Monsalvat: the Parsifal home page | Jessie L. Weston | Waste Land

The Waste Land

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A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother's wreck
And on the king my father's death before him.
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year.

In course of time, the slow advance of knowledge, which has dispelled so many cherished illusions, convinced at least the more thoughtful portion of mankind that the alternations of summer and winter, of spring and autumn, were not merely the result of their own magical rites, but that some deeper cause, some mightier power, was at work behind the shifting scenes of nature. They now pictured to themselves the growth and decay of vegetation, the birth and death of living creatures, as effects of the waxing or waning strength of divine beings, of gods and goddesses, who were born and died, who married and begot children, on the pattern of human life. Thus the old magical theory of the seasons was displaced, or rather supplemented, by a religious theory. For although men now attributed the annual cycle of change primarily to corresponding changes in their deities, they still thought that by performing certain magical rites they could aid the god, who was the principle of life, in his struggle with the opposing principle of death.

Introduction

f Wagner's Parsifal is, as the composer would have us believe, a profoundly Christian work, then as such it does not seem to fit into any Christian dramatic or musical sacred tradition. It has been regarded as a kind of miracle play, which makes use of Christian symbols, although it seems also to draw some ideas from Buddhism. The present article will consider the evidence for regarding Wagner's Parsifal as neither Christian nor Buddhist, but as a sacred drama in an Indo-European tradition that began thousands of years before either of those religions had been established. The article draws on ideas about primitive religion and kingship developed by Sir James Frazer, a pioneer of anthrolopogy, and Jessie L. Weston, a scholar greatly influenced by Frazer, who was the first translator of Wolfram's poem Parzival into English.

Three Kings

The Old King

common feature of kingship in primitive societies is the intimate association of the king with the land. The king is often regarded as the temporary incarnation of a god whose youth, vigour and virility are essential to the kingdom:

The king's life or spirit is so sympathetically bound up with the prosperity of the whole country, that if he fell ill or grew senile the cattle would sicken or cease to multiply, the crops would rot in the fields, and men would perish of widespread disease.

herefore, in such societies, the king is only allowed to rule for a fixed term, after which he is killed (usually by his successor) and replaced. In the most extreme cases, the term is one year, so that the death of the old king coincides with the passing of the old year. J.G.Fraser notes that such annual regicide seems to have been common in Western Asia and particularly in Phrygia, where the king-priest was slain in the character of Attis, a god of vegetation.

o what does this have to do with Wagner's drama? In the three decades between the composer's discovery of Wolfram's Parzival and the completion of his own poem, Wagner rejected Wolfram's account and selected elements from the Grail literature. One such element is that of an old king, a character who appears in several of the Grail romances. In Chrétien's story, he is the father of the Grail king; in Wolfram's account, his grandfather. In Wagner's poem, the old king Titurel lies in a tomb and is kept alive by the sight of the Grail alone. It may be that Chrétien was the first author to locate two kings in the Grail castle, perhaps as the result of merging two earlier stories; in any case, the double-king element was adopted both by Wolfram and by Wagner. In a later form of the story, developed in The Quest of the Holy Grail, there are three kings; all of them are wounded. The life of one, Mordrains, has been preternaturally prolonged and his youth is restored by the completion of the quest.

The Maimed King

essie Weston distinguished between the Maimed King and the Fisher King, in her analysis of the Grail legend and its possible ritual origin:

Students of the Grail cycle will hardly need to be reminded that the identity of the Maimed King is a hopeless puzzle. He may be the Fisher King, or the Fisher King's father, or have no connection with either, as in the Evalach-Mordrains story. He may have been wounded in battle, or accidentally, or wilfully, or by supernatural means, as the punishment of too close an approach to the spiritual mysteries... Probably the characters of the Maimed King and the Fisher King were originally distinct, the Maimed King representing, as we have suggested, the god, in whose honour the rites were performed; the Fisher King, who, whether maimed or not, invariably acts as host, representing the Priest.

n the earliest (Gawain) form of the Grail romances, it seems that the lord of the Grail castle was neither old nor infirm, but dead. It was on account of the death of this knight that misfortune had fallen upon the land. In all of the Perceval versions, however, it was the king who had been wounded (or, in the case of the Didot Perceval only, grown old) and this was the cause of the wasting of the land. To achieve the quest and revive the land, either the king had to be healed, or restored to youth and vigour, or a young and vigorous successor had to undertake the burden of kingship.

agner seems to have distilled the essence of the story. He tells us that he rejected Wolfram's account and recognised that, even in Chrétien's account, the Question was an unnecessary complication. In his Parsifal, the collapse of the Grail community is a result of Anfortas' wound, which is both physical and spiritual. In place of asking a Question, the destined successor has to fulfil a quest through which the symbols of cup and lance are reunited, and the Maimed King is both healed and succeeded.

The Fisher King

n Robert de Boron's Joseph d'Arimathie, the brother of Joseph is called Bron. When the company of the Grail are starving, Bron is told to catch a fish, which feeds them in a ritual meal. After this, Bron is known as the Rich Fisher. Joseph, the original Winner of the Grail, and his brother Bron are another example of the double-king element found in later versions of the story. The fisherman element is found in all of the Perceval versions. In Chrétien's Perceval, for example, the hero meets the Grail king when he is fishing from a boat. It may be significant that the Grail castle is always located close to water (and in at least two cases, on an island). The fish is a traditional fertility symbol, perhaps as a result of its fecundity, a characteristic that it shares with another Grail symbol, the dove.

• More about the Fisher King (this page is very slow on account of large graphics)

Frisch weht der Wind Der Heimat zu Mein Irisch Kind Wo weilest du? 'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; 'They called me the hyacinth girl.' -- Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looked into the heart of light, the silence. Oed' und leer das Meer. [T.S.Eliot, The Burial of the Dead from The Waste Land, 1922. The work quoted is Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.]

Three Heroes

Gawain (Gwalchmai)

essie Weston identified three stages of development in the medieval Grail romances. In the first of them, the hero was Gawain (or the Welsh Gwalchmai) and the land had been wasted as a consequence of the mysterious death of an unnamed knight. In this form of the legend, the body of the dead knight lies on a scarlet cloth upon a bier in the Grail castle. Another feature specific to the Gawain version is that the Grail- bearer weeps piteously.

The most curious instance of the persistence of this part of the original tradition is to be found in Gawain's visit to Corbenic, in the prose Lancelot, where he sees no one, but twelve maidens kneeling at the closed door of the Grail chamber, weeping bitterly and praying to be delivered from their torment. But the dwellers in Castle Corbenic, so far from being in torment, have all that heart can desire, and, moreover, the honour of being guardians of the (here) sacred and most Christian relic, the Holy Grail.

he best- known version of this form is known as the First Continuation to Perceval; which is not consistent with Chrétien's unfinished poem. It appears to be based on an independent story. Gawain fails to ask about the Grail (by which he would have restored the Waste Land) but he does ask about the spear, which brings about a partial restoration.

n the later German text Diu Crône (The Crown), from about 1230, the lord of the Grail castle is old and weak. After Gawain has asked the Question, removing the enchantment from the Waste Land, we are told that the king and his attendants were in fact dead, but held in semblance of life until the task was completed.

Perceval (Peredur)

n the second stage of development, the Widow's Son displaced Gawain as the primary hero. J.L. Weston pointed to a distinctive feature common to the otherwise differing Perceval versions: the sickness and disability of the ruler of the Waste Land, who is called the Fisher King. According to Weston, the element of the Waste Land declined in importance during the development of this form until, in Wolfram's Parzival, the healing of the Fisher King appears to be an end in itself.

This wasting of the land is found in three Gawain Grail stories: [that] by Bleheris, the version of Chastel Merveilleus, and Diu Crône; it is found in one Perceval text, the Gerbert continuation. Thus, briefly, the object of the Rites is the restoration of Vegetation, connected with the revival of the god; the object of the Quest is the same, but connected with the restoration to health of the King.

riginally, the distress of the land was a direct result of the death of the king, or the injury or aging of the king; but in Chrétien's account, the disaster only develops after the failure of Perceval to ask the Question on his first visit to the Grail castle and in the Perlesvaus, the wasting is a direct consequence of Perceval's failure. The Welsh version, Peredur son of Evrawg, is a confused tale, possibly based upon an imperfect recollection either of Chrétien's poem or an earlier version of the same form, perhaps the prose original referred to by Chrétien, and also possibly the Third Continuation. Like Perlesvaus, it is a revenge story.

he Grail romances are characterised by a tension between the theme of revenge and the theme of healing. This tension points to at least two distinct, original sources:

As we review some of the findings of the previous chapters, we perceive that there were not only two main themes which tended to combine in bewildering associations, but several subordinate disharmonies contributed to the mystification of both the authors and their readers. There was a wounded King for the hero to cure; there was a slain King for him to avenge. Yet they seemed to bear somewhat the same name. The King's infirmity or death caused his land to be sterile and waste; yet, strange to say, he possessed a talisman of inexhaustible abundance. There were two damsels in the King's household, one whose function was to serve his guests with the talismanic vessel, to assume a monstrous shape when the hero failed in his task of healing the King, and violently to rebuke him; the other whose function was to spur the hero on to avenge a kinsman's death. The task of healing required the hero to ask a spell-breaking Question; the task of vengeance required him to unite the fragments of a broken sword.

Galahad (Galaad)

n the final stage, the themes of vengeance and healing, together with such elements as the wasting of the land and the Question, have disappeared and what remains is a spiritual quest. As in Perlesvaus, the story is dominated by moralising and Christian allegory. The hero is now Galahad, son of Lancelot. In The Quest of the Holy Grail, there are two wounded kings at the Grail castle, and the title of Fisher King is variously applied to both of them. The virgin Galahad, who was born at the Grail castle, has never failed and achieves the quest in fulfilment of his destiny.

Right: Sir Galahad, by G.F. Watts (1817-1904). Let us note first, that whatever else changes in the story, the essential framework remains the same. Always the castle is found by chance; always the hero beholds marvels he does not comprehend; always he fails to fulfil the test which would have qualified him to receive the explanation of those marvels; always he recognises his fault too late, when the opportunity has passed beyond recall; and only after long trial is it again granted to him. Let us clear our minds once and for all from the delusion that the Grail story is primarily the story of a quest; it is that secondarily. In its primary form it is the romance of a lost opportunity; for always, and in every instance, the first visit connotes failure; it is to redress that failure that the quest is undertaken. So essential is this part of the story that it survives even in the Galahad version; that immaculate and uninteresting hero does not fail, of course; but neither does he come to the Grail castle for the first time when he presides at the solemn and symbolic feast; he was brought up there, but has left it before the Quest begins; like his predecessors, Gawain and Perceval, he goes forth from the castle in order to return. [J.L.Weston, The Grail and the Rites of Adonis.]

Three Gods

Tammuz (Dumuzi)

he cult of the god known to the Sumerians and Akkadians as Dumuzi-abzu, but better known under his Syrian name of Tammuz, may be traced back to about 3000 B.C. Dumuzi is a Sumerian deity of the marshes. His name means "quickener of the young in the mother womb of the deep," and he is generally seen as a fertility deity. His sister, Geshtinanna, is the power in the grape, and his female consort is Inanna, who in the earliest period symbolizes the "storehouse of dates." Dumuzi, Inanna, and Geshtinanna, as well as Duttura, the mother of Dumuzi, and Ereshkigal, the sister of Inanna and goddess of the underworld, are prominent in several mythological cycles and mythical dramas. In a pantheon containing thousands of deities, these serve as examples of the reigning symbolism of fertility. As the god of the harvest, Dumuzi was required, like Osiris of Egypt, to conquer death by emerging from the Underworld. The surviving Sumerian and Akkadian texts contain many lamentations for Dumuzi, who left the surface of the earth once a year, with disastrous consequences for animal and vegetable life. A Sumerian text, The Descent of Inanna, tells of how the goddess descends into the underworld to bring back the god, ensuring seasonal fertility. There is a shorter Akkadian text, found in both Babylonia and Assyria, telling essentially the same story, although the names are changed to Ishtar and Tammuz. Dumuzi-Tammuz appears to have been more than a seasonal god, however; it seems that he was believed to participate in the reproductive activities of all forms of life.

Attis

he Phrygian cult of Attis may be as old as that of Dumuzi-Tammuz and both may have derived from the worship of a common predecessor. Or, despite their common features, they may have developed independently:

The annual death and revival of vegetation is a conception which readily presents itself to men in every stage of savagery and civilisation: and the vastness of the scale on which this ever-recurring decay and regeneration takes place, together with man's most intimate dependence on it for subsistence, combine to render it the most impressive annual occurrence in nature, at least within the temperate zones. It is no wonder that a phenomenon so important, so striking, and so universal should, by suggesting similar ideas, have given rise to similar rites in many lands.

he death and resurrection of Attis were annually mourned and rejoiced over at a festival in spring, usually at the vernal equinox. Attis was said to have been a fair young shepherd or herdsman beloved by Cybele, the Mother of the Gods. There are two different accounts of his death: in one he castrated himself under a pine-tree and bled to death. This version may have been invented to explain the self-castration of his priests. In the other, he was, like Adonis, killed by a wild boar, and hence his followers abstained from pork. He was subsequently changed into a pine-tree and therefore such a tree, decorated with violets, was venerated during the spring festival.

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you. [T.S.Eliot, Death by Water from The Waste Land, 1922.] I weep for Adonais -- he is dead! O, weep for Adonais! though our tears Thaw not the frost that binds so dear a head! [P.B.Shelley, Adonais, 1821.]

Adonis

he cult of Adonis seems to have originated in Phoenicia and spread first to Cyprus and then throughout the Greek world in about the 7th century B.C. The name or title Adonis was also applied to Tammuz, Adon being the Syrian word meaning Lord. Originally, Adonis was the lover of the goddess Astarte, who became identified with the Greek goddess Aphrodite. He was said to have been a mortal who was killed by a wild boar, who may have been Aphrodite's jealous husband, Ares. The intercession of Aphrodite persuaded Zeus to allow Adonis to return from the underworld for a portion of the year. The dispute between Aphrodite and Persephone for possession of Adonis is a curious parallel to that between Ishtar and Ereshkigal for Tammuz. It is possible that the Phrygian Adonis was originally a river-god; the river Nahr Ibrahim, which reaches the sea just south of Byblus, bore in antiquity the name Adonis and there is a complex of temples to Astarte around the gorge of the river. The spring rain colours the river red with clay washed from the hills; this is still referred to as the blood of Adonis. His rites usually ended with the effigy of the god being cast into the sea or a river; this is still echoed in vernal folk-customs in many lands.

raser records that the worship of Adonis as a corn-spirit, i.e. a spirit of harvest, in the month of Tammuz (July) persisted in Syria into the Middle Ages. An Arabic writer of the tenth century recorded: In the middle of this month is the festival of el-Bûgât, that is, of the weeping women, and this is the Tâ-uz festival, which is celebrated in honour of the god Tâ-uz. The women bewail him, because his lord slew him so cruelly, ground his bones in a mill, and then scattered them to the wind.[The Golden Bough]. This propitiation of the corn-god may be ultimately derived from an older, primitive belief that the spirits of animals and vegetation had to be appeased by those who ate them.

essie Weston identified the following points of contact between the Adonis ritual and the Gawain form of the story of the Grail castle: the waste land; the slain king (or knight); the mourning, with special insistence on the part played by women; and the restoration of fertility. Another point is worth noting: the dove was sacred to Adonis and doves were sacrificed during his rites.

Conclusions

essie Weston traced the possible origins of the medieval Grail romances through Gnostic mystery religions back to the fertility rites and initiation ceremonies of ancient vegetation cults. Independently, evidence for the oriental origin of elements of the grail legends was gathered by L.E. Iselin (Der morgenländische Ursprung der Grallegende, 1909). Since Wagner's text draws upon these Grail romances and because Wagner selected elements that connect these romances with the rituals of Indo-European mystery religions, then it seems justifiable to regard his Parsifal as belonging to a religious tradition that is at least five thousand years old.

n this perspective, Parsifal is the story of a failed initiation into a mystery religion. It tells of an infirm king who is, at first, neither healed nor replaced by a vigorous successor and how, as a result, the land becomes a Waste Land and the people of the Grail castle decay. The old king, his father, dies before the quest has been completed. The Grail-bearer, who is also the messenger of the Grail, weeps bitterly on a spring morning. The symbols of cup and spear are reunited to assure the renewed fertility of land and people.

Postscript

Wagner and the Waste Land

hen I wrote the first version of the article above, in December 1996, it was my intention to explore the connections between T.S. Eliot's most famous poem and Wagner's last music-drama. In his own notes on The Waste Land Eliot informs us: Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston's book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance ... To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognise in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.

learly Eliot was influenced by Frazer's anthropological writings both directly and through J.L. Weston. Similarly his relationship to Wagner is both direct (the poem quotes Tristan und Isolde and Das Rheingold; it also quotes Verlaine's poem about Parsifal) and through the Wagnerian J.L. Weston. Furthermore, Eliot's poem is connected to Wagner's last music-drama by drawing on a common myth, the Grail legend. It might be fortuitous that the quotation from Petronius with which Eliot prefaced his poem is singularly appropriate to Kundry: Said the boys, "What do you want, Sibyl?"; she answered, "I want to die".

o there are threads connecting Eliot's Grail poem and Wagner's Grail drama. Unfortunately those threads have led some to believe that Wagner had built his Parsifal upon the myth of the Waste Land, i.e. the variant of the Grail legend in which the land (and the vegetable and animal life of that land) suffers as a result of the king's sickness. In some versions of the myth, it is specifically the infertility of the king that causes the infertility of the crops and livestock of the kingdom. Wagner's treatment of the Grail legend is not, however, based on the Waste Land variant. If Wagner had wanted to stress the sexual aspect of the king's injury, then he would have made the wound one through the genitals and not through the side, which is where the Prose Draft locates the (physical) wound. It is the same wound as the Redeemer received upon the Cross.

herefore the implication in Harry Kupfer's Berlin production that Amfortas' problem is one of sexual dysfunction is an idea that Kupfer has added himself, rather than his interpretation of Wagner's text. Wagner is not concerned with any link between the king and his kingdom although he is concerned with the indirect results of the king's sickness on the community of Monsalvat; it is because the king will not perform the Grail ceremony that the community fails to function. The problem that must be solved, or the need that must be addressed, is not infertility that affects the king and the land, rather it is the king's realisation of his own inadequacy that leaves the knights leaderless. There is no evidence, in the Prose Drafts or Poem, that the domain of the Grail becomes a Waste Land. Yet it has become a cliché of stage productions that the third act (and in some productions also the first act) of Parsifal is set in a bleak waste land. This contradicts not only Wagner's stage directions but also his poem (libretto). Emphasis on the Eliot connection reached its apogee in the Niklaus Lehnhoff production (soon to be re- staged in Chicago). For all its merits, Lehnhoff's production is an example of how not to produce Wagner's dramas. It imposes ideas and references that would not have been recognised by Wagner not as a means by which to make Wagner's own ideas intelligible to a modern audience but instead of presenting his ideas.