. He married her with the aid of large bribes and good friends in Rome. Their children included two of the most renowned and infamous characters in the long panorama of English history: Richard the Lion-Hearted and King John, the signer of the Magna Carta. With illustrious siblings as these, it is easy to lose track of a simple princess, no matter what her literary tastes.
Marie de Champagne deserves a better niche in history if only for her encouragement of poetry. She brought to her court the greatest storyteller of the age, Chretien de Troyes. Through Chretien the undercurrents of the Grail mythos surfaced into literature.
Not much is known about Chretien, his origins or his early works. He was born around 1130 and by 1170, he was famous as the author of a version of Ovid's Book of Love, now lost, and a version of the Tristan story which has also disappeared. Erec is his first medieval bestseller. This poem introduces in a formal way the Matter of Britain to the cosmopolitan audience at the court of Marie de Champagne, and from there passed throughout the courts of Europe. Erec sets the basic pattern for all Arthurian Romances, but though the splendors of the Celtic world are here on display, the Grail is not yet in evidence.
Chretien followed up his success with three more Arthurian tales. Cliges is a Roman myth with an Arthurian background. It wasn't all that popular. There are only two copies extant. But it did introduce certain key elements in the Matter of Britain. Cliges contains the first mention of the Round Table and the first specific mention of Camelot. Chretain may have picked up this name from Camulodunum, the Roman name for Colchester.
The Knight of the Cart and The Knight with the Lion are perhaps Chretien's masterpieces. Certainly Ywain or the knight with the lion with its marvels, strange adventures and courtly love, its finely drawn characters and well wrought unity is a masterpiece. The Knight of the Cart , our introduction to Lancelot, fares less well. The action is unexplained and unmotivated, requiring a broader canvas in order to give the causes and consequences of the adventure. The overall feeling is that of a piece of a larger work rather than a completed work of art in itself.
We can imagine Chretien working on just that problem of scope in the early 1180's.While Chretien produced most of the Arthurian stage dressing that would define the very concept of Romance over the next three hundred years, the Grail has yet to appear.
Chretien's last work, left unfinished at his death, was Perceval, or the History of the Grail. With this uneven masterpiece, Chretien plants the seed germ of the spiritual qualities that will, within only thiry years, become the driving force behind works as unique as Wolfram's Parzival and Walter de Mapp's Queste del Saint Graal.
While the scope of Perceval, or the History of the Grail is broad enough to encompass the entire medieval world view, it is riddled with difficulties and inconsistencies. Chretien himself claimed that he was merely reworking the material that he had found in an old manuscript. Perhaps the marvels and strange doings of his Celtic original simply proved too much for Chretien's more down to earth approach. At any rate, his version ends after Gawain's adventure of the Perilous Bed.
We can be sure that Chretien began his last work, commissioned by Phillip of Flanders, with great enthusiasm. Chretien refers to the story as the greatest ever told in any court. His opening scenes are full of color and verve. He tells of his hero's blunders and gaucheries with a keen comic sensitivity of effect. He invests the encounter with the Fisher King with just the right amount of awe and reverence mixed in with the mystery and strangeness. And Chretien is equally successful with the startling appearance of the Loathly Damsel and her violent denunicaion of Perceval, whose growth from boyish boorishness to knightly grace has been well drawn and realized.
With the shift of narrative focus to Gawain, the tale begins to unravel. By the time the story returns to Perceval, it is obvious that Chretien is deeply confused and that some important concept concerning this "graal" has been lost or misunderstood.
But the clues are there, painted in broad strokes in the Grail procession scene. To understand the mystery of the Grail, it will be necessary to have the outline of Chretien's scene in the Grail Castle firmly in mind. Our first glimpse of the Grail offers many guideposts in the tangled thickets of theological and eschatological speculations to follow. Chretien faithfully followed his original, even when he didn't understand it.
Perceval's early life echoes the boyhoods of the great Celtic Solar Heroes Culchuin and Finn. His entry to the great hall of Camelot is taken from the tale of Kulwich in the Welsh Mabinogion. After his knighting, Perceval sets out in search of further adventures and arrives at the castle of the Fisher King. The Fisher King presides over a vast, empty hall, large enough for four hundred men. An old man is seated on a couch pulled close to the central fire. The Fisher King presents Perceval with a Sword, a richly appointed weapon, a marvel that "could not break save only in one peril which no one knew save him who forged and tempered it."
A procession passes through the hall. First, a squire carries a Spear dripping spackles of blood onto the floor. Two squires with ten-branched candlesticks follow. A beautiful maiden enters carrying a "Graal" which blazes so brightly that it puts out the light of the candles and the stars. Following her is another maiden carrying a talleors, a casket or tabernacle. Perceval watches all this but fails to ask its meaning.
In the morning, the castle is empty and disappears as soon as Perceval moves across the drawbridge. He comes upon a lady holding a headless body. She informs Perceval that all could have been healed if he had only asked of the grail. She also tells him that his sword will break in a careless moment, but that it can be renewed in the lake where the smith, Trebuchet, dwells.
On the surface, this is no stranger than any other marvelous encounter in any of a dozen Celtic adventure tales. It is only when the hermit, whom Perceval visits for confession after five years of godless adventure, begins to explain and chastise that we sense that something is missing or misunderstood.
Why does the hermit rebuke Perceval so severely for not asking of the Grail when he was merely following the teachings of his chivalrous mentor? And, in any case, Perceval did not know that he should ask, or that there was any penalty for not asking. It somehow doesn't seem quite fair.
But even more disturbing is the hermit's assertion that the "Graal" carried by the beautiful maiden did not contain a salmon or lamprey as Chretien implied it should, but simply a consecrated wafer intended for the King's father. Church orthodoxy specifically excluded women from serving in such a priestly capacity. Yet the Grail Maiden passes unexplained. At any rate, a dish wide enough to hold a large fish seems a strange choice to hold a smallish wafer. And, if its purpose is simply sacramental, why does it accompany each course?
The old hermit's explanations are more tantalizing than satisfying, and suggests that Chretien found the need to alibi and cover over his religious tracks. The idea of a miraculous dish is an ancient Celtic motif. The later romances give the Fisher King the name of Bron, a close proximity to the ancient Welsh Bran, whose cauldron supplied the needs of any and everyone. Bran was wounded in the foot, echoing the Fisher King's injury, a spear wound through the thigh.
It's a mistake to assume, as does Professor Loomis and other authorities, that Chretien simply misinterpreted Bran's horn, corz, which also had miraculous abilities, as cors, or body, thereby connecting the dish and the body of Christ which accidently created the spiritually potent image of the Holy Grail. This pun is definitely a clue to the real intention, but it is hardly an accident.
And there is still the matter of a woman celebrating a form of the Mass, something unheard of in orthodox tradition. Where could this have come from?
To simply say "from Celtic sources" is to beg the point. For all the pagan influences in the Grail story, it is still almost numinously Christian. But it is a Christianity far removed from the corruption and politics of Rome. This doesn't explain the eruption of Grail literature in the thirty or so years between the major Romances. For that, a broader perspective is needed.
These thirty years, from roughly 1185 to 1215, marked, in many ways, the nadir of medieval Christianity. The papal squabbles of the mid-century, along with the general sense of discouragment after the failure of the Second Crusade, created a religious vacuum, into which more "heretical" forms of Christianity stepped. These heresies took root so quickly because of the contrast they presented with the church of Rome. These priests lived with and cared about their flock. It was common for prelates in Rome to spent their whole tenure in absentee, and the lower clergy was often as venal and corrupt as the local landowner.
The decline of the church was given an extra push in the 1160's and 70's by the wide circulation of Abelairdian rationalism. Abelaird, best remembered today for his romance with his pupil Heloise, discussed the superstitions of the church with such clear-headedness that many intellectuals agreed that change was necessary, even essential.
If the second crusade has been disaapointing, then the fall of Jerusalem in the autumn of 1187 was devastating. It was seen as a sign of God's disfavor. A crusade was proclaimed, joined by such personages as the Kings of Germany, France and England. Frederick Barbarrossa died along the way and even though Elenor's golden child, Richard I of England, pursued the crusade with all the force of his fiery personality, Jerusalem remained in the hands of the infidels.
Richard, Heart-of-the-Lion, was something of a troubadour himself and gave his own stamp of approval to the new mode of romance. He seemed to literally embody the Matter of Britain and its chivalric traditions. We can be sure that the new poetry of the grail accompanied the crusaders because Richard's nephew, Marie's son, Henry of Champagne was elected King of Jerusalem. It is tempting to envisage the poet Gautier de Danans chanting his continuation of Chretien's masterwork in the great hall of Acre, with Richard and his Queens, his sister Johanna and his wife Berengaria, nodding their approval.
In 1191, the whole of the Arthurian tradition was verified by the monks of Glastonbury. Staking their claim as the "Vale of Avalon," the good monks disinterred the body of a Bronze Age chieftain and his queen. The bodies were supposedly marked with a cross identifying them and King Arthur and Guinevere.
Naturally, this created an international sensation, and along with it, an appetite for stories about Arthur, his knights and their adventures in search of the Grail. There were several good reasons for this sudden discovery. First and foremost stands the political reason. The Plantagenet conquest of Wales was still quite recent and the nationalist guerrillas, to give them a modern appellation, believed that Arthur, rex quondum et futurum, the once and future king would rise from his rocky tomb in Gwenydd and ride to battle against the invaders. It was politically sound to produce Arthur's body, safely buried on English soil.
But, looking closer, there is something very interesting about Glastonbury's claims on Arthur and the Grail. Tradition has it that Joseph of Arimathea brought Christianity, and possibly the Virgin Mother herself, to Britain within a decade of Jesus' death. The first Christian church in the world was then the small circular wattled structure at Glastonbury.
The Celtic Church, which was responsible for bringing culture, indeed one might say even civilization, back to Europe after the fall of Rome, survived at least until the eighth century. It survived even longer in the wilds of Ireland and Scotland. We find Robert the Bruce being crowned by a Culdee bishop as late as the early fourteenth century.
Glastonbury functioned as if it were a school, or spiritual center of some sort. Its place was high on the list of Celtic Church pilgrimages and from the earliest times was associated with the Virgin Mother. Arthur was associated at an early era by his adoption of the image of the Virgin as a personal banner. (See Gildas and Geoffrey of Monmouth). If Arthur has an actual historical focus, it is the late 400's, just after the last legions were recalled to Rome and before the overwhelming wave of Saxon invasions in the early 500's. Arthur at this point is a "Restitutor" or rescuer of Roman civilization. His choice of the Virgin, rather than the crucifix of Rome, indicates that along with restoring the Empire, Arthur intended to change the focus away from apostolic Catholicism toward the more inspiration oriented Celtic Church. That he failed is perhaps the great tragedy of the Dark Ages.
At any rate, it is not hard to see the glimmers of this earlier and more spiritual form of Christianity as the undercurrent of ideas that emerged as Chretien's "graal." The connection is never made directly, accept in the later romances, but the Matter of Britain was basically a front for the Celtic Church. In this seemingly secular form, the spiritual motiffs of a truly gnostic Christianity emerged in the intellectual current of the age. The Roman Church neither encouraged nor discouraged the Grail Romances, even though it was obvious that an earlier and possibly heretical form of Christianity was being represented. As we shall see, the Church was not above persecuting heretics, but there was absolutely no attempt to discredit the Grail stories.
Perhaps the reason for this is that even the Roman Church found it hard not to believe that the origins of the Celtic Church went back to the very family of Christ. "Royal Blood," indeed.
Around 1200, Robert de Borron, following the popularity of the continuations of Chretein, produced Joseph of Arimathea, the prequel to the series the ties it all very neatly into the Celtic Church. He reveals the themes of a hidden or inner teaching given to Joseph after Christ's resurrection. These teachings appear to center around the Grail, here called a Chalice, and consitute the heart of the "mysteries." Mention is also made of a journey westward, to the "Vale of Avaron (Avalon?)" and provision is made for the future hero, Percival, who will fulfill the Quest.
There is a certain murkiness to this story, perhaps as a result of trying to tell the important part (for those with ears to hear) and still stay within certain defined limits that would allow the Roman Church to ignore the tale. Things had changed by 1200. A powerful Pope, Innocent III, had regained the upper hand in his struggles with the Holy Roman Empire and began to turn his attention to unifying the whole world under his spiritual rule. By the grace of God, of course.
And this led directly to the most disgraceful incidents in the history of the Roman Church. The Fourth Crusade and the Crusade against the Cathars were waged against fellow Christians. The Fourth Crusade ended with the sack of Constantinople. The Crusaders, tricked by those crafty and godless Venetians, fell upon the first city of Christendom and plundered and sacked with a vengence. The Knights Templars found the shroud, whose adoration would produce charges of idol worship eventually resulting in their downfall. Innocent III rejoiced in the "unification of the Church."
But not quite. A resurgence of a gnostic heresy in the south of France threatened to become the majority religion and Innocent responded in the manner he knew best: call out the troops. The extermination of heretics in the south of France would continue for half a century, long after Innocent III went to his just rewards in whatever afterlife he actually believed in.
Why exterminate the Cathars, or the Perfecti as they called themselves. Why not also attack the Celtic Church which was also active at the same time?
It boils down to a question of legitimacy. If Rome was afraid to open the question of the Celtic Church, it was because of the nagging suspicion that the Celtic Church had the greater claim to legitimacy and could just possibly prove it. There were connections between the Perfecti and the Celtic Church. By concentrating on the Perfecti, heresy could be severely rebuked as an object lesson that would force at least superficial adherence to Rome.
The Cathars became scapegoats for the whole underground current of Celtic/Grail/Gnostic Christian survivals. It seems to have worked. For by 1220, around the time the first wave of anti-cathar crusading was winding down, Grail Romances were falling out of favor. Other than Malory, whose rendition of Walter de Mapp's 1220 Queste de Saint Greal has become our story book Grail, there is only the "Elucidation" of Chretien by an anonymous author. This is a half hearted attempt to give another explanation for all these mystical goings on. It is unsuccessful and is often not included in the Grail texts.
Clearly, the Grail had a specific significance for those who listened so avidly to these stories of wonder and marvel. The grail's significance is simply its connection with the Holy Family. The Grail suggests in the strongest possible terms that another route to salvation -- one that had nothing to do with the Church of Rome -- was available around the turn of the thirteenth century.
This is most clearly seen in the two most unique of all Grail legends, that of the "Perlesvaus" and Wolfram's Parzival. Wolfram's tale is almost devoid of any mention of the clergy. His Parzival finds grace through knightly prowess in pursuit of a gnostic, or experiential faith. His Grail is the stone that fell from heaven. This "stone" would eventually become, over the centuries, the philosopher's stone of the alchemist.
The "Perlesvaus" ties the matter to Glastonbury and may even have been written there shortly after the discovery of Arthur's Tomb. This story differs somewhat from other Grail legends, but its connection with the megalithic zodiac around Glasonbury, which Katherine Maltwood identified in the 1930's from a close reading of the "Perlesvaus," suggests the area's older connection with the gateway to Anwen, the Celtic underworld where the original cauldron of Bran was hidden. There is even an ancient Welsh poem about Arthur's trip to Anwen to capture the cauldron.
The pattern is clear. Around the turn of the thirteenth century, the Grail Romances offered a direct challenge to the authority of Rome, one that Rome could not answer for fear of exposing her own shaky position. Innocent III felt strong enough, after the fall of Constantinople, to turn the iron grip of Christian chivalry on the most exposed and concentrated group of heretics hoping to quiet the lot of them. Indeed, the fear and horror of the Cathar Crusade did put the fear of the Pope back into the hearts of Christians everywhere.
And if the Celtic heresy could not be brought to the sword directly, then the land of England could be put under interdiction, a terrible form of religious coercion in which the church effectively goes on strike. It will not marry or bury or hold services while under interdiction. Innocent III, for good measure, also excommunicated King John. All of this was resolved by England becoming a Papal Fief for a few years. The Celtic Church gradually faded away over the next century.
The image of the Grail, though, did not fade away. The Matter of Britain still retained its popularity, though without the spiritual overtones. The spiritual current went underground, surfacing in the Renaissance, and then again in the Rosecrucians, and again in the nineteenth century.
Wolfram says that to know the Grail you must "learn your ABC's without the aid of black magic." Robert de Borron's Joseph is quite explicit. The mystery of the Grail is the inner teaching. Jesus taught Joseph strange words to vibrate over the cup that held the holy blood. This attempt to clear away the underbrush of the Grail texts has shown that the source of the Grail is that strange mixture of Celtic and Christian beliefs that developed in the west of England and Ireland before the Empire crumbled. It was defended by Arthur, and almost brought by him on to the stage of European history at just that juncture when the politics of the Empire would have allowed a completely new direction, a completely new version based on the inner teaching of the Christian mysteries.
By the eighth century, the time of Charles the Great, Rome had established her death grip on the religious community, and Charles, out of guilt, or through the trickery of the Pope, allowed himself to accept the Imperial Throne from the hands of the Patriarch of Rome. The fraudulent Donation of Constantine, which supported the temporal power of the Church, clinched the situation. From that point on, Rome was locked in a desperate struggle against the various gnostic survivals, some of whose claim to be the real "Church" was considerably better than Rome's. To admit any other claim was to lose the position of defender of orthodoxy; for if there were many churches, than Rome was not THE church, catholic and universal.
This power struggle would color the next seven hundred years, ending finally with Luthor's thesis nailed to the door of the seminary. That rupture could not be healed, even by the sword.
In the Grail, we see, even at this late date, the radiant quality of that early church. The importance of the Grail, for us now, as we plunge into the next cycle of spiritual evolution, lies in its symbolic nature. Within the Grail can be found a synthesis of all western mystical and magical traditions. It is the source of that underground stream of meaning that flows through the occult and esoteric teachings of the last two thousand years.
The Grail is all things to all people, and to all it is The Mystery. Omnia quia sunt, lumina sunt.
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