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To put into rhyme (at the count’s command)
The best of tales
That are told in royal court:
This is the story of the Grail.
Chrétien de Troyes
Joseph Campbell looked comprehensively upon the whole corpus of medieval Holy Grail stories and pronounced it the world’s first “secular mythology.” And that means, according to one expert, that “the myths were not to be taken literally but to be interpreted as metaphors of the natural stages of spiritual growth and development—symbols of the stages of the individual process, one might say” (Lansing-Smith, Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth, pg. 18).
Like the clash of matter and antimatter, Catholic and Pagan influences (which is to say Cistercian monks’ reworking of Celtic material) cancel each other out, leaving Campbell’s secular mythology in place:
But no matter what their origins may have been, it is clear that these curious parallels between tales of the Crucifixion and of the dolorous stroke [the wound received by the Fisher King] were recognized by Medieval ecclesiastics and employed to allegorical purpose. Discovering in the grail romances material susceptible to reinterpretation, good monks carefully set about reorganizing the legend, abridging here, interpolating there, explaining, allegorizing, and embellishing. The lance they connected with the lance of the Crucifixion. The grail they connected with the cup of the Last Supper. The maimed king they connected with Joseph of Arimathea, who preserved the holy relics of Christ’s passion. The young fertility god, they renamed, finally, Galahad; and then they exalted him to the strangely incongruous role of the celibate ideal. The women connected to the legend they transformed either into nuns or into temptations. The Celtic marvels they turned into Hebraic miracles. (Romance of the Grail, pg. 313)
All. For. Nothing.
The Grail will never be Catholic. If the Arthurian canon—including de Troyes’ Romanz de Perceval, Robert de Boron’s Roman de l’Estoire dou Graal, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, the Vulgate cycle of the well-intentioned Cistercians, the original Celtic stories, Sir Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century Le Morte d’Arthur among others—ended up with a patina of Christian theology, the true meaning of the myth transcended all denominational bias.
The conflict between the Grail tradition and twelfth-century Catholicism is mirrored in that deep division between theology and psychology: “In the church, there are leaders who tell the followers what to think and how to worship. The priests hear confessions, celebrate the Mass, and assure the faithful that salvation is theirs. But the adventurer must always quest for the Grail alone” (Myth and Meaning: Conversations on Mythology and Life, pg. 145).
Which is why I would suggest that the Grail can never be found by either Catholic or Celt because it is not an element of a faith tradition. It is an element of the unconscious. It belongs to everyone who looks not to some distant shore where an imagined enemy walks among the parapets of stone defenses, but with the inward look, to the Self, to the Soul. In brief, the Grail belongs to depth psychology.
The Grail belongs to everyone who looks not to some distant shore where an imagined enemy walks among the parapets of stone defenses, but with the inward look, to the Self, to the Soul.
Dropping the reins
Those of us who cherish insights regarding the true nature of the Self cannot help but take note when Perceval, having only recently acquired his horse, simply lets go of the reins. Why would a knight on a quest relinquish the power of agency for the skittish wisdom of a beast?
During the Middle Ages, the power of life was symbolized in the horse, and the power of the mind in the rider. So, in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, when Parzival seeks the Grail Castle, he lets the reins lie on the neck of the horse. He could not have guided the horse to the castle; the horse knew where it was and automatically led the way. You have to be guided by nature, not by this head up at the top. (Myth and Meaning, pg. 112)
We “drop the reins” when we allow in the experience of Jungian “active imagination,” never knowing where the next set of mental associations will take us, ceding our autonomy to our unconscious, hoping for the best but keeping our thumb off the scale.
We “drop the reins” when we follow our bliss, knowing that we are not in control of all the outcomes, only of our attitudes—foremost among which is hope.
Moses “dropped the reins” to follow his creator for a forty-year tour of the desert in the hopes of reaching a Promised Land.
And Joseph Campbell dropped the reins when he disappeared into a reading room for five years and emerged the foremost scholar of mythology in the twentieth century who would come to the conclusion that “[t]he Waste Land is the land of people not living their own authentic lives, but doing what people expect them to do. One goes and gets a job because you’ve got to live, and so you’re doing the daily grind” (Myth and Meaning, pg. 145).
How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen calvary?
The Mass no longer spoke to the hearts of Crusader Europe because the act of military incursion in the name of Christ is, to put it mildly, a contradiction, and a fatal one at that. Chrétien and Wolfram were both military men. Subverting the bloodless simplicity of the Eucharistic feast for actual warfare in the name of the Prince of Peace left these noble knights—indeed, much of Europe—in a dissociative state where principles had eroded with the clash of spears and thundering of hooves.
Against their better intentions, these twelfth-century writers had been forced to look through the symbols of the Mass and to insist that we do the same because the old thinking had become obsolete:
Today, with the economic net knitting us all together and the resulting interdependency, every single one of the in-group mythologies is not only out of date, but dangerous. There’s no notion of the global community as the prime unit. What I see as the main problem of mythology today is not what the new myth is going to be. The myth is going to be one that recognizes the whole planet as our society … and the next breakthrough has to be of the recognition of the planet as the Holy Land. (Myth and Meaning, pg. 205)
Knights like Chrétien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach learned this lesson the hard way and wrote their works in part to process the disintegration of former orthodoxies. Their faith died on the battlefield because it was not intended for the battlefield. Or, put another way, the armies of Pope Innocent III were successful in their attempt to destroy a religion contrary to the teaching of the Messiah, but that religion turned out to be their own.
MythBlast authored by:
John Bonaduce, PhD, a seasoned writer for Norman Lear and for most of the major Hollywood studios (Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros, et al.) developed a profound interest in story structure beyond the commercial objectives of the industry. His exploration led him to conclude that much of what we call myth derives from a biological origin. This insight inspired his pursuit of deeper relationships between biology and narrative through his theory of Mythobiogenesis, which he explored in his dissertation at Pacifica Graduate Institute and was recognized as a “discovery” in the field of prenatal psychology by Dr. Thomas Verny.
John was recently appointed to the editorial board of the Journal of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health (JOPPPAH) where he advocates for an unrecognized level of human consciousness which exists at the border of biology and mythology.
As a featured writer for the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s MythBlast, he passionately showcases Joseph Campbell’s enduring relevance to a modern audience.
This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 4, and Myth and Meaning
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This Week's Highlights
"In the church, there are leaders who tell the followers what to think and how to worship. The priests hear confessions, celebrate the Mass, and assure the faithful that salvation is theirs. But the adventurer must always quest for the Grail alone."
-- Joseph Campbell
Myth and Meaning, 145