Eternal Rebirth

This web-page will look much better in a browser that supports worldwide web standards although it is accessible to any browser. You appear to be using an older browser that does not support current standards. Please consider upgrading your browser. We suggest the latest version of any one of the following: MS Internet Explorer, Opera, Mozilla or Phoenix/Firebird.

In the Prose Draft of 1865, Wagner described Kundry as living an unending life of constantly alternating rebirths. Sometimes she awakes in the domain of the Grail, to serve the community of Knights; at other times, she is summoned to life by the sorcerer, Klingsor. It is significant that Wagner describes her as wearing a girdle of snakeskins; since the shedding of the snake's skin is a metaphor for rebirth.

Yes, one under a curse she might be. Here she lives today — perhaps reborn, to expiate sin committed in an earlier life, unforgiven there and then. Now she makes atonement with such deeds, as benefit our knightly order; she has done good, beyond all doubt, served us — and in doing so, helped herself.

[Gurnemanz in Parsifal, act one, scene two]

Right: Klingsor conjures Kundry, shown with the serpent of the Garden of Eden in a painting by Franz Stassen.

The wonderful ability of the serpent to slough its skin and so renew its youth has earned for it throughout the world the characteristic of the master of the mystery of rebirth — of which the moon, waxing and waning, sloughing its shadow and again waxing, is the celestial sign. The moon is the lord and measure of the life- creating rhythm of the womb, and therewith of time, through which beings come and go; lord of the mystery of birth and equally of death — which two, in sum, are aspects of one state of being. The moon is the lord of tides and of the dew that falls at night to refresh the verdure on which cattle graze. But the serpent, too, is a lord of waters. Dwelling in the earth, among the roots of trees, frequenting springs, marshes, and water courses, it glides with a motion of waves; or it ascends like a liana into branches, there to hang like some fruit of death. The phallic suggestion is immediate, and, as swallower, the female organ also is suggested; so that a dual image is rendered, which works implicitly on the sentiments. Likewise a dual association of fire and water attaches to the lightning of its strike, the forked darting of its active tongue, and the lethal burning of its poison. When imagined as biting its tail, as mythological uroboros, it suggests the waters that in all archaic cosmologies surround — as well as lie beneath and permeate — the floating circular island Earth.

[Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, vol.3 Occidental Mythology, ch. 1]

Klingsor and Kundry with serpent and apple

What is the significance of Kundry's kiss?' - That, my belovèd, is a terrible secret! You know, of course, the serpent of Paradise and its tempting promise: eritis sicut Deus, scientes bonum et malum [Genesis 3:5, 'Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil']. Adam and Eve became 'knowing'. They became 'conscious of sin'. The human race had to atone for that consciousness by suffering shame and misery until redeemed by Christ, who took upon himself the sin of mankind.

[Richard Wagner to King Ludwig II of Bavaria, 7 September 1865]