the rose, the vault, and the wisdom of the grail
It is old Titurel’s daughter
Carrier of the Grail, who lives in eternal youth…
Until the daughter of a new king
Takes on the burden and the dignity.
…
Hannah Closs (trans.), Der Jüngere Titurel
The Grail and the Virgin
Inevitably in a myth subsumed by Christian mysticism, much of the Faery tradition explored in the previous chapter became hidden away, though it continued to lie just below the surface of the outwardly Christian romances. The most prominent substitution for the goddesses and fées was the Virgin Mary, followed closely by the more enigmatic figure of Sophia, Divine Wisdom. Their presence along with their attendant imagery is every bit as important to the understanding of the Grail and the world of Arthur.
The most prominent symbol representing Mary is the Rose. It is present in the rosary beads used by Roman Catholics to offer the prayer to Mary herself, but the symbolism goes deeper. It leads us inevitably to Arthur and the Grail, specifically in its Christian incarnation as the chalice in which some of the blood of Christ was caught and which was used in the first celebration of the Eucharist. Here we already see aspects of a theme that will later find a restatement in the mysteries of alchemy and the Rosicrucian Enlightenment. From the beginning, in both Chrétien de Troyes and Robert de Boron, the Grail is a vessel that has contained some of the divinity of God: the blood that is symbolized by the wine in Eucharistic symbolism and is the embodiment of that transubstantiation in the mystery of the Eucharist.192
In the Christian interpretation of the mysteries it is also the womb of Mary, in which the divine seed is transmuted into the body of the infant Christ. Thus Mary herself, in the medieval Litany of Loretto, is praised as:
vas spirituale,
vas honorabile,
vas insigne devotionis…
spiritual vessel,
vessel of honour,
singular vessel of devotion…193
In effect, Mary is seen as a living Grail, a vessel in which the blood and essence of Christ are both contained. The litany makes this point even more powerfully when it calls the virgin
Cause of our joy
Ark of the Covenant
Tower of David
Tower of Ivory
House of Gold
Seat of Wisdom
Mirror of Justice
Queen of Prophets.194
Each of these reflects an aspect of the Grail. It too was a vessel of the spirit and devotion, a cause of joy to those who came into its presence, an Ark of the New Covenant between God and Man. It is also associated with a house of gold (the Temple of the Grail), with a seat of wisdom (the Siege Perilous, in which only the one destined to achieve the mysteries of the Grail may sit, and perhaps also with the Throne of Sophia), and with prophecy, an aspect specifically attributed to it in Parzival.
In the full spectrum of medieval symbolism Mary is Queen of Heaven, as well as mirror, vessel, house of gold, and star of the sea. Her supreme symbol is the Rose—Rose of the World, Rosa Alchemica, Queen of the Most Holy Rose Garden in which the Grail lies hidden—or, as Wolfram von Eschenbach puts it, the Grail is “the wondrous thing hidden in the flower garden of the king where the elect of all nations are called.”195
The mysteries of Mary, represented in Catholic tradition by the rosary, are arranged in multiples of five: five decades (or tens) repeated three times, for a total of fifteen decades. Five was thus the number of Marian devotion; the Rose was always depicted in symbolic representation with five petals; Christ was wounded five times, in the hands and feet and side; and as we have seen the Grail underwent five changes, “the nature of which no one ought to speak,” according to the thirteenth-century Perlesvaus.196 The last of these changes is into the form of a child—a restatement of the divinity held by the vessel of the spirit.
Finally, in the elaborate symbolism of courtly love—that medieval dream which placed women on a pedestal while making her the subject of adulterous passion—the rose garden was the place where the beloved awaits the coming of the lover, who must pluck the rose in order to achieve his desire.
All of this can be interpreted in both mystical and alchemical fashion. According to Catholic doctrine, Mary is the vessel in which the Divine Child is brought to term. In alchemical symbolism, the vas mirabile is the vessel in which the Mercurius, the burning child brought forth by a spiritual wedding of the elements, finds manifestation. The coming together of the Lover and the Beloved is the same allegory of divine love extolled by Dante, who understood the Rose’s symbolism. In the Paradiso he makes the Rose the final symbol of revelation and union with the Divine, granted to him at the behest of Bernard of Clairvaux (who, remember, was the instructor and patron of the Templars), who prays for the intercession of the Virgin. The symbolism is interchangeable here; it works as well for the profane (courtly love), the sacred (the Marian impulse), and the alchemical (the birth of the Wondrous Child).
Thus the infinite is born into the finite, Christ becomes man, and the spiritual transformations of the Grail and the alembic are shown to be the same. As St. Ephraem wrote in the fourth century, invoking Christ:
In the womb that bore you are Fire and Spirit,
Fire and Spirit are in the river where you were baptized,
Fire and Spirit are in our baptism too,
And the Bread and Cup are Fire and Spirit.197
One could hardly find a clearer statement of the Grail mystery in alchemical terms than this. Nor is it surprising that we find the troubadours, who fueled the Arthurian myths with their burning and joyful light, referring to Mary as “the Grail of the World” and applying the term with equal validity to the Lady of the Rose Garden, where “the beloved one is the heart’s Grail, her lover will not be alone, for she is to him the highest Grail, which protects from every woe.”198
Much of this symbolism is Catholic and founded on Catholic doctrine, though it also embodies the recognition of the divine feminine at a time when the established church was exoterically opposed to this. Devotion to Mary, while never criticized, was considered as secondary to devotion to Christ. The Grail stories, it seems, were giving voice to an undercurrent of belief that harked back to pre-Christian times, when devotion to the feminine principle was either as important or more important than that to the gods. The Grail’s own Pagan heritage focuses on this in a number of ways—by the implicit femininity of its form (the cup or vessel) and in the story of Dindrane, the only female Grail seeker within the romances. Sister to Perceval, one of the three knights who achieved the mystery of the Grail, Dindrane not only foresees the coming of the sacred vessel in a vision but actually sets forth in search of it. Her death is a parable of the feminine mystery—and of the Grail and the Rose.
Joining the three knights on their quest, Dindrane gives up her life to save another, giving her life-blood to heal a woman suffering from leprosy. The blood that is taken is symbolic of the monthly blood loss of all women, of the blood in the Grail, and of death of the Rose. The modern Grail poet Charles Williams puts this exactly in his poem, significantly entitled “Taliesin in the Rose Garden”:
Woman’s flesh lives the quest of the Grail
in the change from Camelot to Carbonek and from Carbonek to Sarras,
puberty to Carbonek, and the stanching, and Carbonek to death.
Blessed is she who gives herself to the journey.199
Taliesin, as the magical poet of Celtic tradition, draws together a knot of symbolism—the Grail itself, the suffering of the wounded king, the guardian of the sacred chalice whose wounds continue to bleed until he can find healing—something which can only be brought about by the successful accomplishment of the Grail Quest itself.
The Jungian analyst Helen Luke wrote of these lines:
Williams hints at the inner identity of the woman’s menstrual blood, which tells her that she has not yet conceived, with the blood of the wounded Grail king, bleeding because he cannot bring to life the new consciousness of the Christ, the Self…Taliesin speaks of how woman may consciously give birth to the new keeper of the Grail, within herself, and so heal the wound in the psyche.200
Again the message is alchemical and would have found a receptive chord among the Brotherhood of the Rose Cross, an enigmatic movement that emerged in seventeenth-century Europe from the new Protestant order, rebelling against the strictures of Roman Catholicism, and which gave birth to a new myth that borrowed from the older story of the Grail and formulated a new quest—the mystery of Christian Rosenkreutz and the Rosicrucian vault.
The Secret Vault
The first that anyone in the outside world knew of the Rosicrucians was in 1614, when a curious document entitled Fama Fraternitatis of the Meritorious Order of the Rose Cross201 appeared in Germany and was widely circulated. It purported to be a description of the life of one Christian Rosenkreutz, philosopher, mystic, and magician, who was reportedly born in 1378 and lived to the age of 106. His body was concealed in a secret tomb that was not discovered for another 120 years.
The dating of these events would place the lifetime of Christian Rosenkreutz at the end of the fourteenth or the beginning of the fifteenth century, although there are no records from that, or indeed any time, which prove his actual existence. The description of the finding of the vault containing his uncorrupted remains is written in highly symbolic language that reads like an initiatory text. The tomb itself was described as a seven-sided vault illuminated by an inner sun.
The opening of this vault is, in the Fama, likened to an event of far-reaching effect: “for like as our door was after so many years wonderfully discovered, also there shall be opened a door to Europe which already doth begin to appear, and with great desire is expected of many.”202 Judging by the reaction across Europe to the Fama and the manifestos which followed it, the desire and expectation must have been considerable. A new hope was seeded thereby, which had nothing to do with the effects of the Renaissance; medieval attitudes were still abroad, and enlightenment battled uneasily with a mysticism that retained the blinkers of dogma and superstition.
The authorship of the first Rosicrucian manifesto has been traced speculatively to the University of Tübingen and more precisely to a certain Johann Valentine von Andrae, yet behind the human author we may detect the beginning of a powerful new stream of inner teaching that found an outlet in this manner.203 No one knew the whereabouts of the Rosicrucian brotherhood, but this did not stop many who read and understood the true value of the manifestos from trying to make physical contact. The fact that there were writings that spoke of a brotherhood of adepts who could be contacted “through proper channels” was enough to prompt many to advertise in the news-sheets of the time for more information.
When no reply was forthcoming to the various inquiries sent to nonexistent addresses or people, enthusiasts were driven to publish their own books and pamphlets to see whether their ideas resonated harmonically with other would-be Rosicrucians similarly situated. Thus the original manifestos spawned a succession of imitators and commentaries, constellating their writers into the formation of a mystery school whose doctrines were set out for all to read—or at least for those who could understand them.
At its heart the Rosicrucian impulse was a combination of esoteric Christianity and Grail myth with straight mystery school teaching as it had been kept alive in the work of magicians and alchemists. That it transcended both points of origin is an indication of the power of the inner impulse which brought it into being: the symbols of the Rose and the Cross combined to make the first real synthesis of magical and mystical teaching since the original Hermetic impulse.
Just as the Grail myths had previously inspired seekers, so these documents resounded throughout Europe in the hearts of all who sought to discover hidden wisdom, who were drawn to its strangely allusive promises: “Although we might enrich the whole World, and imbue them with Learning, and might release it from Innumerable Miseries, yet we shall never be manifested and made known unto any man, without the especial pleasure of God.”204 The enrichment promised here was nothing less than the alleviation of misery and the spiritual enlightenment of all seekers—a promise the Grail also fulfills.
In the same way that the Grail caused many to leave their everyday lives and seek for its healing, so the Rosicrucian manifestos inspired many to live according to its tenets, agreeing to meet once a year in the House of the Holy Spirit, manifest wherever they happened to be at the time, just as once Arthur’s knights met once a year at the Round Table at Pentecost.
The emblem of the Rose flowering upon the equal-armed Cross, which is the central symbol of the brotherhood, is one of the central images of the Western Esoteric Tradition. It represents the “pure work” of the initiate within the realm of the mundane world and may also stand for the achievement of the seeker whose dedication results in the manifestation of the Grail’s healing. The myth of Christian Rosenkreutz and the “invisible college” of initiates have many correlatives within the Grail legends, especially the more evolved versions such as Perlesvaus, with its oblique and alchemical emblems. The vault in which Christian Rosenkreutz lies sleeping, like the hidden castle of the Grail, is an initiatory chamber in which the initiate/seeker encounters the transformatory powers firsthand. Into this dense theatre of memory we are led to discover scenes as emblematic and allusive as anything from the alchemical texts that inspired them.
Towards the end of the Middle Ages the Grail seemed to vanish for a time. As Adam Maclean has rightly noted:
The Grail mystery returned underground, wrapped itself again in its esotericism and waited for another time to unfold its inner revelation. Such a point was reached after the Reformation, when the inner Grail mystery…surfaced again in the Rosicrucian movement of the early seventeenth century. At this time…the Rosicrucians tried to incarnate an esoteric Christianity within the Protestant movement…in order to provide a much-needed resolution of the polarities of Protestantism. Thus we should see the Rosicrucian movement as being inwardly related to the Grail mystery. The spiritual alchemy that was the esoteric foundation of Rosicrucianism can be seen as a development of the Grail impulse.205
This is indeed the case, and in the symbolism of the Rosicrucian movement we see an unfolding of the original Grail story in a new form. As so often in the past, and again in recent times, an outwardly rigid spirituality is underpinned by an esoteric core. The Rosicrucian movement is just such an esoteric resonance, flowering within Protestantism just as the Grail myths flowered within the rigid forms of Roman Catholicism.
In The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, the most elaborate work of the Rosicrucian Enlightenment,206 the text appears to describe the symbolic marriage of a mysterious king and queen, phrased in deeply mystical language and using alchemical symbolism. Here we glimpse a figure that, though his hair is gray and he accounts himself as no longer young, shares the same innocent earnestness as Perceval in the Grail myths. Here is someone who would sell all that he has for the possession of the pearl of wisdom, and who suffers the rigors of his initiation into that wisdom with the greatest humility and determination. His approach is ideal for a candidate towards initiation, unaware that, although he has been invited to a royal wedding, he himself is the groom. In the same way, Perceval sets out to find the Grail and is at once the guest in the castle where it is hidden, though he does not know this, and sets out on a quest that will take him full circle, back to the point of beginning.
Christian Rosenkreutz and Perceval both suffer the lot of all people. They are thrust into incarnation, into the captivity of matter, where they are yoked to their fellows by the service they both offer to the quest. We see this in the Chymical Wedding, where Christian dreams that he emerges from his dungeon with the help of “an ancient matron.”207 He is already mysteriously wounded in such a manner that blood covers him from head to foot, but when he is released from the dungeon by the matron he is told that he should be proud of his wounds and “keep them for my sake.” There are echoes here of the Christ-like Perceval and of the wounded Fisher King of the Grail, while the matron is almost certainly identifiable with the Virgin Mary.
Christian Rosenkreutz arrays himself for the wedding with crossed red bands over his breast and four red roses in his hat. These roses proclaim his loyalty to the feminine mysteries and show that for all its Protestant veneer, the Chymical Wedding is, in fact, an exposition of the mysteries of Venus, which can be traced back both to the practices of Pagan Europe and through the Grail myth itself in the parallels between the Venusburg of German folklore and the Holy Mountain (Muntsalvasche) of both Rosicrucian and Grail myths.
The roses are a clear indication of the initiate’s dedication to his task. As A. Bothwell Gosse says in his study The Rose Immortal:
The disciple, servant of the Rose and of the Cross, progressing along the narrow Path and passing through the narrow gateway of Initiation, keeps ever before his eyes the Goal, remote at first, but ever growing nearer. From the beginning he has been pledged to the finding of Unity, for Unity stands at the end of the Path.208
That path leads, inevitably, upwards to the Mountain of Salvation, the place of mystery, the site of the Grail Temple, where the unutterable mysteries of unity with the beloved are celebrated.
Suffering is a part of that path. Just as Christian Rosenkreutz suffers in the Chymical Wedding, so does Lancelot in the Grail story. There, the great worldly knight comes to a doorway to the Chapel of the Grail and is turned away and temporarily blinded. So Rosenkreutz, looking upon the naked form of Lady Venus, is likewise blinded by the radiance of the goddess.
Both of these events happen in a temple of the mysteries, and it is in the account of two such temples—one devoted to the Grail and the other to the Rosicrucian mysteries—that we find further analogies and links between the Grail and the Rose.
Temples of Light
As we saw in the previous chapter, the imagery of the Grail Temple is consistent throughout the texts in which it appears. It is usually situated at the top of a mountain, which is in turn surrounded either by an impenetrable forest or deep water. Access, if any, is by way of a perilously narrow bridge. To make the entrance even harder, the whole temple, or the castle that contains it, may revolve rapidly, making it almost impossible to gain entry by normal means. Once within more perils awaited, and for those few who succeeded in reaching the center, the heart of the Grail-Rose, the experience could, as in the case of Lancelot, be both parlous and chastening.
We remember how the Middle High German poem Der Jüngere Titurel attributed to Albrecht von Scharfenberg209 describes the completion of the Grail Temple over a thirty-year period. There the Grail is seen to participate directly in the creation of its own temple, as perhaps the followers of Christian Rosenkreutz understood was the case in the creation of the vault. There, the uncorrupt body of the mysterious Christian lies in suspended animation, just as the body of the Wounded King is preserved in the Temple of the Grail.
The allegory here is dense but permeable. The image of the temple as vessel, containing the holy matter of creation, relates to a fundamental aspect of both the Grail Temple and the Rosicrucian vault—the idea of the temple within, where a fragment of the Divine is contained. The true quest of the Grail consists in strengthening this rosy light until its radiance can be seen by all.
But the way is hard and the mountain steep, guarded by wild animals and powerful otherworldly opponents. In the Grail myths this takes the form of such challenging figures as the Black Maiden, sometimes called Kundrie, who appears to urge the Grail knights on their way when they are beginning to fall by the wayside. However, it is the mountain that remains the most fearsome and terrible trial.
In Rosicrucian terms we have the allegory The Holy Mountain, attributed to the poet Thomas Vaughan. Here we find the following description:
There is a mountain situated in the midst of the earth or centre of the world, which is both small and great. It is soft, yet also above measure hard and stony. It is far off and near at hand, but by the providence of God, invisible. In it are hidden the most ample treasures, which the world is not able to value. This mountain—by envy of the devil, who always opposes the glory of God and the happiness of man—is compassed about with very cruel beasts and ravening birds—which make the way thither both difficult and dangerous.210
Anyone who succeeds in daring all these perils, in recognizing that the mountain is not just a mountain and the treasure not just a treasure, will find that
The most important thing (on the Mountain) and the most powerful, is a certain exalted Tincture, with which the world—if it served God and were worthy of such gifts—might be touched and turned into most pure gold…This Tincture…will make you young when you are old, and you will perceive no disease in any part of your bodies. By means of this Tincture you will find pearls of an excellence which can not be imagined…211
This is so like the function of the Grail it is hard not to believe that its author was directly influenced by the medieval texts—though it is more likely that both are an expression of a hunger for spiritual sustenance and perfection. However, if one turns to one of the most famous and esoterically based of the Grail texts—Wolfram’s Parzival—we can see at once just how close the two streams are.
Wolfram’s description of the effects of the Grail upon those who seek it displays remarkable similarities to the passage from The Holy Mountain:
There never can be human so ill but that if he one day sees the stone (that is, the Grail) he cannot die within the week that follows…and though he should see the stone for two hundred years (his appearance) will never change, save that his hair might perhaps turn gray.212
It is important to remember that for Wolfram the Grail is “a stone of the purest kind…called lapsit exillis.” This phrase has been seen as a reference to the lapis philiosophorum, the Philosopher’s Stone, the pursuit of which occupied the minds and energies of generations of medieval and Rosicrucian alchemists alike, and which symbolized the ultimate completion of the Great Work. If we consider alchemy here to mean a spiritual rather than chemical process, we will see how apt the analogy is. The Grail transforms those who come into its presence. It preserves their bodies and extends their lives indefinitely. It feeds the hunger of the spirit that is present within every seeker. It is an alembic in which the transformation of base material into spiritual gold takes place—in other words, it is an expression of the Great Work, of the Resurrection of Christ, and of the flowering of the Rose and the Grail, which takes place in both the medieval romances and the Rosicrucian allegories.
There is still another parallel between the story told by Wolfram and one of the most fundamental aspects of the Rosicrucian movement. In Parzival we read:
As to those who are appointed to the Grail (that is, to be its guardians) hear how they are made known. Under the top edge of the Stone an inscription announces the name and lineage of the one summoned to make the glad journey…Those who are now full-grown all came here as children. Happy the mother of any child destined to serve there! Rich and poor alike rejoice if a child of theirs is summoned and they are bidden to send it to that Company! Such children are fetched from many countries and forever are immune from the shame of sin and have a rich reward in Heaven.213
This is so much in the spirit of the Fama Fraternitatis, in which we learn of the existence of the secret brotherhood whose task is to remain hidden until the time when the world is ready for their message. The philosopher Robert Fludd (1574–1637), in a defense of the Rosicrucian movement, makes the connection even clearer when he says:
Here then you have that House or Palace of Wisdom erected on the Mount of Reason. It remains however, to learn who are those…to whom this House is open. These most fortunate of men and their spiritual house are described by the Apostle in the following manner: To whom come, as unto a living stone…(the) chosen of God…(to whom) are built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God…A chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy community, a ransomed people, that you should practice the virtues of him who has called you out of darkness into his royal light. For previously you were not a people, but now you are the people of God.214
This is clearly an echo of the “Christian progeny bred to a pure life (who) have the duty of keeping (the Grail)” in Wolfram’s poem. These are summoned to their task in the same way as two young knights at the end of the Perlesvaus who, long after the mysteries of the Grail are over, hear rumours of the existence of the Castle of Wisdom and set forth in search of it:
They were fair knights indeed, very young and high spirited and they swore they would go, and full of excitement they entered the castle. They stayed there a long while, and when they left they lived as hermits, wearing hair-shirts and wandering through the forests, eating only roots; it was a hard life, but it pleased them greatly, and when people asked them why they were living thus, they would only reply: “Go where we went, and you will know why.”215
This is an essential experience, which those who seek the Grail have been undergoing ever since. The alchemist Arnold of Villanova said, “Make a round circle and you have the Philosopher’s Stone.” The Grail—whether a stone, a cup, a sacred vessel, or that which is contained—remains at the center of the circle like the rose at the center of the Hortus Conclusus, the mysterious Rose Garden of the Beloved. But the center is also the circumference, and all quests lead to this place of hallowing. The knights in their wanderings, like the disciples of Christian Rosenkreutz, attain the goal that would have remained inaccessible had they gone purposely to the Grail Castle by a direct route. In surrendering themselves to chance, they are enabled to make the way to the heart of the mystery—where some at least recognize the truth, pluck the rose, or drink from the cup of truth. Given this depth of spiritual truth, it is not surprising to encounter an attempt to create a physical representation of the place of the Grail.
The Castle of the Rose
Long associated with the Grail and the Rose is the castle of Karlstein, which lies twelve miles outside Prague in the Czech Republic, on a wooded hill near the river Beroun.216 Karlstein was built between 1348 and 1365, soon after the first flowering of Grail literature, by the German king and Bohemian emperor Charles IV, whose life and work prefigure that of the later monarchs of Bohemia who fostered the work of the Rosicrucian Enlightenment. Described by Rudolf Steiner as “the last initiate on the throne of the Emperors,” Charles understood the connection between the Rose and the Grail implicitly, and Karlstein was consciously built to reflect this.
The following description shows just how deeply the two themes become one in this place:
The adornment of the walls in the various chapels to be found in the castle, with their quantities of semi-precious stones and gold, the way in which the light is diffused through these semi-precious stones which—set in gilded lead—take the place of window glass, lead one to conclude that Charles IV knew about the (esoteric) powers of precious stones and gold. The small chapel of St Catherine, for example, is a veritable gem. The entire walls, up to the ceiling, are inlaid with semi-precious stones such as amethyst, jasper, cornelian and agate, while the cross vaulting above has a blue background, adorned with roses, according to the Rosicrucian motif. According to tradition it was here that Charles IV withdrew every year from Good Friday to Easter Sunday in order to meditate in undisturbed privacy…217
This period in the Christian calendar is, of course, not only associated with the period of the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, but also with the Grail mysteries, in which the first appearance of the mystical hallow took place at the same time. This is reflected in the design of the castle in a number of ways. Throughout the building are murals that reflect the Rosicrucian rites of initiation—the releasing of the prisoner from his chains, the sowing of seed in darkness, its milling and baking (all aspects of the alchemical process also), the burial of the dead, the feast which reminds us of the wedding banquet in the Chymical Wedding, and, finally, execution and dismemberment.
These images guide the seeker towards the great tower of the castle, which is approached across a narrow bridge—reminiscent of the Sword Bridge in the Grail stories. Within the tower is the Chapel of the Holy Cross, again decorated with semiprecious stones, beneath a roof representing the sun, moon, and stars, interspersed with the motif of roses. The windows are formed of pure topaz, amethyst, and almandine, through which the light enters in bands of glorious color. The symbolism is clear: the initiate makes his way through life, learning, forgetting, relearning, following the path of spiritual alchemy, until he is able to cross the perilous bridge and enter the chamber of the mysteries. The parallels need hardly be spelled out. This is the chapel of the Grail, where the Rose also blooms.
Rudolf Steiner understood this precisely when he said of Karlstein:
I was recently in a castle in Middle Europe in which there is a chapel and where one can find, symbolized, thoughts from the turning point of this new era. In the whole stairway are rather primitive paintings, but what can be found painted throughout this whole stairway—even if the paintings are primitive?—The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz! One walks through this Chymical Wedding, finally reaching the Chapel of the Grail.218
Here the themes of the Grail and the Rose come together. To seek one is to seek the other. To follow one form of enlightenment is to find another. The Rose blossoms from the Grail; Rosicrucianism stems from the root of the Grail myths as a natural outgrowth of the spiritual search.
The Sovereign Power
(CM)
We have already noted that Arthur is more than a mere king; he is also a guardian who possesses a unique relationship with the land, sometimes personified as a goddess, who appears in both early Celtic myth and throughout the Arthuriad under a number of disguises.
The ancient rite of kings is deeply concerned with the marriage of the sovereign to the land. This idea has not been totally lost, as we can see if we look no further than the English coronation rite where the monarch is ceremonially wedded to the land with the wedding ring of England at the presentation of the regalia. If we go even further back, we may trace this custom to the time when the goddess and matrilinear descent were the rule; then the king held the land by right of relatives. He would often have to undergo a symbolic marriage with a priestess who represented the goddess for the purposes of the ritual.
In the medieval Irish tale of the Baile in Scail (the Phantom’s Prophecy) Conn, the king of Tara, stumbles into a mysterious landscape in which he enters a house. He and his companions see there
a young maiden in a glass chair with a gold crown on her head and a cloak with borders of gold round her. A bowl of silver with four golden corners before her, full of red beer. A cup of gold on the ground. A beaker or cup of gold at her lips.219
The maiden is the Flaitheas, the Sovereignty of Ireland, and she gives the bowl of silver to Conn, for it is his descendants who will rule the land. She could well be mistaken for the Grail bearer, the one who confers enlightenment upon the knightly candidate on the quest, yet she has another face, which is revealed to us in a second Irish tale, that of Niall of the Nine Hostages. Here, Niall and his four brothers are serving their weapon training and living off the land. They lose their way and need water. The first brother finds a well, but it is guarded by an ugly old hag who will only allow him to drink if he will kiss her. They each go in turn and have the same difficulty: each one returns waterless. Then Niall approaches the hag: he not only kisses her, he embraces her. As he releases her, he finds that she has changed into the most beautiful woman in the world. In answer to his question, she replies: “I am Sovereignty, King of Tara; your descendants will rule over every clan.” She bids him return to his brothers but to grant them no water until they have acknowledged his seniority over them.
This is a powerful story, which tells us much about the early origins of the Grail itself, as well as its guardian. Whether we read of the maiden with the silver cup in the Baile in Scail or of the Welsh tale of Ceridwen’s Cauldron of Inspiration220 or the hag who guards the well, we may be sure that we are witnessing the Goddess of Sovereignty in action.
In the quest for kingship, the Hideous Damsel, Sovereignty, cannot assume her true shape, nor can the quest succeed if her ugly form is rejected. The test seeks to discover the one who shows himself more concerned with the land than with the glories of kingship. But what are the implications here for the Grail knight? If we relate the quest for the Grail with the quest for sovereignty, we will see many things in a new light.
We may recall that the result of achieving the Grail is the healing of the Wounded King and the flowering of the Wasteland. From earliest times, especially in Celtic understanding, a maimed or wounded king could not reign—he had to be a whole man. This is the theme of another Irish story when Nuadu, king of the Tuatha de Danaan, loses his arm in the battle of Mag Tuired. Sovereignty is disputed and bestowed upon another, even though Nuadu is provided with a silver arm in replacement. It is not until his arm is miraculously restored to the flesh that he is allowed to resume the kingship. The implication is that the Wounded Grail King is wounded in the generative organs or, euphemistically, through the thighs, so that he cannot be joined in union with Sovereignty, and therefore the land is laid waste. The Grail knight’s quest, then, is the healing of his king: a fate in which he shares, for the whole kingdom suffers. Sovereignty, then, is radically important to an understanding of the Grail legends: not only is the Grail Maiden a reflection of a once-potent image of the Divine Feminine, but so too is the Grail messenger, the Hideous Damsel. The two faces of Sovereignty re-emerge in the Grail legend as two separate characters; they also may stand for the land, which suffers and is laid waste—as black and unwanted as the Hideous Damsel—and for the healing of the land, whereby Sovereignty can assume her former condition as the beautiful Grail Maiden.
The feature of this story which readers of the Grail legends are not prepared for is the fact that Niall actually sleeps with the hag aspect of Sovereignty. While this may seem shockingly at odds with the Grail cycle, in fact, there are direct correlatives within the medieval stories, for we are dealing here with a non-dual Celtic tradition. Just as the Celtic cauldrons that predate the Grail dispense food and wisdom, so too the Celtic Grail goddess gives one and the same empowerment as the Grail itself.
This understanding is crucial to our modern understanding of the Grail legends. We are used to thinking of the Grail as “something unattainable, out there.” This is a dangerous syndrome that can put our feet on misleading paths. There is a duality implicit within the later Grail legend that strays away from an older, more holistic story.
One of the most important incidents in Perceval’s story is the “Blood in the Snow” episode. Having searched long in the wilderness and met many adventures, Perceval is transfixed by a strange sight: a wild hawk kills a duck and brings it down in the snow; a raven settles upon the body and starts to scavenge. It is the colors that transfix him: the blackness of the raven, the whiteness of the snow, the redness of the blood. He falls into a mystical trance from which only the courteous and far-seeing Gawain can lead him. Perceval’s vision has been of the “woman he loves best”—the visionary woman that lives in his heart, since he is a virgin knight who as yet has no experience of women. This, for Perceval, is the Grail vision.221
But the three colors he sees are also directly linked with the Goddess of Sovereignty, whose symbolic colors are the white of maidenliness, the red of queenship, and the black of the cailleach. These colors are also symbolic of the three kinds of draught that can be found in Sovereignty’s cup, for she offers the white milk of fostering, the red wine of lordship, and the black drink of forgetting.
Similarly, we find in the medieval work of Wolfram von Eschenbach an incident in which Feirefitz, the piebald half-brother of Parzival, beholds the Grail Maiden, Repanse de Schoye, for the first time. (Significantly, her name means “fullness of love.”) The company are seated and she enters, bearing the Graal, and serves the company from the holy vessel. Feirefitz is entranced by her beauty and charmed at the mysterious way all the cups on the table are miraculously charged with liquid.
Then said the fair Anfortas, who sat by the heathen’s side, “Seest thou not the Graal before thee?” But Feirefitz replied: “Naught I see but a green Archmardi (emerald) that my Lady but now did bear.”222
He cannot see the Grail at all because he is stricken with earthly love for the Grail Maiden. He asks what he has to do to win her love. The old Grail guardian, Titurel, judges that Feirefitz’s inability to see the Grail stems from his being a Pagan and that baptism will rectify matters, as well as make him a suitable suitor for Repanse de Schoye. Feirefitz is baptised from the Grail itself and subsequently marries the Grail Maiden, becoming the father of the mysterious Prester John.
It would be simplistic to overstate Wolfram’s view—that Pagans perceive the Grail bearer but Christians the Grail itself—yet there is a level at which this is valid. For both Perceval and Feirefitz in these early medieval Grail stories there is no duality in their quest; they perceive the spiritual benefits of the Grail through a figure who represents Sovereignty. For them, her gifts and her love are one and the same.
The Goddess of Sovereignty very firmly points to the fundamental problem of how to prepare for the Grail Quest. There is no holy glittering vessel “out there”—the quest must begin with love. If the quester is unbalanced, not whole, then the rest of the quest has, perforce, got to be spent getting that right. The Grail Quest means change, and that change has first to be a personal metanoia—a change of heart.
This is why the Grail Question lies in the gift of the Goddess of Sovereignty, for she is the mistress of changing, and in her vessel is the bountiful love for all creatures that are hurt.
We may aspire to the Grail, but we will not gain it unless we first tackle the causes of our personal wasteland—a state for which we are all responsible, whether we speak of the pollution of our earth or of that less tractable condition, the wasteland of the spirit, the garden which we have not tended.
The Fair and the Foul
(CM)
Two of the most empowering figures of the Grail legends derive from the Goddess of Sovereignty: the Grail Maiden who appears in the procession as described by Chrétien de Troyes in his Conte du Graal and the Hideous Damsel who appears shortly after. First of all, let us meet the Grail Maiden:
A damsel, who came with the youths and was fair and attractive and beautifully adorned, held in both hands a grail. Once she had entered with this grail that she held, so great a radiance appeared that the candles lost their brilliance just as the stars do at the rising of the sun or moon.223
In contrast to her is the Hideous Damsel who accosts Perceval after he has witnessed the Grail procession but failed to answer the all-important Grail Question. Here is the description from the Welsh Peredur, which follows Chrétien closely:
Blacker were her face and her two hands than the blackest iron covered with pitch; and her hue was not more frightful than her form. High cheeks had she, and a face lengthened downwards, and a short nose with distended nostrils. And one eye was of a piercing mottled grey and the other was as black as jet, deep sunk in her head. And her teeth were long and yellow, more yellow were they than the flower of the broom. And her stomach rose from the breastbone, higher than her chin. And her back was in the shape of a crook, and her legs were large and bony. And her figure was very thin and spare, except her feet and her legs, which were of huge size.224
She immediately berates Perceval for not asking the question and for causing the king to remain wounded when it lay in his power to change things.
These two women, so very different and yet both so dedicated to the service of the Grail, appear in many different forms throughout the texts. Sometimes they are named, as in Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, where we learn that the Grail Maiden is Elaine of Corbenic, destined to become the mother of Galahad. The Hideous Damsel is seldom identified, except in Parzival, where she is called Kundrie. Wolfram makes her ugly beyond measure, yet wise beyond all earthly sages.225
Yet whichever version of the story we read, their function is clear: the Grail Maiden presents the vessel of regeneration, manifesting it, making it available for use; the Black Maiden admonishes the Grail knight for not persevering on his quest, compelling and spurring him on to greater feats of achievement.
These twin guardians of the quest are sometimes further subdivided, as is the way with medieval texts, into numerous damsels who carry treasures, guard special weapons, or else become women who have been raped, dispossessed, or widowed. The quest for the Grail is greatly prolonged as the knights find and win these special treasures that are then wielded to protect or avenge the dispossessed women they meet along the way. Whence do these women derive? Why are they so particularly associated with the Grail legends? What is their message for us?
There are many Celtic correlatives to the Grail legends. It is therefore not surprising that the Grail Maiden and the Hideous Damsel should both find their derivation within that tradition and in the person of a particular figure.
We can see at once that this is a basis for the later story of Gawain and Ragnall, where Gawain’s kissing the ugly hag Ragnall uncovers her true beauty and establishes him as the champion of the goddess.226 Arthur himself does not have such a direct encounter with Sovereignty, but he encounters her representatives in the persons of his mother, his sister, and his wife, as well as in more indirect relationships, which, when analyzed, are very revealing.
As we have seen, Arthur is conceived by Igraine through Merlin’s transformation of Uther into the semblance of Gorlois, Igraine’s husband. Although Uther is an earthly father, the fact that he appears in the shape of someone else makes him more than human at that point. Arthur is not raised by his natural parents but is fostered, in the traditional Celtic way, by Sir Ector, according to Malory.227 The English writer Layamon, writing in his history of Britain called the Brut, tells of Arthur’s fostering by the Lady Argante, queen of Avalon and Faery.228
Arthur’s brilliant early career is mostly overshadowed in later texts by his own seemingly passive stance: a king who does not hazard his person but who sends out his knights instead. His inability to maintain his relationship with Guinevere, whom he loses to Lancelot, can be seen as a symptom of his failure to relate fully to Sovereignty. His enmity with Morgan is similarly significant.
The demise of the Round Table Fellowship is nothing less than the reordering of the land in Britain under a new regime, according to Sovereignty’s decision. Several of the later romances include a dream in which Arthur meets the goddess Fortuna, upon whose wheel he rises and falls.229
But the point at which the historical and mythic concepts of Arthur meet and merge is perhaps best seen and understood in the undying king’s defense of Britain. Arthur’s timely welding together of the scattered kingdoms of Britain to form a palladium against barbarian invaders thrust him into mythic prominence. But he was only one of many such defenders dating back to before Bran the Blessed, who as we saw demanded that his head be buried under the White Mound in London to prevent invasion—a talismanic burial that Arthur undid since he wished to fulfil this role alone.230
Arthur’s relationship to the sovereignty of the land is not always as stable as one might expect, as the continuing disruption of the court by visitors from the otherworldly realms shows. The wisdom of the story must be applied directly. By reading, telling, and meditating on the stories of the Grail, we keep alight that spark of wisdom that is our Mother’s gift to us. But only we can assent to its growth. We do not become kings and queens of the Grail Castle without the willingness to heal the earth and ourselves.
We have seen that the Goddess of Sovereignty is she who inaugurates or blesses the king, accepting only the most worthy candidate. He enters into a mystical relationship with his land via Sovereignty, whom he encounters first of all as a hag and latterly as a beautiful maiden. While he is true to her the land flourishes, but if he neglects his sacred duties—whether these be of his kingship or his sacred partnership with the land—then the land is laid waste. In the Grail legends this sacred relationship is apparent in the person of the Wounded King.
His wounding—caused by the Dolorous Blow—results in impotence both personal and political. According to the rules of Celtic kingship, a maimed man cannot be king but has to be deposed in favor of the most worthy man of his clan. And so it is that Perceval appears to fulfil this role of tanaiste. By taking on the role of Grail seeker, he takes up the kingly role, becoming the candidate king by right of his quest. Indeed, at the conclusion of most of the stories, Perceval becomes the new Grail King, reconciling the imbalances of the kingdom on all levels. The restoration of the Wasteland and the healing of the Wounded King is accomplished by the Grail winner’s identification and union with the Grail. At the Celtic level of the story, this is affected by the Grail winner embracing the Hideous Damsel or making her his wife.231
This union is, of course, one of the prime images of wholeness throughout the world, from the Gnostic concept of the wedding of Sophia to the Logos within the bridal chamber of the Pleroma (see below) to the wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz to the Lady Venus or the Tibetan concept of the Buddhist emanation in the embrace of his Shakti. It stands also at the heart of the Grail gnosis, and its implications are profound as well as practical.
The way to restore the Wasteland is to embrace it with compassion, to become identified with it in exactly the same way that the lover identifies with the beloved: for what wounds the beloved wounds the lover. When this compassion is sufficiently manifest in the world, then the Grail will make its reappearance.
The voice of the earth speaks to us in a clear way, for ours is a wasted land no less now than in the medieval Grail stories. Just as we have our mother-wit, that redeeming fundamental earthiness of common humanity, so do we have our imaginal sense that bridges the created and uncreated worlds. To be denied access to the otherworldly realms is to be without the Grail. Such a lack makes humankind desperately sick to the soul. Acts of violence are perpetrated out of an absence of imagination or from its perversion. The clear streams of the senses spring from the central well of wisdom.
Further back than even the Celtic Goddess of Sovereignty stands the Goddess of the Earth herself—she whose appearances no longer come in pleasant forms. In our time the picture is very different from the primordial age in which the Mother was more manifest in our mythos. Even the simpering plaster Madonnas of Catholic piety have been totally replaced by apocalyptic virgins who have no gentle message of peace. The gaunt, empty-breasted mothers of Ethiopia have replaced the Queen of the South who came to Solomon in glory and wisdom. The earth herself is wrapped in an atmosphere that we have made more and more devastating as we puncture the ozone layer and poison it with chemical fumes. Yes, the earth is fair; yes, it is also terrible. But where is our wisdom?
The quest for the Grail must begin at home, in our hearts. When we start seeking its regeneration in our own lives, when we become open to change, then its effect will begin to manifest about us. For whomever touches the Grail becomes a natural catalyst to restorative change. When each human being perceives the intrinsic inner sovereign—the Wounded King or Queen within them—then it may be possible to heal the Dolorous Blow and begin the reconciliation of the interconnected chain of creation in true alignment.
The companion on the quest, the Hideous/Beautiful Maiden, is not peculiar to the Grail Quest alone, nor is she solely the province of the Pagan past. Before we can understand the Grail Quest as a type of spiritual journey, we must examine the mystical tradition—Hebrew, as well as Christian—where the companions appear in other guises, as well as uncovering a secret tradition that perpetuates the hidden wisdom of the ages.
The Exiled Wanderer
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“Exile chills my heart. May He who numbered the stars guide you in helping us and lead us back to happiness,” says Arthur’s mother in Parzival.232 The sense of exile is strong within us. In every culture there is some legend of how humanity fell out of harmony with God. Among Jews and Christians this legend is found in Genesis, where we follow the Fall of Adam and Eve from paradise: it is an account, in mystical language, of the rupture between God and humanity.
Unfortunately, mystical accounts have a way of being interpreted fundamentally, with a view to historicity rather than as allegorical parallels. The Fall, read in isolation, augurs ill for a people exiled from God. But within Christianity the Redemption is a natural concomitant of the Fall, which is known liturgically as the felix culpa, the happy fault, whereby Christ came to redeem the world; without the first Adam, there would have been no second Adam (Christ) to help us. Logically, following from this, the ave of Ave Maria (Hail Mary) is a reversal of Eva’s name, as Mary also redeems the fault of Eve, the mother of all living.
The Fall is our exile from paradise; we make a Wasteland of the Garden of Eden. The quest is our spiritual journey, and the Grail is our return to our sovereign condition as kings and queens of creation. Whatever the orthodox account of the Fall, every culture seems to have developed its own apocryphal explanation of how a part of paradise dwelt among humanity in order to provide a chance of return. The Grail legend is the European response to this exile, but why wasn’t the religion of the time deemed sufficiently efficacious?
As we have already seen, the Grail itself does not necessarily derive from Christian origins, although it has been incorporated into its symbolism. The Grail Quest incorporates dimensions that are implicit within Christianity yet not doctrinally apparent. It is a necessity for every soul to find its individual return from exile: a return that may pursue or avoid the usual channels of exoteric belief. Achieving the Grail was not just a parallel experience to that of receiving communion at Mass: it was far more than this. Partaking of communion can be the ultimate knowing—the union of Creator with created—but unless the communicant brings imaginative awareness to the sacrament, the inner and outer worlds run forever on parallel tracks, never to merge as one. The mystery of communion must be actualized in everyday life, not be relegated to some never-never land of spirituality.
In its exoteric expression, Christianity fails to give any sense of personal responsibility for personal redemption. Few Christians think beyond the possibilities of free will that is the birthright of humanity alone. It was the exercise of free will that resulted in the Fall; yet why should free will not be exercised positively towards ending our exile?
This question has never been squarely faced within exoteric Christianity: faith, good works, and the reception of the sacraments are proposed as the instruments of the Redemption. Mystically, there is an esoteric quorum within all religions that proposes an alternative and more personal response. Christianity has relegated its esoteric tradition to a “safe” expression of mysticism; it has purged itself of the divine feminine, of a mystery tradition, of anything smacking of a private revelation. Yet, despite this, the Grail tradition lived on through an age that saw the destruction of both Cathars and Knights Templar, two different groups whose show of autonomy and grasp of mystical insight, among other things, antagonized the church. The Grail has never been officially sanctioned by the church, yet neither has it ever been denied. The church even had its own Grail story. So popular were Arthurian tales at one time that the Grail legend was turned to good effect by the monks of Glastonbury, who took Perceval the Fool and turned him into Perlesvaus, “He who has lost the valley,” recognizing him as a type of Christ and making the Grail story one of scintillating Christian allegory.
The Grail legend worked on two levels: exoterically as a popular story and esoterically as an alternative path to God, a release from exile. The Jewish conception of the Fall has a distinctly different emphasis. Here the sense of exile is stronger, the urge to return more immediate. In esoteric Judaism, specifically within the Qabalah, we see the exile from God expressed in terms of a relationship. The covenant that God makes with Israel is more like a marriage contract than a legal document. If we follow the esoteric symbolism of Qabalah, we find our companion once more: not as Hideous Damsel or Grail Maiden, although they share a common imagery, but as the Shekinah. The Shekinah was said to reside with God from the beginning of creation; her appearance in the biblical books of wisdom and within Qabalistic texts such as the Zohar give us a clear picture of her function in the way of return.
She appears in this account of the creation from the book of Proverbs:
The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth…When he established the heavens, I was there…when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master workman; and I was daily his delight…233
It is evident from this account that God and his Shekinah are joined together in a loving partnership. When Adam and Eve eat of the Tree and are cast out of paradise, the Shekinah decides to descend with them; if the unity of God and creation is broken, then there can be no union between God and his Shekinah. She goes into voluntary exile with humanity; wherever she appears thereafter, it is as the expression of God’s compassion. Yet she is more than an abstract emanation from the Godhead. She inhabits the Ark of the Covenant, going before it in the desert as pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of flame by night: a visible presence of God’s dwelling among the Israelites. The ark, like the Grail, is a relic of great power: it is a piece of paradise. (We will remember that the Grail in Parzival is termed lapsit exillis, or “stone that fell from heaven”; it is said elsewhere to have been an emerald that fell from Lucifer’s crown at the rebellion of the fallen angels.)
The Shekinah herself is both a personification of that lost paradise as well as becoming associated with the exile from it. She accompanies Israel through the desert, until the ark is eventually housed within the temple. The destruction of the temple in 586 BC strengthened the Jewish sense of exile on every level: the ark was dispersed and its whereabouts became unknown. The Shekinah had no dwelling; henceforward she would live in the hearts of her people. By performing good works, which were pleasing to the Shekinah, the pious Jew hastened the return; works of evil saddened the Shekinah and prolonged the exile. For the Jews, the ark takes on the significance of the Grail—the subject of an interior quest.
The Shekinah is, then, the female counterpart of God; Qabalistic texts go so far as to call her the Bride of God, from whom he is sundered by the Fall and the continuing sinfulness of humanity. The complexity of the Shekinah is appreciable only if we understand that her imagery stems from that of the Canaanite and Mesopotamian goddess Astarte, or Ishtar, who reigned in heaven supreme with her consort Baal, or Tammuz. Divinity was once expressed by the divine Lord and Lady who ruled as a partnership. The Shekinah is the symbolic descendant of this goddess, as well as expressing the feminine nature of an otherwise patriarchal deity. God’s Shekinah was associated with the state of the Israelites themselves, who were also the exiled and the promised of God.
In the Lamentation of Jeremiah over the fall of Jerusalem we see the city personified as the Shekinah:
How like a widow has she become, she that was great among the nations! She that was a princess among the cities has become a vassal. She weeps bitterly in the night, tears on her checks, among all her lovers she had none to comfort her…Judah has gone into exile because of affliction and hard servitude; she dwells now among the nations but finds no resting place…From the daughter of Zion has departed all her majesty.234
This is a picture of the manifest Shekinah, the exiled majesty and wisdom of God, a personification of a people who have lost their sovereignty. In the biblical books of wisdom, the Shekinah is also called Chokmah, or Wisdom: she who cries aloud in the streets, the one who guards the fountain of wisdom that, like the Grail, brings the soul to its right senses. Wisdom or the Shekinah is the hope of restoration; on the day when the exile is ended, she is commanded to
Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem, and put on forever the beauty of the glory from God. Put on the robe of the righteousness from God; put on your head the diadem of the glory of the Everlasting. For God will show your splendour everywhere under heaven.235
Here the Shekinah as Wisdom is spoken of in her transcendent guise: the one who is no longer in exile but in union with God. For the most striking image of the Shekinah is that of wife, of beloved. The mystic has always dealt in sexual imagery to express his union or separation from the Divine. With the Shekinah the image is extended, by implication, to humanity, seen as God’s beloved. Pious Jewish couples made love on the eve of the Sabbath in imitation of God’s union with the Shekinah; Qabalists employed extraordinary techniques of meditation for visualizing this divine union, striving to hasten the return to God. The Shekinah is also the guardian of the Temple of Wisdom, mentioned in Vaughan’s Holy Mountain allegory, thus forging another link with the Rosicrucians.
The symbolism of the Shekinah did not just remain the province of Judaism: the post-exilic period (500 BC onwards) saw the rise of Qabalistic mysticism and the great cross-fertilization of religious concepts within the Hebrew, Hellenic, and Christian worlds. Gnostic Christianity raised the figure of Wisdom, Sophia, to a position that almost rivaled that of Christ; within their apocryphal gospels they reworked the Shekinah’s descent as Sophia’s Fall, making her responsible for the creation of the world. Despite the incipient dualism of these texts, we find again two faces of Sophia: the fallen Sophia, called Achamoth, who roams the world in sorrow and confusion, and Sophia herself, the transcendent queen of heaven whose union with the Logos (God’s emanation or Word) marked the end of creation’s exile.
Standardized Western Christianity may have neglected its esoteric side, but the great mystical texts of the Bible still convey a sense of both Shekinah and Sophia to those mystics who are able to interpret them and comprehend their significance. In both Jewish and Gnostic texts we find the same account of the exile from God, the separation of lover and beloved; Shekinah and Sophia make their appearance among humanity as a way of return, taking on firstly the dark, exiled face as an identification with a lost people; lastly they both appear in their radiant and transcendent guise as saviors.
This is most clear in Parzival, where the Hideous Damsel, Kundrie, rides to the Grail Castle, where the Wounded King still lies in agony; she goes dressed in a hood of black samite upon which is embroidered “a flock of Turtle-doves finely wrought in Arabian gold in the style of the Gral-insignia.”236 She accompanies Parzival to the castle in order that he may answer the Grail Question correctly. At sight of her habit, the Grail knights cry: “Our trouble is over! What we have been longing for ever since we were ensnared by sorrow is approaching us under the Sign of the Gral!…Great happiness is on its way to us!”237
Kundrie’s dark appearance may have deceived us into thinking her a malevolent witch concerned with obstructing the Grail Quest, but we see from her apparel that the Hideous Damsel is sister to the Shekinah and to Sophia, just as she is to the Grail Maiden. The dove has always been the symbol of divine compassion. It was a bird sacred to the goddess, and it passed into the panoply of the Shekinah, where it symbolized God’s Holy Spirit. Within Christianity the Holy Spirit’s doubtful gender has been obscured by its symbolization as a dove: the promise of ultimate redemption, the perfect indwelling of God.
From the beginning of time, where the Holy Spirit brooded over the waters at the Creation, it is this image of hope that inspires those upon the spiritual journey to continue. However the Holy Spirit is theologically understood today, it stems from its origins as part of the divine feminine: the holy Motherhood of God. In this tangle of symbolism Christ has assumed the attributes of Wisdom; he is seen as the expression of God’s Word (Logos) and God’s Wisdom (Sophia) throughout the New Testament—“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God”238—just as Wisdom or the Shekinah is in Proverbs 8, Christ is the one “in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” But although there has been a transition of genders, the symbolism has been perpetuated within esoteric Christian tradition.
The Shekinah is primarily a figure of the Old Testament. The New Testament sees a restatement of both Sophianic and Messianic principles, the manifestations of God’s power, investing both in the person of Christ. Christ is male, yet the feminine symbology is not neglected, as the Messiah needs the means to manifest. “The first Adam is moulded from the vile dust of the earth, the second comes forth from the precious womb of the Virgin.”239
Mary fulfills the role of the second Eve, as well as embodying the principles of the Shekinah. She is not just a receptacle or vehicle of incarnation for Christ, as her many titles, noted earlier, demonstrate; she is also a representative of exiled humanity. Her flesh clothes the divinity of the manifest God, Christ. Human and divine meet in a mystical marriage that is birth, death, and consummation all at once: this is the experience of communion. In transubstantiation, ordinary bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ; in metaphysical terms, the body and blood of Christ are of Mary as his mother, yet they also represent the inspiriting divinity of the Messiah. It is not possible to think in terms of the feminine as matter, the male as spirit in this context, for a real union of the two has taken place. The spiritual realities are almost alchemical:
…the heavenly Spirit makes fertile the womb of the virginal font, by the secret admixture of his light, that it may bring forth as heavenly creatures, and bringing back to the likeness of their Creator, those whom their origin in earth’s dust had produced as men of dust in miserable state.240
Both Sophia and Christ share the Messianic task; both share the exile among humanity, striving to make it remember its likeness to the Creator; both are the means of return from exile.
If we reexamine the Grail legend in this light, we will find startling parallels pertinent to our spiritual journey. In the common language of mysticism there is really no conflict between Judaism, Christianity, or any other religious path: these are but means to arrive at a cessation from exile. If the exoteric sides of religion have not been clear enough in their definitions, an esoteric response has always arisen within, or parallel to, that religion. Within the Grail legend symbolism, both cultural and religious, is a spontaneous and immediate story.
We are in exile, or in a state of forgetfulness. We have lost our sovereignty, our state of union with the Divine. Yet the companion of the quest is with us as a potentiality. Perceval is called “the son of the widow”—an image in which we see ourselves reflected as children both of the exiled Sophia and Christ, the son of Mary. The Wasteland is our state of exile, the place that is not paradise; it is the violated Jerusalem, whether as the Holy City fought over by Jews, Christians, and Muslims or as the exiled Sophia herself. The Grail is that piece of paradise that remains among us, hidden and transcendent, the cup of Sovereignty, of wisdom; a draft from that cup is a remembrance of paradise, a union of soul with God. The Wounded King is the potential Grail knight himself, a symbol of lost sovereignty, or he is Christ, the crucified king wounded with five wounds, which each sin wounds afresh.
Within the Grail legend we find a mystery tradition that embodies much that is in common with the major religions. It is not difficult to see just why it evokes such a popular response wherever it is spoken of. The awareness of our exile has been blunted in this age. Few people concertedly follow a mystical path that helps them recall the fact that they have a spiritual heritage. We live in a state of forgetfulness. Yet while the major religions appear to be in decline, there is a corresponding upsurge of interest in the spiritual quest.
The confusion of an earthly for a heavenly treasure has dogged the history of religion. The heavenly Jerusalem cannot be established on earth; the Wounded King is not a real king, nor is the Grail a physical object. We understand this better if we see these symbols as belonging to the soul itself. The mystique of the Grail symbolism is set there to make us fall in love with an interior world; we must yearn with all our hearts to be there, to inhabit that world and work with these principles. If we apply the Grail principle spiritually, it follows that it will automatically have its reflection in the real world.
The Grail Maiden, the Shekinah, and Sophia are all personifications of the Grail, the hidden treasure that symbolizes the union of the soul with the Divine. We find and lose this Grail continually. There is no means to come to spiritual union, to meet the shining glory of Sophia, unless we first embrace the Hideous Damsel, who is the reality of ourselves. This is what Gawain does, or Niall of the Nine Hostages earlier. As individuals we cannot embark upon a quest to save the world without first attending to our own condition. The bitter cup precedes the golden Grail. We are all lost, in exile, out of harmony with ourselves, unaware of the divine spark within us. We all yearn to recover our lost happiness, yet how shall we do this? First of all, by assuming a sense of responsibility towards ourselves; this is not selfishness but common sense.
Only those who start the journey deserve to win the Grail; if we wait for everyone else to join our party, we shall never begin. It does not matter if we make mistakes along the way. The Grail Messenger or the Hideous Damsel will soon let us know; we must heed them as we would the inner voice of God.
As the quest continues, the idea will begin to impinge upon us that we are not searching for a physical object: this is but a symbol of our yearning for union. As day succeeds day, the awful thought grows: there is no Grail, no blaze of glory, no merging into the infinite. Perhaps we will never see the reality of the Grail Maiden; perhaps we will be in exile forever. There is no progress on this path; it is a false assumption that the further on we go, the better we become. The path is about forgetting and remembering and, therefore, is ultimately about awareness. We need to ask the Grail Question. The spiritual journey, our quest, is also its conclusion. We are all on this journey; all we have to do is make the decision to be aware of the fact. We begin to be aware of the suffering of others and their sense of exile from themselves; we begin to realize the compassion of Sophia, our hidden companion, as our own compassion.
Those who are on this quest are like those who devote themselves to the bodhisattva concept. In Buddhism, a bodhisattva is one who vows never to reenter Nirvana until “the last blade of grass” enters first. It is an awesome concept. We begin our quest in seeming selfishness and continue in total unselfishness. We identify with the sign of hope—the exiled Sophia—becoming coworkers with her in seeking to hasten the union of all beings. God, the Divine, is not outside us but within us. While there can be no ultimate universal union yet, we can strive for remembrance of what we really are, unifying ourselves with the principle of the quest that we live by.
The essence of the Grail Quest is not to disappear into a never-never land of no return; our duty is to return, bearing the gifts of the Grail within ourselves, that we might be a vessel, a means of regeneration and remembrance to every living creature. We become the Grail so that others might drink; to find the Grail is to become it. Perceval, unlike Galahad, returns from his Grail Quest, becoming the king of the Grail Castle. The Wounded King finds his sovereignty once more and is healed. The Wasteland and, by implication, the Hideous Damsel, are restored to their former beauty. The Grail itself ceases to be an object and becomes a living reality. Sophia is restored to unity once again, returning from exile in union with the Grail winner.
The two faces of Sophia as Hideous Damsel and Grail Maiden have accompanied us on our quest; the one prompting, the other leading us on. We understand now that the return to paradise will not be bequeathed to us from on high; the reality lies in our hands. Our spiritual journey is, after all, the return from exile, the quest upon which Sophia accompanies us always.241
Practice
The work associated with the Rose, the vault, and the sacred companions of the quest is really spread through the whole of this book; however, for some specifically associated meditations and rituals, see chapter 14
192. de Troyes, C. Conte du Graal, trans. N. Bryant (D. S. Brewer, 1982).
193. Matthews, J. The Grail: Quest for the Eternal (Thames and Hudson, 1981).
194. Ibid.
195. von Eschenbach, W. Parzival, trans. A. T. Hatto (Penguin Books, 1981).
196. Perlesvaus, trans. N. Bryant (D. S. Brewer, 1975).
197. Matthews, J. The Grail: Quest for the Eternal (Thames and Hudson, 1981).
198. Fisher, L. A. The Mystic Vision in the Grail Legend and the Divine Comedy (AMS Press, 1966).
199. Williams, C. Arthurian Poems, ed. D. L. Dodds (Boydell and Brewer, 1994).
200. Luke, H. “The Return of Dindrane” in At the Table of the Grail, ed. J Matthews (Watkins Publishing, 2002), 119–135.
201. Allen, P. M., ed. A Christian Rosenkreutz Anthology (New York: Rudolf Steiner Publications, 1981).
202. Ibid.
203. Ibid.
204. Ibid.
205. McLean, A. “Alchemical Transmutation in History and Symbolism” in At the Table of the Grail, ed. J. Matthews (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982).
206. Matthews, C. “The Rosicrucian Vault as Sepulchre and Wedding Chamber” in At the Table of the Grail (Watkins Publishing, 2002), 209–228.
207. The Chymical Wedding, trans. E. Foxcroft.
208. Bothwell-Gosse, A. The Rose Immortal (J. Watkins, 1958).
209. von Scharfenberg, A. Der Jüngere Titurel, ed. W. Wolfe (Berlin, 1983).
210. A Christian Rosenkreutz Anthology, compiled and edited by Paul M. Allen (Blauvalt, NY: Rudolf Steiner Publications, 1981).
211. Ibid.
212. von Eschenbach, W. Parzival, trans. A. T. Hatto (Penguin Books, 1981).
213. Ibid.
214. A Christian Rosenkreutz Anthology, compiled and edited by Paul M. Allen (Blauvalt, NY: Rudolf Steiner Publications, 1981).
215. Perlesvaus, trans. N. Bryant.
216. See Carlo Pietzner’s introduction to A Christian Rosenkreutz Anthology.
217. Wegman, I. “On Castle Karlstein and Its Rosicrucian Connections” in A Christian Rosenkreutz Anthology.
218. A Christian Rosenkreutz Anthology, 15.
219. Baile in Scail (The Phantom’s Frenzy), ed. and Trans. K. Murray (Irish Text Society, 2005).
220. Matthews, J. and C. Taliesin: The Last Celtic Shaman (Inner Traditions, 2000).
221. de Troyes, C. Perceval: The Story of the Grail, trans. N. Bryant (D. S. Brewer, 1982).
222. von Eschenbach, W. Parzival, trans. A. T. Hatto (Penguin, 1980).
223. Perceval, loc. cit.
224. Peredur in The Mabinogion, trans. Jeffrey Gantz (Penguin Books, 1976), 248.
225. von Eschenbach, W. Parzival, trans. A. T. Hatto (Penguin, 1980), 125.
226. Withrington, J. Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnall: A Modern Spelling Edition of a Middle English Romance (Department of English, Lancaster University, 1991).
227. Malory, T. Le Morte d’Arthur, ed. John Matthews (Orion Books, 2000).
228. The Brut of Layamon, see Layamon’s Arthur: The Arthurian Section of Layamon’s Brut, eds. W. R. J Barron and S. C. Weinberg (Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies, 2005).
229. Matthews, J. King Arthur (London: Carlton, 2004).
230. Matthews, C. “The Guardian Head, Sacred Palladia of Britain” in The Secret Lore of London, ed. J. Matthews and C. Wise (Hodder Coronet, 2016).
231. Brown, A. C. L. The Origin of the Grail Legend (Harvard University Press, 1943), 219.
232. Parzival, op. cit., 330.
233. Proverbs VIII: 22, 23, 27, 29, 30. R.S.V. Bible.
234. I: 1–3, 6.
235. Baruch V: 1–3.
236. Parzival, op. cit., 386.
237. Parzival, op. cit., 393.
238. St. John I: 1–2.
239. Colossians II: 3.
240. St. Peter Chrysologus, Sermon 117, in The Divine Office, vol. 3 (London: Collins, 1974), 684.
241. Mathews, C. Sophia: Goddess of Wisdom, Bride of God (Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 2001).