Tag: religion

The Grail Legend

Since my mid-teens when I first encountered Modern Man in Search of a Soul and Man and His Symbols, I’ve been interested in Jung and Jungians. In my 20s I worked my way through Jung’s major works, up to a brief attempt at Mysterium Conjunctionis, which defeated me, and like Finnegan’s Wake has resisted any further attempts at reading.

I’d read recently H is for Hawk, which was an interesting memoir about a young woman who deals with the loss of her father by training a goshawk–and in her book Helen MacDonald repeatedly refers to T.H. White’s own book about training a goshawk. T.H. White, of course, was the author of The Once and Future King series about Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and I considered reading those novels for the first time but don’t have them on the shelf. I did, however, have Emma Jung’s analysis of the Grail Legend and picked that up instead.

Emma Jung was Jung’s wife and collaborator, and was a sophisticated analyst as well. Her book is introduced by another long-time associate of Jung’s, Marie-Louise von Franz, who edited and finished the work after Emma Jung died.

As is often the case with books by Jung or Jungians, this is a challenging read, and it presumes a familiarity with Jung’s work and in particular his book Aion.

It is Emma Jung’s contention that the Grail Legend is an attempt by the collective unconscious of pagan Europe to adapt to and internalize Christianity. From our home here in the Correze I can very quickly visit several fountains which were originally pagan sacred sites but which were renamed in the 4th or 5th century for Christian saints and turned into Christian sacred sites. There is a lovely one here in Treignac designated The Fountain of St Meen. Also easily accessible nearby are several ancient crosses, dropped by monks on pagan sacred sites in order to Christianize the locals. One of my faves is La Croix en Haute in Lestards.

Christianity of course was an import to Europe from the Middle East, and its doctrines and rituals struck local residents as strange and alien. But over time as society became structured by converted local nobles and local monastaries and abbeys, pagans had little choice but to adopt themselves to the new religion. But the heavily patriarchal belief system with its dogma of sin and repentence and featuring a hostility towards women, magic, sex and nature was hard to swallow for locals who had their own beliefs almost completely at odds with the Christian worldview.

And so a new series of myths and legends erupted in order to compensate for and make more comprehensible the tenets of this new faith. Emma Jung documents carefully how the writers who first codified the Grail legend took material from widely dispersed pagan legends from as far afield as Wales, Ireland, Syria, Persia, and old Saxony. French poets and troubadors and English poets and historians and German poets all began singing and composing verse about Arthur and his knights and their quest for the Grail.

The Grail is typically understood as a cup which at one time held the blood of Christ captured at his crucifiction–but Jung shows that some stories present the grail as a plate or serving dish. It has the power to heal or destroy, and it exists in a hidden realm in an alternate reality accessible only to those pure enough to find it.

Associated symbols are analyzed and discussed in detail. The Fisher King is linked to the Piscean Age, the sudden eruption of the cult of the Virgin to compensate for a lack of the feminine in doctinaire Catholicism is described, connections between the Grail stories and other concurrent trends (Cathar and Templar beliefs, for example) are established and illuminated.

The focus of the work is Percival and his adventures. His family ties to the Fisher King and back through time to Joseph of Arimethea is examined through a Jungian lens.

To A Mountain in Tibet

A friend kindly leant me this. I often refuse to borrow books because I like to read my own copy and put it on a bookshelf for decades after. But I’d read and really enjoyed Shadow of the Silk Road, and I’m a (very) small business owner trying to live more frugally than when I was a lavishly funded public school teacher in the USA (LOL). So I accepted it (and three other excellent books she kindly offered).

Ostensibly, this is a travel book, and it does indeed recount a truly remarkable voyage to a particularly special and demanding destination. But this is actually a book about grief, and it’s the best book about grief I’ve read since Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Though the family members grieved by Thubron are present for less than 10 pages of the 220 in the book, they haunt its passages about Nepal and Tibet like the dakini spirits he describes.

Of course there is no better country than Tibet in which to devote a mournful pilgrimage and to explore loss and impermanence. Turbron describes the destruction by artillery of several ancient monasteries and the smashing of others by hand during the Cultural Revolution. He meets many people who have their own griefs about family and displacement and the Himalayas become a resonator for sorrow. Many practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism have been displaced by state terror or official exile. And yet the Hindu and Bon and Buddhist pilgrims still come and do their circuits of Mount Kailas. Thurbron does his as well, but finds little comfort in the astonishing myth-enshrouded terrain, birthplace of the Earth and abode of the gods and demons for several religions.