More than this, and of deeper significance, there, was a legend in the Grail castle that one day an innocent fool would wander into the castle, ask the Grail question, and thus heal the wounded Fisher King. Everyone in the castle—except Parsifal—knows this legend and watches keenly to see if Parsifal, who has all the attributes of an innocent fool, will ask the healing question.
But Parsifal does not ask and the Fisher King is soon taken, groaning and writhing in agony, to his chamber. The other knights and ladies disperse and Parsifal is soon escorted to his sleeping chamber by the four youths.
Next morning Parsifal awakes to find himself alone. He saddles his horse and crosses the drawbridge, which snaps shut, ticking the back hooves of his horse (again a dangerous transition), and is back in the ordinary world. There is no castle to be seen and the innocent fool is again in the realm where “there is no habitation for thirty miles.”
THE GRAIL CASTLE LOST
The most important event of one’s inner life is portrayed in the story of the Grail castle. Every youth blunders his way into the Grail castle sometime around age fifteen or sixteen and has a vision that shapes much of the rest of his life. Like Parsifal, he is unprepared for this and does not have the possession to ask the question that would make the experience conscious and stable within him. No youth could be expected to do anything but wander into the castle, be overwhelmed by it, and the next morning find himself back in the same ordinary world—if he has not been unhorsed by the drawbridge.
Most men can remember a magic half hour sometime in their youth when the whole world glowed and showed a beauty not easily described. Perhaps it is a sunrise, a glorious moment on the playing field, a solitary time during a hike when one turns a corner and the whole splendor of the inner world opens for one. No youth can cope with this opening of the Heavens for him and most set it aside but do not forget it. Others find it so disturbing that they dismiss it and play as if it had never happened. A few are so touched by the vision of meaning that they spend the rest of their lives, like Parsifal, searching for the Grail castle again. One has only to “go down the road, turn left, cross the drawbridge.” But the very simplicity of the directions effectively hides it from view. How many times have we gone back to a magic place to see if the sunrise would glow again or set off for a reputedly magic place to see if the Grail procession is there? The imprint of the Grail castle is indelible in a man’s mind, and if it is strong in him it will inspire or haunt him for the rest of his life.
Why was Parsifal not able to ask the simple question that would have opened a glorious world for him and healed the agony of the Fisher King’s wound? He had been instructed to ask the question and it seems an act of stupidity that he fails it. Not so; naivete prevented him from asking.
THE MOTHER COMPLEX
Do you remember the one-piece homespun garment Parsifal’s mother made for him? It is this remnant, under his knight’s armor, which prevents him from appreciating the Grail when he sees it. So long as a man is encased in his mother complex he can not appreciate the Grail or, worse yet, ask the right question to heal the Fisher King wound. To get the mother’s homespun off a youth is an arduous task. Many never succeed in divesting themselves from their mother complex, for that is what is symbolized by the mother’s homespun. To examine this critical issue we must digress and talk about a man’s relationship to things feminine.
There are six basic relationships a man bears to the feminine world. All six are useful to him and each has its own nobility. It is only the contamination of one with another that makes difficulty. These difficulties are central to a man’s passage through life. The six feminine elements in a man are:
His human mother. This is the actual woman who was his mother, she with all her idiosyncrasies, individual characteristics, and uniqueness.
His mother complex. This resides entirely inside the man himself. This is his regressive capacity which would like to return to a dependency on his mother and be a child again. This is a man’s wish to fail, his defeatist capacity, his subterranean fascination with death or accident, his demand to be taken care of. This is pure poison in a man’s psychology.
His mother archetype. If the mother complex is pure poison, the mother archetype is pure gold. It is the feminine half of God, the cornucopia of the universe, mother nature, the bounty which is freely poured out to us without fail. We could not live for one minute without the bounty of the mother archetype. It is always reliable, nourishing, sustaining.
His fair maiden. This is the feminine component in every man’s psychic structure and is the interior companion or inspirer of his life, the fair damsel. It is Blanche Fleur, one’s lady fair, Dulcinea in Don Quixote, Beatrice to Dante in the Comedia Divina. It is she who gives meaning and color to one’s life. Dr. Jung named this quality the anima, she who animates and brings life.
His wife or partner. This is the flesh and blood companion who shares his life journey and is a human companion.
Sophia. This is the Goddess of Wisdom, the feminine half of God, the Shekinah in Jewish mysticism. It comes as a shock to a man to discover that Wisdom is feminine, but all mythologies have portrayed it so.
All of these feminine qualities are useful to man, even the mother complex, which is the most difficult. Faust had to rely on his mother complex to take him to the place of the mothers for his final redemption in Goethe’s masterpiece. It is only in the mixing or contamination of one aspect with another that causes such profound distress. Mankind has a terrible propensity for making such muddles. Let us look at some of these contaminations and see the destruction which follows.
If one contaminates one’s human mother with one’s mother complex he will blame his actual mother for the regressive quality that is his interior mother complex: he will see his mother as a witch who is trying to defeat him. It is commonplace for a young man to blame his mother, or mother substitute, for his own regressive mother complex.
If he contaminates his interior mother image with the mother archetype he will expect his flesh and blood mother to play the goddess of protection for him, a role which only the archetype can provide. He will make ridiculously excessive demands on the mother aspect of the world and demand of the world that it owes him a living—preferably without effort on his part.
If one contaminates his anima, or fair maiden, with his interior mother image he will expect his inner woman to be mother to him.
A very common contamination is the overlay of mother and wife. Such a man will expect his wife to mother him instead of being a companion for him. He will demand of his wife that she fulfill his mother-expectations for him.
Since Sophia is not strong in every man’s life this component is not always present. If a man confuses mother and Sophia he will endow his mother with Goddess-like wisdom that no human could ever sustain. “Mother knows best” and the Sophia archetype make a bad combination.
I leave the other combinations or contaminations to your own inquiry. They are all negative. It is not the feminine which is negative but only the contamination of levels of consciousness.
To return to Parsifal and the question of why he failed at the Grail castle—it was the failure to remove his mother’s homespun garment, his mother complex, which cost him the power and clarity to ask the question Gournamand had taught him. No man can relate to the Grail in a permanent way if his mother complex intervenes between him and his native masculine strength. It is to take twenty years of arduous knight-errantry to get Parsifal’s homespun garment removed so that he can be the strong male who can stand the beauty of the Grail—the greatest symbol of the mother archetype. So long as one is clothed in mother’s homespun, he can not partake of the Grail other than in an occasional chance encounter. Nor can he heal his Fisher King wound. The remaining years of adventure Parsifal experiences are all moving toward the removal of that homespun. One has a chance again at the Grail castle in middle age. The Grail is always near one and available at any moment but sixteen and forty-five, tim
es of change, seem to be the two points in a man’s life when it is most easily found. That miraculous procession goes on every night of one’s life in the Grail castle; but it is only at particular times in his life—and then only when he has prepared for it—that a man has easy access to the splendor of the Grail castle.
Theoretically it should be possible for a man to stay in the Grail castle the first time. The Benedictine monks in medieval Europe observed this possibility in a monastic practice. They took boys at birth, raised them in the Grail castle and never let them out, psychologically speaking. They were never subjected to the pressures of the world, to courtship or marriage or to any possession or power structure in a worldly sense. I have never known anyone who had this experience, and I don’t think it is possible for a modern person. Possibly such a way is open to a medieval mentality or a person of that character today.
A monastic sect in India tries another way of securing the Grail castle. They keep boys from birth to age sixteen in monastic seclusion, marry them at sixteen, and return them to monastic seclusion for the rest of their lives after their first child is born. In this way the space between the two Grail castles is only one year, instead of the usual thirty years that separate those encounters at sixteen and forty-five. Again, this may be possible for very simple medieval personalities but it is not available to us. (And one wonders about the wife and the child!)
If the Grail castle experience is very strong for a boy it nearly incapacitates him. The youth who wanders about seemingly without any motive or goal is often a young man who has been half-blinded by his Grail castle experience.
Many men find the whole experience of Grail castles so painful, so incomprehensible, that they immediately repress it and say, “I don’t remember.” Like all repressed things in the unconscious, far from having gotten rid of it, we find it is everywhere, behind every tree and around every corner, looking over the shoulder of every person we meet. The hunger for “something,” the Saturday night restlessness, the tires squealing around the corner are all not-so-distant echoes of the Grail-castle hunger. The quest comes in many languages.
So much of a youth’s bantam rooster behavior is a turning off of the Grail castle experience. It hurts so much he can’t stand it and tries to persuade himself he is very tough in order to get away from the pain.
Much of advertising plays upon this hunger. I am not sure how consciously advertising specialists do this but they have an uncanny way of searching out this hunger in us. You can sell a man almost anything if you indirectly call it the Grail.
This is also the chief appeal and thrill of drugs. That is a magical way of getting back to the Grail ecstasy. Drugs will take you to an ecstatic experience and bring a legitimate visionary world; but they do it in a wrong way and exact a terrible price. The right way does not necessarily require a long time or a long way; but there are no shortcuts. If one cheats at the process, the drawbridge can snap shut at the wrong moment and one is trapped in a madness or hellish suffering.
If one thinks that something or somebody will fill the Grail hunger in him, no cost is too high. Much of the motivation of late adolescence—the derring-do, the ninety-miles-an-hour down the highway, the drugs—this is Grail hunger.
If the Grail quest is sidetracked by any of the many ways possible, the youth finds himself all too soon a crotchety old man.
I asked a friend once how he was. He replied very honestly, “Well, Robert, I am turning the crank.” The Grail is far away at such a moment.
A woman experiences the Grail in quite a different way from a man. She never leaves the Grail castle and keeps a sense of beauty, connectedness, at-homeness in the universe that a man does not have. A man creates out of his restlessness; a woman creates by knowing what always was. Parsifal had to go out to nearly endless knight adventures; Blanche Fleur stayed in her castle.
Einstein in his old age said, “I now bask in that solitude which was so painful to me in my youth.” This is the Grail castle restored. He earned it by a lifetime of modern knight heroism.
Many men try to make a flesh and blood woman fill the Grail hunger. This is to ask a woman to fulfill a role she can never carry (who can be a living archetype?) and to miss the human miracle she is in fact.
The current fascination with Asian religions is a direct Grail quest. The Asia never fractured as we westerners did, and they never divided the secular and sacred worlds so tragically as we did. No traditional Asian ever strays far from the Grail castle. Asian teachers look at us and say, “What in the world is this great hurry and hunger in you people?” Someone spoke of us as “those aryan birds of prey.” A people in the grips of so urgent a quest are indeed formidable.
The drawbridge is a hint about the nature of the Grail castle. It doesn’t exist in physical reality. It is an inner reality, a vision, poetry, a mystical experience, and it can not be found in any outer place. To search for it outwardly is to exhaust one’s self and to court discouragement. Still, our devotion to outer things as the only reality is so strong that for most of us it requires an outer exploration or drama to fuel the inner search. Even that is suspect, for the Grail is always immediately at hand and is won more by peeling away the insulations around it than by any act of creation. A medieval Christian proverb says, “To search for God is to insult God.” This implies that God is always present and any search for him is a refusal of this fact. A surgeon friend of mine likes to say, “Don’t fix what isn’t broken.” It is only an extension of that to say, “Don’t search for that which is already at hand.” But we are westerners and have to search in order to learn that there is no search.
A Chinese story has it: a fish heard some men talking on a pier about a miraculous substance called water. The fish was so intrigued that he called his fish friends together and profoundly announced he was going in quest of this wonderful stuff. They gave him a fitting ceremony and sent him on his way. Long after they had given him up as lost on his perilous journey he swam home, old, tired, worn. They hastened to greet him and asked urgently, “Did you find it? Did you find it?” “Yes,” replied the old fish, “but you would not believe what I found.” Whereupon the old fish swam slowly away.
There are highly instructive parallels between Christ’s and Parsifal’s journey. The two stories resemble each other in many ways, with the important difference that the very wise man, Christ, makes the quest in the right way. But he still had to go through all the stages. When Christ went to the temple at age twelve and rebuked his parents, this was his first Grail castle. He touched something very deep—his manhood, his strength. He wasn’t badly wounded by it because he understood. He later had to go back to the Grail castle a second time to take up permanent residence there. He did all this in a very wise way, leaving a prototype for us to follow. I am fond of the old twelfth century Grail myth because it offers a more earthy and human statement of our path. I can find more of Parsifal in myself than I can of the martyr.
The Dry Years
Parsifal has left the grail castle and now must earn the right to return to it. He is involved in a long series of knight’s ventures that gradually strengthen him sufficiently so he can ask for a second entrance to the Grail castle.
He comes upon a sorrowful maiden holding her dead lover in her arms. She explains tearfully that her knight-lover was killed by another knight in a rage over something Parsifal had done in one of his earlier naive escapades. Parsifal has to bear the guilt of this. The maiden asks Parsifal where he has been and when he tells her, she rebukes him saying there is no habitation within thirty miles. He describes his experiences in detail and she replies, “Oh, you have been in the Grail castle!” Women often know more of such experiences than men. Then she berates him for not asking the question and healing the Fisher King. This is also his fault. More guilt accumulates. She asks Parsifal his name. Though we have been using his name, Parsifal, the word has not actually appeared in the text until this moment. “Parsifal, he blurts out.” Not until one has been in the Gra
il castle does he have a name, any sense of his own identity.
Parsifal goes on to another weeping damsel who has also suffered much through some naive mischance from his earlier travels. This damsel informs Parsifal that his sword will break the first time he uses it and that it can be mended only by him who forged it originally. Once repaired, it will never break again.
This is a fine bit of advice for a youth; the masculine equipment he carries with him, largely imitation of the father-teachers around him, will not hold up when he tries to use it by himself. Every youth has to go through the humiliation of finding that his imitation masculinity will not hold up. And more, only the father who gave him his sword can repair the broken instrument. This means that what was given by a father can be repaired only by a father. A Godfather is a very valuable ally just at this moment. To have a Godfather who will repair what was transmitted from the father but did not hold up well is an extremely valuable asset.
Parsifal conquers many knights, sends them back to Arthur’s court, rescues many fair damsels, lifts sieges, protects the poor, slays dragons—all the good things a man must do in the middle section of his life. This is the cultural process of making our civilization work. We smile at the stories of dragons and spells on castles but we suffer these things in our own times as directly as did any medieval man. We call them complexes or moods or shadow invasions now, but I find the old language at least (perhaps more) as descriptive as our own.
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