In Search of the Holy Grail:  The Parzival Legend

 

What's the source of the Grail story, where does it come from? Chretien de Troyes says he got the story from a book that was given to him by Count Philip of Flanders, a friend of his patron, Marie of Champagne. We don't know where the book came from, but this is our earliest source for the Grail story. 

 

            Chretien simply retold the story in Old French verse. Chretien was such a virtuosic versifier that one of the German scholars said he could shake couplets from his sleeve like a magician. His retelling ripples along, but he never finished it. He was a cleric, and it may be that as he went along with the story he felt he didn't like what it was leading to. The story was continued by what are called Chretien continuators. Some scholars see three men, some see five there. But they didn't really continue the story. They brought in a lot of other Celtic material, dealing largely with Gawain, and another set of adventures entirely. I mentioned earlier the two Cistercians who wrote the story from a monastic point of view. We don't know what their names were. First there was the Queste del Saint Graal, and then the Estoire del Saint Graal. They followed a man called Robert de Boron, who also had interpreted this story as being about the vessels of Christ's suffering. So these are the ecclesiastical versions of the Grail. The hero, Galahad, is called Galehaut, which is supposed to have come from the Hebrew and means "heap of witness." It's definitely an ecclesiastical accent. 

 

            One of the things you get in the story is the disqualification of most of the knights because of their secular character. The only two that come through are Sir Bors and Sir Galahad. Poor Lancelot came very close to experiencing the Grail. He came to the castle, to a room where an old priest was celebrating the mass. The old priest elevated the host and almost fell down because it became the body of the young Christ. It was more than he could hold. Lancelot was moved by compassion to go into the room and rescue the priest, but he was struck down because he was unworthy to be present. Why? Because of his love for Guinevere. To be forgiven of a sin you have to have true contrition. He could not experience contrition for his love for Guinevere. That's beautiful. For a monk to get that one in speaks very well for him. 

 

            The story, however, was developed to the full by Wolfram von Eschenbach, who was a Bavarian knight. He understood what knighthood was about in a way that Gottfried never did, in a way that the monks couldn't. And so he presents the hero - Perceval, Parsival, Parzival - as the ideal of the twelfth-century kknight. 

 

            Wolfram says Chretien didn't understand the story. "I have," says he, "as my source the poet Kyot." We don't know who that was, but he had supposedly been in Spain, where he got the story from a Moorish alchemist. So there are alchemical themes in this story. His version of the Grail is a stone vessel, which was brought down from heaven. Now what he's doing is imitating the Muslim Kaaba, the stone at Mecca that was brought down from heaven.

 

            The Grail was brought down from heaven by the neutral angels. There's the key. Lucifer, the proudest of the angels, was asked to bow before man as God's highest creation. Formerly God had said, "Bow only to me." Now He changes the rules and says, "Bow to man." Lucifer would not bow. The Christian interpretation is that it was pride that kept him from bowing: Lucifer would not bow to man. The Shi'ite Muslim interpretation is that it was love of God: Lucifer couldn't bring himself to bow to anybody but God. So Satan in hell is God's truest worshiper. They say that the great pain of hell is not fire or physical torment, but the loss, forever, of the sight of your beloved, which is God. And what supports Satan in hell? His memory of the voice of his beloved when his beloved said, "Be gone." This is the Shi'ite version of Lucifer's Fall. 

 

            Anyway, there was this war in heaven, and there were some angels who sided with God and others who sided with Lucifer - the pair of opposites. The metaphysical mystery is to go past all opposites. Where you have opposites of good and evil, you are simply in the field of ethics. Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden when they knew the difference between good and evil. Nature knows nothing of that. The neutral angels were neither on God's side nor on Lucifer's side; and Wolfram interprets the name of Parzival as perce a val, the one piercing through the middle of the valley, going between the pair of opposites. This is heresy. We're in the realm of Gnostic traditions right away. 

 

            Wolfram begins his romance with a long verse to the point that black and white are the qualities of every act. Every act has both good and evil. So what are you going to do about living? Since everything you do has two effects, he says, all you can do is lean towards the good. 

 

            After this opening, Wolfram goes back to Chretien and begins to tell of Parzival's father, Gahmuret. He was a Christian knight, but he was a knight adventurer who went to the Holy Land, where he took service with the caliph of Baghdad. Now the thing Wolfram is saying to us is that virtue is not confined to the Christian world, despite the fact that the Islamic and Christian traditions are in conflict with each other. 

 

            Gahmuret, as a knight of the caliph, comes to a castle which is being besieged by two armies, a Muslim army and a Christian army. He goes to the service of the queen of that castle, who is known as the Black Queen of Zazamanc. She's a Turkish queen, and she is an actual historical character. This period was the period of the Crusades, and there were reports coming back to Europe of all kinds of Oriental adventures, Oriental temples, Oriental marvels. 

 

            It was the period also of Islam conquering India. This began in A.D. 1001 and went on through to about 1550. So there were reports of the Muslims fighting on two fronts. They were fighting in India and they were fighting the European Christians. 

 

            Wolfram places his scene in the world of the medieval battlefields - not just a fairyland, as you have in many of the other Arthurian romances, but right on the ground. Many of his characters have been identified. The name of the Black Queen of Zazamanc is Belak. If you translate that into an Oriental language, it's "Belakane," which means she was the widow of a warrior named Belak, who was killed in the battle of Aleppo. They're actual historical characters. Gahmuret takes the service of the Black Queen of Zazamanc and lifts the siege. So he's her hero, he becomes her knight, and he marries her. Now he's the King of Zazamanc, and she doesn't want him to go out and get killed, so she forbids him to fight. All he lives for is fighting, so after having begotten a son on the Black Queen of Zazamanc, he takes French leave and one night isn't there. 

 

            He goes back to Britain, where this little unmarried queen named Herzeloyde decides to have a jousting festival. The one who wins the jousting festival wins her. So the jousting festival takes place, and of course the one who wins is the King of Zazamanc, namely Gahmuret, and he marries Herzeloyde. He begets a son on her,

goes back to serve the caliph of Baghdad, goes out to fight some more, and gets killed. So there are two widows of this great warrior, one in the Orient and one in Britain. 

 

            The Black Queen of Zazamanc gives birth to a boy who is black and white. His name is Feirefiz, which means the fils, the son, of various cultures, various hues. He is a noble, beautiful youth. 

 

            Herzeloyde, meanwhile, is sick and tired of courtly jousting and all that fighting. She doesn't want her son - she knows it's going to be a boy - to be involved in all that. So she goes out into the country and gets a little farm, and won't have anything to do with what's going on in the court. Her beautiful boy is born with the noble heart of his father - you might say, he was by nature a knight. He doesn't know anything about knighthood, but he learns to make javelins. One day he sees a bird and he spontaneously kills it. When he sees that he's killed the bird, he weeps. He doesn't realize what his acts are going to do. When he's about fifteen years old - he's this blond, callow bumpkin - he's wandering through the fields, a knight goes riding past with a girl, and he's stunned. Then three more knights come along. They say, "Did you see a guy go past here with a dame?" He goes down on his knees. He thinks they're angels. His mother's talked to him, not about knights, but about a God, angels, and all those things. So the only other thing he knows about are angels, and he goes down on his knees. One knight says, "Get off your knees, you don't kneel to knights."

 

            "Knights? What are knights?"

            "Well, we're knights."

            "How does one become a knight?"

            "Go to Arthur's court."

            "Where's Arthur's court?"

            "Down the line."

 

            So he goes back to his mother and says, "I want to be a knight." She faints. "Well," she says to herself, "I'll fix him." So she makes him a ridiculous costume of coarse cloth, a kind of a heavy one-piece sack that comes down to about mid-calf, and he looks a simple fool in this outfit, but what a boy he is. He gets on the farm horse, with his javelins in his quiver on his shoulder, and goes jogging off. She trots after him, and when he turns the corner, she drops dead. That's not a good way to begin your life, by killing your mother; but, again, he didn't know he did it. 

 

            Just as Parzival arrives at Arthur's court, a knight in flaming red armor comes out carrying a golden chalice. This is a king, one of the greatest kings in the world, who believes that King Arthur has stolen some of his property. So he's challenged King Arthur by riding into his court and going right up to the table where Arthur, with Guinevere at his side, and his knights are sitting, and he's taken the wine glass from Guinevere and thrown the wine in her face and said, "Anyone who wants to avenge this, meet me out in the yard." Just at that time, this lout rides in and thinks, "Oh, I'm going to be the champion." And he rides out to kill the king. 

 

            Well, when the king sees this phenomenon on a farm horse and in a fool's rig coming at him, he won't even insult his lance by using it properly. He turns it around the other way and just slugs Parzival off the horse. Parzival and his horse are on the ground. Parzival reaches into his quiver, takes a javelin, and sends it through the knight's visor into his eye and kills him. That's not the proper way to kill a knight, so Arthur's court is now twice shamed. 

 

            Arthur, meanwhile, has caught on that something's happening, and he sends a young page out to see what's going on in the yard. The page finds Parzival dragging the Red Knight around, trying to get the armor off, but he doesn't know how to do it. The page helps him get it off, puts it on him, and Parzival gets on the knight's big horse. He knows how to start the horse, but not how to stop it. So Parzival is off on his career. 

 

            The horse goes full tilt for the rest of the day, and at evening pulls up at a little rural castle. This is the castle of Gurnemanz, an old knight who has lost three sons in jousting and has a little lonely daughter. So this red knight pulls up. As far as they know, this is the Red Knight, the great king. "Oh, come in." They take the armor off, and here's this fool underneath. What a shock. But Gurnemanz knows how to judge male flesh, and he realizes this is some boy. Also, he thinks, this is somebody for my little daughter. So Gurnemanz teaches Parzival the arts of knighthood - how to handle weapons and what the honor system is. One of the requirements of the honor system is that a knight does not ask unnecessary questions. Important. If you want to be a proper knight, you don't ask unnecessary questions. 

 

            It's a lovely, lovely, idyllic period in the romance. Finally the old man offers his daughter to Parzival. Now that's good old standard stuff, but as I said earlier, it's the problem of the Waste Land - people living life inauthentically, living not their life but the life that's put on them by the society. Parzival thinks, "I do not marry a woman who is given to me, I earn my wife." That's the beginning of marriage and love united, the first reply to the split between them. There follows a lovely scene where Parzival takes his departure of the old man and rides off. 

 

            Parzival lets the reins lie slack on the horse's neck. In this tradition, the horse represents the will in nature, and the rider represents the rational control. Here nature is what's moving us. Compare this tradition with the Christian tradition from the Near East, wherein nature is good and evil but we've got to be good, a tradition that does not say "Yield to nature" but rather "Correct nature." Wolfram is here saying "Yield." And the nature of that horse carries Parzival to a castle. 

 

            This is the castle of a young orphan queen who is exactly his age. Her name is Condwiramurs - conduire amours, the guide of love. The castle is in distress. He comes in, and when they take the armor off - the first thing always was to take the armor off a knight - he's all covered with rust because this stuff got all rusty inside. They give him a nice bath and something soft to wear. So he is received and bathed and given soft garments and so forth. He is also given a bed in which to sleep the night. 

 

            He wakes up in the middle of the night. There's somebody kneeling and weeping at his bedside. It's the little queen. "Oh!" he says, remembering that his mother told him that you don't kneel to anyone but God. "If you want this bed, I can sleep over there." She says, "If you promise not to wrestle with me, I'll get in and tell you my story." Wolfram says she was dressed for war; she was wearing a transparent nightgown. So she gets into the bed, and she says, "Let me tell you how it is. Here's this king. He has sent his knights to take my castle." Good old medieval stuff. "He wants to unite my land with his land and marry me, to confirm the appropriation." She says, "Rather than marry him I would jump from my tower into my moat. You've seen my tower, how high it is, you've seen the moat, how deep it is." "Well," says Parzival, "who's running the army out there?" And she tells him the name of this great knight, and he says, "Well, I'll kill him in the morning." She says, "That's fine." So he goes to sleep. 

 

            In the morning, down goes the drawbridge; the Red Knight comes pounding across, and within a few half hours or so, he's got the leader of the invading power on the ground. He rips off his helmet and is about to cut his head off when the knight says, "I yield, I'm your man." Well, he's learned all the lessons. He says, "You go to Arthur's court, tell them Parzival sent you." Well, during the course of the next few months, a number of people arrive in Arthur's court saying "This knight named Parzival sent me," and Arthur says, "Boy, we really lost something there." So the court sets out to find him. 

 

            When Parzival comes back, Condwiramurs has put her hair up in the way of a married woman. They're married. This is marriage for love, the mind's love, the love of character, the love of quality, and they go to bed. Well, he doesn't know anything, and she doesn't know much more, and so they just lie there. As Wolfram says,

"Not many a lady nowadays would have been satisfied with such a night." And then there was the second night, and there was the third night, and then Parzival thought, "Oh, yes, mother told me." So Wolfram says, "If you'll pardon me for letting you know, they interlaced arms and legs and thought, 'This is what we should have been doing all the time,' and the marriage was consummated." No priest. The answer: marriage is the confirmation of love, and sexual love is the sacramentalization of marriage. That's bringing the two terms together. 

 

            This is the first time it's been done, and this is actually the ideal of marriage in our world today - marriage for love. This is the most difficult kind of marriage, because the whole basis of it is relationship, person to person, not to this function, that function, or another.

 

            The point here is that it was not a marriage that began with physical sex; when she put her hair up, they were married. Wolfram tells us that it starts in the spirit and is fulfilled in the flesh. Well, they have a little boy, and she is pregnant again, and Parzival thinks, "I wonder about Mother." Well, Mother's dead, but he doesn't know it. By now we're two years on. He is one of the great knights. He has achieved fulfillment in the world, and he is ready for the spiritual adventure. No monkish knight, no Galahad, the spirit is the fulfillment of life, not something instead of life. He asks for permission to ride back and see how his mother is, and his queen gives him permission. 

 

            So he rides off. Again the reins are slack on the neck of the horse, and that evening he pulls up at a lake. Out in the lake there's a boat, and in it are two men fishing, and one of them has peacock feathers in his bonnet. This is the Grail King, who is, in this story, symbolic of the whole problem of the Waste Land. The Grail King did not earn his position, he inherited it. When he was a beautiful young man, one fine day he rode out of the palace with the war cry "Amors!" 

 

            That's all right for a nice young man, but it's not the proper intention of the keeper of the Grail, a symbol of the highest spiritual fulfillment. He rode out, you might say, on the level of Cakra 2 instead of Cakra 6. As he was riding out, he came to a forest. Out of the forest came riding a pagan knight from the Holy Land near the place of the Holy Sepulcher. The two knights placed their lances and rode at each other. The Grail King's lance killed the pagan knight, and the pagan knight's lance castrated the king and broke the tip of the lance remaining in the wound. 

 

            What is Wolfram telling us? He is telling us that the spiritual ideal of the Middle Ages, which distinguished supernatural from natural grace, has castrated Europe. The natural grace - the movement of the horse - is not allowed, is not what dictates life. What dictates life is supernatural grace, this notion of some spiritual thing that comes by way of the cardinals of the church telling you what's good and what's bad. Nature has been killed in Europe. The energy of nature - this is Wolfram's lesson, and he says it - has been killed. The death of that pagan knight symbolizes it, and the spiritual impotence of the Grail King is the consequence. 

 

            The Grail King, in terrific pain, rode back to the court. When the lance tip was withdrawn from his wound, on it was the word Grail. The meaning of this is: the natural tendency of nature is to the spirit, whereas he - the lord of the spirit - had rejected nature. The Waste Land. How is the Waste Land going to be cured? The answer is by the spontaneous act of a noble heart, whose impulse is not of ego but of love - and love in the sense not of sexual love, but of compassion. That's the Grail problem. 

 

            Parzival, on the shore, says, "Look, it's getting late, is there someplace around here where a person can spend the night?" The king himself says, "Around the corner you'll see a castle; give a call, they'll let the drawbridge down. If you can get there, and don't get lost - a lot of people get lost here - I'll see you tonight. I'll be your host." It all works out. He arrives at the castle and is received with great expectation. 

 

            Now, the interesting thing about enchantment is that the people who are enchanted know how the enchantment is to be lifted, but they can't lift it. The one who is to lift the enchantment does not know how it is to be lifted, but by his spontaneous act he does the thing that has to be done. So these people know that a knight will come and through the proper act lift the enchantment. They think, "Here he is, this beautiful boy." 

 

            That evening there is an enormous festival in the great hall - symbolically rendered, beautifully, by Wolfram - and in the course of it, the king is brought in on a litter. He can neither stand nor sit nor lie. T. S. Eliot takes that line right out of Wolfram von Eschenbach and uses it in The Waste Land: "Here one can neither sit nor stand nor lie down." And Parzival - here's the key now, this is the crisis of the story - is filled with compassion and is moved to ask, "What ails you, uncle?" But immediately he thinks, "A knight does not ask questions." And so, in the name of his social image, he continues the Waste Land principle of acting according to the way you've been told to act instead of the way of the spontaneity of your noble nature. 

 

            The adventure fails. The king is very cordial, polite. Everyone knows what has happened, but Parzival doesn't. The king, as the host, gives his guest a present, a sword. It is a sword which is going to break at a critical moment, just as he broke at a critical moment. He's ushered to his room, put sweetly to bed, and when he gets up in the morning, there isn't a soul in the castle, the place is completely quiet. He looks out the window; there's his horse, with his lance and shield. He doesn't know what's happened. He goes down, gets on the horse, and as he rides across the drawbridge, it is lifted just a little too soon and clips the horse's heels. A voice shouts at him, "Go on, you goose!" That line you'll probably remember from Wagner's Parsifal. 

 

            Parzival spends the next five years trying to get back to that castle. He rides around not knowing where he is, what he's doing, people cursing him. Arthur's court, meanwhile, has gone to find this great guy. So one fine morning in early winter, he's riding on his horse looking for the castle. He can't find it. Although it's right where it was and he's right where it was, it's not visible to him. He sees red blood and black feathers on the white snow where a falcon has attacked a goose. It reminds him of Condwiramurs, her red lips, her white skin, her black hair. He's fascinated, in a love trance. 

 

            Meanwhile, Arthur's court arrives, with their pavilions and tents. A young page sees in the distance this knight sitting on his horse just gazing at the snow. He rousts the court, and Sir Segramors, an eager young knight, dashes into Arthur's tent, snatches the covers off Arthur and Guinevere - there they are stark naked - and pleads to be the first to ride against the unknown knight. Laughing, they consent, and he rides out against the entranced Parzival, whose horse - this marvelous horse - simply turns so that Parzival's lance sends Segramors flying. So they send Sir Keie, the lout of Arthur's group, who also gets thrown, and ends up with a broken arm and leg. Then they send Sir Gawain, who goes out unarmed. Now Gawain's around thirty-six or so. He's been around. He's known as the lady's knight. He sees Parzival in absorbed arrest and says to himself, "This is a love trance." So he flings his big yellow scarf so that it falls over the sign on the snow. Parzival's trance is broken, they have a courteous conversation, and Gawain invites him to Arthur's court. 

 

            So he brings Parzival to Arthur's court. The court welcomes him delightedly, and they set up a picnic. On a flowery field they spread a great big circular cloth of Orient silk, and all sit around it - knight, lady, knight, lady - and await the adventure that must precede their meal. And then, on the horizon, they see a tall, sort of pinkish mule, and riding on the mule is a lady, with a face like a boar and hands that are about as beautiful as those of a monkey, and she has a very fashionable hat from London hanging down in back. This is the Grail messenger. She rides directly to Arthur and says, "You are disgraced forever, receiving into your court this foul monster here." And then she goes to Parzival and says, "Despite the beauty of your face you are more ugly than I." Then she tells what he did and says, "God's curse is on you." Turning to the company, she says, "I have another adventure to suggest. There is a castle with four hundred knights and four hundred ladies that's under enchantment. Who will go on that?" 

 

            Several knights take up that adventure, and when Gawain is leaving, he says to the shamed Parzival, "I commit you to God's graces." Parzival says, "I hate God. I have nothing to do with God. I thought I was serving God. I thought doing as I had been told was the sacred thing to do. And look what he's done to me. I'm through with God." Then Parzival leaves and goes off on his quest. 

 

            On his quest he comes to a hermitage, and the hermit says, "Come in and have dinner." When he sits down, the hermit says, "Let's say grace." Parzival says, "I don't say grace. I hate God." The hermit, whose name is Trevrizent, says, "You hate God? Who's crazy here? God returns manyfold what you give to him. Give him love, and you will have his love. Give him hate, and you will have his hate." This is an interesting thought, that the relation to God is a function of you. Parzival tells him of his adventure and says, "I'm going to go back to that castle." Trevrizent says, "You can't. The adventure must be done spontaneously, the first time; you can't go back to it." Parzival says, "I'm going to do it." He rides off. 

 

            Well, the story goes on and on and on and on, and finally Gawain has rescued the four hundred knights and the four hundred ladies and has, meanwhile, fallen in love. Now, this is a guy who has been with one lady after another and, finally, he is taken. He's riding up a hill one day, when he sees this woman seated with her horse nearby, and he is smitten. He gets off his horse and says, "I'm your man. "Oh," she says, "don't be silly. I don't take things like that." He says, "Well, take 'em or not, I'm your man." She says, "I'll give you a hard time." He says, “You'll only be injuring your own property." And she does give him a hard time - it's a wild story - but Gawain's commitment is steadfast. The high virtue in all of this is loyalty: in love, loyalty; in marriage, loyalty. This is the high, high virtue of this knightly affair. Well, finally, Gawain solves all the problems for this really mad woman, and they're to be married. So Arthur's court and the four hundred men and four hundred women from the castle that Gawain has disenchanted are assembled for his great marriage, when a solitary knight approaches across the plain. Gawain and the stranger ride at each other and unhorse each other and then find who is who and so forth. The interloper, of course, is Parzival, and so an invitation goes out to him: "We're having a wonderful time here at the marriage of Sir Gawain, be with us." Well, as Wolfram says, "There was love and joy in the pavilions." 

 

            But when Parzival sees all this going on, he can't stay there because his own heart is loyal to Condwiramurs, and so out of love for her, he leaves the greatest party the Middle Ages has ever seen and goes riding away. As he's riding, out of the dark forest comes a pagan knight riding toward him - it's the repetition of the old story. The two knights ride at each other, unhorse each other, go at each other with swords, and Parzival's sword breaks on the helmet of the pagan knight, who throws his own sword away and says, "I don't fight a man without weapons. Let's sit down." They sit down and take off their helmets. The pagan knight is black and white. He's Feirefiz, Parzival's brother. So they begin talking about their father. 

 

            Parzival then says, 'Well, there's a great party down the way, perhaps you'd enjoy it." So they go back to the party, and Wolfram says the ladies were particularly enchanted by the grace of Feirefiz, probably because of his interesting complexion. 

 

            There then appears on the horizon a tall, pink mule, and on it is the lady with the stylish London hat and the face of a boar, and she rides up to Parzival and says, "Come to the Grail castle. Through your loyalty you have achieved the adventure. And bring your friend." Now this is something. Very few Christians could come to the Grail castle, and here the Grail messenger invites a pagan, a Muslim. What counts is your spiritual stature, not whether you were baptized or whether you were circumcised. 

 

            So the two come to the castle where the ceremonial adventure takes place. The Grail Maiden comes in. Now it's interesting to recall that the clergy of that period were such an immoral bunch that Pope Innocent III himself called them a sty of pigs. Saint Augustine had implicitly condoned their immorality back in the fifth century, when he responded to the Donatists' heretical declaration that sacraments administered by immoral clergymen don't work, by saying, "No, the sacrament is incorruptible and it doesn't matter." So the clergy's morality didn't matter, and the result was what they had in the twelve and thirteenth centuries. 

 

            The Grail castle, however, is not a church, and the Grail is carried by the Grail Maiden, who is a virgin. She really is a virgin. These are people who are what they are said to be, not inauthentic at all. Well, the Grail Maiden is a beautiful girl, and this Muslim has an eye for the girls, and soon people notice that he can't see the Grail, all he can see is the girl. So they begin to murmur and think, Well, he should be baptized. The first time I came to this part of the story I thought, Now, Wolfram, don't, don't, don't let me down. And he didn't. 

 

            An old priest comes in with an empty baptismal font made of ruby, and Wolfram says it's an old priest who has converted and baptized many a heathen. The baptismal font is tipped toward the Grail and fills with Grail water. Now, the name of the Grail is La pis exilis, and that's the name of the philosopher's stone. With this Grail water, then, the pagan is being baptized, when he says, "What's this, what's going on here? What are you people doing?" They say, "We're turning you into a Christian." He says, "What does that mean?" They say, "That means you give up your God and you accept our God." He says, "Is your God her God?" They say, "Yes." He says, "I'm a Christian." 

 

            So there he is, baptized, and then, not only does he see the Grail, but there appears on the Grail an inscription.

 

If any member of this community should, by the grace of God, become the ruler of an alien people, let him

see to it that they are given their rights.

 

            This is the first time, I think, in the history of civilization that such a thought was expressed. The Magna Carta was 1215 in England, but that was the barons asking for their rights from the king. Here is the idea of the king ruling, not in his name, but in the name of his people. So we have in Wolfram marriage for love, love confirmed through loyalty in marriage, and the king ruling for the people. Big stuff, and in the early thirteenth century.

 

            Then Parzival asks the king, "What ails you?" Immediately, the king is healed, and Parzival himself becomes the Grail King, the guardian of the highest spiritual values - compassion and loyalty. And then his lovely wife arrives, now with two little boys - one of them is Lohengrin - and there's a beautiful scene of reunion.

 

            And finally, Trevrizent - the hermit who had said "You can't do it" when Parzival had said "I am going back to that castle" - says to Parzival, "You, through your tenacity of purpose, have changed God's law." That's big talk. The god within us is the one that gives the laws and can change the laws. And it is within us.