14

Iseult of the Earth

Tristan never makes a human relationship to Iseult the Fair. He never makes a committed, stable, day-to-day life that would give them the human warmth and companionship that each needs. It startles us to realize this when we think of all the dramas and adventures they pass through. They meet in secret, they take terrible risks, they are dragged to the stake, they escape, they continue the drama in the Forest of Morois—struggling with nature and with enemies. Yet all this never translates into a human relationship!

One of the great paradoxes in romantic love is that it never produces human relationship as long as it stays romantic. It produces drama, daring adventures, wondrous, intense love scenes, jealousies, and betrayals; but people never seem to settle into relationship with each other as flesh-and-blood human beings until they are out of the romantic love stage, until they love each other instead of being “in love.”

We begin to understand why this is so. Iseult the Fair is anima. It is the divine love that Tristan seeks in her; unconsciously he seeks passage to the inner world. Tristan can not make an ordinary human relationship to Iseult the Fair because she is anima and must be experienced as inner person, as symbol.

When Tristan departs Cornwall, leaving Iseult with King Mark, he falls into despair. He believes that he leaves anima, literally embodied in a mortal woman, just as all men do when they are “in love.” In his ego’s view, life has no meaning, for he thinks that meaning can only be found in Iseult the Fair.

Apart the lovers could neither live nor die, for it was life and death together; and Tristan fled his sorrow through seas and islands and many lands.

And so comes Tristan’s famous question: “Will I never find someone to heal me of my unhappiness?”

Although his ego sees it as death, fate draws him onward toward life itself! For the quiet, unassuming woman who awaits him in Carhaix Castle is the incarnation of human life: She is Iseult of the White Hands, Iseult of the Earth.

Like Tristan, we come to this Iseult burdened with prejudices, with prior claims on our loyalty. We don’t like anything that is “simple”: To us “simple” means dull or dense or stupid. We have forgotten that simplicity is a need in human life: It is the human art of finding meaning and joy in the small, natural, and less dramatic things. At its highest, it is a consciousness that sees through the confusions we invent to the essential, uncomplicated reality of life. But in our era, we have a collective prejudice against Iseult of the White Hands. If a direct, uncomplicated, simple relationship offers us happiness, we won’t accept it. It is “too simple,” “too dull.” We are trained to respect only what is inflated, hyperintense, high-pressured, big and complicated.

The true tragedy of Tristan and Iseult is hidden in a quiet, humble place where we are not likely to look. It is not Tristan’s death, for all men die. Tristan’s tragedy is that he refuses to live while he is yet alive, and so he has no human life or human love. This is how his life becomes a “living death.” The real tragedy occurs in that moment when Tristan refuses Iseult of the White Hands; in that act he refuses the earth and all that comes with this earthly human life—human love, relatedness, all of earth’s joys.

For us Westerners, who imbibe the liquor of romance with our mothers’ milk, Iseult of the White Hands seems a minor player. We are mesmerized by the other drama: the secret meetings and partings, the intrigues, the unearthly intensity that rages between Tristan and Iseult the Fair. But if we step back from that and turn our gaze on Iseult of the White Hands, it may be as Kaherdin said: “Then perhaps you will hold in greater fondness my sister, Iseult the gentle-hearted, the simple.”

This Iseult personifies a different side of the inner feminine, a side we have not met before. Her “white hands” connote many things in symbol. They are fair and delicate, yet skilled in the practical work of life. This Iseult delights in the ordinary, human, earthly life. We find her first in the women’s room of the castle; she is weaving tapestries, working gold into fine English cloth. She is of royal blood, yet we can imagine her bearing children, rearing them, cooking, living with the simple activities that make human life possible.

We will call this aspect of the feminine the “earth feminine,” for it is she who relates a man to this physical earth, to his fellow human beings, to ordinary life, to all that is part of being incarnate in this human realm bounded by necessity, commitment, duty, time, and space. The earth feminine is the inner person who empowers him to love on a human level, to make human relationships.

She personifies the capacity within each man for seeing the beauty, the value, and the sacredness in the physical world, in the physical life, and in ordinary humanness. It is she who presides over his relationships with outer persons in the external world. By contrast, anima presides over his relationship to the inner persons of the interior realm. The earth feminine knows how to love in a way that is neither romantic idealism nor a projection of inner gods out onto external mortals. Hers is a human love that relates us to flesh-and-blood women and men, that affirms them in their humanness and ordinariness.

Everything that Iseult of the White Hands does show us that her one concern is relatedness. That is her one principle, her fundamental energy system. Tristan says of Iseult the Fair: “We drank our Death together.” But this Iseult is not interested in death: She is interested in life, an ordinary human life on this earth with a person who will love her as she is, care for her, and be nurtured by her. This Iseult of the Earth does not ask to be taken to the “enchanted orchard” found only in the land of death; rather, she asks Tristan to love her and make a life with her in the here-and-now of Carhaix, during their lives on this earth.

We see the earth feminine more clearly as we contrast Iseult of the White Hands with Iseult the Fair. We can not imagine Iseult the Fair as housewife, rearing children, stirring pots of soup, weaving blankets, growing old with her husband in a simple household. We can only imagine her as part of a great drama, dangerous encounters, ecstatic meetings, tearful partings, or as Queen, enthroned in a fairy castle. She is a sorceress, daughter of a sorceress queen, born on a mystic isle across the Unknown. She is goddess: half divine, half person. She is that aspect of the feminine that must always be elusive, unattainable, the “faraway Princess” who can only be truly experienced on the level of the symbolic and imaginal. Anima can be lived inwardly, or she can be extroverted into a drama—the stake, the lepers, the Wood of Morois. But she can’t be contained in ordinary, simple human relationship with its duties, its finite limits.

But what of Iseult of the White Hands? She is human. She is not born of sorcerers and demigods in an outpost of the “other world.” She is born in the known world of mortal parents, reared in ordinary human surroundings, prepared for a human life, a personal life. She is the aspect of the feminine that fits into our ordinary lives and personal relationships.

Anima’s desire is always to take us to the inner world, to the boundless and infinite reaches of the unconscious, with no limitations, no commitments to anyone, no holding back for the limits of necessity or duty. But the earth feminine directs us to the finite, the personal world of human relationship—that which is bounded by commitment, duty, obligation, affection, and relatedness to an individual.

As life turns to death, and death draws near, there is only one time when Tristan begins to live again. He draws near to Iseult of the White hands: he wants to live, he wants to love, and he wants to be human again. He forgets his strange pact with death. Kaherdin opens the gates of Carhaix and takes Tristan to his heart. Tristan finds affection, friendship, love, noble deeds to do.

“Will I never find someone to heal me of my unhappiness?” Here is a wife who loves him, who will give him companionship, devotion, a feeling life, erotic love, the human ties of home and family. With her comes a brother, a father, a homeland. Why does he reject all this?

Later in the story he tells us why…. Lying on his deathbed, he confides the green jasper ring to Kaherdin and sends him off on one last race to fetch Iseult the Fair. “Say she must come, for we drank our death together, and to remember the oath I swore to serve a single love, for I have kept that oath.”

It is this mistaken ideal, this oath, that underlies the whole tragedy of romantic love. Tristan swore to serve a single love. That single love is the divine love of which we have spoken: the love that draws us to the inner world. But when Tristan vows to serve only that divine love of anima, he vows also to give up human love and human relationship. There are two great loves, two worlds in which man must live, two Iseults whom he must serve. The great flaw in romantic love is that it seeks one love but forgets the other. This is the exact meaning of Tristan’s rejection of Iseult of the White Hands.

When Tristan refuses Iseult of the White Hands he shows us the standard attitude of Western men. A Western man unconsciously believes that it is right for him to use his marriage to try to connect with his anima, to use a woman to carry his projected soul-image, and that he need not ever take a woman seriously in her own right, as a physical, individual being with her own complex structure and consciousness. A man believes that he must always search for Iseult the Fair and always reject Iseult of the White Hands; he must always seek the divine world that he projects on a woman but never relate to that woman as an individual person.

Romantic love, true to its paradoxical nature, fools us: It looks as though it aims at making a human relationship to a person. After all, one is not meditating in a temple; one is “in love” with a human person. Or is one? It is difficult for us to see the difference—the vast difference—between relating to a human person and using that person as a vehicle for one’s projection.

In Tristan’s vow, and in his refusal of his marriage, we find the basic flaw in romanticism: its partialness. It at tempts to balance the one-sidedness of our Western psyche by restoring the experience of the gods, the inner world, the mysteries, and the divine love. But, like all collective attempts at balancing, it has become one-sided in the opposite direction. It embraces the opposite polarity, it idealizes the divine and ecstatic world but leaves no room for ordinary humanness. Ordinary human life, with its obligations, its ties, its commitments, its duties, its limitations, and its focus on ordinary human beings, is too earthbound, too dull and sordid for our romantic prejudices.

Tristan’s marriage symbolizes his instinctive, involuntary embrace of human life and human relatedness. His instincts cry out for a down-to-earth, physical, loving companionship with an ordinary, mortal woman. King Hoël offers his daughter. Tristan answers, out of pure reflex and will-to-live, “I will take her, Sire.” She is not his soul, she is not perfection, she is not a visitor from heaven. But she is beautiful in her human way, she is loving, she is related to him, and she is real. She is not his fantasy laid across the face of the external world.

But Tristan, having married Iseult in form, refuses her in fact. When he refuses to consummate the marriage, it means that he rejects human relationship with a mortal being in favor of a passionate vision, a fantasy that can only be experienced inwardly. This is the effect that the romantic ethos has on most modern marriages and relationships. We marry in form, we say the words, but we don’t inwardly make the commitment. There is a provisional quality in most relationships; each person secretly writes an escape clause into it. Each of us reserves the right to break his or her commitment to this physical person if a passionate vision should happen to be projected on another person.

This is exactly what the myth was predicting for our culture, and this is exactly what we see as the normal pattern. People make the marriage in form but refuse it in fact. They refuse to make a real commitment to a human being, because they will only commit themselves to their inner vision, their inner ideal, their search for the perfect manifestation of anima or animus, their search for the divine love. Since they have not learned that this is an inner task, they imagine that they must always keep their options open, they must always reserve the right to follow wherever the inner ideal is projected. In our romantic fog, we think this is very noble, very “liberated,” but in fact it is just a misunderstanding of reality. It is our way of obliterating the human side of the equation, our way of refusing to be committed to Iseult of the White Hands.

The tragedy is that Tristan, in full possession of a life of relatedness, surrounded with human warmth, refuses to enjoy it or appropriate it. Curiously, there is nothing he need do: He only needs to open his eyes, wake up to the riches that surround him, and live. But that fog of romantic idealism, that denigration of the human world, cuts him off from the very love for which he starves. He rejects Iseult of the White Hands: He renews his pact with death.

This pattern in romantic love replays itself constantly in the lives of modern people. A man in a relationship or marriage feels vaguely dissatisfied: Life doesn’t have enough meaning, or he misses the ecstasy and the “rush” that he used to feel. Instead of realizing that he is longing for the divine love, for the inner experience of anima that is his own responsibility, he finds fault with the woman. She is not making him happy; she is not good enough; she does not fulfill his dreams. Although she gives him everything that a mortal woman could provide, he rejects her and goes looking for Iseult the Fair. He always assumes that somewhere, in some woman or in some adventure, he is going to find Iseult the Fair and be able to possess her physically and find there his meaning and fulfillment. Thus we denigrate human love; thus we reject Iseult of the White Hands; thus we renew our collective vow to “serve a single love.”

Human love, symbolized by Iseult of the White Hands, is utterly different from what we call “falling in love.” For a man to love in the human way of the earth feminine means for him to direct his love to a mortal human being, not at the idealized image that he projects. It means for him to be related to the actual human being, to value her, to identify with her, to affirm her value and her sacredness as she is, in her totality—with her shadow side, her imperfections, and all that makes her an ordinary mortal. To be “in love” is different: It is not directed at a woman; it is directed at anima, at a man’s ideal: his dream, his fantasy, his hope, his expectation, his passion for an inner being whom he superimposes over the external woman.

This explains why so much of this “love” between Tristan and Iseult the Fair is so unmistakably egocentric. Tristan wants Iseult to suffer, to join him in his unhappiness, because his love is not really directed at Iseult as a mortal woman, but at himself! He is concerned with his projection onto her, with his passion—this passion that he blames on the love potion but that he studiously nurtures with return trips to Iseult.

Iseult, similarly, seems not to be concerned with Tristan’s happiness or well-being. She is concerned with whether he is putting her first, whether his allegiance is only to her, whether he will keep up the drama with her that transports her to the “enchanted orchard.” Neither of them is concerned with the happiness or well-being or survival of the other but only with renewing their own passion, with being transported to a magical place, with using each other to keep the intense drama going. Finally, at the end, their only concern is to use each other to break free completely from the ordinary earth, to fly to that magical, imaginal world where “great singers sing their songs forever.” They do not actually love each other. They use each other as vehicles to have the intense, passionate experiences they long for.

This, whether we admit it or not, is what romantic love is. In Tristan and Iseult the egotism, the use of each other to create the passion for its own sake, is so blatant, so naive, and so childlike that it is unmistakable. But our own versions of this are scarcely more subtle. It simply never enters our romantic heads that there is something strange about seeking a so-called “love” for the sake of my fulfillment, my thrills, my dreams coming true, my fantasy, my “need to be loved,” my ideal of the perfect love, my security, my entertainment.

When we genuinely love another person, it is a spontaneous act of being, an identification with the other person that causes us to affirm, value, and honor him or her, to desire that person’s happiness and well-being. In those rare moments when we are loving, rather than focused on our own egos, we stop asking what dreams this person is going to fulfill for us, what intense and extraordinary adventures he or she is going to provide.

There are two marriages that Tristan needs to make. The first marriage is an inner marriage with his own soul, with Iseult the Fair. That marriage is made by going to the inner world, practicing his religion, his inner work, living with the gods of the inner world. The second marriage is to Iseult of the White Hands. This marriage means a union with another human being, and it means taking her as a human being. It also means making other relationships—making friends—and taking them as human beings.

We can understand these two marriages as reflecting the two natures that combine in human beings: the human and the divine. The penultimate Western symbol of our two natures in synthesis is Christ, and the dimensions of that reality are expressed perfectly in the symbolism of the Christian doctrine of Incarnation. There, it is said that God came into the physical world and redeemed it; God becomes human! The implications of this belief, taken as symbol, are enormous. It means that this physical world, this physical body, and this mundane life we lead on this earth are also holy. It means that our fellow human beings have their own intrinsic value: They are not here merely to reflect our fantasy of a more perfect world or to carry our projections of anima or to join us in acting out an allegory of another world. The physical, mundane, ordinary world has its own beauty, its own validity, and its own laws to be observed.

There is a statement in Zen: “This earth—that is the Way!” The Way to enlightenment, to soul, is not through the clouds, not by denying this earth. It is found within this mortal life, within the simplicity of our mundane tasks and our relationships with ordinary people. All of this is expressed in the symbolic reality of the Incarnation.

The Incarnation tells us of the paradox of two natures: of divine love and human love mixed in one vessel, contained in one human being. The Incarnation says that God became Man; and the Incarnate God, Christ, was both fully human and fully divine. In this image is reflected the dual nature of every human, the two loves that legitimately claim our loyalty, and the synthesis we should make between the two. The Incarnation shows us that the divine world and the personal world coexist within each human being. It is when the two natures live together in a conscious synthesis that a person becomes a conscious self.

Whatever may be our ideas about the literal historical Incarnation, we need to see the awesome implications of God-become-man as a symbol, as an archetypal model deep in the Western unconscious. It is a psychological reality, a unifying principle that acts on us from within, whether we be conscious of it or not. We are going to live this dual nature in one way or another, either consciously or unconsciously.

The Incarnation symbolizes the synthesis; the love potion symbolizes the muddle. If we take our dual nature consciously we get the transcendent synthesis; if we take it haphazardly, we get the love potion. Western psychological history is this: As we cease to take seriously the Incarnation, even as symbolic reality, the truth of our dual nature goes underground. Unconsciously, the divine love, and the whole paradox of divine love and human love, finds its way into the love potion. And there it rests today, bubbling in a cauldron of projection, mixed up in the soup of romantic love.

We learned that one of the cultural roots of romantic love is Manichaean dualism, living in western Europe in the twelfth century as the Albigensian heresy. The teaching of that religion was that the divine half of reality is absolutely good and the human side of reality is absolutely evil. For the Albigensians, the only good was what existed on the “spiritual” plane, what was found in “heaven.” Physical human beings, ordinary human life, sexuality, erotic love, and this whole physical earth were seen as “evil,” as a corrupt, steaming pit of darkness. This is the theological expression of what Tristan says in the language of romance: “Remember the oath I swore to serve a single love.” Albigensian dualism, Christian dualism, and romantic idealism all teach us that we should only serve the divine love, that ordinary human beings are not worthy of our love, that we should love people only insofar as they reflect our ideal, reflect our projection of otherworldly intensity—the superhuman, cosmic, and divine.

The cult of romance teaches us that ordinary people are not enough, that we must seek a god or goddess, a Hollywood star, a dream-woman or dream-man, a beauty queen: an embodied anima or animus. So long as a man is caught in this mentality he will never accept anything except his anima; he relates to a woman only if she reflects his dream of Iseult the Fair.

The tale of Iseult of the White Hands is the tale of Tristan’s lost opportunity. Tristan misses his chance to discover that there are two loves and two relationships: one with anima within and one with woman in the physical world. Each is distinct, and each has its own validity. But, if Tristan, like us, had a second chance, he could learn from Iseult of the White Hands rather than reject her. He could learn that the meaning of life is not found only in seeking his inner ideal; it is also found in the physical woman with whom he lives in the castle of Carhaix.