THE WOUNDED KINGS
The King and the Land are one.
…
John Boorman, Excalibur
The Grail as Transformative Vessel
Robert Bly wisely pointed out a few years ago that while the bird stores its instinctual knowledge in its brain, humanity has stored its innate wisdom in myth, legend, and story.242 Of all the story cycles of the West, those of Arthur and the quest for the Grail ring out most clearly. We have explored these at length here, but one aspect remains that continues not only to exert a fascination over all who answer the call of Arthur, but also to have a constant effect upon all who follow the way of the Arthuriad: the story of the Wounded King, that mysterious monarch who possesses a terrible wound that will not heal until a particular set of circumstances are allowed to occur.243
First among these is the coming of a “foolish” person who will ask a particular question, setting in motion a chain reaction that results not only in the healing of the king, but also of the land over which he rules. We saw in chapter 5 especially how deep the connection between the king and the land can be, and how the land is itself mysteriously wounded. The king himself exists in a kind of suspended animation—half dead, half living—and what is required to release him is significant to all who follow the path of Arthur and the Grail.
The story of the Wounded King can be seen as applicable to anyone who is wounded and has lost or forgotten how to restore themselves to health. The king can represent any one of us, and it is important here to note that this story is applicable as much to women as to men. It is also about the soul’s journey, which everyone takes and which leads each of us to somewhere different, but which yet, in the end, leads us all to the same place! It is this journey, which we may categorize as a journey towards wholeness, which promises health and a sense of connection to a larger world, a journey in search of the miraculous—of healing and restoration—to the kingdom of the Grail.
When considering the subject of creative healing, the gift of story is something we tend to overlook—yet story has the power to heal a remarkable number of hurts. It can, literally, enchant us, help us to discover the truth about ourselves, find new strengths, and lay old ghosts to rest. The story of the Grail is perhaps the single greatest healing story of all, and by working with it in a deeply personal way, we open ourselves to its many levels, discovering, again and again, life situations and problems that we recognize reflected back with the ever-present opportunity to make changes for the better.
Of course, wounds and woundedness can take many forms, and not every sort of wound will respond to the kind of work we are discussing here, which is essentially a spiritual healing and is therefore best directed towards spiritual wounds. Ultimately, all of these wounds derive from an inner state, from the health or otherwise of the soul, though they can manifest themselves physically, psychically, or spiritually. They may be purely personal or they may extend outwards to include our direct family, our friends, and finally our whole race! They may blight a relationship, ruin a good day out, wreck our chances of getting a good job, or systematically erode our inner lives until we feel as empty and useless as husks of straw.
Common indications of woundedness manifest in characteristics with which many of us will be familiar. These can be grouped roughly into “active” and “passive” qualities and would include in the former bracket anger, self-pity, aggression, self-aggrandizement, combativeness, cynicism, repression, and manipulation; in the latter, it would include inadequacy, emptiness, detachment, helplessness, lack of love, lack of encouragement, and so on.
Those who have ever stood in front of a great work of art, listened to a great musical work, read a mighty and noble book, or watched a deeply moving play or motion picture and felt utterly unmoved, unshaken, or detached will recognize this as an expression of the wound. If you think you possess everything to make you happy and yet still feel empty inside, this is another. Equally, if you feel that everything is too much for you, that life is overwhelming you at every point or that you have only two reactions to any new challenge—anger or despair—then you are suffering from the kind of wound that we shall be looking at here.
Working with the Grail story can help us come to terms with all of these problems and with our own wounds. Remember that the Grail is a marvelous vessel that offers sustenance to the thirsty soul. Those who seek it do so, in a sense, because they need to. All of the Grail stories have one premise in common: they deal with a loss of connection—especially with the healing waters of life. There is a Wasteland surrounding the Grail King’s home, and it is dead because no water flows there; the same may be said of our own lives when we inhabit a wounded state. But the missing element is more than simply water, important though that is; it is the raw substance of life itself that is lacking, and in the stories both the land and its ruler suffer this. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that in both the medieval Grail stories and the more ancient traditions on which they are based, quests to find the Well at the World’s End or the Fountain of Life abound.
The tellers of such tales recognized the dislocation that existed in both people and place. They knew that to be cut off from the natural world, from the living energy of the land, was also to be cut off from the magical power of the otherworld, with a consequent loss of vitality. This manifests again and again in the tales as images of desolation, soul hunger, and fragmentation. The quest for the Grail and for the healing of land and king is really about the quest for reconnection, for the reestablishment and restoration of what we may call “the Courts of Joy”—an expression of a state of being where the many dislocations of contemporary life are repaired, where we are literally restored to ourselves.
When we chose, towards the middle of the eighteenth century, to place our faith in science, we cut ourselves adrift from the inherited traditions of spirituality that had underpinned our lives for as long as we could remember. This did not happen overnight, of course, but it began a general tendency that has only recently begun to be reversed. In our own time scientific discoveries have begun to reveal that the universe is far more complex than we could ever have imagined, and the resultant effect upon the scientific community has been to demonstrate that the borderlands between the long-neglected realm of the spirit and that of science is far narrower than anyone was prepared to admit, until recently. The resulting upsurge of interest in ancient cosmology and spirituality has begun to transform scientific thinking, while the shifting paradigms of New Science have joined forces with the ancient laws of magic and vision.
The story of the Grail shows us that a science of the soul is once again possible, and that the physical wounding both of our own soul life and of the environment are linked. Further, it tells us that both can be reversed—though whether, in the latter case, this has happened in time remains to be seen. The important point to realize here is that our own wounds are reflected in the wounds we inflict on the earth, and that the healing of the one may (in time) bring about the healing of the other. This alone makes the story of the Wounded King of the utmost importance and relevance to our own time, when we have systematically ravaged the earth for its raw materials with a cavalier disregard for the future. That we will, in time, have to suffer the consequences of that disregard is a fact we need to acknowledge now, just as we need to acknowledge that we are ourselves wounded.
A second way of understanding the relationship between king and land is to recognize this as symptomatic of our inability to connect with our souls. We live now in an age when organized religion is beginning to fail (in the West at least), and, in recognition of this, many have begun to search for something other. It was this same search for a transcendental spirituality that motivated the authors of many of the Grail texts composed during the Middle Ages, when the Christian foundation of the West was undergoing a profound doctrinal upheaval, and it is not at all surprising that these myths should speak to us so forcefully today. We are also suffering from the same sense of unease, a sign of soul loss on a vast scale.
Such concepts as soul loss and soul fragmentation have been perfectly understood among the tribal peoples of the world for many ages. Many things are seen as resulting from this, including sickness and several kinds of psychic complaint that we would class as neuroses. Indeed, tribal shamans have all kinds of techniques for dealing with this, the most widely used and generally effective of these being the spirit journey—in which the shaman travels out of his body and into the spirit realm, and with the help of spirit guides and helpers brings back the missing soul parts and restores them to their clients.
This kind of work is today seeing a revival, both in Europe and the United States, and it is my belief that the damage done to the soul by various aspects of modern living, as well as by circumstances beyond our control, can be similarly treated by working with the imagery and symbolism of the Grail myths—in particular with the story of the Wounded King, who represents so exactly the state of being in which many people today find themselves.244
The Healing Story
Two stories of the Grail Quest, both of which we have explored throughout this book, are relevant here, though they can be augmented by others. The first of these is Chrétien’s Perceval: The Story of the Grail.245 No one knows for sure where the author found this story or what elements of ancient myth he drew upon in its composition, but it remains one of the most powerful statements of these themes to be found, and we make no excuse for examining it again here.
We may recall that at the beginning of the story Perceval is at home in the forest, where he has been brought up by his mother, protected from the world. His father and brothers have all been killed in battle, and he knows nothing of the society of men, of fatherly love and affection, or of the companionship of siblings. He has no idea that there is anything missing from his life. Then, one day, he meets with some of Arthur’s knights, and this seemingly accidental encounter opens to him a universe of possibilities that he is eager to experience for himself. He hastens back to his mother and announces his intention of departing. Knowing that there is nothing she can do to prevent this, and that her desire to protect her son from the outside world has failed, she gives him the best advice she can—that he should give aid to any women he may encounter, and that if they seem pleased with him he should accept a ring or a kiss by way of thanks.
When Perceval escapes into the forest he is already trying to assert his independence; with the appearance of the knights he is given the means to break completely free. He seems heartless, caring nothing for his mother’s feelings, yet he is truly fighting for the possession of his own soul, part of which has been appropriated by his mother and which he will leave behind when he sets out on his momentous journey.
Here he is taking the first step towards the recognition of his own wounded state. He knows, without thinking, that he can be himself, and he is filled with excitement at the prospect. This causes him to leave in an impetuous manner, and in his first adventure he does just this. He has hardly left home when he sees a pavilion set up beside the road. Entering it he finds a young woman alone. This is his first contact with the feminine outside of the familiar setting of his home, and he has no idea how to behave. Unfortunately, he misunderstands his mother’s advice, which, in his excitement, he had not really heard; and instead of dealing gently with the girl he forcefully demands a kiss and takes her ring without permission—acts which are to cause trouble for the Maiden herself and ultimately for Perceval as well. His actions here are further indications of his own wounded state, which causes him to act without thinking. His wound has cut him off from the outer world, crippling the natural instinct that would govern his behavior and leaving him without a sense of self, which is such a vital part of human expression.
Hastening on, Perceval arrives at Arthur’s court and is at once recognized by a girl who has not spoken for years. She prophesies his future fame and in return receives a blow from the arrogant seneschal Kay. It is significant that Perceval receives his first recognition outside of his home environment from a woman. Although on one level he is trying to assert his masculinity and carve out a place for himself in the world of knights and chivalry, he is also seeking to balance this with his feminine self. Thus at virtually every point on his journey he encounters women who give him direction, though typically he fails to notice this until it is almost too late.
Perceval now undertakes his first real adventure. Not surprisingly, perhaps, in the light of his attachment to the feminine, it is on behalf of Queen Guinevere that he sets out to exact reparation for a blow which a Red Knight had dealt her, and to bring back a golden cup that he had stolen. This in a way predicts the later quest for the Grail and demonstrates once again that Perceval is trying to get in touch with another aspect of his feminine self, which he has hitherto only known through his mother, and thus to recover a lost soul part, which he has left behind in the forest.
His first adventure is successful—more by accident than design. He overtakes and overcomes the Red Knight with ease. And, having tasted the heady excitement of battle and conquest, he is eager to set out again. It is at this point that he meets an older knight, Gorneman, who acts as a surrogate father, teaching him the ways of chivalry and knighthood. In fact, it is now that Perceval receives his initiation into manhood, and it is from Gorneman that he also acquires his next piece of advice: to help those in need but not to ask too many questions. This advice, given with sincerity, is to be his undoing. It reenforces his inability to act, which derives from his years in the protective womb of the forest, and it will prevent him from carrying out his greatest task, the healing of the Wounded King, which is so closely linked to his own quest for wholeness.
He comes now to his next encounter with the feminine in the shape of the maiden Blanchfleur, who is imprisoned within her own castle. Here he experiences the pains of love for the first time and has his own feelings reciprocated. Interestingly, it is here that we encounter a kind of pre-image of the Wasteland. An unsuccessful suitor has besieged Blanchfleur for some time, and her lands have suffered accordingly. Presented with images of desolation and assaulted by his newfound feelings of love, Perceval desires only to help the lady of the castle. He puts his newly honed skills to work and defeats those who would have taken Blanchfleur by force. For the moment he is on course, following the path that was intended for him, combining both his masculine and feminine energies in the service of good. But, almost immediately, he is knocked off-balance by the memory of his mother, whom he had last seen fainting at the entrance to their house but whom he has scarcely thought of since. Unable to commit to his love of Blanchfleur, he turns aside and sets out in search of home.
At once he realizes he is lost. He has taken his foot off the path, and the forest has reclaimed him. Yet it is at this point that the Wounded Hero encounters the Wounded King. As so often happens in our own lives, just at the moment when we are feeling most deeply bereft and alone, something occurs that renews our belief in ourselves and sets us on the right road again. In Perceval’s case it is not to be so simple. He has first to undergo a supreme test of self-awareness, an opportunity to act in which he will fail dismally, precisely because he has no understanding of his life purpose. At this point Perceval has lost the innate sense of direction that enables us to steer a course through life; his wound at this point is one of incompleteness.
Fittingly for someone in this condition, he sees a man fishing from a small boat in the midst of a wide and tumultuous river. The water rushes by on all sides, but the fisherman and his boat are still and calm in the center. Perceval calls out, asking for a way across. He is told there is no fording place nearby, but that he is welcome to stay in the fisherman’s house that night if he wishes. Faced with what seems to be an insurmountable barrier, Perceval is more than willing to accept.
Thus he comes to the house of the Grail and witnesses the strange and wonderful procession of objects: the lance or spear, from which run drops of blood, and a mysterious vessel from which issues light so powerful that the candles also carried in the procession seem like stars whose radiance is dimmed by the rising sun. Perceval wonders greatly at this, but he remembers Gorneman’s advice and fails to ask the meaning of what he sees. This is because, as we may have done ourselves on countless occasions, he fails to recognize the solution to his own problem—which is right in front of him. Had he asked, he not only would have released the Wounded King, but also found the answer he was seeking: the healing of his own inner wounds. As it is, he wakens in the morning to find the castle strangely deserted, his horse saddled and his armor and weapons laid out and ready. As he departs, expecting at every moment to meet someone from the castle, the drawbridge slams shut behind him. Though he still does not know it, he has been cut off from the opportunity of healing for some time to come.
Wandering onwards, Perceval enters a period in his life when he will begin to earn some of the qualities that have been hitherto missing. First, he encounters a weeping girl, who is astonished that he looks so fresh when there is nowhere close by where he could have found shelter. When he tells her of the castle, however, she acknowledges its existence at once and begins to question him. This seeming inconsistency is not without significance. The Grail Castle is always close by, but it is not always visible to those who seek it. Indeed, it seems quite often that the seeker must take the longest possible road to reach somewhere that was next door all the time.
From the girl Perceval learns more about his host of the previous night and how he had been wounded through both thighs and could only find rest in fishing. If Perceval had asked about the procession, not only would the Fisher King have been healed but good would have come to him also. He also learns more about himself. The girl turns out to be his own cousin, who had lived in his house when he was an infant. She tells him that his mother has died of the grief caused by his departure and asks him his name. Perceval, who has hitherto been referred to only as “the boy,” confesses that he is uncertain of his own name but “guesses” that it is Perceval.
This is a pivotal point in the story; Perceval has taken the first real step towards discovering who he is. With this will come, in time, the healing he needs to make himself whole. As he confesses his ignorance, he is gifted with an inner twinge of knowledge—his name. If, as some have suggested, it means to “pierce the vale,” this is indeed what he is beginning to do. In this moment of recognition his own road towards healing has begun, though he has no real awareness of this as yet.
From here the story begins to unravel itself. Perceval opts to avenge himself on the knight who had murdered his cousin’s lover. When he catches up with the felon, he discovers him to be the protector of the Maiden of the Tent and learns now of the effect of his earlier unthinking actions. The knight, discovering that his lady had received a visitor who had helped himself to her ring (and who knew what else), forced her to ride before him on a broken-down horse and wear the same dress until it was almost falling from her. Thus Perceval is given the opportunity to put right his earlier mistake. He defeats the knight and makes him promise to make full reparation to his lady and to request judgment in the matter of the dead knight from King Arthur.
This whole episode reflects a kind of situation of woundedness with which many of us will be familiar. Perhaps we have been falsely accused in this way and treated in a cavalier fashion against all reason. This is a result of a wound that generates an inability to see clearly enough to judge anything fairly or reasonably.
Perceval wanders on in search of his old home, to which he has lost the way, until he sees where a wild goose has been killed by a hawk. Drops of blood in the snow remind him of the white skin and red lips of Blanchfleur, and he becomes so abstracted that when Arthur and some of his knights arrive on the scene, looking for him, he absently unhorses Kay, thus avenging the blow given to the girl who had not spoken for years until she saw him.
With this it seems Perceval’s star is in the ascendant. He has defeated all who oppose him, he has won the love of a beautiful woman, and he is honored at Arthur’s court. But, in fact, this is only the beginning of the most severe of his trials. Haunted by the memory of the Wounded King and by the death of his mother, he feels empty. It is at this moment, when he might have settled for the life of a knight and forgotten everything else, that a new figure enters his life. This is the Hideous Damsel, who, as we learned in chapter 6, berates him for his failure to ask the all-important questions concerning the Grail and the lance. Because of him women will be widowed, lands laid waste, girls raped, and men killed. It is a terrible load to lay upon anyone, and Perceval is indeed brought low by it.
Yet, despite this, he is actually being offered another chance to find healing. Sometimes we require a shock of this kind, delivered with merciless grace, to shake us free of our habitual lives. It is all too easy to settle back into a state of usualness, accepting what fate or circumstance metes out to us. The first step towards healing is to recognize that this does not have to be so, and in some dim, half-hidden chamber of his soul Perceval does just this. He breaks free of the dream state—represented by the blood in the snow episode—and prepares to set out again, to undergo whatever tests and trials may lie in wait for him, urged on by the Hideous Damsel, the dark and powerful aspect of the feminine, which he has been seeking to deny ever since he left the forest.
But even now his way is dogged by doubt and uncertainty, by wrong turnings and forgotten promises. For a time he goes about behaving exactly as a knight was expected to, following his destiny and, as it seems, doing a good job. But all is hollow; Perceval knows there should be more but is afraid to search his own wound too deeply. In this he is like many of us. We become aware that we are wounded but are afraid to take the necessary action to seek healing. Facing this fear is another of the most important steps towards healing the wound, and very often we are unable to do so without help. In fact, we need a healer ourselves, someone who can remind us of the possibility of healing, and this is just what happens in the story. Perceval wanders for years, lost and gradually forgetting his true task. Then he meets a party of pilgrims on their way to celebrate Easter at the chapel of a famous hermit. It is they who remind him of his true task and are instrumental in setting his feet once again on the right path. They bring Perceval to the hermit, who turns out to be the Wounded King’s brother and Perceval’s own uncle. It is now that some of the final pieces fall into place. Perceval discovers that he is part of the Grail Family and is told that it was guilt over the death of his mother (self-blame is another primary sign of woundedness) that had prevented him from finding his way back to the Grail Castle.
The hermit then grants Perceval forgiveness, which is something we all need if we are to get any further in our quest for healing. Often this means forgiving ourselves and acknowledging that we are not perfect, that we have behaved wrongly towards others or that we have failed in our most serious undertakings. This simple action, like the asking of the Grail Question, can be immensely helpful in enabling us to discover the way back to a healed state. Perceval, set free of his greatest burdens, can proceed with the task at hand: the healing of the Wounded King and the Wasteland. Even though Chrétien’s story breaks off before the end, it is not difficult to foresee the outcome. In the end, Perceval will transcend his own state of woundedness. He is able to make a new beginning. When he has healed the king and the land—set free the waters both within himself and the king—he will be able to function properly. He will marry Blanchfleur and father a family. He will become a whole individual for the first time.
This is an often painful journey that we must all, in some fashion, undergo. Whether we are men or women, these patterns can be present in our lives from the day we are born. There is no shortcut, no easy answer to the Grail Question. Many give up and fall by the wayside, slipping into patterns of self-abuse or abandonment to the pressures of the outer world. Many of us continue to seek the “safe place” that is generally represented by our childhood home and the family circle in childhood. When we try to escape from that place—as Perceval does—we are drawn back, inexorably, into our old habitual actions and ways of seeing and feeling. Often this causes unnecessary pain and suffering to others—the new “family” of friends, lovers, and children that come to represent our original family. This is represented in the story by Perceval’s desire to become a knight—to become part of the family of the Round Table—and by his inability to see how he can do so. His desire is strong, but his intellectual understanding is weak. He tries and sometimes succeeds through strength and intuition (which manifests blind, unthinking actions), but in his main task, the healing of the Wounded King, he fails—until, that is, he has learned how to integrate feeling and action, and to acknowledge his own wounded state.
The answer to much of this is to face the question of emptiness squarely; in fact, to ask it what it means. This is the basis of the Grail Question, the asking of which, you will remember, brings healing not only to the Wounded King, but also to the land. The question is generally given as “Whom does the Grail serve?” but it can be phrased differently when we approach our own wounds. Our question may be “What is the meaning of the wound, the cause of the pain?” And even more importantly, “What is the cure?” Answers to all these questions can be found—but only by asking will we discover them.
In the myth, a simple fool asks the all-important question that sets everything right. Perceval sets free the waters (of emotion, of the soul) that have been frozen and that prevent the Wounded King from acting for himself. Until the healer appears and asks the question, others must act in his stead. His own child, the Grail Princess, who carries the burden of the Grail, must act for him until he reaches the state of being in which healing comes from within.
The implication in the story is that the Grail Procession takes place every day, and that in the same way healing is available to us at every moment; we have only to take charge and ask for help to receive healing. The failure to do this is as crucial as failing to ask the Grail Question. Healing is always present and accessible; the Grail Castle is never far away. When Perceval sees the Grail borne through the Fisher King’s hall, he is seeing an everyday miracle. When we perceive the inner ability to heal our own wounds, we perceive the daily wonder of our own lives. The path of the Grail Hero—who represents every one of us—is littered with signs and wonders, extraordinary events used to illuminate everyday events, in order that we might see the extraordinary power and beauty of the living world. The Grail is essentially always present; we simply cannot see it. It appears in flashes of profound insight, in moments during which we transcend our ordinary consciousness. Those glimpses are the motivation to go further. Just as the Quest knights were prompted to go in search of the wonder that had visited them in their own home, so we are encouraged to seek the answers that are accessible everywhere, constantly present in our daily lives.
The Dry Wells
The second major Grail story is the Elucidation, which, as we saw earlier, gives a unique account of the causes of the Wasteland.246 It also adds significantly to our understanding of the Wounded King. As we have already outlined the story in chapter 5, readers are referred to this; however, a brief outline demonstrates aspects of the theme of woundedness.
In the beginning there are the damsels of the wells, who are connected to the court of the Rich Fisher but are yet under the protection of King Amangons. Their task is to speak with “the voices of the wells” and to offer hospitality and food to weary travellers who, we are told, go out of their way to experience this. Then comes Amangons, who, having lusted after one of the damsels, casually rapes her and steals her golden cup, which he then displays daily as a trophy of his action. His followers, witnessing this, follow suit until all the damsels are raped and their golden cups stolen. This, we are told, is the reason for the Wasteland, where no tree is leafy and where the meadows and flowers are dried up. Also, in some way, the court of the Rich Fisher is no longer accessible, and with its withdrawal go the richness and plenty that once marked out the kingdom of Logres as the finest in the land, for they lost the voices of the wells and the damsels that were therein.
We have seen how the damsels of the wells are probably faery women or perhaps priestesses of some ancient sacred well cult. The Elucidation makes them guardians of particular sacred sites and shows them issuing forth with offerings from their golden cups in a similar fashion to the Grail procession.
But with the actions of Amangons, who betrays his position of trust and steals both the virginity of the maidens as well as their cups, comes a period of deprivation, where the land becomes desolate. We may justly see the wells as a source of healing that becomes inaccessible after the wounding of their guardians.
The story now moves to Arthur’s time, when the Knights of the Round Table hear the story of the damsels of the wells and seek to recover them and to destroy root and branch the kindred of those who had wrought them harm.
As we saw, all they succeed in discovering are the descendants of the original damsels and Amangons’ followers. The Round Table knights join with them and together they succeed in defeating Amangons’ people. In the process they capture the storyteller Blihos Bliheris, who predicts that if the Round Table knights wish to set right the evil done in that earlier time they should seek “the Court of Joy, whereby the land shall again be made bright. To them that shall seek the Court, shall befall adventures such as were never before found nor told of in this land before.” In other words, there is an alternative to the path of vengeance; by seeking out joy so that wounds may be healed.247
The story ends enigmatically:
…in very truth it was (the) finding of the Court and the Grail whereby the realm was repeopled, in such wise that the waters which ran not, and the fountains which flowed not, for that they had been dried up, ran forth (again) amidst the meadows. Then were the fields green and bountiful, and the woods clad in leaves the day that the Court was found. Throughout the country were the forests so thick, so fair and fresh, that every wayfarer journeying through the land did marvel thereat.248
This is not simply another version of Chrétien’s text but one that preserves a more ancient version of the Grail myth, in all probability dating from Celtic tradition, and it is important that it shifts the emphasis from the more masculine direction of the later Grail texts back to a deeper awareness of the importance of the feminine. The way in which this is represented is by the land and the waters that flow (or do not flow) therein.
The importance of wells as a symbol of life is attested throughout the world, as is the idea that water contains the essence of life. At root, this probably stems from the simple fact that we need water to sustain life, and at another level that we emerged from the water and that we are made up of more than two-thirds water ourselves. But there is a deeper sense in which water is seen as a vehicle of life, and this results in the idea of the Water of Life—of which to drink is to be restored—and to the many references to wells and fountains that contain an essence that is somehow more than just water.249
The Celtic peoples in particular acknowledged this in a number of ways. Water was the way to the otherworld, which was often represented as lying across the sea on an island; it offered a means for observing the mystery of being and a substance that contained the fire of illumination, which poets and other folk of skill sought above all else. Thus we have the early Irish story of Nechtan’s well, which contains not only water but a brilliant light that can either blind those who look into it or illuminate them with a powerful inspiration. This same idea is reflected in the concept of the Imbas Forosna, the “wisdom that illumines,” which was understood as one of the prime initiatory secrets of the Celtic bards, as in the Irish tale where it is said “the poets thought that the brink of water was always a place of revelation and poetry.”
It is apparent within the stories that water is the bridge by which we cross the divide between the otherworld and ourselves. It is by crossing the waters that lie between us and the otherworldly realm of the Grail that we are enabled to ask the right question, to “see” the source of our woundedness.
Images of wells, cauldrons, and fountains as providers of wisdom and plenty occur in folk tradition all over the world. In the great fairytale collection of the Grimm brothers there is a story called, appropriately enough, “The Water of Life.”250 In it a young man searches through the world for a healing draught to cure his sick father. With the help of a princess he finds his way to the fountain, from which he must draw water before midnight. He succeeds, but as he departs the clock strikes twelve and the iron gate that protects the fountain slams shut, cutting off part of his heel. Like Perceval he is wounded in the attempt to bring healing to another, and he is like Perceval when he is shut out of the Gail Castle by his inability to ask the question.
Here we see how similar the king and the healer are. Both are wounded and both find healing in the end, but only after a period of suffering and travail. Again, we learn that the healer, the wounded person, and the healing are linked in a sequence that seldom varies throughout every version of the story.
Celtic tradition abounds in stories of cauldrons, wells and fountains. In the story of “Branwen daughter of Llyr” from the Mabinogion, a cauldron reanimates the dead warriors who are placed within it, and there is also the story of Taliesin, where the young proto-poet imbibes the three drops of wisdom from Ceridwen’s cauldron.251 In addition, there are the fountains like that at which Merlin finds healing for his madness or where the waters of divine inspiration flow. The waters that arise in the otherworld are almost always healing to mortals; they are charged with the energy we lack. It is thus more than just the voices of the wells that are taken from us when Amangons attacks the maidens; we lose our ability to feel and to express those feelings as well. We are cut off from paradise, from the Temple of the Grail, with a resultant woundedness and soul loss.
At one level the urge that caused Amangons to attack the maidens of the wells is lust. At another it is a desire to possess the wisdom that is contained in the wells they protect. Both the maidens and the earth are perceived as aspects of the divine feminine, so that what we are also seeing here is a raid on the wisdom of the feminine. That the same thing can and does happen within us is all too obvious. On the surface we denigrate the earth and the feminine principle; inwardly we long for it. Once again the Grail has a lesson for us here, showing in the story of the maidens of the wells what can occur when the feminine is defiled; while in the story as told by Chrétien the balancing of the Grail’s feminine wisdom with that of the masculine spear are shown to be polarized in the wounding/healing of the individual.
The myths of the Wasteland are about separation, division, the loss of the feminine, the neglect of our emotional life. The waters of life spring from the fountain, the well, and the cauldron; when we lose the voices of the wells and their restoring waters, we lose our connection to life itself; our grasp of the essential nature of humanity is loosened, and we slip away into a place where meaning almost ceases. Yet the healing of the land and the quest for the Grail is about restoring, among other things, the polarity between the masculine and the feminine.
It is this that makes the loss of the wells so shocking, for when Amangons acts out of selfishness and greed, the benefits that derive from them are dammed up. The land becomes barren, trees are without leaves, the crops fail, suffering is everywhere. The damsels of the wells depart. They take the wisdom of the wells with them. They wander and are lost—and they take the reproductive function with them. As with the Wounded King, there can be no further generation within the Wasteland while they are absent.
In the story of the Maidens, the phrase “they lost the voices of the wells” may well suggest a personal loss of voice—of self and of identity, wounds inflicted upon them by society and the way things are set up. Some of this is merely the product of habit. We are used to feeling the way we do and find it increasingly hard to shift into another mode of thought or feeling. Our minds have pathways they like to take. Just as we will follow a route we know gets us to where we are going in the least possible time—or because it takes us through the most beautiful countryside—so our minds will follow a route we have laid down for them. If this route is an aimless, wandering path, like that followed by Perceval during his five years in the wilderness, than we will follow that same route and lose ourselves. If the path leads back to some moment of past pain—such as the memory of Perceval’s mother, which is always being flashed upon the screen of his mind—then the mind will go there and dwell in that wound. It will even feed off that wound, increasing its energy, while the rest of the wounded person shrivels up inside. The result is ever-deepening wounds over which we have less and less control, a festering sore like the Fisher King’s wounds that do not heal.
At another level the story of the maidens is about the loss of a personal relationship between ourselves and the land on which we live. We need to preserve this if we are to maintain our soul health, which suffers when we are dislocated from the earth. When the land is sick, we are sick, and vice versa; we draw our nourishment from the earth in much the same way that plants do, except that our roots are invisible. They are no less important for that, and if we ignore them or cut them off, the flow of nutrients ceases, with the result that we grow sick. One of the names by which Perceval is known is “He Who Frees the Waters.” This refers to the fact that, when the Grail Question is asked, water flows again in the dead land, bringing fruition to the plants and creatures that live there. It can also mean one who frees the waters of the spirit or of the emotions. When old, dammed-up feelings are released, healing nearly always follows, whether it comes from the release of long-rankling anger or the considered examination of an old wound that has never fully healed. In the context of the maidens of the wells story, this freeing of the waters means that the land is once again made fruitful; in the context of our own search for healing, it means that we are once again in touch with our emotional selves, with the water of life, and are once again rooted in the land.
Nor is it without significance that the Wounded King is also called the Fisher King, the Rich Fisher, or the Rich Fisherman. In effect, he is casting his line into the waters of the soul to bring forth healing—he can still practice a degree of autonomy that will ultimately help him towards a state of wholeness. In the same way we can help ourselves, encouraging the dammed-up waters to flow again in our hearts and minds, calling out to the hero within to take on the role of healer.
Discovering a more spiritual connection with the earth is an important step on the road to healing, for just as the land cannot be healed until the king is healed, so there is a sense in which the king cannot receive healing until the land is healed. In terms of our own journey, until we are able to perceive the earth as a living being with which we have a close and personal relationship, we will find it that much harder to see the nature of our own wounds and address their healing.
The mystery of our wounded nature is such that we can be both diminished by it and at the same time ennobled. The process of healing is such that it shows us how our wounds originated and what we can do to put them right. This is a simple enough truth, and once we are aware of it, it can led us back onto the path to health and inner truth that we have strayed away from. The story of Perceval and the Wounded King tells us this in almost every line. Perceval’s journey is from a state of woundedness to a state of well-being. On the way he heals others simply by being there. His journey is not easy—far from it—but when his wounded nature comes into contact with the wounded nature of others, something happens—an almost chemical reaction that takes place at the soul level. The result is a great upsurge of well-being. As individuals our fragmented souls are restored; we literally find the Courts of Joy through this experience. And, in doing so, we enter into a realm of fulfillment that separates us from our wounds and gives us the strength to deny them. Out of this comes healing. Perceval sets free the waters; the voices of the wells are heard again.
Practice
The central ritual that derives from these texts and the healing stories they contain will be found in chapters 14 and 17. A meditation intended to unlock the wounds within us will be found beginning on page 361.
242. Bly, R. Iron John: A Book About Men (Rider, 2001).
243. Matthews, J. Healing the Wounded King: Soul Work and the Quest for the Grail (Shaftsbury: Element Books, 1997; Mythwood Books, 2014).
244. Ibid.
245. de Troyes, C. Perceval: The Story of the Grail, trans. N. Bryant (D. S. Brewer, 1982).
246. Matthews, C. and J. The Lost Book of the Grail (Starlight Press, 2017).
247. Elucidation in S. Evans, The Quest of the Holy Grail (J. M. Dent, 1892).
248. Ibid.
249. Matthews, C. and J. The Lost Book of the Grail (Starlight Press, 2017).
250. The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (Princeton University Press, 2014).
251. Mabinogion, trans. J. Gantz (Penguin Books, 1985).