19

The Dolorous Stroke

Let us now examine the various forms assumed by the motif of the fallen king, besides the one previously considered in reference to Amfortas.

In the Grand Saint Graal and in the Queste du Graal the king has received wounds, from which he now suffers, when fighting against King Crudel, an enemy of Christianity. These wounds are not felt until he loses his sight for having gotten too close to the Grail. We could interpret the symbol in the sense that the failed realization of the Grail leads to the acknowledgment of an inferiority, or having been wounded without knowing it, when struggling against the representatives of traditional non-Christian forms and defeating them.

In these texts the wound is also related to the test of the sword that lies, together with the golden crown, in Solomon’s ship; this sword is sometimes drawn halfway out of its scabbard, named “memory of blood” and according to Le Morte D’Arthur (17.6), partially made with the wood of the Tree of Life. This sword, as I have explained, awaits one who has been predestined: a sign warns that he who wants to use this sword will find it useless in time of need. Nescien wields it against a giant, but it breaks in half. After Mordrain puts it together again, Nacien is wounded by another flaming sword, wielded by an invisible hand, as a punishment for having unsheathed the sword ax estranges renges.¹ In the Queste du Graal and in Le Morte D’Arthur, Nacien is told that his right hand has been smitten by the sword because of his sins; in the Grand Saint Graal Nacien is healed by a priest who walks barefoot on the sea, as if to symbolize the qualification Nacien should have exhibited in order to wield the sword legitimately.² Pelles too unsheathes the sword halfway, but is immediately wounded in the thigh by a lance; he will not heal before the arrival of Galahad, who is the predestined one.

Besides all this, in the Grand Saint Graal we also find the principle of faith. Just when Nacien thinks that Solomon’s ship, carrying sword and crown, is a mirage, the ship disintegrates and he is thrown into the sea. Here the theme of usurpation merges with the theme of lack of faith; in one of the versions, Joseph of Arimathea’s disciple Moses, lacking faith, is swallowed up by a chasm that opens up beneath the “perilous” seat reserved for the elect one. The weapon cannot be brandished against the giant without breaking, or before the one wielding it assumes a different quality from all that may have a relation with the elemental, the wild, the titanic (the giant) and before his faith becomes unshakable.

The story of the sword is almost always related to le coup douloureux, the Dolorous Stroke. The following is the version found in the Queste du Graal. This sword was used by Labran to treacherously murder King Urban in the kingdom of Logres (an ancient name for Britannia); since that time, the kingdom of Logres has been devastated by an epidemic. Labran himself, while on Solomon’s ship, drops dead at the act of sheathing the sword back into its scabbard. It is said that from then on, no one was ever able to either wield or unsheathe this sword without either being killed or wounded by it.

Further developments of this theme are found in Le Morte D’Arthur. The revelant character here is Sir Balin le Savage, also called The Knight with Two Swords, who was believed to be the one who imparted the Dolorous Stroke. In these texts the sword is related to Avalon and is a facsimile of Arthur’s own sword: it is carried by a maiden sent by the great lady Lile of Aveilon and may be extracted only by a knight “without villainy or treachery, and without treason.” Sir Balin passes this test; that is, he successfully draws the sword but refuses to return it to the woman. Thus he is told that the sword will become the cause of his perdition.

Balin later finds himself battling King Pellan: the sword breaks in half, and as he looks for another weapon, he finds the prodigious lance on top of a golden table. With it he wounds Pellan, who passes out and does not heal until “Galahad, the noble prince, will come to heal him as he follows the quest of the Sangreal.” Next to the table, on a bed, lies Joseph of Arimathea, plagued by old age. This is the Dolorous Stroke that partially destroys the kingdom of Logres and attracts some kind of nemesis. In fact, Balin ends up fighting his own brother Balan, without recognizing him, and the two knights slay each other.³ In all this we can clearly see the representation of a wild irruption (Balin le Savage) who, next to a fallen regality (symbolized by the decrepit Joseph of Arimathea) does not act in the sense of a restoration, but rather in the sense of a usurpation, or, in other words, in the sense of a usurped force that only leads to an internecine conflict: Balin striking Pellan, of Joseph’s dynasty (representing a power that more or less corresponds to that which is conferred by the sword), and Balin fighting against his own brother Balan. After these events, nobody else will own the sword, with the exception of Galahad, who will be able to take it out of a marble stone hovering above the waters, that is, out of a supernatural and immaterial stability.⁴

In Gautier, the sword belongs to a knight killed by an unknown hand. Gawain puts on his armor (which is to say, he takes on his function), picks up his sword, and carries it with him into the Grail’s castle. The king of the Grail takes this sword and notices that it is broken and that the other half is stuck in the body of a knight lying in a crypt. He asks Gawain to put the two halves together, but when the latter is not successful, the king tells him that he is still not ready to undertake the task for which he has come there. As Gawain begins to “ask the question” and receives some preliminary explanations, he learns that the power of the lance has been neutralized by the Dolorous Stroke, which has impoverished Logres’s kingdom. But as soon as the king begins to talk about the secret connected with the sword, Gawain falls asleep. The king, after all, had previously warned him that since he was not able to piece the sword together, such a secret could not be revealed to him. Here the theme of the broken sword assumes its most significant form: a part of it belongs to the type of a stricken hero, whose function is assumed by Gawain, while the other part refers to the dead king and, by correlation, to the task of restoring the regnum. To reconnect the two parts means to get at the heart of the synthesis proper to the restoration and to the primordial king, who rises up again thanks to the hero. But Gawain fails, at least at first. His consciousness is not able to follow the mystery of the sword; he falls asleep.

In another development of the cycle, sleep, owing to which Gawain fails in his task, becomes the cause of the wound. Alain, in his Terra Faraine, had a beautiful castle built to keep the Grail, in the middle of an overwhelming current; the castle, named Corbenic, should be identified with the Grail itself, since in Caldaic, according to the text, “Corbenic” means “most holy vessel,” saintisme vaisiaus. This is the castle of the “perennial wake” and of the test of sleep; no one is allowed to sleep in it. When the king, Alfasem, tries to fall asleep, a fiery figure pierces both his thighs with a lance; this wound will later cause his death. Corbenic is le palais aventureus, and every knight who falls asleep in it is found dead the morning after.⁵

An analogous theme is found in the Diu Crone. Unlike his companions, though he is asked to drink, Gawain refuses; this symbolic abstinence allows him not to fall asleep like the others and thus to “ask the question,” “without which everything he had done up to that point and everything that he still could have accomplished would have been useless.” The meaning of this is rather obvious. Just as “sleep” is a well-known initiatory symbol, so is that of the “Awakened One” and of the “Sleepless One.” In every initiatory tradition, to overcome sleep has had the meaning of participating in a transcendent lucidity, free from the contingencies of material and individual existence.

A variation on the theme of usurpation, which is somewhat connected to the theme of Amfortas, is found in the so-called Elucidation: the kingdom of Logres is ravaged and sterile because King Amagon and his knights raped the “women of the Fountain” and stole from them a golden cup. Since then, the court of the Fisher King, or the Grail’s court, which was the wealth of the country, disappeared, and the throne remained vacant for more than a thousand years. In the end, at the time of King Arthur, Gawain learns about this and begins his quest for the Grail’s court and king. In Wolfram, Klinschor too is portrayed as a man who violates women; this characteristic of his, presented in the allegorical form of adultery, is the cause of his emasculation and ensuing involvement in black magic, which is a counterfeit of true supernatural power. Klinschor owns a castle to which, with the aid of his magical arts, he draws and imprisons various women, including Arthur’s mother. It is in this castle that Gawain’s final test takes place, at the end of which he takes Orgeluse, the woman who previously ruined Amfortas and the Grail’s realm. All this is relatively clear, provided one follows the interpretation I suggested at the end of chapter 16. One can see that the various themes of these tales form an overall pattern, at the center of which is one basic idea.

In Manessier, the sword is that with which the brother of the Grail’s king was treacherously slain and which on this occasion broke in half. The person killed is the corpse that lies in the coffin in the Grail’s castle. The broken sword was preserved, but with its pieces the next king of the Grail accidentally wounded himself and lost all his powers: the employment of the wounded strength, if not reintegrated, proves to be fatal too. Here the theme of revenge is at the forefront. The sword needs to be mended; the one who is capable of doing it must then avenge the slain person by reaching Partinial, who is the lord of the Red Tower. After various adventures, which have an initiatory character, Percival kills Partinial (who in this context may be the equivalent of the “giant,” fighting against whom the heroes who are not qualified break David’s sword); when this happens, the king of the Grail jumps out of bed, healed.

In Gerbert, the lesion or wound caused by the broken sword corresponds to a crack that still remains in the mended sword and that motivates Percival to seek new adventures in order to win the Grail. During these adventures we find again the theme of revenge, since Percival regains his health and avenges his first instructor, Gurnmeant, whom he found lying mortally wounded. Second, we find the following important episode. At Arthur’s court, to which Percival returns, arrives a boat led by a swan and bearing a coffin, which nobody knows how to open. Percival opens it and finds a dead knight inside, whom he must avenge. Having resolved to do so, Percival comes across another adventure; he opens a tomb in which a live man had been buried. At first the man tries to lock Percival in the tomb, but Percival succeeds in pushing him back into it. Then Percival reaches the fatal castle, and here he mends once and for all the broken sword. The same episode is found in Gautier, where the knight pleading for help from inside the tomb succeeds in temporarily locking Percival in it and then attempts to steal his horse. In yet another of these texts, the knight in the tomb is said to be the devil himself.

The apparition of the swan is significant, since the swan is strictly related to the Hyperborean tradition and to Apollo, the Hyperborean god of the primordial or Golden Age. The coffin carried by the swan (the animal that will lead Lohengrin out of the Grail’s land) evidently symbolizes a mute invocation to make something that is either dead or decayed come back to life again, namely, the ancient Hyperborean tradition (sometimes the hero is also presented as the son of a widow who dwells and rules over a solitary, desolated forest; concerning the widow, see chapter 6). And yet there is the danger that the hero may fall victim to this death or to this sleep: such is the meaning of the demonic attempt to lock Percival, the chosen one, in the same tomb where a live person was crying for help.

This meaning is integrated from what is written in the Diu Crone, in which the king of the Grail is said to be old and apparently ill. When Gawain, who does not fall asleep like his companions, asks the question, the king shouts with joy and gives the following explanation: he, with his men, had died a long time ago, though he looked alive and retained a semblance of life until the quest for the Grail was fulfilled. This happens thanks to Gawain, to whom the old king gives the sword, which will always make him victorious; then the king disappears with his men and with the Grail itself, in the obvious sense of inaugurating a truly living and restored kingdom. In other texts, the purpose of the question is analogous: it has the power to heal the king and, at the same time, to restore his mortality, which was retained only in an artificial manner. In Wolfram, though the wounded king is healed, he nevertheless abdicates the throne, which is assumed by Percival. This is the real sense: a transmission. An ancient and decayed dynasty is liberated from its artificial life and ends at the moment in which a new dynasty proves to be capable of assuming the regal function by wielding or mending the sword, carrying out the revenge, and restoring what had fallen. The substitution, which occurs in an irregular and arbitrary fashion, accompanied by violence and a lack of proper qualifications, or in terms of a fratricidal strife, is the meaning of the story of the Dolorous Stroke, both according to my summary of Le Morte D’Arthur and according to various other confused and complicated versions.

In Wolfram von Eschenbach, next to the wounded king, a magnificent old man lies on a bed. His name is Titurel, the first person to whom the “Grail’s banner” was entrusted. The Grail—that is, the function of which he still remains the representative—keeps him alive, although he is “afflicted by a paralysis that cannot be cured.” The fallen kings mentioned in other texts often have an unnaturally prolonged life: some are a thousand, others four hundred, others three hundred years old.⁶ They cannot die before the coming of the chosen one. This is an allusion to an interregnum, in the sense of a simply formal survival of the regnum. It is a mandate that is retained at a latent state and carried on by wounded, paralyzed, or blinded people until the restorer arrives. When we read in the Perceval li Gallois that Percival’s father, obeying a divine calling, traveled to the far Western countries and could not die there until the arrival of the man who deserved to be called the best knight in the world, we find once more the theme of the “Western island,” of Avalon and the wounded Arthur.

Another interesting reference is provided by Wolfram, according to whom the poisonous and burning wound of Amfortas gets worse, especially under the sign of Saturn, or Kronos.⁷ Saturn-Kronos is the king of the primordial age, who is asleep in the Hyperborean seat; according to some myths he was castrated at the beginning of a new cycle. What has been expounded helps to explain why Amfortas’s wound grows worse and opens up again under the sign of Kronos. Moreover, in the Hermetic tradition Saturn-Kronos is the deceased who must be resuscitated; the royal art of the heroes consists in freeing lead from its “leprosy,” namely, from its imperfections and darkness, transforming it into gold, thus actualizing the Mystery of the Stone. Moreover, Kronos, gold, and “foundation stone” are different references to the primordial regal tradition. Wherever the sign appears again, the wound of the person who has either degenerated or usurped burns and becomes troublesome.

The theme we have already encountered, of a slain or wounded knight whom the seekers of the Grail find by his woman (sometimes, significantly enough, next to a tree),⁸ refers to the motif of the hero who has failed in his task; in other words, it awakens the Grail seeker to the reasons why he failed in his mission at first. Significantly, such a woman, conceived as a relative of the seeker of the Grail, makes him aware of his own name, which he himself has ignored. In any event she offers some explanations regarding the mystery of the Grail’s castle; she blames the knight for not having asked the question, and sometimes she gives instructions on how to mend the sword should it break. Since in Wolfram the woman stands by the embalmed body of the dead knight, there seems to be a further interference, namely, the mixing of the motif of the king of the Grail, whose life is only apparent, with that of the hero struck down before he was able to conclude his adventure. In Wolfram this woman is named Sigune; she even curses Percival for his indifference toward the suffering king in the Grail’s castle and the meaning of the Grail itself.

A variation of the previous theme is that according to which the king is not ill and his kingdom is not devastated, and yet all this happens exclusively because the Grail has been sighted together with the lance and the sword as many as three times, without anybody asking what purpose they served. Indifference and lack of understanding have caused a “great misfortune”; this is why King Arthur’s court has lost its ancient splendor and why various conflicts have erupted all over the earth. This particular version of the legend has something that recalls the tragic tone of the “twilight of the gods.” When Percival arrives, the Fisher King has already died; his opponent, the king of Chastel Mortel, has seized the Grail, the lance, and the sword. Percival regains these objects and forces the enemy king to commit suicide, but he does not found a new dynasty of the Grail; rather, he retires to an ascetic life with his companions. A divine voice warns him that the Grail will never manifest itself other than in a mysterious place that will be revealed to them; Percival and his companions leave to seek this place and never return. We will see later on that this episode may also have reflected a particular historical situation.