Chapter 8
THE PARACLETE

I. The Son of the Widow

BOOK I: THE BLACK QUEEN OF ZAZAMANC

“Brave, and slowly wise: thus I hail my hero.” So the poet introduces Parzival.

Figure 70. GahmuretHis father, Gahmuret, brave too, had been a younger son of royalty, who, though invited to share his brother’s kingdom, had preferred to prove himself on his own, and so, adventuring, came to Baghdad, where he served the caliph so valiantly that his reputation extended soon from Persia to Morocco. He left, however, to sail to Zazamanc, where the people are as black as night.

The black ladies leaned from their windows to watch the company descend from his ship into their port, Patelamunt: ten pack horses before, with twenty squires behind; also pages, cooks, and cooks’ helpers; twelve noble cavaliers, a number of them Saracens; eight caparisoned steeds with a ninth bearing the knight’s jousting saddle and a young shield-bearer striding saucily at its side; mounted trumpeters and a drummer that swung and struck his instrument over his head, flute-players and fiddlers three; after all of which came the great knight himself with his ship’s captain riding beside him.

Gahmuret was greeted with delight by the black Queen Belakane; for her city was under siege, with a black army of Moors at the west, and eastward a white, of Christian knights. Her crown was an immense transparent ruby that encased her head like a bubble; through it her dark face could be seen. Courteously she received him. They looked upon each other and their two hearts were unlocked. And when he asked the reason for the siege, with sighs and tears she confessed she had been hesitant in love. Her chivalrous lover, Isenhart, driven to desperation, a princely youth, black like herself, had sought renown by riding without armor into battles and these armies were of his friends, come to avenge his death. Her whole kingdom was in mourning.

“I will serve you, my lady,” said Gahmuret.

“Sir,” she replied, “you have my trust.”

And he overthrew, next day, the champions of both sides.

The rescued queen led him in triumph to her castle, where she removed his armor with her own black hands and bestowed on him her kingdom and herself. More dear to him than his life was then that black and heathen wife; not more, however, than the feats of arms from which she restrained him. As king, therefore, he languished, and one night, at last, sailed away; so that in grief she bore their son (Feirefiz Angevin, she named him ), in whom God had wrought a miracle: he was piebald, white and black, like a magpie’s plumage.

And his mother, when she saw him, kissed him over and over and over again, on the white spots.

BOOK II: THE WHITE QUEEN OF WALES

The maiden queen Herzeloyde of Wales proclaimed at Kanvoleis a tournament: herself and two countries, the prize. And as the kings and knights, arriving, set up tents and pavilions on the meadow, she with her ladies sat watching from the windows.

“What a pavilion that one is!” an impudent young page exclaimed. “Your country and crown aren’t half its worth.”

It was of the rich king of Zazamanc: its transport had required thirty horses.

The unofficial warming-up games commenced next morning gradually when the kings and knights from many lands, galloping up and down the great field, began maneuvering in companies, colliding in single charges, splintering spears, clashing swords, and running each other down. The old father of King Arthur was out there, and Gawain, still a mere lad; Gawain’s father, King Lot of Norway; also Rivalin, who had yet to sire Tristan, and the mighty Morholt of Ireland, who was yet to be Tristan’s foe.

The king of Zazamanc, resting in his tent, lured by the gradually increasing tumult, rose, became arrayed, put on his head­gear (which, like the ruby crown of his queen, was an immense transparent diamond, fitting over his whole head), and mounting his caparisoned charger, rode out onto the field, where he unhorsed one man of might after another. Many spears became snow on that field, saddles flew, men in iron clothing ran about among the legs of horses, shattered shields and banners lay all about. And when darkness closed it was evident to all, from the general exhaustion, there could be no tournament the next day.

In his pavilion that night the infinitely rich king of Zazamanc was entertaining the kings, princes, and others who had fallen to him, when the noble Lady Herzeloyde arrived with joy in her eyes to embrace him; for the talk of all was that he had gained the field. He had just that evening learned, however, of the deaths, during his years of absence, of his brother and his mother, so that when the queen came into his tent he was in tears. Moreover, nostalgia for his distant wife had been coming upon him all that day. Further, an embassy had just brought a letter from an earlier lady with claims on him, the Queen of France. So that when Herzeloyde also claimed him, he demurred.

“I have a wife, my lady, who is more dear to me than myself.”

“You must renounce that Moor,” she answered; “renounce your heathendom and love me — by our own religious laws.”

He put forward the claim of the Queen of France; after that, of his new sorrow; next, the cancellation of the tournament: at which last, however, appeal was made to a judge, who declared that, having donned his helm, he had officially competed and must now accept the award. She capitulated to his last demand: never, like his former wife, to prevent him from entering tournaments. And when that was done, she took his hand.

“And so now,” she said, “you belong to me and must yield yourself to my charge.”

She led him by a secret way to a place where he dismissed his sorrow and she her maidenhood. And he then did an admirable thing: he released those he had overthrown; to all poor knights gave Arabian gold; to the traveling minstrels, presents; and to the kings who were there, his gems. In delight and full of praise for that king all rode away to their homes.

However, the sword blade of Herzeloyde’s joy soon snapped; for when Gahmuret learned that his former lord, the caliph, was being overridden by Babylon, he sailed to serve him and six months later the message returned of his death.

Queen Herzeloyde gave birth to a son so large she hardly survived. Bon fils, cher fils, beau fils, she called him, as she pressed into his tiny mouth the little pink buds of her breasts. “I am his mother and his wife,” she thought; for she felt that she again held Gahmuret in her arms. And she mused: “The supreme Queen gave her breasts to Jesus, Who for our sake suffered death on the Cross, and thus to His faith in us remained loyal. But the soul of anyone who underestimates His wrath will be in trouble on Judgment Day. This fable I know to be true.”

BOOK III: THE GREAT FOOL

Overwhelmed with grief, the widowed queen withdrew from her castle and world to a solitary waste, charging her people never to mention a word about chivalry to her son. He was thus raised ignorant of his heritage and even of his name. All he ever heard himself called was fils: bon fils, cher fils, beau fils. Yet with his own little hands he made himself a tiny bow with which to shoot at birds. The sweetness of their song transfixed his heart, and when he saw them dead, he wept.

His mother told him of God. “ He is brighter than day, yet assumed the form of man. Pray to Him when in trouble; He is faithful and gives help. There is another, however, the Lord of Hell, dark he is and faithless. Turn your mind away from him, and from doubt.”

Figure 71. Parzival spies three knightsIn early youth strong and beautiful, the boy was one day rambling on a mountainside when he heard galloping hoofs and thought the noise must be of devils. Three knights then flashed into view, and, deciding that they were angels, he fell to his knees to pray. A fourth appeared with bells ringing from his stirrups and right arm, who pulled to a halt and asked the stupefied youth if he had seen two knights ride past with an abducted maid.

“O God of help!” the youth prayed to the knight. “Give me help!”

Gently the prince answered: “I am not God. We are four knights.”

“What is a knight?” the lad asked; and he was told: told, also, of King Arthur, who made knights. And when they had shown him what a sword was and a lance, and passed on, he ran in rapture to his mother, who, when told what he had seen, collapsed.
Figure 72. Parzival and HerzeloydeBelieving that if she made him look the fool, he might be forced to return, she procured the poorest horse she could find and clothed him in a clown’s rig of hempen shirt and breeches in one piece, coming halfway down his legs, a monk’s hood, and clumsy, untanned boots; then gave him the following advice:

1. to cross streams only where most shallow
2. to greet people with the words, “God protect you!”
3. to ask advice of those with gray hair, and
4. to strive to win a good lady’s ring and then to kiss and embrace her

She also told of a knight, Lahelin, who had taken from her two countries. “I will avenge that,” her son said as he mounted, with a quiver of darts on his back. She kissed him, stumbled after as he rode, and when he had disappeared, fell and was dead.

Simplicity’s child came to a brook that a rooster could have crossed, rode along to a very shallow place, and forded to the meadow beyond, where a colorful tent was to be seen. Within, a young wife lay asleep with her coverlet to her hips (God himself had fashioned that body), and on her soft white hand there was a ring, to seize which the youth pounced upon the bed. During the lively tussle that ensued he acquired, besides the ring, a forced kiss and a brooch; then made a meal of her provisions, forced another kiss, and rode off.

“Aha!” the knight, her husband, exclaimed when he returned.

He was the brother of the knight Lahelin, Duke Orilus de Lalander, and in a paroxism of mortification, smashed her saddle, tore up her clothes, bade her ride behind him in shreds, and departed to find the youth by whom his honor had been undone — who, meanwhile, had come to a forest cliff, beneath which a lady sat with a dead knight on her knees, tearing her hair in grief. Simplicity approached.

“What is your name?” she asked.

“Bon fils, cher fils, beau fils," he replied.

She was Sigune, his mother’s sister’s child, and she recognized the litany. “Your name,” she said, “is Parzival. Its meaning is ‘right through the middle’; for a false love cut its furrow through the middle of your mother’s heart.” Then she told him his parents’ story and of how the knight on her lap, Prince Schianatulander, had been slain defending his heritage against Lähelin and Orilus.

“I shall avenge these things,” he told her. But she, fearing for his life should he come to Arthur’s court, sent him off in the wrong direction, along a broad, much-traveled road, where he greeted whomever he passed, “God protect you!” and when night came, turned to the large dwelling of an avaricious fisherman, who refused shelter until the brooch was offered, then became so hospitable that the next morning he brought his guest all the way to the towers of Arthur’s court.

No Curvenal had trained this youth as Tristan had been trained. Trotting forward on his stumbling mount, he saw come galloping from the castle a knight in bright red armor with a goblet in his hand, who, when greeted, reined and called to him to tell the court, he would be waiting on the jousting field — with apologies to the queen for having splashed her gown with the wine. He was King Ither of Kukumerlant ("Cucumberland"), who had seized the cup in token of his claim to a portion of Arthur’s kingdom.

At the castle gate were sentries and a crowd; but God had been in good spirits when fashioning Parzival: his beauty and the kindness of a young page got him through to the Round Table, where Arthur himself heard his brash demand to be knighted on the spot and given the red suit of armor he had seen on the knight outside — whose message he briefly told. The court’s rude seneschal, Keie, shouted to let him get the suit himself; but a lady, Cunneware by name, of whom it had been prophesied that she would never laugh in her life until she saw the flower of knighthood, laughed loudly as Parzival passed, going out, for which Keie beat her with his staff. And when the court fool Antanor cried that Keie would be sorry for that beating, he too tasted of that stick.

Parzival trotted to the field, challenged Ither for his suit, and the knight, indignantly reversing his bright red lance, struck him with its butt so hard that both he and his pony went sprawling among the flowers of that April day — who got quickly to his feet, however, and replied with a swift dart through the grill of the Red Knight’s vizor to his eye, and he fell from his charger, dead. The powerful stallion whinnied loud. And the lout was rolling the knight about to remove his bright red armor, when the queen’s page who had shown him to the court came running, helped with the suit and attired him over his mother’s clothes, shoes and all (which he refused to remove), took away the darts (forbidden to knighthood), taught him briefly the use of shield and spear, and fastened upon him the knight’s sword. Parzival then sprang onto the charger. “Return the goblet to the king,” he said as the horse began to move, “and tell that beaten maid I will avenge her pain.”

Figure 73. Parzival rides forth

He rode the great Castilian at a gallop all day because he had not been taught how to check it, and that evening came to the towers of the aged Prince Gurnemanz de Graharz (Wagner’s Gurnemanz, with whose words the opera starts, who is here the lord of a castle of his own, not, as in Wagner’s work, a member of the company of the Grail). Reposing with his young falcon beneath a large tree outside his castle, the old knight rose to greet the red horseman, whose steed halted before him. “My mother told me,” said the rider, “to ask advice from people whose hair is gray.” To which the elder replied courteously, “If you have come for advice, young man, you must pledge to me your friendship.” And he cast from his hand his hawk, which, wearing a little golden bell, flew as messenger to the castle, where the gates opened, a company appeared, and the visitor was made welcome. But when his armor was removed, his fool’s costume came to view, and all were embarrassed and amazed. Yet his form was noble. Gurnemanz took him to his heart and for a season coached him in knighthood.

“You talk,” said the old knight, “like a little child. Why not be quiet now about your mother and take thought of something else?” He gave the youth certain rules of conduct: never to lose the sense of shame; to be compassionate to the needy; neither to squander wealth nor to hoard it; not to ask too many questions; to reply to questions frankly; to be manly and of good cheer; not to kill a foe begging mercy; to be loyal in love, and to remember that a husband and wife are one: they blossom from a single seed.

Figure 74. Gurnemanz and his daughterOld Gurnemanz, who had lost three sons, hoped now to marry Parzival to his daughter. The youth had a feeling, however, that before experiencing a wife’s arms he should prove himself in the field. In the poet’s words: “He sensed in noble striving a lofty aim for both this life and beyond — and that is still no lie.”^{Note 1} Compare in Goethe’s Faust the famous line: “Whoever strives with unremitting effort, we can redeem”;^{Note 2} also, Goethe’s words to Eckermann on the Godhead effective in the living. When Parzival rode away, therefore, with his mentor’s sad permission, the old man, riding beside him a short way, felt in his heart that he was giving to knighthood a fourth son, his fourth great loss.

BOOK IV: CONDWIRAMURS

Parzival, now a knight well schooled, let his stallion take him through the forest as it would, too melancholy to care; and riding into wild, high, wooded mountains came, before day was done, upon a roaring mountain, stream that tumbled downward over cliffs to the city of Pelrapeire, where it was spanned by a wickerwork drawbridge, flimsy and without a rope, under which its waters coursed to the sea. Across the bridge some sixty armed knights were to be seen, who as Parzival approached warned him back. His stallion balked, so he dismounted, and as he led the beast across the rocking span, the knights withdrew and the city gates closed. A pretty maid leaning from a window asked if the knight were a friend or a foe, and when a portal was opened he found within the city walls the whole population armed. But they were frail, haggard with hunger, and there were everywhere towers, turrets, and armed keeps.

Admitted to the castle, relieved of his arms, and clothed in a mantle of sable with a fresh wild furry smell, he was conducted to the maiden queen, the beautiful Condwiramurs.
Figure 75. Condwiramurs He sat beside her for some time in silence, in obedience, he thought, to Gurnemanz’s law, and the young queen wondered; but then deciding that, as hostess, she might start the talk herself, she asked whence he had come. He told of Gurnemanz and then learned from this queenly maiden that she was his niece. She was more radiant, like a rose both red and white, than the two Isolts together.

When her guest that night had retired and already slept, she came quietly to his bedside, not for such love as changes maids into women, but for aid and a friend’s advice. Yet she wore the raiment of battle: a white silk nightgown, over which she had tossed a samite robe; and since all in the castle were asleep, she could talk now as she would.

She knelt beside his bed. He woke and discovered her. “Lady, are you mocking me?” he said. “One kneels that way only to God.”

She replied, “If you will promise on your honor, to be temperate and not to wrestle with me, I shall lie then by your side.”

Neither she nor he, states the poet, had any notion of joining in love. Parzival lacked all knowledge of the art, and she, desperate and ashamed, had come in misery of her life. In tears, Condwiramurs, the orphan queen, told him of her plight. A certain powerful king, Clamide by name, with an army led by his seneschal Kingrun, had taken every castle of her land, right up to that rickety bridge. He had slain the elder son of Gurnemanz and now wanted her for his wife. “But I am ready,” she said, “to kill myself before surrendering my maidenhood and body to Clamide. You have seen the height of my palace. I would cast myself into the moat.”

And there we have Wolfram’s second point, the second term of an opposition right through the middle of which his hero and heroine were to pass: on one hand, the magic of the senses, sheer passion (the side of Isolt and Tristan), and on the other hand, the sacramentalized marriage of convenience, society, and custom, without love (Isolt and King Mark).

Said Parzival to the young queen weeping in bed beside him: “Lady, is there no way to console you?”

“Yes, my lord,” she answered, “if I could be freed from the power of this king and his seneschal Kingrun.”

“My lady, let Kingrun be a Frenchman, a Briton, or what-not, my hand here will defend you as far as my life can serve.”

And that night ending, its day arrived, and with day the army of Kingrun, showing many a banner and Kingrun himself in the lead.

Riding forth to his first battle, Parzival galloped out the castle gate and against the charging seneschal with such force that the girths of both saddles broke. Their swords flashed, and presently Kingrun, whose fame in the world was great, lay on his back surrendering, with Parzival’s knee on his chest. The fresh young knight, recalling his mentor’s rules, bade him go submit to Gurnemanz.

“Gurnemanz,” said the man, “would kill me: I slew his son.”

“Then surrender here to the queen.”

“They would hack me to bits in that town.”

“Go to Britain, then, to King Arthur’s court, and submit there to the maiden who was beaten for my sake.”

So the battle ended, and Condwiramurs, when her knight returned, embraced him before all. Her citizens paid him homage, and she declared him to be her ami, her lord and theirs.

^*Note the way in which an old mythic formula has here been applied to the new ideal:
1. desolation, the Waste Land, as a function of the social order typified in Clamide;
2. a combat of the old king and the new, legitimized sensuality (Clamide) against noble personal love (Parzival);
3. the marriage of a goddess-queen and god-king, here two integral individuals; and finally
4. the renewal of life.“I shall never be the wife,” she said, “of any man on earth but the one I have just embraced.” Then all looked to the sea, and behold! there were merchantmen arriving, ships bearing food and nothing but food, good meats and wine.*

After a jubilant feast and festival, the two were asked would they share one bed, and they answered together, yes. However, he lay with her so decently that not many a lady nowadays would have been satisfied with such a night. He left the young queen a maiden. Yet she thought of herself as his wife, and next day, in token of her love, did up her hair in the way of a matron; conferring on him, her beloved, all her castles and her land: this virgin bride. Two days and two nights more they were happy in this way — although now and then there came to him the idea which his mother had advised of embraces. Gurnemanz too had explained to him that husband and wife are one. And so — if I may tell you so — they enlaced legs and arms and he found the closeness sweet; and that old custom, ever new, was theirs thereafter: in which they were glad and nowise sad.^{Note 3}

“The ineffable, the mystical and transcendent quality of this love,” comments Gottfried Weber on this critical passage, “is epitomized in the ‘purity’ of the first three nights, in the full sense of the Middle High German term, kiusche. The morning following the first night, the ‘virgin bride’ (magetbaeriu brut) felt herself to be a ‘woman’ (wip: a ‘wife’); for her soul had already absorbed an absolutely new, perfectly fulfilling, traumatic impression, experienced as completely unique: the virginality of her heart had been bestowed upon that other as her gift, he was now her spouse vor gote, ‘before God.’ … And it was only after this consummation of the marriage purely in soul and spirit that the bond, already recognized as confirmed, was substantiated through extension to the physical estate.”^{Note 4}

In time, however, Clamide himself arrived, having heard report of his seneschal’s defeat at the hands (it was said) of the Red Knight (King Ither of Kukumerlant, whose armor Parzival wore). He appeared with a second army, and all the machines of war. Greek fire, catapults, battering rams, and portable sheds were brought to bear, until, learning from his captives of the marriage of the maid he had come to win, Clamide sent to the castle a challenge to single combat, and the Red Knight again broke from the city at a gallop. The king charged to meet him and they fought till their steeds collapsed, then went at it with their swords. Presently Clamide weakened. Parzival tore his helm off, so that the blood gushed from his nose and eyes, and was about to do him dead when the once-great king begged mercy and was sent — like his seneschal — to Arthur’s court, to be subject to the Lady Cunneware. And there was amazement there indeed when those two appeared; for that beaten king had been richer even than Arthur in wealth of lands.

But at Pelrapeire, after fifteen months of love and jubilation, a time came for departure. One morning Parzival said courteously (as many there saw and heard), “If you will permit, my lady, I should like, with your allowance, to see how things stand now with my mother: I know not whether ill or well.”

He was so dear to her, the young queen could not deny him, and he rode forth from their castle and town, again alone.

BOOK V: THE CASTLE OF THE GRAIL

And again riding without reins, but now through autumn foliage, not spring, he arrived that evening at a lake where he saw two fishermen
Figure 76. The Fisher King floating at anchor in a boat, one so richly clad he might have been king of the world. From his bonnet peacock feathers plumed. The Red Knight called to know where lodging for the night might be obtained, and the fisherman richly clad — he was deeply sad of mien — replied that he knew of no habitation but one within thirty miles. “There, at the head of the cliff,” he called back, “turn right, ascend the hill, and when you come to the moat, call to let down the bridge. But have a care! The roads here lead astray; no one knows where. If you arrive, I shall be your host.”

The perilous wilderness again: the “dark wood” of Dante’s opening lines!

Without difficulty, at an easy trot, Parzival rode past the cliff, turned right, and ascended the wooded hill to the moat before a castle of many turrets, where a squire from within caught sight of him and cried to know what he wanted.

“The fisherman sent me,” Parzival called, and the drawbridge descended. He crossed and passed into a spacious court, where the grass was unworn by jousting; for that castle was in sorrow: no banners flew. When his armor was removed and they beheld his beautiful young face, still boyish, beardless, they were joyful. A cloak of finest silk was cast around him, which, he was told, was of the queen, whom he was presently to see: Repanse de Schoye (Repense de Joie). He was conducted kindly to an immense hall with a full hundred chandeliers and as many couches, well apart, a carpet before each, and on each of which there sat four knights. In three great marble fireplaces fires blazed of aromatic aloewood, and the lord of castle, carried in on a stretcher, was set before the central of these: who bade Parzival sit beside him. And the sense of it all was of sorrow.

Through a door a squire then came rushing, bearing a lance; and by this rite the sorrow was increased. From its point gushed blood that ran down its length to the bearer’s hand and on into his sleeve. The squire circled the hall and when he reached the door again, ran out.

A steel door opened at the end of the great room and two beautiful maidens entered, clothed in gowns of earth-brown wool, drawn tight by girdles at the waist. Wreaths of flowers crowned their long flowing fair hair, and each bore a lighted candle in a golden candlestick. They were followed by another two, each with a little ivory stool, which, when they bowed, all four, before the host, was set before him on the floor. The four stood back, and from the door there entered twice four again, clad, however, in gowns more green than grass, long, full, and gathered at the waist by long, narrow girdles, richly wrought. The first four of these bore candles, and the second four a precious tabletop carved of hyacinth-tawny translucent garnet, which they carefully set down on the two little ivory stools; after which the eight in green stepped back to the four in brown, and the number standing now was twelve.

Next appeared six: two bearing on cloths two very sharp white silver knives, which the candles of the other four made to gleam. Clothed in gowns of two manners of silk, one dark, the other shot with gold, these, approaching, courteously bowed. The two knives were placed upon the table, and all six stood back before the twelve. When see! from that door there entered six again in the same parti-colored gowns, bearing in tall glass vessels lights of costliest balsam; and they were followed by the queen, Repanse de Schoye: radiant as a dawn breaking, clothed in Arabian silk, and she bore on a deep green cloth of gold-threaded silk the Joy of Paradise, both root and branch.

That was the object called the Grail. It was beyond all earthly joy, and such that its bearer was required to preserve her purity, cultivate virtue, and spurn falsity [in contrast to that doctrine of the Church whereby the personal morals of its clergy — who, moreover, were exclusively male — were declared to bear no relation to the operation of the sacraments they dispensed]. The queen, together with her six maidens bearing lights, advanced and courteously bowed as she placed the Grail before the host — while Parzival, watching as she did so, thought only, “The robe I have on is hers.” The seven drew back to the other eighteen and the queen, then standing in the center, had twelve at either hand.

A hundred tables, now carried in, were set before the couches. White cloths were spread upon them. The host washed his hands from a vessel and Parzival from the same. Four cars carried costly golden vessels to every knight in the hall, and a hundred squires, bearing white napkins, began gathering from before the Grail a feast which they served to the knights.

“And I have been told,” states Wolfram, “and I pass it on to you (but on your responsibility, not mine, so that if I speak false, we do so together), that whatever one reached one’s hand to take, it was found there before the Grail: food warm and cold, foods new and old, both cultivated and wild.… For the Grail was beatitude’s own fruit and provided such abundance of the world’s sweetness that its delights were very like what we are told of the kingdom of Heaven.… And for whatever drink one held one’s cup, that was the drink that flowed by the power of the Grail: white wine, mulberry, or red.”

Figure 77. Don't ask too many questions

And Parzival marked all this, the richness and great wonder, but thought, remembering Gurnemanz: “He counseled me, in sincerity and truth, not to ask too many questions.”

There appeared a squire, bearing a sword in a jeweled sheath, its hilt a ruby, its blade a source of wonder. Presenting this to Parzival, the melancholy host declared that before God had maimed him, he had worn this sword in battle. And still the guest never spoke.

“For that I pity him,” declares Wolfram; “and I pity too his sweet host, whom divine displeasure does not spare, when a mere question would have set him free.”

The queen and twenty-four maidens advanced, bowed courteously to both Parzival and his host, took up the Grail, and proceeded to their door, through which, before it closed behind them, he saw on a couch in a large room, where there was also a great fireplace, the most beautiful old man his eyes had ever seen: he was grayer even than mist. “Your bed,” said his host politely, “I think, is ready,” and the company dispersed.

Figure 78. Leaving the castleThe youth was shown to his room. Four fair maidens saw him to bed with wine and fruits of the sort that grow in Paradise. And he slept long, but with threatening, terrible dreams, and when he woke the morning was half gone. His armor and two swords were on the carpet, and he had to don them alone. His steed was tethered outside, at the foot of the main exit stair, with his shield and spear set up nearby; but not a soul did he see about. Nor did he hear anywhere a sound. He mounted. The great gate was open. Through it ran the tracks of many horses. And as he crossed the bridge, a squire, unseen, pulled the draw so hard that it nearly struck his steed as it sprang clear. Then somebody’s voice was heard: “Ride on, you goose, and bear the hatred of the sun. If you had only moved your jaws and asked the question of your host! You’ve lost for yourself great praise!”

The knight called back for an explanation, but the castle again was all silence, and, turning, he followed the other tracks, which, however, gradually dispersed and were lost.…

Before him, in a linden tree, sat a maiden with a dead knight, embalmed, propped against her: again Sigune, his mother’s sister’s child. When she saw him, “This wilderness,” she warned, “is dangerous; turn back!” Then she asked whence he had come, and he told her of the castle. “It is a mile or so from here,” he said.

“Do not lie to me,” she answered. “For thirty miles round about, no hand has touched here either tree or stone, save for a single rich castle that many seek but none has found. For he who seeks will not find it. The name is Munsalvaesche (French, mon salvage: "my salvation"), and its kingdom, Terre de Salvaesche ("Land of Salvation"). It was bequeathed by the aged Titurel to his son, King Frimutel, who was killed in a joust for love. One of his sons, who can neither ride nor walk nor lie nor stand, is its present lord, Anfortas. Another son, Trevrizent, has retired as a hermit from the world.”

“I beheld great marvels there,” declared Parzival; and it was then that she recognized his voice. “I am the same,” she told him, “who revealed to you your name.”

“But your long brown wavy hair,” he asked, “what has become of it?” For she was bald. “And let us bury that dead man,” he suggested, “whose company you keep.”

For response, she only wept. Then, noticing his sword, she disclosed its danger. On the second blow it would break. However, if dipped in the waters of a certain spring beneath a rock it would come together and be stronger than before. “It requires a magic spell,” she said, “which perhaps you failed to learn. Did you ask the question?”

“No,” he answered.

“Oh, alas,” she cried, “that I must look upon you!” And she stared with loathing. “You should have felt pity for your host and have asked concerning his pain.”

“Dear cousin, show me a friendlier mien,” Parzival protested. “For whatever wrong I have done, I shall make amendment.”

“You are cursed,” she cried. “At Munsalvaesche you forfeited both your honor and your fame. I will say no more.”

She turned away. And he too turned away. He wheeled his charger and, riding off, came remarkably soon upon two fresh tracks: one of a charger well shod, the other of an unshod mount — which latter he soon overtook. It was a beast in miserable case, with a lady on its back clad in shreds, who, when she turned and saw him, gave a start.

“I have seen you before,” she said. “And may God give you more honor and joy than, from your treatment of me, you deserve!”

She was the lady of the tent. No part of her gown was untorn, yet in her purity she was clothed. And when Parzival’s stallion, bending its head to her mare, neighed, the knight riding far ahead turned back and on seeing a knight beside his dame, immediately couched his spear for the charge. He was elegantly armed. On his shield was a dragon, as though alive; another was on his helm; and there were many more, in gold, rare stones, and rubies, on his gambeson; more still on the trappings of his steed. The two collided, and the lady, watching, wrung her hands, wishing neither any harm. The dragons, one by one, received blows and serious wounds. The two champions fought with swords from their mounts, but finally, seizing each other, tumbled to the ground with Parzival on top; and the other, forced to surrender, was compelled next to forgive his all-but-naked wife and to report, then, to Arthur’s court and the Lady Cunneware.

Afraid of what her husband now would do to her, the lady held apart; but at last, “Lady,” said he, “since I am beaten for your sake — well, come here: you shall be kissed.” She leaped down and ran to him, kissing as commanded, careless of the blood about his face. On a sacred relic, which they presently discovered in an empty hermitage, Parzival swore that in the episode of the tent the lady had been all innocence, and he no man, but a fool. Orilus thereupon was reconciled, and the couple rode off to Arthur’s court in joy. “For, as all the world knows,” comments the author, “eyes that weep have a mouth that is sweet. Great love is born of joy and sorrow, both.”

BOOK VI: THE LOATHLY DAMSEL

“Would you not like to hear,” the poet asks, “how Arthur with his court set forth from Karidoel, his castle and land?” He set forth to add to his Round Table company the champion (of whom no one knew the name) responsible for those three impressive arrivals submitting to Cunneware: Kingrun, Clamide, and now, with his lovely wife Jeschute (French, je chute: “I fall”) the Lady Cunneware’s own brother, proud and fierce Orilus.

The company had been out some eight days with its tents, banners, and pavilions, when a party of the king’s falconers, hawking of an evening, lost their best bird. It disappeared into the woods. But the night being chill and the forest unfamiliar, it flew to the neighborhood of a campfire, which chanced to be of Parzival, who was also in that wood. Next morning the world lay covered with the winter’s first light snow; and when the Red Knight mounted, to ride on, the falcon followed.

Figure 79. Parzival staring at the drops of blood on the snowBefore them, with a great roar of wings and cackling, a thousand wild geese went up, and the hawk, darting, struck at one so fiercely that its blood fell on the snow in three large drops — bright red on purest white — the sight of which brought Parzival to a stop. And he was sitting on his mount, in recollection of his wife’s complexion (the bright red of her cheeks and chin on the pure white of her skin), when a squire of the Lady Cunneware, riding with a message to her brother, spied him in the distance, like a statue on his steed, and galloped back to camp, setting up a din.

“Fie! You cowards! Wake up! The Round Table is disgraced! There is a knight here trampling your tent ropes!”

The whole camp became a-clatter, and a young knight, Sir Segramors, dashed into Arthur’s tent, where the king lay sweetly sleeping with his queen, snatched away their sable coverlet, and cried at them to be the first to go — to which, laughing, they consented. And he rode at the unknown knight still lost in absorbed arrest — whose steed, however, to meet the charge, wheeled of itself, and when its rider’s view of his idol was broken, his knightly honor was saved; for he lowered his spear in such a way that the oncoming Sir Segramors soon learned what it meant to fly. Without a word or sign, the stranger knight then returned to his contemplation of the snow.

Sir Keie came next, and the Lady Cunneware was avenged; for he ended wedged between a rock and his shattered saddle, with a broken arm and leg, and his horse beside him, dead, while the knight, again without word or sign, wheeled back to his dream.

Third to come was the courteous knight, Sir Gawain, with neither spur, sword, shield, nor lance. “What if it be love that holds that man enthralled,” he thought, “as, at times, it has held me!” Remarking the focus of the knight’s gaze, he flung a yellow scarf across the red drops; and when Parzival murmured to the vanished presence, “Who has taken you from me?” and more loudly, “But what has become of my lance?” Gawain courteously answered, “You just broke it in a joust, my lord.” He mollified skillfully the other’s irritation at the interruption, told his name, offered his service, and in peace led the knight to Arthur’s camp, where the two were greeted by a joyous crowd, from which the Lady Cunneware emerged to welcome her champion with a kiss.

The precious guest, brought to Gawain’s pavilion, was relieved there of his armor and clothed in a mantle of silk, provided by Cunneware. It was fastened with an emerald at the neck, and at the waist with a girdle of rare stones; so that he looked like an angel come to flower on this earth when Arthur and his knights arrived.

“You have brought me pain as well as joy,” said the king; “yet more honor than I have ever received from any man before.” And he ordered spread on a flowery field a great circular cloth of Orient silk, large enough for every knight to be seated by his lady, and there, when all had made the guest welcome, they awaited an adventure: “For,” as the poet tells, “it was a firm custom of the king that none should eat with him on a day when adventure failed to visit his court.” And it was then that she appeared of whom we have now to speak, whose tidings brought grief to many.

Figure 80. CundrieOn a mule the maiden rode, as tall as a Castilian steed, yellow-red, with nostrils slit and sides terribly branded. The rich bridle was excellently wrought. She was Cundrie [Wagner’s Kundry], the sorceress, eloquent in many tongues, Latin, Arabic, and French. She wore a cape more blue than lapis lazuli, tailored in the French style, with a fine new hat from London hanging down her back, over which there fell and swung a switch of long black hair, as coarse as the bristles of a pig. She had a great nose, like a dog; two protruding boar’s tusks, and eyebrows braided to the ribbon of her hair, bear’s ears, a hairy face, and in her hand a whip with ruby grip, but fingernails like a lion’s claws and hands charming as a monkey’s. She rode directly to Arthur.

“O son of King Utpandragun,” she said to him in French, “what you have here done today has brought shame both to yourself and to many a Briton. The Round Table is destroyed: dishonor has been joined to it. Parzival here has the look of a knight. The Red Knight, you call him, after that noble one he slew; yet none could less resemble that noble knight than this.” She turned and rode directly to the Welshman. “Cursed be the beauty of your face! I am less a monster than you,” she said. “Parzival, speak up! Tell why, when the sorrowful Fisherman sat there, you did not relieve him of his sighs. May your tongue now become as empty as your heart is empty of right feeling. By Heaven you are condemned to Hell, as you will be by all the noble of this earth when people come to their senses. I think of your father, Gahmuret; of your mother, Herzeloyde: alas that I have had to learn now of the dishonor of their child!

“Your noble brother Feirefiz, son of the queen of Zazamanc, is black and white, yet in him the manhood of your father never has failed. He has won through chivalrous service the queen of the city of Thabronit, where all earthly desires are fulfilled; yet had the question been asked at Munsalvaesche, riches far beyond his would here and now have been yours.”

She broke into great tears, wrung her hands, and changing the subject, turned to the company. “Is there here no noble knight yearning to win both fame and noble love? I know four queens and four hundred maidens, all in the Castle of Wonders; and all adventure is wind compared to what might there be gained through noble love. The road is difficult, yet I shall be in that place this night.” And she rode abruptly off with the words: “O Munsalvaesche, sorrow’s home! To comfort you, alas, there now is none!”

But to Parzival of what help were now his brave heart, true breeding, and manhood? Yet there was one great virtue more in him, namely shame. He had not been guilty of real falsity. Shame brings honor. Shame is the crown of the soul and a sense of shame the highest virtue.

The first to begin to weep for the shamed knight in whose welcome this circle had been gathered was the lady Cunneware; many another lady followed. And they were all thus sitting in sorrow and tears when there came riding a knight, richly armed, holding a sword aloft, still sheathed, who cried, “Where is Arthur? Where Gawain?” He gave greeting to all save Gawain, whom he then challenged to a duel of hate. “He slew my lord while giving greeting,” he said; “and I here challenge him to meet me forty days from this day before the King of Ascalun [Avalon], in the city of Schanpfanzun.” When he gave his name he was recognized as a knight of the greatest wisdom, honor, and fame, Prince Kingrimursel; and when he rode away the entire astonished company rose and broke into a tumult of talk.

“I am resolved to enjoy no joy,” said Parzival to a dark heathen lady from Janfuse, who had approached to tell him of his brother. “The man whom Cundrie named may well be your brother,” she had told him. “He is a noble king, both black and white, worshiped as a god. I am the daughter of his mother’s sister, and perceive that you too have nobility and strength.”

“I am resolved to enjoy no joy until I shall have seen again the Grail,” Parzival declared. “If I am to suffer the scorn of the world for having obeyed a rule of courtesy, the counsel of Gurnemanz may perhaps not have been quite wise. A sharp judgment has here been passed upon me.”

The manly Gawain came and kissed him. “God give you good fortune in battle,” said Gawain. “And may God’s power help me to serve you one day as I would like!”

“Alas,” replied Parzival, “what is God? Were He great, He would not have heaped undeserved disgrace on us both. I was in His service, expecting His grace. But I now renounce Him and His service. If He hates me, I shall bear that. Good friend, when your own time comes for battle, let a woman be your shield. May a woman’s love be your guard! When I am to see you again I do not know. My good wishes go with you.”

The Lady Cunneware, sorrowing, led her knight to her pavilion, with her soft, lovely hands there to arm him. King Clamide, whom he had sent to her in service, had lately asked her to marry him, and for that she thanked her knight. He kissed her and rode away, clad in shining steel. And many more of Arthur’s knights that day rode away for the Castle of Wonders; but Gawain left for his war in Schanpfanzun.

II. First Intermezzo: The Restitution of Symbols

Parzival’s denunciation of God—or of what he took to be God: that Universal King, “up there,” reported to him by his mother — marks a deep break in the spiritual life not only of this Christian hero, as a necessary prelude to his healing of the Maimed King and assumption of the role without inheriting the wound, but also of the Gothic age itself and thereby Western man. In Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man the same break is represented in essentially the same terms; for in each of these Catholic biographies (eight centuries apart), the hero’s self-realization required a rejection first of his mother’s mythology of God, the authorized, contemporary ecclesiastical mask, and a confrontation then, directly, with the void wherein, as Nietzsche tells, the dragon “Thou Shalt” is to be slain:^{Note 5} the void of Parzival’s exit to the wilderness and of Stephen’s alienation from home, and his brooding, in Ulysses, on the mystery deeper than the sea.

In each of these works it was through “a struggle for the existential possibilities of faith” (to use a phrase coined by the philosopher Karl Jaspers)^{Note 6} that the redemptive symbols of the hero’s inheritance of myth were transformed and effectively integrated as guides for the unfolding of his life. The local, provincial Roman Catholic inflections of what are actually archetypal, universal mythic images of spiritual transformation are, in both works, opened outward, to combine with their non-Christian, pagan, primitive, and Oriental counterparts; and they become thereby transformed into nonsectarian, nonecclesiastical, psychologically (as opposed to theologically) significant symbols. I have already remarked the relevance of the Waste Land theme to the state of the European Church under its authorized yet inauthentic spiritual guides (wolves in shepherd’s clothing, as they were called by their contemporaries) in the period of Innocent III.^{Note 7} In Joyce’s work the hero, Stephen Dedalus, though grateful to his Jesuit masters — “intelligent and serious priests, athletic and highspirited prefects, who had taught him Christian doctrine and urged him to live a good life and, when he had fallen into grievous sin, had led him back to grace” — yet began to realize at an early age that “some of their judgments sounded a little childish in his ears,” and that “the chill and order of their life repelled him.”^{Note 8} “He was destined,” he mused, “to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world. The snares of the world were its ways of sin. He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard; and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be at some instant to come, falling, falling, but not yet fallen, still unfallen, but about to fall.”^{Note 9} And then, in the brothel scene of Ulysses, at the nadir of this young man’s plunge to the abyss, in the context of a Black Mass and at a stage of his adventure roughly comparable to Station 10 of the round of Figure 5, that vision of the Irish sea-god appeared, amalgamated with Śiva, which was to him the sign of a power deeper than the sea, in which all beings, all things, are consubstantial:^{Note 10} and he then was able to recognize in his sympathy for Bloom’s suffering a shared life, as of one power in two reflections, poles apart.^{Note 11}

Comparably, in Wolfram’s Castle of the Grail, where Celtic, Oriental, alchemical, and Christian features are combined in a communion ritual of unorthodox form and sense, the young hero’s spiritual test is to forget himself, his ego and its goals, and to participate with sympathy (caritas, karuṇā) in the anguish of another life.

However, Parzival’s mind on that occasion was on himself and his social reputation. The Round Table stands in Wolfram’s work for the social order of the period of which it was the summit and consummation. The young knight’s concern for his reputation as one worthy of that circle was his motive for holding his tongue when his own better nature was actually pressing him to speak; and in the light of his conscious notion of himself as a knight worthy of the name, just hailed as the greatest in the world, one can understand his shock and resentment at the sharp judgments of the Loathly Damsel and Sigune. However, those two were the messengers of a deeper sphere of values and possibilities than was yet known, or even sensed, by his socially conscious mind; they were of the sphere not of the Round Table but of the Castle of the Grail, which had not been a feature of the normal daylight world, visible to all, but dreamlike, visionary, mythic — and yet to the questing knight not an unsubstantial mirage. It had appeared to him as the first sign and challenge of a kingdom yet to be earned, beyond the sphere of the world’s flattery, proper to his own unfolding life: a kingdom hidden from the known world and screened from even himself by his fascination with the glamour of knighthood; a kingdom the vision of which had opened to him — significantly — only after his series of great victories, not as a retreat from failure but as his guerdon of fulfillment. His decision to act in that intelligible sphere, not according to the dictates of his nature but in terms of what people would think, broke the line of his integrity, and the result to his soul was first shown to him alone by the baldness of his cousin, but then to all the world, and to his utmost shock and shame, by that Loathly Damsel, richly arrayed, as ugly as a hog.

This figure of the Loathly Damsel is comparable, and perhaps related, to that Zoroastrian “Spirit of the Way” who meets the soul at death on the Chinvat Bridge to the Persian yonder world. Those of wicked life see her ugly; those of unsullied virtue, most fair.^{Note 12} The Loathly Damsel or Ugly Bride is a well-known figure, moreover, in Celtic fairytale and legend. We have met with one of her manifestations in the Irish folktale of the daughter of the King of the Land of Youth, who was cursed with the head of a pig (as here, a pig’s bristles and boar’s snout), but when boldly kissed became beautiful and bestowed on her savior the kingship of her timeless realm. The Kingdom of the Grail is such a land: to be achieved only by one capable of transcending the painted wall of space-time with its foul and fair, good and evil, true and false display of the names and forms of merely phenomenal pairs of opposites. Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400) provides an elegant example of the resolution of the Loathly Bride motif in his “Tale of the Wife of Bath”; John Gower (1325?–1408) another, in his “Tale of Florent.” There is also the fifteenth-century poem “The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnall,” as well as a mid-seventeenth-century ballad, “The Marriage of Sir Gawain.” The transformation of the fairy bride and the sovereignty that she bestows are, finally, of one’s own heart in fulfillment. The knightly rules of Gurnemanz had prepared Parzival well for his ambition in the world, but left his own unfolding interior life, his “intelligible character” (to use Schopenhauer’s term), not only unguided but unrecognized and completely out of account. And yet, when the old knight offered him his daughter, the youth discreetly departed, not because she was unlovely, unworthy of him, or unkind, but because an inward knowledge already told him that a life — a life with substance — has to be earned and fashioned from within, not received from the world as a gift, as the Maimed Grail King had received his castle and throne. And it was precisely this integrity of heart that marked Parzival for a destiny beyond the bounds and gifts of any settled social order, proved him eligible to approach the Grail, and brought him in the next adventure directly to his counterpart, a young woman resisting to the death the suit of a powerful, highly respected king who, though offering her the world, had not awakened love. In contrast to her cousin Liaze, the compliant daughter of Gurnemanz, submissive to her father’s will, Condwiramurs, like Parzival, stood for a new ideal, a new possibility in love and life: namely, of love (amor) as the sole motive for marriage and an indissoluble marriage as the sacrament of love — whereas in the normal manner of that period the sacrament was held as far as possible apart from the influence of amor, to be governed by the concerns only of security and reputation, politics and economics: while love, known only as eros, was to be sublimated as agapē, and if any such physical contact occurred as would not become either a monk or a nun, it was to be undertaken dutifully, as far as possible without pleasure, for God’s purpose of repopulating those vacant seats in Heaven which had been emptied when the wicked angels fell.

But now, it is rather curious and of considerable interest to remark that in Wagner’s operatic transformation of the Parzival there is no mention either of Condwiramurs or of the new Grail King as a married man, whereas in Wolfram’s work it was precisely because of this love-marriage and through his loyalty to its sacrament that Parzival was to achieve at last the healing of Anfortas and succeed to his throne without inheriting his wound. Furthermore, whereas in Wolfram’s Castle of the Grail all members of the procession except the startling bearer of the bleeding lance were female — young, stately, and lovely — those of Wagner’s chorus and procession are exclusively male. And still further, Gurnemanz, whose calls to the guardians of the Grail Forest sound the opening words of Wagner’s opera, serves there not as a teacher of the laws of chivalry but as a guide directly to the Grail Temple. He has no daughter to offer, nor respect for marriage, but is himself a member of the Temple order, and in the spirit rather of a monk than of a knight cries out at Parsifal, when the “Guileless Fool” has failed to ask the question: “Go find yourself a goose, you gander!” After which, the first curtain falls.

The leading theme of Wolfram’s writing is thus in Wagner’s work dismissed: the lesson of loyalty in true love, joined with heroism in action, as the human way to perfection, passing in freedom between the two impersonal compulsions, on one hand of mere nature, the daemonic species-lust (eros) of the body, and on the other of sheer spirit, the celestial charity (agapē) of saints. Accordingly, in Wagner’s work the Grail is represented, as in Tennyson’s sentimental Idylls of the King, as the holy chalice of the Last Supper; and when the vessel is uncovered before the suffering Amfortas a ray of light pours upon it from aloft, while a chorus of boys’ voices, floating down from high in the dome, echoes angelically the words of Christ in consecration of the sacrament of the altar:

Take and drink my blood,

In recollection of our love!

Take and eat my body,

And in doing so, think of me.

But there is absolutely nothing of this kind either in Wolfram or in Chrétien’s work.

Figure 81. Dionysian Scene; mid-5th century b.c.

Figure 82. The Fisher among Baccic Satyrs; c. 500 b.c.

Jessie Weston was the first to suggest, I believe, that the symbols of the Bleeding Lance borne by a squire and the Grail carried by a maiden must have been originally sexual emblems in some classical mystery rite.^{Note 13} The Greek vase painting of Figure 81, from the fifth century b.c., attests to the antiquity of such symbols in the context of initiation rites. The flaming staff and empty pitcher in the hands of the young girl are matched by the sprouting thyrsus, running with living sap, and the proffered wine cup of the god. And in Figure 82, from another vase of about the same date, showing the Fisher among Bacchic satyrs, we have a most striking confirmation of Miss Weston’s thesis. In the early Christian communities Christ became associated with the imagery of such rites: with the Singer and Good Shepherd Orpheus (Figures 3 and 11); the bread and wine of Dionysus, in which the god himself is consumed; the death and resurrection of Tammuz, Adonis, Attis, and Osiris; and the sexual imagery (in certain Gnostic sects) of the god in menstrual blood and semen, suffering in both the woman and the man, made whole through sexual union. The original reference of such pagan symbols, however, had not been forward to the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ (i.e. to Roman Catholic theology), but inward to the powers of nature operative in the universe and in man; and the function accordingly of the Hellenistic initiation rites had not been to refer the mind to Christ or even, finally, to Apollo, but to effect in the individual certain psychological transformations, adjustments, and illuminations. The lance that pierced Christ’s side is, by analogy, the boar that slew Adonis and, like the boar, a counterpart of the slain divinity himself, in whom opposites are transcended: death and birth, time and eternity, the slayer and the slain; also, male and female. Accordingly, the lance in Christ’s wound is comparable to the liṅgaṃ in the yonī (or as the Buddhists say, “the jewel in the lotus” ) , and the blood pouring from the wound (the yonī) is equally pouring from the lance (the liṅgaṃ), as the one life-substance of the god: for the two, though apparently separate, are the same. And that is the lesson of the bleeding lance symbolically borne about the great hall, with the blood running down the length of its shaft and over the bearer’s hand into his sleeve. It tells of the lance by which the Maimed Fisher was wounded: Anfortas on his bed of pain, Christ upon the Cross; announcing the sense of the mystery to come, of the Grail, the Perfection of Paradise, in which opposites are at one. For such signs to be effective in life, however, they must move the human heart to recognition and response in human terms, until which moment their mere presence, supernaturally interpreted, though perhaps of comfort and of promise, do not quite convince.

The Castle of the Grail, like the bowl of a baptismal font or the sanctuary of the winged serpent (Figure 18), is the place — the vas the temenos — of regeneration and, as such, a sanctuary in which sexual symbolism is both appropriate and inevitable. The great virtue of Wolfram lay in his translation of the magically interpreted symbols back into the language of human heterosexual experience, illustrating in his narrative, through many modes and on many levels, the influence of the sexes on each other as guiding, inspiriting, and illuminating forces — with the symbols there to inform us of the grades of realization achieved: as in the instance of Parzival. When crude and raw, seeking only his own good (kneeling in prayer to what he took to be a god of help, indifferent to his mother’s sorrow, violently taking what he wanted from the lady of the tent), he met an avaricious fisherman who pointed him to the castle of worldly fame; but when he had risked death for another and experienced with her the initiation of love (Condwiramurs: Old French, conduire-amours: “to conduct, to serve, to guide love”), the fisherman met was the Fisher King, pointing to the Castle of the Grail, for the attainment of which he was now eligible to strive. And in this dreamlike epic of earthly spiritual quest the heroes and heroines are many, though the destinies of all — as in Schopenhauer’s cosmic vision of the most miraculous harmonia praestabilita — interlace.

III. The Ladies’ Knight

BOOK VII: THE LITTLE LADY OBILOT

Parzival, now at large, alone, in the Waste Land of his own disoriented life, is to wander for a span of five years. He may be thought of as the Stephen Dedalus of this medieval work, an introverted, essentially solitary youth, deeply moved by a supreme sense of purpose; while Gawain, his elder by some sixteen years, can be compared in a way to Bloom, the extrovert, moving in a casual course from one adventure to the next, largely with ladies on his mind.

Gawain had been riding, we know not how many days, when he left the forest and beheld before him on a hillside many banners and a mighty host on the move in his direction. And where their road joined his, he drew aside to watch many costly helmets go past and multitudes of new white spears, flying pennons. Mules bearing armor followed, and numerous loaded wagons; tradesmen laden with exotic wares, and ladies in large number: no queens, these last, but soldier girls, some wearing their twelfth love-token. A rabble of young and old besides, footsore and bedraggled, of whom some would have been appropriately garnished with a rope around the neck.

Gawain asked a young squire whose multitude this was, and learned that its lord was King Poydiconjunz of Gors, the father of that rude Prince Meljacanz who had once abducted Arthur’s queen. Poydiconjunz and his son, with the powerful Duke Astor of Lanverunz, were here in the van of the still larger force of the king’s young nephew, King Meljanz of Liz (French, mal chance: "bad luck"), who, having been spumed by the daughter of his loyal vassal, Duke Lyppaut of Bearosche, was here coming to gain his suit by force. The duke had raised Meljanz from boyhood and was now in the deepest distress.

Gawain’s interest was greatly excited by this tale, and, not knowing that Parzival was in the army of Meljanz, he pressed on to the fortified town, before which a large defending army was encamped; and although one tent rope crowded the next, he and his equipage rode through, until he came below the castle walls. Above, from a window, leaned the difficult daughter, Obie, who had brought this all about, together with her mother and little sister, Obilot.

“Who is that fine young knight just arrived?” the mother asked.

“O Mother!” answered the daughter. “That is no knight. That is just a merchant!”

“But they have brought along his shields.”

“Many merchants have that custom,” said the girl.

The little sister, however, was admiring the knight. “Shame on you!” she scolded. “He is no merchant. He is handsome. I want him for my knight.”

Gawain’s squires had meanwhile settled him beneath a large linden tree, and presently the old Duke Lyppaut himself came out to request him to assist in the coming battle.

“I would do so, gladly,” said Gawain, “but must avoid battle, my lord, until an appointed time. For I am on the way to redeem my honor in combat, or else to die on the field.”

The old man, disheartened, rose and returned to his city gate, but within found his little Obilot.

“Father,” she said, “I think the knight will do it for me: I want to pledge him to my service.” And her father, with hope, having released her, out she ran to Sir Gawain, who, when she arrived, stood to receive the little guest.

“Sir,” she said, “God is my witness: you are the first man I have spoken to alone. My governess tells me that speech is the garment of the mind; I hope mine will show me to be modest and of good breeding. It is only the greatest distress that brings me to this. I hope you will let me tell you what it is.

“You are really I and I am you, though our names are different. I shall give you now my name, and that will make you both maid and man, so that I shall be speaking both to you and to myself. Sir, if you wish it, I will give you my love with all my heart; and if you have a manly heart, you will serve us both well for my reward alone.”

Gawain thought of how Parzival had said it was better to trust a woman than God, and gave the little lady his word.

“Into your hands I give my sword,” he said. “When I am challenged, it will be you who ride for me. Others will think they see me, but I shall know they see you.”

“That will not be too much for me to do,” she said. “I shall be your protection and shield.”

“Lady!” said he, and her little hands now lay clasped between his own. “Now I live at your command, and by the gift of your comfort and love.”

“Sir,” she said, “I must now leave you; for there is something more I must do. I must arrange my token. If you wear it, no knight will be greater in fame.” And with her playmate, the burgrave’s little daughter Clauditte, she ran off.

“What a gallant and good man!” the Duchess said when the story had been told. They made the child a new dress of golden silk, of which they took one sleeve and gave it to her playmate to carry to Gawain, who immediately, in delight, nailed it to one of his three shields.

Next day, like splitting thunder, with a sound of cracking spears, the great voice of battle rose, and Gawain rode to the attack, overthrowing swiftly two young lords. When, however, he heard the Duke Astor of Lanverunz shout the battle cry, “Nantes,” of the knights of the Round Table and saw on a shield among his men the coat of arms of Arthur’s son, he wheeled away and left that army, riding to attack the other, of King Meljanz, whom he unhorsed and bound to the service of Obilot. Parzival was elsewhere on the battlefield, clashing with the champions of Duke Lyppaut’s brother, while the duke himself was engaged with Poydiconjunz: and Gawain, returning to assist him, struck down the rude Meljacanz, whom Astor, however, rescued. So that the day of battle ended with King Meljanz a captive and the best deeds of the day having been performed in the name of Obilot.

Nor did Gawain fail to receive a kiss when they asked him to take his lady in his arms. He pressed the pretty child like a doll to his breast and, summoning King Meljanz, bound him to her service. Whereafter Lady Love, with her powerful art, old yet ever young, waked love anew — and as to how the wedding of that humbled king with Obilot’s elder sister went, ask those who there received gifts. Gawain himself departed. His little lady wept bitterly. Her mother could scarcely get her away from him, and he rode into the forest with a heavy heart.

BOOK VIII: THE WILLING QUEEN OF ASCALUN

“Now help me lament Gawain’s woes!” the poet writes. High ranges and many moors he crossed, then saw approaching, before a mighty castle, an army of some five hundred knights out hawking. On a tall Arabian steed from Spain, their king, Vergulaht of Ascalun of the race of the fairy hills, (Ascalun, Avalon: Gawain’s adventures generally are transformations of Celtic visits to the fairy hills.) shone like day in the midst of night. However, when he wheeled to pursue and rescue a falcon that with its prey had dropped into a pond, his Arabian stumbled and he was hurled into the wet — at which moment, up rode Gawain, to ask the way to Schanpfanzun.

“You see it before you,” said the king. “My sister is there, but if you will permit, I shall continue here a while longer. She will care for you till I come, and you will not be sorry if I tarry.”

The reader familiar with the fourteenth-century Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight will have guessed that we are approaching here a variant of its temptation scene,^{Note 14} at the opposite range of Gawain’s spectrum from his affair with tiny Obilot.

The castle was immense; the lady, beautiful. “Since my brother has so highly recommended you,” she said, “I shall kiss you if you like. But you must let me know what I am to do, according to your own rules.” She was standing there with all charm.

“Lady, your mouth,” Gawain said, “looks to me so kissable, I will have that kiss of greeting.”

The mouth was hot, plump, and red. Upon it Gawain affixed his own, and there took place a kiss that was not of the sort recommended for greeting guests. She and her well-born guest sat down. Sweet talk, quite frank, ensued, which advanced rapidly to a point where she could only repeat a refusal and he an unchanging plea.

“Sir,” she said, at last, “if you know what you are doing, you will realize that I have already gone far enough. Besides, I don’t even know who you are.”

“I am my aunt’s brother’s son,” he answered, “of a line high enough to match yours; so that if you’d like to grant that favor, don’t let our ancestors prevent you.”

The waiting maid who had been pouring their drink disappeared, and some other ladies who had been sitting there did not forget they had things elsewhere to attend to. The knight who had escorted Gawain also was out of the way. And he, then reflecting that even a badly wounded eagle may catch a big fat ostrich, reached his hand beneath her mantle, “and I think,” states the poet, “touched her hip” — which only increased his anguish. They were in such distress of love that something very nearly happened. Both the man and the maid were ready for it, when alas! their hearts’ sorrow arrived! A white-haired knight came to the door and, on perceiving Gawain, set up a loud halloo of war, “Alas and hey hey for my master,” he cried, “my master, whom you murdered! And now you would rape his daughter!”

People usually answer a call to arms, and so it happened now. Here a knight appeared; there, a merchant. They heard the rabble coming from the city.

“Lady,” said Gawain, “let me now know your advice! If I only had my sword!”

“Let us fly into that tower,” she said. “It’s the one next to my chamber.” And the two made for the door.

Gawain yanked from the wall the bar to lock the tower, and, wielding this, held the door while his lady ran upstairs. Above, she rushed about for a weapon of some sort, found a beautifully inlaid chessboard with its pieces, and brought these down to Gawain, who used that square board for a shield while the queen, behind him, flung the kings and rooks, and (as our story tells) they were heavy, so that those whom they hit went down. Like a knight that mighty lady fought, and no market woman at carnival time ever offered battle more warlike. A female soiled with armor-rust soon forgets what is seemly. And all the while, giving battle, she was in tears.

But Gawain? Every chance he got, he turned to have another look at his queen. You never saw on a spitted hare a better shape than hers. Between hips and breast, where the belt went round, no ant had ever slimmer waist. Every time Gawain had a fresh sight of her, more attackers lost their lives.

Then the king arrived, Vergulaht. He saw that battle, how it stood; “and I am afraid,” interjects the poet, “that I am now going to have to let you hear that a king there disgraced himself in his handling of a guest.” Gawain had to stand waiting until Vergulaht donned his armor, then he fell back, retreating up the stairs.

However, at this juncture the noble Prince Kingrimursel appeared, who at the field banquet of Arthur had challenged Gawain to this journey. And when he saw what was going on, he tore his hair in distress, for he had guaranteed on his honor that Gawain should come in peace until met in single combat on the field. He beat the rabble back from the tower, cried to Gawain to let him come fight by his side, and the two escaped to the open.

The king’s counselors persuaded him first to proclaim an armistice, and then to make up his mind how his father was to be avenged. The battlefield became still. The lady appeared from her tower, kissed her cousin, Kingrimursel, on the lips for having rescued Gawain, and turned upon the king, her brother:

“Modesty and good manners were the only shield I had,” she said, “to protect myself and the knight you sent to me. You have done me a grievous wrong. Furthermore, I had always heard that when a man turns for protection to a lady his opponent should give up the combat. The flight of your guest to me, King Vergulaht, is going to do your reputation no good.”

The prince accused him too. “I gave Gawain guarantee. You betrayed him, and I too, therefore, have suffered affront. My fellow princes all will look into this. If you cannot honor princes, we shall not respect your crown.”

There were some further verbal exchanges, but the upshot of it all was that while the lady — her name was Antikonie — that evening entertained Gawain and Kingrimursel with a dinner of wines, pheasant, partridge, fish, and white bread, served by beautiful maidens — all slim-waisted as ants — the king, meeting with his counselors, told of a battle he had lately fought with a powerful knight in the forest who had sent him flying from his steed and made him swear to procure for him the Grail within a year. “And if I fail I must go to Queen Condwiramurs and pronounce an oath to her of submission.”

The counselors then agreed that since Gawain was in Vergulaht’s grasp, flapping his wings in his trap, the king should turn the Grail task over to him. “Let him rest for the night,” they suggested, “and let him hear of this in the morning.”

So when Mass had been said, and the lady with her two knights appeared, a wreath of flowers in her hair of which no rose was redder than her lips, King Vergulaht begged his guest to help persuade his sister to forgive him. “And I will then forgive you my heart’s sorrow for my father — provided,” he added, “that you swear to me without delay you will seek for me the Grail.”

Thus all were reconciled, and, breakfast having ended, Gawain’s time came for departure. The queen approached without guile, spoke adieu, and her mouth again kissed his. “I think,” states the poet, “they were both very sad.” Then his pages brought his steeds, and he mounted Gringuljete (his white fairy horse with shining red ears) and in quest of the Grail for King Vergulaht of Ascalun rode away.

IV. Illuminations

BOOK IX: THE GOSPEL OF TREVRIZENT

“Open up, now, my heart,” writes the poet, “to the knock of Lady Adventure! Let us hear how fares that noble knight whom Cundrie, with her harshest words, sent questing for the Grail. Has he yet seen Munsalvaesche?”

The book of his adventure tells that as he rode one day in the forest — “I know not at what hour” — God took thought for his guidance, and he spied among the trees a hermit’s hut. Within was a hermitess, kneeling over a coffin, and the knight, hoping for direction, called, “Is anybody in?” She responded, and when he heard a woman’s voice he quickly turned his mount away and, while she was rising, left his horse, shield, and sword by a tree.

She wore a hair shirt beneath a gray gown, but wore also a garnet ring. “May God reward you for your greeting, as He rewards all courtesy,” she said as she came to sit beside him on a bench, where he asked concerning her life. “My food is from the Grail,” she said. “Cundrie brings it, the sorceress, on Saturdays, for the week.” And that seeming to him an unlikely tale, he indicated the ring.

“I wear this,” she explained, “for a man beloved, whose love, in the way of human love, I never knew. And I have worn it since the day the lance of the Duke Orilus struck him dead. I am unmarried and a maid; yet in God’s sight he is my husband, and this ring is to go with me before God.”

Then he realized that the woman was Sigune.

Grief pressed his heart; he removed his helm and she looked hard into his face. “Parzival! It is you!" Her manner became very hard. “How do you stand now with the Grail? Have you learned its meaning yet?”

“It is cruel of you, my cousin, to bear me such ill will,” he replied. “I have lost in these years all joy because of the Grail. We are kin, dear cousin. I behaved there as one bound to be a loser. Give me counsel.”

She answered more kindly. “May the hand of Him now help you, to Whom all sorrow is known. You may succeed yet in finding a track that will take you to Munsalvaesche, for Cundrie has just now gone that way. Her mule stands over there when she comes, where the spring flows from the rock. I suggest you follow Cundrie; she may not be far ahead.” (Compare again Eliot, The Waste Land: “If there were rock/And also water/And water/A spring/A pool among the rock” (lines 348–52).)

He thanked her and mounted; but the fresh track soon was lost, and there came riding at him instead a bareheaded knight in shining mail and rich surcoat, shouting at him to get out. “Munsalvaesche allows no one this close who is not prepared either for battle,” he cried, “or else for that transformation that in the world outside this forest is called death.” The knight donned his helmet, which he carried in his hand, and Parzival, charging, struck him just above the shield and sent him rolling down a ravine. Parzival’s steed went over too, but himself quickly catching a cedar branch, he dangled there until, groping with his feet, he found a rock. Below, his great Castilian lay dead, but the Temple Knight was scrambling up the other slope, and his mount, not far from Parzival, was standing with its feet tangled in the reins.

Mounting and now missing nothing but his spear, Parzival again was riding without aim, and so for weeks on end, until one morning when a light snow had fallen — just enough to be chill — he chanced upon a file of pilgrims, barefoot, all in rough gray cloaks. In the lead were a white-haired nobleman, his wife, and their two daughters, the ladies with little dogs trotting at their sides; and these were followed by a troupe of squires and knights, also in pilgrim garb. Said the leader as he passed, to the armored horseman, who had turned his steed out of their path: “I am shocked to see you mounted on this day, and not barefoot, like ourselves.” To which the mounted Parzival answered, “Sir, I do not know what day this year began, how many weeks have passed, nor what day this is of the week. I used to serve someone named God, until His mercy condemned me to shame.”

“Do you mean God, Whom the Virgin bore?” the elder asked. “He died for us on this day, Good Friday, when all the world, though rejoicing, sighs with grief. Sir, if you are not a heathen, think upon this day and follow in our track. There is a holy man ahead who, if you confess to him with contrite heart, will absolve you of your sin.”

The daughters interrupted. “Father, why torment him so? In that armor he must be freezing. We have tents nearby, lots of pilgrim cloaks: if Arthur himself were to visit us, we’d have food enough for a feast. Now be a decent host and take this knight to a place where he can get warm.”

The old man, abashed, relenting, confessed that every year he took this walk with his household and would gladly share his provisions. The daughters begged the knight to join them and they did not seem at all sad. But he thought: “He whom they love, I hate.”

“May good fortune bring you well-being,” he said, and with courtesies took his leave — but with repentance already stirring in his heart. He thought of his Creator. “What if God should give me help?” he thought, and let the reins fall on his mount’s neck. “Let Him show this steed the road that for me is best.” And so he came to the place where Trevrizent, the brother of the Grail King, dwelt in fasting, prayer, and struggle with the Devil.

Figure 83. Parzival and Trevizant“Sir, give me counsel,” Parzival begged, when asked why he rode that day in armor. “I am one who has sinned.” And when the hermit asked who had sent him, he told of the pilgrims on the path, then asked, “When I rode at you that way, were you not afraid?”

“Stag and bear have frightened me,” said the hermit, “but there is nothing human I fear. I once, like you, was a knight, and I strove for noble love. But I have now forgotten all that. Give me your reins!”

He led the steed to a protected ledge, and the knight himself to his cave. There were some books there, and an altar of stone with a casket on it of relics: the same, Parzival realized, on which he had once sworn to the beaten Duke Orilus that he had not ravished his wife. Thus he had passed that way before — four and a half years and three days before. He sighed when he was told the date. “How long! Unguided and in grief! Toward God I hold great hatred,” he said. “He is the Lord, they say, of all help. Why, then, did He not help me?”

The holy man was quietly regarding him. “May God help us both!” he prayed. “So now tell me, calmly and soberly, how this wrath of God came about, by which He gained your hate. But before you begin accusing Him to me, let me tell you of His innocence. He is loyalty. Be loyal! He is called truth. Whatever is false, He abhors. Anyone seeing you defy Him with hate would take you for insane. With such anger you get nowhere. Think of Lucifer and his host.”

Then he told the old tale of Adam and Eve, the Fall, and the sin of Cain, the blood of whose brother fell upon the earth, whence hatred first arose. The virgin earth, from which Adam had been born, was desecrated by that blood. But then God Himself became the Virgin’s child, so that there have now been two men born of virgins: from the first, Adam, came sorrow; from the second, joy.

“Hear these ancient tales as new,” said Trevrizent. “Let them teach you how to speak truth. The prophet Plato taught in this manner in his day; the sibyl, too, the prophetess. Many years ago they assured us that for even the greatest debt of sin, redemption might be ours.

“With Divine Love, the Highest Hand delivered us from Hell: the unclean alone He left there. For God shares with man His love and His hate, and between them all the world can choose. But if you wish God only ill — Who is ready for either your love or your wrath — it will be you alone who are lost. So now turn to Him your heart and let Him answer your good will. Listen well to the sweet tale of this Lover True.”

“My greatest grief,” said Parzival, “is for the Grail; my second grief for my wife. I yearn for them both.”

“As for your marriage, that is well,” said Trevrizent. “Remain true in that, and though you may suffer in Hell, the agony will end, and with God’s grace you will be freed. But you tell me also of the Grail, and in that you are a fool: for no man ever achieved the Grail who was not named to it in Heaven. This I tell you, for I know and have seen for myself.”

“You have been there?”

“Yes, sir, I have.”

And Trevrizent then told Parzival of the king, his injury, the marvel of the stone, and of how, moreover, on a day there had been one who came to the castle unbidden. “A foolish man,” said Trevrizent, “who bore sin away with him for not having spoken one word to the king concerning the anguish that he saw.”

And each now looked the other full in the face.

“There is a horse now standing in my stable,” said the elder, “with the sign of Munsalvaesche on its saddle, the sign of the dove. Furthermore, you bear a certain resemblance to the late Grail King Frimutel. Now tell me, sir, where you come from and of what family born.” And when told of Parzival’s birth and of his trip to Arthur’s court, “Alas, O world!” he exclaimed. “You have slain your own flesh and blood. The Red Knight, Ither, was your relative; and your mother, my sister Herzeloyde, because of you, died of grief!”

The youth had not heard this last before. “Oh no! No!” he exclaimed. “What are you telling me, good sir!”

It was, however, some time before he could bring himself to confess that it was he, misfortune’s child, who had failed to ask the question of the Grail.

BOOK X: THE BEAUTY OF THE LADY ORGELUSE

Wild tales are now in store; for Gawain, as we have heard, was on the way to adventures of great peril. Whoever seeks the Grail must do so with his sword. And so he rode, one morning, onto a meadow, where he saw a horse tethered to a linden. There was a shield beside it that a spear had pierced, yet the bridle and saddle were for a woman’s use; and our knight, therefore imagining that he might now have to wrestle with someone to whose throw he would gladly fall, peered around the tree and found sitting there a lady on whose lap lay a knight, pierced through.

“Sir,” she said, “he is alive, but not for long.”

The man’s blood was pouring inward. So Gawain — no fool in the matter of wounds — plucked a branch of the tree, slipped the bark off like a tube, and inserting this in the wound, bade the woman suck until the blood flowed outward. And when the knight, reviving, saw Gawain there bending over him, he warned against the road ahead.

“I shall ever regret this adventure,” he said, “and you will too, if you continue. Lischoys Gwelljus unhorsed me with a perfect thrust through my shield.”

The trail Gawain found all bloody, as though a stag had been shot there, and this brought him soon within sight of the magician Clinschor’s towered castle.* *Clinschor is Wagner’s Klingsor. His magic castle, according to Wagner, was the Garden of Delights where Amfortas received his wound. In the opera, Kundry is Klingsor’s slave; the lance is still in his possession. Moreover, Parsifal, not Gawain, is Wagner’s knight of this adventure. A very different Parsifal from the Parzival of Wolfram (more like Tennyson’s Galahad), he resists seduction in the garden (Act II) and comes away with Klingsor’s lance, which, when applied to the wound, heals the king. (The road winds around the hill on which it stands, so that ignorant people declare it spins like a top.) (Thus Wolfram’s rationalization of the Celtic “Whirling Castle” motif. Curoi has become Clinschor; Cuchullin, Gawain. Compare with The Balance) And he came, as he continued upward, to a spring that welled from a rock, where he saw a lady whose beauty brought him to a stop. She was Orgeluse de Logroys.

“By your leave, may I dismount?” he asked. “Let me die if ever I have seen a woman of greater beauty.”

“I too know that very well,” she said. “Little honor is it, however, to be praised by all and sundry: the praise I want is of the wise. It is time you were riding on. You will be closest to my heart when far away. And if adventure brings you questing for love, the only reward you will get from me will be disgrace.”

He replied, enchanted, “My lady, you are right. My eyes do imperil my heart: they have seen you and I am in your keep. Loose or bind me: I shall like it either way.”

She replied indifferently: “Oh well, then take me along! You will regret it. If honor is what you want, you had better give this up.”

“Who wants love unearned?” he answered, and she pointed down the road. “Dismount! Walk down that footpath, over the little bridge and on into the orchard. People are there, dancing, beating tambourines, playing flutes. Walk on, right through, you will see my horse. Untie it; it will follow you back.”

Confiding his own horse to her charge, he did as told; and as he passed among the folk a number of men and women came to him, lamenting his misfortune. He saw the horse tethered to an olive tree with a gray-beard knight leaning on a crutch nearby, who warned him: “If you will take advice, you will not lay hand on that horse.” But Gawain untied the beast, and it followed him back to the mistress of his heart.

Figure 84. Gawain and Orgeluse“Welcome, you goose,” she said.

He offered to help her mount. “I didn’t ask for your help!” she retorted and mounted by herself. “Now follow me, and may God throw you from that steed.”

He followed, and they rode to a flowery heath, where, noticing a plant that was good for healing wounds, Gawain got down to dig it up. “I see my friend is both doctor and knight,” was the lady’s comment. “He will earn for us a good living if he knows how to sell ointment jars.”

He explained that he had lately passed a knight to whom this plant would be of benefit. “Oh good!” she said. “I am going to learn something!” And rode on.

Following, Gawain saw approaching a strange squire, a sort of monster, Malcreatiure (French, mal creature: "evil creature") his name: he was Cundrie’s brother and had a face like hers, but male, with a wild boar’s tusk at either side and hair like the bristles of a hog.^{* *}Dr. Goetz calls attention to Indian images of tusked gods and goddesses as probable sources of the idea that such creatures lived by the Ganges. For a Celtic parallel of this encounter of Gawain with Orgeluse and the Malcreatiure, compare Occidental Mythology.In the land Tribalibot, by the Ganges, people grow that way. Our father Adam, who named all things according to their nature, and knew, moreover, the movements of the stars and seven spheres, knew also the virtues of herbs. And when any of his daughters came of childbearing age he would warn her against eating certain things that would spoil the human fruit. But some — as women will — did exactly as they pleased, and with this perverse result. And there were a number of such people in the land now ruled by Feirefiz and his noble Queen Secundille. The queen had heard reports of the Grail and of its guardian King Anfortas. In her own realm there were flowing streams of gems and mountains all of gold. And when she thought, “How can I learn more about this king to whom the Grail is subject?” she sent to him the most valuable gems, along with two of these monsters, Cundrie and her brother — the latter of which sweet Anfortas then generously bestowed upon the Lady Orgeluse.

And this Malcreatiure, kinsman of the plants and stars, riding on a runt of a nag that was lame in all four quarters, now came shouting insults at Gawain. “You fool! You are going to get such a beating for your service to this lady, you will wish you had done something else!”

Gawain grabbed him by his bristling hair and flung him from the nag, and when the bristles cut his hands, the Lady Orgeluse laughed. “I love to see you two in such a pet,” she said. Malcreatiure remounted, and turning, they all rode back until they reached again the wounded knight, to whose hurt Gawain applied the plant.

“You have brought with you the lady through whose fault I lie here in pain,” the man said. Then he asked Gawain to lift his lady to her horse, and while that was being done, leapt up and onto Gawain’s own steed, and with a laugh the couple spurred away.

Orgeluse laughed too. “I took you first for a knight, then a doctor, and now I see a page. If you ever have to live by your wits, you have a lot to fall back on. You are still eager for my love?”

“Yes, my lady,” came the answer. “If I could know your noble love, there is nothing I would hold dearer. Call me knight, squire, page, or villain — anything you like. Hurting me, you are damaging your own property, but since I am your vassal, that is your right.”

The fellow who had ridden off meanwhile had returned for a parting gibe. “Gawain, I have now paid you for that beating you gave me when you took me to your uncle’s house, and he kept me four weeks eating with the dogs!”

“Urians!” Gawain cried. “It is you! But I saved your life!”

The other laughed. “Have you never heard the old saying about saving someone’s life? He will be your enemy forever!” And with that he wheeled and was gone.

Gawain turned to his lady. “It happened,” he explained, “like this. A lady had been ravished of her maidenhood, and I, riding after this doer of the deed, overthrew him. He is the Prince of Punturtoys. To save his life he surrendered and I brought him before the king, who condemned him to be hung: whereupon he appealed to me, who had guaranteed his life, and I begged both the king and the injured lady for clemency, which they granted — but only on the king’s condition he should eat for a month from the trough with the palace dogs.”

Then said the lady Orgeluse: “I shall see that he gets his deserts — not for what he has here done to you, but for what he did there to that lady.

“Wickedness must be repaid

With blows of a knightly blade.”

She sent Malcreatiure off walking, and Gawain turned to the nag.

“Is my knight now going to ride on that?”

“I shall follow your orders,” he replied.

“They may be slow in coming.”

“I shall serve you, even so.”

“Well, in that case, you seem to me stupid,” she said. “You will soon quit the world of the glad and be joined to that of the sad.”

“In joy or in sorrow, either way,” he replied, “whether riding or afoot,” and he turned to inspect his mount. The stirrup straps were of bark, and the saddle so frail he was afraid he might pull it to pieces: the animal, too, might break apart. So he led it, and himself carried both his shield and one of his spears.

The lady taunted: “Do you now bring merchandise to my land? First a medical man, now a tradesman! Watch out for tolls on the way!”

Her remarks he adored: it was such a pleasure just to watch her lovely mouth. And since loss and gain were the same in her, he was equally bound and made free.

“O love!” here exclaims the poet, “I should have thought you too old to play tricks of this childish sort! I should like to get Gawain out of this fix, but to save him would be to end his joy.”

The two thus arrived before a castle that lay beyond a broad, swift, navigable stream; a castle full, Gawain could see, of ladies. He was now astride the lame nag and saw a knight approaching at a gallop.

Said his lady, “You see? Just as I promised! You will have chance enough now for disgrace. That chap is going to finish you, and if your breeches split when you tumble from your beast, will it not be a sight for those ladies?”

A ferryman had come at her beck, and she, on her steed, rode aboard, leaving Gawain to make out as he might.

It would be wrong to say that Lischoys Gwelljus was flying; but he was coming pretty fast, and Gawain thought: “How shall I receive him?” His decision was to let him come full tilt and stumble over the nag, then deal with him afoot, which is exactly how it worked. And the battle afoot was great, until at last Gawain — who was marvelous at wrestling — seized and flung the other to the ground, who when charged to surrender, refused.

“Better for me to be dead,” he said, “than to live conquered.”

And Gawain, thinking, “But why should I kill this man?” let him up, without guarantee.

They sat apart among the flowers until Gawain presently became aware that the other’s horse was Gringuljete, his own, which had been ridden away only a while ago by Urians. He got up, mounted, rode about and, again dismounting, noticed that the animal’s hock was now branded with a turtle dove, the emblem of the Grail. But Lischoys Gwelljus, having recovered his sword, was coming at him for another round, and the ladies watched while he again was thrown, again refused surrender, and again was let up by Gawain.

By this time the ferryman had returned. It was the custom of that place, he told Gawain, that the mount of the knight defeated should be given to him as ferry toll.

”He defeated me,” answered Gawain, “when he first ran down my horse. You can have the nag. It’s over there. But if you value a man as highly, you can have the knight himself who rode my own steed against me. I’ll bring him to your door with my own hand.”

The ferryman laughed. “In that case, you will surely be welcome,” he said. And they fared thus all three to the farther shore, where the boatman said to Gawain, “You are now yourself the master of my house.”

The good man’s son attended Gawain’s mount, and his daughter, Bene, Gawain. She conducted him to his room, where there were strewn on the floor fresh rushes, scattered with pretty flowers, and she helped to remove his armor. The son then brought in cushions, the father and mother entered, and all sat courteously to eat. When done, the table was removed and a bed was prepared by the daughter of snow-white sheets, a head pillow and a coverlet, over cushions.

V. Second Intermezzo: The Secularization of Myth

Gawain had now passed from the sphere of earthly adventure to a transcendental yonder shore, which his poet Wolfram was to associate with the magic of the mystic East; and as Heinrich Zimmer has made evident in his important, as well as delightful, comparative study of a series of Oriental and Occidental tales, The King and the Corpse,^{Note 15} there is indeed a correspondence both in incident and in sense, between the adventures of Arthur’s knights and those of the great and little heroes of the Orient, even of the Buddha himself; and, by analogy, the Gnostic and other heretical versions of the miracles of Christ.

One of the most remarkable things about Wolfram is that in his development of the Grail romance he was already aware of these unorthodox analogies and could make use of them; as in his unprecedented assimilation of the Grail to both the philosophers’ stone and the Ka’aba. Moreover, he applied his interpretations consciously to an altogether secular mythology, of men and women living for this world, not “that,” pursuing earthly, human, and humane (i.e., in Wolfram’s terms, “courtly”) purposes, and supported in their spiritual tasks not by a supernatural grace dispensed by way of sacraments but by the natural grace of individual endowment and the worldly virtue of loyalty in love. That is what gives to his work its epochal significance as the first example in the history of world literature of a consciously developed secular Christian myth. As the great modem poet (perhaps the greatest of our century) William Butler Yeats pointed out in his strangely inspired revelation of an orderly destiny, fate, or wyrd made manifest in history, A Vision:

Throughout the German Parsifal there is no ceremony of the Church, neither Marriage nor Mass nor Baptism, but instead we discover that strangest creation of romance or of life, “the love trance.” Parsifal in such a trance, seeing nothing before his eyes but the image of his absent love, overcame knight after knight, and awakening at last looked amazed upon his dinted sword and shield; and it is to his lady and not to God or the Virgin that Parsifal prayed upon the day of battle, and it was his lady’s soul, separated from her entranced or sleeping body, that went beside him and gave him victory.^{Note 16}

In that parody of spiritual effort represented in the Good Friday excursion of the old aristocrat and his family — barefoot, yet with their pet dogs trotting at their side and entire household behind — there is a delicious strain of irony; yet the poet allows this shallow domestic comedy to affect profoundly the sentiments of his actual spiritual pilgrim: the knight in armor, not as pilgrim clad, who, cut off from the world for nigh onto five years, had been riding on a really significant spiritual adventure.

“And when you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by men. Truly, I say to you, they have their reward. But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, that your fasting may not be seen by men but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:16–18) .

The pious pilgrim for a day told the actual knightly saint to seek absolution for his sins from the hermit down the road; yet Trevrizent was a layman, not a priest. He had never been ordained. In his forest retreat, in fact, he was not even attending Mass or otherwise partaking of the sacraments. Nor was that strange neurotic lover of a corpse, Sigune: “She heard no Mass,” Wolfram declares, “yet her whole life was a kneeling.”^{Note 17} She was fed in her abstracted state from the bounty of the Grail,^{Note 18} which itself received its power from a dove that on Good Friday annually flew from heaven with a wafer, which it placed upon the stone:^{Note 19} a sign substantial of God’s love, not derived from the sacrament of the altar, but directly from the sphere of grace itself. And Trevrizent defined that sphere in terms rather of a psychological than of a sacramental order, as corresponding — and responding reciprocally — to the human sentiments of hate, love, and loyalty, in the mysteries of Hell, Heaven, and the Crucifixion. The Crucifixion he interpreted, furthermore, in accord with Abelard, as the freely rendered signal of God’s love, to move our hearts, so that He might fill, and thus redeem, our lives. And accordingly, the knight Parzival’s conversion (not reconversion to his mother’s image of God, for that, in his heart, was dead) (Compare the problem of Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, culminating in the latter.^{Note 20}) occurred on the festival of the Crucifixion, Good Friday; but there was no churchly sacrament, no Mass, no proper confession or eucharistic communion; only a turning of Parzival’s heart from hate and mistrust, inspired first by the mock pilgrims, and confirmed by the unordained hermit Trevrizent’s psychologically pointed retelling of the old tales “as new.”

To quote again from the commentary of Gottfried Weber:

It is not true, as Parzival had supposed before his encounter with Trevrizent, that God can be understood in courtly terms, measured by courtly standards, and conceived of as a kind of supreme knight, who can be expected to render assistance to those of his own social set, according to the rules of courtly life.… Parzival’s thought that he might somehow alleviate the sufferings of the Grail Castle through a performance of external knightly deeds was thus shown by Trevrizent to have been a cruelly naïve mistake.^{Note 21}

Figure 85. The Ages of the World (Joachim of Floris); c. 1200 a.d.

It is to be recalled that during Wolfram’s lifetime the Abbot Joachim of Floris (c. 1145–1202) was publishing those prophecies over which James Joyce’s hero Stephen Dedalus pored as a boy “in the stagnant bay of Marsh’s library,”^{Note 22} according to which there were to be, in all, three ages of humanity (Figure 85): the first, following a dark preludium from the time of Adam to Moses, the “Age of the Father” (of the Mosaic Law and Israel); the second, the “Age of the Son” (the Gospel and the Church); and the last (to commence about the year 1260), the “Age of the Holy Spirit,” when the authority of Rome was to dissolve and the world become an earthly Paradise of saints communing directly with God.^{Note 23} Saint Francis too was a prominent figure of this time (1186–1226), and, as noticed in Occidental Mythology, was thought by many to have marked the start of Joachim’s final period through the founding of his order of friars. In Wolfram’s work Trevrizent and Sigune represent this almost Indian ideal of the forest saint, which Parzival is to surpass, however, as Christ surpassed the Baptist^{Note 24} and the Buddha his teachers, Arada and Udraka.^{Note 25} For, though wakened by Trevrizent to a new understanding of spirituality, Parzival was not content to rest bound by the rules that up to that time had prevailed (according to his teacher) in relation to the Grail quest, namely: 1. that no one who had failed the adventure would be given a second chance; and 2. that no one consciously striving for it could ever achieve the Grail. As he had once departed from his worldly teacher, Gurnemanz, so would he now from Trevrizent. And as the Old Law was transcended — “the veil of the temple was rent”^{Note 26} — through Christ’s passion, so through Parzival’s, a new age, of neither a chosen people nor an authorized church, but of authentic individuals, fulfilled right here on earth in truth, loyalty, and love, was to be gospeled in the winning of the Grail. Trevrizent’s Joachimite hermitage, on one hand, and the love grotto of Tristan (no less removed from the world), on the other, stand exactly for the two poles between which Wolfram’s Parzival was to pass “through the middle.” And his counterplayer in this passage was to be the worldly, sterling character Gawain, supporting him throughout through a series of parallel, though less exalted, exploits of his own.

Both knights were engaged in adventures announced by the self-same Loathly Damsel: adventures of enchantment and disenchantment, of a type well known to fairy lore. For example, as Professor William A. Nitze has recognized in his Grail study already cited,^{Note 27} there is in The Arabian Nights the tale of “The Ensorceled Prince”: a young king who had been turned to stone from the waist downward by the sorcery of his unfaithful wife consorting with a black magician. His city with its population also was enchanted, turned into a lake full of fish of four colors: white, blue, yellow, and red (respectively the Moslems, Christians, Jews, and Magians of his realm). A fisherman, guided by a jinni to that spellbound lake, caught four of its fish and presented them to his own king, who undertook to solve their mystery, and through his adventure the enchantment was dissolved.^{Note 28}

In The Hero with a Thousand Faces I have shown that myths and wonder tales of this kind belong to a general type, which I have called “The Adventure of the Hero,” that has not changed in essential form throughout the documented history of mankind: 1. A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder (in the present instances, regions under enchantment); 2. fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won (the enchantments are dispelled); 3. the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.^{Note 29} In Wolfram’s Parzival the boon is to be the inauguration of a new age of the human spirit: of secular spirituality, sustained by self-responsible individuals acting not in terms of general laws supposed to represent the will or way of some personal god or impersonal eternity, but each in terms of his own developing realization of worth. Such an idea is distinctly — and uniquely — European. It is the idea represented in Schopenhauer’s “intelligible” character; the old Germanic wyrd (See The Word Behind Words here and here.), a life responsible to itself, to its own supreme experiences and expectations of value, realized through trials in truth, loyalty, and love, and by example redounding, then, to the inspiration of others to like achievement.

In the long course of our survey of the mythologies of mankind we have encountered nothing quite like this. The Indian notion of sva-dharma, “one’s own duty,” suggests comparison: “Better is one’s own dharma, imperfectly performed, than the dharma of another, performed to perfection,” states the Bhagavad Gitā.^{Note 30} However, the idea of duty there is of the duties of one’s caste, as defined by the timeless (supposed to be timeless) Indian social order. The Westerner reading such a text might think of duties selfimposed, self-discovered, self-assumed: a vocation elected and realized. That is not the Oriental idea. Nor is the Oriental “person” the same as ours. “Even as a person casts off worn-out clothes and puts on others that are new, so the indwelling being casts off wornout bodies and enters into others that are new.”^{Note 31} The “indwelling being” is the reincarnating monad; and the aim of a well-lived lifetime is not to realize the unique possibilities of its temporal embodiment, but on the contrary, to achieve such indifference to this body and its limitations, potentialities, and vicissitudes, that, “completely devoid of the sense of ‘I’ and ‘mine,’ one attains peace.”^{Note 32} One attains “release,” from the destiny of this body and its deluding attachments to this world; and the reincarnating monad then dissolves, as Ramakrishna says, “like a salt doll that has walked into the ocean”:^{Note 33} the ocean of the Cosmic Self (brahmātman), which is at once the nothing and the all. Likewise in Buddhism — even in the Mahāyāna of Japan — it will be long and in vain that one seeks for anything like the European sense of wyrd. Carl Jung has made the point in his distinction between the “Self” as understood in Eastern thought and the “self” in his own science of individuation. “In Eastern texts,” he writes, “the ‘Self’ represents a purely spiritual idea, but in Western psychology the ‘self’ stands for a totality which comprises instincts, physiological and semi-physiological phenomena”:^{Note 34} exactly the “garment,” in other words, that the “reincarnating monad” puts on and casts off. Schopenhauer’s “intelligible character” might be likened to this “indweller of the body,” and since he too sees the ultimate aim of life in a denial of the will, there is much in his philosophy that can be compared with Hindu-Buddhist thought. However, when he states in so many words that “every human being represents an altogether unique Platonic Idea,” he writes as a Western man.

The arts devoted to the representation of the idea of humanity [he continues] have as their concern, therefore, besides the rendition of beauty as a quality of the species “M an,” equally that of rendering the character of the individual, which is what, properly, we call character. And this must be rendered, furthermore, not as something merely accidental, altogether particular to the individual in his uniqueness, but as an especially stressed aspect of the idea of humanity, so appearing just in this individual, and to the revelation of which his portrayal is to serve.… Neglect of the character of the species for that of the individual yields a caricature, and of the individual for the species, insignificance.^{Note 35}

As expressed in our Western arts of portraiture, in a Rembrandt, in a Titian, this experience of the metaphysical dimension of the individual as a value is set forth in a manner unmatched in this world history of art; and in Dante’s work as well, the souls disposed in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise retain for eternity their characters exhibited on earth. For here the individuality is not (as in the Orient) a mere figment of illusion, to be analyzed away and dissolved at last, but a substantial entity in itself, to be realized, brought to flower. And the adventure of each, so interpreted, will consist in the following of a summons away from “the fixed and the set fast” (Goethe’s phase) of the world conceived as law, to a “becoming,” the Purgatory, of an individual life moving toward its own proper end, its wyrd, or, in Dante’s terms, its own appropriate place among the petals of the Paradisal golden rose.

Thus in the Parzival of Wolfram it is precisely in the general, authorized, socially ordered life-ways of his time that the obstacles are recognized to that solitary journey to fulfillment, that lonely, dangerous quest, which is the only way to an individual life. And in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, as well, the call to adventure is to a land of no return, like Gawain’s, that is absolutely removed from every law and notion of value of the “flatland” (as Mann calls it): the business-land, the newspaper-and-ledger-land, of the hero’s native city.

In the first chapter of Ulysses, the initiating “call to adventure” is served by a little old Irishwoman who comes at breakfast time to bring the milk to the triad of the book’s young heroes — Buck Mulligan, Stephen Dedalus, and their English companion, Haines — who are sitting at table in their symbolic (and now world-famous) Martello Tower on the shore of Dublin Bay. She was unaware of her symbolic role as she entered the circular, ill-lighted room.

—How much, sir? asked the old woman.

—A quart, Stephen said.

He watched her pour into the measure and thence into the jug rich white milk, not hers. Old shrunken paps. She poured again a measureful and a tilly. Old and secret she had entered from a morning world, maybe a messenger.^{Note 36}

She could not speak her own language, Gaelic, but the Britisher, Haines, could. He had deprived her of her speech as well as land, and has come now to collect her folklore for an English publication. Stephen’s sense, at that moment, as he watched, of the poverty of his land and people, corresponds, according to one layer of Joyce’s multilayered allegory, to the call, in Homer’s Odyssey, brought by the goddess Athene to Odysseus’s son, Telemachus, to go forth in search of his father and clear his heritage of the usurpers, the suitors, who were blithely consuming his goods and even threatening his life.

In The Magic Mountain, on the other hand, Hans Castorp’s summons to adventure emerges from the heart of the hero himself, or rather, his lungs, his failing body, by way of the orders of his family physician. He had begun to come home from his shipping firm, Tunder and Wilms, “looking rather paler than a man of his blond, rosy type should,” and his family doctor, Heidekind, finally advised a change of air, a few weeks in the high mountains. His cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, was already in Switzerland, at Davos. Why not, then, visit Joachim? And so, hardly recking to what whirling mountain of Klingsor his destiny had summoned him, he left his home on the Baltic for a season — three weeks, he thought — in the Land of No Return.^{Note 37}

At the opening of the Parzival, the summons to adventure was conveyed by the flashing armor of the knights whom the rustic mistook naively for angels. Traditionally all the fabulous powers encountered by heroes in their spiritual adventures were personified as such supernaturals. In tales told for amusement, of course, the personifications were not meant to be taken seriously. The ensorceled prince never lived. In the bibles of the world, on the other hand, such fantasies are advanced, generally, as “facts”: in the legend of Moses’ talk with God, for example, or Christ’s harrowing of Hell. The important thing about Wolfram’s Grail is that, though his tale is for amusement and its characters and episodes are frankly fantasies, they are nevertheless understood to be true in a timeless, trans-historic dimension. As in esoteric rites the mythic forms are displayed not in the crude sense of supernatural “facts,” but as signs revelatory of insights, so here: the adventures, once of Celtic gods, are presented as paradigms of secular human experiences in a depth dimension. They are represented, however — in contrast to the older, esoteric, ritualized approach to initiation — as inherent in the episodes of men’s normal daily lives, displayed for those with eyes to see in the sights of common day. As in the words of the Gnostic Thomas Gospel: “The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it.”^{Note 38} Poets see it. That is the faculty of poets. And great biographers and novelists have always recognized that, in the lives of people growing up, initiations transpire through the revelations of chance, according to the readiness of the psyche. Beneath the accidental surface effects of this world sit — as of yore — the gods. Their ageless order of the archetypes of myth, “the grave and constant in human sufferings,” can be discerned through all time and tide. The entire course of a lifetime is thus a rite of initiation and can be experienced as such. And in the works of both Joyce and Mann, as well as of Chrétien de Troyes and Wolfram, this inherent relevance of myth to biography is indicated by just such juxtapositions of fantasy and fact as those of the young Parzival’s thought of angels when he saw the shining knights, Stephen’s thought of Mother Ireland while watching the little old woman with the milk, and Mann’s comparison of Castorp’s mountain journey with a visit to the world of King Death.

In the legend of Parzival, when the boy’s imagination had been roused by the message of his angels, he left everything of his childhood — his mother and his play — behind him and through a dreamlike cycle of adventures, among which the most important were his marriage to Condwiramurs and his first, unwitting visit to the Castle of the Grail, he developed gradually to young manhood as the paramount knight of his day and was linked then by Gawain, the gentle, most noble knight of the world, to King Arthur’s company and court, his worldly goal. But then, immediately, a second, more mysterious adventure was announced: what Jung has termed the task of life’s second half.^{Note 39} The aim of the first half, properly, is to reach maturity as an adult functioning responsibly in the con­text of a society, and in Parzival’s case society was represented by Arthur’s court. At the moment of fulfillment there, however, the claims begin to be heard of what Joyce terms “the uncreated conscience” of one’s race,^{Note 40} an inward world of potentials unrealized in the visible order of one’s time; and accordingly, the messenger, the summoner to this more inward quest is not, like the angel of the first task, a normal figure of the light world: in the case of Parzival, not a shining knight but an apparition with the muzzle of a boar, the boar of the wound of Adonis, the same pigfaced Daughter of the King of the Land of Youth who in the fairytale appeared to Oisin (See The Word Behind Words and Primitive Mythology.). And the adventure itself, in accord with the character of its announcer, required a passage beyond the known bounds and forms of time, space, and causality to a domain of vision, where time and eternity were at one: in Parzival’s case, the Grail Castle, and in Gawain’s — announced at the same weird hour by the same weird sister of night — the Château Merveil.

In the brothel scene of Ulysses, Bloom, the elder of the two heroes of that work (he is thirty-eight, Stephen, twenty-two),^{Note 41} is in his own imagination transformed into a pig by the massive whoremistress Bella Cohen.

(Her eyes are deeply carboned. She has a sprouting moustache. Her olive face is heavy, slightly sweated and fullnosed, with orangetainted nostrils. She has large pendant beryl eardrops.… She glances around her at the couples. Then her eyes rest on Bloom with hard insistence. Her large fan winnows wind toward her heated face, neck and embonpoint. Her falcon eyes glitter.)

The Fan

(Flirting quickly, then slowly.) Married, I see.

Bloom

Yes.… Partly, I have mislaid…

The Fan

(Half opening, then closing) And the missus is master. Petticoat government.

Bloom

(Looks down with a sheepish grin.) That is so.

The Fan

(Folding together, rests against her eardrop.) Have you forgotten me?

Bloom

Nes. Yo.

The Fan

(Folded akimbo against her waist.) Is me her was you dreamed before? Was then she him you us since knew? Am all them and the same now we?

(Bella approaches, gently tapping with the fan.)

Presently she is transformed before him, becoming in his sight a male; he is beginning to' feel female. The sexes are reversed. Bella has become Bello, and Bloom is now called “she”:

Bello

Down! (He taps her on the shoulder with his fan.) Incline feet forward! Slide left foot one pace back. You will fall. You are falling. On the hands down!

Bloom

(Her eyes upturned in the sign of admiration, closing.)

Truffles!

(With a piercing epileptic cry she sinks on all fours, grunting, snuffling, rooting at his feet, then lies, shamming dead with eyes shut tight, trembling eyelids, bowed upon the ground in the attitude of most excellent master.… Bloom creeps under the sofa and peers out through the fringe.)^{Note 42}

This whole unsavory adventure of the night had been foretold at Bloom’s breakfast time, at the hour, exactly, of the coming of the little old woman with the milk to the younger hero, Stephen. Bloom had decided to eat for his breakfast that morning a pork kidney — and he a Jew! — to the purchase of which, he then went out to the shop of a Jewish pork-butcher, where he found on the counter a pile of cut sheets, announcing the project of a Zionist center in Jerusalem. He read the advertisement. “A barren land,” he mused, “bare waste. Volcanic lake, dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth.… A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old.…”^{Note 43} And as Stephen’s heart, that same hour, was being awakened to a sense of a land become waste, so Leopold’s. The two were to wander that day separately, in separate, undefined quests, like Parzival and Gawain, to come together at last in a brothel. Bloom folded the page into his pocket, feeling old. Cold oils slid along his veins, chilling his blood. “Well, I am here now,” he thought. “Morning mouth, bad images. Got up the wrong side of the bed. Must begin again those Sandow’s exercises. On the hands down.”^{Note 44}

Like Bloom, the noble ladies’ knight Gawain, Parzival’s elder by some sixteen years, was defenseless, absolutely, against women. We have seen him ensnared with equal ease by the innocence of Obilot and seductiveness of the sister of King Vergulaht. Both those adventures were of the normal daylight world. However, when he went on past the mock pieta at the tree of the wounded knight Urians, he entered the field of a stronger, very different spiritual force. Urians had warned him not to go on — as Settembrini in The Magic Mountain was to warn Hans Castorp (a type altogether different from Gawain, as well as from Bloom, yet embarked in his own phlegmatic way on the same adventurous path). Like Castorp to the Magic Mountain and Leopold Bloom into Nighttown, Sir Gawain pressed on; and he had not ridden far up the magic mountain of Logroys when there, by a spring, sat absolutely, unquestionably, the woman of his life.

So too in the mountain adventure of Hans Castorp:

The young marine engineer was sitting at table in the large institutional dining room, when a most irritating event occurred, an event such as had occurred before, and always onward into the meal: the slamming of a glass door. It occurred this time during the fish course (and the fish being the animal of Venus and Good Friday, this coincidence, like many in the book, is of more than accidental force).

Hans Castorp [we now read] gave an exasperated shrug and angrily resolved that this time he really must find out who was doing that.… He turned his whole upper body to the left [the side of the heart, the female, and the perilous “left-hand path”] and opened wide his bloodshot eyes.

It was a lady there passing through the room, a woman, or rather, a young woman of middle stature, in a white sweater and colorful skirt, with red-blond hair, simply wound in braids around her head. Hans Castorp caught no more than a glimpse of her profile, practically nothing. She moved without a sound, in wonderful contrast to the noisiness of her entrance, and with a peculiar gliding step, her head a little thrust forward, proceeded to the last table on the left, at right angles to the veranda door, the “good” Russian table, namely; and as she walked she had one hand in the pocket of her close-fitting wool sweater, while the other she raised to the back of her head, supporting and ordering her hair.…^{Note 45}

We need not go on: the novel is readily available and certainly to be read, one of the five or six greatest of the century. My only remark at this point is that in the Odyssey both Circe and Calypso are described with braided tresses,^{Note 46} and that the engineer Hans Castorp’s declaration of love to this Eurasian nymph with her Kirghiz eyes, Madame Clavdia Chauchat by name, is to be found in the chapter entitled “Walpurgisnacht,” where a lively game takes place to see who can draw blindfolded the best outline of a pig. Madame Chauchat of the braided locks is Castorp’s “Lady of Destiny,” as is the Lady Orgeluse Gawain’s. Each — literally — is an invitation to death and corresponds exactly to those guiding, shining nymphs in the cycle of the sacramental bowl of Figure 5, by which the eligible neophyte without fear is initiated into the knowledge (gnosis, bodhi) beyond death.

In C. G. Jung’s terminology, such women, shining with the light of the sun, are anima figures, the anima being for the male, he states, the archetype of life itself,^{Note 47} life’s promise and allure. In Sanskrit, the term is śakti (“power”): the wife is her husband’s śakti; the sweetheart the lover’s; and the goddess the god’s.^{Note 48} “The anima lives,” writes Jung, “beyond all categories, and can therefore dispense with blame as well as with praise.”^{Note 49} “This image,” he writes again, “is ‘My Lady Soul.’”^{Note 50} And as the great archetypes of myth are personified variously in differing local traditions (the resurrected god as Dumuzi, Osiris, Christ, or the Aztec Quetzalcoatl), so in the province of individual psychology the anima embodiments of Mr. B. cannot be those of Mr. A. “Every mother and every beloved is forced to become the carrier and embodiment of this omnipresent and ageless image,” states Jung, “which corresponds to the deepest reality in a man.”^{Note 51}

As in Dante’s moment of “aesthetic arrest” on first beholding Beatrice, so in the case of Gawain: when he beheld, with a shock of recognition, the reflection of the moving principle of his life mirrored as by magic in the form of a woman sitting by a spring — not simply any woman but exactly and fully this only one — the order and sense of his lifelong service to love was irreversibly transformed. A moment of psychological readiness must be presumed to have been attained, and at the critical instant, lo! — the indelible imprint was impressed and the life thereafter committed.^{Note 52} No longer in quest, for his object now was found, Gawain abruptly passed from the sphere of female forms merely “there,” in the field of space and time, to a depth experience of this only one as “forever”; and his spiritual effort thenceforth was to be to hold to that experience of his own whole meaning as “out there”: to hold to it in loyalty and love, beyond both fear and all desire for distraction — as strongly confirmed in that outward reference of his being, that “immovable point,” as the Buddha inward, beyond fear and desire, beneath the Bo-tree. For psychologically, as well as mythologically, the sense of such a female by a spring is of an apparition of the abyss: psychologically, the unconscious; mythologically, the Land below Waves, Hell, Purgatory, or Heaven. She is a portion of oneself, one’s destiny, or, as Schopenhauer states in his meditation on Fate, one’s secret intention for oneself. Rachel at the well, in the legend of Jacob; Zipporah with her sisters at the well, in the legend of the young Moses;^{Note 53} in the world of Stephen Dedalus, the girl wading in the stream played such a part, and in that of Bloom, Molly, his ample spouse, the sum of all the nymphs and matrons, memories and prospects, of his life.

“She is the man’s solace for all the bitterness of life,” states Jung in discussion of the anima, this perilous image of Woman. “And, at the same time, she is the great illusionist, the seductress, who draws him into life with her māyā — and not only into life’s reasonable and useful aspects, but into its frightful paradoxes and ambivalences where good and evil, success and ruin, hope and despair, counterbalance one another. Because she is his greatest danger she demands from a man his greatest, and if he has it in him she will receive it.”^{Note 54}

In a rather amazing speech, delivered in Vienna on the occasion of Freud’s eightieth birthday, May 6, 1936, Thomas Mann discoursed on both the psychology and the mystery of such personifications of fate. He was then at work on Joseph and His Brothers, of which he had just completed Volume III, Joseph in Egypt. In Volume I, The Tales of Jacob, he had introduced Rachel, his heroine, standing by a desert well, and described her, both before and after marriage, as her husband’s śakti-anima. In Volume II, Young Joseph, the focus of the adolescent anima fixation of Rachel’s very handsome son was the beauty of his own body, reminiscent of that of his departed mother; and on a fateful day when he was flaunting his father’s special gift to him, his mother’s wedding veil (his “coat of many colors”), he was tossed by his indignant brothers into a second well — through which he passed, in Volume III, into Egypt, to encounter there, in Potiphar’s wife, an anima figure of such scope that he was unable to meet its challenge and ended in the Pharaoh’s jail: once again in the pit of his own (and as Mann tells the tale, also Israel’s) unconscious.

Now one could have thought that this mighty novelist, on the eightieth birthday of the most influential psychologist of his time, might have seized upon the occasion — with the old man there before him — to acknowledge Freud’s influence on his own creative life. But no! The leading theme of his eulogy was that, though he recognized strains of relationship between his own ideas and those of the great psychologist — deriving, as he believed, from their common spiritual descent from the masters of German romanticism (Goethe, Novalis, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the rest) — he had discovered the works of Freud only after his own ideas had been placed before the world in his earliest novel and short stories, Buddenbrooks, “Tristan,” “Tonio Kröger,” and so on; while in his writing of the Joseph novels the ideas by which he was being most fruitfully inspired were of C. G. Jung (“an able but somewhat ungrateful scion of the Freudian school,” as he termed him ); particularly Jung’s application of analytical evidence (as Mann expressed the idea) “to construct a bridge between Occidental thought and Oriental esoteric,” reuniting Freudian clinical psychology with its antecedents, not only in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, but also in Oriental wisdom and that philosophia perennis which had been for millenniums and forever both implicit and explicit in the universal pictorial script of myth. And the master novelist brought forward in evidence to this point, the “pregnant and mysterious idea” (as he called it) developed by Schopenhauer in his paper “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual” as representing (to use Mann’s words again) “the most profound and mysterious point of contact between Freud’s natural-scientific world and Schopenhauer’s philosophic one.”

“Precisely,” said Mann in summation of this theme, “as in a dream it is our own will which unconsciously appears as inexorable objective destiny, everything in it proceeding out of ourselves and each of us being the secret theater-manager of his own dream; so also in reality, the great dream which a single essence, the will itself, dreams with us all, our fate, may be the product of our inmost selves, of our wills, and we are actually ourselves bringing about what seems to be happening to us.”^{Note 55}

Mann then quoted the words of Jung in his “significant introduction” to The Tibetan Book of the Dead (to which astounding work Jung himself had declared he owed “not only many stimulating ideas and discoveries, but also many fundamental insights”):^{Note 56} “It is so much more straightforward, more dramatic, impressive, and therefore more convincing, to see how things happen to me, than to observe how I make them happen.”^{Note 57}

“The giver of all given conditions resides in ourselves,” declared Mann, again quoting Jung.^{Note 58} “All phenomena merely arise from false notions in the mind,” the Buddhist sage Ashvaghosha had said two thousand years before;^{Note 59} and Schopenhauer: “Life accompanies the will as inseparably as the shadow accompanies the body; and if will exists, so will life, the world, exist.”^{Note 60}

It is possible, even probable — indeed, I would say, it is evident — that our poet Wolfram von Eschenbach also had such an idea in mind: at least in relation to the apparition of the Grail Castle in Parzival’s way and the Lady Orgeluse in Gawain’s. These events are clearly functions of the states of readiness of the knights. But all the other episodes are too. In fact, this correlation between will and appearance, readiness and experience, subjectivity and object — as in dream — is exactly what gives to mythic tales their quality of revelation. And one of the most amazing things about modern thought is the way in which it is coming back — by one route or another — to this deeply mysterious primordial sense of life in this world as (in Schopenhauer’s words) “a vast dream, dreamed by a single being.”

The dreamer Gawain, however, seems not to have been as aware as his poet that it was he himself who had made the fascinating Lady Orgeluse appear beside that spring on the whirling mountain, as the mirrored shape, in the form of a woman, of the moving principle of his life. It was so much more dramatic and impressive to see her as one who had just happened to be sitting waiting for him in that place! But he now was hers and she his; though there were still to be trials, many trials, and of increasing force, to test his willingness to let go of himself. She had withdrawn him in service to her love from the world of those who were merely of this world. As we have seen, when he had met his first mortifying tests, he was ferried to the yonder shore, to which his lady had already passed, and there, in the ferryman’s home, within sight of her Marvelous Castle itself, he slept.

In the imagery of alchemy, the elementary substance to be sublimated has been now placed in the vas, the retort, for the fires of great trials, and hermetically sealed.

VI. The Castle of Marvels

BOOK XI: THE PERILOUS BED

When, at the first light of day, he woke, Gawain noticed that the wall of his room had many windows, and, rising to enjoy the birdsong of dawn, was amazed to remark that the ladies over in the castle were all still moving about, awake. He had entered the realm of those tireless forces that operate without thought of fatigue in nature and the psyche; the same to which Goethe’s Faust descended with a magic key in hand to release the shade of Helen of Troy: “The Realm of the Mothers.” There as Goethe tells:

Göttinnen thronen hehr in Einsamkeit,

Um sie kein Ort, noch weniger eine Zeit;

Von ihnen sprechen ist Verlegenheit.

Die Mutter sind es!^{Note 61}

Gawain was to find here his mother, grandmother, and two sisters, none of whom, however, would recognize him; for they and all about them were under an enchantment, bound, like the figures of a dream, by laws of a strange twilight compulsion, the force of which Gawain was to break. The same Loathly Damsel had announced the Grail adventure and this: the two enchantments were reciprocal. Parzival’s task it would be to release the Grail King and people of his realm; Gawain’s, the Lady Orgeluse and the bound folk of her Castle of Marvels: Gawain, therefore, was on the female side, as Parzival on the male, of the same Waste Land spell of life in death. And as Christ, crucified, descended into Hell to break the law of Hell and release the souls of the just from that same eternal death to which Dante thirteen centuries later condemned Paolo and Francesca, Tristan and Isolt, Lancelot and Guinevere, so these two supreme knights of the gospel of loyalty in love were to renew for their day (at least in Wolfram’s view) the life-releasing redemptive lesson — O felix culpa! — of Paul’s message in Romans 11:32.

“O certe necessarium Adae peccatum,” we read in the prayers to be recited Holy Saturday at the blessing of the Paschal candle: “O truly needful sin of Adam, which was blotted out by the death of Christ! O happy fault, which deserved to possess such and so great a Redeemer! This is the night of which it is written: And the night shall be as light as the day; and the night is my light in my enjoyments.”^{Note 62}

Gawain, gazing from the window — between night and day, as it were — into Hamlet’s “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns,”^{Note 63} was at precisely that point in the archetypal ordeal of death and transformation where Christ at Gethsemane prayed that the ordeal before him might be withdrawn; and his disciples slept, for in them “the spirit indeed was willing, but the flesh was weak.”^{Note 64} In Gawain the flesh too would have to be willing; for it was himself alone who was about to endure the ordeal. He gazed long at those ladies, wondering, then thought, “I shall honor them by going back to sleep” ; and when again he woke, he found the daughter of the ferryman sitting by his bedside on the carpet.

“God keep you, little lady,” he said, and she answered that both she and her family wished he might stay and be their lord. But when he asked why all those ladies were in the castle, with a look of horror she burst into tears. “Oh, don’t ask me that!” she cried. “Ask anything else!” At which point her father came in, who, when he saw his daughter in that horrified state and his night’s guest still abed, supposing that something else had happened, reassured her. “Bene, don’t cry. When this sort of thing happens in play, it may at first make you angry, but soon it will be all right.”

Gawain assured him nothing had occurred (“though,” as Wolfram states, “if it had, the father would not have been angry”), then asked again about the ladies, and he too, with a cry of anguish, pleaded with his guest not to insist. Gawain, however, did insist and finally was answered: “You are in the Land of Marvels, at the Castle of Marvels, about to enter the Bed of Marvels, where your end is going to be death.”

“Then,” said Gawain, undaunted, “you must give me your advice.”

“If God lets it appear that you are not doomed,” the ferryman told him, “you will become the lord of this land and all those ladies, with many a knight besides, who are held here by enchantment. However, should you turn at this point and depart, you would suffer no dishonor: for fame is already abundantly yours from your defeat of Lischoys Gwelljus, who arrived here questing for the Grail.”^{Note 65}

Gawain stood firm, and his host then offered him his own shield. “My shield,” he said, “is sound.” Then he told Gawain that on arriving at the castle he would see a merchant at the gate with a bounty of marvelous wares. He was to buy something, leave his horse with the man, and proceed to the Bed of Marvels. “And never let go of this shield or of your sword; for though you have known adventures before, they will have been child’s play to this. When you think your troubles over, they will have just begun.”

The brave knight mounted; the boatman’s daughter wept; and at the gate Gawain did as told. The merchant’s booth was high and spacious, and not all the gold of Baghdad would have paid the worth of its wares. “Sir, if you live,” the merchant said to him, “everything here, I and all that I own, will be yours.” He took charge of Gringuljete, and Gawain, going on, entered a great hall with a ceiling of many hues, like a peacock’s tail. Many couches stood about, where the ladies had been sitting, all of whom, however, had withdrawn. He passed through and on into a chamber where he saw, in the middle of the floor, the Marvel Bed.

Figure 86. The Perilous Bed (carved ivory, France, c. 1330–1350)

It stood on four wheels made of rubies on a floor of jasper, chrysolite, and sard, so smooth that he could scarcely keep his feet; and every time he tried to touch it, the bed darted from his reach — as Heinrich Zimmer has humorously said, “like a reluctant bride in rebellion against the embrace being forced upon her.”^{Note 66} In desperation, heavy shield and all, the knight gave a great leap and landed directly in the bed’s middle, whereupon, with the greatest speed anyone has ever seen, that irritating article of furniture began dashing, bumping back and forth, slamming into all four walls with such force the entire castle shook. Getting little rest in that bed, though lying on his back, Gawain covered himself with his shield and gave himself up to God. The noise subsided and the bed stood quiet in the middle of the floor. But Gawain remembered the warning.

Abruptly five hundred bolts from as many slings flew at him from all sides; next, arrows from as many crossbows struck and quivered in the shield. A hideous burly churl, garbed in a surcoat, bonnet, and pair of pantaloons, all of fishskin, rushed at him with a prodigious club — who, however, when the knight sat up, backed out with a curse and a great lion dashed into the chamber in his stead (Like the fish, so is the lion a symbol of the power of the Goddess. See, for example, Occidental Mythology, Figure 12.). Gawain sprang to the floor with his shield, at which the lion struck so fiercely its talons stuck, and the knight sliced off that leg, which remained hanging there while the animal ran about on three, the floor becoming so wet with its blood Gawain could scarcely stand. Finally, with a prodigious pounce, the beast flew at Gawain, whose sword went through its chest, and it fell dead, with the warrior, dazed and bleeding from its blows, unconscious on its back.

Presently a maiden peered into the quiet room and her cry apprised the ladies of the condition of their knight. She tore a bit of sable from his gambeson, held it to his nose, and the hair a little stirred: he was alive. When water was brought, she forced her ring between his teeth and poured very slowly, watching. He revived and, giving thanks, begged her forgiveness for the unseemly state in which he had been found. “If you would not mention it to anyone,” he said, “I would be grateful.”

He had fifty wounds or more. The four hundred ladies of the castle were able, however, to restore him, chief among them being his own grandmother, Queen Amive, the mother of King Arthur, who had no idea who he was. She ordered a bed to be set for him by the fire, applied salves brought by the sorceress Cundrie from Munsalvaesche of the Grail, gave him an herb to make him sleep, and at nightfall brought him food. Noble ladies stood all about; he had never known such attendance. Yet, as he regarded them, every one of loveliest form, the only yearning in his heart was for his Orgeluse.

BOOK XII: THE KING OF THE WOOD

1.

The knight woke next morning in the greatest pain, not so much from his wounds as from the yearning in his heart; and he rose, donned the rich clothes set out for him, strolled from his room across the sumptuous hall, and climbed a winding stair at the end of it into a circular tower rising high above the roof, where he found an amazing pillar, wrought by sorcery. The whole tower had been brought from the lands of Feirefiz by the necromancer Clinschor. Its windows were of various gems; so too its roof and columns. And to Gawain it seemed that he could see in that marvelous central pillar all the lands round about, and the people there riding and walking, running or standing still. He sat down to watch, and had scarcely done so when the old queen, his grandmother, entered, accompanied by his mother, Sangive, and his two sisters, Itonje and sweet Cundrie (Not the sorceress Cundrie of Munsalvaesche.), none of whom, however, yet realized who he was.

“Sir,” the old queen said, “you should be sleeping.” She bade him kiss the ladies, which he did, and then he asked about the pillar. “No hammer can destroy it,” he was told; “and its light shines for six miles around. It was stolen from Feirefiz’s queen, Secundille, by the necromancer Clinschor.”

As he gazed, he saw two riders approaching on the meadows where he had jousted with Lischoys the day before: a lady leading a knight. And when he realized who she was, her image passed through his eyes to his heart as swiftly and keenly as hellebore (the sneezing herb) into a nose.

“That is the Duchess of Logroys,” the old queen said. “I wonder who it is she has snared now! Why, it’s Florant the Turkoyte! He’s a valiant man, too strong for you now, with all your wounds unhealed.”

Gawain got up, calling for his fighting gear, went below, and while fair eyes wept, mounted Gringuljete, scarcely holding his shield for the pain. He was ferried across by his friend, and when the Turkoyte came at him galloping, Gawain’s well-aimed point met his visor and he fell, a colorful flower of knighthood spread upon the flowers of the earth. He pledged security, the ferryman took his horse, and the victor then turned gladly to his lady.

“That lion’s paw in your shield is quite a sight,” she said. “All those holes in it make you pretty proud, and those ladies up there think you wonderful. Well, go back to them! You would never dare what I have in store for you now — if you still have heart for my love.”

This was to be her final test. She was about to reveal who she was. And to the modern reader, its accord with the Bronze Age rite discussed by Frazer in The Golden Bough will perhaps be a surprise; though (God knows!) after all that we have been through together in the way of exhibits of the archetypes of myth, it should be, rather, an expected satisfaction.

“You must bring me a wreath,” the lady said, “from the branch of a certain tree. By that deed you will earn my praise, and if you then ask for my love, it will be yours.”

Frazer in The Golden Bough, asked and resolved two questions; first: “Why had Diana’s priest at Nemi, the King of the Wood, to slay his predecessor?” and second: “Why before doing so had he to pluck the branch of a certain tree which the public opinion of the ancients identified with Virgil’s Golden Bough?”^{Note 67}

The priest at Nemi who had had to slay his predecessor was in the service of Diana as the Goddess Mother of Life. Her sanctuary was a grove about a lake where the object of veneration was an oak, of which the priest, the King of the Wood, was the consort and protector. The bough to be plucked was of the mistletoe (according to Frazer’s view); a plant that grows aloft, on the limbs of trees, whence it was culled by the Druids for ritual use. It is green throughout the year and when plucked and dried turns golden, hence typifying the ever-living force personified in the priest himself. The man who plucked it came into possession of this force and, if he then could slay the one before him, became an eligible consort of the goddess. That the knight in the service of the Duchess of Logroys had to prove himself in this adventure speaks volumes for the authenticity of Wolfram’s understanding of his symbols.

When the ladies of the Castle of Marvels saw their knight turn his steed to follow the duchess into the wood, they wept. “Alas!” the old queen sighed. “The Ford Perilous won’t be healthy for those wounds.” The couple, disappearing from view, rode along a road that was wide and straight into the beautiful grove known as Clinschor’s wood, a stand of tamarisk trees, through which they continued to a great ravine filled with the roar of a mightily rushing torrent, beyond which the tree could be seen from which the wreath was to be culled.

“Sir, that tree,” said the lady, “is guarded by the man who robbed me of my joy. Bring me a branch of it and never will knight have gained a greater reward than yours in the service of love. But you will have to force your mount to a mighty leap to clear the Perilous Ford.”

Gawain galloped on, heard the terrible roar of water through its wide and deep ravine, dug his spurs into his horse’s flanks, and with a vast spring nearly made it. The beast touched the farther bank with its front two feet, and the lady broke into tears when she saw the horse and rider fall. Gawain, though encumbered by his armor, yet contrived to pull himself ashore, then ran downstream to where Gringuljete was being whirled close to the bank and, catching the bridle, drew his mount to land, where the animal stood and shook itself dry. The knight mounted, rode to the tree, plucked the bough, and, when he had wreathed his helmet, saw a splendid knight riding toward him unarmed, wearing a bonnet of peacock plumes and a cloak of grass-green samite trimmed with ermine, so long it trailed the ground on both sides.

“Sir, I have not yielded my claim to that wreath,” said the knight. He was King Gramoflanz of Rosche Sabins, who had sworn never to fight fewer than two knights at a time. “By the state of your shield I perceive that you have survived the Bed of Marvels. Were I not so friendly with Clinschor, I should have had to endure that too. He and I are the enemies of the Lady Orgeluse, whose noble husband, Cidegast, the Duke of Logroys, I killed; and I made her my captive, offering my lands, held her for a whole year; but she repaid my service with hate (Compare the case of Condwiramurs.). I tell you this, for I know that she has promised you her love, since you are here to seek my death.”

The king told Gawain he would not battle him alone but asked instead a service. “I have here a token, a ring,” he said; “for I have turned my thoughts from the duchess to a lady in the castle of which you are now the lord, and I would have you bring her this ring.” He named Gawain’s own sister Itonje, and when Gawain had given his word then said, “There is but one man in the world I would fight alone, and that man is Gawain; for his father treacherously killed mine.”

To which the knight now bearing both the ring and the wreath responded: “Sir, it seems to me strange indeed that you should hope to gain a maid’s love whose father you charge with treachery and brother you would slay. My name is Gawain.”

“I am both glad and sad that he whom I hate with a hate unappeased is so noble a knight,” the other answered; “pleased, though, that we shall fight. And since our fame will be increased if ladies are invited, I shall bring along fifteen hundred. You have those of the Castle of Marvels. Arthur’s whole court, too, should be invited. Sir, we shall meet the sixteenth day from this, on the jousting field of Joflanz.”

Gawain, with a great bound across the water, rode to Orgeluse with the bough, and she cast herself at his feet. “Sir,” she said, “my love, I am not worthy of the risks I have asked.”

He had won, but now became stern. “The shield of knighthood deserves respect and you have sinned against it. Here, lady, is the wreath, accept it. Never use your beauty again to bring disgrace to any knight. And if I am still to be mocked, I can do without your love.”

She was in tears. “Sir, when I tell you of the sorrows of my heart, you will, I hope, forgive. Cidegast, my noble husband, was a unicorn of good faith (The unicorn was symbolic of purity in love and, as such, a figure of Christ.). He was my life; I, his heart — I lost him: slain by Gramoflanz. Sir, I beg you. How could I have given myself to anyone less the knight than he? These have been my tests, and you are gallant, you are gold.”

Appeased, Gawain glanced about. “I have just pledged myself to meet your enemy. Unless death do me in, I shall put an end to his works. And now, my lady, my advice would be that you should here and now behave honorably. There is no one about. Grant your favor.”

“In iron arms?” she answered. “I should hardly be moved to warmth. At the castle I shall not resist.”

She was embraced in his iron arms. She wept, he lifted her to her mount, and as they rode she continued to weep. He asked her why.

“You are not the first,” she answered, “through whom I have sought to kill Gramoflanz. There was a king once offered me his service, a young king named Anfortas. Though young, he was the lord of what all men most desire, and it was he who gave me that booth full of wares that stands before the castle gate. But in my service, striving like you for my love, all that he gained was sorrow; and my grief for his misfortune is even greater than for Cidegast.”

The two legends — dramatically, suddenly — have come together as one: of the Castle of Marvels and the Castle of the Grail: the wound of the Maimed King had been acquired in the service of Orgeluse. Like the wounded knight Urians, like Lischoys Gwelljus and Gawain himself, he had been sent against the King of the Wood to regain, in the service of love, the office usurped by one who, refusing that service, had thought to prevail by force. I cannot find that Wolfram has made clear the relationship of Gramoflanz and Clinschor, his ally, to the young heathen knight from the precincts of the earthly Paradise whose lance, engraved with the name of the Grail, dealt the fearful wound to Anfortas. However, a general formula is evident, of which the sense is clear enough. As Orgeluse had been outraged by Gramoflanz’s murder of her spouse and usurpation of her grove, so had Feirefiz’s queen, Secundille, by Clinschor’s theft of her magic tower. Queen Secundille, who had heard reports of the Grail, sent gifts to its guardian, King Anfortas: the monsters Cundrie and her brother Malcreatiure, along with those gems that were now in the booth before the Castle of Marvels. Anfortas had presented both the gems and Malcreatiure to his lady, Orgeluse, and then, one day riding forth with the cry “Amor!” had been wounded by a heathen spear from the realm of Secundille. Putting all of which together, we learn that the realm of nature, represented in the West by Orgeluse and her Diana grove, and in the East by Secondille, Feirefiz, and the young heathen quester for the Grail, is spontaneously moved (as in Mann’s view) with yearning for the kingdom of the spirit. However, in that kingdom — namely Christendom — the just relationship of nature to spirit in mutual love has been violated and two ineligible kings now reign: Anfortas in the spiritual Castle of the Grail, and Gramoflanz in the nature-grove of the goddess Diana-Orgeluse. And that Wolfram intended to represent these two offices as complementary counterparts is clearly evident in the fact that the bonnets of the two kings, Anfortas and Gramoflanz, are alike of peacock plumes.

In early Christian art the peacock, like the phoenix, was symbolic of the Resurrection. Its flesh, it was believed, would not decay; in the words of Augustine: “Who was it but God that made the flesh of a dead peacock to remain always sweet, and without any putrefaction?”^{Note 68} Moreover, the peacock annually molts and puts on its bright feathers anew, like the universe each year. As we read in a late text:

The serene and starry sky and the shining sun are peacocks. The deep blue firmament shining with a thousand brilliant eyes, and the sun rich with the colors of the rainbow, present the appearance of a peacock in all the splendor of its eye-bespangled feathers. When the sky of the thousand-rayed sun is hidden by clouds, or veiled by autumnal mists, it again resembles the peacock, which, in the dark part of the year, like a great number of vividly colored birds, sheds its beautiful plumage and becomes drab and unadorned; the crow which had put on the peacock’s feathers then caws with the other crows in funereal concert. [Compare the Raven theme in the cycle of Figure 5.] In winter the peacock-crow has nothing left to it except its shrill disagreeable cry, which is not dissimilar to that of the crow. It is commonly said of the peacock that it has an angel’s feathers, a devil’s voice, and a thief’s walk.”^{Note 69}

Figure 87. The Peacock's Tail (Cauda Pavonis)

In alchemy the technical term “peacock’s tail,” cauda pavonis (Figure 87), referred to a stage of the process immediately following the mortificatio and ablutio (Figure 58), when in the vas there appeared, or seemed to appear, “many colors” (omnes colores). “In the gentle heat,” states a late alchemical work, “the mixture will liquefy and begin to swell up, and at God’s command will be endowed with spirit, which will soar upward bearing the stone and produce new colors.” The first color will be “the green of Venus.” “Green,” comments Dr. Jung, “is the color of the Holy Ghost, of life, procreation and resurrection.”^{Note 70} The green phase terminates when the color becomes a livid purple symbolic of the Lord’s passion, at which moment the “philosophical tree” puts forth its blossoms and the phase known as the Regimen of Mars begins, showing “the ephemeral colors of the rainbow and the peacock at their most glorious”; and “in these days,” the text then tells, “the hyacinthine color appears”^{Note 71} — which is the very color of the garnet-hyacinth table-stone that was set before the Fisher King by the maidens clothed in garments “greener than grass,” on which the Grail-stone was to be placed.^*

*The ceiling of the Castle of Marvels, also, was “like a peacock’s tail”. Dr. Goetz sees in Wolfram’s description of this fairy castle on a Celtic “Isle of Women” the influence of reports of the fabulous Baghdad palace of the Abbasid caliphs: Qasr-at-Tāj, on the Tigris, with its cupola and observation platform (destroyed 1154, rebuilt 1178). The mirror-pillar stolen from the Indian queen Secundille suggests the polished steel column Qutb-Minār, now standing in the Quwwat-ul-Islām mosque in Delhi, taken from the Hindu capital Ajmer. The very young Hindu queen of Ajmer when it fell (1195) was named Samyogita, celebrated in Old Hindi bardic song. Somyogitā > Somgita > Sogunda > Secunda, plus -ilia (Italian diminutive) >Secundille. She ruled under protection of the Muslim viceroy (who was later the first Sultan of Delhi), Qutb ud-dīn Aibak: the Beg (“Bey,” a Turkish title of nobility) as handsome as Ai, “the moon.” But the moon is mottled: compare Feirefiz (Old French, vair, “dappled,” fils “son”). The lunar image links Feirefiz to the mythic moon-hero context of Osiris, Tammuz, etc.

The eyes in the tail plumes of the peacock suggest the opening from within of the eyes of the ground of being, to view the universe of its own body. They are the eyes (stars) of the night sky; the eyes of the immanent Eye Goddess (Figure 28); those eyes in the extended palms of the offered hands of the merciful Bodhisattva which may be likened to the wounds of Christ.

Or the eye of the peacock feather is that in the middle of the forehead, which opens in man to the vision of eternity. Again, it is the fiery sun door (the lion mouth of Figure 28): the eye of the Cyclops in the Odyssey, through which Odysseus passed.^{Note 72} In this sense, as the bird of the eye of danger, the peacock serves in Hindu iconography as the mount of the war-god Kartikeya (compare above: “the Regimen of Mars”), the young and fair, but fierce divinity who stands guard before the gate of the lofty mountain paradise of his father Śiva; in which role he is comparable to the cherub that Yahweh stationed with a flaming sword before the gate of Paradise^{Note 73} — from which very gate, as we have heard, the young heathen prince came forth from whose lance the unworthy Grail King, Anfortas, received his wound.

There can be no doubt that Wolfram knew exactly what he was doing when he put peacock plumes in the bonnets of both King Gramoflanz, the guardian of the tree — the World Tree, the philosophical tree, the tree of the Garden, the tree of Christ’s Cross, the Bo-tree of Buddhahood — and the wounded Fisher King, whose fishline from the Great Above to the Great Below is equally the axis mundi: awaiting everywhere, with its baited hook, in the waters of this world, to haul us up to the lotus boat of the radiant Fisher of Men with the peacock feathers pluming from his cap.

2.

Nor was Gawain, who had now been accepted by the lady of the Tree, the only member of his uncle’s Round Table wearing on his helm at this time the wreath of victory. For, as the lady confessed, still weeping, as they rode back from the Perilous Ford: “Every day of the week, every week of the year, I have sent out companies against Gramoflanz. Knights too rich to serve me for pay served, as you did, for love. And there was never one but I could have his service; none, that is, save one, whose name was Parzival. He came riding to the meadow and when my knights attacked him, he felled five. I offered him both my land and myself, but he replied that he already had a wife; and the Grail, he declared, caused him grief enough. He wanted no grief more.”

We are to hear nothing more from Wolfram of this encounter of Parzival and Orgeluse. Wagner, however, devotes to it his entire second act. Act I is at the Temple of the Grail; Act III is to be there again. In Act II, however, the curtain rises upon Klingsor, sitting high in the magic tower of his Castle of Marvels, watching in his necromantic mirror (Wagner’s adaptation of the radiant radarpillar) the unwitting approach of Parsifal, who here is still the Great Fool. Klingsor’s castle and Titurel’s Temple of the Grail are in Wagner’s legend opposed, as evil and good, dark and light, in a truly Manichaean dichotomy. They are not, as in the earlier work, equally enspelled by a power alien to both.

Moreover, Kundry, in whom Wagner has fused the chief female roles and characters of the legend (Orgeluse, Cundrie, and Sigune, together with something of the Valkyrie, a touch of Goethe’s Ewig-Weibliches, and great deal of the Gnostic Sophia [Divine Wisdom, fallen (or enspelled) through ignorance; entrapped in the toils of this world illusion, of which — ironically — her own captured energy is the creative force.]) is herself enspelled by Klingsor and, against her will, his creature, yearning to be free. It was she, as his creature and agent — not, as in Wolfram’s work, in her own interest, against his — who seduced the Grail King, Amfortas. And it had been when he was lying heedless in her toils, like Samson seduced by Delilah, that Klingsor, stealing his unguarded lance — the same that had pierced Christ’s side — delivered a wound that would never heal until a savior — the prophesied “guileless fool” — should appear and touch it with the selfsame point.

Such a wound suggests, obviously, the wound of the arrow of love, which can be healed only by a touch of the one from whom the arrow came. In Wagner’s work, however, the allegory is of lust and violence transformed by innocence to compassion (eros and thanatos to agapē). In Malory’s Morte Darthur, Book II (“The Tale of Balin”) (Thomas Malory flourished c. 1470. His Morte Darthur is derived largely from much earlier Old French texts, Book II being from a version of the Prose Merlin [c. 1215] preserved in a single manuscript of a date c. 1300. An Old Spanish and an Old Portuguese translation also exist.), there is an evil knight named Garlon who is killed (Chapter XIV) when his head is split by the blow of a sword and the broken truncheon of his own spear shoved into the wound. In Wolfram’s epic, Trevrizent states that when the planets are in certain courses, or the moon at a certain phase, the king’s wound pains terribly and the poison on the point of the spear becomes hot. “Then,” he declares, “they lay that point on the wound and it draws the chill from the king’s body, which hardens to glass all about the spear, like ice.”^{Note 74}

There is the Greek legend, furthermore, of the hero Telephos, wounded by Achilles in the upper thigh with a wound that will not heal. An oracle declares, “He that wounded shall also heal!” and after a long and painful quest Telephos finds Achilles and is healed. Or, according to another reading, the cure is effected by the weapon: the remedy being scraped off the point and sprinkled on the wound.^{Note 75}

It is an old old mythic theme related to that of Medusa, whose blood from the left side brought death, but from the right, healing.^{Note 76} Or we may think of the elder Isolt and the poison of Morold’s sword. In Wolfram’s Parzival it plays but a minor part: is only once mentioned by Trevrizent. And the lance, moreover, is there in the Castle of the Grail, not Clinschor’s palace. Wagner, in contrast, has elevated the lance theme to the leading role in his opus, in his own mind equating its poison with that of Tristan’s wound. And in fact, he had been still at work on his Tristan when the idea of a Parsifal first occurred to him; still at the height, moreover, of his own Tristan affair with Mathilde Wesendonck, and indeed, even living, together with his tortured wife, Minne, in a house named the “Asyl,” that had been provided by Mathilde and her patient spouse, Otto, adjacent to their home.

The year, as we read in Wagner’s own story of his life, was 1857; the month, April; and the day — Good Friday. Richard and Minne had arrived the previous September in Zurich, and it was there, in the “Asyl,” as he tells, that he finished, that winter, Act I of Siegfried and commenced work seriously on Tristan.

Now came [he states] beautiful spring weather, and on Good Friday, for the first time in this house, I woke to sunshine. The garden had turned green, the birds were singing, and at last I could sit up on the roof-tower of the cottage to enjoy a promising bit of long-desired quiet. Full of all this, suddenly I realized that today was, yes! Good Friday, and recalled how deeply a sense of the admonition of this day had once before struck me in W olfram’s Parzival. I had not occupied myself at all with this legend since that time of my stay in M arienbad [1845],^{Note 77} when I conceived the Meistersinger and Lohengrin; but now its ideal essentials came back to me in overpowering form, and from that Good Friday’s inspiration I suddenly conceived an entire drama which with a few strokes I sketched out rapidly in three acts.^{Note 78}

Already in Tannhäuser, 1842–1844, the main lines of Wagner’s interpretation of the Grail themes had been anticipated. The “Venusberg Bacchanal” is there a prelude to Klingsor’s Garden of Enchantment, and the song of the poet Tannhäuser in celebration of the love grotto, altogether in the spirit of a Tristan:

So that my yearning may forever burn,

I quicken myself forever at that spring.^{Note 79}

However, the song there assigned to Wolfram as the rival singer in the song contest is (ironically) a paean to love as a heavenly gift — not at all “right through the middle,” between black and white, sky and earth:

Thou comest as though from God,

And I follow at respectful distance.

Two years after his Good Friday morning inspiration in the roof tower of the “Asyl,” Wagner was at work in Lucerne, in May 1859, on the last act of his Tristan, when the analogy of Tristan’s wound with the wound of Amfortas in the opera yet to be written filled him with an appalled realization of the task he had assigned himself. “What a devilish business!” he wrote at that time in a letter to Mathilde. “Imagine, in Heaven’s name, what has happened! Suddenly it has become hideously clear to me: Amfortas is my Tristan of Act III in a state of inconceivable intensification.”^{Note 80} “This ‘intensification,’” comments Thomas Mann to this note,

was the involuntary law of life and growth of Wagner’s productivity, and it derived from his own self-indulgence. He had been laboring all of his life, in fact, on the painand sin-laden accents of Amfortas. They are already heard in the cry of Tannhäuser: “Alas, the weight of sin overwhelms me!” In Tristan they attained to what then seemed to be the ultimate of lacerated anguish. But now, as he had realized with a shock, that would have to be surpassed in Parsifal and raised to an inconceivable intensity. Actually, what he was doing was simply pressing to the limit a statement for which he had always been unconsciously seeking stronger and profounder situations and occasions. The materials of his several works represent but stages — self-transcending inflections — of a unity, a life work self-enclosed, fully rounded, which “unfolds itself,” yet in a certain manner was already there from the start. Which explains the box-within-box, one-inside-another, of his creative conceptions: and tells us also that an artist of this kind, a genius of this spiritual order, is never at work simply on the task, the opus, in hand. Everything else weighs upon him at the same time and adds its burden to the creative moment. Something apparently (but only half apparently) mapped out, like a life plan, comes to view: so that in the year 1862, while he was still composing The Meistersinger, Wagner foretold with complete certainty, in a letter written to von Billow from Bieberich, that Parsifal was going to be his final work — fully twenty years before it was presented. For before that there would be Siegfried, in the midst of which both Tristan and The Meistersinger were going to be put forth; and there was, furthermore, the whole of The Twilight of the Gods to be composed: all to fill out spaces in the work program. He had to carry the weight of The Ring throughout his labors on Tristan, into which latter work, from the outset, the whisper of Parsifal was intruding. And that voice was present still while he was at work on his healthy Lutheran Meistersinger. Indeed, ever since the year, 1845, of the first Dresden production of Tannhäuser, that same voice had been awaiting him. In the year 1848 there came the prose sketch of the Nibelungen myth as a drama, as well as the writing of Siegfried’s Death, from which The Twilight of the Gods was to evolve. In between, from 1846 to ’47, Lohengrin took shape and the action of The Meistersinger was sketched out — both of which works belong, actually, as satyr-play and humorous counterpart, in the Tannhäuser context.

These years of the eighteen-forties, in the midst of which he reached the age of thirty-two, hold together and define the entire work plan of his life, from The Flying Dutchman to Parsifal which plan then was executed in the course of the following four decades, until 1881, by an inward labor on all of its boxedtogether elements simultaneously. Thus in the strictest sense, Wagner’s work is without chronology. It arose in time, it is true; yet was all suddenly there from the start, and all at once.^{Note 81}

In short: in Wagner’s recognition of the wound of the Grail King as the same as that of Tristan — with his Parsifal then standing for an idealized, released, and releasing state of sunlike, boyish innocence — there is a reflex of his own entangled life, with loyalty to anyone or anything but himself the last thought in his mind or strain of truth in his heart. His Parsifal of Act II is still the nature boy of Act I, has gone through no ordeal of theological disillusionment or entry into knighthood, is unmarried, in fact knows nothing yet of either love or life, and is simply — to put it in so many words — a two-hundred-pound bambino with a tenor voice. The baritone Klingsor, gazing into his mirror, sees the innocent approaching, “jung und dumm,” and like the Indian god of love and death, tempter of the Buddha, conjures up, to undo the saving hero, a spectacle of damsels in a garden of enchantment, rushing about, all in disarray, as though suddenly startled from sleep. But, like the Buddha on the immovable spot, sitting beneath the Botree, indifferent to both the allure of sex and the violence of weapons (unlike the Lord Buddha, however, in that he is not full, but empty, of knowledge), Parsifal, the guileless fool, simply has no idea of what these simpering women might be. “How sweet your scent!” he sings to them. “Are you flowers?”

Kundry tells him of his father’s fame and mother’s death; of how she knew his father and mother and has known himself since childhood (another Brünnhilde to a Siegfried); tells him it was she who named him Parsi-fal, the “Pure Fool” (Contrast the meaning of the name in Wolfram’s version: Per-ce-val, “right through the middle.”), and, inviting him to her mothering arms, plants a kiss full on his boy’s mouth with a fervor that fills him first with intense terror, but then… with an appalled realization of the sense of Amfortas’s wound: not, that is to say, with passion for the female, but with compassion for the male!

Amfortas [he cries]! The wound! The wound!

It is burning, now, in my heart.

 

The wound I beheld bleeding:

It is bleeding, now, within me.

Well, that is hardly Wolfram von Eschenbach!

Klingsor, like the tempter of the Buddha, now changing from his character as lord of desire to his other as lord of death,^{Note 82} appears with the precious lance in hand, which with a curse he flings. But again as in the legend of the Buddha, where the weapons of the lord of death, though flung at the savior, never strike him, when the great spear reaches Parsifal it hangs floating overhead; he simply makes the sign of the Cross, reaches up, takes hold of it, and will bear it now to Amfortas (Act III) to heal the sorrowful wound; and as from an earthquake the Castle and Garden of Enchantment disappear, the damsels collapse to the ground like faded flowers (see the Buddha’s “Graveyard Vision”),^{Note 83} and the curtain falls.

“Richard Wagner,” wrote his utterly disillusioned worshiper Nietzsche, “apparently the greatest victor, actually a now decayed and confused decadent, sank suddenly down, helpless and in pieces, before the Christian Cross.”^{Note 84}

One could have wished [he wrote again] that the Wagnerian Parsifal had been meant in a spirit of fun, as a kind of terminal piece and satyr-play with which the great tragic master — in a manner proper to and worthy of himself — might have taken his leave as well from himself as from us, and above all, from Tragedy: i.e., with an extravaganza of the most sublimely mischievous parody of the tragic art itself, and of all that ghastly, ponderous seriousness and agony of yore: that stupidest form of existence, now at last overcome, the un-nature of the ascetic ideal. Parsifal is actually operatic material par excellence. But is Wagner’s Parsifal, then, his secretly superior laugh at himself? his final triumph in supreme artistic freedom and transcendence? Do we have here a Wagner who knows how to laugh at himself?

As I say, one could wish that that were so; for what, if earnestly meant, could this Parsifal be? Must we actually recognize in this (as people have sometimes said of m e), the product of “a hatred of knowledge, intellect, and sensuality, gone mad”? a curse, in one breath of hate, upon both the senses and the mind? an apostasy and reversion to sickly Christian, obscurantist ideals? And even, finally, a work of self-denial, self-cancellation, on the part of an artist, who, up to this, had been dedicated, with all the might of his will, to just the opposite, in the superlative spirituality and sensuality of his art? and not only his art, but also his life?

One recalls how enthusiastically Wagner walked, in his time, in the footsteps of the philosopher Feuerbach [1804–1872]. Feuerbach’s theme of “healthy sensuality”! In the thirties and forties of this century, that had sounded to Wagner, as to many Germans — they called themselves the young Germans — like the Gospel of Redemption. Has he now finally unlearned that song? For, it looks, at least, as though he had made up his mind to unteach it!

Can it be that a hatred of life has got the better of him, as it got the better of Flaubert? For Parsifal is a work of malice and revenge, a secret poison against the preconditions of life, a wicked work. The sermon of chastity is an incitement to pathology, and I would despise anyone who did not feel in Parsifal an attack upon morality itself.^{Note 85}

When Gawain, then, wearing the wreath he had taken from the tree, rode with his lady Orgeluse onto the meadow before the Castle of Marvels, the ferryman pushed out from the other bank with Bene, his daughter, in his craft, and they welcomed the couple aboard. From the castle walls and windows the multitude of ladies joyously watched them ferried across, while the four hundred knights of the castle, whom Gawain had not before seen, colorfully jousted in their honor on the lawns.

BOOK XIII: THE LEGEND OF CLINSCHOR'S WOUND

There was in the castle that evening a festival at which the knights and ladies danced. They had been kept apart by Clinschor’s arts, even unaware of each other, but that enchantment now was undone. Lischoys Gwelljus and the Turkoyte, set free without condition, were brought to the hall by Bene, who turned next to attend her lord Gawain, still in great pain from his wounds. And she was sitting beside him, chatting, when he asked softly to be shown which of the ladies was Itonje, then went to his sister, and after courteous preliminaries presented her with the ring of the man who had challenged him to the death. She blushed. “In my thoughts,” she confessed, “I have already granted him all he desires of me and would have fled to him long since, had I been able to quit this horrid castle.”

In the great hall the knights and ladies, that evening, moved freely among each other. Gawain had sent for good fiddlers. All they knew, however, were the old-style tunes, none of the new from Thuringia; yet many a lovely lady danced and many a handsome knight, pairing now with one, now another; one knight often with two ladies, one at either hand: and if any had wished that evening to offer his service for love, there were chances enough.

Gawain sat watching with his mother, Sangive; Arnive, his grandmother; and the duchess holding his hand. “You had better go to bed now,” said the old queen to him at last. “Will the duchess keep you company tonight and see that you are kept covered?” “He shall be in my care,” the lady answered. Gawain called for the drink to be brought that gave to all the sign of departure, and as she rose to go, the old queen turned to Orgeluse. “Now, you take good care of our knight.” Faithful Bene bore the light before them and continued on with the others, while Gawain, alone with his lady at last, closed tight and made fast the door.

At Arthur’s court, meanwhile, a messenger had arrived, bearing the message of the coming joust of Gawain with Gramoflanz. “Oh, blessed be the hand that wrote you!” the queen exclaimed when the letter came into her hand. “It is now four years and a half, and six weeks, since Gawain and Parzival rode away.” Arthur read the letter through. “Gramoflanz,” said he with angry mien, “must think my nephew another Cidegast. He had troubles enough in that bout! I shall add to his troubles in this.” And when the messenger returned with Arthur’s promise to attend, he told Gawain of the joy of the Round Table at the news of him, alive.

Then his grandmother told him something else. At a window apart, facing the river, he had taken a seat beside her. “Dear lady,” he asked, “can you tell me something of Clinschor?”

Figure 88. Clinschor“Sir,” she answered willingly, “his magic is beyond measure. These marvels here are little, compared with those he holds in many lands. He was once a great noble of Capua. But he offered himself in service to the wife, Queen Iblis (Iblis, Arabic name of Satan, here bestowed upon a heathen queen.), of the King of Sicily. And I now have a secret to tell. Forgive me, it is impolite to mention such things; but when the king discovered him in his wife’s arms, one cut of a knife made him a capon.”

Gawain burst into a loud, long laugh, and before he had finished, she was again talking.

“Magic,” she was saying, “was first invented in a city called Persidia; not Persia, as many people think. Clinschor went there and returned with this magic art. Because of the shame he had suffered, he was so filled with hatred for all, that his greatest pleasure now lies in robbing those who are happiest of their joy, especially those most honored and respected.

“But now, in Rosche Sabins there dwelt a king, Irot, the father of Gramoflanz, who, frightened by Clinschor’s magic, thought to buy his good will by offering him this impregnable mountain with the lands eight miles about, and Clinschor wrought here then this curious work. If the castle were besieged, there would be food for thirty years. When, next, Gramoflanz killed the Duke of Logroys, the duchess, in great fear of both him and his protector, presented Clinschor with the treasure booth that stands before this castle gate, which she had just received as a love-gift from the young Anfortas of Munsalvaesche; and it was then agreed between all that whoever survived the adventure of this castle would be left in peace by Clinschor and have gained both the castle and herself. However, in the meantime every noble knight and lady on Christian soil upon whom Clinschor laid eyes, he bound here in enchantment; and all now have become yours. Release us!”

Need we ask or tell what, or whom, the poet Wolfram might have had in mind when, about the year 1210, he was writing thus of a sterilizing magic brought upon Europe from the Near East by a life-despising castrate holding power over all spirits, good and bad? The King of Sicily at that moment was the infant Frederick II (1194–1250), crowned at Palermo 1198, who on the death of his mother six months later had become the ward of Innocent III (r. 1198–1216), the mightiest pope of all time (Clinschor, derivation uncertain; possibly Provencal, clergier: “clergyman” [Goetz, op. cit., p. 37]).^{Note 86}  The medieval poet Wolfram’s reading of the Waste Land theme was in any case diametrically opposite to that of Richard Wagner: For not the passion of love, but a castrate’s revenge against it, was for him the source of the pall of death over both the palace of life (the Castle of Marvels) and the palace of awe (the Castle of the Grail). Nor would any such magical sign of the Cross as Wagner’s “guileless fool” employs at the climax of Act II have broken the spell of Wolfram’s necromancer. The necromancer himself, Innocent, was employing that very sign to enforce the magic spell of his interdicts, by which kings were undone, cowed, and brought to heel. Such magic allied with duress (Clinschor with Gramoflanz, religion with secular power) was, in Wolfram’s day and age, precisely the force to be undone.

Anfortas, who, like Abelard, was unworthy of his ordination — hence split in two, a pretender — riding forth in quest of integrity, an experience of his own, had immediately entered the field of the allied king and eunuch, the field of his own limitations; and thus, like Joyce’s Bloom and Dedalus, he had “found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible.” He had found his soul, his Lady Soul, whom he was seeking: the Lady Orgeluse. She was not, however, as she seemed. She had been bereaved of her lover in truth; there was a pretender in his stead. Superstition (magic) and violence had usurped the seats of truth and justice. Fear, hate, and deception were in the groves and gardens of desire, and she had been to such a degree dissociated from the spontaneities of innocent life that anyone who would release her to love would have first to undo the spell by which she was enthralled. Anfortas in her service — like Abelard, and for the same reason, by exactly the same enemy — was undone.

Gawain, on the other hand, was one who had spent his life not posing in a role unearned, conferred upon him by anointment, but in quest, sincerely, for his object of desire, and when he found her — after years, not days — he was transfixed, established in his own true center, and knew exactly where he stood. She was, again, the bereaved Orgeluse. But he was no toy king. There was no threat, no fear, either of man or of spirit, that could put him off his course or freeze him to a halt. His trials were proper to his own life and he was consequently their match: hence, at one with his Lady Soul; at peace with her; and in the fair castle of love, the master of his world.

It remained only to make peace as well with the world beyond the broad stream.…

Sitting chatting with his grandmother at the window, Gawain with a start of joy espied on the meadow on the other shore the first of Arthur’s host arriving with banners, colors, spears, and immediately setting up pavilions. With love in his heart, tears in his eyes, he watched, then ordered all his own castle company — knights and ladies, squires and pages — to make ready with their own banners and tents to cross and welcome his uncle’s court. Arthur and his queen were introduced to Arnive, the king’s mother, Sangive, his sister, and the sisters of Gawain. All kissed and laughed, wept and laughed and kissed again. Moreover, many a knight who had been mourning Gawain’s death came smiling into his tent. But the seneschal Keie only murmured, “God surely does work wonders! Where did Gawain get all these queens?”

Next day a third host, that of Gramoflanz, arrived, and Gawain then rode forth onto a broad plain, alone, for exercise, where he saw a lone knight galloping his way, wearing armor redder than rubies.…

But we have heard of that man before and our tale here returns to its main stem.

VII. Third Intermezzo: Mythogenesis

Gawain is the basic Arthurian knight, in both his character and his adventures the closest to the Celtic sphere. Gringuljete, his horse, like many another fairy beast, was white with shining red ears (Compare the words of the Goddess Morrigan quoted in Occidental Mythology, from “The Golden Book of Lecan”: “I will become a white red-eared cow, with a hundred white red-eared cows behind me.”), and his sword Excalibur (which had been conferred on him when Arthur dubbed him knight) flashed, when drawn from its sheath, like lightning. The knight himself increased in strength every day until noon, like the sun, after which his fighting powers declined; whence it was customary at Arthur’s court, in deference to Gawain, to hold tournaments in the morning hours. “Apparently,” as Heinrich Zimmer has remarked, “the knight was a solar god, masquerading under medieval armament, doomed, as ever, to expire every twilight and pass into the ‘Land of No Return.’ Like Osiris, he there became the king, the sun, of the netherworld, but, like the rolling solar disk, traversed and broke free from the ‘great below,’ to reappear reborn in the east as the orb of the new day.”^{Note 87} And in the words of Professor Loomis: “That Gawain is a counterpart of Cuchulinn is one of the commonplaces of Arthurian scholarship.”^{Note 88}

In the oral, creative period of Arthurian romance — from, say, the time of the Norman Conquest to that of the Tristan of Thomas of Britain (1066–c. 1160) — Sir Gawain was almost certainly the champion of that basic adventure later assigned to practically every hero of the century, the rescue of a harassed chatelaine from either an assault upon her own castle (Gahmuret and the Black Queen of Zazamanc, Parzival and Condwiramurs) or abduction to another (Lancelot’s rescue of Guinevere from the castle of Meleagant). The other great Celtic hero deed (also assigned to Lancelot) of running off with another man’s wife came into Arthurian romance through Tristan, whose own court, however, was of his uncle Mark, who had horse’s ears — possibly red.

Arthur and his nephew Gawain, Mark and his nephew Tristan, stand for separate strains of invention, adapting related Celtic mythic themes to the modes of the French, Provençal and Norman, twelfth-century courts. As already noted, the earliest versions of these adaptations are lost to us. So too is all record of the lives of the Welsh and Breton tabulators who brought them into being. However, there is that one master, apparently a great master, of whom the name, at least, is known, written variously as Breri, Bleheris, and Blihis,^{Note 89} and of whom Thomas of Britain wrote that he knew “all the feats and all the tales of all the kings and all the courts who had ever lived in Britain,”^{Note 90} while a second author, anonymous, states that he possessed the knowledge of the secret of the Grail.^{Note 91} A third, likewise anonymous, tells that he was “bom and begotten in Wales” and was, moreover, the man who introduced the legend of Gawain to the court of the Count of Poitiers (This count, as already remarked, would have been either William IX of Aquitaine (1071–1127) or William X (d. 1137), respectively the grandfather and father of Queen Eleanor [1122–1204]).^{Note 92} So that in one sensational package, opened to view at the crucial court of Poitiers, c. 1120–1137, one Celtic bard could disclose in seed the whole magical world to come of Arthurian romance: the youthful dream, holding all the symbols of destiny, of the waking modern Occidental soul.

The earliest years of formation of this dream of youth belong to that period mixed of resurgent barbarism and disintegrating civilization when the Roman Empire in Europe was being sacked and turned to rubble:^{Note 93} a period of regeneration comparable in many ways to that of the fall of Crete and Troy at the opening of the Homeric age. In our inquiry here into the history and conditions of the coming-to-manifestation of the mythic forms specific to modern man, we may term it:

1. THE MYTHOGENIC MOMENT: c. 450–950 a.d.

Freud, in his Moses and Monotheism, finds a like moment in the background of the desert years of the Jews, when (as he believed he had shown) they slew their Egyptian master, Moses, an event which, according to his view, occurred some time between 1350 and 1310 b.c.^{Note 94} The catastrophe was followed by a period of forgetting, “latency,” or incubation, of which the counterpart in the classical development would have fallen between the time of the Dorian attacks upon Pylos, Thebes, and Troy (c. 1250–1150 b.c.), and their literary transformation in the epics (c. 850–650 b.c.). Freud compared such moments in the histories of peoples to those earliest years of childhood when the crucial imprintings occur that determine the imagery and structuring themes of our dreams: the imagery, as Jung would say, of the personal unconscious, based on one’s personal biography, through which the “grave and constant” themes of the inevitable common human destiny of growth, spiritual conflict, initiations, maturation, failure of powers, and passing, will in the individual case be inflected, interpreted, and expressed.

Specifically, in relation to Arthurian romance, the precipitating catastrophe was the conquest of Christian Britain by the pagan Angles, Jutes, and Saxons, c. 450–550 a.d. The Romans, after an occupation of four centuries, had just withdrawn. The undefended population was being harried from the north by the untamed Piets and Scots. King Vortigern of the Britons sent a cry for help to the Saxons, who, arriving under Hengest and Horsa, received a grant of land in Kent, and thence, in due time, launched their own campaign of conquest.

The origins of the mainland Nibelungen legend date from this period as well; specifically, the early fifth century, when the Burgundians, an East German tribe, migrating from the Baltic southward, settled on the Rhine, near Worms, and in the year 435 rose against the Roman governor Aetius. Two years later these people were all but annihilated by a troop of Huns acting as agents of the Empire, and their remnants retreated to the Rhone. The Franks about Cologne, their former neighbors on the Rhine, preserved a memory of their disaster and developed it in the legend known to us from the following sources: a) from Iceland, in 1. The Poetic Edda (c. 1200), 2. The Prose Edda, by Snorri Sturleson (c. 1179–1241), and 3. The Völsunga Saga (c. 1250); b) from South Germany, in the Nibelungenlied (c. 1250); and; c) from Denmark and Norway, in the Vilkina Saga (c. 1250). There is also a passage in Beowulf (c. 675–725, lines 875–913) in which an early version of the legend is briefly cited.

Arthur apparently was a native Briton who distinguished himself in a series of battles in the early sixth century and for a time represented the last hope of the Celtic Christian cause. The chronicle of a Welsh cleric of that time, Gildas (516?–570), De exidio et conquestu Britanniae, mentions a great battle at Mount Badon (in Dorset) on the day of the chronicler’s birth; and in a later work, Historia Britonum, by another Welsh cleric, Nennius (fl. 796), the name of Arthur is celebrated in connection with the same event. Arthur, according to this text, was not a king but a professional military man (dux bellorum), who “fought in company with the kings of the Britons” in a series of twelve battles, in the eighth of which, at the castle Guinnon, he “carried on his shoulders [possibly meaning ‘on his shield’] the image of the Holy Virgin Mary: the pagans that day were put to flight, and there was great slaughter among them through the favor of our Lord Jesus Christ and His Holy Mother, Saint Mary,” while in the twelfth engagement, on Mount Badon, “there fell 960 men in one day at a single onset of Arthur: no one overthrew them but he alone, and in all battles he came out victorious.”^{Note 95} Recorded also in this work is the legend of Ambrosius, later identified with Merlin: a marvelous “child without a father” who revealed to King Vortigern the secret of the insecure foundation of a tower he was building, namely, the presence in the earth beneath it of two battling dragons, a red and a white (allegorically the pagan Saxons and the Christian Celts).^{Note 96} And in still another chronicle of the time, the anonymous Annales Cambriae, written shortly after 956,^{Note 97} Arthur is again named in connection with the battle of Mount Badon, here dated 516, with the further notice of his death, together with that of Medraut (Mordred), at the battle of Camlann, 537.*

2. THE FIRST ORAL PERIOD OF DEVELOPMENT: c. 550–1066

Already in Nennius’s chronicle there is evidence of an oral folk tradition rising throughout the Celtic “mythogenetic zone” (Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland), having as a leading theme the so-called “hope of the Britons” for a second coming of Arthur. And this tradition embraced a multitude of such scattered local sagas as that of a cairn in northern Breconshire (Wales) upon one stone of which Arthur’s hound Caval had left a footprint while hunting the boar Troynt: you might carry off that stone as often as you liked; next day it would be back there on the cairn. Or again in Wales: a burial mound, said to be of Anir, Arthur’s son, whom the dux bellorum had himself killed and buried there: when measured, that mound was sometimes six, sometimes nine feet long, or as much as fifteen, but never twice the same. Nennius had himself measured it and found this saying to be true.^{Note 98} “Originally,” states Professor Loomis of King Arthur, “he was the historic champion of the Britons in their desperate struggle with the Saxons. Popular tradition came to associate his name with cairns and cromlechs, Roman ruins and crumbling castles. He survived in the isle of Avalon or in the deep recesses of Mount Etna or in the caverns of the Welsh hills. He became king of the pigmy people of the Antipodes, or he led the Wild Hunt by moonlight on the forested slopes of the Mont du Chat (Compare the “Wild Hunt” theme throughout Finnegans Wake, and in Wagner’s Tristan the hunting horn motifs of Act II. Compare, also, in Mann’s Magic Mountain the name of Castorp’s Lady Soul, Mme. Chauchat.). The Cornish and Breton folk regarded him as a Messiah and awaited the day when he would return to recover their ancestral home from the Saxons.”^{Note 99}*

*Similarly, in the kindred Germanic “mythogenetic zone,” which extended from Iceland to the Alps and eastward to the Caspian Sea, elements of local history and saga became attached to the growing legend of the fall of the Burgundians. Attila, the king of the Huns (406?–453), who was not present at the massacre, was added to the tale, along with a popular interpretation of his death as from a hemorrhage in his throat the very night of his marriage to Ildico, or Hildico, a German princess. The rumor ran that she had killed him in revenge for the slaughter of her relatives (though in fact she was not a Burgundian).

In the Nibelungenlied, Attila became Etzel and Hildico, Kriemhild (Hilda, “Warrior Maid,” Hildico, “Little Warrior Maid”; Kriem-hild, “Helmed Warrior Maid”). In the Völsunga Saga, Attila is Atli and Hildico, Gudrun.

Brunhilda (“Armored Warrior Maid”) was actually a Visigothic queen of Austrasia, c. 543–613. In 567 she abjured Arianism and accepted orthodox Christianity, to marry King Sigebert of the Eastern Franks, whose brother, Chilperic of the Western Franks, married and then murdered her sister (having been urged to this deed by Fredegond, his mistress), whereupon war broke out between the brothers. In 575 Sigebert was murdered and Brunhilda, his widow, made captive; however, she married her captor’s son, and so escaped; whereafter she flourished for some thirty years in a great career of political intrigue until, in 613, the Frankish nobles, in revenge for her murder of ten of their royal dynasty, seized and led her about in shame on a camel, tortured her for three days, and had her torn apart by wild horses, then burned her remains on a pyre.

Both the oral tales and the Latin chronicles of this first stage of development of the reputation of Arthur were largely unselfconscious; not so, however, those of the next.

3. THE SECOND ORAL PERIOD OF DEVELOPMENT c. 1066–1140

With the Norman Conquest of England, a new era dawned for Celtic bards. The Anglo-Saxon kings and courts were displaced, and a French-speaking aristocracy with strong Continental connections offered new stages and new audiences to the bards and tabulators of the older natives of the British Isles. These were disciplined creative and performing artists, trained in the mythopoetic craftsmanship of the old Druidic Filid, which included, besides a knowledge by memory of all the basic Celtic myths, practice and facility in the arts of improvisation. And it was these consciously creative master entertainers (of whom the Welshman Breri, Blihis, Bleheris, was apparently an outstanding representative) who, in the brief span of years between the Norman Conquest of England and Breri’s appearance in the southern court of Count William of Poitiers, established along traditionally Celtic mythic lines the new European secular mythology of King Arthur and his questing knights — of whom chivalrous Gawain was, throughout this period, the chief inheritor of such roles of fame as in the elder Celtic sphere had been assigned to the chariot-fighter Cuchullin.^†

^†And meanwhile, as in the Celtic “mythogenetic zone,” so too — though under totally different circumstances — in the recently Christianized Germanic: the amalgamation of local, spontaneously generated folklore and saga with the larger heritage of Aryan (here specifically Germanic) myth must be attributed to a traditionally trained, highly appreciated generation of consciously creative poets. For it was at this time that the aristocratic art of old Germanic alliterative poetry matured, of which Beowulf is a prime example. Furthermore, among the Vikings the still more sophisticated poetry of the skalds came into being at about the turn from the eighth to ninth century. Passing from Norway to Iceland at the turn from the tenth to eleventh, skaldic verse continued to be composed there until about the close of the fourteenth. The Norwegian Bragi Boddason the Old (early ninth century) may be named among the first of these skaldic masters. Christianity reached the Norse about the year 1000, and the bulk of their written matter dates from c. 1100–1250. Snorri Sturleson (1179–1241), author of the Prose Edda, flourished at the culminating moment of the art.

To be recalled at this point also is the fact that the Pietroasa Bowl (Figure 5) was discovered in Germanic territory. Germanic mythology in the early Middle Ages was anything but “primitive.” Zoroastrian, Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine influences can be recognized throughout. Hence the mythic themes of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Nibelungenlied, Völsunga Saga, and Icelandic Eddas, which appealed so greatly to Wagner and give the works their epic force, show unmistakable affinities with all the great high mythologies to which we have been devoting the greater part of this four-volume work.

Mythological creativity of this kind is not to be explained romantically as a kind of spontaneous poetry of the “folk soul,” in the sense, for example, of Jacob Grimm’s “das Volk dichtet.” Nor can we here go all the way with Freud and interpret the productions of these poets simply as symptoms of the traumata of what I have termed the Mythogenetic Moment. Something of the kind might perhaps be suggested of Period 2, the first oral stage of development. However, the tabulators of this second oral stage were traditionally trained master craftsmen, composing and manipulating the new pseudo-historical materials according to the inherited mythopoetic principles of a tradition long anteceding the cuts and blows of c. 450 a.d. This was an age, furthermore, of a number of considerable traumatic moments of its own: not only 1066, the Norman conquest of England, but also 1085, the Spanish conquest of Toledo, and 1097, the preaching of the First Crusade. New philosophical and theological concepts had to be mastered and assimilated. Translations from the Arabic, silks and fashions of the Orient, Manichaean heretics, Jewish Cabbalists and merchants: all were opening to the European mind a world of new horizons, a new world that had to be entered, and with which the mind as well as heart had to be brought into accord. In Primitive Mythology I have used the term land-náma, “land naming,” or “land taking,” to designate the process by which the features of a newly entered land are assimilated by an immigrant folk to its heritage of myth.^{Note 100} The mythopoetic creativity of the Celtic bards and fabulators of the period of the great European awakening from 1066 to c. 1140 was in essence equivalent to that mythogenetic process: an appropriation and mastery, not of space, however, but of time, not of the raw facts of a geography, but of the novelties, possibilities, raw facts, dangers, pains, and wonders of a new age: a “mythological updating.”

But the oral literature of the bards was not the only carrier of Arthurian lore in this second oral period; for, as in the first, there were now also written chronicles, and of these, principally two. The first was the Gesta Regum Anglorum of the most respected and respectable English historian of the age, the learned monk William of Malmesbury (c. 1080–c. 1143), whose book appeared about 1120; and here not only was Arthur again connected with the battle of Mount Badon, but a strong objection was registered, in the name of accurate history, to the body of irresponsible fable growing up around the great man’s name.

“He is the Arthur,” we read, “about whom the Britons rave in empty words, but who, in truth, is worthy to be the subject, not of deceitful tales and dreams, but of true history; for he was long the prop of his tottering fatherland, and spurred the broken spirits of his countrymen on to war; and finally at the siege of Mount Badon, trusting in the image of the Mother of God, which he had fastened on his armor, he alone routed nine hundred of the enemy with incredible bloodshed.”^{Note 101}

We learn also from this “true history” that the name of a certain Walwen (Gawain) had already become attached to the legendry of the all but deified Arthur, leader of battles.

However, by far the most voluminous and important Arthurian document of this time was Geoffrey of Monmouth’s really wonderful History of the Kings of Britain (Historia Regum Britanniae), which appeared in 1136 and of which one learned churchman, Giraldus Cambrensis, declared that, whereas if the Gospel of St. John were placed on the chest of a dying man angels would flock around him, if this chronicle of lies were placed there devils would arrive.^{Note 102} For, whereas on the face of it the work was another chronicle by a monkish hand purporting to be a “true history,” namely, of the reigns of the Celtic kings of Britain, from the time of the supposed first settlement of the island by refugees from Troy (led by an eponymous hero, Brut, from whom the name Britain was derived) to the years of the coming of the Anglo-Saxons, actually it was a great and wonderfully rich compendium of Celtic legends up to then unrecorded; and, though known to be such by the learned, was yet preferred by all the courtly world of that day to any book of truth ever written. It became à la mode immediately and supplied for a time the fashionable talk of Europe — as, centuries later, James Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian (1760, 1762), which enspelled the mind even of Goethe. Geoffrey, like Macpherson, pretended to have taken his text from an ancient Celtic book; in Macpherson’s case, of the Gaelic tongue, in Geoffrey’s, of the British. The two were scorned equally as liars by the soberheads of their centuries: Macpherson by Samuel Johnson, Geoffrey by Giraldus Cambrensis and many more. However, if the opening through a single book of the freshets of a grandiose river of tradition that is running in force to this day counts for anything at all, then Geoffrey, like Macpherson, merits laurel. For in the Latin of his pages there appear, for the first time in literature, not only the figure of Arthur as a king and the whole story of his birth, the names of his favorite knights, Gawain, Bedivere, and Kay, the treachery of Mordred (here as Arthur’s nephew, not his son), the faithlessness of Guinevere (in adultery with M ordred), the last battle of Arthur with Mordred and the mortal wounding of the king, his queen Guinevere’s refuge in a convent, and the passage of himself to Avalon in the year of Our Lord 542; but also the legend of King Lear and his daughters, Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia, the name of King Cymbeline, and the entire legend of Merlin’s life, including his magical transportation of the “Dance of the Giants” (Stonehenge) from Ireland to the Salisbury plain.

But with this we have been carried fully from the oral stages to the great culminating century of Arthurian invention in:

4. THE LITERARY STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT: c. 1136–1230

This is represented in documents roughly of four categories:

1. Anglo-Norman patriotic epics: 1137–1205
2. French courtly romances: c. 1160–1230
3. Religious legends of the Grail: c. 1180–1230
4. German biographical epics: c. 1200–1215

A. The Anglo-Norman patriotic epics, 1136–1205. There is reason to believe that Geoffrey of Monmouth was aware of the political value of his epoch-inaugurating Historia; for as Dr. Sebastian Evans states in the Epilogue to his translation of the work, it was indeed “a true national epos.” The question arises, however, as to what the nation could have been that the book was written to serve; for it is not English, Norman, Breton, or Welsh. Dr. Evans answers:

*Henry I, r. 1100–1135; Stephen, r. 1135–1154; Henry II, r. 1154–1189.

In a word, it was the national empire of Geoffrey’s time, and his “time” was that of Henry I, Stephen, and the first year of Henry II.* The actual empire of Henry I consisted mainly in England, Normandy, Wales, and Brittany. The actual empire of Henry II extended from the Orkneys to the Pyrenees. The dominant idea of the first two Henries, the son and great-grandson of the Conqueror of England, was gradually to extend the frontiers of the Anglo-Welsh-Norman-Breton empire until, in the fulness of time, the descendants of the mighty William should be the emperors of Christendom.^{Note 103}

The poet Virgil, as Evans observes, had made the Roman Empire glorious and commended it to the intellect and imagination of the world by claiming for its founders the blood of the heroes of Troy, transforming an exiled Trojan prince into a national Roman hero. Why, therefore, should not Geoffrey do as much for the Anglo-Welsh-Norman-Breton empire of the Henrys?

Geoffrey’s book [Evans concludes] is an epic that failed, for it was to have been the national epic of an empire that failed.… King Arthur, Geoffrey’s creation as Aeneas was the creation of Virgil, the king who was to have been the traditional hero of the Anglo-Welsh-Norman-Breton nucleus of empire and all the dominions which that empire might thereafter annex to its own, was left without any empire to hail him as the founder of its glories. He became a national hero unattached, a literary wonder and enigma to ages which had forgotten the existence of the composite and short-lived empire which was the justification of his own existence.^{Note 104}

But in addition, as remarked by Professor Loomis, “Geoffrey was not unmindful of the parallel which his Arthur presented in a vague fashion to Charlemagne”^{Note 105} — Charlemagne, that is to say, of the French Chansons de Geste, and particularly the Song of Roland, the dating of which, sometime between c. 1098 and 1120, was two or three decades earlier than Geoffrey’s work.*

^*As the Arthurian legends developed in the mythogenetic zone of the Celts, and the legends of Sigurd and Brunhilda in that of the German tribes, so in France, la douce France, the Chansons de Geste. However, as the late Professor Joseph Bédier of the University of Paris demonstrated in a formidable four-volume study of the origins of these Gallic “songs of deeds” — Les Légendes épiques: recherches sur la formation des Chansons de Geste (Paris: Edouard Champion, 1907, 2nd ed., 1921, 3rd ed., 1926) — their sources are not to be sought for, either in the folk imagination o r in the traditionally grounded mythopoetic creativity of bards, but specifically and precisely in Latin chronicles preserved in monasteries along and near the popular eleventh- and twelfth-century pilgrim routes from France to: a) the shrine in Spain of Saint James of Compostela, b) Rome, and c) Jerusalem. These monasteries served as inns, and, in order to advertise their neighborhoods, the monks furnished jongleurs and fabulators with stories of local deeds of fame from the precious parchments on their shelves.

Specifically, at the narrow pass of Ronceval in the Pyrenees, some rocks had been hurled upon the rear guard of Charlemagne’s army in the year 791 or 792 as it was returning from an expedition, not against the Moors, but in alliance with the Moors against the Basques, who were Christians. The rocks hurled by the Basques from an ambuscade did little damage and the hillmen disappeared. However, some three centuries later, when the Moors were being pressed back (fall of Toledo, 1085), the name of Charlemagne was being recalled by the French as of an earlier great king—and theirs!—who had also fought the Moors. “I believe, actually,” states Bédier in his commentary on La Chanson de Roland (Paris: L’Edition d’art, 1927, p. 14), “that the first inventions relative to the battle of Ronceval were composed in the eleventh century in the sanctuaries along the road from Blaye and Bordeaux to Ronceval.” And he concludes: ‘The texts emanating from the churches, toward the close of the eleventh century, celebrating Charlemagne’s tireless propagation of the faith were innumerable. ‘Pious Charles,’ we read in the Translation of Saint Servais, ‘was not afraid to die for his country, to die for the Church; moreover, he traveled the whole earth; those whom he found in rebellion against God, he subdued with the sword.’ That is why the preachers of the Crusade represented him as a model for all; that is why Godefroy de Bouillon and Baudoin de Flandre took pride in representing themselves as his descendants; and that is why, in the year 1101, on the evidence of Ekkehard d’Aura, word went around among the crusaders that he had just revived and was about to put himself in their lead.

“It was in the course of this period, under influences partly secular, partly ecclesiastical, that the traditions up to that time dispersed among the various sanctuaries, up to that time kept apart, were gradually brought together, linked by the lines of the pilgrim routes and by the mystic line of an idea: the idea of the mission of France, which Charlemagne and his worthies had once represented, and which it was now incumbent on all to reassume. In the eyes of the clerics of the eleventh century, Charlemagne was still what he had been in the earlier age, the priestly king; and he became besides, in the course of the century, little by little, the crusading king. He remained the emperor of all Christendom, and became most especially king of the fairest kingdom this side of heaven: ‘Par cels de France vuet il del tut errer.’ His Frenchmen conquered, not for themselves, but for God, to 'eshalcier sainte crestienté.’ This was wholly the spirit of the Crusades, wholly the spirit of the chansons de geste, and of the most beautiful of these, the Chanson de Roland”.

Et voilà! — the mythology of France to this day, already full born.

But finally, no matter what Geoffrey himself may have intended, the value of his fabled king to the actual Norman throne was recognized, if not by the first Henry, then certainly by the second. The entire epic-as-chronicle was turned into Norman French octosyllabic couplets by a clerc lisant named Wace (1100–1175), educated in Abelard’s Paris, whose Geste des Bretons, as he called his work — which is better known, however, as Brut — gained for him from Henry II advancement to the post of canon at Bayeux. And then, just half a century later, in the reign, however, of John, under whom the empire was disintegrating, an English country pastor in Worcestershire named Layamon turned the Norman poem, with many additions of his own, into a Middle English alliterative epic (1205): not to flatter any king, as he declares in his charming preface, but “to tell the noble deeds of the English; what they were named and whence they came who first possessed this English land after the flood that came from the Lord, which destroyed here all that it found alive except Noah and Shem, Japheth and Ham, and their four wives, who were with them in the ark.”^{Note 106}

It was in Wace’s work that the first literary mention of the Round Table appeared, and in Layamon’s that its shape was explained as designed to avoid such disputes for precedence as were common at Celtic feasts.^{Note 107} Also in Wace, for the first time, clear mention was made of the “hope of Britain” for Arthur’s return, while from Layamon’s Brut we learn that the mortally wounded king was taken by fairies to Avalon, whence, after his healing by the fairy queen Argante (a variant of the name Morgant or Morgan), he would return one day to this earth (Compare The Love-Death).^{Note 108}

These three, then — of Geoffrey, Wace, and Layamon, in Latin, French, and English — are the basic texts of the first order of A rthurian literary legend, the Anglo-Norman epic texts of “the whole history of the king.” There is little of love, nothing of the gentle heart, and much of the clash of armies in their pages; much about the king himself and little of his individual knights; nearly nothing of his queen, who is hardly more than a name (and, at that, a very bad one), now at his side, now in treasonous league with his nephew, and at last in flight to a convent from her noble husband’s wrath. It was from this tradition of the “whole history of Arthur” that the concluding scenes of Malory’s Le Morte Darthur were derived and of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King.

Very different were both the ideals and flavor of the works of the following category.

B. The French Courtly Romances, c. 1160–1230. For in France, where the figure of Charlemagne had already inspired a beloved national epos, Arthur as king held small appeal. Interest shifted to his knights. And it was the court poet, Chrétien de Troyes (fl. c. 1160–1190?), of Queen Eleanor’s daughter, the Countess Marie de Champagne, who first invented—or at least committed to writing in fluent octosyllabic couplets—the image of Arthur’s court with its Round Table, as merely a base from which his model knights set forth, and back to which they returned when all was done. Chrétien’s major works were as follows:

1. A Tristan: lost, date unknown
2. Erec and Enid: c. 1170
3. Cligés: c. 1176
4. Lancelot, or The Knight of the Cart: after 1176
5. Yvain, or The Knight of the Lion: c. 1180
6. Perceval, or The Legend of the Grail: after 1181

The poets of the Middle Ages employed the terms matière and san to refer, respectively, to their source materials and their own imaginative interpretations. What version of the Tristan matière Chrétien followed and what san he gave to it, are unknown. It is clear, however, that he cannot in any sense have been the inventor of the tale; nor was he of any of the rest — the first three of which, Erec, Cligés, and Lancelot, were attempts to counteract the influence of the powerful Tristan theme with what have been appropriately termed anti-Tristan works. The Lancelot, not quite finished, was terminated by a certain Godefroy de Lagny, and the Perceval, also unfinished, by four separate continuators: the first two anonymous (both before 1200), the next Manessier (between 1214 and 1227), and the fourth Gerbert (c. 1130).

Erec and Enid, a tale of wifely constancy resembling that (in the Parzival) of the lady of the tent and her spouse (See The Paraclete here and here.), Chrétien declares to have been a story “which those who desire to earn their livelihood by telling tales are wont to dismember and spoil in the presence of kings and counts.” A Welsh version of the same, Geraint, corresponds, not only in outline but in many precise details, and is of about the same date as Chrétien’s piece.

Cligés, on the other hand, is a composite, based on several scattered models, Oriental and Celtic, deliberately put together as a direct negative to the Tristan. “Virtually every incident of the poem,” declares Professor Bruce in his formidable work on The Evolution of Arthurian Romance, “can be traced to its source. It approaches, however, close to invention — certainly as near to invention as we can expect of a poet of the Middle Ages or of most of modern times — that is to say, Chrétien had taken widely separated details and brought them into a new combination, so as to produce the effect of originality.”^{Note 109}

It is a crass, very cruel tale of a doting husband so befooled by his wife and her lover that he is finally shamed to death, after which the woman, who has been tantalizingly putting the lover off, “so as not to be like Iseult,” accepts him in marriage. “A highly complicated but perfectly definite statement of the ideal relations of the sexes,” states one amazing modern critic;^{Note 110} and apparently Chrétien thought so too.

Both the matière and the san of the Lancelot, Chrétien tells, were supplied to him by the Countess Marie, and in verse 468 (car si con li contes afiche, “for as the story testifies”) he refers to a conte, an oral tale, as his authority.^{Note 111} But apparently in this case neither san nor matière quite appealed to him, since he left the work to be finished by another. It is the famous tale of the abduction of Guinevere by the rude dark prince Meleagant and her rescue from his dangerous isle by Lancelot.

Yvain, a truly wonderful adventure tale, is by all odds Chrétien’s best. It is perfectly duplicated, however, in the Welsh legend of Owain and the Countess of the Fountain.

But there is a Welsh counterpart also of Chrétien’s Perceval, Peredur. Hence, since Erec is matched by Geraint, and Yvain by Owain, the question has been earnestly asked as to which came first, Chrétien’s versions of these tales or the Welsh; the answer to which is now that Chrétien came first. However, it is not clear that Chrétien was the source, or at least the sole source, of the Welsh tales Geraint, Owain, and Peredur. Professor Loomis’s answer is the best: namely, that in each of the first two cases the French and the Welsh authors worked independently from “what was substantially a common original, written in the French language”; and in relation, then, to Peredur and Perceval, the sources again were French, but apparently of variant forms. “For,” as Loomis states, “it has been pointed out by a succession of scholars that again and again Peredur agrees with Wolfram’s Parzival or the Middle English Sir Percevelle or the Italian Carduino against Chrétien. No one would suspect the Welsh author of reading the German, English, or Italian poems, especially since the last two were composed a hundred years or so after his time, and it is inconceivable that the English and Continental authors could read Welsh. Only French sources, other than Chrétien, can explain the numerous agreements. Even Wolfram, who knew and used Le Conte del Graal [Chrétien’s Perceval], nevertheless repudiates Chrétien’s authority and reveals a large debt to sources which, though sometimes close to Chrétien, must have been independent branches of the widespread tradition of Perceval and the Grail.”^{Note 112}

In sum: by Chrétien’s time, c. 1160–1190, there was a floating body of Celtic lore available in French, both in oral and in written form, from which the poets of the age were deriving the matière of those masterworks of poetic romance that stand at the headwaters of our modern creative tradition. Back of all lay Celtic myth. Next, as a consequence of historic crises, new names and personalities — Arthur, Gawain, Tristan, Mark, et cetera — became the focal centers around which a new folk tradition developed, renewing the timeless archetypes of old: the well-known Celtic mythic and legendary patterns of hero birth and death, tragic loves and magical deeds. The composition of these folk materials into masterful oral epics followed, as the work of professional fabulators — some, no doubt, in the cottages of the peasantry, others, we know, in the palace halls of kings. Presently, c. 1150, written versions began appearing and what is known as the “history of literature” began — almost chemically, on every hand simultaneously, with inspired authors at work on identical themes: everywhere the same matière, but in each case, under each hand, a different san.

And as for Chrétien’s san, let me quote Professor Bruce:

Taken altogether, Chrétien is undoubtedly the best of the French authors of metrical romances that deal with the matière de Bretagne. In saying this, however, we are making an acknowledgment of the limitations of what was achieved in this genre — at least, in France; for in the works of this writer there is no question of the higher imagination, of philosophical insight into the riddles of existence, of “the dower of spanning wisdom,” with regard to either character or the conduct of life, or of the magic of diction and phrase, which have distinguished the representative poets of many other ages. His imagery is confined to a few similes — the majority of which are of a purely conventional kind — and to a restricted, though somewhat richer, store of metaphor. His “criticism of life” is merely that of a shrewd, alert, man of the world of his time. He was quite contented with the feudal society in which he moved and he delighted in the bustle and splendor if its festivities, its pageantry, and its tournaments. Within the bounds of this society, apart from the externals just mentioned, the code of chivalry and the problems of the relations of the sexes — the latter especially in the new form which these problems had assumed under the system of the amour courtois — were the things that most attracted him. Moreover, living in a naive age, when in the elementary interests and emotions the grown man was nearer to the child than at present, he was keenly susceptible to the spell of the marvellous, as were his contemporaries generally. Consequently, the setting which he gives to the life of chivalry and to his solution of the abovementioned problems is taken largely from the folk-tales of Celtic regions and of the Orient, where such fancies most abounded, with occasional admixture of classical motifs. In the case of Perceval, perhaps, he did not understand the full significance of the materials that he drew from his sources, but, in general, the combination of the various elements of content and setting in his poems produces on the reader an effect of harmonious unity, and the creation of this new world in which mediaeval barons and ladies jostle fairies and even stranger Otherworld figures is no mean achievement.

Since love is the dominant theme of Chrétien’s romances, it is natural that he should display most knowledge of the human heart in his characterizations of women. We are wearied occasionally, it is true, with the hair-splitting analyses of amorous emotions in the lovers’ soliloquies of his romances and with the conceits which such analyses engender, but the patient loyalty of Enid, the sovereign haughtiness of Guinevere, and the piquant fickleness of Laudine [Yvain’s Countess of the Fountain] in their relations with their lovers or husbands are depicted with much truth to nature and with no little charm, and, in the last-named case, also, with an effective touch of malice.

It is particularly, however, as a born conteur that Chrétien can claim a notable place among the poets of the Middle Ages. In telling a story his sparkling vivacity never fails him, and, as a German critic has happily said, he makes the impression of a juggler who can shake couplets out of his sleeve as long as he pleases.…

However, his most memorable services to the great cause of poetry, perhaps, were in stimulating immeasurably the imagination of his contemporaries — for the vast forest of mediaeval Arthurian romance sprang mainly from the seeds of his sowing — and in enriching the whole poetic tradition of Europe with new and beautiful themes on which greater men than himself have exercised their genius, from the age immediately succeeding his own down to that of Tennyson and Wagner.^{Note 113}

And so let us turn now to the next great phase of development of this magical world of inspiration, wherein the Grail became the vessel of the Last Supper. For over what formerly had been but Celtic magic the baptismal waters of the Church were poured, and caldrons became chalices: where Manannan Mac Lir had served the ale of immortality and the flesh of swine that, killed today, were alive again tomorrow, Christ arrived to serve the wine of his blood and the meat of his immortal flesh.

C. The religious legends of the Grail, c. 1180–1230. The main works of this abundant, enormously influential tradition are four:

1. Joseph d ’Arimathie, composed between 1180 and 1199 by a Burgundian poet, Robert de Boron, who claims for his source a mysterious “great book” (grant livre). It is here that the Grail is first represented as a chalice, the vessel of the Last Supper, which had been carried to Britain toward the end of the first century by Joseph of Arimathea.

2. L ’Estoire del Saint Graal, the first member of a huge, rambling, heterogeneous quintet of prose romances in Old French known to scholarship as the Vulgate Cycle: their various authorships are anonymous, their dates c. 1215–1230, and the order of their composition is a matter of dispute.* *The members of the Vulgate Cycle are as follows: 1. L’Estoire del Saint Graal, 2. L’Estoire de Merlin (the Prose Merlin), 3. Li Livres de Lancelot (the Prose Lancelot), 4. La Queste del Saint Graal, and 5. La Mort Artu. “The whole vast corpus,” states Professor Loomis, “was probably composed between 1215 and 1230, perhaps in the same county of Champagne which gave us our first Lancelot romance and our first quest of the Grail, the poems of Chrétien de Troyes” (Loomis, The Grail, p. 146). The popular attribution of the last three parts of this anthology to a learned clerk of Henry II’s court named Walter Map, who died in 1209, has not been explained. The Estoire, the first member of this extremely popular treasury, duplicates the legend of Robert de Boron’s Joseph d’Arimathie, but amplifies the tale considerably and, if Professor Loomis is correct, must have been drawn from the same grant livre. “Not Robert,” Loomis states, “but the author of the ‘grant livre’ was the bold and clever man who linked certain authentic, originally Celtic traditions of the Grail with the early Christian legend of Joseph of Arimathea.”^{Note 114} The grant livre has, of course, disappeared. Its author is unknown. But if it ever existed it must have antedated Robert’s work and so may have influenced Chrétien’s concept of the Grail as well.

However, in the Estoire, and throughout the Vulgate Cycle, the Grail, as in Chrétien, is an escuele, a “dish” or “bowl” (Figure 63), not, as in Robert’s work, a chalice, or, as in Wolfram’s, the philosphers’ stone, while the Grail hero to whose coming the Estoire looks forward — whose career is described in the Queste, and whose begetting by the sinful lover of Queen Guinevere is the culminating episode of the Lancelot — is the absolutely chaste youth Galahad, who is unknown outside of the Vulgate Cycle.

Galahad is unknown even to Robert de Boron. He was apparently conceived and first put forward by the author of the Queste, a Cistercian monk, the immediate inspiration of whose highly symbolic, eminently Gothic work was the authoritative definition in 1215 by the Fourth Lateran Council, of the doctrine of the actual presence of the Savior in the bread and wine of the eucharist. Galahad’s name, it has been shown, was derived from the Old Testament name Galaad (Gilead), which at times refers to a place, but at times also to a person. According to Genesis 31:47–52 , the word Galaad means “heap of testimony.” The Venerable Bede, Isidore of Seville, and numerous others in the Middle Ages construed it as a reference to Christ. Hence, Galaad (the Old French form of Galahad), who was conceived of by his author as himself a “heap of testimony” to our redemption in Christ, bears the appellation appropriately, and, as Professor Loomis comments: “Nothing better illustrates the ingenuity of the author of the Queste than the selection of this name.”^{Note 115} 5 The author of the Estoire almost certainly derived the name from the Queste: and he too was a monk, a Cistercian. The authors, on the other hand, of the bulky work that in the order of the cycle falls between the Estoire and the Queste were of a considerably more secular cast of mind; namely those of the infinitely influential, popular compendium:

3. Li Livres de Lancelot (the Vulgate or Prose Lancelot) This interminable terminal moraine of Arthurian bits and pieces is the product of many hands. It is in many passages wonderful, in many, simply banal. Commencing with the birth of Lancelot, whose baptismal name, significantly, is declared to have been Galahad, we pass to his fosterage in the Land below Waves of the Lady of the Lake, come then to the waking of his manhood by the beauty of Arthur’s queen (at the first touch of whose hand, the text tells, he woke as it were from sleep), after which the rambling narrative moves through many adventures to the Grail Castle of King Pelles, Corbenic, where prophecies have announced that the Waste Land is to be redeemed by a son begotten by Lancelot on the king’s virgin daughter. By sorcery the great knight is led to believe that he is lying with his love, Queen Guinevere, and so, the necessary work is accomplished, which is to lead to the birth and marvelous works of the “Desired Knight,” as told in one of the major creative works of the Middle Ages; namely, the following member of the cvcle:

4. La Queste del Saint Graal. The composition of this richly symbolic work almost certainly preceded the Estoire, which obviously was conceived as an introduction to its vision (a century before Dante’s) of the journey of the Christian soul from temporal life to eternal being and bliss in the vision of God.

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Let us review, as briefly as possible, the main lines of the common legend of these four interlacing works: the first by the poet Robert and the rest from the anonymous Vulgate Cycle, with two of the latter, Estoire and Queste, from the quills of cloistered monks.

1. When Joseph of Arimathea received from Pontius Pilate the vessel of the Last Supper, he was joined by Nicodemus, and the two, with Pilate’s permission, removed Christ’s body from the cross. They bore it to the tomb, and when the body was washed, blood flowed, which Joseph caught in the Grail.

The Jews, terrified by the Resurrection, believing that Joseph had hidden Christ’s body, condemned him to a dungeon, where the resurrected Savior appeared and, again presenting the Grail, instructed him to entrust it to none save his brother-in-law Bron and the son who would be born to Bron. All who ever beheld the Grail, Christ declared, would be of his own true company and dwell in eternal joy.

And so Joseph remained with the Grail until it came to pass, in Rome, that the emperor’s son Vespasian was cured of leprosy by the sight of the veil with which Veronica had wiped the face of Christ. In gratitude he went to Judea and, discovering Joseph in his dungeon, released him and slew many of the Jews.^{Note 116}

Joseph, together with his sister Enygeus and her saintly spouse Bron, then set off with a large company of converted Jews on an indeterminate journey, during the course of which, because of the sins of certain members, the crops failed and all were on the point of death. Joseph prayed before the Grail and the voice of the Holy Ghost declared that, in the name of the table at which Christ last sat, he was to build another table, at which one seat was to be left vacant because Judas, when he withdrew from the first, had left a vacant seat. Moreover, Bron was to catch a fish, and that, with the Grail, was to be placed on the table. Joseph was to sit where Christ had sat, Bron at his right, and the vacant seat between, which should remain empty until occupied by the son of Enygeus’s son.

Joseph did as told, and bade his people sit. Those who remained standing were the sinners and, so proven, were ordered to leave. However, one of them, named Moyses, presuming to sit in the vacant seat, the earth opened and he disapeared.

Now there were born to Enygeus and Bron twelve sons, of whom one, Alain, was not to marry but to be the keeper of the vessel and to voyage with his brethren westward to the farthest point, preaching Christ (The reader is not to worry about inconsistencies. First we h ear that Bron’s son is to be the last keeper of the Grail. Next we learn that it will be Bron’s grandson. Now we hear that Bron’s son is to remain chaste. These are not the only inconsistencies of this poet, who must have been drawing from different sources, which he simply failed to collate.). “The Lord,” declared an angelic voice, “knows Bron to be a worthy man; that is why the Lord willed him to go fishing. He is now to receive the vessel from Joseph, who will instruct him in those holy words that God spoke to him in the dungeon — which are sweet and precious, merciful, and properly called the Secrets of the Grail.” Bron was to be called the rich fisher, because of the fish he had caught, at which time the period of grace began. And when his son’s son arrived, he would pass the vessel on, whereupon the meaning of the Trinity would have been fulfilled. Joseph obediently consigned the Grail to Bron and, when the company, weeping, departed for the farthest West, returned alone to the land of his birth.

2. The author of Estoire pretends that on Good Friday, 717 a.d., Christ, appearing in a dream, presented him with a book composed by the Savior after the resurrection. The recipient, reading, swooned and was transported to Heaven, to a vision of the Trinity. When he returned to earth, he put the book away and it disappeared, but reappeared on the altar of a mysterious forest chapel, where, following Christ’s command, he transcribed from it “The Early History of the Grail.”

In the main, the first portion of this untidy composition parallels Robert de Boron’s Joseph, except that the keeper of the Grail is now not Joseph, who is married, but his celibate son Josephe. (The author, we have said, was a monk.) Moreover, the Grail company, before heading west, goes east to the city of Sarras, where the heathen monarch and his brother, when converted, take the names Mordrain and Nascien. Christ, appearing, makes Josephe a bishop, the first in Christendom, and Nascien, uncovering the Grail, goes blind, but is healed with the blood pouring from a lance, which, as Josephe prophesies, will not again bleed until the Adventures of the Grail take place. At that time the unveiled marvels of the Grail would be disclosed to the last scion of Nascien’s line.

A series of adventures follows around an extraordinary ship, which Solomon built on his wife’s advice when he had had a vision of that same last scion of his own and Nascien’s line. Within it on a rich bed in a sumptuous chamber lay David’s sword and a crown — the sword, however, embellished with coarse trappings of tow and hemp put there by Solomon’s wife, which were to be changed for better by a virgin at the time of the Adventures of the Grail. And on that bed there were three spindles, a red, a white, and a green, fashioned from sprouts of the Tree of Life that Eve carried from the Garden: the allegory of that ship being Holy Mother Church; of the bed, the altar of the sacrifice; and of the spindles, the red, the passion of Christ, the white, purity, and the green, hope. (Or, as interpreted in the Queste: the white, Eve’s virginity; the green, her motherhood; and the red, the blood of her son Abel, whose death, the first in the world, prefigured that of Mary’s son.) The ship moved marvelously of itself on the sea and came to a turning isle to which Nascien had already been spirited; but when his unworthy hand touched the sword it broke. His brother, Mordrain, touched it and it healed. Then Nascien dreamed that the last scion of his line was to return to Sarras in that ship.

All arrived miraculously in Britain, which they proceeded to convert. And there Mordrain, presuming to unveil the Grail, was blinded and paralyzed. He would be cured, a voice proclaimed, only when the blood of the lance again flowed and the good knight came to visit him. He retired, maimed, to a hermitage, which he made into an abbey and endowed.

And now Bron (who has not appeared before in this work) is told by Joseph’s son Josephe that the vacant seat at the table of the Grail was of Jesus (not, as in Robert’s work, of Judas) and was to remain empty until filled either by Christ or by someone sent by Christ (namely, Galahad). Moys (M oyses), daring to occupy it, is snatched away by fiery hands, after which Josephe consecrates Bron’s son Alain as Keeper of the Grail (Figure 63), and Alain feeds the company with a single fish he has caught, for which miracle he and those to follow him are to be known as the rich fisher.

After further marvels the company reaches Scotland, where an adventure like that of Tristan befalls the son of Bron who is to become the ancestor of Gawain. His name, as here given, is Peter. Wounded by a poisoned weapon while battling a sinful heathen, he has himself sent to sea in a boat, is discovered by the daughter of an island king, and, when cured, slays the King of Ireland; whereupon he is offered the hand of the island princess by her father.^{Note 117}

Joseph and Josephe die in Scotland, after which Alain, proceeding to la Terre Foraine, “the Foreign Land,” cures its king, Alphasem, of leprosy: who in gratitude builds a castle for the Grail which he names Corbenic; but for daring to spend a night in it he is wounded by a lance through both thighs.^{Note 118} Joseph, before him, had been wounded, battling a heathen, by a sword thrust through both thighs;^{Note 119} Peter, we have just seen, was also wounded; and before that, early in the legend, Josephe himself had been wounded by an angel who thrust a lance through his right thigh.^{Note 120} Alain presently dies, then Alphasem; and in due time the seventh Rich Fisher, Lambor, is slain by a Saracen, who, with the sword from Solomon’s ship, cleaves both him and his horse to the ground, whereupon la Terre Foraine, “the Foreign Land,” becomes la Terre Gaste, “the Waste Land.” Pelleam, next, is maimed in battle by a lance thrust through both thighs and is known, thereafter, as the Maimed King: but his son, Pelles, becomes father of the maid who is to give birth to Galahad.^{Note 121}

3. And so now, for the delicate scene of the begetting of that perfect knight, we may turn to Malory’s translation of the episode in Le Morte Darthur (1485), from the Old French Prose Vulgate Lancelot:

The king knew well that Sir Launcelot should get a child upon his daughter, the which should be named Sir Galahad the good knight, by whom all the foreign country should be brought out of danger, and by him the Holy Greal should be achieved. Then came forth a lady that hight Dame Brisen, and she said unto the king: Sir, wit ye well Sir Launcelot loveth no lady in Brisen, said the king, hope ye to bring this about? Sir, said she, upon pain of my life let me deal; for this Brisen was one of the greatest enchantresses that was at that time in the world living.

Then anon by Dame Brisen’s wit she made one to come to Sir Launcelot that he knew well. And this man brought him a ring from Queen Guenever like as it had come from her, and such one as she was wont for the most part to wear; and when Sir Launcelot saw that token wit ye well he was never so fain. Where is my Lady? said Sir Launcelot. In the castle of Case, said the messenger, but five mile hence. Then Sir Launcelot thought to be there the same night. And then this Brisen by the commandment of King Pelles let send Elaine to this castle with twenty-five knights unto the castle of Case.

Then Sir Launcelot against night rode unto that castle, and there anon he was received worshipfully with such people to his seeming as were about Queen Guenever secret. So when Sir Launcelot was alit, he asked where the queen was. So Dame Brisen said she was in her bed; and then the people were avoided, and Sir Launcelot was led unto his chamber. And then Dame Brisen brought Sir Launcelot a cupful of wine; and anon as he had drunken the wine he was so assotted and mad that he might make no delay, but withouten any let he went to bed; and he weened that maiden Elaine had been Queen Guenever. Wit you well that Sir Launcelot was glad, and so was that lady Elaine that she had gotten Sir Launcelot in her arms. For well she knew that same night should be gotten upon her Galahad that should prove the best knight of the world; and so they lay together until underne of the morn; and all the windows and holes of that chamber were stopped that no manner of day might be seen. And then Sir Launcelot remembered him, and he arose up and went to the window.

And anon as he had unshut the window the enchantment was gone; then he knew himself that he had done amiss. Alas, he said, that I have lived so long; now I am shamed. So then he got his sword in his hand and said: Thou traitoress, what art thou that I have lain by all this night? thou shalt die right here of my hands.

Then this fair lady Elaine skipped out of her bed all naked, and kneeled down afore Sir Launcelot, and said: Fair courteous knight, come of king’s blood, I require you have mercy upon me, and as thou art renowned the most noble knight of the world, slay me not, for I have in my womb him by thee that shall be the most noblest knight of the world.

Ah, false traitoress, said Sir Launcelot, why hast thou betrayed me? anon tell me what thou art.

Sir, she said, I am Elaine, the daughter of King Pelles.

Well, said Sir Launcelot, I will forgive you this deed; and therewith he took her up in his arms, and kissed her, for she was as fair a lady, and thereto lusty and young, and as wise, as any was that time living. So God me help, said Sir Launcelot, I may not wyte this to you; but her that made this enchantment upon me as between you and me, an I may find her, that same Lady Brisen, she shall lose her head for witchcrafts, for there was never knight deceived so as I am this night.

Then she said: My lord Sir Launcelot, I beseech you see me as soon as ye may, for I have obeyed me unto the prophecy that my father told me. And by his commandment to fulfil this prophecy I have given the greatest riches and the fairest flower that ever I had, and that is my maidenhood that I shall never have again; and therefore, gentle knight, owe me your goodwill. And so Sir Launcelot arrayed him and was armed, and took his leave mildly at that young Elaine; and so he departed, and rode till he came to the castle of Corbin, where her father was. And as fast as her time came she was delivered of a fair child, and they christened him Galahad; and wit ye well that child was well kept and well nourished, and he was named Galahad by cause Sir Launcelot was so named at the fountain stone; and after that the Lady of the Lake confirmed him Sir Launcelot du Lake.^{Note 122}

4. It was on the vigil of the feast of Pentecost, as we read in La Queste del Saint Graal, that a beautiful damsel rode into the dining hall of Camelot, and in the name of the Rich Fisher, King Pelles, summoning Lancelot to follow to the forest, conducted him to a nunnery where Galahad was being raised. There he found the knights Bors and Lionel, his cousins, and the next morning dubbed his son, not knowing who he was; then returned with the knights to Camelot, leaving Galahad with the nuns. But when they entered the dining hall, behold, an inscription had appeared on the Perilous Seat: four hundred years and fifty-four have passed since the passion of jesus christ: and on the feast of pentecost this seat is to find its master. A servant entered. “Sire,” he cried to the king, “I bring most marvelous news.” He had seen a beautiful sword, fixed in a red stone, floating on the river, which all hastened to view; and on the pommel they read in letters of gold: no one ever will draw me hence but him at whose side i am to hang: and he will be the best knight in the world. Arthur bade Lancelot assay the adventure, but he refused. Gawain failed in it; also, Perceval. Whereat, marveling, all returned to Arthur’s hall.

And when they were seated, the doors and windows suddenly closed of themselves, yet the room remained light, and there entered an old man clothed in white, conducting a knight arrayed in red, with neither sword nor shield. “King Arthur,” said the old man “I bring to you the Desired Knight, sprung from the high lineage of King David and the line of Joseph of Arimathea, by whom the marvels of this country and the foreign lands are to be ended. Regard him!”

He departed, and the young knight, coming forward, occupied the Perilous Seat, where his name had appeared in gold: this is galahad's seat. And Guinevere, the queen, then realized whose son this was.

Galahad rose, left the hall, and, with all watching, drew the sword from the stone, whereupon a tournament of joyous welcome was arranged, during which — though as yet without a shield — he unhorsed every knight except Perceval and Lancelot, his father. All heard vespers and returned to their evening meal.

And so they were sitting at table when a great crack of thunder was heard (Compare Ulysses), an intense light filled the hall, and the radiant Holy Grail appeared, covered with a white samite cloth and borne by hands invisible. There poured from it a marvelous fragrance. And it satisfied every knight that was there with the food that pleased him best; then disappeared.

Arthur, greatly marveling, spoke to those about him of the joy and thanks to the Lord that all should feel for the love and grace bestowed on them by this sign on the day of Pentecost. But Gawain, pointing out that the vessel had been veiled, proposed to all a vow: to depart for a year and a day, setting forth the very next morning, to find and see the Grail unveiled. All present following suit, the king became disconsolate; for he feared the loss of his knights. And the ladies too were distressed when they learned of this terrible vow: they cried in their dining room most tenderly and declared when they rejoined their knights that they were going too. At which point, however, an old hermit, entering, announced that it would be a mortal sin for any woman to go on that quest; nor should there go any knight who had not confessed his sins.

“For this quest,” said he, “is not of earthly things. It is the search for the highest secrets and hidden things of Our Lord, those high mysteries which the Highest Teacher will disclose only to that blessed knight among the knights of this earth whom He has elected to His Service. To him will He uncover the great marvels of the Holy Grail, causing him to behold, what no mortal heart can devise, nor terrestrial tongue describe.”^{Note 123}

All retired with thoughts on the morrow, and the king unable to sleep. They had decided to ride forth, each in his own direction, because to start out in a group would have been shameful. And in the morning, at first fight, the fellowship rose. When all had assumed their arms, they attended Mass and, when that was done, mounting, commended their good king to God, thanked him for the honors he had done them, and, issuing from his castle, “entered into the forest, at one point and another, there where they saw it to be thickest, all in those places where they found no way or path.…”^{Note 124}

Now Dante, in the Convito, and again when writing to Can Grande, his patron, was to make the point that spiritual writings “may be taken and should be expounded chiefly in four senses”: the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical. The literal of his own Commedia is the passage of himself out of the “dark wood” in which he had been lost on the vigil of Good Friday, 1300 a.d., midway along the road of his fife; and his transit then beyond the spheres of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, to a vision of the Trinity in the rose of Paradise: and at every stage along the way there were those to be seen who had arrived only that far. So likewise in the Queste: the literal story is of the several adventuring knights, going their several ways in the wood “where they found no way or path,” and of their various grades of achievement: Galahad alone, like Dante, arriving at the ultimate vision, beyond speech.

The allegorical senses are in both works announced by references to the calendar: in Dante, the vigil of Good Friday; in the Queste, that of Pentecost. Thus each in its own way is an imitatio Christi: the first, of Christ in his death and resurrection; the second, of Christ resurrected, as he appeared in that upper room — “the doors being shut”^{Note 125} — where, on the day of Pentecost, his disciples were gathered together.^{Note 126}

The moral meanings of the two works are rendered in their definitions of character: their analyses of the sins and virtues of the personages variously met and left along the way between the “dark wood” and the Beatific Vision: the moral in both being of the turning of the heart from sensual to spiritual concerns. In the Queste, the precipitating event — the general vision of the covered yet radiant Holy Grail in Arthur’s hall — corresponds, for all who beheld it, to that moment of “aesthetic arrest” described in Dante’s Vita Nuova (and in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), when the first sight of Beatrice at the age of nine (the girl wading in the stream) transferred the appetite of the poet’s noble heart from the forms of mortal sense to those of reason moving toward divine intelligence (Compare Goethe). And as in Dante’s Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, so again here: there have been many called, but the impediments of sin leave all but the gifted few strewn variously in defeat or partial victory along the way.

In both works, furthermore, the anagogical sense — the “upward pointing,” the “upward lead,” to mysteries beyond the reach of sight, sound, word, or symbol (Compare Kant: a:b = c:x) — is again the same: the Beatific Vision, beheld by Dante in the radiant celestial bowl of the rose of Paradise, and to be seen, finally, by Galahad within the mystic vessel of the Grail. (Compare again Figures 4, 18, and 63.) Thus the Grail in this work is equivalent to the celestial rose in Dante and, in Buddhist imagery, to the lotus of the saying “om mani padme hum: the jewel in the lotus.”^{Note 127}

However, between the anagogical sense of the Buddhist lotus of the universe and the vessel of the Grail as viewed by the author of the Queste — though not of the Grail as viewed by Wolfram — there is a world of difference. It is certain that the Cistercian monk who was the author of the Queste had been greatly inspired by the confirmation at the Fourth Lateran Council, in the year 1215, of the Catholic dogma of the Real Presence of Christ’s body in the sacrament of the altar (the Host in the ciborium). As stated for all time in the Latin of that Council: “Una vero est fidelium universalis ecclesia, extra quam nullus omnino salvatur. In qua idem ipse sacerdos, et sacrificium Jesus Christus; cujus corpus et sanguis in sacramento altaris sub speciebus panis et vini veraciter contenentur; transubstantiata pane in corpus et vino in sanguinem, potestate divina, ut ad perficiendum mysterium unitatis accipimus ipsi de suo quod accepit ipse de nostro: There is, verily, one true, universal church, outside of which no one whosoever is saved. In which one and the same Jesus Christ is himself both priest and sacrifice, whose body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the species of bread and wine (Compare in the Bhagavad Gītā: “Brahman is the process of the offering, brahman the oblation; by brahman the offering is made in the fire that is brahman. Verily, brahman is realized by anyone who in all action beholds brahman” [Bhagavad Gītā 4:24].); the bread being transubstantiated into the body and the wine into the blood, by the power of God, so that through the accomplishment of this mystery of unity, we receive him unto ourselves, that he unto himself may receive us.”^{Note 128}

Part and parcel of the literal sense of the Cistercian Queste del Saint Graal, therefore, is its representation of the influence of the sacraments. Their effects upon those who receive or reject them are to be read literally and morally, as well as allegorically and anagogically. Those who reject them are lost and will end, literally, in Hell. Those who receive them properly will be saved, each according to his own life and faith. That is the aspect of the moral of this work which sets it (together with its Church) apart from the natural order of mankind, in a sacerdotal fairyland of nuns, angelic voices, forest chapels, and consecrations; along with false allures and temptresses dispelled (like Wagner’s palace of Klingsor) by a gestured sign of the Cross.

Galahad, the fifth day out, came to an abbey of Cistercians, where there was kept a marvelous white shield emblazoned with a large red cross. A knight that was there, King Baudemagus, attempting to carry this away, a white knight (Christ) appeared, unhorsed him, and sent the shield to Galahad by a squire. Then Gawain, some little time later, came to that same Cistercian abbey and, learning of Galahad’s passage before him, rode hard along the same way, hoping to follow his lead, but went soon astray and came to a forest hermitage where a saintly man, learning his name, urged him to confession, chiding him for his sins. “Gawain. Gawain,” the old hermit pleaded, “if only you would renounce the life you have been leading all these years, you could still make peace with Our Lord.” The knight remained at heart unrepentant, however, and so failed in his quest entirely: as did Hector, the pattern of knightly pride; and Lionel, of anger. Perceval, however, Gawain’s dear friend, opened his heart to God’s grace and consequently fared well — very well indeed.

Perceval in this work is not married but the beautiful chaste youth again of the first years of his knighthood; and, riding his way in the pathless wood, he came into the “Waste Forest,” where he chanced on a little chapel, out the window of which a hermit female thrust her head to ask the knight his name. She proved to be his aunt, known now as the Queen of the Waste Land, La Reine de la Terre Gaste, though she had once been, as she told him, the richest woman in the world. She informed him of his mother’s death; taught him, also, the history of the Grail and of three tables, the chief tables of this world, namely: 1. that of the Last Supper; 2. that of Joseph and Josephe; and 3. that of the Perilous Seat, which Merlin established for King Arthur. She warned him earnestly, moreover, to remain chaste.

And riding forth, thus spiritually armed, the young knight survived a series of perils, not the least of which was of a seductress who one moonlight night, when he stirred and woke from sleep, was there, inviting him to follow on adventure. He made the sign of the Cross and with a cry she vanished in a burst of flame. Then (thanks be to God!) he arrived at Solomon’s ship, where he found Galahad and Bors; and together with these there was a pure virgin, his own sister, who explained to them the symbols of the ship and, as prophesied, removed the old coarse trappings from King David’s sword, replacing them with those she had made from her own golden hair woven with jewels. Whereupon she died in a most saintly way — and her body was placed on a second ship, which, like the first, sailed the seas of itself.

Lancelot also, at the outset of his adventure, encountered hermits in the wood. And he strove manfully to reform his noble heart — which, however, was Guinevere’s. Urged and persuaded to confess, even to wear a hair shirt, he went his way and arrived at the seashore, where before him he found the ship bearing the body of Perceval’s sister, which he boarded; and it sailed with him by moonlight to a great and marvelous castle: Castle Corbenic, of the Grail, where at midnight he heard a voice. “Lancelot! Go from this ship into that castle! There you will find in great measure what you seek.”

Two lions watched the gate, and Lancelot put his hand to his sword. “Shame!” the voice cried. “Why trust you more to your hand than to your Creator?” He made the sign of the Cross, breathing a prayer of thanks, and passed within.

There was no sound but of himself in those halls until he heard somewhere a voice so sweetly singing that it seemed to him scarcely human. “To Thee, O Father in Heaven, glory, praise, and honor!” it sang. He approached and fell upon his knees. The door of a chamber opened and he saw within a great brightness. A voice warned: “Do not enter!” And he beheld the Grail there on a table of silver, covered with a cloth of red samite. Angels were all about it, and before it stood an old priest celebrating Mass.

It was the moment of the elevation of the Host, and above the priest’s lifted hands Lancelot distinctly saw two aged men supporting a youth, whom they placed in the hands of the priest, who seemed about to fall from the weight. Lancelot sprang to his aid, with a prayer for Christ’s forgiveness, but as he approached felt on his face a blast like fire.… And the folk of the castle, next morning, found him lying before the chamber in a trance that lasted twenty-four days.

“I have seen so great marvels,” were Lancelot’s words when he revived, “that my tongue may not describe them, nor my own heart think upon them, they are so great. That was no earthly thing, but spiritual: and were it not for my great sins, I should have seen more.”

King Pelles of the castle then informed him of the death of Elaine, who had died of sorrow for himself; and in grief, wearing still his hair shirt, the knight rode away.

Bors, Perceval, and Galahad next arrived at the same castle and were joined there by three knights from Ireland, three from Gaul, three from Wales, King Pelles also, his son Eliezar, and his niece: and at vesper time the Maimed King, Pelles’ father, was carried in withdrew. A voice ordered all to leave the room that were not of the fellowship of the quest, and all save Bors, Perceval, Galahad, and the Maimed King departed.

“And therewithal,” we read in Malory’s translation of this episode,

beseemed them that there came a man, and four angels from heaven, clothed in likeness of a bishop, and had a cross in his hand; and these four angels bare him in a chair, and set him down before the table of silver whereupon the Sangreal was; and it seemed that he had in the middest of his forehead letters the which said: see here josephe the first bishop of christendom the same which our lord succoured in the city of sarras in the spiritual place. Then the knights marvelled, for that bishop was dead more than three hundred year tofore. O knights, said he, marvel not, for I was sometime an earthly man.

With that they heard the chamber door open, and there they saw angels; and two bare candles of wax, and the third a towel, and the fourth a spear which bled marvellously, that three drops fell within a box which he held in his other hand. And they set the candles upon the table, and the third the towel upon the vessel, and the fourth the holy spear even upright upon the vessel. And then the bishop made semblant as though he would have gone to the sacring of the mass.

And then he took an ubblye which was made in the likeness of bread. And at the lifting up there came a figure in the likeness of a child, and the visage was as red and as bright as any fire, and smote himself into the bread, so that they all saw it that the bread was formed of a fleshly man; and then he [Josephe] put it into the holy vessel again, and then he did that longed to a priest to do to a mass. And then he went to Galahad and kissed him, and bade him go and kiss his fellows: and so he did anon.

Now, said he, servants of Jesu Christ, ye shall be fed afore this table with sweetmeats that never knights tasted. And when he had said, he vanished away. And they set them at the table in great dread, and made their prayers. Then looked they and saw a man come out of the holy vessel that had all the signs of the passion of Jesu Christ, bleeding all openly, and said: My knights, and my servants, and my true children, which be come out of deadly life into spiritual life, I will now no longer hide me from you, but ye shall see now a part of my secrets and of my hidden things: now hold and receive the high meat which ye have so much desired. Then took he himself the holy vessel and came to Galahad; and he kneeled down, and there received his Saviour, and after him so received all his fellows; and they thought it so sweet that it was marvellous to tell. Then said he to Galahad: Son, wotest thou what I hold betwixt my hands? Nay, said he, but if ye will tell me. This is, said he, the holy dish wherein I ate the lamb on Sher-Thursday. And now hast thou seen that thou most desired to see, but yet hast thou not seen it so openly as thou shalt see it in the city of Sarras in the spiritual place. Therefore thou must go hence and bear with thee this holy vessel; for this night it shall depart from the realm of Logris, that it shale never be seen more here. And wotest thou wherefore? For he is not served nor worshipped to his right by them of this land, for they be turned to evil living; therefore I shall disherit them of the honour which I have done them. And therefore go ye three tomorrow unto the sea, where ye shall find your ship ready, and with you take the sword with the strange girdles, and no more with you but Sir Percivale and Sir Bors. Also I will that ye take with you of the blood of this spear for to anoint the maimed king, both his legs and all his body, and he shall have his health.

Sir, said Galahad, why shall not these other fellows go with us?

For this cause: for right as I departed my apostles one here and another there, so will I that ye depart; and two of you shall die in my service, but one of you shall come again and tell tidings. Then he gave them his blessings and vanished away.^{Note 129}

Galahad healed the Maimed King with the blood flowing from the lance, and the old man immediately retired to an abbey of Cistercians. The knights then rode to the shore, where they found and again boarded Solomon’s ship. It backed away, set to sea, and sailed with Bors, Perceval, Galahad, and the Grail aboard toward the distant city of Sarras, whence all this holiness originally came. On the way, Galahad prayed that he might die; for at Corbenic he had experienced such spiritual joy that his body was now an encumbrance. Perceval bade him lie upon the bed, the rich bed in the ship’s holy chamber where the Grail on its silver table reposed; and night and day the ship sailed, none knowing to what port, while Galahad slept.

He woke when they reached Sarras. In port lay the other ship, bearing the body of Perceval’s sister. “Truly,” said Perceval, “in God’s name! Well has my sister kept us covenant!” And they disembarked, bearing the table of the Grail, with Bors and Perceval before and Galahad behind. They bade an old cripple who had not walked for ten years to lend Galahad a hand; he rose and joined them: and when the king learned of that miracle, he thrust all three into a dungeon, where they were fed by the Grail until the king himself, falling ill of his deed, sent for them, prayed mercy, and, when forgiven, died. Then Galahad became king.

One year thereafter, entering the room of the palace where the Grail stood on its table, they beheld there kneeling a beautiful man in the likeness of a bishop, with about him a fellowship of angels. He rose and began a Mass in honor of Our Lady; and after the consecration, turned. “Come forward,” he said to Galahad, “thou servant of Jesus Christ: now shalt thou see what thou hast long desired to behold.”

Figure 89. The Grail appears to Galahad, Bors, and Perceval (tapestry, England, 1891–1894)

And the knight arose. He went forward, gazed full into the bowl of the uncovered Grail, and as soon as he had done so began to tremble terribly, as when mortal flesh begins to regard spiritual things. He lifted his arms. “Lord,” he prayed, “I adore and thank Thee; for Thou hast accomplished here my desire. Now I see all openly what tongue cannot speak, neither heart conceive: the beginning and end of the great adventure: marvels of all marvels. And my dear sweet Lord, since it is thus that Thou hast accomplished in me my wish, letting me see what I have all my days desired, so now I pray that in this great joy Thou mayest suffer me to pass on from this terrestrial to celestial life.”^{Note 130}

The bishop took in his hands the very body of Christ, the consecrated Host, and proffered it to Galahad, who received it gladly and meekly.

“Do you know now who I am?” the bishop asked. “I am Joseph of Arimathea. And Our Lord sent me to bear you fellowship, for you have resembled me in two things: in that you have seen the marvels of the Holy Grail, and in that you have been a clean maiden, as I have been and am.”

And when the bishop had said these words, Galahad went to Perceval and kissed him, commending him to God, and likewise to Sir Bors, to whom, however, he said: “Fair Lord, salute me to my lord, Sir Lancelot, my father, and as soon as you shall see him, bid him remember this unstable world.”

“And therewith,” Malory translates, “he kneeled down tofore the table and made his prayers, and then suddenly his soul departed to Jesus Christ, and a great multitude of angels bare his soul up to heaven, that the two fellows might well behold it. Also the two fellows saw come from heaven a hand but they saw no body. And then it came right to the Vessel, and took it and the spear, and so bare it up to heaven. Sithen was there never man so hardy to say that he had seen the Sangreal.”^{Note 131}

Perceval expired also, but Sir Bors returned to Camelot, to recount there the adventure. However, in Arthur’s court, as told in La Mort Artu, the last portion of the Old French Vulgate Cycle (Malory, Books XVIII–XXI, and Tennyson’s terminal Idylls of the King: “The Last Tournament,” “Guinevere,” and “The Passing of Arthur” ), pride, treachery, and the increasingly brazen conduct of a relapsed Lancelot and the queen, brought about an ugly Götterdämmerung, which today can be read as a prophecy of the end of the Gothic world itself, which, in fact, immediately followed. For the removal of the symbol of value, the Grail, from earth to Heaven in Solomon’s ship had left life on earth without a spiritual center, and the City of Man, the kingdom of Arthur, went apart.

As in the crystalline bed of the love grotto, so here in Galahad’s bed of rapture in the hold of Solomon’s ship (which, like the rudderless boat of Tristan, sails of itself to its voyager’s goal: a Celtic ship to Avalon, heading now the other way) all thought of service to life through knightly deeds is abandoned for an ecstasy: in Galahad’s case, by the right-hand path, to the Father and the light; in Tristan’s the left-hand way, to the Mothers (Compare the two ways of the Gnostics). The bed in the chamber of Solomon’s ship is compared to the altar of the Mass; likewise, the bed in the grotto. Allegorically, the altar is the Cross of Christ, the place of sacrifice. But the Cross also is a bed. “A sweet bed is the wood of Thy Cross,” we read, for example, in a sermon on Solomon’s Song of Songs by a twelfth-century Cistercian abbot, Gilbert of Holland (d. 1172).^{Note 132} Galahad in the bed in the ship is, by analogy, Christ in his Church: the Church as inheritor of the Temple, but now departing from this world.

We recall Joachim of Floris (c. 1145–1202, Figure 85) and his doctrine of the Ages of the Trinity in history: of the Father and the Son (Temple and Church, i.e. Solomon’s ship), to be followed by that of the Holy Ghost (the passage to Sarras). In Robert de Boron’s poem (c. 1180–1199), when Joseph in his dungeon received the Grail and heard “those holy words that are properly called the Secrets of the Grail,” it was the resurrected Christ who spoke to him: a later, higher, more mystic form — not visible to all — than that of the earthly Christ who had founded the visible Church. Further, when Joseph subsequently knelt before the Grail, the voice heard was of the Holy Ghost. And finally, when the last keeper of the Grail was born, the “meaning of the Trinity” would be fulfilled.

Likewise in the Queste, the entire order of symbols stands beyond the exoteric order of the Church. Joseph and Josephe are not of the line of the historical papal throne, established by the historical Christ on the rock of historical Peter, but of a line established by Christ Resurrected. And the way to Corbenic, their hidden palace-church, is not by any public path, but through an inwardly governed individual quest, commencing there where the forest is thickest and most dark. When the Grail, the summoning angel of this hermetic quest, appeared in Arthur’s banquet hall, the time of historic deeds and aims had abruptly ended. The moment was apocalyptic. The Age of the Holy Spirit had begun. And, as by an irresistible magnet, the entire courtly fellowship was drawn away from their spheres of earthly service. Arthur, with reason, was distressed; and the ladies, too, with reason: for, like Eve, they were the antithesis of all that the Grail (in this version) represented.

Professor Loomis, in his authoritative work, The Grail, makes it evident beyond question that the matière of the Queste was derived in the main from Celtic myths, largely of Manannan Mac Lir and his Welsh counterpart, Bran the Blessed: the “Rich Fisher,” Bron, with his “blessed horn of plenty,” cors-benoiz (Corbenic); his boat, the moon that rides celestial seas; and his whirling castle of mist and dream from the fairyland “below waves.” However, as another student of the Queste del Saint Graal, Professor Frederick Locke of Stanford University, points out, “It is first and foremost a Christian book, and nothing in it suggests a conscious use of any pagan mythology, ritual, or folklore in their primitive forms.… Once the pre-Christian elements had been appropriated, they became thoroughly Christianized and entered completely into the symbolic structure of the new religion. They had, in fact, been chosen for their insight value and as a means of illuminating the context of the new gnosis.”^{Note 133}

“In the Queste,” Professor Locke declares, “the progressive stages of illumination are symbolized by the revelation of the Grail as a movement from what is perceived by the eyes to what is absorbed by the spirit.”^{Note 134} But that precisely is the sense of all myths and rites of illumination whatsoever. Compare again the round of Figure 5. The first idiosyncrasy of the Cistercian Queste, therefore, is not that it points a way to illumination, but that its view is so narrowly Christian: no other way of the spirit but that of the Roman Catholic sacramental system is admitted to exist. And the second idiosyncrasy is the extreme asceticism of its concept of that way. All the symbols and values of the Celtic world are consequently reversed in this work — and not only of the Celtic world. As Professor Albert Pauphilet of the University of Paris states in the introduction to his edition of the text:

The author of the Queste shows in numerous passages that what he intended was to set his work in opposition to the literature in vogue in his time. He despised bravery, purely knightly exploit, and disparaged love, choosing to confound its “courtly” form with the “vile sin of lust.” From the Round Table romances, and especially the Lancelot, he borrowed some of the most brilliant heroes — Gawain, Yvain, Lancelot, Hector — but only to assign them to pitiful roles. And by these means, with various others, he produced the impression, from the very start of his work, that in the precincts of the Grail the world assumes an aspect totally new, where the accepted values of men and things are reversed.^{Note 135}

The women in this inverted world are of two types: those who are not, and those who are, virgins. Those who are not, of course, once were, as Lancelot once had been Galahad: at the moment of his perfection — not exactly at his birth, that is to say, for then he had been merely fallen nature, but at the moment of baptism, when his eternal soul had been magically cleansed and restored to the state of Adam before his fall to Eve’s allure. “A perilous thing is the company of the female,” we read in the rules of the order of the Knights Templar, whose shield — exactly Galahad’s — showed a pure white ground emblazoned with a large red cross; “for the old devil (le deable ancien) has lured many, through the company of women, from the straight path to Paradise.… We believe it to be a danger to all religion to regard too long a woman’s face. None of you, therefore, should presume to kiss any female: whether a widow, child, mother, sister, aunt, or any other. The Knights of Jesus Christ, for this reason, must eschew by all means that kissing of women by which men have so frequently put it in jeopardy that they should ever live and rest, in purity of conscience and surety of life, before the face of God forever.”^{Note 136} The ladies of Arthur’s court, accordingly, could neither participate in nor contribute to the adventure of the Queste: only Perceval’s sister, a virgin, in a role like that of Dante’s inviolate Beatrice. And yet even she arrived in the holy city of Sarras, the New Jerusalem, dead.

Sir Galahad as the Grail Hero, then, is entirely a monkish innovation. Originally, as we have seen, the model knight was Sir Gawain, who in the Queste is in the place, virtually, of Paolo and Francesca in the Inferno. In the courtly world, on the other hand, even where his roles were taken over by Lancelot or Perceval, he was not condemned, but was ever the noble, gracious elder of the new heroes, aiding them in their adventures, much like a father to his sons. In fact, as Miss Jessie Weston has shown, there was the legend of a young knight fathered by Gawain, known as Guinglain or Le Bel Inconnu in French, Wigalois in German, Libeaus Desconus in English, and Carduino in Italian, whose life is in all essential points so close to that of the youthful “Great Fool” Perceval that (in her words), “if the Fair Unknown be not Perceval himself, he and Perceval are both representatives of the same primitive hero, which practically amounts to the same thing.”^{Note 137}

As Lancelot to Galahad, then, so was Gawain to Perceval (the Fair Unknown). The two cycles are analogous, save that in the Lancelot-Galahad redaction a later, strictly sacramental and monastic order of belief is represented. In the figures of the almost pagan solar hero Gawain and the pure child Perceval of uncorrupted nature, there is no sign at all of the churchly notion of the force of Original Sin, whereas Lancelot is explicitly fallen man — and Woman, moreover, Guinevere-Eve, was the cause of his corruption. By a device of magic, however, that a monk should perhaps not closely scrutinize, he was brought to lie with the virgin daughter of the Grail King, whom he thought by enchantment to be his lady, Arthur’s queen — and the moral sense of this begetting of a saint upon a virgin by a sinner who supposed himself to be with someone else’s wife is not too easy to explain:

“Lancelot’s alter ego,” wrote Heinrich Zimmer in his brilliant series of essays interpreting these legends,

the son who bears the name that Lancelot himself received in baptism from his human father (before the Lady of the Lake abstracted, initiated, and renamed him “Lancelot of the Lake”), will achieve the holy adventure of the Grail; for, as in the symbolism of dreams, the child, the son, here connotes a higher transformation of the personality. The child is the self reborn in pristine perfection, the perfect being that we ought to be, that we are striving to become, and that we hoped to become, so to say, when we entered our present body. It is the symbol of the entelechy, or secret model, of our destination.

Thus Sir Galahad, the immaculate, is the redemption of the ambiguous, brilliant father whose “Christian” name he reaffirms and bears. He is the redemption because he is the re-embodiment of the father. The virtues of this triumphant saintly son are those of the essence of the father himself. And so, that father — Sir Lancelot of the Lake, but Sir Galahad of the Baptismal Font — is revealed to have combined in himself the energies of the two spheres, the wordly sphere of desires, and the higher one of the purely spiritual adventure. This is the final secret of his charm.^{Note 138}

And in the matter of his night with the virgin whom he took to be Arthur’s queen, a like reading can be suggested: namely, that in its spiritual, “intelligible” dimension, as opposed to its social, accidential, his love for the queen was pure: it was the vehicle on this contingent plane of his realization on the spiritual plane of fulfillment.

But let us descend closer to earth and move on, now, to the fourth sphere of development of the matière of King Arthur:

D. The German biographical epics, 1200–1215. The san, the sense, to which the matière de Bretagne was here applied was neither political (as in phase A), nor of courtly ideals and manners (phase B), not sacramental-ecclesiastical-ascetic (phase C), but psychological in the modern sense of treating of spiritual initiations generally available in this world and inevitable to anyone seriously sensitive to his own unfolding realizations of the mystery — and impulse — of existence. In the Queste the knights entered the forest individually, “there where they saw it to be thickest, in all those places where they found no way or path,” and there was great promise in that start. However, it soon appeared that there was actually but one way to be followed, after all: the one “straight path to Paradise,” and not the several paths of the variously unfolding intelligible characters of each. Whereas in Wolfram the guide is within — for each, unique; and I see in this the first completely intentional statement of the fundamental mythology of modern Western man, the first sheerly individualistic mythology in the history of the human race: a mythology of quest inwardly motivated — directed from within — where there is no authorized way or guru to be followed or obeyed, but where, for each, all ways already found, known and proven, are wrong ways, since they are not his own.

For each, in himself, is in his “intelligible character” an unprecedented species in himself, whose life-way and life-form (as of a newly sprung plant or animal sport) can be revealed and realized only by and through himself. Hence that sense of yearning and striving toward an unknown end, so characteristic of the Western living of life — so alien to the Oriental. What is unknown, yet deeply, infallibly intended, is one’s own peculiar teleology, not the one “straight path to Paradise.” The learned Anglo-Indian critic of our civilization, Dr. Ananda Kent Coomaraswamy — who had lived and worked in this country somewhat more than forty years, yet never got the idea nor any sense of the unique majesty of this Occidental style of spirituality — with disparaging intent coined a really telling characterization of the “Faustian soul,” when he wrote (using the pronoun “we” to connote not himself, a master of India’s “eternal” wisdom, but his Occidental colleagues at the Boston Museum and Harvard University): “We who can call an art ‘significant,’ knowing not of what, are also proud to ‘progress,’ we know not whither.”^{Note 139} And indeed we are — and had better be. For as Spengler has well said: “In Wolfram von Eschenbach, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Goethe, the tragic line of the individual life develops from within outward, dynamically, functionally.”^{Note 140}

And so we return from the Vulgate monastic epic of Lancelot and Galahad, with its subsequent disintegration of the worldly court of King Arthur, to the earthly Divine Comedy of their naturerooted predecessors: Gawain, the model lover, at about the age of Leopold Bloom, and Parzival, the questing youth, like Stephen, willing to challenge even God if the mask that he shows — or is said to have shown — rings hollow when struck.

VIII. The Crowning of the King

BOOK XIV: THE FESTIVAL OF LOVE

Gawain, we have learned, saw a solitary knight approaching on the plain in armor redder than ruby. There was a wreath about his helm plucked from the tree that Gramoflanz guarded, and his shield was pierced through and through. Gawain recognized the wreath and, immediately lowering his lance (the other lowered too), spurred and charged (the other too). They clashed, brought each other down, steeds and all, and went at it with their swords — alone on the plain.

Messengers of Arthur, meanwhile, had arrived before Gramodanz’s camp, which they beheld spread out before them as broad as a mile and a half, guarded by strange knights: Turkish bowmen, footmen brandishing spears, and beyond those, trumpets blaring and ladies with bells on their bridles riding in circles around the king’s tent. The ranks parted and the messengers, admitted, saw the king on a couch beneath a canopy, with gay and pretty maidens all about him, putting on his greaves.

“Sir,” they said, “Arthur asks: How dare you challenge his sister’s son? The Round Table knights are his brothers and if need arise will defend him.”

“I have knights of my own,” the king answered; “I am not afraid of number. Never before, however, have I battled only one man at a time. The ladies are not to praise me when I win.”

Returning, the messengers on their homeward way spied the two battling knights. Gawain was giving ground, and anxious for his life, they cried out his name, whereupon the other, with a great shout, flung away his sword and cried: “I am betrayed: I am fighting myself!”

“Sir, alas!” then said Gawain, who by now could hardly stand. “Who are you?”

“I am your kinsman,” said the other. “I am Parzival.”

And so it was, that, when the time arrived for which all these companies had assembled, of the battle of Gawain with Gramoflanz (for whom, because of the wreath, Gawain had mistaken Parzival), the battered knight was so poorly off that the proud king, confronting him on the field, refused to fight and postponed the tournament to the morrow. Parzival, beside his friend, offered to stand in his stead, but Gramoflanz again refused.

And it was then that little Bene, the daughter of the boatman, who had come with Parzival onto the field bearing a token for the king from Gawain’s sister, first realized that Gawain was Itonje’s brother, and that Gramoflanz, insisting on this tournament, wished to kill him. The oars of sorrow then drew a heavy cargo of grief into her heart, and in anger, fierce words flew from her lips. “You faithless dog! Whose token is this I bring you?” she cried. “Love rejects your service. Love is not to be joined with treachery.” Unsettled in his confidence, the king drew her aside, pleading. “You have never learned what loyalty means. Get away from me, you foul thing!” she flung back. And the king turned, mounted, and with his company rode off, while Bene, with Parzival and Gawain, returned to Gawain’s pavilion.

Her lord, on the way, made her promise not to reveal the nature of the coming tournament to his sister, who had not yet realized that the champion who was to meet her ami was her brother. Moreover, when Parzival tried to persuade Gawain to let him fight in his stead, Gawain refused.

“This morning,” Parzival argued, “I found the tree in the grove undefended, broke a branch from it, and came this way to challenge Gramoflanz. I had no idea that you would be here and when I saw you, thought you were he. Let me now face him!”

“God bless you,” Gawain answered; “but with fortune, I shall win. I trust my own cause.”

Parzival seemed to give in, yet that evening in his quarters, went carefully over his armor, and at dawn rode forth secretly; so that when Gramoflanz arrived early on the field, it was Parzival, already there, who immediately attacked him. And they were at it hard when Gawain, after Mass, arrived to engage his man. Fighting afoot, those two warriors hurled their swords many times high into the air to reverse the cutting edges. Then Gramoflanz began to fail and Arthur rode out with a company of knights to separate the pair. The King of the Tree admitted he was beaten and Gawain said to him courteously: “Sir King, I shall do for you today what you did yesterday for me: we shalt meet tomorrow.”

Long before the morrow dawned, however, Itonje noticed that Bene had turned pale and was secretly weeping. “Did the king refuse my token?” she thought. Her ears opened to the gossip of the day and when the message struck her heart, she rushed in terror to her grandmother and mother. “Shall the hand of my own brother cut down my heart’s beloved?” she cried; and they too, when they understood what a serious battle was in prospect, were dismayed. Amive called to a page to go summon Arthur to her tent.

And Gramoflanz on his own side, meanwhile, stung by the tongue of Bene, had begun to feel some anxiety concerning his standing with Itonje, and to set the matter straight had sent two young messengers with a letter to learn what they could of her state of mind. Bene, leaving the ladies’ tent when Arthur entered, noticed these two young squires among the tent ropes. “Stand back,” she said. “Stand back beyond these ropes.” Itonje, within, was crying at Arthur: “Does the Lady Orgeluse then think it proper that my brother, in her service, should murder my ami?” and the squires had overheard. They gave the letter from their lord to Bene, who took it into the tent and presently Arthur, coming out, courteously greeted them.

“So what have I done to your king,” he asked, “that he should treat my family this way? He cannot regard me very highly. And to pay with hate the brother of a lady one claims to love! Let him think about that! He must realize that if that is what he wants, his heart is untrue.”

“But the Duchess of Logrois still denies him her good will,” they answered. “Gawain is not the only knight of hers that our lord must fear in this camp.”

Arthur promised to obtain a truce from her and in turn proposed a meeting midway between the two camps. The truce was readily gained. The Lady Orgeluse was still in sorrow for Cidegast, but her anger against his slayer had cooled in the warmth of Gawain’s embraces, while Gramoflanz, on his own side, was learning to soften as well. Bene had gone to him with his returning squires, and he never had felt such joy in his life as when she told him of his lady’s love. Arthur, furthermore, had sent along with her Gawain’s young brother Beakurs, and when he looked upon this graceful lad Gramoflanz thought in his heart: “He rides so winsomely! And she, after all, is his sister!” While as for the matter of the wreath: since Parzival, having plucked a branch, had overcome both himself and Gawain, his quarrel with Itonje’s brother on that score was no longer in point.

Before riding to the meeting, between camps, Arthur saw to it that a tentful of ladies should be left in attendance on his niece, and when he had met Gramoflanz in midfield he simply returned with him to that tent. “If you see among these ladies anyone you love,” he said, “you may greet her with a kiss.” And so, as the poet declares at the close of this festive chapter, no one can say that there ever took place a more beautiful marriage celebration. Gawain’s second sister was bestowed on Lischois Gwelljus, and his widowed mother, Sangive, on Florant the Turkoyte. There were also Gawain and Orgeluse; and with many a fair lady more thereabout, tenting by the riverside, love and joy among pavilions were the order of the day.

But Parzival, amidst all this, was brooding alone on Condwiramurs. Would he perhaps greet another in the spirit of this celebration? No indeed! Such loyalty stood guard upon his heart, and also on his body, that no other woman anywhere would ever distract his love. He thought: “If I am to keep striving for the Grail, the dream of her pure embrace it will be that ever spurs me on — from which I have been too long parted. However, if I am to witness here only joy where my heart knows only sorrow, my eyes and heart will be ill matched.” His armor lay at hand. He had often donned it alone. “May fortune bear me on,” he mused, “to what I have yet to accomplish.” He saddled his steed, and when dawn broke, galloped away.

BOOK XV: THE ACCOLADE

And he was riding smartly one day toward the line of a great forest, when he beheld cantering toward him a richly bedizened stranger. Finest silks caparisoned his mount. Nor would all the wealth of Arthur’s Britain have paid for the jewels of his surcoat: salamander worms in the Argremuntin mountains had in hot fires loomed them together; with a brilliant light they blazed. And it had been chiefly noble ladies who had given him these tokens. He wore them now, thus splendidly, in sign of his high heart’s striving. Beyond the forest behind him, in a wild bay of the sea, there lay a camp of twenty-five armies, not one of which could understand any language of the others. And he had ridden forth alone from them on adventure.

The lion, they say, is born dead from its dam; its father’s roar gives it life: these two men had been born of battle din. They rode immediately charging at each other, and each was amazed and angered when the other held his seat. They battled fiercely and long. And I mourn for this; for they were two sons of one man. One could say that “they” were fighting if one wished to speak of two. They were, however, one. “ My brother and I” is one body — like good man and good wife. One flesh, one blood, here battling from loyalty of heart, was doing itself much harm.

The heathen fought for love and gems, and he pressed with them right hard. His battle cry was “Thabronit.” And the baptized man fell back. The heathen never wearied of love: his heart, therefore, was great in combat. God shield Gahmuret’s son, I say! That is my wish for them both.

The baptized man, since leaving Trevrizent, had cleaved to his trust in God. But the heathen was mighty of limb, and whenever he shouted “Thabronit!” — which is where his queen Secundille was — his battle strength increased. The baptized man now troubles me. More than once he has gone to his knees. However, there is one more thing, brave Parzival, to think upon for courage: those two sweet little boys, Kardeiz and Loherangrin (Lohengrin) — they must not so soon be left orphans — whom your dear pure wife Condwiramurs bore to you after your last embrace.

“Thabronit!” now was answered with “Pelrapeire!” and just in time. Condwiramurs came across the world and filled her knight with the power of her love. Chips flaked and flew from the heathen’s valuable shield — many hundred marks’ worth, I should say. And with a great crack down upon his ornamented helm, the sword of the Christian broke.

“I see, brave man,” said the noble heathen in French, “you would now have to fight without a blade and no fame would I gain from that. Stand still and tell me who you are. Let there be a truce, till we have rested.” They sat down, both, upon the grass and the powerful heathen went on: “I have never encountered such a fighter in my life. Be so kind: let me know your name and race, and I shall not have made this journey for nought.”

“Am I to tell you then out of fear?” asked Herzeloyde’s son.

“I shall give you my own name first,” said the other. “I am Feirefiz the Angevin. Many countries pay me tribute.”

“How Angevin?” asked Parzival. “Anjou is by inheritance mine. I am told I have a brother, however, in heathendom, who has won great love and praise. If I might see your face, I could tell, sir, if you are the one.”

The other flung away his sword. “If there is any fighting to be done now,” he said, “our chances will be the same. Tell me, what does your brother look like?”

“He is black and white, they say, like written parchment.”

Figure 90. Parzival and Feirefiz parlay (ink on vellum, Germany, thirteenth century)

And the heathen said to the baptized man: “I am the one.”

Then neither lost time. Both helmets were removed, and indeed he had the markings of the magpie. Kissing, those two concluded peace. Feirefiz, the elder, bade his brother address him now as tu, not vous; but Parzival, in deference to his age, power, and wealth, demurred. They spoke of their father, and Feirefiz, who had hoped to meet him in Europe, was saddened to learn of his death. “I have seen in this one hour,” he said, “both the loss and the winning of joy. You, my father, and I were one; but this one appeared in three parts. I rode against myself and would gladly have killed myself. O Jupiter, write this miracle down! Your power came to our aid.” He laughed and tried to conceal his tears; then presently suggested that his brother should come see his army. However, when the Christian spoke of Arthur’s host and the heathen heard mention of ladies (they were life itself to Feirefiz), “Take me there,” he said, and side by side they rode to Arthur’s tents.

Everybody was ready for them; for a messenger from the Castle of Marvels had brought news to the assembled camps of a combat seen reflected in the pillar of the magic tower. Gawain received them in his tent, and when their armor had been removed there was no less amazement at the marvel of a man both black and white than at the wealth and beauty of his arms. A sumptuous evening was arranged and the noble heathen was praised and admired all round, the ladies glancing and whispering, wondering what woman had given him such attire. If he proved unfaithful to her, his reputation surely would suffer; yet all were so attracted they would have accepted gladly his service (I suppose, the poet remarks, because of his interesting markings). Arthur, Gramoflanz, Parzival, and Gawain stepped away to let the ladies have their fill, and for the following day made plans for another such Round Table event — spread about a costly circular cloth on the lawn — as, years before, had seen the visit of the Loathly Damsel.

And behold! When all were settled, a damsel, mounted, was seen approaching at a canter. Her bridle, saddle, and mount were splendid, and her face was heavily veiled. Her costly black mantle, hooded in the French style, displayed in gleaming Arabian gold a multitude of small turtle doves. She rode around the circle, gave Arthur greeting, turned to Parzival, sprang from her steed, fell before his feet, and weeping, pleaded for his greeting; then rose, tossed away the veil, and, as before, was Cundrie la sorcière, as ugly as ever: muzzle, tusks, and all; yet with dignity she stood and delivered her say.

“O Crown of Man’s Salvation, Parzival: in youth you courted Sorrow; Joy will now take you from her. You have striven for the soul’s peace, waiting in sorrow for the body’s joy. Condwiramurs, and Loherangrin, your son, have also been named to the Grail. Kardeiz, the other son, is to be crowned King of Pelrapeire. Greetings I bring, also, from the noble sweet King Anfortas, whom you now are to heal.”

Tears sprang from Parzival’s eyes and all about the circle arose murmuring.

“What am I to do?” he asked.

“Dear my lord,” Cundrie answered, “you will choose a male companion. I shall lead you then on your way.”

Parzival asked Feirefiz, who agreed to ride with him in fellowship to the Castle of the Grail; and how it all ended for the rest, I cannot say; but Cundrie and those two together rode away (The Muslim Feirefiz/Aibak, “Mottled, like the Moon” , is as worthy to enter the Castle as the Christian. Compare the two Grail Kings.).

BOOK XVI: THE NEW KING

Anfortas was still in excruciating pain. His eyes would often close, sometimes for as long as four days. But joy is now to be heard of him.

Parzival and Feirefiz were following Cundrie’s lead when a company of armed Templars came riding down upon them, but, recognizing the guide, set up a shout. The heathen, lowering his lance, spurred; but Cundrie caught his reign. “They are wholly in your service,” she said. Dismounting, baring their heads, they greeted Parzival afoot, welcomed Feirefiz too, and, again mounting, rode to Munsalvaesche in tears, there to be greeted by a multitude of elder knights, squires, and pages.

We have already heard how the sorrowing Anfortas leaned and seldom sat. His couch was adorned with healing gems. Parzival asked, in tears, “Show me where the Grail is kept, and if God’s mercy triumphs in me, this company shall bear witness.” He was shown and turning to face the Grail, genuflecting thrice to the Trinity, prayed surcease to the king’s pain; then arose, turned again to Anfortas, and asked the long-awaited question: “Oeheim, was wirret dier? Uncle, what ails thee?”^{Note 141}

Whereupon He that bade Lazarus arise gave help; so that Anfortas was healed, and the luster that the French call fleur was seen to come over his flesh. Parzival’s beauty, in comparison, now was mere wind. Indeed, no one whose beauty is from birth ever equaled that of Anfortas coming out of his sickness. And since the writing on the Grail had named Parzival its lord, he was there proclaimed its king.

Condwiramurs too was riding hard toward Munsalvaesche, and at the very point where the blood on the snow once had arrested Parzival’s heart he was to meet her. He paused, on the way, to visit Trevrizent, who, when he learned of the healing of his brother’s wound, was amazed: “Greater marvel,” he said, “has seldom come to pass: you have forced God by defiance to make His Trinity grant your will.” And he commended Parzival to God, who continued on his way the same night. The escort knew the forest well, and next morning there before him were the tents spread out of the company of his queen. An elder knight came forth, the father of Sigune, Duke Kyot of Catalonia, who, courteously greeting Parzival, brought him to the large tent where Condwiramurs, still asleep with slumbering ladies all about, was in bed with her two little sons. Going directly to the bed, Kyot slapped the covers, calling her to wake and laugh for joy. Her eyes opened: there stood her husband. And though she had nothing on but her smock, she quickly clasped the bedclothes about and hopped out to the carpet. Parzival clasped her in his arms. The children woke, and he kissed them too. Then old Kyot considerately had the little boys carried off, told the ladies in the tent to leave, and closed the tent flaps from outside.

Later that day a priest sang Mass, and Parzival supervised the coronation of his little boy Kardeiz, after which the tents were all struck amid tears and the two companies parted. The old duke had said nothing of his daughter. However, when Parzival and Condwiramurs paused with their escort at Sigune’s hermitage, they found her within, kneeling still, but dead. They raised the cover of her lover’s grave, where he lay embalmed in all his beauty, placed the virgin gently beside him, closed the cover with a prayer, and pressed on, to arrive in Munsalvaesche that night.

Feirefiz had waited up, and he laughed when little Loherangrin, frightened by the mottled skin, refused his uncle’s kiss. Then quickly, preparations were instituted for a ceremony of the Grail. Three great fires of pungent aloe wood were lighted in the middle of the hall; innumerable candles too. And the maidens in the service of the Joy of Paradise appeared, to the number of twenty-five. The Templars all were gathering, and when Condwiramurs had changed from her traveling dress she too came into the great hall. Seats and carpets were set about, and again there was enacted the entire procession of the Grail.

However, something very strange now was observed.

Feirefiz, sitting with Parzival and Anfortas on the seat before which the Grail was set down, saw nothing at all of the stone, but only the eyes of her who carried it, the Queen Repanse de Schoye.

“Do you not see the Grail before you?” Anfortas asked.

“I see nothing but a table,” he answered. “But the eyes of that girl go to my heart.”

Love’s power had turned him pale in the white parts of his complexion. What help now to Secundille the love she had bestowed on him? Or to any of those other ladies of his life the rich rewards they had granted? Gentle Anfortas perceived that he was in anguish. “Sir, I am sorry if my sister is causing you pain,” he said. “Your brother is her sister’s son. He perhaps can give you help.” And he turned to Parzival. “Sir, I do believe that your brother has not yet seen the Grail.”

Feirefiz agreed. He had not. The knights all found this strange, and word of it reached Titurel, the aged, crippled, bedridden old man in the neighboring great hall, from which the Grail had been brought, and back to which it would be returned. “If he is a heathen, unbaptized,” so came the word from Titurel, “there is no use for him to associate with those who do see the Grail. For him there is a veil around it.”

He was urged to be baptized. “Will it help me in this love?” he asked; and Parzival — addressing him now as tu, not vous — gave him to understand that he then might sue for the lady’s love. The baptismal font was sent for: a single beautiful ruby on a circular jasper step. “If you wish to marry my aunt,” said Parzival in warning, “you will have to renounce your gods and Secundille too.”

“Whatever I have to do for that girl, I will do,” the heathen answered. He was instructed in the doctrine of the Trinity. “Dear brother,” he said, “if your aunt has that god, it is in that god I believe, and all my own are abjured. For the sake of your aunt’s god, let me be baptized.”

And when all had been accomplished, the Grail was uncovered in his sight, and upon its stone there was now found written the following charge: any templar appointed by god’s hand to be master over a foreign fold must forbid the asking of his name or race and help them to their rights. but if the question is aksed of him, they shall no longer have his help.

Twelve days later Feirefiz departed with his bride. Messengers to his army had told of the death of Queen Secundille, and subsequently in India Repanse de Schoye gave birth to the son now known to the world as Prester John.…

IX. ENVOY: TO EACH HIS OWN

And so we have heard — the poet claims — at last correctly, how Parzival, Herzeloyde’s child, won the Grail. And he adds: “If Master Chrétien of Troyes did this story an injustice, there is in­deed reason for Kyot to be angry, who gave it to us correctly.… From Provence to the German lands the proper story was sent to us, on up to the adventure’s end. And I, Wolfram of Eschenbach, am going to tell no more of it here than the Master told of it there.”^{Note 142}

We need not argue whether Wolfram’s references to a Provinçal master Kyot may be taken seriously.^{Note 143} The point for now, rather, is that in the syndrome of ideas here presented asa unit we have the earliest definition of the secular mythology that is today the guiding spiritual force of the European West. Theologians seem not even to realize that this mythology exists and is the functioning religion of many of their parishoners, mumbling incredible credos in their pews.

The Grail here, as in the later Queste, is the symbol of supreme spiritual value. It is attained, however, not by renouncing the world or even current social custom, but, on the contrary, by participation with every ounce of one’s force in the century’s order of life in the way or ways dictated by one’s own uncorrupted heart: what the mystics call the Inner Voice. Trevrizent’s observation that a miracle had come to pass, inasmuch as Parzival had forced God by defiance to make his Trinity grant his will, touched the quick of the teaching: the anagogy, the metaphysical san, of this exemplary Gothic tale. According to its revelation, sprung from the heart and heartland of the European West, the moral initiative in the field of time is of man, not God; and not of man as species, or as member of some divinely ordained consensus, but of each one separately, as an individual, self-moved in self-consistent action. That is the meaning in our West of the term “free will.” The idea was announced in Trevrizent’s first sermon, where he taught the lost Parzival that God returns hate for hate and love for love. It is implicit in the very structure of the plot, where the hero, on his first visit to the Grail Castle, abiding by instructions, not only fails to heal the Maimed King but also forfeits the virtue of his own sweet life and, disoriented, converts everything he touches into waste: whereas, when he has learned, at last, through solitude in exile, to become what Nietzsche has termed “a wheel rolling from its own center,” lo, on the Grail stone, his name! In his own life, his own depth, he has touched the quick of time, in accord with that twelfth-century hermetic maxim already cited in these pages (See Experience and Authority here and here, and The Word Behind Words, and Occidental Mythology), of God as “an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.”

For according to this mythology there is no fixed law, no established knowledge of God, set up by prophet or by priest, that can stand against the revelation of a life lived with integrity in the spirit of its own brave truth. Every so-called “fall,” or departure from the “law,” is then itself a creative act in which God (to use a mythological term) participates. Hence Joyce’s theme from Romans ll:32 (See Phoenix Fire.). God’s initiative is represented in the inborn, sealedin soul or “intelligible character” of the individual at birth; and the initiative, the freedom to act, must thereafter be one’s own, guided not by what other people say, have done, or may tell one is God’s will, but by one’s own interior voice; for indeed (continuing to speak mythologically) it is in one’s sealed-in soul, its hidden, God-given difference from all others, that “God’s will” has been secreted, to be found and shown, like an Easter egg: and not by retreat to a bed of rapture either in darkness or in light, but through action here in this mixed world (why, otherwise, be born?), where nothing is foul, nothing pure, but all, like a magpie’s plumage, mixed.

Yet in this mythology of the self-moving, self-responsible individual in time there is a depth-dimension as well, transcending time, transcending space. Gahmuret, Feirefiz, and Parzival are one, as are Parzival and Condwiramurs. The baptized and unbaptized even in battle are at one, as are in sex play the male and female. We are reminded again of Joyce and his theme at the heart of Finnegans Wake, of the battling brothers: “equals of opposites, evolved by a onesame power … and polarized for reunion by the symphysis of their antipathies. Distinctly different were their duadestinies” (See The Balance, from Finnegans Wake, p. 92.).

Still further, again as already remarked, there is a truly mystical sense in this work of that accord between outward event and inward readiness recognized by Schopenhauer in his essay on “apparent intention” (See The Balance.). For, as the last episodes reveal, Parzival had been circling for years within range of a single night’s ride of Munsalvaesche. Only when ready for each did he chance (chance?) upon his various adventures in that mystic wood, the forest of this world. It is a law of symbolic life that the god beheld is a function of the state of consciousness of the beholder, and in this work — as in life itself — it is the individual’s friends and enemies who function for him as messengers and gods of initiatory guidance and revelation.

But this, after all, is the leading lesson of Arthurian romance in general. Within its fold the gods and goddesses of other days have become knights and ladies, hermits and kings of this world, their dwellings castles; and the adventures, largely magical, are of the magic rather of poetry than of traditional religion, not so much miracles of God as signs of an unfolding dimension of nature: as though in Gafurius’s design of the Music of the Spheres (Figure 20) the voice of Thalia surda, below ground, were beginning to be heard again, as in pagan times, in her own bucolic song, as the first statement of an accord that should expand through all the inward-outward spheres of the nine Muses. The main purpose of the monk’s Queste del Saint Graal was to check the trend of this reawakening to nature, reverse its current, and translate the Grail, the cornucopia of the lord of life, into a symbol no longer of nature’s earthly grace, but of the supernatural — leaving nature, man, history, and all womankind except baptized nuns, to the Devil.

In total contrast, love, and specifically heterosexual love, with womankind its chief ministrant and vessel, is both the moving and the redeeming power enshrined by the poet Wolfram in his cathedral erected to the virtue of the Grail. Maidens, not invisibles, here bear the talisman, and loves in all variety illuminate the adventure, like saints’ lives in the stained glass of Chartres, Amiens, and Beauvais: the loves of families and of couples, mothers for sons, fathers for daughters, a nunlike hermitess for a corpse that her love preserves in all the beauty of youth. Loyalty in service to love is the motivation of the action of this world, where, as the author tells, although all is mixed of black and white, inconstancy augments the black, while “he of steadfast mind trends toward the white.”^{Note 144} And, as in the love cult and songs of the troubadours, the loves of this world are always personal, specific. They are never, as in the ancient and Oriental cults of eros and agapē — or as in the fashionable antic of the Provençal Valentines — impersonal, orgiastic; unless in the instance of the magpie Feirefiz, who, however, in the Castle of the Grail was smitten specifically — and for good — by a single pair of blue eyes.

Love is born of the eyes and heart: the light world of the godly gift of sight and the dark of the grotto that opens within to infinity (in Figure 5, the realms 16 and 10). Hence, if the goddess Amor is to be served, neither light alone nor darkness can represent her way, which is mixed: neither Galahad’s couch to Sarras nor the crystalline bed of Tristan’s cave, but as long as life lasts — and life, after all, is her field — Gawain’s Marvel Bed of bolts and darts (“Anyone seeking rest,” states the author, “had better not come to this bed”),^{Note 145} or the hard war-saddle of Parzival’s turtle-dove-branded charger. At the moment of the wakening to love, an object, apparently without, “passes [in the words of Joyce] into the soul for ever.… And the soul leaps at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!” Condwiramurs, conduire amour: the guide, the summoner, will have opened a prospect to the castle, the passage to which, however, will have to be earned. And, according to this mythology, the one way is of absolute loyalty to that outward innermost object. By this alone can the two worlds be united and the kingship won of one’s proper Castle of Life.

“A life so concluded,” Wolfram states, “that God is not robbed of the soul, and which yet can with dignity win the world’s favor: that is a worthy work.”^{Note 146} Essentially, this sounds very much like Gottfried’s moraliteit, of which we have read that “its doctrine is in harmony with God and the world.” However, there the young hero sinned against the Goddess in not recognizing her summons but out of fear acting a role, as Tantris — Tristan reversed — with what results we have seen: shame in the world, disloyalty, and the Amfortas wound unhealed. The ideal, moraliteit, kingship of the Grail, was never attained.

Whereas Wolfram solved the spiritual problem of his century first by setting the ideal of love above marriage and, simultaneously, the ideal of an indissoluble marriage beyond love; then by moving his heroes to this end through adventures undertaken, without pretense and with unvacillating courage, on the impulse of their uncorrupted hearts. As far as I know, he was the first poet in the world to put forward seriously this socially explosive ideal of marriage, which has become today, however, the romantic norm of the West, resisted and even despised in the Orient as anarchic, immoral, and insane. For through it are transcended the primitive, ancient, and Oriental orders of tribal and family marriage, where social, political, and economic considerations prevail over personal and romantic, and where the unfolding personality (which in the lore of this revelation is the flower of human life) is bound back, cropped and trained to the interests of a group. Transcended equally here is the desperate courtly answer in adultery to such sociological violations of the claims of the wakening heart, as well as the cold ascetic answer in total escape, by way of a cloister, into Solomon’s ship.

And after all the miracles, angelic voices, consecrations, and elevations to the sky of the Cistercian Queste del Saint Graal, was it not a lovely thing at last to see a Grail King, newly crowned, proceed immediately to fetch his wife and youngsters from exactly that spot where, in the period of the freshness of his youth, her memory had overpowered him? Further, is it not proper, in the name of life, that the Grail Maiden herself, Repanse de Schoye, should in due time have quit her angelic role for marriage and the bearing of a son? And finally, what are we to say in this year of Our Lord 1968 or so, of that order which appeared, written on the Grail, about the year 1215, directing every knight in its service, who, by God’s grace, might ever be appointed master of an alien folk, daz er in hulfe rehtes, “that he should help them to their rights” (See The Paraclete, as in Wolfram, op. cit., XVI. 818:24–819:2.)?

It is not possible for. all, or even many, of the noble children of this world, however, to fare into the adventure of life with such aplomb as Parzival. And how many have met their Condwiramurs, once and for all, so beautifully, at just that perfect time? For most, the quest for the ideal to serve will have been rather in the way of Gawain, with his ladies here, ladies there, and finally his lifescarred, dangerously fascinating Lady Orgeluse and her Perilous Bed. For whereas Parzival is the model of an absolute ideal, Gawain is the man of the world. With his noble heart given willingly to Parzival in service, he facilitates the youth’s appearances in the field of history (Arthur’s court). The two are like father and son, like Lancelot and Galahad. So that once again we may recognize here, as there, the virtues of the younger knight as of the spirit or essence of his elder. Moreover, the same may be said of their marriages. As Zimmer wrote of Lancelot in relation to his son: the father “combined in himself the energies of the two spheres, the worldly sphere of desires, and the higher one of the purely spiritual adventure,” so, relating these two marriages we may see in that of Gawain and Orgeluse a combination of the energies of both: the imperfect, of marriage in this life on earth, and the perfect, of the ideal it intends; the normal and the supernormal image of that mystery of love, wherein each is both (For the idea of the “supernormal image,” compare The Love-Death, and Primitive Mythology.).

But now, what of that strange farce, the baptism of Feirefiz? The magic of the sacraments had played no significant role in any of the major biographies of the work. Their rites had been associated rather with the ceremonialism of court than with the needs and realizations of the inner life — and then, suddenly, when all was done, a baptism occurred.

One could be tempted to regard the scene as a burlesque of the conversion of heathens by fiat or persuasion, against which stands the fact, however, that following his baptism the mottled heathen (a prefiguration of the modern Anglo-Indian) could actually see — though not greatly appreciate — the Grail. One explanation might be that, since the Roman Church was in Wolfram’s time the only authorized public vehicle of the European spiritual heritage, Feirefiz’s submission to the rite represented and confirmed an act of willing participation in the moral order of the Christian world. However, there was something rather special about this particular rite.

“The baptismal font,” we read, “was tilted a little toward the Grail and immediately became full of water, neither too warm nor too cold.”^{Note 147} That is, the Grail itself, the philosophers’ stone, was the source of the water (aqua mercurialis) poured upon the black-and-white man’s head.

Furthermore, the order concerning the need for the rite had come from that mysterious beautiful old man — “grayer even than mist” — whom Parzival, on the occasion of his first visit to the castle, had glimpsed reposing on a bed in the neighboring great room. And who was he?

His name, we have heard, was Titurel, the grandfather of Anfortas. Himself the earliest Grail King, he is here the counterpart of Brons, the rich fisher, in Robert de Boron’s Estoire, and in Celtic myth, the Welsh god Bran the Blessed (Irish Manannan Mac Lir), lord of the sea and its fish: or once again the Fisher of Men (Figure 5, Station l).^*

^*In the cathedral-treasury of S. Lorenzo in Genoa there is an octagonal shallow bowl of green Roman glass (first century a.d.),brought from the conquest of Caesarea (1001–1002), once thought to be a priceless emerald and identified with the Grail in which Joseph caught Christ’s blood. “On the rim is an inscription in very fine lines, visible only under a certain light: the writing through which the Grail revealed its commands. Thus at once the m ost precious stone, a cult vessel, and an oracle!” (Goetz, op. cit., p. 5). The date and form associate this bowl with Figures 3 and 18; the size, with the gem-helmets of Belakane and Gahmuret.

The date of this great work, about 1215, represents — as Henry Adams remarked in his studies of cultural dynamics — the apogee of the Gothic Christian arc. “Symbol or energy,” he wrote in his chapter on “The Dynamo and The Virgin,” celebrating the miracle of the building of Chartres (an exact contemporary of Wolfram’s Parzival), “the Virgin had acted as the greatest force the Western world ever felt, and had drawn man’s activities to herself more strongly than any other power, natural or supernatural, had ever done; the historian’s business was to follow the track of the energy; to find where it came from and where it went to; its complex source and shifting channels; its values, equivalents, conversions.”^{Note 148}

We have already found where it came from: the energy both of the altar of Chartres and of the water (aqua permanens) of the Grail (Figures 55–58). We have now, therefore, only to follow what Adams called its “Curve of Degradation,” when it burst its Gothic vault and streamed with ever-increasing force to the great “Hall of Dynamos” of the Paris Exposition of the year 1900 and — beyond that — to Hiroshima and the moon.