The Grail Legend

I have decided to post the Parzival story I presented in Zen week 24, so everyone has the chance to review the story in detail. It is a long read but worth your time. Reading the story helps to bring its weight to bear, so to realize the deeper mythology the story of Parzival represents. So take a moment. Find a soft chair to read, and enjoy considering the deeper lessons hidden within the Grail Legend. 

Joseph Campbell here presents the story in all its glory and grandeur. Enjoy!!

Joseph Campbell:

“Well, I’m going to be talking now about the Grail Legend, particularly as it appears in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival. This seems to me to be the great mythos of the modern European world. The problem is very eloquently stated, which we’re still facing in this beautiful and very amusing legend.

The great dates for the emergence of the European spirit in its own terms, in this secular literature, secular mythology, the great period is between the dates 1150 and 1250. That’s the crucial century here. It’s the century of the building of the great cathedrals and also of the flowering of Arthurian romance. Before that date we do not have it. After that date we do not have it. It’s a recollection and vestige from that date on.

Now the European world was reemerging in this period from almost a thousand years of abyssal darkness, really. The Roman Empire had extended its domain all the way up to Scotland in the period shortly after Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, and so Roman civilization had been present and very well developed. All I have to do is visit, for example, in England the city of Bath and see the Roman remains there, and in Spain, in France, and along the Rhine in Germany. Into the Roman world at this time there came the great influences of the mystery cults which were flourishing in the Near East, in the late Alexandrian world of the Near East: the Orphic mysteries, the Mithraic mysteries, and others. The number of altars to Mithra that have been found all the way up along the Danube into France and on into England is simply enormous, and there are remains also of the Orphic cults throughout Europe at this time.

Now, as we know, in the early days Christianity was generally associated by the classical world with these mystery cults. Its mythology, its miracle was essentially equivalent to that of the mysteries. With Constantine in the early fourth century, Christianity was recognized as one of the religions of the Roman world. But then, shortly later, with Theodosius the First, Theodosius the Great, it was declared that Christianity was the only religion permitted in the Christian world. Theodosius’s dates are 378 to 395, and with this a persecution of the pagans began. The temples were torn down. These ruins that we see all over the Near East and Europe of pagan temples were deliberately rendered ruins. And there was an exodus really and an extinction of the cult: the burning of the library in Alexandria, the closing of the classical philosophical schools in Athens. All of these followed.

Meanwhile, great theological problems were presented by the Christian doctrine, and these were resolved in that series of fourth-, fifth-, and early sixth-century councils of Chalcedon and Ephesus and Constantinople and so on. The problem of the relationship of the Son to the Father, the Holy Ghost to the Father and the Son, the problem of the birth of God: was Mary the Mother of God or was she the mother merely of Jesus? And did Jesus become the vehicle at the time of the baptism and whatnot? All of these really very difficult and intricate problems were decided. The decisions were made during these centuries by councils of Levantine bishops. There were hardly any European participants in these. The center of gravity of the Roman Empire shifted to Constantinople when Constantine founded that city. Constantine himself was an Asian, not a European. And meanwhile the European world fell into second place and a very miserable second place.

Of course the Roman Empire fell only a generation and a half after its conversion to Christianity, the European Roman Empire, and it was Augustine’s problem in The City of God to rationalize this disaster and to say that the city of man has collapsed but the city of God has triumphed. Now Augustine was a North African, of course, so again we don’t have the European.

Meanwhile there were a number of heresies, the great number of heresies flourishing, and the most important for our present point were two. One is the Pelagian heresy. Now Pelagius was an Irish monk. This here we are in Europe, and the crux of the Pelagian heresy was this: that no one can inherit the sin of another. Consequently mankind has not inherited the sin of Adam. Consequently there is no value in the doctrine of original sin. Consequently man does not have to be saved from original sin. Man can save himself; he does not need the sacraments. This is the Pelagian heresy. Christ as a model is a great advantage to the Christian world because through that model man can be inspired to that act of will which enables him to release himself from the darkness of ignorance. But it is not through vicarious grace gained by the crucifixion of Christ that the individual is to be saved.

Well, this was the first great heresy that Augustine set himself against. Without original sin, without the inheritance of original sin, the whole doctrine of the necessity for the Incarnation is in trouble. But from that individualistic standpoint which I have identified with Europe, it’s impossible to think of this tribal heritage of sin or this racial heritage of sin. And so in a situation there, that’s the first point.

The second great heresy was known as the Donatist heresy. And the doctrine here was this: it was a heresy that accepted the necessity of the sacraments. The doctrine was that sacraments administered by an unworthy priest do not work. This brought up a terribly difficult problem because it rendered the administration of sacraments questionable all the time. Who knows what the moral condition of the priest is? And again Augustine let go at the Donatist heresy with the doctrine of the incorruptibility of the sacraments: that no matter what the character of the priest, the anointed, sacramentally anointed and ordained priest, the sacrament works.

So you see what you have now. You have as the official doctrine the absolute necessity of the sacraments for salvation, since man cannot save himself because we have inherited original sin and that is overcome by Christ and Christ’s virtue which is communicated to man through the sacraments. The absolute necessity of man accepting sacraments from the church, which is the only authorized organization to administer the sacraments, and the absolute freedom of the clergy to behave any way it wanted to in administering the sacraments.

Well, that may have been all right in the fifth century and sixth century, but by the twelfth the clergy had become notoriously immoral. Pope Innocent III himself called his clergy a sty of swine. The behavior was disgraceful on all accounts, and yet these had the keys to heaven and everyone had to submit to them.

Now this question of a clergy behaving as it should not behave, enforcing beliefs that people did not always have or profess, but making it absolutely necessary, brought about a condition that was really spiritually terrible. And this is the condition represented in the mythological image of the wasteland, which is the basic image of the Grail romance.

The basic theme of the Grail romance is of a king, a Fisher King. The pope is the fisherman. Christ had said, “I will make you fishers of men.” The pope’s ring is called the fisherman’s ring. It has a picture of the draft of fishes, the great draft of fishes on it. The Fisher King has been very seriously wounded, and as a result of the wound the land is laid waste. The problem of the Grail romance is to heal the Fisher King. The problem of the Grail hero is to heal that wound. And he is to do so without knowing how he is to do so. He is not to know the rules of the quest. He is to ask spontaneously, “What is the matter?” That’s exactly the question that was asked last night by the man who inherited the wound. The Grail King is a counterpart of this Bodhisattva figure.

Now, with respect to life in the domestic sphere, marriage in the Middle Ages was the marriage of convenience, rendered sacralized by the church by these clergymen, the sacrament of marriage. Love was the danger. Woman is called the gate of Hell because of her seductive beauty. And because of the danger of love, this situation of a sacralized marriage without love as being the norm brought about in the aristocratic circles a powerful reaction. And this is the reaction represented in the troubadour poetry and the ideal of love of the troubadours.

Now I just want to say a word about these ideals of love that were in the air at that time. There were in the Christian tradition these two loves in opposition: the love that was known as Eros or erotic passion, and the love known as Agape, which was spiritual love, the love of “Love thy neighbor.” Now both of these loves, if you will think about them a little bit, are impersonal. “Love thy neighbor as thyself” means no matter who the neighbor is, love him as thyself. Shut your eyes and whoever is there, that is your neighbor and your love goes to that presence. Also, that is the basic nature of Agape: that you don’t select whom you’re going to be in love with, that the love of Christ is for all, and “love thy neighbor as thyself for the love of God” and so on.

Eros, the antipode to this, is also basically impersonal. It is, so to say, the call of the organs to the organs. It’s a purely biological situation. And the great festivals, the orgies, were the typical manifestations of this, where it didn’t matter whom you found so long as the person was of the opposite sex. And there were actually cult situations where this was developed. So we have these two basically impersonal loves.

The love idea of the troubadours was completely different from either of these. It’s a third factor. It is not love in the dark, you might say. The troubadour Giraut de Bornelh, who flourished in the middle and end of the twelfth century, epitomized the troubadour ideal. There were many, many arguments in the sort of verse debates as to whether the eyes or the heart were the prime factor in love. Bornelh synthesized the two traditions in the following way: love, he declares, is born of the eyes and the heart. The eyes are the scouts of the heart. They are looking for an appropriate object of beauty. That is to say, they are selective. This is discriminative. This is elite. This is personal, selective. And having found their image, they recommend that image to the heart, but not any heart: the noble heart, the gentle heart, the heart capable of love, not sheer lust. And being in accord, these three—the two eyes and the heart—love is born.

So love is born of the eyes and the heart. It is an individual experience. The eyes questing in the outer world for the object of inspiration, and the heart—that chakra of the sound that is not made by two things striking together receives the image and this image becomes the idol so to say of individual devotion.

Now all of these Arthurian romances are based on old Celtic pagan myths. The knights and ladies and incidents of Arthurian romance—the knights are the gods and heroes and heroines and goddesses of Celtic mythology. We know this; we can identify them, the themes and all. There’s no doubt about it. Let’s see what this really means to start with: namely that those people whom we know in the world because they are depicted as knights and ladies of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, these people whom we know in the world are really gods—as we all are, according to this view—and the relationship of people to each other are the relationships of the myths. Our problem is simply to recognize this in the adventures of our lives. We are undergoing the mythological adventure, not knowing it.

The idea of the enchantment and disenchantment is that people at a certain time and place are forced to perceive the world in a way that is inadequate or improper to its character. This makes me think of the Gnostic aphorism in the Gospel According to Thomas, where—and I’ve already mentioned this once before—Christ is asked when the kingdom will come, and Christ says it will not come by expectation; it is here now. The kingdom of the Father is spread over the Earth and men do not see it. Men do not see it because of an enchantment of their eyes. The word of the Savior would be the disenchanting factor. So in these legends the Savior who is to disenchant the world is the equivalent of the Christ figure or the Savior figure who opens men’s eyes, or in the Oriental tradition of Buddhism, to the Buddha who releases you from the enchantment of Maya. And the enchantment of Maya, in modern psychological terms, is exactly that image of the world that you have as a consequence of the desire and fear systems of your own life mode. If you could break that, break away from your ego limitation, you would behold the world of paradise right here now

There is a Buddhist saying: this world with all its ills, with all its horrors, with all its stupidities, with all its darkness, is the Golden Lotus world right now as it is. And if you cannot see it as such, this is not the world’s fault. What is to be corrected is not the world but your own perspective. And so we must expect to find in the Grail legend that everything is all there; only it is not being seen. And what the hero is to do is to clarify the situation.

Now what has brought about the enchantment in the Grail legend? There are two factors in the legend as it is communicated to us by Wolfram von Eschenbach in his Parzival, composed about 1210 to 1215. There’s an earlier Parzival by Chrétien de Troyes which, however, is incomplete. Chrétien’s Parzival is perhaps 1190 or something like that. The theme was not congenial to Chrétien. Chrétien was extremely fluent, graceful, lovely, fabulous. He could write, as one German commentator says, he could jingle rhymes from his sleeve like a magician; they just come rippling, running out. And I’ll be speaking of him a little later perhaps in some of his other romances: the Lancelot and the Yvain is far more successful than in the Parzival. It was Wolfram von Eschenbach who picked up the theme and declares in his preface and in his conclusion that Chrétien had misrepresented it. He developed it in full, and this is the great Parzival which Wagner took over and, I would say, in a certain way destroyed. And I’ll explain why a little later.

Now according to Wolfram, who really knew what he was talking about, the reason for the enchantment was that the Grail King had been very severely wounded by a pagan lance. Now the character of the Grail King is the crux of this whole situation. This was a young man, the Grail King, who had inherited his role; he had not earned it. He was simply anointed as king. The whole problem in the Middle Ages was that the religious life was under the control of the anointed. The salvation of man was through the sacraments which were handed down through anointed clergy. And whether you were a person of great majestic spirituality or very trivial character who had made a good confession, you would nevertheless be saved through the ritual magic of the sacraments.

You might ask why should anyone go in quest of the Grail in the Middle Ages when the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is being celebrated all around him every day, all the time, and all he had to do was go around the corner and there was Christ himself in the sacrament of the altar. What more do you want? Well, the point is that the sacrament of the altar was simply sacramental and ritual, and the Grail Castle is achieved by one who is worthy of it. A person unworthy, no matter how okay sacramentally and true contrition and perfect confessions and Holy Communion and all that, he’s ineligible for it. But as we’ll see later, the Grail Castle was entered not only by the Grail hero but also by his Muslim half-brother. So you didn’t have to be a baptized Christian to go to the Grail Castle. In Wolfram’s context it is the majesty of spirit that counts.

Now the character of an enchantment is that there are people all around who know the rules of the enchantment. These are the people of the Grail Castle community. But they can’t dispel it. The only way the enchantment can be dispelled is by some naive person doing the thing that has to be done unintentionally, out of his nature. To do it intentionally will not break the spell. 

So you get the point: the rescue of the world is to be through an intrinsic nobility of nature which is expressed through the hero. The hero in this tradition is called the Great Fool. He is one who is uninstructed in the secret of the enchantment and nevertheless, because of the purity—and I don’t mean purity in the Galahad sense at all but the integrity and honesty and courage and forthrightness of his nature—is able to restore the proper natural order as against the enforced social order of the anointments.

Now here was a king, the Grail King, who was not naturally competent for his job. He had been anointed. No sooner anointed than, as a young man and properly in the way of young men, he was interested in the adventure of love. So the Grail King, who represents the champion, the guardian of the highest spiritual symbol, goes forth in quest of love with the war cry “Amore!” And he encounters on the way a natural man, a pagan, who represents the natural principle in quest of the Grail. And these two encounter one, being a Christian and the other a Muslim. They immediately go into combat, and what happens is that the Moor, the Muslim, sends his lance through the genitals of the king so that he is rendered impotent. That is the symbol of the wasteland. The king who represents its fertilization, its spiritual fertilization, is symbolically rendered impotent. And that king at the same time with his blow slays the Muslim. So as a result of the fact that the lord of the spirit is inadequate to his function, both the world of the spirit and the world of nature are knocked down, rendered impotent. And that’s the wasteland situation.

A pall falls over the Grail Castle. The king is carried—he manages to get home—and he is in terrific anguish. And when the head of the lance is extracted from the wound, the name of the Grail is seen written on it. This Muslim was in quest of the Grail. What you have here is spirit in quest of nature, nature in quest of spirit, and neither helping the other but in collision with each other. What we’ve got to do now is unite the two.

There is another enchantment in this same story of Wolfram which runs parallel to the enchantment of the Grail Castle. This is the enchantment of the Castle of Marvels. This has to do not with the realm of the spirit but with the realm of love and, let’s say, physical love, erotics. It has to do with the world of the troubadour love. The story is of a very powerful and well-known and distinguished duke who falls in love with the wife of a noble king of Sicily—who would be probably Frederick II—and in the way of twelfth-century troubadour love he becomes the love of the king’s wife. But when the king discovers the two together the king castrates this man, who is so mortified by this as well as physically stricken that he decides on revenge. He goes to Persia and learns tremendously powerful magic, and then he comes back and enchants the whole aristocracy of Europe in a castle known as the Castle of Marvels: all the queens and countesses and everybody else and beautiful women are there, and all the glorious knights, and all completely separated each from each other, even forgetting who they are.

So we have the Castle of Marvels enchanted over here that represents the sort of wasteland of love which I spoke of earlier in connection with the Tristan story, and the Castle of the Grail here, the wasteland of the spiritual life. Both the spiritual and the secular worlds of spiritual experience—love and beauty—are under this pall of enchantment through these two castrati. Klingsor is the name of the one who puts the Castle of Marvels enchantment, and the poor old King Anfortas, the young King Anfortas, is the stricken Grail King.

Now you see your Wagner here already. That’s the situation. That’s what has to be healed. And there are two heroes available, one for each task. One hero is Parzival, who is a young, a callow great fool indeed, and the other Gawain, graceful, courteous, lovely Gawain, who is a highly sophisticated philanderer. He is the stories—the funny adventures are absolutely beyond belief that Wolfram manages to present for Gawain as he goes from one to another of these experiences of his, in and out of bed and in and out of battlefields and all of it, going along in grand style. But that all represents part of the enchantment situation.

Now I’ll deal first with Parzival to show something of the sort of adventure that led to the release of the enchantment. His father had been killed in courtly combat, and his mother, sick and tired of the whole courtly game, had gone into the forest and had given birth to her child in the forest in a kind of hermitage and had told her servants never even to mention the world of courtly life to her son. So he grows up as a kind of country bumpkin of glorious beauty. Well, I guess he’s something like about fifteen or sixteen when one day, rambling around the hills, he hears the clatter of hoofs. He’s never heard hoofs before. His mother has told him about religion. His mother has told him that God is good and the Devil is bad and he should look out for devils and always be for God. In other words, he has been given instruction, the normal family instruction about religion that many of us have had. When he sees these shining knights come along—three of them—he thinks they are angels, and so he kneels down and prays to them. And the leader, a great duke in glorious armor with bangles and everything else, he says, “Young man, I’m no angel. I am a knight.”

Now in the romantic view of the Middle Ages this awakens in him his noble nature. He has inherited the knightly character of his wonderful knightly father, and even though ignorant of it and living under an illusion he has been awakened. Now this is the counterpart of the call to adventure that I mentioned yesterday. The hero is called to adventure. There is a call. And so he says, “What is a knight?” And he’s told what a knight is and that if he would go to Arthur’s court he would be made a knight. That’s where knights are made. So he determines to go to Arthur’s court. He goes back to his mother to say, “I want to be a knight,” and she faints. Then she determines to make him look like a jackass and send him off to the court so that they’ll immediately send him home. So she gets the worst horse she can find, and he picks up a little bunch of javelins that he has fashioned for himself, and she makes a costume for him where the shirt and the pants are all one thing, the sort of thing that fools wear, the costume of a fool. And she sends him forth in this rig to Arthur’s court. And she gives him certain advice: again, don’t cross streams where the water is deep; when you see a fine beautiful woman try to acquire a kiss from her and a ring; and with a few little details like that to give him instruction for life he starts out. And here he’s trotting along, and his mother follows him down the road, and when he passes out of sight she drops dead. So he’s killed his mother, and he didn’t mean that either. He’s going to go through for a long way just being the one that knocks things over.

He comes to a stream—as Wolfram says, a stream that a rooster could have crossed—but on this horse with this mother’s instruction he goes along the stream until he finds a place where there’s almost no water at all. Then he goes across. The first thing he sees is a tent on a field, a beautiful tent. So he drives to the tent. He moves in. And what behold does he see? A beautiful girl lying asleep on a bed with the covers way down to her waist. And Wolfram said, “And God had made that body.” And when he saw it he noticed that there was a ring on her finger. So this lout jumps on the bed, and the woman wakes up with him trying to get a kiss from her and drag the ring from her finger and so forth. And it’s that way he goes through life.

Then when her husband comes back and finds the ruin in the place he says, “What’s been going on?” He thinks his honor has been destroyed. The boy wouldn’t have known how to destroy his honor. And he tears the clothes of his wife to shreds and sits her on a horse, and they ride off together. And he’s going to look for that guy until he finds him. So the boy hasn’t gone one half day and he’s got a major knight of the Arthurian court after him with his wife in distress and everything going to pieces.

He arrives in the court, and he sees a knight in red armor with a golden goblet riding out. And the knight says, “You tell Arthur when you go in—when he sees this silly fellow—that I’m out in the field.” Well, what had happened had been this: this was a knight who had felt that Arthur owed him some land. Arthur had taken some land. So he had gone in and insulted the court by taking the queen’s cup and dashing the wine in her face, riding out and saying, “Who in this court is going to avenge the queen?” This is just one way to provoke a knightly combat. Knightly combat is always engaged in according to the rules. So in goes this lout. He rides into the court and he sees Arthur. He says, “Who’s Arthur?” He finds Arthur and he says, “Make me a knight.” Arthur was baffled. And Kay, who’s a tough guy in the court, he says, “Send him out to deal with the Red Knight.” All right, the kid turns around, goes out. The Red Knight—he comes riding at him on the silly horse without any lance or anything else, just a packet of javelins. The knight won’t even deign to use his lance on him but turns it around the butt end and gives him a bash with it. The horse falls down and the kid’s on the ground. But he picks up a javelin and tosses it right through the knight’s visor and puts it right into his head, and the knight drops dead. This is altogether against knightly rule. 

So the court has actually been greatly scandalized by this whole thing. They come out to find what’s going on out there, and they see this kid dragging the knight around trying to find how to get the armor off. One of the pages helps him get the armor off, shows him how to put it on. But the kid won’t take off the clothes underneath. He’s got the fool’s costume underneath. And he inherits this mighty charger of this knight. He jumps on the darn thing and he rides at a gallop for the whole day because he doesn’t know how to stop the horse. The horse pulls him up at a castle where a magnificent knight receives him. And when they take his armor off—as they always do—they’re appalled by what they see here. And of course the symbol is he’s still carrying his mother with him all the time, the clothes his mother made. And we’re going to try to make him a knight. And this knight sees what a beautiful boy he is, and the knight has an available daughter here, and he’s trying to put things together. You know, men were a little scarcer in those days than they are now. And this all looks like a very good match. So he’s perfectly willing to give the boy instructions in knightly arms and so forth, which the kid has a great talent for. And the kid always talks about his mother. So the man says, “Why don’t you grow up and quit talking about your mother and just become a knight according to these rules?”

Now one of the great rules that he tells him—and this is the key rule to the failure of the knight when he comes to the castle for the first time—is: don’t ask too many questions. Be polite. Let people tell you things. Don’t be over-curious. He offers him his daughter. The boy has this feeling now—his knightly feeling, the sound thing—I shouldn’t marry someone who’s just given to me. I must earn my wife. I must earn my life. So to the man’s great sorrow he rides away, and he’s on adventure. The horse takes him to a castle. I would describe it how it is: it’s a castle in very bad case, and it is being besieged by a king who has taken all the lands away from this orphan countess who is the chatelaine, the woman whose castle it is. He wants to marry her by force. Now here again is the medieval evil social marriage. She was a good match, or at least he had the lands he wanted, and this marriage had come about. But she had sworn that she would not marry anyone except for love. Now she represents the feminine end of this adventure. She has the integrity not to acquiesce in anything that does not accord with the dictates of her heart. The boy Parzival is questing for his destiny. She is waiting for hers. And she knows when it isn’t there. In other words, refusal of suitor’s motif that I’ve already mentioned here.

Why is the darling scene? These two kids, they’re about sixteen years old and they’ve never known anything of anything. And he comes in, and he doesn’t say a thing. They take the armor off and put him in nice silk garments and all. He just sits mute. And she thinks, “What a funny fellow.” He’d been told not to ask any questions. So she thinks, “Well, perhaps I’ll ask the question.” So she asks him who he is and so forth. And presently he goes to bed. He wakes up in the middle of the night to find her on her knees beside him in her nightgown—as Wolfram says, in the gear for war. And he says, “Don’t kneel to me. Kneel to God.” Well, he says, “Get out of the bed if you want to be with me.” “No,” she says, “you stay in the bed. And if you’ll promise not to wrestle with me I’ll get in there with you.” There exactly what she said. And he didn’t know anything about wrestling anyhow. And so she gets in. And then she tells him her story of how the knight has come to take her land, but she would rather throw herself in the castle tower than submit her body to someone she did not love. And he said, “Well, here he is. I’ll kill the knight for you tomorrow.” So indeed he did. He gets on that prodigious horse, and he’s been taught now by a master knight how to use his weapons. Out he goes, and this invincible one—one of the great kings of the world—is knocked down.

Well, he has been told that when a man submits to you you don’t kill him. So when he’s got him down the knight submits. He says, “I submit.” And Parzival says, “Okay, well you just go into the town there and you become the servant of this girl. Her name is Condwiramurs, the one who conducts love.” “Well,” he said, “if I went in there they’d murder me.” “Well then,” says Parzival, “you go to King Arthur’s court and submit yourself there to a certain lady whom he named.” So this great knight goes. One after another knights are being sent to Arthur’s court by this lad that went out, and the court begins to think, “You know, this is somebody worth a place here.”

The girl then comes and receives him and says, “This is my beloved and I am his wife. He is lord of the castle.” This is marriage out of love, and it constitutes a marriage. There is no priest involved in this at all. She puts her hair up as a married woman. They go to bed a second night together, and it’s still a marriage simply of souls. Then the third night something nice happens. Wolfram says, “Please excuse me for mentioning it, but he touched her. He found it nice. They interlaced arms and legs. And from that time on that’s how it was.” And they thought, “This is what we should have been doing all the while.” But the point here is that the marriage—just the opposite to that of the other courts—was a spiritual marriage first and actually a marriage out of love and not out of social purposes. And then gradually the physical thing comes in as the consummation of a marriage that had already been consummated in the spirit. This is Wolfram’s approach to these matters.

So now he’s married, and for a while he’s lord of the castle. And then he thinks, you know, he’s done this. He’s a great knight. He’s the greatest knight in the whole world. He thinks, “I wonder how mother is these days.” He doesn’t know that she dropped dead when he left. So he starts out to find mother. He has accomplished the worldly adventure perfectly out of his own spirit. He has caused a lot of trouble, but he has surpassed that in his positive deeds. And it’s a man in that position—not one who has retreated from the ways of the world but has mastered them fully—who is eligible for the next adventure, the adventure of the Grail. And the Grail Castle appears to him as he starts out in quest of his mother. What he actually finds is the castle of the Grail.

Now this is a very interesting adventure of the Grail Castle. The Grail Castle is not a church; it’s a castle. This is not a priestly; it’s an aristocratic affair. The carrier of the Grail is not a male, is not a priest; it’s an absolutely perfectly chaste virgin, and she is accompanied by a little company of virgins. So that the people performing the functions are people properly eligible for them in this tradition, which is exactly the opposite to what one saw in the church. The scandals of the clergy in the twelfth century were well known to everybody. Saints and everybody else were complaining about the way the clergy was behaving. And Pope Innocent the Third called them a sty of pigs. So there was a certain reason for a challenge to all this.

Here is the way the adventure of the Grail Castle begins. This knight is charting along. By the way, he always lets the horse guide him. He never guides the horse. The horse represents the dynamics of the unconscious, of the psyche, of nature. And the conscious guide is acquiescing in whatever the horse did. And it’s the horse that carried them all to the proper castles all the way. He comes to a pond. And this is the very famous motif of the Fisher King. He comes to a pond where two men are in a boat fishing. When you look at the Orphic imagery of the Orphic tradition, Orpheus is the Fisher. Christ made his Apostles fishers of men. 

The ring worn by the pope is called the fisherman’s ring. “I shall make you fishers of men.” It is the spiritual principle going down into the unconscious waters to pull souls or beings out of the unconscious state into the realm of the light. So here is the Fisher King. He is the maimed king. He is exactly the Grail King who I’ve already spoken about who has been maimed. He cannot walk. He is in great pain. And he simply—this is the only thing he can do—is sit in a boat fishing. Well, Christ the maimed king fishing for us all. The boy asks where he could spend the night. And the king says, “There’s a castle up the way, but don’t get lost. A lot of people get lost.” And he tells them how to get there. And you call and they’re let down the gate. So it happens the boy is received. And then he’s ushered into a vast hall with hundreds of knights in it. And there is the Fisher King who had been in the boat brought in on a litter for the ceremony of the Grail. It was a scene of great anguish.

Well, I don’t want to go through the whole ceremony. It’s gorgeously rendered. The girls carrying the Grail are clothed in garments that suggest the world of nature—brown and green and the blue of the sky and all. They are nymphs, as it were, incarnating the powers of the natural world. And the Grail that they carry is a stone. Wolfram’s Grail is a stone. There is a carved stone, a kind of jewel-like stone that may have been the model for this. But it is always represented as a stone. And that stone is given the name of the Philosopher’s Stone. Now the Philosopher’s Stone is that alchemical marvel which can transmute gross into subtle matter, can transmute primal filth into gold. It can transmute the life of the world into the golden life of the spirit. That’s what the Grail can do. Furthermore, it is a vessel, as it were, that will give to everyone what he asks for. It is the inexhaustible vessel of plenty which is the symbol of that spiritual conduit that carries the inexhaustible of the eternal into the inexhaustible forms of the temporal world. There is a slope in one of the Upanishads that says, “From that inexhaustible this inexhaustible, and that one is not tapped even. It cannot be exhausted.” And the Grail is the source through which this comes. So there’s a wonderful feast provided by the Grail, everyone receiving just what he wants. The king is very gracious to the boy. 

And now comes the main point. The boy’s nature moves him to ask, “What is wrong here? What is the cause of the sorrow of the king?” If he had asked that question the king would have been healed. But he remembers his instruction: don’t ask any questions. And so the motive of sympathy or compassion is eluded, is cut out because of his ambition to be a proper knight. For the first time this youth acts not according to his nature but according to his ambition and the rules for that ambition. So he fails in the Grail quest. Everyone is very polite to him. He goes to his room. When he wakes up in the morning it’s an empty castle, and he goes out, gets on his horse which is left there saddled and everything with his lance beside it. And as he rides over the bridge the bridge is suddenly drawn up, and a voice cries after him, “Go on, you goose!” And off he goes wondering what he did wrong. He has failed because he has obeyed the rules of the day instead of the order of his nature. Now that’s the whole crux of the Grail problem.

Now how does he get back again? The rule of the Grail Castle is once you have failed you get no more chances. The rule of the castle is you must spontaneously do the thing that was to be done, namely ask the question of compassion instead of holding yourself according to the rules of life as represented by the society. You must act according to nature. The enchantment which is to be broken is the enchantment of the social order.

Well, there’s a rather amusing scene that follows. He rides away. He is desolate. And he comes to a forest where he camps. Arthur’s court meanwhile has gone forth to find who this fellow is that’s sending all these knights in whom he has defeated. And they’re camped not far away. A hawk flies from—they are falconing out with falcons—one of the falcons flies away and goes to where Parzival is. Next morning there’s snow on the ground. The falcon flies after a goose, a flying goose, and strikes it. And the blood of the goose falls on the soil. And when Parzival sees the blood—he’s on his horse—sees the blood in the snow he becomes infatuated with it. It reminds him of the red cheeks of his Condwiramurs on the snow-white body. So he’s in meditation on Condwiramurs, his wife, when the court wakes up and sees this strange knight out here. Three knights ride at him as he’s standing there. And he’s so lost in contemplation he doesn’t even know they’re coming. But his horse does. And just automatically he pulls his lance off, and the knight who’s come after him is knocked to pieces.

Finally Gawain comes and sees him, and he thinks perhaps he’s in love. “I’ve been in love a lot of times, and that’s the way people behave that way.” So he just took a little silken scarf and threw it over the blood. And Parzival comes out of it, looks at him, and is very graciously greeted and brought to court. They have a great celebration for him there. And while he is being welcomed in the Arthurian court the Grail messenger comes: Kundry. She abuses him as the worst scoundrel in the world, abuses the whole court for having received him. And he departs in shame and he renounces God because he thought he was behaving as a knight of God and God had rejected him. So he says to Gawain, who wishes him well and godspeed, “I have nothing to do with God, and you better hadn’t either. Think more of women than of God.” And off he goes with that. So as an outcast from the church, self-outcast from the whole system—social, religious, and everything else—he wanders for five years in the desert.

Meanwhile Gawain starts on his quest—not knowing he’s on it—to release the Castle of Marvels, the Castle of Maidens, the Castle of Women. This is a transformation into a medieval form of the old image of the Isle of Women, which is a very important motif in Celtic romance. It is the isle of the dead, and anyone who goes there can’t return. Well, Gawain is riding along, and he comes to a spring beside which a beautiful woman is seated, the Ordeluse. Now he’s the philanderer of the world. He sees this woman and he says, “Do you mind if I stay a while? You are absolutely the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” And she says, “Well, I certainly know I am the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen, but I don’t appreciate compliments from idiots. Go on. The further away you are from me the better.” Well, he says, “Ready or not, I am your servant. And whether you maltreat me or treat me nicely, you are handling your property. I’m it.” And she sends him on a number of terrible adventures, always telling him that each one’s going to be worse than the last. And indeed it is. But he comes out of it in pretty good case. The final adventure she gives him is to get that castle back, to disenchant the castle.

Well, he starts this adventure of disenchanting the castle. I’m telling you this because of what the prime adventure is. The prime adventure to disenchant that castle is to survive the ordeal of the perilous bed. In full armor he must sleep a night on this bed. Well, it doesn’t sound too difficult, except that he comes into this great marble room, and in the middle of it is the perilous bed. And he tries to walk on the marble, and he’s slipping in his armor with his shield and everything else. And every time he touches the bed it runs away. And he touches again and it runs away in another direction. Finally he decides to jump on the thing, and indeed he does in full armor: plop on the bed. And as soon as he does that it starts bumping around and hitting all the walls. And then suddenly a lot of arrows come in on him, and he’s got the shield. Then a lot of bolts and one thing. When Heinrich Zimmer was interpreting this he gave it the interpretation that stays in my mind. He says this is a symbol of the feminine temperament as experienced by the male. But Gawain has had a good deal of experience of this temperament, and he knows how to stay with this bed no matter how irrational and arbitrary the whole thing seems. He’s perfectly willing to acquiesce in whatever it wants and does. 

And finally indeed he’s been terribly wounded by all kinds of lions that have pounced on him and everything else. And finally in a state of complete exhaustion from all that’s happened he seems to be dead. And then the door opens and the little girl peeks in and wonders if the knight is dead. And she holds a bit of feather to his nostril, and there’s just a little trickle of air coming in and out. So he’s alive. While the girls rescue him. And as Zimmer says, if you can survive the ordeal of the perilous bed the glory of womanhood comes to you in all kinds of wonderful ways. And so it did to Gawain.

Well, it was through this act and a number of other great deeds—but this is the key one—that he released the enchantment of the Castle of Marvels. So he’s now won his woman Ordeluse, and there’s going to be a marriage.

To get back to our main hero Parzival: he has renounced God. He comes in the course of his strolling to a hermitage. The hermit is not an ordained priest. He is the brother of the Grail King who has simply gone into the forest to practice the life of meditation. Now I must tell you that at this time in the twelfth century, late twelfth century and early thirteenth, there was a very great monk named Joachim of Fiore who had announced what he said were the three ages of the spirit. The first age was the age of the Father or the Old Testament. This was the spirit communicated to a single people. The second was the age of the Son, the age of the church, the gift of this people given to the world. The third, which is about to appear to occur, is the age of the Holy Ghost, of the spirit speaking directly to everyone without any church. But being a monk he declared that this was going to be an age of hermits or monastic period. It was thought that St. Francis of Assisi, who lived at exactly this time, was the initiator, the beginner of that age. The Franciscans picked this up. And so the idea of the hermit life as the life that is going to supplant the life of the church comes in as a dominant motif in this period. This is what Trevizent—this hermit represents the hermit life, not the ordained churchly hermit but one just any man who goes into the forest. Just as the marriage of Condwiramurs and Parzival was unsanctified by the church, so this hermit. Parzival comes and he asks for shelter, and the hermit takes him in. And the hermit gives him comfort. And Parzival says, “Well, I just have to tell you I hate God. I despise God. He’s been mean to me.” So the hermit says—and here’s the great new doctrine for the church—”Don’t be an idiot.” He says, “God has love in response for love and hatred in response for hatred. If hatred is all you’ve got to give, hatred is all you’re going to get. And if love is what you have to give, love is what you will get.” And then he says, “Now read the old stories with a new eye.” This pleased me. There’s the story of Adam born from the virgin Earth, and there’s the story of Jesus born from the virgin Mary. These from the virginal soul. And you also must think of yourself in the light of these great heroes of love and giving and so forth.

Well, it touches him, and he goes off and gradually he’s reconciled to God. He comes back to religion, but not the religion of the church, not the religion he was taught. It’s a total transformation: the direct communication of the individual to God.

Well, I don’t want to go on with the rest of this. It goes on and on and on. More than to give you the final touch: there is a great wedding in Gawain’s castle. He’s going to marry Ordeluse, and Parzival is there. But his wife Condwiramurs isn’t. And the text says there were pavilions; there were plenty of girls available. And he’s looking around, and everybody has his girl, and there would have been plenty for him too. But he’s thinking of Condwiramurs. And he thinks, “When my heart is there and my eyes are here there is a sort of disequilibrium. I will take my eyes away.” So he goes riding away from this wonderful party because of his integrity of love for Condwiramurs.

By the way, Trevizent had told him, “You can’t go back to the Grail Castle once having made a mess of it.” He said, “I am going back and I am going to get it.” The rules are it’ll happen only once. Parzival says, “I’ll get it anyhow.” And having ridden away he encounters coming toward him a glorious Oriental knight. Now I must tell you that this Oriental knight is his half-brother. Parzival’s father had had an Indian, a Hindu wife before he married Parzival’s mother, and his son by her was this knight who was coming to him, whose name is Feirefiz. The two meet. They don’t know who they are. This is the brother-battle motif. They are in fierce combat. Neither has ever met such a knight before. When Parzival’s sword breaks and the pagan knight says, “Well, there’s no honor to me for killing a man without a sword,” so he throws his own sword away. And the two sit down to rest. The Muslim says, “What’s your name?” And Parzival says, “Why should I tell you my name?” And Feirefiz, who’s older than he, says, “Well, I’ll tell you mine first. My name is Feirefiz.” And Parzival says, “Well, I’m the Anfortas.” Well then they find they have the same—probably have the same father. They remove their helmets, and the descriptions that they have heard of each other match. So they come back to the castle.

Before they come back Feirefiz says, “Why don’t you come see my army? I’ve got a terrific army here of ninety-eight different nations. None speaks the language of any other.” And he’s quite an Oriental boy. And Parzival says, “Well, the castle of these is just around the corner here.” And Feirefiz says, “Are there any women there?” And Parzival says, “They sure are.” So they go. Now the thing about Feirefiz is that his complexion is mottled of black and white, which no one has—no one has seen such a complexion before. So when he arrives he becomes the idol of all the women. Parzival claims “it’s probably because of his complexion”. And well, one way or another, because of the integrity of Parzival’s love for Condwiramurs which took him through this whole affair, the Grail messenger comes again and says, “You are eligible for the Grail Castle.” The integrity of his character had changed the rules of the Grail Castle. When Trevizent hears of this he says, “By your human act you have changed the mind of God.” He had told him first that God would respond to his love, that God would respond to his hate. He is the initiator. God is a reflex of man is the thesis here. And well, Kundry says, “Bring your friend here along with you.” And the two of them go to the Grail Castle together. And the king is healed of his wound. But the king is no longer eligible. It’s Parzival who becomes eligible for the Grail position without the wound.

There’s the whole story really. There’s more to say, but this is the main thesis: by behaving according to the rules, by being a king by anointment instead of by achievement, the individuals of that world had brought about the enchantment. And the great fool who didn’t know what he was doing but acted out of his nature—not with intent to achieve anything but with intent simply to realize the nature impulse of his own soul—he was the redeemer of the world.

Now let me add just one more theme before concluding. There’s another Grail tradition entirely, a Grail tradition that was invented by the monks representing this idea here. And that is the Grail tradition of which Galahad is the hero. Parzival of Wolfram is about 1210–1215. The Galahad story is about 1230. That’s the story that was taken over by Malory two centuries later for the Morte d’Arthur. And that’s the one that most of us know. According to this tradition the aim is not integrity in heterosexual love and social virtues; it is spiritual purity. Galahad—the word Galahad in old French, Galahad, means—is taken right from the Bible where it means “heap of witness.” Galahad as a witness to Christ. He appears in Arthur’s castle, in Arthur’s court, on the day of Pentecost. The Grail has been handed down to Joseph of Arimathea by Christ, but not Christ before the crucifixion: Christ after the crucifixion. The point of the Grail Castle here is that the church was founded by Christ physically visible to mortal eyes, to all mortal eyes. The Grail tradition is communicated by Christ risen to eyes worthy or capable of seeing the risen Christ. And so the castle appears only to those eligible for it, whereas the church is visible to simply everybody.

I will conclude this talk with just the kickoff to the quest of the Galahad. Arthur’s court is seated at table. There’s a rule of Arthur: never to start a meal until an adventure has occurred. So they’re all waiting for an adventure. And suddenly the Grail appeared, covered however by a cloth. So Gawain, Arthur’s nephew, stands up and says, “I propose a vow: after the Grail has disappeared that we should all go in quest to behold this Grail unveiled.” And they all indeed have decided to start the next day to quest for the Grail unveiled, each to seek it. And here’s a line that struck me when I first read it. It’s in this wonderful Queste del Saint Graal. The line is: “This they thought it would be a disgrace to set forth in a group. Each entered the forest at that point which he had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no way or path. Because when there and where there is a way or path it is someone else’s path, not yours.” In the course of that quest, whenever one of those knights saw someone else’s track and thought, “He’s getting there,” followed it, he went astray entirely. Each quested where there was no path.

This is a peculiarly Occidental motif. I’ve never heard or thought of anything comparable in the Orient, where you follow your instructions from the guru and do just what he tells. There is no guru here. They meet gurus along the way who point ways, sometimes right, sometimes wrong. But each is questing on his own. Now this is a motif that is peculiarly European. It is that romantic sense of something to come into being that has never been on land or sea. And what is it? It is the fulfillment of your own personal, intelligible character and destiny which no one else can do for you. No one can tell you what it is, what it is going to be, or anything of the kind. And that is the one who finds the Grail—not the one who simply goes to the church and does what the establishment tells him to do, but has left the village bound, gone into the forest on a path that is no path, on a way that was never walked before: the way of that personal adventure of your own. This is the great myth of Europe, the myth of the Grail—whether you read it in the way of Parzival in the secular quest where your marriage, your spiritual life is a function of your life, not of what someone tells you to do, and where your spiritual life, if you choose the monastic way, is again going to be that of the individual hermit quest, so to say. I think this is a very telling, a wonderful story.”