2

The Ethnological Prejudice

A second prejudice that has to be overcome is the ethnological one. This prejudice essentially concerns an order of researches that have begun to unearth many hidden roots of the cycle of legends to which the Grail belongs. These studies have not been able to recognize in these legends anything other than fragments of folklore and of ancient, primitive, popular beliefs. It is important to make a clarification in regard to this subject, because the presence of such elements in the Grail tradition is real. Moreover, they constitute the guiding thread that reconnects the historical aspect, which is relative to the presence and to the effectiveness of a particular tradition, to the suprahistorical and initiatory aspect of the legend of the Grail.

First of all, it is necessary to extend to the collective dimension the relativity of the “creative” aspect that I have previously discussed in relation to individual productions, since most people see in folklore a spontaneous popular production, or a fantastic collective product, that is mixed with superstitions and needs to be considered for all practical purposes as an oddity. Influenced by such a prejudice, the so-called ethnological schools, just like the psychoanalytical trends devoted to the study of the “collective unconscious,” have engaged in various researches that always amount to a systematic, contaminating reduction of what is higher and superior to what is lower and inferior.

At this point I must dispute the very notion of “primitiveness” that is attributed today to some popular traditions. Far from being “primitive” (i.e., primordial), in most cases such traditions are nothing but degenerated residues that must be reconnected to very ancient cycles of civilization. Thus I concur with René Guénon’s assessment that so-called folklore,

in almost every instance, contains traditional elements in the true sense of the word, although at times they are deformed, diminished, or fragmentary. These elements have a real, symbolic value and thus, far from originating in people’s minds, do not even have a human origin; the only popular thing is merely the fact that they have “survived,” considering that these elements belong to traditional forms that by now have disappeared.

These extinct traditional forms sometimes are to be traced to such a distant past that it would be impossible to determine it, a past that is therefore confined to the obscure domain of prehistory. In this regard, people act as some sort of more or less unconscious collective memory, the content of which is derived from some other source.¹

Likewise, I agree with Guénon’s explanation concerning the peculiar fact that people in these cases are the bearers of many elements belonging to a higher plane, such as the initiatory one, and therefore to a plane that is in essence “unpopular”:

When a traditional form is about to become extinct, its last representatives can willingly entrust to that collective memory what would otherwise be lost. This, in other words, is the only way to salvage what can still be salvaged. At the same time, the natural lack of understanding of the masses is a sufficient guarantee that what had an esoteric character may not be lost, but that it rather may continue to exist as a sort of witness of the past to those who in a later epoch will be able to comprehend it.²

This last observation is especially true in the case of the elements of the allegedly “pagan,” Nordic-Western folklore that are present in the legends of the Grail and King Arthur. These elements, once properly integrated (i.e., brought back to their original symbolic meaning through traditional and even intertraditional references), will convey the true meaning that certain romances and epics incorporated. These romances were highly regarded in the medieval knightly world and also had a relationship with the Ghibelline ideal of the imperium and with various secret traditions and groups that inherited, in various forms, the spiritual legacy of this ideal.

Thus we can clearly see the difference between this perspective and the above-mentioned psychoanalytical theories concerning the subconscious or collective unconscious, in which the latter has become a sort of grab bag containing all kinds of things, all of which are considered, more or less, in terms of “life,” “atavism,” and the “irrational.” What such theories regard uniformly as the “unconscious” should rather be considered the superconsciousness. It is simply ridiculous to regard myths and symbols as manifestations or archetypes of “life,” considering that their nature is essentially metaphysical and that they have nothing to do with “life,” unless we are talking about their empty shells. It is pointless to remark, as C. G. Jung and Richard Wilhelm have done,³ that any positive consideration must be limited to the study of the manifestations of the “unconscious,” understood as pure experiences, without any reference to transcendent elements.

The truth is that when there are no firm reference points, there is no hope of orienting oneself through various experiences, of understanding and evaluating them, especially when experience as a whole is abusively identified with some of its particular modalities, which at times are even affected by pathological factors. This has been abundantly demonstrated by the outcome of all the various psychoanalytical interpretations. These attempts fail to reach the plane of the spirit. Moreover, even when they do not lead to a subnormal world of neuropaths and hysterics by producing such aberrations as those found in Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo, they nevertheless produce (as in the case of Jung’s theory of “archetypes”) confused perceptions that are greatly influenced by the new superstitious cult of what is “vital” and “irrational,” thereby proving not so much to lack assumptions as to have mistaken ones.