Chapter 4
The Love-Death

I. Eros, Agapē, and Amor

I find it impossible to understand how anyone who had really read both the literature of Gnosticism and the poetry of Gottfried could suggest — as does a recent student of the psychology of amor — that not only Gottfried but also the other Tristan poets, and the troubadours as well, were Manichaeans.^{Note 1} The period of their flowering, it is true, was that of the Albigensian heresy. It is also true that the cult of amor, with its guiding light, the “Fair Lady of Thought,” was in principle both adulterous and not directed to reproduction. Moreover, the consecration of this love was not an ecclesiastical affair of bell, book, and clergy, but a matter, purely, of the character and sentiments of the couple involved. And finally, the mad disciplines to which a lover might, in the name of love, subject himself, sometimes approached the lunacies of a penitential grove.

There is an account of one who bought a leper’s gown, bowl, and clapper from some afflicted wretch and, having mutilated a finger, sat amidst a company of the sick and maimed before his lady’s door, to await her alms. The poet Peire Vidal (c. 1150–c. 1210?), in honor of a lady named La Loba, “The She-Wolf,” had himself sewn into the skin of a wolf, and then, provoking a shepherd’s dogs, ran before them until pulled down, nearly dead — after which the countess and her husband, laughing together, had him doctored until well.^{Note 2} Sir Lancelot leapt from Guinevere’s high window and ran lunatic in the woods for months, clad only in his shirt.^{Note 3} Tristan too went mad. Such lovers, known as Gallois, seem to have been, if not common, at least not rare, in the days when knighthood was in flower. There were some who undertook the discipline called in India the “reversed seasons,” where the penitent, as the year became warmer, piled on more and more clothing until by midsummer he was an Eskimo, and, as the season cooled, peeled away, until in midwinter he was, like Lancelot, in his shirt.^{Note 4} One is reminded of the childlike contemporary of these poets, Saint Francis (1182–1226), who, conceiving of himself as the troubadour of Dame Poverty, begged alms with the lepers, wandered in hair shirt through the winter woods, wrote poems to the elements, and preached sermons to the birds.

However, the first point to be remarked in connection with the Albigensian charge is that, whereas according to the Gnostic-Manichaean view nature is corrupt and the lure of the senses to be repudiated, in the poetry of the troubadours, in the Tristan story, and in Gottfried’s work above all, nature in its noblest moment — the realization of love — is an end and glory in itself; and the senses, ennobled and refined by courtesy and art, temperance, loyalty and courage, are the guides to this realization. Like a flower potential in its seed, the blossom of the realization of love is potential in every heart (or, at least, every noble heart) and requires only proper cultivation to be fostered to maturity. Hence, if the courtly cult of amor is to be catalogued according to its heresy, it should be indexed rather as Pelagian than as Gnostic or Manichaean, for, as noticed in Occidental Mythology,^{Note 5} Pelagius and his followers absolutely rejected the doctrine of our inheritance of the sin of Adam and Eve, and taught that we have finally no need of supernatural grace, since our nature itself is full of grace; no need of a miraculous redemption, but only of awakening and maturation; and that, though the Christian is advantaged by the model and teaching of Christ, every man is finally (and must be) the author and means of his own fulfillment. In the lyrics of the troubadours we hear little or nothing of the fall and corruption either of the senses or of the world.

Moreover, in contrast to the spirit of the indiscriminate Love Feast, whether of the orgiastic Phibionite variety or the charitable church-supper type, the address of amor is personal. It follows the lead and allure, as we have said, of the senses, and in particular of the noblest sense, that of sight; whereas the whole point of the Love Feast, and the very virtue of communal love, is that its aim is indiscriminate. “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”^{Note 6} Selectivity, the prime function of the eye and heart, is in the agapē methodically abjured. The lights go out, so to say, and whatever is at hand, one loves — either in the angelic way of charity or in the orgiastic, demonic way of a Dionysian orgy; but in either case, religiously: in renunciation of ego, ego judgment, and ego choice.

It is amazing, but our theologians still are writing of agapē and eros and their radical opposition, as though these two were the final terms of the principle of “love”: the former, “charity,” godly and spiritual, being “of men toward each other in a community,” and the latter, “lust,” natural and fleshly, being “the urge, desire and delight of sex.”^{Note 7} Nobody in a pulpit seems ever to have heard of amor as a third, selective, discriminating principle in contrast to the other two. For amor is neither of the right-hand path (the sublimating spirit, the mind and the community of m an), nor of the indiscriminate left (the spontaneity of nature, the mutual incitement of the phallus and the womb), but is the path directly before one, of the eyes and their message to the heart.

There is a poem to this point by a great troubadour (perhaps the greatest of all), Guiraut de Borneilh (c. 1138–1200 ?):

So, through the eyes love attains the heart:

For the eyes are the scouts of the heart,

And the eyes go reconnoitering

For what it would please the heart to possess. 

And when they are in full accord

And firm, all three, in the one resolve, 

At that time, perfect love is born

From what the eyes have made welcome to the heart.

Not otherwise can love either be born or have commencement

Than by this birth and commencement moved by inclination.

 

By the grace and by command

Of these three, and from their pleasure,

Love is born, who with fair hope

Goes comforting her friends.

For as all true lovers

Know, love is perfect kindness,

Which is born — there is no doubt — from the heart and eyes.

The eyes make it blossom; the heart matures it:

Love, which is the fruit of their very seed.^{Note 8}

We have here attained, I would say, new ground: such ground as in the whole course of our long survey of the world’s primitive, Oriental, and Occidental traditions has not been encountered before. It is the ground, unique and new, on which stands the modern self-reliant individual — in so far, at least, as he has yet been able to mature, to show himself, and to hold his gained ground against the panic weight in opposition of the old and new mass and tribal thinkers. In the nineteen lines of this troubadour poem, in fact, there already comes to view a prospect of that world of Renaissance man which in art was presently to be typified in the rules, the objectively discovered principles, of Renaissance (linear) perspective: the organization of a selected or imagined field from an individual point of view, along lines going out toward a vanishing point from the locus of a living pair of eyes — according to the impulse, moreover, of the individual’s private heart. The world is now showing itself in its own sweet light and form, at last, to men and women of sense, who are daring to look, to see, and to respond. The system of problems of the controlling religious tradition is in principle disregarded, and the individual standpoint becomes decisive. And so, although it is true that in the century of the troubadours there was rampant throughout Europe a general Manichaean heresy, and that many of the ladies celebrated in the poems are known to have been heretics — just as others were practicing Christians, and the poets themselves communicants of one tradition or the other — in their character as artists and in their poetry and song the troubadours stood apart from both traditions. The whole meaning of their stanzas lay in the celebration of a love the aim of which was neither marriage nor the dissolution of the world. Nor was it even carnal intercourse; nor, again — as among the Sufis — the enjoyment, by analogy, of the “wine” of a divine love and the quenching of the soul in God. The aim, rather, was life directly in the experience of love as a refining, sublimating, mystagogic force, of itself opening the pierced heart to the sad, sweet, bittersweet, poignant melody of being, through love’s own anguish and love’s joy.

One thinks here of the Japanese courtly gallants and their loves in Lady Murasaki’s Tale of Genji, and there is indeed a common sentiment in the Mahāyāna Buddhist “awareness of the pity of things” (Japanese: mono no awarē wo shiru);^{Note 9} however, as remarked in Oriental Mythology, the ambience of religion hangs there over all, whereas in the love lyrics of the troubadours, even where analogies to certain religious motifs would seem to be obvious, mythological references are ignored and the poem remains frankly and wholly secular, with the poet as the devotee of his lady, who is radiant and potent not by analogy, but with a brilliance and grace of her own that is sufficient for life in this world. Let me cite, for example, three stanzas from a celebrated poem known as “The Joy of Being in Love,” by another of the greatest of the Provencal masters of this art, Bernart de Ventadorn (fl. c. 1150–1200 ?):

It is no marvel, that I should sing

Better than any other singer;

For my heart more draws me toward

Love, And I am likelier made to her command.

Heart and body, wisdom and wits,

Strength and power, have I wagered:

The bridle so draws me toward

Love That I attend to nothing else.

This love smites me so gently

At heart and with such sweet savor!

Of grief do I die one hundred times a day,

And of joy revive, again a hundred.

My malady, indeed, is of excellent kind;

More worth, this malady, than any other good:

And since my malady is so good for me,

Good, after the malady, will be its cure.

Noble Lady, nothing do I ask of thee

But that thou shouldst take me for thy servant.

I would serve as one serves a good lord,

Whatever reward I might gain.

Behold, I am at thy command:

Sincere and humble, gay and courteous.

Neither bear nor lion art thou,

To kill me, as I here to thee surrender.^{Note 10}

From the courts of Provence this poetry passed to Germany, where it was reattuned to the language and spirit of the Minnesingers, the singers of minne (amor); and among these the leading master, wandering from court to court, was Walther von der Vogelweide (c. 1170–c. 1230), who brought to his lyrics a typically German tone of moral depth and fervor, threaded with a new strain of sympathy for the rustic and the natural against the artificialities of fashion. The morality of this Christian poet was of a type, however, not preached in church; for, as Henry Osborn Taylor has remarked of his blithe little “Under the Linden”: “Marvelously, it gives the mood of love’s joy remembered — and anticipated too. The immorality is complete … and rendered most alluring by the utter gladness of the girl’s song — no repentance, no regret; only joy and roguish laughter.”^{Note 11}

The pretty runs of rhyme and the charming sense of innocence of the medieval language I find impossible to rerender, but the sense of fresh young delight, I think, comes through:

Under the linden,

On the heath,

There was our bed for two;

There you will find,

Gently arranged,

Broken flowers and grass.

Beside the woods in a dale,

Tandaraday!

Gently sang the nightingale.

 

I came a-walking

Toward the stream,

My lover had come before.

There was I greeted:

“My lady fair!”

So am happy now for evermore.

Did he kiss me? Full a thousand clips.

Tandaraday!

See how red now are my lips.

 

There he’d prepared,

Luxuriously,

A bedding place of flowers:

It would still bring a smile

Inwardly,

If one chanced along that way.

For by the roses one can see,

Tandaraday!

The pillow where my head would be.

 

That he lay beside me,

If anyone knew

(God forbid!), I’d be mortified.

But whatever he did with me,

No one shall ever

Know anything of that: only he and I

And a tiny little bird,

Tandaraday!

Who will never let fall a word.^{Note 12}

The morality here is of Heloise in the first fair days of her love, and her courageous gospel can be heard again through many of Walther’s lines:

Whoever says that love is sin,

Let him consider first and well:

Right many virtues lodge therein

With which we all, by rights, should dwell.^{Note 13}

“Woman will be ever woman’s noblest name, greater in worth than Lady!” Walther wrote.^{Note 14} 

“It took a German,” states Professor Taylor, “to say this.”^{Note 15} And again, it took a German to recognize in the world-transfiguring sentiment of love as minne, amor, an experience of that same transcendent, immanent ground of being, beyond duality, which Schopenhauer six centuries later was to celebrate in his philosophy. We have already taken note of Gottfried of Strassburg’s celebration of this mystery in his symbology of the love grotto with its crystalline bed in the place of the altar of the sacrament. A number of W alther’s poems, also, extend the revelation of the goddess Minne to a metaphysical depth beyond anything suggested either in the Provengal or in the Old French love poetry of his day:

Minne is neither male nor female,

She has neither a soul nor a body,

She resembles nothing imaginable.

Her name is known; her self, however, ungrasped.

Yet nobody from her apart

Merits the blessing of God’s grace.

 

She comes never to a false heart.^{Note 16}

Now it is a matter of no small moment that in the period of this idyllic poetry the world of harsh reality should have been about as dangerous and unlikely a domicile for amor as the nightmare of history has ever produced. We have mentioned the devastation of southern France. The whole of Central Europe likewise was in a state of hideous turmoil. For with the death in the year 1197 of the Hohenstaufen Emperor Henry VI, surnamed the Cruel, the crown of the Holy Roman Empire had fallen to the ground and was rolling like a fumbled football for anyone to retrieve. And the armies battling to possess it — on one hand, of the allied English, papal, and Guelph contenders, and, on the other, of the German princes and incumbent Philip of Swabia — were everywhere pillaging towns and villages, devastating whole provinces, perpetrating the most brutal and revolting crimes;^{Note 17} which wanton work continued until about 1220, when the brilliant young nephew of the murdered Philip, Frederick II (1194–1250), was finally crowned Emperor in Saint Peter’s by a reluctant and uneasy Pope. Walther had been a witness to these horrors, and he wrote of them with unmitigated scorn:

I saw with my own eyes hidden things about men and women, heard and saw all they did and said. How Rome lied and betrayed two kings, I heard. And when the popes and laity had formed their contending parties, there took place the most terrible war that ever was or will ever be: the worst, because both the body and the soul were thereby slain.…^{Note 18}

Ironic, is it not? In the name of love and of peace on earth to men of good will, treachery, arson, pillage, and massacre everywhere; and in such an age the elevation of the most glorious visions in radiant glass and carved stone of that peace and love fulfilled! Fulfilled, however, not on earth, but in a realm away from this vale of tears, to which the most blessed opener of the gate is that woman shining as the sun, to whom the cathedral itself is dedicate, earthly, yet the Mother of God — the Virgin Mary, Notre Dame. In the words of the long-cherished hymn “Salve Regina” composed by Abelard’s elder contemporary Adhemar de Monteil, Bishop of Le Puy (d. 1098), which is to this day engraved, with love, in the heart of every kneeling Catholic:

Hail, holy Queen, Mother of Mercy,

Our life, our sweetness, and our hope,

All hail!

To thee we cry, poor banished children of Eve;

To thee we sigh, weeping and mourning in this vale of tears.

Therefore, O our Advocate,

Turn thou on us those merciful eyes of thine;

And after this our exile,

Show unto us Jesus, the blessed fruit of thy womb.

O merciful, O kind, O sweet Virgin Mary!^{Note 19}

The last three aspirations, “O merciful, O kind, O sweet Virgin Mary!” were added by Abelard’s exact contemporary and dangerous challenger in debate, the mighty Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1091–1153), to whom Dante, in the Commedia, assigns the loftiest possible station, at the very feet of God. Throughout his lifetime this passionate preacher of transcendental euphoria strained every metaphor in the book of love to elevate the eyes of men from the visible women of this earth to the glorified form of that crowned Virgin Mother above, who is the Queen of Angels and of Saints — and Dante, in due time, followed suit. However, the troubadours, minnesingers, and epic poets of the century, in their celebration of amor, remained in Nietzsche’s sense “true to this earth,” this vale of tears where the devil roams for the ruin of souls. For in their view, not heaven but this blossoming earth was to be recognized as the true domain of love, as it is of life, and the corruption ruinous of love was not of nature (of which love is the very heart) but of society, both lay and ecclesiastical: the public order and, most immediately, its sacramentalized loveless marriages.

Among the verse forms of the troubadours, the song of the parting of lovers at dawn, at the warning of the watchman (the Alba, “Dawn Song,” or Aubade, which became the Tagelied of the minnesingers) rendered simply yet dramatically the sense of discontinuity between the two worlds, on one hand of love’s rapture, and on the other of the social order epitomized in the lady’s dangerous spouse, “the jealous one,” lo gilos. Here is a frequently quoted anonymous example:

In an orchard, under a hawthorn tree,

By her side the Lady clasps her lover,

Till the watchman calls that dawn has appeared.

O God! O God! this dawn! how quickly it comes!

 

“Would to God the night never had ended,

That my love might never depart from me,

Nor ever the watchman sight day or dawn.

O God! O God! this dawn! how quickly it comes!

 

“Sweet love, let us start anew our dear game

In the garden where the birds are warbling,

Till the watch sounds again his flageolet.”

O God! O God! this dawn! how quickly it comes!^{Note 20}

In the Tristan romance King Mark is of course in the role of the jealous spouse; and his royal estate, Tintagel, with its elegant princely court, stands for the values of the day world — history, society, knightly honor, deeds, career and fame, chivalry and friendship — in absolute opposition to the grotto of the timeless goddess Minne, which is of the order of enduring nature, in the forest where the birds still sing. Set apart from all spheres of historic change, the Venus Mountain with its crystalline bed has been entered by lovers through all ages, from every order of life. Its seat is in the heart of nature — nature without and within — which two are the same. And its virtue, so, is of the species, not of this particular culture, nor of that: Veda, Bible, or Qu'ran; but of man pristine in the universe — which is something, however, that in this vale of tears is never to be seen, since we are each brought up (are we not?) in the ethnic sphere of this or that particular culture.

The immanent yet lost — but not forgotten — realm within us all is in Celtic mythology and folklore allegorized variously as the Land below Waves, the Land of Youth, the Fairy Hills, and, in Arthurian romance, that Never Never Land of the Lady of the Lake where Lancelot du Lac was fostered and from which Arthur received his sword Excalibur. In the earliest of the old chronicles of King Arthur — the Welsh monk Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (ad 1136) — it is told that at the time of his great last battle with his traitorous son Mordred, “Arthur himself was wounded mortally and borne away, for the healing of his wounds, to the island Avalon.”^{Note 21} And in a later work, the Vita Merlini (c. 1145?), the same chronicler adds that the boat was steered by an old Irish abbot, Barinthus, and that in Avalon the wounded king was tended by Morgan la Fee and her sisters. The next we hear is from an old French verse chronicle by a Norman poet named Wace, the Roman de Brut (ad 1155), where it is added that “Arthur is still in Avalon and awaited by the Britons; for, as they say and believe, he will return from that place to which he passed and will again be alive.”^{Note 22} And then finally (c. 1200), an English country priest named Layamon not only transformed the old Irish abbot into something more romantic but let the wounded king himself announce the prophecy of his second coming. Arthur, we here read, had been wounded with no less than fifteen dreadful wounds, into the least of which one might have thrust two gloves, and to a young kinsman, dear to him, who stood by where he lay on the ground, he said these words with sorrowful heart:

“Constantine, thou wert Cador’s son: I here give to thee my kingdom. Defend my Britons ever in thy life; maintain for them all the laws of my days and all the good laws of the days of Uther. And I myself will go to Avalon, to the most beauteous of all women, to the queen Argante, an elf marvelously fair, and she will make my wounds all sound, make me whole with a healing drink. And anon I shall come again to my kingdom and dwell among the Britons in great joy.”

And even while he was speaking thus there approached from the sea a little boat, borne by the waves. There were therein two women of marvelous form, and they took Arthur and bore him quickly and laid him softly in the boat and sailed away.^{Note 23}

We recall the telling line from Tennyson’s “Passing of Arthur,” in his Idylls of the King:

From the great deep to the great deep he goes,

when the wounded king in a dusky barge, wherein were three dark queens, passed to Avalon, “to be king among the dead.”

The name, Avalon, of that timeless land beyond the setting sun,

Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,

Nor ever wind blows loudly,

is cognate with the Welsh afallen, “apple tree” (from afal, “apple”), and so reveals the affinity of this Celtic Land below Waves with the Isle of the Golden Apples of the classical Hesperides^{Note 24} — and thereby with the entire complex of that garden of immortality of the Great Goddess of the two worlds of death and life to which so many pages of this study of the mythologies of mankind have been devoted. An echo of the same theme of the paradisial garden of the goddess, with its tree of immortal life, is to be recognized even in the first stanza of the alba quoted earlier, where the lady, under a hawthorn tree, clasps her lover to her side. The Christian figure of the pietà, the dead Savior on his mother’s knees, who will presently return alive, is also of this complex. Can it be accidental, then, that the king had fifteen wounds — the fifteenth day of the moon being that of the culmination of its waxing and beginning of its waning, toward death and, after three days’ dark, rebirth? Moreover, the mortally wounded Tristan’s first melancholy voyage to Isolt’s Dublin Bay, in a self-propelled coracle that bore him infallibly to her castle, is certainly but another variant and example of this same Land-below-Waves motif: so that Isolt, the Lady of the Lake, and the Goddess Mother of the pietà in their final sense are at one: opposed in every measure to the judgments of this day world of ours, of the Sons of Light.

II. The Noble Heart

As in the poetry of the troubadours, so in Gottfried’s Tristan, love is bom of the eyes, in the world of day, in a moment of aesthetic arrest, but opens within to a mystery of night. The point is first made in his version of the love tale of Tristan’s parents, Blancheflor and Rivalin. For there was in their case no potion at work, inspiring magically a premonition a priori of the course along which they were to be drawn through sensuous allure, from love’s meeting of the eyes, to love’s pain, love’s rapture, and on to death.

Figure 35. Blancheflor
(print, United States, 1905)

Beautiful, innocent Blancheflor, the sister of King Mark, was simply sitting among the ladies, watching the sort of tournament called a bohort, in which knights, jousting without armor, contend with only shields and blunt lances, when she began to hear those around her murmuring: “Look! What a heavenly man. How he rides!” And her eyes, searching, discovered Rivalin. “How well he handles that shield and lance!” they were all saying.

“What a noble head! What hair! Happy the woman who gets him!”

He was a youth who had arrived lately from his own estates in Brittany, drawn to her brother’s court by its fame. And when the game had broken up, this joy-giving knight came cantering Blancheflor’s way to salute courteously his host’s sister, in the kingdom of whose heart he had already won the crown. His eyes met hers. “May God bless you, beautiful lady!”

“Merci!” she answered kindly; and, though discomposed by his gaze, pressed on: “May the Blessed God, who makes all hearts blessed, give blessing to your heart and mind! I congratulate you heartily; yet I have a certain small complaint to plead.”

“Ah?” said he. “Sweet lady, what have I done?”

She answered: “Through a friend of mine, the best I ever had” — and she meant by that her heart.

“Good Lord!” he thought. “What tale is this?”^{Note 25}

Gottfried’s analysis, from this point on, of the brooding of the stricken couple opens poignantly, through a tale of young romance, to the ominous love-death theme announced already in his Prologue (See Experience and Authority and The World Transformed.) and to be developed, ever mounting, through his handling of the legend of their son. As in the poem of the troubadour Borneilh, so in Gottfried’s work, love is born of the eyes and heart.

However, here there is a new interest brought to the stricken heart itself: what happens there, and to what end; for not every heart opens to love. Gottfried’s term is “the noble heart” (das edele herze); and as the most learned and discerning of his recent interpreters, Gottfried Weber, shows in a thoroughgoing two-volume total study of the romance,^{Note 26} this crucial concept is, in fact, the nuclear theme of the poet’s entire work. It opens inward toward the mystery of character, destiny, and worth, and at the same time outward, toward the world and the wonder of beauty, where it sets the lover at odds, however, with the moral order. The poet in his Prologue had already dedicated himself, his life and work, to those alone who could bear together in one heart “dear pain” as well as “bitter sweetness” ; and, as Professor Weber observes, it is just this readiness to embrace love’s pain along with its rapture that makes the noble heart exceptional. “Nor is the pain that is so endured,” he writes, “merely adventitious, overlaid from without upon a pleasure in love that is alone essential. The pain is implicit, rather, in the very delight by which it is complemented — to such a degree that the pleasure and pain are indissolubly interlaced, as commensurate components of one experience of existence. And in fact,” this perceptive critic concludes, “the poet’s intention to give verbal force to this idea is what justifies, both poetically and philosophically, his repeated use — already anticipatively in the Prologue — of the rhetorical device of the oxymoron.”^{Note 27}

Now this classical rhetorical term, “oxymoron,” is defined in Webster’s Dictionary as “a combination for epigrammatic effect of contradictory or incongruous words (cruel kindness, laborious idleness).”^{Note 28} It is a term derived from the Greek ὀξύ-μωρος “pointedly foolish,” and denotes a mode of speech commonly found in Oriental religious texts, where it is used as a device to point past those pairs of opposites by which all logical thought is limited, to a “sphere that is no sphere,” beyond “names and forms” ; as when in the Upaniṣads we read of “the Manifest- Hidden, called ‘Moving-in-secret,’ which is known as ‘Being and Non-being’”:^{Note 29}

There the eye goes not;

Speech goes not, nor the mind: ^{Note 30}

or when we open a Zen Buddhist work called The Gateless Gate and there read of “the endless moment” and “the full void”:

Before the first step is taken the goal is reached.

Before the tongue is moved the speech is finished.^{Note 31}

Compare the language of the Buddhist texts of “The Wisdom of the Yonder Shore” (prajñā-prāmitā), discussed in Oriental Mythology:

The Enlightened One sets forth in the Great Ferryboat, but there is nothing from which he sets forth. He starts from the universe; but in truth he starts from nowhere. His boat is manned with all perfections; and is manned by no one. It will find its support on nothing whatsoever and will find its support on the state of all-knowing, which will serve as a non-support.^{Note 32}

We term such speech “anagogical” (from the Greek verb ἀν-άγω, “to lead upward” ) because it points beyond itself, beyond speech. William Blake in the same wisdom of the yonder shore wrote of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Nicholas Cusanus (1401–1464) wrote in his Apologia doctae ignorantiae (“Apology for Learned Unknowing”) that “God is the simultaneous mutual implication of all things, even the contradictory ones,” and in this sense protested against what he called “the present predominance of the Aristotelian sect, which considers the coincidence of opposites a heresy, whereas its admission is the starting point of the ascension to mystical theology.”^{Note 33} Even Saint Thomas Aquinas states, in a sentence of mystical insight, that “then alone do we know God truly, when we believe that he is far above all that man can possibly think of God.”^{Note 34} And accordingly, in Gottfried, for whom the mode of divine manifestation in human life is love, the “pointedly foolish” oxymoron is the most appropriate stylistic signal of the mystery of which his work is the text.

In the progress of his legend the steadily mounting tension of the polarities of joy and sorrow, love against honor, death-life, light and darkness, can be read as a gradually deepening and expanding realization of the nature of that mighty goddess beyond the male-female polarity who was celebrated by the Minnesinger Walther: the same represented in the center of the Orphic Pietroasa bowl (Figure 5), between the two lords of the light and the great dark, the eye and heart, Apollo and the god of the abyss; or again, of whom the Graces and the Muses are the manifest allure (Figure 20) — dancing in tripody before the eye of heaven, while yet, with silent Thalia, immobile in the earth.

One cannot help thinking also, in this connection, of the modern finding in the realm of atomic physics of the “principle of indeterminacy, or complementarity,” according to which, in the words of Dr. Werner Heisenberg, “the knowledge of the position of a particle is complementary to the knowledge of its velocity or momentum. If we know the one with high accuracy we cannot know the other with high accuracy; still we must know both for determining the behavior of the system. The space-time description of the atomic events is complementary to their deterministic description.”^{Note 35}

Apparently in every sphere of human search and experience the mystery of the ultimate nature of being breaks into oxymoronic paradox, and the best that can be said of it has to be taken simply as metaphor — whether as particles and waves or as Apollo and Dionysus, pleasure and pain. Both in science and in poetry, the principle of the anagogical metaphor is thus recognized today: it is only from the pulpit and the press that one hears of truths and virtues definable in fixed terms. In Gottfried’s world there was no tolerance of “the Ass Festival” (as Nietzsche named it) of those who would make thinkable the unthinkableness of being. “Life itself,” wrote Nietzsche, “confided to me this secret: ‘Behold,’ it said, ‘I am what must always overcome itself.’”^{Note 36} And in Gottfried’s world as well, the self-surpassing power of life, which is experienced in love when it wakes in the noble heart, brings pain to the entire system of fixed concepts, judgments, virtues, and ideals of the mortal being assaulted.

Rivalin’s spiritual plight, after his first brief exchange, eye to eye, with the beauty of Blancheflor, the poet likens to the agony of a bird that has come down on a limed twig: “When it becomes aware of the lime, it lifts to fly, still held by its feet, and spreading wings, makes to go; but then wherever it brushes the twig, however lightly, it is caught tbe more, and made fast.”^{Note 37} The noble youth presently realized that he was trapped. “And yet,” as the poet warns,

even now that sweet Love had brought his heart and mind to her will, it was still unknown to him what a keen torment love was to be. Not until he had pondered in all detail, from end to end, the destiny [aventiure]* *Aventiure (Middle High German, from Old French aventure, Latin adventura), “event, occurrence,” or more usually “a marvel, an accident, a bold beginning of uncertain outcome,” and especially, “a fortuna te occurrence; a destiny.” Matthias Lexer, Mittelhochdeutsches Taschenwörterbuch (Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel, 17th edition, 1926), p. 9.that was now his in his Blancheflor — her hair, her brow, her temples, cheeks, mouth and chin, the joyful Easter Day that couched laughing in her eyes — did True Love [diu rehte minne] come, that infallible fire lighter, who set going a fever of desire. And the flame that then fired his heart and incinerated his body let him know in full force what piercing pain and yearning anguish are.… Silence and a mien of melancholy were the best he could show the world, and what had formerly been his gaiety now turned to a yearning need.

Nor did the languishing Blancheflor escape a like history of pining. She was laden, through him, with the same weight of sorrow as he, through her; for Love, the Tyrant [diu gewaltaerinne Minne], had invaded her senses too, somewhat too tempestuously and taken from her by force the best part of her composure. In her demeanor she was no longer at one — as she had used to be — with herself and with the world. Whatever pleasures she had been accustomed to, whatever pastimes she had enjoyed, they all displeased her now. Her life took shape as the very image of the need so close to her heart; and of nought that she was suffering from this yearning had she any understanding whatsoever. Never had she experienced such heaviness and heart’s need. “O Lord God,” she said to herself, time and time again, “what a life I lead!”^{Note 38}

The power of free choice, and even of conceiving of any end or joy beyond the destiny to which the tyrant-goddess Love (diu gewaltaerinne Minne) had consigned them, had been taken from this helpless couple. On a tide beyond their knowledge or control they were to be carried to the work — the destiny of surpassing themselves — to which they were assigned; and the occasion occurred as though arranged for them — and yet apparently only by accident — when the brave young earl, doing battle for his host in a war begun by a neighboring king, was run through by a lance and carried from the battlefield on the very point of death.

As Gottfried tells:

Many a noble woman wept for him, many a lady mourned for his life; indeed, all who had seen him lamented the misfortune. But no matter how sorrowful they, for his wounding, it was alone his Blancheflor — the pure maid, gentle and gracious — who with unrelenting fervor, moaned and wept with eyes and heart for the dear pain of her heart.^{Note 39}

Her old nurse, therefore, made anxious for the young thing’s life, took thought and, reasoning, “What harm can it be with the man already half dead?” contrived to admit her delicate charge, alone, to the quiet chamber where the young earl lay wounded on a couch. And the anxious girl, beholding him there, approached gingerly in fright and, perceiving how close he lay to death, fairly swooned. She bent to study him, tenderly brought her cheek to his, and then swooned indeed. So that now the two lay together on that couch, unconscious and quite still, her cheek to his cheek, as though both were dead. And they remained so for some time.

Whereafter [as we next learn] Blancheflor, reviving a little, took her darling in both arms and, placing her mouth to his, in a very short space of time had kissed him one hundred thousand times; which activity so fired his senses and informed his zeal for love that [as Gottfried further relates] he strained that glorious woman to his half-dead body, ardently and closely, until, before long, their mutual desire was realized and from his body that sweet woman received a child. The man was nearly dead — both from the woman and from love; and never would have recovered had God not stayed him in his need. But he did recover, since so it was to be.…

And thus Blancheflor was healed of her heart’s anguish; but what she carried thence was death. She had been freed of her need when love came, but it was death she conceived with her child. Of the child and death within her, she knew not, but of love and the man, she knew well. For he was hers and she was his; she was he and he was she: there were they — and there was true love.^{Note 40}

The rest can be shortly told.

News arrived of an invasion of Rivalin’s own estates and, with his Blancheflor, he sailed to Brittany, to be slain there in a battle. And when the girl, now big with child, received that grievous news, her tongue froze and her heart became stone; she uttered neither “Oh!” nor “Alas!” but sank to the earth and, four days later, in pain, gave birth and died.

“But look! The little son lives!”^{Note 41}

To protect the name of the dead parents of this little nephew of King Mark, his father’s loyal marshal, Rual li Foitenant, with his wife raised him as their own son, letting no one — even the boy himself — know the story of his birth. They named him Tristan, as they said, because triste means “sorrow,” and in sorrow Tristan had been born. When he was seven, they sent him off with a tutor named Curvenal (Wagner’s Kurvenal) to learn languages abroad; and he mastered in short course more books than any youngster since or before. He learned, too, to hunt, to ride with shield and lance, to play every known stringed instrument, and at fourteen, still with Curvenal, returned home.

However, he then was kidnaped to sea by merchantmen, who, when struck by a storm that tossed their ship for eight days, set him ashore alone in Cornwall, where the waif, arriving at Tintagel, so impressed the good King Mark with his skills that he became his unrecognized uncle’s chief huntsman, harpist, and companion. So it chanced — or rather, seemed to have chanced — that, as Gottfried, our poet, concludes this portion of his tale, “Tristan, without knowing it, arrived home yet thought himself astray; and noble, splendid Mark, the unsuspected ‘father,’ behaved to him right nobly.… Mark held him dear to his heart.”^{Note 42}

III. Anamorphosis

The universally popular mythological theme known to folklore scholarship as infant exile and return carries in the legend of Tristan’s boyhood, as wherever it occurs, the inherent suggestion of a destiny unfolding — like a seed into flower — ineluctably, in the incidents of a life. In the love story of Tristan’s parents, on the other hand, there is no such evident mythic strain. Events are there presented in the manner of a naturalistic novel, as though determined only by chance. The unfoldment of the destinies follows — or at least appears to follow — upon the fall of outer circumstance. Yet we know that there, as here, all was predetermined in the author’s mind, and that what was read as substantial event was actually but a veil, a tissue of circumstance, conjured forth for the realization of a plot already formed.

Might the same be said of the circumstances of our lives?

As Schopenhauer cautions in his wonderful paper “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual”: “Everything about such thoughts is questionable: the problem itself is questionable — let alone its resolution.”

Yet, as he then goes on to remark:

Everyone, during the course of his lifetime, becomes aware of certain events that, on the one hand, bear the mark of a moral or inner necessity, because of their especially decisive importance to him, and yet, on the other hand, have clearly the character of outward, wholly accidental chance. The frequent occurrence of such events may lead gradually to the notion, which often becomes a conviction, that the life course of the individual, confused as it may seem, is an essential whole, having within itself a certain self-consistent, definite direction, and a certain instructive meaning — no less than the best thought-out of epics.^{Note 43}

On the naturalistic plane of Gottfried’s romance of Blancheflor and Rivalin, the self-consistent plot of the two lives that in their fate and meaning were at one became known, both to the reader and to the characters themselves, only a posteriori — through what appeared to be chance event; whereas in such a romance as that of Tristan and Isolt, resting frankly on symbolic, mythological forms, which emerge with increasing force as the narrative proceeds, the sense communicated is rather of the force of destiny in the shaping of a life, or, to use the old Germanic term, of wyrd (See The Word Behind Words here and here.).

Rationally, as Schopenhauer suggests,

The apparent plan of the course of a life might be explained, to some extent, as founded on the unchangeability and continuity of inborn character, as a consequence of which the individual is being continually brought back to the one track. For each recognizes so certainly and immediately whatever is appropriate to his own character that, as a rule, he hardly even brings it into reflective consciousness, but acts directly and, as it were, on instinct.…

However, if we now consider the mighty influence and immense power of outer circumstance, our explanation in terms of inner character will seem hardly strong enough. Furthermore, that the weightiest thing in the world — which is to say, the life course of the individual, won at the cost of so much effort, torment and pain — should receive its outer complement and aspect wholly from the hand of blind Chance — Chance without significance or regulation — is scarcely believable. Rather, one is moved to believe that — just as in the cases of those pictures called anamorphoses, which to the naked eye are only broken, fragmentary deformities but when reflected in a conic mirror show normal human forms — so the purely empirical interpretation of the course of the world resembles the seeing of those pictures with naked eyes, while the recognition of the intention of Fate resembles the reflection in the conic mirror, which binds together and organizes the disjointed, scattered fragments.^{Note 44}

I should like to fix in mind here this analogy of the anamorphosis (the word is from the Greek μορφόω, “to form,” plus ἀνα “again”: ἀναμορφόω, “to form anew”). For it is a thought that will clarify much in the fields of modern literature and art — as, for example, James Joyce’s title Ulysses for a novel about the wanderings of a Jewish advertising broker round and about Dublin. The casual, chance, fragmentary events of an apparently undistinguished life disclose the form and dimension of a classic epic of destiny when the conic mirror is applied, and our own scattered lives today, as well, are then seen, also, as anamorphoses. Like Shakespeare’s mirror held up to nature, the symbols of myth bring forward into view that informing Form of forms which, through apparent discontinuity, is “manifest,” as the Upaniṣads declare, “yet hidden: called ‘Moving-in-secret.’” Primitive and Oriental thought is full of presentiments of this kind: on the crudest level, in the sentiment of magic and its force; more subtly, in the recognition of the force of dream and vision in the shaping of a life; and, most majestically, in such intuitions of a support not alone of the individual life, but of all things together, as in the following from the Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad:

That on which heaven, earth, and the space between are woven;

The mind, also, with the breath of life:

That alone know as the one spirit. All other

Talk dismiss. That is the bridge to immortality.^{Note 45}

And in the Occident too we find such thoughts; as, for instance, in the romantic poet William Wordsworth’s celebrated “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour. July 13, 1798”:

For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.^{Note 46}

The sense experienced by lovers, already at the first meeting of the eyes, of having discovered in the world without the perfect complement of their own truth, and so of a marvelous coincidence thereby of destiny and chance, inner and external worlds, may, in the course of a lifetime flowering from such love, conduce to the poetic conviction of an accord universal of the seen and the unseen.

But of course, on the other hand, to those upon whom neither love, nature, nor symbol has ever bestowed any conic mirror, such romanticism is moonshine. Furthermore, as Schopenhauer states in his ruminating paper: “The view of an ordering Fate can always be countered by comparing the orderly design that we may imagine ourselves to have recognized in the scattered facts of our lives to the mere unconscious work of our own organizing and schematizing fantasy when we look at a spotted wall and see there, clearly and distinctly, human figures and groups — ourselves introducing the orderly connections into a field of spots scattered by blind chance.”^{Note 47}

The modern reader will think of the Rorschach Test, with its inkblots in which different people see different forms, symptomatic of the psychology of their own fantasizing minds. And the world itself, it is said by some, is such an ink-blot, into which people read their own minds: the ordered universe, the great course of history and evolution, the norms of human life. There is a passage to this effect in Ulysses, in the scene where Stephen, in the library, is arguing a point with John Eglinton. “We walk,” Stephen states, “through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.”

Stephen Dedalus, in this conversation, has just quoted a line from Maeterlinck: “‘If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend.’” And he has applied the lesson of this solipsism to an interpretation of Shakespeare’s art, suggesting in turn that such creativity by projection is analogous to God’s creation of the world: “He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible.”^{Note 48} In the micro-macrocosmic dream-novel Finnegans Wake, Joyce drops the plane of vision from the level of individuated consciousness to the unconscious — of the race: an interior “Land below Waves,” such as in one transformation or another, according to local influence, is common to mankind. However, in Ulysses, up to the moment, at least, of the great spell-dispelling thunderclap that occurs just halfway through the book^{Note 49} (after which the two apparently distinct universes of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus gradually open to each other and display their common strains), the plane and point of view is strictly that of our common twentieth-century day-world of separate, self-preserving, self-assertive individuals; each the fragment of a general anamorphosis, to which none has found the conic mirror.

For, in fact, do we not have among us in abundance today a species even of philosophers who (maintaining in their own way the biblical notion of nature as corrupt) cannot discover in the nature either of man or of the universe any sign of inherent order? — to say nothing of a congruence of the two worlds, inside and out! Consider, for instance, Jean-Paul Sartre’s complaint that he “finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist; for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven.… Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn; for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself.… We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free.”^{Note 50}

But on the other hand, at the opposite pole, there are those who believe that they know, can act upon, and can even teach — absolutely — the order in the mind of God for all mankind. They have learned it from the Bible or Qu'ran or, more passionately, through some hysterical “leap of faith” and pentecostal “decision” of their own. So, for example, in the journal of Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), just a century before Sartre:

The most tremendous thing that has been granted to man is: the choice, freedom. And if you desire to save it and preserve it there is only one way: in the very same second unconditionally and in complete resignation to give it back to God, and yourself with it.… You have freedom of choice, you say, and still you have not chosen God. Then you will grow ill, freedom of choice will become your idée fixe, till at last you will be like the rich man who imagines that he is poor, and will die of want: you sigh that you have lost your freedom of choice — and your fault is only that you do not grieve deeply enough or you would find it again.…

There is a God; his will is made known to me in Holy Scripture and in my conscience. This God wishes to intervene in the world. But how is he to do so except with the help of, i.e. per, man?^{Note 51}

Between these two contending camps of uncompromising guessers, with their leaps and acts of faith in one direction or the other, there are those of a less dogmatic cast who are willing — like Schopenhauer and Wordsworth — to concede that, though one may indeed, in the contemplation of nature and one’s life, be filled, like Wordsworth, with “a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused,” it is well and proper to remember that “everything in such thoughts is questionable,” and, as Schopenhauer states further: “decisive answers, consequently, are [in such matters] the last things to be expressed.”

Is a complete misadjustment possible [he asks], between the character and the fate of an individual? Or is every destiny on the whole appropriate to the character that bears it? Or, finally, is there some inexplicable, secret determinator, comparable to the author of a drama, that always joins the two appropriately, one to the other?

But this [he then goes on to reply] is exactly the point at which we are in the dark. And in the meantime we go on imagining ourselves to be, at every moment, the masters of our own deeds. It is only when we look back over the completed portions of our lives and review the unluckier steps together with their consequences that we marvel at how we could have done this, or have failed to do that; and it then may seem to us that an alien power must have guided our steps. As Shakespeare says:

Fate, show thy force; ourselves we do not owe;

What is decreed must be, and be this so!^{Note 52}

Or as Goethe says in Götz von Berlichingen (Act V): “We men do not guide ourselves; wicked spirits are given power over us,

to work their naughtiness to our destruction.” And again, in Egmont (Act V, last scene): “Man imagines himself to be conducting his own life; and irresistibly his inmost being is drawn to its fate.” — Yes, and it was said already by the prophet Jeremiah: “A man’s deeds do not rest in his power; it rests in no man’s power, how he moves or directs his way” (1 0 :2 3) . Compare Herodotus I. 91 [“It is impossible even for a god to escape the decree of destiny”] and IX. 16 [“It is not possible for man to avert what God has decreed shall occur”]; see also Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead X IX and XXX.

Indeed, the ancients never tire of insisting, in verse and in prose, on the power of fate and the comparative impotence of man. One can see everywhere that this was their overpowering conviction, and that they suspected a more secret, deep continuity in things than is evident on the clearly empirical surface. Hence the great variety of terms, in Greek, for this idea: πότμος [“that which befalls one”], ἆισα [“the divine dispensation of one’s lot”], εἱμαρμένη [“what is allotted”], εἱμαρμένη [“what is foredoomed”], μοῖρα [“one’s portion”], Ἀδράστεια [a name of the goddess Nemesis, goddess of divine retribution], and perhaps, also, many more. The word πρόνοια [“foresight, foreknowledge”], on the other hand, displaces our understanding of the matter: for it is derived from νοῦς [“mind, a thought, an act of mind”], which is the secondary factor, and though it makes everything clear and comprehensible, is superficial and false. — And this whole enigmatic circumstance is a consequence of the fact that our deeds are inevitably the product of two factors: one, our intelligible character, which stands unchangeably established, yet becomes known to us only gradually, a posteriori; and two, our motivations, which come to us from without, are supplied inevitably from the tides of world event, and with almost machinelike determinacy work upon our given character in terms of the limits and possibilities of its permanent constitution. — But then, finally, our ego judges the resultant event. In its role as the mere subject of knowledge, however,, it is distinct from both character and motivation and so is no more than the critical observer of their effects. No wonder if it sometimes marvels!

However, once one has grasped the idea of a transcendent fatality and has learned to contemplate the individual life from this point of view, one can have the sense, at times, of attending the most marvelous of all theatrical productions — in the contrast between the obvious, physical, accidental aspect of a situation and its moral-metaphysical necessity: the latter, however, never demonstrable and perhaps even, only imagined.^{Note 53}

IV. The Music of the Land below Waves

In the context of the Tristan legend, the symbolic forms and motifs through which the intimation is communicated of a moving destiny and alien power (which, paradoxically, is a function of the character of the motivated individual) were derived—as we have seen—from the pagan Celtic lore of Ireland, Cornwall, and Wales. Inherent in them, consequently, was the old, generally pagan message of the immanent divinity of all things, and of the manifestation of this hidden Being of beings particularly in certain heroic individuals, who thus stand as epiphanies of that “manifest-hidden” which moves and lives within us all and is the secret of the harmony of nature. Such a figure was the Christ of the Gnostics. Such a figure was Orpheus with his lyre (Figure 3). The Celtic myths and legends are full of tales of the singers and harpers of the fairy hills whose music has the power to enchant and to move the world: to make men weep, to make men sleep, and to make men laugh. They appear mysteriously from the Land of Eternal Youth, the Land within the Fairy Hills, the Land below Waves; and though taken to be human beings — odd and exceptional, indeed, yet as self-contained, after all, as you or I (or, at least, as we suppose ourselves to be) — they are not actually so, but open out behind, so to say, toward the universe.

The Irish mythological trickster Manannan Mac Lir was a figure of this kind. Actually a sea-god — after whom the Isle of Man is named — it was he, we are told, who through his magic concealed from human eyes those fairy hills, the Sídhe (pronounced “shee”), within which the Celtic gods of old, the Tuatha Dé Danann, are feasting to this day on the inexhaustible flesh of his divine swine, washed down with his ale of immortality. Like the classical water-god Proteus, M anannan was an adroit shape-shifter; and he is recorded to have appeared in various deluding forms even as late as the sixteenth century, as, for instance, at a famous feast in Ballyshannon, where the host was the historical Black Hugh O’Donnell (d. 1537).

From nowhere, as it were, the wild old sea-god appeared at that feast in the semblance of a kern, or churl, wearing narrow stripes: “the puddle-water plashing in his brogues and a moiety of his sword’s length naked sticking out behind his stern, while in his right hand he bore three limber javelins of hollywood with firehardened tips.” The javelins three suggest the trident of Poseidon and the puddle-water in his brogues is another significant sign. Having challenged each of the four cunning harpers at the feast (who played, each and all, we are told, such harmonious, delectable, smooth-flowing airs that with the fairy spell of their minstrelsy men might well have been lulled to sleep), this kern cried out that, by Heaven’s graces three, such dissonance he had never heard this side the smoke-wrapped ground-tier of Hell, where the Devil’s artists, and Albiron’s, with their sledgehammers ding the iron. “And with that,” our document continues, “taking up an instrument, he made symphony so gently sweet, and in such wise wakened the dulcet pulses of the harp, that in the whole world all women laboring of child, all wounded warriors, mangled soldiers, and gallant men gashed about — with all in general that suffered sore sickness and distemper — might with the witching charm of this his modulation have been lapped in stupor of slumber and of soundest sleep. ‘By Heaven’s grace,’ exclaimed O’Donnell, ‘since first I heard the fame of them that within the hills and under the earth beneath us make the fairy music, that at one and the same time make some to sleep, and some to weep, and others again to laugh, music sweeter than thy strains I never have heard: thou art in sooth a most melodious rogue!’ ‘One day I’m sweet another I’m bitter,’ replied the kern.” And thereafter, presently, once again taking the instrument, he made melody of such kind and so befuddled the company, that all in fury arose in wrath and began to do battle with each other — when he disappeared.^{Note 54}

Figure 36. Isolt Taught by Tristan to Harp

Figure 36 is another of the series of tiles from Chertsey Abbey, of a date about 1270. It is of the young Tristan teaching the maid Isolt to harp on the occasion of his first visit to Ireland: with the same harp and same music by which he had spellbound his uncle (Figure 4).

“Tristan, listen!” King Mark had said. “You have all the talents I yearn for. You do everything I wish I could do: hunt, speak languages, harp. Let us be companions: you, mine; I, yours. We shall ride hunting by day and by night enjoy courtly diversions — harping, singing, fiddling — here at home. You do all these things so well! Do them now for me. And for you I shall play the tune / know, for which perhaps your heart already yearns: magnificent clothes and horses. All that you want I shall give you, and with these serenade you well. See, my comrade, to you I confide my sword, my spurs, my crossbow and my golden drinking horn.”^{Note 55}

Born of a widow, beyond the sea, who expired on giving him birth, Tristan had come, as it were, from nowhere. Tossed ashore from the storming waters, he had been born as from the womb of nature itself: the boy brought ashore by the dolphin, the pig of the sea. Miraculously, as it were, he had appeared with the power and glory of a god, yet in the character of a boy. Furthermore, the vessel in which he had been abducted from his birthplace beyond the waters (the yonder shore) had been a merchantman (ein kaufschif). Hermes, the guide of souls to rebirth, was the lord and patron of merchants — also of thievery and cunning.

The tale is to be recalled at this point of Hermes’ fashioning of the lyre when but an infant a couple of hours old. Conceived of Zeus, he had been born of a night-sky nymph named Maia (meaning “old mother, grandmother, foster-mother, old nurse, or midwife”; but also a certain large kind of crab). In a cave he had been born, at dawn; and toddling forth from his cradle before noon, he had chanced — or had seemed to chance — at the entrance of the cave upon a tortoise (an early animal symbol of the universe), which he broke up and fashioned into a lyre, to which at noon he beautifully sang. That evening he stole Apollo’s cattle, and to appease the god gave him the lyre, which Apollo passed to his own son Orpheus (Figure 3 and Figure 11). And, as the whole world knows, the sound of that lyre in Orpheus’s hands stilled the animals of the wilderness, moved trees and rocks, and even charmed the lord of the netherworld when the lover descended alive to the abyss to recover Eurydice, his lost bride.

Now, as already remarked in relation to the old Celtic god of the boar of Figure 23, Figure 27, and Figure 29, the ultimate roots of the tree of Celtic folklore and mythology rest deep in that megalithic culture stratum of Western Europe that was contemporary and in trade contact with the pre-Hellenic seafaring civilizations of Crete and Mycenae of which Poseidon was a mighty god, and from which the basically non-Homeric, Dionysian-Orphic strains of classical myth and ritual derived.^{Note 56} There is therefore an actual, archaeologically documented, family relationship to be recognized between the mythic harpists of the Celtic otherworld and those of the Orphic and Gnostic mysteries. Furthermore, as remarked in Primitive Mythology,^{Note 57} there is evidence as well of a generic kinship of the classical mystery cults not only with the grandiose Egyptian mythic complex of that dying god Osiris and the Mesopotamian of Tammuz, but also with those widely distributed primitive myths and rites of the sacrificed youth or maiden (or, more vividly, the young couple ritually killed embracing in a sacramental love-death),^{Note 58} whose flesh, consumed in cannibal communion, typifies the mystery of that Being beyond duality that lives partitioned in us all. The same idea is expressed mythologically in the Indian account, quoted in Oriental Mythology, of the first being, the Self, which, in the beginning, swelled, split into male and female, and so, begetting on itself all the creatures of this world, became this world.^{Note 59}

The Indian god who is equivalent to Poseidon, and so to the Irish sea-god Manannan, is Śiva, who, as already seen, bears in his right hand the trident and in the Christian version of the netherworld is the Devil. He is known as the “Lord of Beasts” (paśupati),^{Note 60} also as the “Player of the Lyre” (viṇa-dhara); is, moreover, a phallic god and, as lord of the liṅgaṃ-yonī symbol, often shown united in one body with his goddess, she the left side, he the right. Gottfried’s metaphor of Tristan-Isolt as the two whose being is one is thus in India a familiar icon of the mystery of non-duality. Hermes, too, is both lord of the phallus and male and female at once. The word “hermaphrodite” (Hermes-Aphrodite) points to this secret of his nature. And with the goddess Aphrodite, of course, the inevitable associate is her child, the winged huntsman with his very dangerous bow: Roman Cupid, Greek Eros — the boy on the dolphin. Aphrodite too was born of the sea. And she is the consort, furthermore, of the ever-dying, ever-reborn god gored by the boar, whose celestial sign is the waning and waxing moon: the lord of the magic of night. So that Tristan, master of the arts of the hunt, as well as of music and all tongues, carried with him to Cornwall the powers of these gods.

To Mark he was to be as the young year to the old, or as David to Saul (Figure 4). He was the young god destined to supplant the old in possession of the queen, who in the ritual lore of the old Bronze Age tradition was symbolic of the land, the realm, the universe itself, and in the language of the later Hellenistic mystery cults became the guide and symbol of the interior kingdom of the soul: that realm of the spirit which can be found and fertilized only through death, humiliation, and a submission of the solar principle of rational self-reliant consciousness to the song, the sleep-song, of the interior abyss where the two — the male and female — become one (Figure 5, at Station 11). We may think also of those bull-bodied harps that were found in the royal tombs of Ur, the music they sang of the harmony of the universe, and the love-death there celebrated of the goddess and god of the deep: Inanna and Dumuzi-absu, Ishtar and Tammuz.^{Note 61}

There is the fragment of an episode from a lost, early version of the Tristan legend preserved in a Welsh triad, which opens a fresh prospect into the mythological background of Tristan in relation to Isolt, as follows:

Trystan son of Tallwch, disguised as a swineherd,

Tended the pigs of Marc son of Meirchyon

While the [true] swineherd went with a message to Esyllt.^{Note 62}

One discovers here, first, that the father of the hero is named not Rivalin but Tallwch. Tracing the history of the legend back through its Breton, Cornish, Welsh, and Irish phases, the leading Celtic scholar of the last century, Dr. H. Zimmer (As noted in Occidental Mythology, H. Zimmer (1851–1910) is not to be confused with his son of the same name, the distinguished Sanskritist, Heinrich Zimmer (1890–1943), whom I have cited in Oriental Mythology. To prevent confusion, I designate the elder as H. Zimmer and the younger as Heinrich Zimmer.), discovered that in the Pictish marshlands of southern Scotland, from the sixth to ninth centuries a.d., there had actually been a reigning series of kings named Drustan alternating with a series named Talorc, of which the member reigning from 780 to 785 was the Drustan son of Talorc of the earliest — and now forever lost — version of our legend.^{Note 63} Drustan son of Talorc became, in Wales, Trystan son of Tallwch, and the name Rivalin was substituted only when the romance reached Brittany after c. 1000, where it received its final form.

The episode of the lover, masquerading as Mark’s swineherd, sending his message by the real swineherd to Mark’s queen, which is otherwise unknown to the Tristan cycle, suggests very strongly the legend, registered in Primitive Mythology, of the abduction of Persephone to the netherworld by Hades, where it is told that a herd of swine went down too, when the earth opened to receive her.^{Note 64} Significantly, the name of the swineherd of that lost herd was Ebouleus, “Giver of Good Counsel,” an appellation of Hades himself; and, as Frazer in The Golden Bough points out, Persephone, in her animal aspect, was a pig.^{Note 65} Or again: in the Odyssey there is that episode of the magic isle of Circe, who, when she returned Odysseus’s men to their former shapes (and they were younger and fairer than before), took Odysseus to her bed, after which she led him to the netherworld, where he met and talked with — among others of the living dead — the male-female sage Tiresias (once again Figure 5, Station 11). In the general body of Celtic folklore the classical legend of the pig-goddess-guide to the mysteries beyond the plane of death is matched by the Irish folktale, retold in Primitive Mythology and noted a few pages back, of the Daughter of the King of the Land of Youth whose head was the head of a pig. When she appeared on earth and attached herself to Finn McCool’s son Ossian, he kissed the pig’s head away and became the King of the Land of Youth.^{Note 66}

Gottfried’s vision of Tristan as a wild boar ravaging King Mark’s bed, the Welsh triad of his role as Mark’s pretended swineherd, and the legend of the scar on his thigh all point in the same direction: to his derivation ultimately from the Celtic-megalithic god of the boar with the eyes of the Great Mother engraved along either side (Figure 27), who, as lord of the wilderness, the underworld, and the vital force of nature, was also king of the Land below Waves and the music-master of its spell.

But, on the other hand, King Mark appears to have been associated with a totally different mythic context, as contrary as the day to night, or as the world of fine clothes and horses to that of harping, fiddling, singing, and the lore of love and the moon. For whereas Tristan, as we have just seen, was originally a Pictish, pre-Celtic king of a Bronze Age matrilineal folk — possibly with memories of ritual regicide not distant in its past — and whereas Queen Isolt, as a legendary daughter of pre-Celtic Ireland, of the breed somewhat of Queen Meave,^{Note 67} was likewise of a matriarchal line; King Mark — known also, in Wales, as Eochaid — seems to have been a Celtic king of Cornwall of about the period of Drustan/ Tristan (c. 780–785 a.d.), whose legend, on entering Wales some time before the year 1000, became combined with that of the other two — in a relation generally comparable to that of the Celtic warrior-prince Ailill to Queen Meave.

His name, Marc, is understood usually as an abridgment of the Latin Marcus, from the name of the war-god Mars. It may also bear some relation, however, to the Middle High German marc, meaning “war-horse,” Welsh march, old Irish more or margg, “stallion or steed”; and this alternative is supported by his other Celtic name, Eochaid, which is related to the old Irish ech, Latin equus, meaning “horse.” Moreover, in one old French version of the romance (by the continental Norman poet Beroul, c. 1195 — 1205 a.d.) we find the following startling statement:

Marc a orelles de cheval,

“Mark has horses’ ears.”^{Note 68} And with this we are suddenly dropped into an extremely suggestive vortex of both mythological and high historical associations.

V. Moon Bull and Sun Steed

Figure 37. Bronze Solar Horse and Car (bronze, Denmark, c. 1000 b.c.)

Figure 38. Sun Steed and Eagle (silver, France, Gallo-Roman Period)

We think first of the classical legend of King Midas, who had ass’s ears and whose touch turned everything, including his daughter, into gold, the metal of the sun; recall, too, that the leaders of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain (c. 450 a.d.) were Hengest and Horsa, both of which names are from Germanic nouns meaning “horse.” Figure 37 is a bronze solar disk ornamented with a gold design of spirals, set on wheels of bronze, and with a bronze steed before it, found at Trundholm, Nordseeland, Denmark (whence Hengest and Horsa came), and usually dated c. 1000 b.c.; while in Figure 38 are a couple of late Gaulish coins showing horses, each with an eagle (sun-bird) on its back, and in one the horse has the head of a man. We know that annually in Rome in October a horse was sacrificed to Mars, and that at midsummer both Celts and Germans sacrificed horses. In Aryan India the high “horse sacrifice” (aśva-medha) was a rite reserved for kings, where, as seen in Oriental Mythology,^{Note 69} the noble animal was identified not only with the sun but also with the king in whose name the rite was to be celebrated; whose queen then had to enact in a pit a ritual of simulated intercourse with the immolated horse: all of which gave to her spouse the status of a solar king whose light should illuminate the earth. And, more remotely, there is the kindred legend of the birth of the beloved Japanese prince Shotoku (573–621 a.d.) while his mother was inspecting the palace precincts. “When she came to the Horse Department and had just come to the door of the stables, she was suddenly delivered of him without effort.”^{Note 70}

It is almost certain, in the light of these facts, that the association of King Mark with a horse, and even horse’s ears, testifies to an original involvement of his image in a context of royal solar rites, the warrior rites of those Celtic Aryans who, with their maleoriented patriarchal order, overran in the course of the first millennium b.c. the old Bronze Age world of the Mother Goddess and mother-right. The composition of the coin of Figure 38 in which a human-headed horse leaps over a bull as the sun leaps over the earth suggests the relationship of the two orders of the conquerors and conquered in that early Celtic heroic age; and when these figures are compared with those of Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” (Figure 39), where a horse and its rider lie shattered and a bull stands mighty and whole, the beginning and end are seen illustrated, in a remarkably consistent way, of the long majestic day in Europe of the conquering cavalier and his mount.

Oswald Spengler, in his final published work, Years of the Decision (published 1933), delineated in two bold paragraphs the whole reach of this great day, of which we are now in the twilight hour:

In the course of world history, there have been two great revolutions in the manner of waging war produced by sudden increases in mobility. The first occurred in the early centuries of the first millennium b.c., when, somewhere on the broad plains between the Danube and Amur rivers, the riding horse appeared. Mounted hosts were vastly superior to men afoot.^** “And to war-chariots as well, which could be employed only in battle and were of no use on the march. Chariots first appeared about a thousand years earlier than the mounted horse, in the same area, and, wherever employed, were invincible on contemporary battlefields: in China and India, shortly after 1500 b.c.; in the Near East somewhat earlier, and in the Hellenic sphere shortly after 1600. Soon they were in service everywhere, but disappeared when mounted troops came into general use — even when the latter were employed only as special auxiliaries to forces afoot.” (Spengler’s note.) The riders could appear and disappear before a defense or pursuit could be assembled. It was in vain that populations, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, supplemented their foot forces with mounted contingents of their own: the latter were hindered in maneuvers by the footmen. Nor were the Chinese and Roman empires saved by the building of walls and moats: such a wall as can be seen to this day cutting half across Asia; or such as the Roman limes recently discovered in the Syro-Arabian desert. It was impossible to send an assembled army out from behind such barriers quickly enough to break up a surprise attack. The settled agrarian, peasant populations of the Chinese, Indian, Roman, Arabian, and West European spheres were, time and again, overwhelmed, in helpless terror, by swarms of Parthians, Huns, Scythians, Mongols, and Turks. Cavalry and peasantry, it is apparent, are in spirit irreconcilable. It was in this way, to their superior speed, that the hosts of Jenghis Khan owed their victories.

The second decisive transformation, we are witnessing at this very hour in the displacement of the horse by the “horse power” of our Faustian technology. As late as through the [First] World War there hung about the famous old West European cavalry regiments an atmosphere of knightly pride, daring adventure and heroism, which greatly surpassed that of any other military arm. These had been, for centuries, true Vikings of the land. They came to represent more and more — much more than the infantries of the general armies — the true sense of vocation of the dedicated soldier’s life and military career. In the future all this will change. Indeed, the airplane and tank corps have already taken their place, and mobility has been carried with these beyond the limits of organic possibility to the inorganic range of the machine: of (so to say) personal machines, however, which, in contrast to the impersonality of the machine-gun fire of the trenches of the [First] World War, now will again challenge the spirit of personal heroism to great tasks.^{Note 71}

Figure 39. Adapted from Pablo Picasso: Guernica: 1937

In Picasso’s “Guernica,” the glaring electric bulb is the only sign of the new order of power and life by which the old is being destroyed: the old, of the barnyard bull and the warhorse, peasantry and cavalry. The shattered steed, the once conquering vehicle of the day of history now ending, appears to have been pierced by the lance of its own rider, as well as gored by the bull. The lance wound is a reference, obviously, to civil war: the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939, during the course of which, in April 1937, the Basque town of Guernica was bombed. But the Basque race and language are pre-Aryan. They represent, thus, like Drustan’s Picts, a period of history antecedent to the day and people of the horse. They typify and represent even to this present hour the patient spirit of those long, toiling millenniums of the entry into Europe and establishment there of its basic peasant population: when the myths and rites of the sacrificial bull — symbolic of the everdying, self-resurrecting lord of the tides of life, whose celestial sign is the moon — were the life-supporting forms of faith and prayer. In the bull ring, from which Picasso took his imagery, the old wornout picador-horse is gored by the bull, but the bull itself is then slain by a solar weapon — the sword of the matador, who is clothed in a garment called “the garment of light.” In Picasso’s work there is no such avenger: the enigmatic bull still stands. The day of the cavalier is ended; and tracing back now through the centuries, to identify the symbolic moments of its beginning, culmination, climacteric, and dissolution, we may number the stages of this culture period as follows:

1. The long, general period represented by the coins of Figure 38, of the pagan Aryan beginnings of what today is Occidental civilization: the centuries, first, of the Celtic (Hallstatt and La Tene) expansions, raids, and invasions, c. 900–15 b.c., and then, of the rise and world empire of pagan Rome, c. 400 b.c.–400 a.d.^{Note 72}
2. The very dark, at first, but then brightening years of the Christian Middle Ages: first of the forceful conversion and immediate collapse of the Roman Empire in Europe (Theodosius the Great, 379–395 a.d.); next of the saints of Christian Ireland, maintaining a dim yet steady light while on the Continent the ravages of the pagan Germanic wars and plunderings were augmented by the works of riding Asiatic Huns and African Moors (the dark ordeals of this stage endured from the sixth to the ninth centuries);^{Note 73} the beginnings of improvement, then, among the Franks, Lombards, and Saxons, emanating largely from the palace school (but also the weaponry) of Charlemagne (Holy Roman Emperor, 800–814 a.d.); and then — at last! — with the fall of Moorish Toledo in the year 1085 and the preaching ten years later of the First Crusade, the sudden flowering of the golden age of European courtesy and amor, theology, cathedrals, and knighthood on adventure: that age par excellence of chivalry and the mounted steed, of which the paragons for all time must be the knights and ladies fair of King Mark’s and Arthur’s courts.

But now, passing the noon of that day of the mounted steed, and moving onward toward a later time when gunpowder and cannons will have given the advantage to men afoot, we ask:

3. who that strange silhouette against the setting sun might be, riding tall and lean, picador-like, on a tall, lean, knobby-kneed horse, with a short, round second figure trotting now beside, now after, on a donkey. Why none other, indeed, than Don Quixote, in his patched armor, on Rozinante, his “Horse of Yore”: the Knight of the Rueful Countenance, about 1605 a.d., riding to adventure on the dusty plane of La Mancha with his portly squire Sancho Panza, “poor in purse and poor in brains,” loyally behind! As Ortega y Gasset has remarked in his Meditations on Quixote: “Don Quixote, in a certain way, is the sad parody of a more divine and serene Christ: he is a Gothic Christ, torn by the modern anguish; a ridiculous Christ of our own neighborhood, created by a sorrowful imagination, which has lost its innocence and its will and is striving to replace them.…^{Note 74}

“Don Quixote stands at the intersection where two worlds meet, forming a beveled edge,” he writes again: the two worlds, on the one hand, of poetic aspiration and spiritual adventure, and, on the other, empirical reality, “the anti-poetic per se.”^{Note 75}

“Cervantes looks at the world,” Ortega states, “from the height of the Renaissance. The Renaissance has tightened things.… With his physics Galileo lays down the stern laws that govern the universe. A new system has begun; everything is confined within stricter forms. Adventures are impossible in this new order of things.…^{Note 76}

“Another characteristic of the Renaissance,” Ortega then adds, however,

is the predominance acquired by the psychological.… The Renaissance discovers the inner world in all its vast extension, the me ipsum, the consciousness, the subjective. The novel Don Quixote is the flower of this great new turn that culture takes. In it the epic comes to an end forever, along with its aspiration to support a mythical world bordering on that of material phenomena but different from it.… The reality of the adventure is reduced to the psychological, perhaps even to a biological humor. It is real insofar as it is a vapor from a brain, so that its reality is that of its opposite, the material.…

Regarded for itself, in a direct way, reality, the actual, would never be poetic: that is the privilege of the mythical. But we can consider it obliquely, as destructive of the myth, as criticism of the myth. In this manner reality, which is of an inert and meaningless nature, quiet and mute, acquires movement, is changed into an active power of aggression against the crystal orb of the ideal. The enchantment of the latter broken, it falls into fine, iridescent dust, which loses gradually its colors until it becomes an earthy brown.^{Note 77}

And with this we are brought to our terminal stage, namely:

4. The present, of Picasso’s shattered horse and the broken, hollow rider: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and “The Hollow Men.” For by the middle of the nineteenth century, three centuries after Galileo, Quixote, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet (“To be, or not to be…” ), not only had the motions of life become reduced to mechanistic formulas, but even those of the mind and will were on the point of being so interpreted. In Ortega’s words, once again:

And so it is that, in this dismal scene of mechanized cities of “adjusted” automatons, the age arrives, as Ortega states, of the roman expérimental of Zola and the rest.

The subject matter is still man, but since man is no longer the agent of his acts but is moved by the environment in which he lives, the novel will look to the representation of the environment. The environment is the only protagonist. People speak of evoking the “atmosphere.” Art submits to one rule: verisimilitude…: the beautiful is what is probable and the true lies only in physics. The aim of the novel is physiology.^{Note 79}

With the conditioned-reflex experiments on dogs of the Russian physiologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1848–1936)^{Note 80} and the application of his methods to the study and control of human thinking and behavior,^{Note 81} psychology itself became a department of mechanics. The last dark cavern of retreat of Schopenhauer’s “intelligible character” of the individual was about to become wholly illuminated by a laboratory lamp, and the old Germanic sense of destiny as wyrd, an irreversible process of becoming from within (See The Word Behind Words and 138–40; also, The Love-Death.), reduced to an electrician’s diagram of afferent and efferent nerves; so that what romantics still were attributing to some vague force, felt to be divine, within, was actually to be analyzed as a property of matter, no less and no more mysterious or divine than what goes on within the carburetor and cylinders of one’s car. In the words of an American master of this ultimate field of nineteenth-century science:

There are common factors running through all forms of human acts. In each adjustment there is always both a response or act and a stimulus or situation which calls out that response. Without going too far beyond our facts, it seems possible to say that the stimulus is always provided by the environment, external to the body, or by the movements of man’s own muscles and the secretions of his glands; finally, that the responses always follow relatively immediately upon the presentation of the stimulus. These are really assumptions, but they seem to be basal ones for psychology.… If we provisionally accept them we may say that the goal of psychological study is the ascertaining of such data and laws that, given the stimulus, psychology can predict what the response will be; or, on the other hand, given the response, it can specify the nature of the effective stimulus.”^{Note 82}

Little wonder, then, if in Picasso’s apocalyptic “Guernica” the fallen broken hero is revealed as a hollow statue and his pierced Rozinante a strange thing of papier-mache. The dead child of the pieta at the left is a doll, and the entire canvas, for all its great size (11 feet, 6 inches, by 28 feet, 8 inches), suggests a puppet stage: the only centers of possible life being the heads and mouths, with their flashing tongues, of the bull, the mother, and the screaming horse, plus the tails of the two beasts, the mother’s hair, and the modest flower at the fallen hero’s right hand. The other mouths are without tongue. Even the flames are unreal of the ecstatic (falling or rising?) woman at the right. The figures are two-dimensional cut-outs, without depth, as we all are now supposed to be in this self-moving machine world: mere masks of nothing beyond.

This seems to many to be an exclusively modern way of conceiving of the universe and mankind. However, in the long perspective that has been opened to our view by the scholarship of comparative world mythology, it must be recognized that it actually was anticipated, together with its moral implications, in the absolutely impersonal, mathematical space-time cosmology and associated social order of those priestly watchers of the skies of the old Sumerian temple cities (fourth millennium b.c.), from whose heaven-oriented gaze and related cerebrations the world has received all the basic elements of archaic high civilization: calendric astronomy, mathematics, writing, and monumental symbolic architecture; the idea of a moral order of the universe, made known by way of the features of the night sky, with the waning and waxing moon its focal sign (the rhythmically dying and reappearing lunar bull, whose light is for three nights dark), and, subordinate to this, the moral order and symbolic rites of the hieratic priestly state, with its symbolic king and court enacting, as well as enforcing, here on earth the order of death in life and life in death made known aloft. We have discussed all this at length in the earlier volumes of this series: in Primitive Mythology; in Oriental Mythology, throughout; and in Occidental Mythology. There can now be nothing new to us about it, or surprising.

However, what I do find surprising, and cannot help pausing a moment to remark, is the fact that in the tortured figures of Picasso’s masterpiece (and he surely knew what he was doing — as will appear on a later page) what we are contemplating is a constellation of perfectly traditional mythological symbols, arranged in such a way as to bear to us in their silent speech (whether intended or not by the artist) a message still in perfect concord with the spirit and lore of the old Sumerian lunar bull: “That One,” as we read in the Indian Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, “who is the Death on whom our life depends.… He is one as he is there, but many as he is in his children here.”^{Note 83}

In Occidental Mythology there is an illustration (Figure 16) in which the old Sumerian bearded moon bull is shown with the sun bird perched on his back biting into his flank. The bull is unconcerned, as here in Picasso’s piece. Moreover, the flames emanating from the knee joints of the earlier symbolic beast have their counterpart in the flamelike spike pointing backward from the right foreknee of the “Guernica” bull. And further, since the mountain peak above which the old Sumerian lunar bull stands represents the mountain body of the Mother Goddess Earth, whose child is that ever-dying, self-resurrecting god that is in substance one with his father (and so, is “the bull,” as they say, “of his own mother”),^{Note 84} symbolically, in traditional terms of which Picasso surely was aware, the bull and pietà of his “Guernica” correspond precisely to the moon bull and world-mountain of the old Sumerian icon. The dead child is the living god in the oxymoron of his death: the Christ of the sacrifice, who in the Gnostic view (as we have seen) is the living substance of us all. And the scene, then, of the gored horse in the central, triangular field — illuminated by the hand-held lamp, which intervenes below the higher light — is the scene of this dear death that is our bitter life, where, as we read in the Bhagavad Gītā: “Even as a person casts off worn-out clothes and puts on others that are new, what is embodied casts off worn-out bodies and enters into others that are new.”^{Note 85}

The hollow hero of Picasso’s vision and the torn body of his paper horse contrast calamitously with the young, naive, life-willing and -daring hero-symbols of the early European pagan coins. The bird of prey, the sun bird riding on the back of the prancing steed, has become, in the late work, a broken, screaming pigeon. The most obvious thing to say is that the initiative in shaping history and the destiny of man has passed from the cavalier and his civilization; and that a great, a very great culture cycle has therewith terminated — whether we like it or not.

Picasso’s enigmatic bull, unharmed, has eyes of two perspectives. The eye in the center of the brow is at that point at which in Indian art the eye of time-transcending vision opens, to recognize in the passing forms of this world the mere shadow-play of that inevitable, bitter yet bitter-sweet round that James Joyce, in Finnegans Wake, has dubbed “the Here-we-are-again Gaieties”:^{Note 86} the bull-god Śiva’s cruel, ecstatic, unremitting, everlastingly repetitive Dance of the Burning Ground. And the other eye, beneath the pricked ear, is apparently regarding — as the ear is heeding — the catastrophe of the day: the day, that is to say, of the witness of the picture; for its focus, certainly, is on us. Worth noticing also is the fact that the nostrils of both this bull and the sacrificial horse, as well as the eyes of both the wailing mother and the flaming figure at the right, suggest the well-known yang and yin elements of the Chinese symbol of the ineluctable, ever-revolving light-and-dark Way and law of nature, the Tao: .^{Note 87} The rays from the glaring bulb are dark as well as light. So too is the body of the dove — which, in contrast to the solar eagle riding the backs of the conquering steeds of the Gallo-Roman coins, suggests the suffering, complaining, as opposed to the active, aggressive, energetic, side of the yin-yang polarity. Meanwhile the Graces three — those three women at the right, participating with surprise and anguish in the scene, as though it were not an already well-known passage of their own oft-repeated choreography — are without tongues. They are in the place here of Silent Thalia at the base of Gafurius’s scale of the Music of the Spheres (Figure 20), at the top of which — above that blazing bulb, as the mystai of Figure 18 are above the blazing sun door — they would have been revealed in their supernal aspect, in that dance before the lord of light of which this scene below is but a reflex in Plato’s shadow cave.

Picasso’s bull, like the serpent of Gafurius’s design, is thus the vehicle of the appearance of an eternal present in the field of passing time: future, present, past. Standing in the posture of the world-father bull of the old Sumerian archetype, beyond the triangle of the lesser light, within which the tragedy of the pierced horse appears, he elevates us, through his two eyes, to that higher sphere, where his horns suggest the balanced crescents of the waning, but then waxing, moon. And finally, we note that the floral element of Gafurius’s design, represented blooming in the vase of the immortal water above, has here its counterpart in the modest flower blooming by the clenched hand of the broken hollow hero and bent right foreknee of his steed.

Of Picasso’s treatment of traditional symbolic forms there will be more to say in our last chapter. Already obvious here, however, is the power of his art to capture and inflect anew the multifarious ambiguities of their silent speech. His choice of black and white for this masterwork, and its setting, at once indoors and out, suggest immediately the shadow play of Plato’s cave. The door at the extreme right is ajar; a wall is omitted at the left; the window at the upper right opens to a void, a light void, whereas the void with­in the steed is black; so also, that within the hollow man.… In Schopenhauer’s paper “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual” it has been asked whether in such an overwhelming event, for example, as that here depicted by Picasso there could be any possibility whatsoever of detecting an accord between the outer circumstance and inward character of the individuals involved. Picasso’s figure of the hollow man suggests strongly that there might. Moreover, since all the other elements of his scene are well-known classical symbols of the play of a secret will in the general course of temporal event — death itself, however it may come, being of the essence, part and parcel, of each man’s life, to which he must be reconciled if he is to penetrate beyond the monstrous show of things to what the poet Robinson Jeffers termed the “Tower beyond Tragedy” — it is evident that here, as in all truly tragic art (as opposed to critical caricature), there is implied an affirmation in depth of this world in being, either exactly as it is or as it might be taught to become.

The latter is the way of the historic hero, hero of a day: the knight riding on crusade, the bombardier in his plane. The whole history of a culture — briefly told — is a function of its incidence of heroes of this kind, tried and true; as in this European cycle of the four stages of a day fulfilled which we have identified schematically as: 1. the dawn — in the Celtic Aryan pagan coin, with its steed overleaping the bull, representing the young and barbarous beginning; 2. the forenoon, of the courtly world of King Mark (or, alternately, Arthur), at that supreme period of flowering of the European creative imagination when, as Henry Adams saw, the moment of the apogee of spirituality was attained (1150–1250); then 3. the post meridian of Don Quixote (1605), when the will to the ideal, though still there, was no longer a match for the force of matter; and finally 4. the Angelus hour of Picasso’s “Guernica” and Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods.

But there is another type of heroism as well; namely, of the son of the abyss, Dumuzi-absu: not the warhorse, but the ever-dying, self-resurrecting son, who is “the bull of his own mother,” and whose sign is the orb not of day but of night, whose world is not of history but of nature and its mystery — nature without and nature within: as in Wagner’s music of the all-resuming waters at the end of his cycle of The Ring, or that of the soaring second act of his Tristan, where the lovers together — “Heart to heart and lip to lip” — curse the day with its deceits:

Daylight phantoms!

Morning visions!

Empty and vain!

Away! Begone!

VI. The Legend of the Fair Isolt

THE POISONED WOUND

Figure 40. Morold Wounds Tristan

Figure 39 is another of the Chertsey tiles. At the left Prince Morold the Mighty, maternal uncle of Isolt, has come from Ireland to claim from the nobles of Mark's court sixty of their sons. There is here an echo of the legend of the youths and maidens required of Athens to feed the Cretan Minotaur. Morold has arrived as the emissary of King Gurmun the Gay of Dublin, scion of a northwest African house, who, having conquered Ireland many years before and there married Morold’s sister, turned upon Cornwall and imposed this cruel tax. Gurmun is the Minos of this legend. His daughter, Isolt, bearing the same name as her mother, is to be its Ariadne, and Tristan (at the right), its hero Theseus. At the time of the previous tribute collection, Tristan had not yet appeared from the sea. But he is now a knight without peer. Having challenged to single combat the seasoned fighting man from Ireland, he is receiving on his left thigh a stroke from the enemy’s poisoned sword.

“How now?” yelled Morold. “Will you give up?” He wheeled his charger and, on guard, continued shouting through his helm. “Think fast! No doctor now can save you, but only my sister Isolt. That wound, unless I help, will be your death.”^{Note 88}

Figure 41. Tristan Slays Morold

Figure 40 shows Tristan’s answer. “He delivered a buffet on the helm” states Gottfried, “and went so deeply through that when he pulled the weapon out, his tug left a piece of blade in the skull, — which in due time would bring him into the greatest jeopardy and distress.”^{Note 89}

In the earlier Norman French version of the legend by Thomas of Britain, Gottfried’s source, the two champions met on a jousting field; in Gottfried, however, they battled on an islet off the Cornish coast, to which they and their mounts were conveyed in skiffs. Morold stepped into one, leading with him his charger, took up the oar, and ferried himself across. “And when he came,” we read, “to the islet, he beached the boat and made it fast, quickly mounted, gripped his lance in hand, and across the isle went galloping most elegantly. His charges were as easy and playful as for a game.”^{Note 90} And the young Tristan, eighteen, also unbeaten up to then, was standing at the bow of his own skiff, bidding God’s grace to his uncle. “Be not anxious for me and my life. Let us leave it all in God’s hands,” he said and, pushing off, paddled, likewise with his mount aboard, to the isle.

It is amusing to remark that in the figures on the Chertsey tiles, where Tristan is attacking, the lion of his shield rears forward, but when attacked, its back is turned. This animal is the Lion of Anjou, emblem of the royal house of England at the time of the Norman poet Thomas. Gottfried, on the other hand, gives Tristan’s emblem as a black boar. “The shield,” he states, “having been burnished to a splendid gloss, enough for a new mirror, there was a boar inlaid upon it, masterly and well, as sable-black as coal.”^{Note 91} But the boar, as we have amply seen, was the sacrificial beast proper to such mysteries of the netherworld as those to which Tristan now was to be consigned, whereas the lion, the kingly solar beast, was of the sphere, rather, of Mark. Though closely following Thomas for the main lines of his story, Gottfried apparently recognized the preferability of the boar; and he added, furthermore, the sign of an arrow engraved on Tristan’s helm: “Love’s prophecy,” as he tells us, “which, however long he might be spared, was to be well verified by what Love, in time, would do to him.”^{Note 92}

The lamentations in Ireland, when the carved-up beheaded body and head of the champion Morold arrived, were great;

but the grief [states Gottfried] of his sister, Queen Isolt, surpassed all: her anguish and her weeping. She and her daughter (as women will, you know), completely abandoned themselves to every kind of torment, seizing upon this dead man as an occasion purely for keening, that the grief in their hearts should be increased. They kissed his head, and they kissed those hands by which peoples and lands had been conquered. The gash in his skull they scrutinized this way and that, closely, disconsolately, until presently the wise, discerning queen became aware of the piece of metal. She sent for a little pair of tweezers, and with these reached in, drew the piece of metal out. Then she and her daughter studied this, with sobbing and with anguish, and at last, together, took it up and laid it by in a casket — where, in due time, it was to bring Tristan to real trouble.^{Note 93}

So that again, as by chance, the course of destiny has been set by incidents of an external, unlikely kind: an exchange of tokens of death, yet heralding love and the opening of its way.

Richard Wagner’s theme of the death potion was developed from this base. In his radically abridged version of the romance — commencing at the much later scene of the love potion aboard ship — the earlier adventures, meetings, and preparations, which in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had occupied nearly half the plot, were dramatically reduced to a dozen or so passionately sung lines in the first act: as where Kurvenal, in a taunting ballad, insults Isolde with an account of Morold’s death — who, according to Wagner’s reconstruction, had been her betrothed, not her uncle.

For on Wagner’s stage there was neither time nor place for the gradual unfoldment of a subtle psychological epic. By transposing Isolde’s relationship to the man Tristan had killed, the composer contrived to intensify and to motivate convincingly the ambivalence of her dangerously irritable sentiments, and so to compress into a single ardent scene the whole force of that mounting agony of hate-against-love which was to culminate in her baffled, desperate resolve to implicate the object of her passion in a covenant neither of love nor of a lifelong renunciation of love in the fellowship and service of King Mark, but of death — right there, on the surging sea. And lo! The drink they had thought was to be their death, was of love.

In contrast, in all the earlier versions the potion was drunk by accident, not as a death potion, but as wine. For the symbolic passage through death’s door had already been taken care of in a series of adventures treating of the cure of Tristan’s wound, and Isolt’s resentment over the murder had already been so assuaged that she and Tristan could chat about it lightly during their voyage to King Mark. Indeed, the sentiments of the gifted, beautiful young couple were of unawakened virginal innocence; whereas Wagner filled his art with the magic of his own hardly innocent rapture in the wife, Mathilde, of his friend and benefactor Otto Wesendonck. In her arms he wished to die.

Furthermore, in Wagner’s mind the philosophies of Schopenhauer and the Buddha were at work; so that his art too had lost its innocence. Already the first strains of his Prelude release an atmosphere of longing, irresolution, loneliness, and lust; and when the curtain then rising reveals Isolde and her maid Brangaene on the broad opera-deck of Tristan’s ship (which has more the look, by the way, of a sixteenth-century galleon of Spain than of anything on the Irish Sea in the early or late Middle Ages), the opening sung lines floating down from the lone sailor’s chantey in the rigging sound immediately the mystic night-sea-voyage theme of loss and passage toward a culmination unknown:

Westward strain the eyes,

Eastward the ship flies:

telling of a loss not only of home, but of mastery, and an irreversible passage into what Wagner himself termed “that most beautiful of all dreams,” compulsive, passionate love — already anticipatory of the end of the work and that great parting song of the lovedeath, drowning and dissolving, at last, in the unconscious sea of night — to the world-sigh of all things:

In dem wogenden Schwall,

in dem tönenden Schall,

in des Welt A thems wehendem All —

— ertrinken,

versinken,

unbewusst,

höchste Lust!

The curtain falls on the last chord. And in the course of three timeless hours everything that in the earlier master versions had been presented lightly, at leisure, at length, and at a certain remove from reality (like the scenes and figures of a tapestry) has been delivered, full force, in a triptych of swelling frames, wherein — as Nietzsche declared of his great friend — Wagner indeed proved himself to be “the Orpheus of life’s secret pain.”

“He creates most successfully,” Nietzsche wrote, “out of the deepest depths of human delight, as it were from its already emptied chalice, where the bitterest, most unappetizing drops have run together with the sweet — for good and for ill.”^{Note 94}

The Rudderless Boat

Figure 42. Tristan Afloat to Ireland

The bitter-sweet draft that Wagner pours as music through the porches of our ears, Gottfried and the other poets of his day delivered silently to an inward sense, on the wings of mythic symbols to which the windows of that period still were open. Figure 42, again from the Chertsey tiles, shows the wounded Tristan magically voyaging in a rudderless boat, without oars, to the Ireland of Queen Isolt.

The place where the blow had struck [states Gottfried] emitted such a fearful stench that his life now was a burden, his own body repulsive to him; and he appreciated more and more the import of Morold’s words. Further, he had often heard, in days gone by, of the beauty and cunning of Morold’s sister; for in all the neighboring lands in which her name was known, there was a popular saying about her:

Isolt the Beautiful, Isolt the Wise:

She is radiant as dawn!^{Note 95}

Figure 43. Dionysus in the Ship; 6th century b.c.

In Thomas of Britain’s version the rotting, reeking hero begged his friends to place him in a coracle, equipped only with his harp, and in this floated wonderfully to Ireland; so that the same marvelous child who had been carried by storm to Cornwall, now, as a youth, was again borne by the tides. I would compare with this the representation of Dionysus (Figure 43) from a sixth-century b.c. Greek kylix, illustrating a myth known from a Homeric hymn:

The god, we are told, was standing on a promontory in the form of a youth in his first bloom, when Etruscan pirates put to shore and, pouncing on the lad, bound and bore him off. But at sea the bonds fell from his limbs, wine began pouring through the ship, a grapevine burgeoned up the mast, and ivy curled about the oarlocks. The youth, becoming a lion, roaring, tore the captain apart, while the rest, leaping overboard,- became dolphins.^{Note 96}

We shall have more of Dionysus anon. Meanwhile, his twelfth-century avatar, Tristan, resting trustfully on the bosom of those cosmic powers by which the movements of the heavens and all things on earth are controlled, has been carried on the concord of his Orphic-Irish harp, resounding to the music of the sea and spheres, to that very Dublin Bay where Joyce’s hero Dedalus was to go walking centuries later, questioning his heart as to whether he would ever have the courage to entrust himself to life. In Gottfried’s shaping of the legend, the altogether magical theme of the unguided skiff has been discarded. Rejecting the littie miracle, the poet tells more rationally of the miserable Tristan’s friends taking him in a seaworthy craft to the mouth of Dublin Bay and there, at night, setting him adrift in his skiff, a short way off Sandymount Shore. And when morning dawned, as he writes:

When the folk of Dublin spied that rudderless little boat upon the waves, orders were given to speed to it. An expedition went out. And as they approached, unable still to see anybody within, they all, to their hearts’ delight, heard a lovely harp, sweetly sounding; and to that harp the voice of a man so pleasantly at song that every one of them deemed this the most marvelous greeting and adventure. And as long as he harped and sang they never stirred.^{Note 97}

The sight and the stench of what they found within, garbed as a minstrel, appalled them; yet for his song they bade him welcome. He declared he was from Spain. Having set to sea in a merchant ship, according to his tale, he had been attacked by pirates, wounded, and committed to this skiff, in which he had drifted now some forty days and nights — the period of Christ’s ordeal and fast in the desert.

The Pretender

Tristan gave his name as Tantris and, when towed ashore, so filled the city with the sweet strains of his song that all pressed around to hear. A physician among them took him to his home, where a priest of the palace, marveling at the talents of the youth in music, languages, and courtesy as well, took pity and brought him to the queen, who when she beheld him was overcome with compassion.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, examining his leg. “You poor poor minstrel! You are poisoned.”

The invalid feigned amazement.

“Now Tantris, have confidence that I am really going to mend you. I shall be your doctor, myself,” she said; then asked if he was strong enough to let her hear him play, and he replied that nothing whatsoever could prevent him from doing — and doing right well — anything she asked. The harp was sent for, and her daughter as well, that she too might enjoy this prodigy.

“Love’s signet, she was,” states Gottfried, “by which his heart was to be sealed away and impounded from all the world, save herself alone: beautiful Isolt. She entered. She paid very studious attention to the one there harping away. And he played better than he had ever played in his life.”^{Note 98}

However, that ugly slash on his thigh was emitting such an insupportable stench that in spite of the rapture of his music it was more than anyone present could stand to remain as much as an hour in his vicinity. The queen presently spoke.

“Tantris, just as soon as we can bring it to the point that this foul odor of yours is quenched and people can bear to be near you, let me confide this young lady to your teaching.” — Shades of Abelard and Heloise! — “She has always worked diligently at her books and music, and considering the time and opportunity she has had for it, does rather well. I shall repay you with your life and with your body in good health and of comely mien. Both to give and to withhold are in my hand.”^{Note 99}

One thinks of the Greek Medusa, the blood from whose left side brought death, and from her right side, life.^{Note 100} For this Queen Isolt was indeed of the number of those mighty goddess queens of the Celtic past who controlled the destinies and powers even of the gods. In Ireland, their reign has continued to the present. “Have you ever seen a fairy or such like?” the poet Yeats asked an old man in County Sligo. “Amn’t I annoyed with them?” was the answer. “Do the fishermen along here know anything of the mermaids?” he asked a woman in a village in County Dublin. “Indeed, they don’t like to see them at all,” she answered, “for they always bring bad weather.”^{Note 101} There’s little cause, then, for wonder in the magic of the beautiful Dublin queen Isolt of the medieval Tristan legend: far more in the way she let compassion veil her eyes to the identity of the trickster in her hands.

“The cunning queen,” states Gottfried, “turned all her thoughts and every skill to the task of healing a man whom she would gladly have given her life and reputation to have destroyed. She hated him more than she loved herself, yet thought of nothing but to ease and advance him, and to bring about his cure — to which end she strove and labored, day and night.”^{Note 102} And with such effect that in twenty days people could bear to approach him, and the princess was entrusted to his care. The young lady worked diligently and found that what she already knew greatly helped; for she could speak French, Latin, and Irish, play the fiddle in the Welsh style, besides the lyre and harp, and sweetly sing. Tristan’s teaching improved her in all these, and he instructed her, besides, in the valuable discipline called moraliteit, which, according to Gottfried’s definition, is “the art that teaches beautiful manners.”

“All women,” Gottfried urges, “should apply themselves to this art diligently when young; for its delightful teaching, pure and wholesome, accords with the world and with God, showing through its precepts how to please both. And to all noble hearts it is given as their nurse, that in its lore they may seek their living and their life. For unless moraliteit directs them, they will enjoy neither well-being nor good name.”^{Note 103}

In not one word of all of which is there any hint, nuance, or possibility of discovering so much as a trace of that Gnostic-Manichaean philosophy of world-rejection of which Gottfried has been, by some of his critics, accused. Indeed, it would be difficult to coin a formula that would have less about it of the Manichaean. Professor August Closs of the University of Bristol, in the introduction to his edition of the Middle High German text, compares Gottfried’s concept of moraliteit to the classical ideal of καλοκἀγαΘία, the character and conduct of a perfect man, which is an ideal, as he points out, that can be attained only “in the most sacred moments in the life of men or nations.”^{Note 104} And Gottfried himself points in this direction — not the Manichaean — when he states of his love grotto that its fashioners had been the giants of heathen times, and calls upon the Muses and Apollo to inspire his work.

The gentle, beautiful, fateful Isolt, whom Tristan unwittingly was training for his own destruction, learned to play her lyre and harp with such grace (see Figure 36) that in six months all Ireland was talking. “And to what,” the poet asks, “might I compare that beautiful, gifted girl but to the Sirens with their lodestone, who draw to themselves stray ships? … It was to the agitation of many a heart that she sang, both openly and secretly, by way of both ear and eye. The song openly sung to her tutor and elsewhere was of her own sweet singing and soft sounding of strings, which openly and clearly traveled through the kingdom of the ears down deep into the heart: but the secret song was of her beauty, which meanwhile slipped covertly and silently through the windows of the eyes into many a noble heart, where it spread a magic that made those hearts instantaneously captive and bound them with yearning and yearning stress.”^{Note 105}

Thus it was specifically and explicitly from the sensuous beauty of this virginal maid that the arrow of love passed through the eyes to the heart — as in the poem of the troubadour Borneilh. And it was these unintentional effects that were shaping Isolt’s destiny. She was in a sense, thus, the unwilling victim of her own beauty. However, if Schopenhauer’s proposal that one’s body is an “objectification” of one’s “intelligible character” * be taken seriously, it will appear that although her conscious mind may not have been the fashioner of her destiny, her actuality surely was; and that this in a profound sense was more truly she — an expression of her most essential “will” — than were all her drifting maiden thoughts and dreams. Moreover, reciprocally, the response of Tristan’s noble heart to her beauty was a function of his character and will, as well: he had never played better in his life! So that, through a kind of valency beyond their conscious willing, the wills of these two were already co-authoring the romance that was to become, through apparent chance, the one realization in time and space of their only possible destiny.

When the wound of the Tantris who was Tristan had been healed by the unwitting queen, who would have wished rather to have slain him, both the wise yet deceived mother and her innocent, provocative daughter begged the honorable deceiver to remain with them in Ireland. He, however, prudently pleaded with such fervor to return to his nonexistent wife in Spain that, with thanks, great courtesy and honor, in God’s name, he was let go.

The Incitement of King Mark

Tristan returned to Cornwall. And when he recounted his adventure, he was questioned particularly of the maid Isolt, and replied with such a paean of praise that neither Mark nor anyone else could put her image thereafter out of mind. “She is a maid,” he said, “so lovely that everything the world has ever told of beauty is in comparison mere wind.” And he went on: “Radiant Isolt is a princess of such superlative enchantment, both in manner and in person, that no peer of her ever was born, or will ever be. Luminous, effulgent Isolt: she glows like Arabian gold.”^{Note 106}

In the Eilhart-Béroul version of the romance, a fairytale motive is invoked to inspire Tristan’s second voyage to Ireland. A swallow, building its nest outside the window of King Mark, had let fall a golden hair, which came floating, long and fair, into the room, shining like a beam of light; and the king, whose people had been urging him to marry, agreed to accommodate them only if his barons could find the maid to whom that hair belonged. The spirit of this fairytale motive accorded with a troubadour theme of the time, of the “Princess Far Away.” The great troubadour Jaufre Rudel (fl. 1130–1150) was said to have fallen immediately in love on hearing the name of the Princess of Tripoli. “Sad and joyous shall I be,” he sang, “When I meet my distant love.”^{Note 107} Gottfried, however, in a side remark, makes mock of Eilhart’s fairytale device. “Did ever any swallow ever build its nest,” he asks, “in such a roundabout way that, with so much in its own land, it went searching for nesting material abroad, over sea?”^{Note 108} In his own version, following Thomas, there was no need for any such swallow, since Tristan’s own mouth had carried golden tidings enough.

“I had believed,” the infatuated innocent said, “from the books I had read in praise of Aurora’s daughter Helen, that in her alone the beauties of all womankind were laid together in a single flower; but I have now escaped that illusion. Isolt has cured me of the notion, which I never again shall credit, that the sun rose in Mycenae. Beauty supreme never dawned upon Greece; beauty supreme has dawned only here. Let all thought and all mankind turn now to Ireland. Let the eyes there take delight and see how the new sun, succeeding to the light of its dawn — Isolt after Isolt — from Dublin shines into all hearts!”^{Note 109}

Clearly, Gottfried’s Tristan is already head-over-heels in love, and the potion, consequently, will simply break open the gates to a tide already pressing to burst through: not consciously suppressed, as in Wagner’s nineteenth-century moderns, but absolutely unrecognized, through innocence blinded by an ego-ideal of loyalty and some notion of the general good. The young man’s glowing description of a golden female shining like the sun perfectly accords with C. G. Jung’s definition of an archetypal anima-projection: the attribution to a living female of the male’s unconscious image of the Woman of his soul.^{Note 110} And little wonder, meanwhile, if the entire nation of Cornwall is importuning King Mark, who has sworn to remain a bachelor and pass his throne on to his nephew, to take that Irish paragon, advertised by that same besotted nephew, for his queen.

“Gurmun the King and Isolt the Queen have but one sole heir,” said the courtiers. “With Isolt comes Ireland itself.”

And Mark, in a quandary, answered ruefully, “Tristan has brought her deeply into my thought.”^{Note 111}

Which in Gottfried’s book was a telling point against Mark: for he had not seen Isolt himself, the magic of her beauty had not passed through his eyes to his heart, but only her report, through his ears to his brain. It was not love, amor, that would join him to Isolt, therefore, but prudence, matters of state, importuning counselors, and a certain weakness of resolve. In the end, an expedition was equipped wherein, with a company of twenty knights, twenty barons, and three times twenty men, Tristan, again as Tantris, but pretending now to be a merchant, set sail, once again, for Dublin Bay.

Bride Quest

Figure 44. Tristan and the Dragon (tapestry, Austria, fourteenth century) 

From the point of view of a student of folklore, this second voyage is but a modified duplication of the first, culminating not in abandonment but in capture of the bride. And as Tristan, in the first, before meeting Isolt, had had to encounter Morold, who infected him with death, so in this a like threshold-guardian was to be encountered. In Thomas of Britain’s version, Morold’s shield had been emblazoned with the figure of a dragon.^{Note 112} He was a manifestation in human form of the same dark guarding power that Tristan now was to face on its home ground in its primal, animal shape (Figures 33 and 34).

For the tale speaks of a serpent in the country [Gottfried tells], which evil monster had laden the people and land with harmful harm so harmfully, that Gurmun the Gay, the Irish king, had sworn by his kingly honor that he would give his daughter Isolt to any knight of noble birth that would undo him. The report throughout the land and the ravishing beauty of the maid had sufficed to entail the deaths of thousands, who arrived to give battle and meet their end. Ireland was full of the tale — and Tristan knew it well: which, in fact, is what had heartened him to undertake the voyage; for no other hope did he have, on which to rely to gain his end.^{Note 113} 3

Tristan galloped at the flaming open jaws of the lizard, and his lance drove deep into its throat; but when the jaws snapped, the entire front portion of his mount, as far as to the saddle, was chopped off and consumed. The dragon turned and made for its den, spreading fire to both sides, with Tristan after, afoot; then turned at bay, and a terrible fiery battle ensued, until, with the lance still in its throat, the devil’s brat began to fail, and, sinking to the ground, expired when Tristan thrust his sword into its heart.

A very different dragon battle from that of Beowulf, five centuries before!

The victor cut out the dead thing’s tongue and thrust it into his bosom — which, however, sent such a burning poison through his body that, to cool himself, he dove into a nearby pond and remained there with only mouth and nose to the surface.

But now in the Irish court there was a very cowardly steward who had for years been zealous to follow every battle with this dragon, so that if ever the beast were killed he might claim to have shared in the work. And this fool, hearing from afar the dragon thunder of Tristan’s combat, hastily mounted and came riding, saw the remaining rear of the mutilated horse, drew an optimistic conclusion, and, following the burned trail, suddenly, with a mighty shock, beheld the dead beast right before him. He drew back on the reins so hard that both he and his mount collapsed in a thrashing heap, then looked at the monster and fled. But he returned and presently, cautiously, guaranteed the situation, and with a mighty flashing, cutting, and stabbing of his trusty blade, made at the monstrous corpse, shouting meanwhile, as he lashed about, “Ma blunde Isot ma bele.” And in the end contriving to cut off the prodigious head, he sent to court for a wagon, and so transported his trophy to the king.

The queen, however, realizing that the claim could not be sound, proceeded with her daughter, intuitively, directly to the pond, where they found Tristan, nearly dead. They found the dragon’s tongue also and knew immediately what had happened; bore the knight secretly to their chambers, healed him, and when, before the nation, the steward proposed his arrant claim, the two cunning as well as beautiful Isolts released, to the astonishment of all, their knight — who, standing, simply required that the jaws of the trophy be opened, exhibited the missing tongue, and so won both the day and the girl — not for himself, but for his country and his king.^{Note 114}

The Bathtub Scene

The name Isolt has not been explained. However, as the mythological associations of the dragon attach to Morold, and the pig and horse respectively to Tristan and to Mark, so to Isolt the sun bird, the lion-bird of the Magna Mater.^{Note 115} In a passage of great charm Gottfried describes her as the falcon of the goddess.

So came the Queen Isolt, the glad Dawn; and by her hand led the Sun, the wonder of Ireland, the brilliant maid Isolt … shaped in her attire as if Love had formed her to be her own falcon. She was in her posture as erect and forthright as a sparrow hawk, as well preened as a parrot. Like a falcon on a bough she let rove her two eyes, which together sought their prey, neither gently nor yet too intently: so smoothly flying, silently and sweetly hunting, that there were there many eyes to whom her flashing mirrors were a wonder and field of delight.^{Note 116}

There can be no doubt: Gottfried knew what mythological figures he was using. He took care, however, to subordinate them to a playfully pretended rational concern for naturalism and factual truth, as Ovid had pretended in his Metamorphoses, a mythological work that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, though rejected from all ecclesiastical lists of approved “curriculum authors,”^{Note 117} nevertheless decisively influenced the whole narrative art of the secular tradition. And Gottfried played his game most aptly in his handling of the celebrated bathtub scene, which occurred in the period of Tristan’s convalescence, between the dragon fight and his victory in court.

The scene is pivotal. First, on the mythological plane, it reveals the terrible aspect of the goddess — the goddess of the lion and the double ax — through whom the sacrifice of our divine wild boar was all but consummated in a household version of the watery abyss. Secondly, on the psychological plane, the scene represents a total reversal of the sentiments of the two Isolts in relation to their guest, and as such was used by Wagner as a base for the motivation of his heroine’s wrath in his opening act. And finally, on the purely narrative plane, certain separated themes of the First and Second Voyages to Ireland are here dramatically brought together, and the whole emotional coloration of the romance thereby transformed.

The scene occurs shortly after the two Isolts, mother and maid, have drawn their potential savior from the pond in which he had sought to quench the fire of the dragon poison — all but dead, once again, of a dragon wound. The duplication is obvious. The women once again are ministering in their apartments to one whose name is known to them only in reverse; but this time he has come clad not as a minstrel, but in armor, with sword and shield. And it was while he was soaking in a bathtub — in water once again, as in the pond in which he had been found; or the waters, so to say, to which he had given himself, alone with his harp, in the little boat without oars; or again, the waters, finally, of the Land below Waves, Avalon, the Isle beyond the Sunset Sky, of which Ireland is the symbol — that the younger Isolt, in the other room, examining his armor, chanced to draw his sword — and lo! her falcon eyes pounced on the notch in the blade.

Appalled, she put the weapon down, turned to the reliquary casket, took the fragment out, brought it to the notch in the blade; and they matched. Then it dawned on her that the names, Tantris-Tristan, also matched, as a negative to a positive. Stunned, then mortified, then seething at the deception by one to whom she had given love, she picked up the mighty blade in her suddenly strengthened hand and strode to the man now helpless in her tub. One thinks of Clytemnestra and her returned spouse, Agamemnon; one thinks today, retroactively, of Charlotte Corday’s murder of Marat.

Figure 45. Isolt attacks Tristan in the bathtub (tempera on parchment, France, c. 1320–1340)

“So it is Tristan!” she said as she approached him with his own sword “So that is who you are!”

He answered from his disadvantage, “No, my lady! Tantris!” “Yes,” she said, “Tantris and Tristan, and the two are now one dead man.”

But the elder Isolt, in the nick of time, entered and stopped her hand. The hero pleaded mercy from his tub, and the maid Brangaene, who had also appeared, pleaded reason — noticing, namely, that if the steward were to be proved false, this champion, notch or no notch, would have to be kept alive. And so it was that, after a moment of hesitation, with the sword meanwhile getting heavier in Isolt’s hand, the danger passed and the Graces Three withdrew, to allow the necessary man to ascend, renamed, reborn as it were, from the ladies’ bath.

The Love Drink

Therewith, the poison of hate, which had entered the minds of the two Isolts from the metal in Morold’s skull, and the poison of the queen’s magic, which from the blade of the same slain Morold had entered Tristan’s wound, were brought dramatically together, to be transformed, in time, into the no less lethal daemonic aspect of amor. The innocent love in Isolt’s heart became eclipsed by a violent surge of hate and, as Wagner recognized in his reconstruction, the psychological sense of the entire first portion of the legend is epitomized in this moment of peripety. On the broad deck of his opera stage, Isolde, swelling with mixed emotion, sings to his Tristan, who throughout the voyage has been avoiding her neighborhood aboard, “Blood-guilt hangs between us!”

“That,” sings Wagner’s tenor, “was absolved.”

“Not between us!” she answers: and to the mixed strains of the leitmotifs of Spiritual Excitement, Longing, Sailors’ Calls, and Death, Isolde rehearses the episodes of his cure at her hands, her recognition of the notch, and her failure there to slay him.

“Yet what I with hand and lips there had vowed, I swore to hold to, in secret.”

“What, woman, had you vowed?” “Revenge!” she responds. “For Morold!”

Figure 46. Tristan Hands the Goblet to Isolt

Figure 46 is another of the Chertsey Abbey tiles. It shows, in its twelfth-century style, the young Tristan passing the goblet to Isolt, which the two suppose to be of wine. For there had been throughout the voyage, in these earlier versions, no such strained situation of longing with avoidance as Wagner contrived for his first act. Tristan frequently, in fact, to give comfort to Isolt in the anxiety and loneliness of her sea voyage to King Mark, had visited her cabin — where, as Gottfried tells,

every time he came and found her in tears, he took her very gently and sweetly in his arms, but only in such a way as might a liege man his lady. What he loyally wished was only to be of solace in her pain. However, no sooner would his arm go round than the lovely girl would think of her uncle’s death and say: “Now stop, sir, move back! Take your arm away! You are just too tiresome! Why do you keep touching me?”

“Am I doing something wrong, my lady?” “Indeed you are — for I hate you.”

“But why, my dear lady?” “Because you killed my uncle.” “I have made amends for all that.”

“Even so, I find you intolerable; for if it weren’t for you I should be without worry or care.…^{Note 118}

And it was on one of those intimate occasions that the potion was drunk by accident: but it really is remarkable how difficult many modern scholars have found the interpretation of that drink. Some, as already remarked, have argued that in Gottfried’s view the potion was the cause of the love. Professor A. T. Hatto, for example, in the introduction to his translation, declares in so many words that the poet “adheres closely to the tradition of his story, namely that it was a philtre which made his lovers fall in love.”^{Note 119} Professor August Closs, on the other hand, states that “Gottfried’s love-potion does not cause love, but symbolizes it,”^{Note 120} which surely is better. However, if there is one point completely clear in Gottfried’s own version of his tale, it is that the potion cannot possibly have marked the birth of love, either as symbol or as cause, since love had already been animating this perfectly matched young couple for some time.

One would have thought that even if our scholars had themselves been deprived, through diligence in philology, of experiencing in the days of their youth the mystery of love’s transformation, through the magic of a catalyst, from its personal-aesthetic to its compulsive-daemonic mode, they might at least have recalled, from the scene of Dante’s Inferno, the words of the fire-ridden, Hell-bound Francesca da Rimini: that famous, oft-quoted passage describing the circumstance of her fall into what Dante and his God of Love condemned as carnal sin. Tristan also was in that Dantean circle of Hell, whirled along, with the other sorry lovers — Dido, Semiramis, Cleopatra, Paris, Helen, and the rest — on the tide of a blazing wind.

Figure 47. Paolo and Francesca (print, England, 1886)

As Paolo and Francesca passed, embracing still, in torment, Dante, like a sociologist, asked what had brought them to that pass.

“At the time of the sweet sighs,” he asked, “by what and how did love concede to you to know of your dubious desires?”

The question clearly anticipates our modern theory of the unconscious by a good six hundred years. And the suffering Francesca generously replied:

“For pleasure, we two, one day, were reading of Lancelot, how love constrained him. We were alone and without any suspicion. Many times that reading urged our eyes, and took the color from our faces, but only one point was it that overcame us. When we read of the longed-for smile being kissed by such a lover, this one, who never shall be divided from me, kissed my mouth all trembling. Galehaut^* was the book, and he who wrote it: that day we read no more.”^{Note 121}

^* Galehaut (also Galehos) is the name of a king opposed to Arthur in the prose text know as the Vulgate Lancelot, composed some time between 1215 and 1230 (see The Paraclete), which became the most popular redaction of the romance in the late Middle Ages. In some manuscripts the title “Galehaut” is given to the first large section of this version of the romance.

Professor Gottfried Weber of Cologne, from whose formidable Tristan study we have already quoted, interprets the potion, it seems to me, correctly when he reads it as “a metaphor for that psychological moment in love when two people of strongly sensual disposition lose control of the human faculty of free choice, under the influence of an already vehement, unsuspected, inward approach to each other, and the tides of passion that have been stored in the unconscious flood together, submerging them, who have lost all power of will.” Further, he goes on to state: “This psychological process — and here is the important point — is elevated by the poet into an objective experience of an existential absolute and described as an independent force, more than human, opening out to the transcendent.”^{Note 122}

In the magic potion’s effect [he continues], the poet has thus given aesthetic form to the idea that Tristan and Isolt have come under the spell of an extra-mundane power, which is at work in them irresistibly, with no possibility of a restraining act of will; and it is this commanding power, within them and above them, that is pressing them together, to the physical act of love’s union. Thus in the magic potion the belief and experience of the poet is formulated of the lack of freedom of the will and the compulsive force of circumstance. The lovers are incapable of resisting each other. Moreover, they do not want to; but rather, on the contrary, they affirm their lack of freedom — which is a bondage, furthermore, that is not confined to the sphere of the phenomenology of their love and urge to love’s physical union, but takes hold of them in the most comprehensive sense, forging for them a common destiny unto death.… And this magical force has been experienced and rendered by the poet as divine: the very being and operation of the goddess Minne … [which is to say, in opposition to the orthodox ecclesiastical imagery and dogma of supernatural grace], in the way of an analogia antithetica, even analogia antithetica daemoniaca.… For the pain of love [which, in its extreme state, is of Hell] follows directly and inevitably both from the irresistible zeal of its experience as sensual delight, and from the further fact that its selfmoving overpowering consummation mounts to the spiritual state of a willing affirmation.^{Note 123}

In Gottfried’s poem the transformation from, innocence to realization does not occur instantaneously, as in Wagner’s dramatic scene — or as in the case of Paolo and Francesca. The sense of the need now to be near each other, a zeal, a new sense of pain, and the dawn of a realization that this, indeed, was love, required a day or two, until, when the couple again were together and Tristan asked innocently — but not quite — why the fair Isolt now looked distressed, she answered: “ ‘Everything I think about torments me; everything I look upon gives pain. The sky, the sea, they oppress me. My body and life are a burden.’ She leaned, resting her elbow against him — and that was the beginning for them both.”^{Note 124} He took her, to comfort her, gently in his arms and asked again what ailed her.

“Lameir!” she answered; of which word he then strove to learn the sense. “‘L ’ameir, the bitterness?’ he asked. ‘La meir, the sea?’”

“‘No, my lord, no!’ she replied. ‘Neither of those: not the air, not the sea, but l’ameir.’”

And so he came to the heart of the word: l’ameir, l’amour — to which he answered: “‘Oh my lovely one, so it is, also, with me: l’ameir and you: you are my torment. Isolt dear, queen of my heart, you alone and my love for you have undone and robbed me of my wits. I have gone so completely astray that I shall never again be restored. There is in this entire world nothing dear to my heart but you.’

“Isolt replied: ‘Sire, and so you are to me.’

“And since the lovers,” we read, “now realized that there was between them just one mind, one heart, and one will, their pain began at the same time to subside and to come to light. Each regarded and addressed the other more boldly: the man, the maid; the maid, the man: the sense of a difference between them was gone. He kissed her and she kissed him, lovingly, sweetly; and that, for Love’s cure, was a delightful start.”^{Note 125}

Love’s Consummation

Brangaene was the only one aboard who knew that a love potion was in question; for Isolt’s mother had confided the flask to her in secret, to be served as wine to Isolt and King Mark: “a love drink,” Gottfried explains, “so cunningly produced and devised, with such power to its purpose and aim, that with whomsoever anyone shared the drink, that one, willy-nilly, he would love above all things, and she, him: there would be given them one death and one life, one sorrow and one joy.”^{Note 126}

Brangaene, the good woman, had been out of the cabin when the philter had been served, and, returning, nearly fainted when she perceived what her negligence had brought to pass. She flung the flask into the sea and kept the secret to herself, but now, recognizing the philter’s work, begged the tortured couple to tell her why they were sighing, moping, fretting, and complaining all the time.

“Poor me and poor Isolt!” Tristan responded. “What has happened to us, I do not know. In the briefest time, we have both gone mad with a singular affliction. We are expiring of love, but can find neither time nor place for it, since you, night and day, are so diligently watchful. And I can tell you, surely, if we die — there will be no one to blame but you.” Isolt concurred, and “May God have pity,” Brangaene said, “that the Devil has made mock of us this way! I now see, there is nothing for it, but I must henceforth for your two sakes work to my own sorrow and your shame.”^{Note 127}

She withdrew, swearing secrecy. “And that night,” the poet tells,

when the lovely maid Isolt lay suffering, yearning for her darling, there came stealing into her cabin, softly, her lover together with her doctor, Tristan with the goddess Love. The doctor held her patient, Tristan, by his hand, and there found the other patient, Isolt; she took hold of the two, directly, and gave to him, her, to her, him, to become each other’s cure. For what else could have healed those two of the pain they shared when separated, but the joining of them together and entangling of their senses? Love, the Entangler, wove those two hearts together with the weaving of her sweetness, so skillfully and with such marvelous force that the bond, in all their days, was never undone.^{Note 128}

Eternal Death

The problem then arose, however, of presenting Mark with a virgin on the wedding night, and the answer found was to beg Brangaene to serve — who, on hearing the petition, turned red and pale a number of times, “for, after all,” says Gottfried, “it was an odd request.” Yet finally, uncomfortably, she consented; for she felt strongly that the guilt here was her own.

“My dear lady,” she said to Isolt, “your mother, my lady the blessed Queen, entrusted you to my care. I should have protected you on this voyage, but instead, you are now in sorrow and pain, all because of my carelessness.”

In amazement Isolt asked how that could be.

“The other day,” Brangaene replied, “I threw a flask overboard.”

“So you did.”

“That flask and what it contained will be the death of you both,” she said, and she told the two the whole tale.

Said Tristan: “So then, God’s will be done, whether death it be or life! For that drink has sweetly poisoned me. W hat the death of which you tell is to be, I do not know; but this death suits me well. And if delightful Isolt is to go on being my death this way, then I shall gladly court an eternal death.”^{Note 129}

And that, in sum, is the love-death theme, as understood by Gottfried, as by all true lovers in the Gothic Middle Ages. Dante, we have seen, consigned Paolo and Francesca to Hell; and for Gottfried too the meaning of the term “eternal death” was “Hell.” That was the love-death sought by Heloise, but feared by Abelard — who, though from Brittany and a singer of love, was, finally, no Tristan. Three orders of “death” are referred to in this passage:

1. That of which Brangaene spoke, physical death.
2. That to which Tristan referred in his celebration of “this” death, namely his ecstasy in Isolt — which, as Professor Weber has shown, is the main mystical theme developed throughout the poem in antithetic analogy to the Christian idea of love. The crystalline bed in the grotto is, of course, the ultimate symbol of this analogy. The reference, unmistakably, is to the sacrament of the altar in its dual sense of love and death: Christ’s love-death, celebrated in the eloquent passage of Philippians 2:6–8, which is enacted mystically every day — indeed every hour of the day — on the altars innumerable of Christ’s Church.

The passionate Saint Bernard, in the very period of Heloise and Abelard, in a celebrated series of sermons on the biblical Song of Songs, had coined for ecclesiastical use a rich vocabulary of erotic terms based on the allegory of the soul — or, alternately, Holy Mother Church — as the bride of Christ, responding with yearning in their marriage bed to the provocation of God’s zeal; and Gottfried threaded echoes of the celibate saint’s seraphic rapture through many verses of his own inspired work:

“Love speaks throughout this nuptial song,” the monk had declared in celebration of his text; “and if any one of those who read it desires to attain to a knowledge of it, let him love.…

“O love precipitate, passionate, impetuous, who suffer yourself to think of nothing but yourself, who loathe all else, who despise everything not yourself, content with yourself alone! You throw order into confusion, you disregard custom, you know no restraint. Everything that seems a matter of propriety, a matter of prudence or judgment, you triumph over in your own name and bring into subjection.”^{Note 130}

Now the Song of Songs, which the saint was here interpreting, is not, as traditionally claimed, a poem composed, tenth century b.c., by the king of a thousand wives and concubines, but a composite of erotic pieces, mostly incomplete, all later than the fifth century b.c. The book had required reinterpretation before being read into the canon. However, its attribution to Solomon had made it seem desirable, and the problem was solved by treating it “as a picture of love existing between Yahweh and the ideal Israel.”^{Note 131} But the Christian monk now was reading it in still another sense, with the bride of the Lord played by an institution of which the alleged author never heard. And in the name of this second bride he cried to his congregation, as if in a paroxysm of mad, illicit pain:

“By desire, not by reason, am I impelled.…

“A sense of modesty protests, it is true; love, however, conquers.…

“I am not unmindful of the fact that the king’s honor loveth judgment. But intense love does not wait upon judgment. It is not restrained by counsel; it is not checked by a sense of false modesty; it is not subject to reason. I ask, I implore, I entreat with all my heart: Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth.”^{Note 132}

In India there was likewise a doctrine of divine love flourishing in Bernard’s time (See The Word Behind Words here and here.); however its metaphors of rapture were not confined to sermons but displayed in temple sculpture and translated into rites of the kind of our Gnostic friends, the Phibionites. Jayadeva’s “Song of the Cowherd,” celebrating in voluptuous detail the love — illicit and divine — of the man-god Kṛṣṇa for the earthly matron Radha, goes considerably beyond Bernard in its intimacies of the bed;^{Note 133} yet its spiritual aim is the same: to offer a base for meditation whereby the heart may be elevated from the earthly to the supernatural sphere, through what in psychological jargon might be termed “a supernormal image.”^{Note 134}

Figure 48. Oystercatcher Responding to a “Supernormal Stimulus”

Figure 48, from N. Tinbergen’s Study of Instinct, shows a potentially saintly bird, an oystercatcher, spiritually responding to a giant egg, a “supernormal sign stimulus,” immensely greater than her own; her own being the little thing in the foreground. The middle-sized egg is of a herring gull. States Professor Tinbergen: “If presented with an egg of normal oystercatcher size, one of herring gull’s size, and one of double the (linear) size of a herring gull’s egg, the majority of choices fall upon the largest egg.”^{Note 135} And Saint Bernard now continues the lesson of this bird:

Thus, therefore, even in this body of ours the joy of the Bridegroom’s presence is frequently felt, but not the fullness of it; for although His visitation gladdens the heart, the alternation of His absence makes it sad. And this the beloved must of necessity endure until she has once laid down the burden of the body of the flesh, when she too will fly aloft, borne on the wings of her desires, freely making her way through the realms of contemplation and with unimpeded mind following her Beloved whithersoever He goeth.^{Note 136}

Gottfried is recalling that spiritual bird back to earth, the oyster-catcher to her nest, in accord, prophetically, with the gospel of Nietzsche, “to remain true to this earth.” And he thereby reverses the yonder-worldling’s prospect: not abandoning the little for the big, but realizing in the little the rapture of the big. For there is no such thing as a love that is either purely spiritual or merely sensual. Man is composed of body and spirit (if we still may use such terms) and is thus an essential mystery in himself; and the deepest heart of this mystery (in Gottfried’s view) is the very point touched and wakened by — and in — the mystery of love, the sacramental purity of which has nothing whatsoever to do with a suspension or suppression of the sensuous and the senses, but includes and even rests upon the physical realization.

Gottfried’s version of the purity of love comprises thus two factors: a) uniqueness, singularity, unconditioned loyalty in the love experience, and b) a boundless readiness for the suffering of this love — which brings us, finally, to the ultimate and third order of “death” in his reading of the love-death:

3. An “eternal death” in Hell.

But this, actually, is only an affirmation absolute of the “purity” of love against the supernormal terrors of the Christian myth; or even in willing affirmation of the fire as merely the bitter aspect of the rapture, bitter-sweet, that would there endure forever. How seriously did Heloise fear that fire? She believed in it, as did Abelard. How seriously did Paolo and Francesca suffer in the flames in which Dante thought he heard them wailing? There is a “memorable fancy” of the poet Blake that may clear this matter up. “As I was walking,” he wrote, “among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius, which to Angels look like torment and insanity, I collected some of their Proverbs.…” And among the number of these was the following: “Dip him in the river who loves water.”^{Note 137}

For Dante, when he paused to interrogate Francesca, was at the start of a long dream-journey that was to bring him in its last canto to the auditorium of a lecture by Saint Bernard on the population of Heaven, together with a vision of the same, whereas for Gottfried and his Tristan, as for Heloise (though not for Abelard), not the big egg but the little was the real, and the suffering of the crucified, symbolized as of God and so eternal, is the rapture of love on this earth where all things die.

However again, as Gottfried tells, though love is the very being of life, it is everywhere brutalized.

I pity Love [he writes] with all my heart; for though almost all today hold and cleave to her, no one concedes to her her due. We all want our pleasure of her, and to consort with her. But no! Love is not what we, with our deceptions, are now making of her for each other. We are going at things the wrong way. We sow black henbane, then expect to reap lilies and roses. But, believe me, that cannot be.…

It is really true, what they say, “Love is harried and hounded to the ends of the earth.” All that we possess of her is the word, the name alone remains to us; and that, too, we have so bandied about, misused and vulgarized, that the poor thing is ashamed of her name, disgusted with the very sound of it. She is cringing and flinching everywhere at her own existence. Misused and dishonored, she sneaks begging from house to house, lugging shamefully a sack all of patches, crammed with her swag and booty, which she denies to her own mouth, and offers for sale in the streets. Alas! It is we who have created that market. We traffic with her in this amazing way and claim then to be innocent. Love, the queen of all hearts, the free-born, the one and only, is put up for public sale! What a shameful tribute is this that our mastery has required of her! ^{Note 138}

And so incipit tragoedia!

For not love alone, but honor as well, was the motivating interest of both Tristan and Isolt: not love alone, but their reputations in the fashionable courtly world, and commitments there in the field of history and of day. And by striving to pay honor its due while at the same time honoring love, they sacrificed both, and so came finally to that death of which Brangaene had told.

“We cultivate love,” states Gottfried, “with embittered minds, with lies, and with deceit, and then expect from her joy of body and heart: but instead, she bears only pain, corruption, evil fruit, and blight — as her soil was sown.”^{Note 139}

The Marriage of King Mark

The brideship arrived in Cornwall and was greeted there with royal splendor. The eyes of all at the wedding were addressed to the sunlike, miserable bride. When bedtime arrived, the king retired, the women swiftly exchanged garments, Tristan led Brangaene to her altar of sacrifice, and Isolt put out the lights.

“I do not know,” Gottfried confesses, “how Brangaene felt when the affair began; she bore it so discreetly it went without a sound. Whatever her partner required of her, she rendered and fulfilled with brass and with gold, as fully as he wished.” Isolt, however, was anxious. “Lord God,” she prayed, “guard and help me, lest my cousin prove unfaithful. I fear that if she carries on too long with this bed-game, or too ardently, she may come to like it and lie there until dawn, when we shall all become the laugh and talk of the world.”

But no! Brangaene was loyal and true. When she had fully paid her due, she quietly quit the bed, and Isolt came and sat there in her stead. The king called for wine; for it was the custom of those days that when a man had lain with a virgin the two should drink together; and this, in fact, was the moment for which the potion had been prepared. Tristan arrived with a light and the wine; the King drank, so too the Queen. The two lay down, the light was quenched again, and Isolt then paid her own dues, no less nobly than the maid Brangaene, while the King remarked no difference, whether of brass or of gold, in the coin. One woman, to him, was as another.^{Note 140} And that was the tragic fault through which Mark too became entangled, along with the ensnared couple, in the toils of the magic net of the goddess Love.

Indifferent to the individuality of his queen, he had become infatuated with her beauty, unmarried heart to heart. “And alas!” the poet exclaims. “How many Marks and Isolts one sees today — if one may speak of such a thing — who are as blind or even blinder in their hearts and eyes! Desire is the force that, throughout the world and through all time, has deluded the clearest eyes. For whatever may be said of blindness, no blindness blinds as dangerously and frighteningly as desire and appetite. Deny it though we may, the old saying remains true: ‘Of beauty, beware!’”^{Note 141}

Figure 49. Mark spies on Tristan and Isolt; Marjadoc hides at the foot of the tree (ink on parchment, England, late thirteenth century)

And so it came to pass that when the actual personality of the female he had contracted for began to be talked about in court and his chief steward, Marjadoc (who had had that dream of the wild boar), reported rumors and gossip, the noble and good King Mark, altogether committed to his social role and the associated courtly concepts of honor and a royal marriage, became deeply troubled, concerned, suspicious, and finally a very pattern of the enemy, lo gilos. — (“O God! O God! This dawn, how quickly it comes!”) — He began to set guards and traps, which, however, only sharpened the wits and occasions of the lovers.

And that [comments Gottfried] is the point against surveillance. Surveillance, so long as it is practiced, nourishes and produces nothing but briars and thorns. That is the maddening aggravation that ruins honor and reputation and has filched from many a woman the honor she would gladly have held on to, had she only been properly treated. But when she is badly treated, honor and her spirits equally deteriorate, so that surveillance actually reverses their condition. And after all, no matter what one may do, surveillance is wasted on a woman. For no man can keep watch on a wicked one, whereas a good one should not be watched: she will keep watch on herself, as they say. And if, for all that, a man sets watch upon her, what he will earn will be her hate. He will be the ruin of his wife, in both her life and her reputation; and most likely to such a degree that she will never recover sufficiently not to have clinging to her, ever after, something of what her hedge of thorns will have borne.… Accordingly, the wise man, or whoever would grant to woman her honor, should turn no other watch upon her virtue, in lieu of her own good will, beyond counsel, instruction, tenderness, and kindness. With these he shall be her guard — and, moreover, let him know this for the truth: he will never keep better guard.^{Note 142}

In the case of poor Mark, as things went on, his eyes, on watch, finally told him all. His traps had all been outwitted; his spies and informers too. But his own eyes, ever watchful, read the truth many times in the meetings of the lovers’ eyes, and the pain to his heart was great. In this blinding sorrow, tortured and at wits’ end, he sent for the two before the court and, exposing his heart completely before all, sent them off. “My nephew Tristan, my wife Isolt,” he said to them, “you two are too dear to me (loth as I am to admit it) for me to have you put to death, or to do you any other hurt. However, since I now can see it in you both, that, despite my every wish, you love and have always loved each other more than me, then go, remain together as you will: have no further fear of me. Since your love is so great, I shall not, from this time forth, trouble or oppress you in any of your affairs. Take each other by the hand and depart from this court and land. For if I am to be wronged by you, I prefer not to see or hear of it.… For a king to collaborate knowingly in such a love intrigue would be degrading. So go, both of you, in God’s care! Go love and live as you please! Our fellowship is ended, here and now.”^{Note 143}

Of Honor and Love

There followed the “forest years” in the lovers’ cave, la fossiure a la gent amant: the sanctuary of that crystalline bed where the truth beyond the laws of this world is consummated in eternity. In time, however, time caught up on them. For on a day when there was heard a sound of horns and hounds floating distant through the wilderness (we have come to the end of Wagner’s Act II; with, however, a notable difference), the lovers suspected the echos to be of a party from the palace, and that night, lest they should be chanced upon, slept apart on the crystalline bed with Tristan’s sword between — which was a violation of love’s law, in the name of honor, that marked the beginning of their end. For the hounds and horns were indeed of Mark. He was riding with his chief huntsman, pursuing a strange beast, a white hart with a mane like that of a horse, strong and big, its antlers but recently shed, and with the mere pedicles in their place. The quarry had disappeared. Mark and his huntsman were astray. And by singular chance they reached the lovers’ cave, its secure bronze door, and, above, those tiny windows, through one of which the king peered and with a shock recognized his nephew and wife asleep, wide apart, with Tristan’s sword between.

Figure 50. Mark discovers Tristan and Isolt sleeping with a sword between them (ink on vellum, Germany, thirteenth century)

“Merciful Lord of Hosts, what can this mean?” he thought; and his doubts again assailed him: “Are they guilty?” “Assuredly, yes!” “Are they guilty?” “Clearly, no!” And as he gazed down on the loveliness of his lost wife’s radiant face, over which love’s deception had spread her best cosmetic, golden denial, Love the Reconciler crept into his heart. Her beauty had never seemed to him more desirable. A beam fell through the window on her features; the one sunlight and the other were an ecstasy to see. To protect her from the rays, Mark gathered leaves, flowers, and grass, and with these tenderly blocked the window, then, committing her to God, turned away in tears.

Convinced and reconciled, he presently recalled the pair to court, where, however, he soon discovered them in bed together, and Tristan had to flee in fear to Brittany, alone. “To whatever regions of the earth you may fare,” Isolt said to him when they parted, “take care of yourself: you are my body. If I, your body, am orphaned of you, I shall have perished. And I shall watchfully take care of myself, your body, for your sake, not mine. For you and your life — well I know — reside in me: we are one body and one life.”^{Note 144}

The Second Isolt

In Brittany, as the world knows, Tristan married a second Isolt, Isolt of the White Hands, for the love, purely and merely, of her name; and at this point Gottfried’s text breaks off. There is some question as to why. In the year 1212 there took place in Strassburg the first trial of heretics in that city, and that is approximately the year of our poet’s death. Was he condemned? If so, there would almost surely have been some record of the execution. Did he take his own life, in despair of his world or in fear? Unlikely. He may have broken, however, psychologically, of the tensions, evident throughout his work, between the values of his two worlds, of his goddess Love and the Christian God.^{Note 145} In any case, for the terminal episodes of the legend we must turn to Gottfried’s source, Thomas of Britain.

Briefly: In his homeland, Brittany, assisting a knight named (significantly) Dwarf Tristan to recover his abducted wife, Tristan was wounded by a poisoned spear thrust through his loins: and with that we are taken back to Part I; for, as in a symphony, all the early motives are to return now, transfigured and transposed. The wielder of the poisoned spear, Estult l’Orgillus of Castle Fer, was a dragon-knight with seven heads so to say, for he had six brothers. All seven were slain; but so, too, was Dwarf Tristan. And the great Tristan could be healed by none save Queen Isolt the Fair, of King Mark — to fetch whom, the brother of Tristan’s second Isolt set sail. And it was agreed that if Isolt responded to the call he would return with a white sail; if not, a black.

The Love-Death

Figure 51. The Voyage of Isolt to Tristan

Figure 51 is of Isolt on her way. But, as in the classical legend of the return of Theseus to Athens after his battle with the Minotaur, there was a mix-up in the matter of the sails. The second Isolt was jealous, for, though married, she was still a virgin. She loved no one in the world but Tristan, whose heart was with Isolt of Ireland; while Mark had the body of that Isolt and delight of her as he liked, whose heart, however, was with Tristan. As the poet Thomas observes: “Between these four is a love strange indeed.”^{Note 146}

Tristan’s wife, no wife, was sitting at his bedside, gazing out to sea.

“My love,” she said, “I see your ship. God grant it brings you comfort of heart.”

“My love,” he answered, “are you sure it is ours? Now tell me, what is the sail?”

“The sail,” she answered, “is black.”

He turned to the wall and sighed. “Isolt, my love, God save us.” Three times he repeated, “Isolt, my love,” and died.

The ship came to port and the sail was white.

And so there came to pass that death of both, of which Brangaene had foretold: Tristan of love; Isolt of pity. She stretched her body to his, laid her mouth to his, yielded her spirit, and expired. Which is the death that Wagner rendered as the love-death — with an Oriental turn, however, borrowed from Schopenhauer, of the transcendence of duality in extinction.

In the opera the entire theme of the marriage with the second Isolt is omitted, the mortal wound being delivered at the end of the second act by a traitorous friend at court, Melot, who in the older texts was but a malicious dwarf, tale-bearer to the King. With Mark, Melot rushes in upon the lovers, Tristan is wounded, and the act ends.

Act III, then, is in Brittany, without the second Isolt. Tristan’s loyal servant, Kurvenal, has transported him for safety to his own land, his birthplace, where Isolde’s arrival is expected; and the wounded lover, stirring from deep coma, sings of his longing for the kingdom of night, from which only his yearning to behold once again his sun, Isolde, has returned him to this world. The pipe of Tristan’s shepherd sounds the “Sad Shepherd’s Tune,” Oed’ und leer das Meer, “Waste and empty the sea”; but suddenly changes to the “Happy Shepherd’s Tune”: for the ship has appeared, its flag joyous at the masthead. There is no switching here of sails. “She is aboard!” sings out Kurvenal. “She is waving!” “She lives!” cries Tristan. “Life holds me still in its web!” And when his guardian, Kurvenal, has left the stage to welcome the queen, the lover, deliriously rising from his couch, shouting, tears of! his bandages to greet life, and, when Isolde enters, dies in her embrace — as Wagner himself had wished to die in Mathilde’s arms.

Forthwith Melot, Mark, and Brangaene appear, the maid having told the King at last the secret of the potion. He has come to forgive — too late. There emerge from the orchestra the strains of Isolde’s “Death for Love Motive,” and the sweetly tortured final aria begins, of love’s transfiguration, parting, and exultation in the sounding sea of an eternal night.