Mark Booth - The Secret History of the World

Raised to be a forester, Parsifal lived with his mother deep in the woods, far away from the glamour of court life and the dangers of chivalry. He did not know his father or his uncle. He was never to be a knight like Roland, famous in his own day, a knight whose deeds were blazed across the sky and celebrated in the official records, but his local deeds, his private battles, would change the course of history.

One day Parsifal was playing by himself in the woods when a troop of knights rode by. The episode is described in a passage by Chrétien de Troyes that lights up the imagination:

Trees were bursting into leaf, the iris blooming and birds singing when the son of the widow went out into the wild and lonely forest. He was practising hurling spears when he heard a clashing, jangling, thumping sound. Then suddenly he saw five knights ride out from among the trees in full armour, their helmets shining in the sun. The gold, silver, white and blue of their liveries danced before his eyes. He had never seen anything like this before and thought he was being granted a vision of angels.

Parsifal’s own imagination was fired. He left his mother, heartbroken, and set off in search of adventure.

For all his ideals Parsifal was a foolish knight and his missions were often fraught with misunderstanding and accident. His was a journey of loneliness and failure.

Then one day, as dusk approached, he was riding by a river and asked two fishermen if they knew where he could find shelter. They directed him to a great castle, set high on a hill. This turned out to be the castle of the Fisher King, Amfortas, who had been wounded and was bleeding from his thighs. It seemed that an evil king, Klingsor, had laid a trap for Amfortas, involving some kind of sexual temptation, and had succeeded in inflicting this wound on him.

While Parsifal was sitting at dinner a wonderful procession appeared, page boys carrying a bleeding spear and a shining bowl. After dinner Parsifal fell into a deep sleep. In some versions of the legend he also faced a series of trials. He was menaced by wild beasts — lions — and was tempted by a beautiful demon. He also had to cross the Bridge Perilous, a giant sword that spanned the moat. As we shall see these variations can be reconciled.

When he awoke he found that the castle was deserted. He rode out to find that the crops had failed and the country become a wasteland.

Parsifal was later accepted at court and received his spurs. But one day an ugly crone, the Loathly Lady, accosted him. She explained that the country was suffering because, when presented with a vision of the Grail, he had failed to ask the question which would have healed the Fisher King and restored his kingdom’s fortunes.

On his second visit to the Grail Castle, Parsifal asked Amfortas what ailed him, and he succeeded in the quest for the Grail where all other knights had been denied. Sir Launcelot had failed, for instance, because of his love for Guinevere. He did not have a pure heart.

At the climax of his quest, Parsifal sees first the spear of Longinus — a reminder of the connection with Charlemagne — and then, finally, the Grail itself.

What are we to make of this as history? The visionary element should certainly be understood as an account of an initiation ceremony. Parsifal’s trials and visions took place in a deep trance.

But, of course, the fact that events are symbolic or allegorical does not mean that they are not to be understood as literally true, too.

What, then, is the Grail?

We saw that in the early German version of the story the Grail is a stone. In this version the Grail also seems to have the properties of the philosopher’s stone of the alchemists. It shines, it regenerates, makes flesh and bones young again and, in the words of von Eschenbach, ‘offers so much of the world’s sweetness and delight that it seems like the kingdom of heaven’. Of course, if this stone that fell out of the forehead of Lucifer had been shaped into a bowl, it would also be a stone that had been worked on.

In order to understand what the Grail really is, we should recall what its function is, listen carefully to what the well-known story is telling us. It is a chalice or receptacle to hold bodily fluids. More particularly, it was to hold the blood of Christ, used to catch it as it spurted from his body on the cross and then later, symbolically, at the Last Supper.

As we have seen, blood is the distinguishing feature of animal consciousness, and in occult physiology the animal part of our nature nestles in or is carried by — as if by a chalice — the vegetable part of our nature.

The secret of the Holy Grail, then, is not that it represents a bloodline. This, I have already suggested, would go against the esoteric doctrine of reincarnation. Rather it alludes to the role of the vegetable part of our nature as a living receptacle for our spirit or consciousness. The quest for the Grail is the quest for a purified receptacle fit to carry a higher form of spirit, and the trials in the course of the quest involve certain esoteric techniques of purification of the vegetable body. Rudolf Steiner, perhaps the greatest teacher of the twentieth century, said that all serious esoteric work begins with work on the etheric, that is to say the vegetable body.

Because of the Fall our animal selves have become so corrupted and we are in thrall to our sexual selves. In fact our animal selves are so corrupt that this has seeped down into our vegetable and material bodies, and it is beyond our power to purify them. We need supernatural help, and esoteric techniques are intended to enlist this help.

If the plant-like dimension of humanity is purified, we will naturally become more plant-like. Saintly individuals can sometimes live on almost nothing but sunlight, after the manner of plants. The twentieth-century German mystic and miracle-worker Therese Neumann lived for some forty years on nothing more than the daily consumption of a consecrated wafer.

But if techniques to transform our vegetable bodies have existed since ancient times, what was new and distinctive about the techniques involved in the Grail initiation?

In his deeply meaningful second encounter with the wounded Fisher King, Parsifal asks the question, What ails thee, brother?

This shows a combination of selfless compassion and — most significantly — shows a free, enquiring spirit which was new in the eighth century. Here, then, is the beginning of a new impulse towards freedom of thought that marked the beginning of the end of the age of Church authority.

When Parsifal achieves a vision of the Holy Grail, this is a vision of the vegetable body or soul which has been so transformed by moral feeling and intellectual questioning that it is fit to carry a higher form of spirit, the Spirit of Jesus Christ.