Where There Was No Path:  Arthurian Legends and The Western Way

 

The Grail is a topic that can serve to guide us from the general universal themes of myth into the material that is specifically of the European consciousness that we inherit. The period of the Arthurian and Grail romances which dates almost precisely from A.D. 1150 to 1250, was something of a prelude to the second great phase of Occidental culture. The first great phase was the Greco-Roman period, beginning with the Homeric epics. The period of the Arthurian romances was the counterpart for the Gothic and modern world of the Homeric period for the Greco-Roman, which is to say it was then that the main themes were stated and developed in terms of culture values and the spiritual dimension.  

 

            The great works appear suddenly. This is a remarkable thing about the birth of civilizations: within two hundred years the whole thing is there and it wasn't there before. There was the material but not this particular constellating of it. 

 

            Now Europe had four powerful mythological traditions in full career before the introduction of Christianity. There was the Classical Greek, the Classical Italic or Roman, there was the Celtic material, and there was the Germanic. They were in full strength, and they represented something that is typical in Europe and nowhere else - that is, respect for the individual and the individual path, the individual way. The Greeks had already recognized that their distinction from the world of the ancients and from what they called the Orient was in precisely this recognition of the individual. The idea that a member of a society is a citizen instead of a subject is Greek. And it's this idea of the individual and the individual quest that is our subject. In the European Gothic, this was taken a step further. The sense of the individual path was very, very strong. 

 

            There are many Grail romances, but there are three great ones. The earliest is the Perceval of Chretien de Troyes, which dates from about 1180. The second, the greatest one, is the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach, which is the version that Wagner took over and changed. It dates from around 1210. These two are the Grail romances of the heroic view, in which the heroic knight, or Parzival, is a married man and a self-motivated figure. The third great Grail romance, the one that Malory translated into English and condensed in the Morte d'Arthur, is an Old French text known as La Queste del Saint Graal (The Quest of the Holy Grail), written by a Cistercian monk whose name we do not know. This rendition was followed by a lesser work by another Cistercian called Estoire del Saint Graal  (History of the Holy Grail), wherein the Grail is interpreted as the vessel of the passion of Christ: the cup of the Last Supper and the cup, the same cup, that held his blood when his body was taken from the cross and his wounds were washed. These Cistercian recountings emphasize the Christian point of view. 

 

            So here we have the two traditions in Europe: the heroic one, which is the native one of Europe going back to the old Germanic Celtic spirit, and the applied Christian one, which was brought in from the Near East, where the thinking and value system were precisely the opposite - and remain precisely the opposite - of that of Europe. In the Near East, one's membership in the community is what counts. One is not an individual, one is a member of a society. One is an organ in an organism. Everything is done with an enormous emphasis on ritual, rules, laws. Read the law books of the Old Testament - Leviticus, for example - and you'll see what it is. 

 

            This Near Eastern tradition was brought into Europe and applied by military force in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., and there was enormous dislocation. By the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the ones we're talking about, Europe was beginning to assimilate this material, and the Grail story and the Arthurian romances represent that assimilation. Those were beautiful years, 1150 to 1250. Why did this flowering suddenly stop? You've all heard of the Inquisition: the College of Cardinals telling you what to think - what God thinks - and how you are supposed to relate to that instead of to this other experience - namely, of the divine power operative in your own heart. That stopped it, for the Grail romance is of the God in your own heart, and the Christ becomes a metaphor, a symbol, for that transcendent power which is the support and being of your own life. This is the understanding that we're going to get from the Grail story. 

 

            With respect to The Quest of the Holy Grail, it opens with the knights of Arthur's court in the great dining hall, where Arthur will not let the meal be served until an adventure has occurred. Now, in those days adventures did occur, so no one thought he was going to go away without food. The adventure, in this case, is that the

Grail appears, carried by angelic messengers and covered with a veil, and it hovers above the company. Everyone sits there in rapture, and then the Grail is withdrawn. That is the call to adventure, and Gawain - a name that is going to recur a great deal - Sir Gawain, the nephew of King Arthur, stands up and says,  “I propose a quest. I propose that we now should go in quest of that Grail, each to behold it unveiled." 

 

            There then occurs in the Old French text a passage that Malory, for some reason or another, did not translate, but one that seems to me to epitomize the whole sense of this Grail symbology. "They agreed that all would go on this quest, but they thought it would be a disgrace" - and that's the word used - "to go forth in a group." Think of the group psychology that the Oriental tradition represents - "they thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group, so each entered the forest" - the forest of the adventure - "at a point that he, himself, had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path." 

 

            Now all of you who have had anything to do with Oriental gurus know that they have the path, and they know where you are on the path. Some of them will give you their picture to wear, so you know where you are to get to, instead of your own picture. This is the difference, and this is Europe. 

 

            So the knights entered the forest at the point that they had chosen, where there was no path. If there is a path, it is someone else's path, and you are not on the adventure. Now, what are you to do about instruction? You can get clues from people who have followed paths, but then you have to carom off that and translate it into your own decision, and there is no book of rules. On this wonderful quest - it's a marvelous romance, with each knight going his own way - when anyone finds the path of anotherr and thinks, "Oh, he's getting there!" and begins to follow that path, then he goes astray totally, even though the other may get there. This is a wonderful story: that which we intend, that which is the journey, that which is the goal, is the fulfillment of something that never was on the earth before - namely, your own potentiality. Every thumbprint is different from every other. Every cell and structure in your body is different from that of anyone who has ever been on earth before, so you have to work it out yourself, taking your clues from here and there. 

 

            So, after we briefly review some of the historical background that underlies the tradition of the quest that the Arthurian romances illustrate, we will move into the two great stories of this tradition: that of the quest for the Grail, and the story of Tristan and Isolde. 

 

            The story of Tristan and Isolde is the story of love as the guide, love as a divine infusion. The date for the early troubadours, who were the first to celebrate this great theme, was the twelfth century - the troubadour century. The great theme was what is known as courtly love, which was by definition adulterous love. 

 

            A marriage, in the courts of those days, was a marriage arranged by the family, not a marriage of individual choice. That's the kind of marriage that predominates to this day in the East, and it was the kind of marriage of the ancient world. Two people who have never seen each other before are joined in marriage, and the church then sacramentalizes this and says, "two bodies, one flesh." What it really is is "two bank accounts, one bank account." You don't have the electrification of love at all, although you may have a very warm, genial, social relationship, production of children, and all of that sort of thing. Love entered such a situation as a destiny - a terrifying destiny, because the social response was death.

 

            In the Gottfried von Strassburg Tristan, which is the Tristan that Wagner took over, there's a wonderful moment when Tristan is bringing Isolde back to Cornwall from Ireland - she was a Dublin girl - to marry his uncle, King Mark. Now Isolde's mother has sent along a nurse, Brangaene, with a love potion that is supposed to be drunk by Isolde and King Mark. But on board the ship, she leaves the potion unguarded, and the young couple, thinking it is wine, drink it. 

 

            Well, they're just a couple of kids, about fifteen years old, and they have no idea what has happened to them, and they begin to feel sick. They don't know what it is, but Isolde - apparently girls catch on to these things faster than boys - says,  "L'etoile cherche la mer." She pronounces la mer as if it were l'amour, sort of in between. Is it the sea? Are we seasick? Is this what is called love? 

 

            The whole sense of the courtly idea was the pain of love. Unless you've got it in the gut and can hardly bear it, it hasn't happened. The idea was to feel; the Buddha says all life is sorrowful. This is the experience of the pain of being alive. Where your pain is, that's where your life is. So find it. 

 

            When Brangaene realizes what has happened, she's appalled. She goes to Tristan and says, "Tristan, you have drunk your death." Then there's this wonderful line in the Gottfried version. Tristan says, "I don't know what you mean. If by death you mean the pain of my love for Isolde, that's my life. If by death you mean the punishment that I am to suffer from society, I accept that. If by death you mean eternal damnation in hell, I accept that." Now there's the individual experience - refuting the values of the whole system. That's what these people represent. We're dealing with something serious here. 

 

            So after our historical review, I want to talk about the Tristan problem, which leaves a tension between the social order - which is imported, implanted, and put on the person - and the individual life. They don't go together. The word amor, Provencal for amour, spelled backwards is roma. So roma is the Roman Catholic church and its sacraments, and amor is individual experience. By what kind of magic can people put God in your heart? They can't. He's either there or not there, out of your own experience. That's the sense of this thing. Consequently, when we come to the Grail of Wolfram von Eschenbach, there is the problem of coordinating these two. 

 

            The theme of the Grail is the bringing of life into what is known as "the waste land." The waste land is the preliminary theme to which the Grail is the answer. What is the sense of "the waste land" in medieval terms and in T. S. Eliot's terms in his key poem, The Waste Land? It's exactly the same sense. It's the world of people living inauthentic lives - doing what they're supposed to do. In the twelfth century, people had to profess beliefs that they may or may not have held, they had to love in marriage people that they may or may not have learned to love, and they had to behave the way that the cardinals told them to behave. And as you will see when Parzival fails in the Grail adventure, he fails because he's doing what he's been told to do instead of what his heart tells him to do. 

 

            I want now to give some sense of the fantastic traditions and the levels of culture that have piled up in Europe, which is not the youngest but the oldest culture in the world - going way back to the caves. Lascaux and the other caves date from 30,000 B.C., and there's nothing like them on the planet for many, many millennia afterwards. Then on top of that tradition comes the Neolithic, the tradition of the early planting people. Then come the great Bronze Age traditions, then come the invading Indo-European warrior traditions, then comes the Roman tradition, then come the Christian traditions - each one piled right on top of the other. So I want to give a view of that development, and then we'll move into the two great stories: first Tristan, and then the Grail. 

 

            Merlin was the great "guru" of the Arthurian world. He had the whole program in his mind. The world of the Arthurian knights was a world of two great stages or periods. The first was that of Christianizing - or civilizing, you might say - the wild Iron Age, the barbaric world of Europe. After that came the age of the individual journey, the individual adventure. Now Merlin is a purely fictional figure, who's associated with the Druid mysteries. He's a sort of late manifestation of the Druid tradition. The Druids were the priests and spiritual guardians of the Celts, who came into Europe from Bavaria during the first millennium B.C. in two stages. The first stage, known as the Hallstatt culture, was what might be called an "ox-cart" culture: slow waves of herding people with their families in ox-drawn carts lumbering into the European wilderness and domesticating it. The second stage of invasion, beginning around 500 B.C., was during the period known as La Tene culture, which was centered in southern France and Switzerland. It was then that brilliant chariot warriors came in and went up into the British Isles. 

 

            The people who had been living in Europe before these invasions were pre-Celtic, pre-Indo-European, and their tradition may go back all the way to the caves. But the great period of their flowering was that of Stonehenge. Since Stonehenge was built in three or four different stages, its dates range from 1800 to 1400 B.C. In the medieval tradition Merlin is supposed to have brought the stones to Stonehenge. 

 

            There is an arch in Algeria, from the same period, and you recognize this from Mycenae. The way the uprights and the cross-beams are put together is exactly the way they're put together at Stonehenge. So, Stonehenge, or at least the great sarsen ring of Stonehenge, is of approximately the same date as Mycenae, the middle of the second millennium B.C., which is also the period of the High Bronze Age and the period of the great dynasties of imperial Egypt. In that same period, Syria was a very important culture center, and traders from there went out through the Mediterranean and up the coast to where Stonehenge is. 

 

            Now there are two types of bronze: one, an alloy of copper and arsenic, and the other, of copper and tin. The tin alloy was the most used and important, so wherever tin was found, there was a settlement of people mining it. One very important source of tin was in Transylvania, and another was in Cornwall, where, beginning in the second millennium B.C., there was a settlement of people mining tin. 

 

            In Mycenae is the great mound known as Agamemnon's Treasury, which was actually a great burial mound. Now, following the traders' path across the Mediterranean, we find a similar mound in southwest Spain, and then heading north into Ireland, we find Newgrange, site of another such burial mound, which dates from as early as 3100 B.C. What I'm trying to bring out here is that the marginal northwest of Europe was, from perhaps 3000 B.C., in immediate connection with the high cultures of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and  Syria. That's the deep ground of our story. 

 

            The gods of the Gentiles are devils and in the name of God you must get rid of them. That rejection of everybody in the world but oneself is what underlies the ferocity of the missionary work of the Christians in the third, fourth, and fifth centuries in Europe. 

 

            This is a mosaic of the eleventh century showing Arthur, Rex Artus, in hell, riding a goat. He was associated by the orthodox with demon worship. And so Arthur himself is put down. 

 

            So the part of Europe that belongs to the period of the great megalithic monuments is also what we might call the underground world of the Arthurian romances. And with the great caves - of Lascaux and so forth - found in the southwest of the region, we have a tradition going back to 30,000 B.C. operative in Europe - with a new and very important inflection in the second millennium B.C. 

 

            It is then that we have the invasion of what are known as the battle-axe people - the Aryans, the Indo-Europeans. And they come smashing in as warrior people and you have this overlay of a warrior, herding, patriarchal society on top of an earth-oriented, agricultural, mother goddess society. They come in from north of the Black Sea into Europe. There they break up into many, many special communities, but they are all related people with related languages. This is a historical principle that you'll find not only in this zone but in other zones as well. The people from an arid, relatively desert land come into a rich river valley land as conquerors. They're sturdy people. They've had a tough time. They impose themselves on the area, but they absorb the civilization from below, and the people below absorb their language and mythology, and you get this marriage. The same thing is happening at the same time in the Near East, where you have the Semites coming in. Again we have two groups - the people of the land and the people of the desert who come in as conquerors. 

 

            The Celts were just one group of Indo-Europeans. The first group of them come in, about 1000 B.C., as a lumbering, heavily laden people with their herds and families. Then in Switzerland and southern France, we have a new development, La Tene culture, great vigorous warrior tribes. 

 

            This is the Gringastip bowl from Denmark. We begin to have a notion of the deities of these people. The deer sheds its antlers and the antlers grow again. Any animal that has this kind of cycle becomes associated with the cosmic cycle, and the deer becomes a very important symbolic animal here. Any deity that may show itself as an animal can also show itself as a human being. If you have a real mythological tradition, the emphasis is not on the form of the god, but on the energy of the god. That energy can show itself in an animal form, in a human form, in the form of a rock - all kinds of forms. Here is the serpent that sheds its skin to be born again, and here is what is known as a torque, a neckpiece. Gold is the color of the sun. The serpent is the animal of the moon. We have here the solar torque of gold and the serpent that sheds its skin. The deity represents the synthesis of those two worlds. You get this same symbolic theme in Kundalini yoga, where the

two nerves, ida and pin gala, represent lunar and solar. So this is Cernunnos, one of the deities of the Celts. 

 

            To review, we have the old European Bronze Age culture, and on top of that we have the Celtic warrior traditions, and now the Romans come in (Caesar's Gallic Wars, 50 B.C.), and we have the Roman overlay. 

 

            This is a monument from the Roman period, probably dating between the first century B.C. and the first A.D. This figure has the antlers of a deer-the same god that we've just seen. In his lap is a cornucopia, and from it pours, inexhaustibly, the food. This is the Grail, the vessel of inexhaustible vitality. The Grail is that fountain in the center of the universe from which the energies of eternity pour into the world of time. It's in each of our hearts, that same energy. The grain comes out, and a deer and a bull feed. The deer is the wild animal, the bull is the domestic animal, symbolic of the lunar life. The two deities are Roman deities - Apollo and Mercury. Caesar, in the sixth chapter of his Gallic Wars, describes the gods of the Celts but gives them Roman names. This is wonderful: the Romans, and before them the Greeks, could see that the gods of other people were the same gods they worshiped, because those gods are personifications of the energies that shape and maintain the universe. So Caesar could go into Gaul and say, "He whom you call Cernunnos we call Pluto." When Alexander the Great went into India, 527 B.C., he recognized Krishna as a counterpart of Herakles and Indra as a counterpart of Zeus. So there no missionizing, but rather a wonderful recognition. But you could not possibly say, "He whom you call Ashur we call Yahweh." And why is that? That's because for the Celtic (?) tribes, the desert people, the principal divinities were the tribal gods, the patrons of their tribes, and the gods of nature were secondary or nonexistent. But in the Greek and Roman traditions, the principal deities are the deities that support the universe and the secondary deity is the tribal patron - the one who happens to be the guardian and advisor of a particular race. These two mythological perspectives are in total contrast. One is exclusive, the other is what is called syncretic. So, with the Romans we begin to have a combination of classical and Celtic divinities, and they all come from the same Indo-European Bronze Age background. There's a wonderful coordination taking place. 

 

            The Roman Empire was vast and included the whole world of the Near East, North Africa, and Europe. Alexander had gone through to India. King Ashoka, the great Buddhist king of the third century B.C., had sent Buddhist missionaries to Cyprus, to Macedon, and to Alexandria. So Hinduism and the Gnosticism of Buddhism were also operating in the Roman Empire and underlying these symbols, and these people knew about it. The Roman army included a lot of Persians who were sent up to Britain to defend the borders. The Danube was another border, and the Roman armies along there included many soldiers from the Orient. Then, in the fifth century, the Huns from Asia come smashing in with Attila, and they hit the Ostrogoths, who then bump into the Visgoths, and they in turn run into the Sarmatians, and so forth and so on, and the Roman lines cannot hold. Rome collapses. 

 

            Now I want to turn to something from this period that was found in the Pyrenees and is a big surprise. Just to the west of Lourdes is a little place called St. Pe', where we have this monument from the first century A.D. And what it says is "Lexiia, the daughter of Odan, has gained merit through her vows to Artehe." This shows us that already in the period of Roman Europe, Arthur, Artehe, was revered as a god. He's originally a Celtic god, and the place where we find him revered is in the Pyrenees. The name Artus, Arthur, is related to Artemis, Arcturus, and all of these are related to the deity, the bear. The bear is the oldest worshiped deity in the world. And in this part of the world, we have bear shrines going back to Neanderthal times, perhaps 100,000 B.C.

 

            So much for the Roman Empire up to the fourth century. Then we have Constantine, who converts that whole empire into a Christian empire. Along the Danube, as I said, there were Persian soldiers, and the Persian myth at that time was of Mithra. Mithra's great sacrifice was to kill the bull - the original cosmic bull - which releases the energies of life to the world. The sacrifice is the sacrifice of the container of the energy for the release of the energy. The contrast between the Mithraic and Christian religions, which were contemporary rivals for the Roman mind, was that in the Christian tradition the savior is the one who is killed, while in the Mithraic, the savior is the one who kills. Actually, the one killed and the one doing the killing - this is the same power. 

 

            This is why the Christian tradition has done a mean job on Judas. He is the midwife of our salvation. The negative and the positive are two aspects of the play in the field of time of the one power. According to the Gospels, at the Last Supper Jesus says, "He to whom I give the sop will betray me." He then dips a piece of bread in the wine and hands it to Judas. Is that not an assignment? Of the twelve, Judas is the one worthy to play the counter role to the sacrifice. 

 

            After Constantine, in the latter half of the fourth century, comes Theodosius, who declares that "no religion is to exist in the Roman Empire but the Christian religion, no form of the Christian religion but that of the Byzantine throne." So then starts an exodus to the Orient of Roman, Syrian, and other artists, and there is a great new flowering of the Persian and Indian arts and a complete collapse of the European. This is the fourth and fifth centuries. When did Europe come back? In the period we're talking about, and this is quite a story. A map showing the extent of the Christian empire - the Christianization of Europe - includes England and, specifically, Ireland, converted by Saint Patrick in the fifth century. And now what happens? Along the Danube are the German tribes. Bang! Rome collapses. The invasions take place. And now comes the invasion we're interested in. The Romans had to pull out of England around A.D. 450 to shorten their lines. They couldn't maintain themselves. That left England naked, like an oyster with the shell removed. There was no defense. And it was then that the Anglo-Saxons - the Danes, the Frisians, the people from Denmark and Germany - came pouring in. 

 

            This is the period of the warrior Arthur. The earlier god was down in the Pyrenees. Now we come to the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. in Britain, and there is a man named Arthur who fights for the Britains - that is to say, the Celtic people - against the invading English. This particular Arthur was not a king. The chroniclers of the time, Gildas (d. 570) and Nennius (fi.ca. 800), speak of him as a dux bellorum, a leader in war. He was a military man, a native fighter trained by the Romans, and he assisted the native British kings in their battles. To him are assigned, two or three centuries after his death, great victories in twelve battles. Twelve? You've got the zodiac. You've got a Sun King. He's already being identified with the gods. So this Artus Dux Bellorum becomes synthesized with the god image in the popular talk. 

 

            The British lost. The English won, but they won only in the area that the Romans had held. They did not go into Cornwall. They did not conquer Wales. They did not go into Scotland. So the old Celtic tradition survives in Ireland and in Wales and in Scotland. I would call this the Celtic matrix. All kinds of Celtic stories survive there. 

 

            The people from the south of England, the Bretons, immigrated to Brittany, and a legend grew up among them. Arthur was the great defender. He will return. He will restore us to our motherland. This is known as the Hope of the Bretons, and it's out of Brittany that much of this Arthurian legendry comes - refreshed, in the oral tradition, by material from Ireland and Wales - so there's a lot of old Celtic stuff associated with the stories. What has been going on meanwhile? In the seventh century A.D. there was a whole new problem - the rise of Islam. The Christians had been arguing about the relationship of the Son to the Father and the Holy Ghost to the Father and the Son, and all this kind of business. Then Muhammad comes along and says, "There's no God but God, and Muhammad is His Prophet." And what a relief that was. So with all the philosophical and theological arguments annihilated with just the statement "There's no God but God," Islam swept through much of the former Roman Empire and, within one century, the Moors were into Spain and at the gates of India. 

 

            Then, in A.D. 800, Charles the Great, Charlemagne, united Europe in the Christian empire, but when you read European history you wonder how the place survived at all. So we've had the German invasions, and then the Muslims sweeping across southern Europe, and now we have the Norse, the Vikings - riding up the rivers of Europe, burniing cities. This was the period - the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries - when in the Litany was the prayer "From the fury of the Normans, O Lord, deliver us." They were a wild, ferocious people who intentionally inspired terror. The imperiled Christian world had three hundred years of this kind of thing and was really in trouble. 

 

            Ireland had not been invaded by the Germanic people and was a stand of the old Christian traditions. Nonetheless, towers of refuge were built throughout Ireland during the ninth century. Here is a tenth-century stone cross from northeast Ireland. On its side is a symbolic design that suggests Chakras 4, 5, 6, and 7 of the Kundalini and the two serpents of ida and pingala. So underlying this tradition that we're talking about are these esoteric traditions. 

 

            The empire of Charlemagne survives the turmoil and then is split into three domains for his three sons. To one, he gave the world which is now France. To the second, he gave Germany, and to the third, Alsace-Lorraine, which has been back and forth between the two ever since. 

 

            An interesting thing then begins to happen: modern language evolves - French out of Latin, and German out of the Old Germanic. Whereas in Latin, the subject and the verb are together - amo, I love; amas, thou lovest; and so forth - now the subject begins to break away from the verb. Here again is the emphasis on the individual: ich liebe, I love. 

 

            In 1066 we have a new conquest of the British Isles, this time by William the Conqueror. In 1097 Pope Urban preaches the first crusade, and Europe, which has been squabbling, is united in one cause - going to the Near East to save the shrines of the Holy Land from the Muslims. So by the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the life of every young man had to be that of a warrior, of a knight, of a fighter. And when war is the career, war games are the play. So you have this whole tradition of jousting and of battle: with their ladies watching, the young men show off, knock each other off their horses, and go into battle, each for his lady, wearing her scarf in his helmet. 

 

            There's a wonderful story of Guinevere and Lancelot, her lover. She wants to show her power, so she tells him to go into the jousting as a fool. "Lose, don't win," she says. "Get knocked off your horse until I give you a sign, and then let go." So Lancelot, a knight who always does what his lady wants, goes into the joust, gets knocked around, and then, at a signal from Guinevere, defeats his opponents. 

 

            This is the background of Tristan and the Grail. We have this great esoteric information in the images, with what appears to be just superficial play going on.