We will leave Tristan in Ireland for now, and pause for a while. Now is the time to begin to look at the symbolic language of our myth, to begin to understand the truths it has to teach us.
At the beginning we find a hero born in sadness, his mother lost on the first day of his earthly life. But who is this child? What does Blanchefleur’s death mean for us?
The loss of Tristan’s mother is not his experience alone. For Tristan is the prototype of modern Western man, the firstborn of our modern race. Tristan’s mind is our mind, his world is our world, his problems are our problems, and his loss is our loss.
Psychologically our modern era began in the twelfth century, the time when Tristan was born and this myth came to life. That century was a great watershed in our history. The seeds of our modern mind were planted in that time: What we are today—our attitudes, values, conflicts, and ideals—has grown from those seeds. The collective psyche is like a giant spreading tree that grows slowly, century by century. For this huge, evolving, collective mind, a thousand years is but a short time.
Tristan is the new child, born in the Middle Ages, who grew up over a millennium to be modern Western man. His mother and father, Blanchefleur and King Rivalen, symbolize the old order, the ancient mind of Europe. They die, but they give birth to a child, and that child is the modern mind of the West. He is Tristan, the New Man.
Blanchefleur’s tragic death leaves Tristan in a sadly distorted world, bereft of almost all traces of the feminine. And like Tristan, we have inherited that world. For Blanchefleur is the inner feminine. She personifies the inner feminine soul of Western man, the feminine values that once lived in our culture. Her death records that sad day in our history when our patriarchal mentality finally drove the feminine completely out of our culture and out of our individual lives.
Tristan is raised to the “arts of barony.” And what are those? To fight with the sword, the lance, and the bow. To ride a war-horse and leap wide dykes. To hunt. Everything in his world emphasizes the masculine side of life: wielding power, training for battle, defending territory. Every hero needs these skills—of that be sure! But they represent only half of human nature. King Mark has no queen; his sister, Blanchefleur has died. The whole feminine side of life—love, feeling relationship, introspection, the intuitive and lyrical experience of life—has all but disappeared from Cornwall and Lyonesse. The only remnant of the feminine left to Tristan is his harp, but as we shall see, it is his harp that saves him.
We will understand our story better if we get a clear idea of what we mean by “the feminine.”
Jung found that the psyche is androgynous: It is made up of both masculine and feminine components. Thus, every man and every woman comes equipped with a psychological structure that in its wholeness includes the richness of both sides, both natures, both sets of capacities and strengths. The psyche spontaneously divides itself into complementary opposites and represents them as a masculine-feminine constellation. It characterizes some qualities as being “masculine” and certain others as being “feminine.” Like yin and yang in ancient Chinese psychology, these complementary opposites balance and complete each other. No human value or trait is complete in itself: It must be joined with its masculine or feminine “mate” in a conscious synthesis if we are to have balance and wholeness.
The psyche sees our capacity for relatedness and love as a “feminine” quality, emanating from the feminine side of the psyche. By contrast it views the ability to wield power, control situations, and defend territory as strengths that we find in the “masculine” department of the psyche. To become a complete man or woman, each of us must develop both sides of the psyche. We must be able both to handle power and to love, both to exert control and to flow spontaneously with fate—each value in its season.
When we speak of “feminine” in this sense, we obviously do not mean “pertaining to women.” We are speaking of inner, psychological qualities that are common to both men and women. When a man develops the strengths of his inner feminine, it actually completes his maleness. He becomes more fully male as he becomes more fully human. The strongest man is the one who can genuinely show love to his children, as well as fight his battles in the business world during the work day. His masculine strength is augmented and balanced by his feminine capacity to be related, to express his affection and his feelings.
In each of us there is a potential for wholeness, for bringing the conflicting parts of ourselves together in a synthesis. We have a simple name for this totality of the individual: Jung called it the “self.”
The self is the sum of all the divergent forces, energies, and qualities that live within you and make you who you are—a unique individual. The self is the balanced, harmonious, symmetrical unity at the very center of one’s being, which each of us senses within. But we rarely experience the self with our conscious mind; we rarely have that sense of unity and wholeness. We feel ourselves usually as a chaotic mass of conflicting desires, values, ideals, and possibilities, some conscious and some unconscious, pulling us in many directions at once.
The work of “enlightenment” is to make conscious these divided and conflicting parts of ourselves, to wake up to the primordial unity that joins them. To awaken to the unity of the self is the great goal of our psychological evolution, the Pearl Without Price, the object of our deepest longings. It is this possibility that is manifested by the dual masculine-feminine nature of the psyche.
In mythical symbolism the self is often represented by a masculine-feminine pair: a king and queen, a divine brother and sister, a god and goddess. Through this symbol of the royal couple the psyche tells us that the self is one, though we experience it as complementary opposites. It shows us that we must make a “marriage,” a holy synthesis, between the two great polarities of our human nature. Like the dragons of yin and yang, the inner king and queen constantly create our world out of the masculine and feminine energies of the self in an eternal cosmic dance.
But Tristan’s world has no queen! There is a king: There is Mark. But the queen has died: Blanchefleur has gone away.
It is the feminine qualities that bring meaning into life: relatedness to other human beings, the ability to soften power with love, awareness of our inner feelings and values, respect for our earthly environment, a delight in earth’s beauty, and the introspective quest for inner wisdom. With these qualities shortchanged, we don’t find much meaning. With our swords and lances we build our empires, but they don’t give us a sense of meaning or purpose.
But the death of Blanchefleur does not mean that we have lost these qualities forever. Death, in a myth or dream, means something has left the conscious mind; yet it rests in the unconscious, waiting to be reborn into consciousness. We see people today trying to bring Blanchefleur back from the unconscious. People try to learn to express their feelings, to show affection, to awaken to the intuitive side of life. Some of it misfires, becomes a fad, is reduced to self-conscious embraces and forced “spontaneity,” but at least people are trying to find Blanchefleur.
Why did Blanchefleur die? Why have we Western people lost so much of our capacity to love, to feel, to be related?
Look at Blanchefleur! She is surrounded by war, married to an ally for help in a war, rushed to another war in Lyonesse that kills her husband and destroys her will to live. Ever a camp follower, she only knows of soldiers, battles, alliances, and death. In our culture the inner feminine is the same—always a camp follower, dragged in the dusty train of masculine power drive, choked by war, forgotten in a deafening and eternal clash of steel.
When Blanchefleur died, that cold day in Lyonesse, the feminine soul of the West departed: to Ireland, to some mythical island across the seas. She went to live in the unconscious, to await a better time when she will return to human life.