THE GRAIL
The point is a pretty simple one. Like all good myths, the Grail quest is a roadmap, a trail of breadcrumbs that leads us through the dark forests of life. It shows us how we heal our own inner wounds and become the whole and functional (or individuated) people we were meant to be.
In the meantime, we can restore the missing archetype, the shining sword of power, to the Grail myth. We can heal inside using the power of the Grail, and use the power of Excalibur to make a difference outside , in the world around us.
That is Arthur’s challenge to all of us, especially those of us living in dangerous times and wounded societies (don’t we all?): to drink from the Grail, and use the power of the sword to make a difference, to turn the Wasteland into a Camelot,
with white towers standing tall in a golden age. It’s our turn to complete the myth. How? That’s for us to determine. After all, it’s not enough merely to live and
breathe the myth cycles that are our inheritance—it is our duty to add to the treasure trove for future generations. Our dreams nourish tomorrow. This isn’t a call to merely keep myth alive. This is a call to mythopoeia, to myth making. It’s
not enough to simply tell and retell. We have a responsibility to add to our birthright. It is our job to bring myth into our modern world, to see how the heroes and monsters might respond to our modern world.
The point is a pretty simple one. Like all good myths, the Grail quest is a roadmap, a trail of breadcrumbs that leads us through the dark forests of life. It shows us how we heal our own inner wounds and become the whole and functional (or individuated) people we were meant to be.
In the meantime, we can restore the missing archetype, the shining sword of power, to the Grail myth. We can heal inside using the power of the Grail, and use the power of Excalibur to make a difference outside , in the world around us.
That is Arthur’s challenge to all of us, especially those of us living in dangerous times and wounded societies (don’t we all?): to drink from the Grail, and use the power of the sword to make a difference, to turn the Wasteland into a Camelot,
with white towers standing tall in a golden age. It’s our turn to complete the myth. How? That’s for us to determine. After all, it’s not enough merely to live and
breathe the myth cycles that are our inheritance—it is our duty to add to the treasure trove for future generations. Our dreams nourish tomorrow. This isn’t a call to merely keep myth alive. This is a call to mythopoeia, to myth making. It’s
not enough to simply tell and retell. We have a responsibility to add to our birthright. It is our job to bring myth into our modern world, to see how the heroes and monsters might respond to our modern world.
The feminine mind is pictorial and symbolic and comes close to what the ancients called Sophia. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 189
YHVH, Android Jones
What Jungians call the “Collective Unconscious” and physicists call “matter” in alchemy were always one – the Psyche. ~Marie Louise von Franz.
The collective unconscious comprises in itself the psychic life of our ancestors right back to the earliest beginnings. Our inheritance consists in physiological paths -- mental processes in our ancestors that traced these paths. It matters because we matter as the psychophysical expression of all those who came before us. We continue to embody them. Thus, the ancestors are personal, collective, and present.
Collective unconscious is a summary of experiences of our ancient ancestors. We all possess specifics of humankind's knowledge from birth. As we realize it, it becomes conscious. Symbols, images and archetypes are the language of the soul, of the collective unconscious -- perceptiions of supra-normal comprehension. Thus, we gain knowledge of, and participate in, the domains of Matter (our senses), Mind (reason and language), Soul (feeling and ASCs), and Spirit (intuition and silence).
Collective unconscious influences every aspect of our life, especially the emotional ones which help us to see and study it. The reflection of the collective unconscious in our family tree helps us consciously see and study collective unconscious, its patterns and ways of influence. Psyche is a unity of three parts: ego, personal unconscious and collective unconscious, a summary of experiences of our ancient ancestors.
The unconscious is the Holy Grail of consciousness, the supreme value of life, which we find when we truly realize ourselves, joining the family of the Grail. In the family tree we find the presence of the most ancient symbolic appearance of the Grail itself. The soul takes flesh and descends...the hidden gate through which all creation moves.
Robert Johnson says, “The object of life is not happiness, but to serve God or the Grail.” That is, we serve not our materialistic questing ego, but our inner spirituality. Here we integrate the mother, the father, and the inner masculine/feminine connection to life that brings us to our personal Grail of spirituality.
The ancestors, the gods, and the Grail were always there in our Tree, which we bring to completion when we finally bring ourselves to it, fully. Here, we serve ourself, the ancestors, and the gods as revealed in our own family tree. It is our own matter that forms the elements of the Grail tradition, the present embodiment of past times.
We can, therefore, in our genealogical quest, do as Meister Eckhart suggests: “Start with yourself therefore and take leave of yourself. If you do not depart from yourself, then wherever you take refuge, you will find obstacles and unrest, wherever it may be.” He also said, “We are all Mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born."
We depart from ourselves following the paths of our descent back up into the heights and roots of our Tree. Crossing that threshold we begin our Genealogical Journey. Our two branches become four, the four branches become eight, the eight sixteen great-grandparents, and so on.
Baron Arild Rosenkrantz, Called
The collective unconscious comprises in itself the psychic life of our ancestors right back to the earliest beginnings. Our inheritance consists in physiological paths -- mental processes in our ancestors that traced these paths. It matters because we matter as the psychophysical expression of all those who came before us. We continue to embody them. Thus, the ancestors are personal, collective, and present.
Collective unconscious is a summary of experiences of our ancient ancestors. We all possess specifics of humankind's knowledge from birth. As we realize it, it becomes conscious. Symbols, images and archetypes are the language of the soul, of the collective unconscious -- perceptiions of supra-normal comprehension. Thus, we gain knowledge of, and participate in, the domains of Matter (our senses), Mind (reason and language), Soul (feeling and ASCs), and Spirit (intuition and silence).
Collective unconscious influences every aspect of our life, especially the emotional ones which help us to see and study it. The reflection of the collective unconscious in our family tree helps us consciously see and study collective unconscious, its patterns and ways of influence. Psyche is a unity of three parts: ego, personal unconscious and collective unconscious, a summary of experiences of our ancient ancestors.
The unconscious is the Holy Grail of consciousness, the supreme value of life, which we find when we truly realize ourselves, joining the family of the Grail. In the family tree we find the presence of the most ancient symbolic appearance of the Grail itself. The soul takes flesh and descends...the hidden gate through which all creation moves.
Robert Johnson says, “The object of life is not happiness, but to serve God or the Grail.” That is, we serve not our materialistic questing ego, but our inner spirituality. Here we integrate the mother, the father, and the inner masculine/feminine connection to life that brings us to our personal Grail of spirituality.
The ancestors, the gods, and the Grail were always there in our Tree, which we bring to completion when we finally bring ourselves to it, fully. Here, we serve ourself, the ancestors, and the gods as revealed in our own family tree. It is our own matter that forms the elements of the Grail tradition, the present embodiment of past times.
We can, therefore, in our genealogical quest, do as Meister Eckhart suggests: “Start with yourself therefore and take leave of yourself. If you do not depart from yourself, then wherever you take refuge, you will find obstacles and unrest, wherever it may be.” He also said, “We are all Mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born."
We depart from ourselves following the paths of our descent back up into the heights and roots of our Tree. Crossing that threshold we begin our Genealogical Journey. Our two branches become four, the four branches become eight, the eight sixteen great-grandparents, and so on.
Baron Arild Rosenkrantz, Called
Kinuko Y. Craft (‘The Grail Of The Summer Stars’)
There is currently an active market in Europe and America for taking the medieval myths further. In Holy Blood, Holy Grail (1982), Hugh Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln developed their theory that the Holy Grail was not the cup used at the Last Supper, but the Holy Bloodline of a family descended from Jesus himself. Dan Brown has developed the same idea in fictional form in The DaVinci Code (2003). These writers speculate that Mary Magdalene was the wife of Jesus, and that the two of them had a son.In some medieval stories Mary Magdalene was identified with Mary of Bethany, and in others she was said to have accompanied Joseph of Arimathea to Marseilles after Jesus’ crucifixion. In Baigent’s extension of the medieval story, Mary Magdalene brought her son to Marseilles as well. Supposedly, that son became the ancestor of certain European royal families, notably the Merovingians, who were the earliest royal family of the Franks, forerunners of the French. In support of this theory, Baigent et al. offer an alternative etymology for San Graal (the Holy Grail); they call it the Sang Real (the Blood Royal). They also ornament their theory with many authentic medieval legends. For example, Godfroi de Bouillon, the 11th century Crusader ruler of Jerusalem, was said by his contemporaries to have been the son or grandson of Lohengrin, even though he lived some 600 years later, even assuming that there was an historical Lohengrin.
Nevertheless, the meat of Holy Blood, Holy Grail rests on the forged Lobineau genealogies, and the monomania of Pierre Plantard, a Frenchman who in the early 1960s sought to prove that he is a descendant of the Merovingians though Dagobert II, an obscure 7th century dynast who is not known to have left descendants. Moreover, there is no evidence of a secret Priory of Sion that has worked through the centuries to promote the rule of these soi disant descendants of Jesus, nor is there evidence that the Roman Catholic church has sought though the centuries to exterminate them.
Despite the dubious material used by Baigent et al., the royal families of modern Europe, and a great many noble families, are in fact descended from the Merovingians, as are many ordinary people in northern and western Europe and the Americas.
Nevertheless, the meat of Holy Blood, Holy Grail rests on the forged Lobineau genealogies, and the monomania of Pierre Plantard, a Frenchman who in the early 1960s sought to prove that he is a descendant of the Merovingians though Dagobert II, an obscure 7th century dynast who is not known to have left descendants. Moreover, there is no evidence of a secret Priory of Sion that has worked through the centuries to promote the rule of these soi disant descendants of Jesus, nor is there evidence that the Roman Catholic church has sought though the centuries to exterminate them.
Despite the dubious material used by Baigent et al., the royal families of modern Europe, and a great many noble families, are in fact descended from the Merovingians, as are many ordinary people in northern and western Europe and the Americas.
The Holy Grail: The Legend, the History, the Evidence By Justin E. Griffin
The Second Coming of Christ on Iona
The spiritual associations between women and Iona are reinforced by the legend that Mary the mother of Jesus visited the island, and by a prophecy mentioned by the author William Sharp, writing as Fiona Macleod in 1910: "When I think of Iona I think often, too, of a prophecy once connected with Iona....the old prophecy that Christ shall come again upon Iona, and of that later and obscure prophecy which foretells, now as the Bride of Christ, now as the Daughter of God, now as the Divine Spirit embodied through mortal birth in a Woman, as once through mortal birth in a man, the coming of a new Presence and Power: and dream that this may be upon Iona, so that the little Gaelic island may become as the little Syrian Bethlehem.... A young Hebridean priest once told me how, 'as our forefathers and elders believed and still believe, that Holy Spirit shall come again which once was mortally born among us as the Son of God, but, then, shall be the Daughter of God. The Divine Spirit shall come again as a Woman. Then for the first time the world will know peace'."
Iona was admired by Dr Samuel Johnson when he spent the night in a barn on the island in 1773, and by Felix Mendelssohn who captured the atmosphere of the region in his Hebrides Overture, composed between 1830 and 1832.
Enlarging upon the Iona prophecy as related by William Sharp (Fiona Macleod) in his essay on Iona, this author relates: "When I think of Iona I think often, too, of a prophecy once connected with Iona....the old prophecy that Christ shall come again upon Iona, and of that later and obscure prophecy which foretells, now as the Bride of Christ, now as the Daughter of God, now as the Divine Spirit embodied through mortal birth in a Woman, as once through mortal birth in a man, the coming of a new Presence and Power: and dream that this may be upon Iona, so that the little Gaelic island may become as the little Syrian Bethlehem....the Shepherdess shall call us home. A young Hebridean priest once told me how, 'as our forefathers and elders believed and still believe, that Holy Spirit shall come again which once was mortally born among us as the Son of God, but, then, shall be the Daughter of God. The Divine Spirit shall come again as a Woman. Then for the first time the world will know peace'." Interestingly, in the Hebridean mythos Christ is called "the Shepherd of the flocks", while St. Bride is referred to as "the Shepherdess of the flocks". (vide Carmina Gadelica). A similar relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene is implied in the early Christian gnostic texts.
William Sharp continues: "Nor must I forget that my old nurse, Barabal, used to sing a strange oran, to the effect that when St. Bride came again to Iona it would be to bind the hair and to wash the feet of the Bride of Christ....Legend itself is more ancient here than elsewhere. Once a woman was worshipped. Some say she was the moon, but this was before the dim day of the moon-worshippers. (In Gaelic too, as with all the Celtic people, it is not the moon but the sun that is feminine.) She may have been an ancestral Brighde, or that mysterious Anait [ancient Mother Goddess of the East] whose Scythian name survives elsewhere in the Gaelic west, and nothing else of all her ancient glory but that shadowy word."
Commenting on St. Bride, Eleanor Merry refers to: "Bride, who is the soul of the ancient Mysteries - She is the Virgin-Sophia, the Virgin of Light whom the Bards once met among the stars. Companion of Christ, she came down to Earth with Him...." (The Flaming Door, 1962). Moreover, Alice O. Howell in The Dove in the Stone (1988) says: "There in the Gaelic tongue the prayers and songs rose and fell, with a Christian overlay, to the unflagging devotion to Sophia, first called Brith (or Brid), then St. Brigid, the Mary of the Gael....What Sophia offers is a view of the earth beyond the ego's arrogance, an empirical experience, at long last, of the Holy all about us. It is akin to what a dedicated gardener may sense. It sheds light on Mary Magdalen, who, of all the women around Jesus, was first to see the risen Christ, thinking he was 'the gardener' in the garden....The presence of the feminine is essential to the masculine for spiritual rebirth, and vice versa. Even the alchemist required a soror mystica, a mystical sister, to perform the opus." -- Hiram Mystery
The spiritual associations between women and Iona are reinforced by the legend that Mary the mother of Jesus visited the island, and by a prophecy mentioned by the author William Sharp, writing as Fiona Macleod in 1910: "When I think of Iona I think often, too, of a prophecy once connected with Iona....the old prophecy that Christ shall come again upon Iona, and of that later and obscure prophecy which foretells, now as the Bride of Christ, now as the Daughter of God, now as the Divine Spirit embodied through mortal birth in a Woman, as once through mortal birth in a man, the coming of a new Presence and Power: and dream that this may be upon Iona, so that the little Gaelic island may become as the little Syrian Bethlehem.... A young Hebridean priest once told me how, 'as our forefathers and elders believed and still believe, that Holy Spirit shall come again which once was mortally born among us as the Son of God, but, then, shall be the Daughter of God. The Divine Spirit shall come again as a Woman. Then for the first time the world will know peace'."
Iona was admired by Dr Samuel Johnson when he spent the night in a barn on the island in 1773, and by Felix Mendelssohn who captured the atmosphere of the region in his Hebrides Overture, composed between 1830 and 1832.
Enlarging upon the Iona prophecy as related by William Sharp (Fiona Macleod) in his essay on Iona, this author relates: "When I think of Iona I think often, too, of a prophecy once connected with Iona....the old prophecy that Christ shall come again upon Iona, and of that later and obscure prophecy which foretells, now as the Bride of Christ, now as the Daughter of God, now as the Divine Spirit embodied through mortal birth in a Woman, as once through mortal birth in a man, the coming of a new Presence and Power: and dream that this may be upon Iona, so that the little Gaelic island may become as the little Syrian Bethlehem....the Shepherdess shall call us home. A young Hebridean priest once told me how, 'as our forefathers and elders believed and still believe, that Holy Spirit shall come again which once was mortally born among us as the Son of God, but, then, shall be the Daughter of God. The Divine Spirit shall come again as a Woman. Then for the first time the world will know peace'." Interestingly, in the Hebridean mythos Christ is called "the Shepherd of the flocks", while St. Bride is referred to as "the Shepherdess of the flocks". (vide Carmina Gadelica). A similar relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene is implied in the early Christian gnostic texts.
William Sharp continues: "Nor must I forget that my old nurse, Barabal, used to sing a strange oran, to the effect that when St. Bride came again to Iona it would be to bind the hair and to wash the feet of the Bride of Christ....Legend itself is more ancient here than elsewhere. Once a woman was worshipped. Some say she was the moon, but this was before the dim day of the moon-worshippers. (In Gaelic too, as with all the Celtic people, it is not the moon but the sun that is feminine.) She may have been an ancestral Brighde, or that mysterious Anait [ancient Mother Goddess of the East] whose Scythian name survives elsewhere in the Gaelic west, and nothing else of all her ancient glory but that shadowy word."
Commenting on St. Bride, Eleanor Merry refers to: "Bride, who is the soul of the ancient Mysteries - She is the Virgin-Sophia, the Virgin of Light whom the Bards once met among the stars. Companion of Christ, she came down to Earth with Him...." (The Flaming Door, 1962). Moreover, Alice O. Howell in The Dove in the Stone (1988) says: "There in the Gaelic tongue the prayers and songs rose and fell, with a Christian overlay, to the unflagging devotion to Sophia, first called Brith (or Brid), then St. Brigid, the Mary of the Gael....What Sophia offers is a view of the earth beyond the ego's arrogance, an empirical experience, at long last, of the Holy all about us. It is akin to what a dedicated gardener may sense. It sheds light on Mary Magdalen, who, of all the women around Jesus, was first to see the risen Christ, thinking he was 'the gardener' in the garden....The presence of the feminine is essential to the masculine for spiritual rebirth, and vice versa. Even the alchemist required a soror mystica, a mystical sister, to perform the opus." -- Hiram Mystery
BILL MOYERS: Was there some of this in the legend of the Holy Grail?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes. Wolfram has a very interesting statement about the origin of the Grail. He says the Grail was brought from heaven by the neutral angels. There was the war in heaven between God and Lucifer, and the angelic hosts that sided one group with Lucifer, and the other with God. Pair of opposites, good and evil, God and Satan. The Grail was brought down through the middle, the way of the middle, by the neutral angels.
BILL MOYERS: What is the Grail representing, then?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, the Grail becomes the, what we call it, that which is attained and realized by people who have lived their own lives. So the story very briefly is of this — I’m giving it now as Wolfram gives it — but this is just one version. The Grail King was a lovely young man, but he had not earned that position. And the Grail represents the fulfillment of the highest spiritual potentialities of the human consciousness. And he was a lovely young man, and he rode forth from his castle with the war cry, “Amor!” And as he’s riding forth, a Moslem, a pagan warrior, a Mohammedan warrior, comes out of the woods, a knight. And they both level their lances at each other, they drive at each other, and the lance of the grail king kills the Mohammedan, but the Mohammedan lance castrates the Grail King.
What that means is that the Christian separation of matter and spirit, of the dynamism of life and the spiritual, natural grace and supernatural grace, has really castrated nature. And the European mind, the European life, has been as it were, emasculated by this; true spirituality, which would have come from this, has been killed. And then what did the pagan represent? He was a person from the suburbs of Eden. He was regarded as a nature man, and on the head of his lance was written the word, “Grail.” That is to say, nature intends the grail. Spiritual life is the bouquet of natural life, not a supernatural thing imposed upon it. And so the impulses of nature are what give authenticity to life, not obeying rules come from a supernatural authority, that’s the sense of the Grail.
BILL MOYERS: And the Grail that these romantic legends were searching for is the union once again of what had been divided? The peace that comes from joining?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The grail becomes symbolic of an authentic life that has lived in terms of its own volition, in terms of its own impulse system, which carries it between the pairs of opposites, of good and evil, light and dark. Wolfram starts his epic with a short poem saying, “Every act has both good and evil results.” Every act in life yields pairs of opposites in its results. The best we can do is lean toward the light, that is to say, intend the light, and what the light is, is that of the harmonious relationships that come from compassion, with suffering, understanding of the other person. This is what the Grail is about.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes. Wolfram has a very interesting statement about the origin of the Grail. He says the Grail was brought from heaven by the neutral angels. There was the war in heaven between God and Lucifer, and the angelic hosts that sided one group with Lucifer, and the other with God. Pair of opposites, good and evil, God and Satan. The Grail was brought down through the middle, the way of the middle, by the neutral angels.
BILL MOYERS: What is the Grail representing, then?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, the Grail becomes the, what we call it, that which is attained and realized by people who have lived their own lives. So the story very briefly is of this — I’m giving it now as Wolfram gives it — but this is just one version. The Grail King was a lovely young man, but he had not earned that position. And the Grail represents the fulfillment of the highest spiritual potentialities of the human consciousness. And he was a lovely young man, and he rode forth from his castle with the war cry, “Amor!” And as he’s riding forth, a Moslem, a pagan warrior, a Mohammedan warrior, comes out of the woods, a knight. And they both level their lances at each other, they drive at each other, and the lance of the grail king kills the Mohammedan, but the Mohammedan lance castrates the Grail King.
What that means is that the Christian separation of matter and spirit, of the dynamism of life and the spiritual, natural grace and supernatural grace, has really castrated nature. And the European mind, the European life, has been as it were, emasculated by this; true spirituality, which would have come from this, has been killed. And then what did the pagan represent? He was a person from the suburbs of Eden. He was regarded as a nature man, and on the head of his lance was written the word, “Grail.” That is to say, nature intends the grail. Spiritual life is the bouquet of natural life, not a supernatural thing imposed upon it. And so the impulses of nature are what give authenticity to life, not obeying rules come from a supernatural authority, that’s the sense of the Grail.
BILL MOYERS: And the Grail that these romantic legends were searching for is the union once again of what had been divided? The peace that comes from joining?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The grail becomes symbolic of an authentic life that has lived in terms of its own volition, in terms of its own impulse system, which carries it between the pairs of opposites, of good and evil, light and dark. Wolfram starts his epic with a short poem saying, “Every act has both good and evil results.” Every act in life yields pairs of opposites in its results. The best we can do is lean toward the light, that is to say, intend the light, and what the light is, is that of the harmonious relationships that come from compassion, with suffering, understanding of the other person. This is what the Grail is about.
Finally, Gawain, Arthur's nephew, stood up and said, "I propose a vow to this company, that we all go in quest of that Grail to behold it unveiled."
Now we come to the text that interested me.
The text reads, "They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. Each entered the Forest Adventurous at that point which he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path."
You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path.
Where there's a way or a path, it is someone else's path; each human being is a unique phenomenon.
The idea is to find your own pathway to bliss.
Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss, pp.xxv-xxvi
Now we come to the text that interested me.
The text reads, "They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. Each entered the Forest Adventurous at that point which he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path."
You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path.
Where there's a way or a path, it is someone else's path; each human being is a unique phenomenon.
The idea is to find your own pathway to bliss.
Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss, pp.xxv-xxvi
Finally, Gawain, Arthur's nephew, stood up and said, "I propose a vow to this company, that we all go in quest of that Grail to behold it unveiled."
Now we come to the text that interested me.
The text reads, "They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. Each entered the Forest Adventurous at that point which he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path."
You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path.
Where there's a way or a path, it is someone else's path; each human being is a unique phenomenon.
The idea is to find your own pathway to bliss.
Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss, pp.xxv-xxvi
Now we come to the text that interested me.
The text reads, "They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. Each entered the Forest Adventurous at that point which he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path."
You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path.
Where there's a way or a path, it is someone else's path; each human being is a unique phenomenon.
The idea is to find your own pathway to bliss.
Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss, pp.xxv-xxvi
Grail Bearers
"We have to finish it. We have to carry it on. Even though we don't talk about grails and castles and enchanted maidens, still it is our myth to be completed in our lives. The myth has taken us to exactly the point where modern people are now. Collectively speaking we are stuck at the point where the French poem ends. So if you want a quest, if you want something meaningful for your life, pick up the grail myth where it now lies in you." (Robert Johnson)
When he first finds the Grail Castle, Perceval fails to ask the crucial questions about the origins of evil, the king's wound, and the Grail's meaning. He does get another chance to find wholeness -- to redeem the divine in matter. That doesn't mean he had a cognition of the whole but it is said to be so. Emma Jung and M-L von Franz describe how The Grail is brought to the Old Grail King; the goal of the quest is death to the old king, who 'dies' to the dominant collective consciousness of the day with its one-sided god image and is restored.
Encountering the Grail is an emotional readiness for reflective experience and to receive numinous experience. With the secret words spoken and Perceval’s royal ancestry revealed, the Grail is placed in his care. The Grail disappeared with his death, went back into concealment in the unconscious of each living person, available as an inner guide, the voice of the divine, inviting each of us to our individual completeness.
We Embody the Grail
The genealogical Quest for the Grail shares something in common with the quest for the Philosopher's Stone, which forms itself. The magic of genealogy as the magic of the Stone is in the seeking after it. The Grail is our own transformation.
We are filled by the Grail when we point ourselves toward it. The Grail serves the whole community.
In Hymn to an Unknown God, Sam Keen says, "The voice that calls us forth and inspires us to undertake the journey is always specific. So long as we respond to the needs of our world by offering both our compassion and our skill, we will not fall into despair at the overwhelming quantity of need. The spiritual life is based on a refusal to despair that arises from concerned action and humble agnosticism. We don't know enough to despair. Despair is hidden arrogance -- I have seen the future, and it doesn't work. Hope is rooted in trust in the Unknown God. We do not know the final destiny of the individual soul or the commonwealth of beings; therefore we work, wait, and hope. and it is enough."
The quest for the Grail is the quest for the awakened and aware spiritual consciousness. If the myth of seeking the Grail is the story of facing challenges as you follow your bliss, the myth of the attainment of the Grail has a different significance. We have successfully undertaken the first few steps of our perilous journey, learned enough about ourselves to go deeper within.
Now we enter the Wasteland. Now we come to the source of our life challenges. We are now face to face with the Wounded King – the Wounded Self. Now is the time to take on Percival's task, with its mysterious question, "What ails thee?" Like Percival, we may find it hard to look at our Wounded Self honestly enough to ask this question. From my own journal:
The Percival version of the Grail myth is primarily a story of a failed opportunity to bless. If we lack the courage to look at our wounds and see the desolation around us, our quest for spiritual fulfillment will fail. When we can look at the Wounded Self and ask the questions that begin to heal us, we are blessed with the vision of the unveiled Grail, the deep love of the sacred that nourishes the soul. It is the lessons of our wounds that make us strong. "No one whose beauty is from birth ever equaled that of the Grail Guardian coming out of his sickness." (9)
We generally have the compassion to look at the ills of others and to help them if we can. It is asking the question of ourselves that is hard, and that, I think, is the meaning of this myth. There is a fear that comes over us, like the deeply ingrained "thou shalt not" that kept Percival from asking his instinctive question at first. We instinctively know that we have to look at our pain – indeed, we must touch it, embrace it – in order to heal it, but it is far easier to look away, to refuse the adventure.
Why would we not look within? Again, we look to the myths for guidance. Different versions give us different reasons for Percival's failure. The seeker simply fell asleep before he could ask – mundane exhaustion may keep us from taking on the kind of honest inner searching that could heal us. The seeker fell into a trance – perhaps we are numbing ourselves with drugs or distractions rather than facing our wounds. The seeker was placed in a trance by the Wounded King himself – perhaps we are not in a good place to confront the causes of our inner Wasteland; perhaps we need to gain more wisdom through other trials first. "It is death to touch the holy things unprepared..." (10)
In most versions, when the seeker fails in the quest, there is no blame laid on him. Indeed, the seeker usually does not even know there was a test happening at all, or that the Grail was within reach. So we come unknowing to places in our lives where we have a chance for breakthrough. Perhaps entering the soul's Wasteland can be seen as a sign that we are near the Grail. Perhaps our grief and pain can only carry us so far, back to pain's home, and then we must surrender to the path of bliss. When Percival has achieved his task, he is told, "In youth you courted Sorrow... Joy will now take you from her." (11)
The theme of sorrow runs all through the Grail myths, "the persistent recurrence in these stories of a weeping maiden or maidens, the cause of whose grief is never made clear." (12) This is not a rollicking adventure of knights and their valiant deeds. Each obstacle is a blow to the ego, the heart or the soul. Each task undertaken in the search for spiritual wholeness will challenge to the very depth of our beings.
At the beginning of their bliss-quest, the knights entered the forest at its most mysterious point, because what was known well to them was obviously not the source of spiritual breakthrough. On our own quest for healing, we must also look where we haven't explored before. We are each the Wounded King. We must have the courage to expose our wounds that they may be cleansed and healed. And we are each Percival. We must follow through on the instinctive generosity of a loving heart that cares for others, and care for ourselves with the same gentle compassion. We must dwell in the castle of the Wounded Self, the place where compassion joins courage, and the waters of the Grail are bestowed.
The quest for the Grail is not a quest to win love, but a quest to give love. This is the message of all cups – to give. A cup may have water poured into it, but only holds it until it may again be bestowed. Each of us guards the Grail; as we heal our Wounded Selves with the waters of compassion, we add to the healing of the Wasteland that threatens all creation. Seek the Grail within you, and carry its waters to those in need of its blessing. The Wasteland will be transformed by your courage and your love.
"We have to finish it. We have to carry it on. Even though we don't talk about grails and castles and enchanted maidens, still it is our myth to be completed in our lives. The myth has taken us to exactly the point where modern people are now. Collectively speaking we are stuck at the point where the French poem ends. So if you want a quest, if you want something meaningful for your life, pick up the grail myth where it now lies in you." (Robert Johnson)
When he first finds the Grail Castle, Perceval fails to ask the crucial questions about the origins of evil, the king's wound, and the Grail's meaning. He does get another chance to find wholeness -- to redeem the divine in matter. That doesn't mean he had a cognition of the whole but it is said to be so. Emma Jung and M-L von Franz describe how The Grail is brought to the Old Grail King; the goal of the quest is death to the old king, who 'dies' to the dominant collective consciousness of the day with its one-sided god image and is restored.
Encountering the Grail is an emotional readiness for reflective experience and to receive numinous experience. With the secret words spoken and Perceval’s royal ancestry revealed, the Grail is placed in his care. The Grail disappeared with his death, went back into concealment in the unconscious of each living person, available as an inner guide, the voice of the divine, inviting each of us to our individual completeness.
We Embody the Grail
The genealogical Quest for the Grail shares something in common with the quest for the Philosopher's Stone, which forms itself. The magic of genealogy as the magic of the Stone is in the seeking after it. The Grail is our own transformation.
We are filled by the Grail when we point ourselves toward it. The Grail serves the whole community.
In Hymn to an Unknown God, Sam Keen says, "The voice that calls us forth and inspires us to undertake the journey is always specific. So long as we respond to the needs of our world by offering both our compassion and our skill, we will not fall into despair at the overwhelming quantity of need. The spiritual life is based on a refusal to despair that arises from concerned action and humble agnosticism. We don't know enough to despair. Despair is hidden arrogance -- I have seen the future, and it doesn't work. Hope is rooted in trust in the Unknown God. We do not know the final destiny of the individual soul or the commonwealth of beings; therefore we work, wait, and hope. and it is enough."
The quest for the Grail is the quest for the awakened and aware spiritual consciousness. If the myth of seeking the Grail is the story of facing challenges as you follow your bliss, the myth of the attainment of the Grail has a different significance. We have successfully undertaken the first few steps of our perilous journey, learned enough about ourselves to go deeper within.
Now we enter the Wasteland. Now we come to the source of our life challenges. We are now face to face with the Wounded King – the Wounded Self. Now is the time to take on Percival's task, with its mysterious question, "What ails thee?" Like Percival, we may find it hard to look at our Wounded Self honestly enough to ask this question. From my own journal:
The Percival version of the Grail myth is primarily a story of a failed opportunity to bless. If we lack the courage to look at our wounds and see the desolation around us, our quest for spiritual fulfillment will fail. When we can look at the Wounded Self and ask the questions that begin to heal us, we are blessed with the vision of the unveiled Grail, the deep love of the sacred that nourishes the soul. It is the lessons of our wounds that make us strong. "No one whose beauty is from birth ever equaled that of the Grail Guardian coming out of his sickness." (9)
We generally have the compassion to look at the ills of others and to help them if we can. It is asking the question of ourselves that is hard, and that, I think, is the meaning of this myth. There is a fear that comes over us, like the deeply ingrained "thou shalt not" that kept Percival from asking his instinctive question at first. We instinctively know that we have to look at our pain – indeed, we must touch it, embrace it – in order to heal it, but it is far easier to look away, to refuse the adventure.
Why would we not look within? Again, we look to the myths for guidance. Different versions give us different reasons for Percival's failure. The seeker simply fell asleep before he could ask – mundane exhaustion may keep us from taking on the kind of honest inner searching that could heal us. The seeker fell into a trance – perhaps we are numbing ourselves with drugs or distractions rather than facing our wounds. The seeker was placed in a trance by the Wounded King himself – perhaps we are not in a good place to confront the causes of our inner Wasteland; perhaps we need to gain more wisdom through other trials first. "It is death to touch the holy things unprepared..." (10)
In most versions, when the seeker fails in the quest, there is no blame laid on him. Indeed, the seeker usually does not even know there was a test happening at all, or that the Grail was within reach. So we come unknowing to places in our lives where we have a chance for breakthrough. Perhaps entering the soul's Wasteland can be seen as a sign that we are near the Grail. Perhaps our grief and pain can only carry us so far, back to pain's home, and then we must surrender to the path of bliss. When Percival has achieved his task, he is told, "In youth you courted Sorrow... Joy will now take you from her." (11)
The theme of sorrow runs all through the Grail myths, "the persistent recurrence in these stories of a weeping maiden or maidens, the cause of whose grief is never made clear." (12) This is not a rollicking adventure of knights and their valiant deeds. Each obstacle is a blow to the ego, the heart or the soul. Each task undertaken in the search for spiritual wholeness will challenge to the very depth of our beings.
At the beginning of their bliss-quest, the knights entered the forest at its most mysterious point, because what was known well to them was obviously not the source of spiritual breakthrough. On our own quest for healing, we must also look where we haven't explored before. We are each the Wounded King. We must have the courage to expose our wounds that they may be cleansed and healed. And we are each Percival. We must follow through on the instinctive generosity of a loving heart that cares for others, and care for ourselves with the same gentle compassion. We must dwell in the castle of the Wounded Self, the place where compassion joins courage, and the waters of the Grail are bestowed.
The quest for the Grail is not a quest to win love, but a quest to give love. This is the message of all cups – to give. A cup may have water poured into it, but only holds it until it may again be bestowed. Each of us guards the Grail; as we heal our Wounded Selves with the waters of compassion, we add to the healing of the Wasteland that threatens all creation. Seek the Grail within you, and carry its waters to those in need of its blessing. The Wasteland will be transformed by your courage and your love.
'Sophia,' from _Secret figures of the Rosicrucians of 16th and 17th centuries_ (1775)