The Wasteland, the Wounded King, and the Grail Quest
The power of compassion to heal wounds great and small
The image of the Wasteland is an ancient one. But its anxieties haunt our present. What leads an individual, a society, a land to ruin? It is a terrifying question without a clear, easy answer. In the distant past, people nevertheless sought simple causes. From Celtic lands to ancient Greece, the human mind, given to symbolism and belief in sympathetic magic, saw the flourishing of its lands and livestock inextricably linked to the physical and spiritual health of its kings. Whether Bran the Blessed or Oedipus, a physically or morally flawed sovereign could bring on plague, famine, and pestilence.
In some cultures, it was believed that kings were the bridegrooms of goddesses, such as in the infamous example of bestiality and sacrifice described so vividly by Geraldus Cambrensis. Sovereigns had to be worthy specimens or the goddess would refuse them as consorts and the lands would become barren. A king with a disqualifying blemish, particularly one to the genitals, was an unacceptable occupant for the throne. If crops and stock declined, a king’s head might be on the chopping block, as it signified his having earned the goddess’s displeasure. Some hypothesize that many of the Irish bog bodies are the remains of sacrificed kings who met their end when their subjects fell on hard times, and whose dramatic retirements were meant to rejuvenate the land.
Dawn vs Darkness
The recent Easter holiday, of course, has its roots in a celebration of the rites of spring. Eastre/Eostre/Ostara was the Anglo-Saxon goddess of Dawn, and our English word “east” derives from the same root. She has cognates across the Indo-European (IE) world, which suggests that Dawn, or the act of sunrising, was held sacred and worthy of celebration. In the days before the precision of magnetic north became our guiding principle, IE people pointed to where the daily miracle of sunrise occurred to orient themselves in the world.
Similarly, the celebration of vegetation rising from the lifeless earth and the creatures emerging from their burrows around the spring equinox was rejoiced with due reverence. It’s easy to see why Christians co-opted this festival for their god who also rose from apparent death to new life. Spring and dawn were times to show gratitude for the reappearance of life and light, emerging after spells of darkness and dearth.
But, sometimes events in the natural world are not reflective of our experience in the social or spiritual worlds we inhabit. Just as overcast skies make a poor companion for a happy heart, it can be hard to reconcile endless, sunny days with a less-than sunny outlook. As someone who lived in Arizona for a few years, sometimes too much sunshine can be oppressive, and all you crave is a grey sky or a rainy day to mirror your shitty mood. You need the occasional thunderstorm to echo your inner turmoil.
The Wasteland
So, when in “The Waste Land,” T.S. Eliot called April the cruelest month, maybe he had a point.
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain
—T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”
What right has the earth to bring forth so much vitality, beauty, and life around us while there remains so much apathy, ugliness, and misery within us and our decaying civilization? For him, it seems, this was the essence of his Wasteland. The false pretense of hope in a seemingly hopeless world. Eliot’s Wasteland is not physically barren as its ancient precursors were. It is spiritually sterile. But the effect is much the same. It has rendered its citizens feeble, hollow, lifeless. It has left them forsaken and forlorn. That is the Wasteland’s ultimate curse.
The Grail Quest
There have, of course, been other Wastelands in poetry and myth for millennia. The most famous perhaps, alluded to by Eliot, is the desolate realm of the Fisher King in the grail romances. Several versions of the story exist, but the basic theme is that of a king who is wounded in the nether regions, rendering him spiritually and physically impotent. Called the Fisher King—a kind of parallel Pope (the fisher of men)—his realm has been doomed to suffer a corresponding lack of fertility as a result of this injury. The problem of the hero is to heal the king’s affliction and thereby heal the land. Except, the hero embarks in ignorance, not knowing the rules of his quest, but must trust in his knightly training and noble nature to discover the secret that will restore his world.
Upon entering the Grail Castle, the young knight fails in his unnamed mission, which was to ask the wounded king The Question that will release him from his pain: what is the cause of his suffering? When he awakes the next morning, the castle is abandoned, and the hero lives in exile for a period of years, unable to return or even see the castle. When the knight is finally ready, the Grail Castle reappears, and the wiser hero earns another chance to ask The Question.
The Grail Hero
Joseph Campbell examined the grail legend mainly through Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, which represents a particularly sophisticated view of the Grail Quest. Campbell defined the Wasteland as a place where its citizens live unfulfilled, inauthentic lives, performing duties against their nature, professing beliefs they don’t hold. To this end, the Grail Hero, Parzival, learns knightly rules, including not to indulge his curiosity or ask too many questions, and not to speak unless spoken to. Strict courtly manners and the knightly code of honor alone are to be his guiding lights.1
Campbell considered the nature of Parzival’s failure in the Grail Castle to be a failure of compassion—not failure to feel compassion, but to properly express it, due to the constraints of his station as a knight.
On coming into the grail castle and seeing the wounded king, he [Parzival] was moved spontaneously with compassion to ask ‘what is the matter here,’ but he had been taught a good knight does not ask questions, so he let the social rule prevail over his spontaneous action. He failed to ask the question and the quest had failed. It is through our spontaneous life and the leading of that, that we can save our society. Now when T.S. Eliot picks up the idea of wasteland for our society, it’s simply this: of people doing things they’re told to do; people going into business because that’s where you earn your money and you get those five things that professor Maslow spoke about: prestige, security, and all that. Is that what you’re living for? That’s the key to the wasteland life.2
In the meantime, the king and the land continued to suffer for his error. When desire to project an image, protect the ego, or gain prestige supersedes the human desire to connect with and care about the people in our lives, we have failed our most basic test. As Parzival learns, this is the failure that stings more than any social shame or censure ever could.
The failed quest
Parzival failed his first test. But after many cursed years in the harsh Wasteland, and time to mature, he got an invaluable second chance. Upon his next encounter with the Fisher King, he is moved to compassion, and understands now that he must speak it aloud, and not be silent in the face of the unbearable mystery before him: that of another’s suffering. Parzival risks embarrassing or alienating his host, humiliating himself, and losing sight of his hard-fought quest again. But he acts anyway. This time without reservation or hesitation, according to his conscience, he asks the king what ails him, and all the world is healed.
Unbeknownst to Parzival all this time, the true Grail Hero was never the one with perfect courtly manners, but the one willing to risk vulnerability, embarrassment, humiliation, rejection, shame, or any of the unpleasant emotions and social consequences that come with genuinely caring about others. Further:
Not only is the Grail Castle not a church…but it does not appear to everyone. In the grail romances of the 13th century… it is declared that the Grail was the vessel of the last supper which the resurrected Jesus gave to Joseph of Arimathea to serve as the founding of a church. Before the crucifixion and resurrection, Jesus was walking among us and we could all see him. And his church was founded upon Peter, the rock of Peter… and was one that anyone could go into and anyone could find. Socially approved sacraments carried grace to you automatically. You made a confession, valid contrition, and you were available to the grace of salvation. But the Grail Castle was founded by the resurrected Jesus whom only those with spiritual eyes could see. And the Grail Castle appears only to those who are ready for it. And it appears when they are ready for it. And this is the secret church of the Grail. And this is connected again on the religious side with the idea of the individual.3
The most fascinating aspect of the story for me is the gnostic nature of the Quest. Anyone can enter a church and be guaranteed salvation if they follow its rules, but the Grail Castle and the Grail only appear to those who are prepared to see it—who are worthy. How do we become worthy? Trials. Failures. Perseverance. We don’t always choose the challenges that present themselves to us, and can only try to live with integrity, navigating them as best we can. We learn; we evolve. But there are no assurances. We may succeed or fail in the attempt—that much is in our hands.
Whom does the Grail serve?
What prevents the healing of the king—and his kingdom—is not the lack of pity or compassion, but the withholding of it due to social constraints. The proper knight, the dependable friend, the good neighbor doesn’t intrude in the lives of others, minds his or her own business, and tries not to offend. Not giving offense, not making others remotely uncomfortable has gone from polite manners to something of a religion in recent years, to the point where we pathologize and punish anyone who truly speaks their mind, even in innocence or with the best of intentions, and everyone is expected to err on the side of shutting the fuck up, lest they overstep some invisible line or inadvertently “harm” someone with their words.
But, what if the opposite is true? Parzival’s journey questions whether this virtue is so virtuous after all. What if a kind or concerned word, even if deemed intrusive or inappropriate, might actually be healing? What if acknowledging some truth—even a painful, ugly, or difficult truth—could save a life or even a land? Isn’t that worth a little discomfort? Isn’t that worth risking the shame the questioner might earn, or the embarrassment the questioned might feel?
Like many, probably, I’ve held back with coworkers, friends, and family, in an effort to be discreet. Is a compliment too familiar, concern too inquisitive, advice too invasive? I constantly search for that line, and err on the side of saying nothing. When I’ve worried, I warned myself it’s probably none of my business. When I’ve thought well of others, I felt too awkward to say so, lest my comments be misconstrued, or deemed inappropriate or just… weird. Is it best to keep quiet, even if maybe some would have benefitted from knowing they were cared about or appreciated?
Recently, I learned the extent to which a dear friend, who was very good at projecting confidence, was inwardly quite anxious and insecure. I often praised his kindness and creativity, his knowledge and skill to others; I just wish I’d said more of those things to him, because I genuinely thought he was wonderful.
This past week, I lost that friend suddenly. Looking back, there were times I should have asked The Question. I wanted to. But, I chose to safely observe the invisible boundaries. I can’t say if speaking forthrightly would have changed anything, but now I’ll never know. I failed the quest. And the castle, once lost, can’t be regained.
The Grail
Campbell spoke of the courtly taboo to not ask questions, to not speak out of turn. The social order is all, and the impulse of the individual toward compassion must be suppressed in polite settings. But until Parzival disregards those restrictions, nothing in their world will change: the king will continue to suffer, and his kingdom will continue to languish. In a sense, the liberation of his tongue to express what is in his heart is the key to the realm’s salvation.
If spring brings the false pretense of hope in a forsaken world, the Grail Hero is the one who instills hope into that hopeless realm. To speak with optimism is to give it life in a dead and despairing world. He is the one who defies the cynicism and nihilism that grips it and rallies against the desolation. Is his quest in vain? In the tale, success depended on the magical forces at work in the kingdom—on the rules of the quest, on the nature of the curse, on the king. In our tale, it depends upon us. The Grail we seek is our own heart.
Will we be the kind of society that is so afraid to say the wrong thing that we say nothing—even when it might heal a wound or save a life? Sometimes medicine is bitter, and healing hurts. Sometimes we talk out of turn; it’s awkward and it strains relationships. Both are preferable to the unhealed hurt, festering without cure. Must we continually punish ourselves or one another for a little awkwardness? Can we forgive each other our gracelessness, our indiscretion, our talking out of turn, understanding when it is meant in a spirit of goodwill? Can we allow ourselves a little leeway to be clumsy, and weird, and not agonize over every nuance in a conversation? The words we most wish to say are there if only we have the courage to voice them. Can we take such words in the spirit in which they are offered, without dissecting them for ulterior motives and frisking them for poison daggers? Let us be human sometimes, and maybe we can regain our humanity. Parzival was written in the 13th century, and we’re still struggling to find our way out of his Wasteland.
We live in a time of unprecedented freedom, and particular repressions. Of anxiety and depression, of alienation and addiction. Somewhere, the equilibrium between freedom and restraint has been shattered. The world has not ceased to bloom, we’ve just forgotten where to find joy in it. This is our Wasteland.
What promise is there that an outpouring of compassion can cure our ills? None. The Grail solution may a simplistic answer to a complex problem. But it is a beginning—the beginning. The suspicion, the fear, the rebuttal is: what if speaking our hearts can’t change anything, and only makes it hurt more? It might. But, isn’t hurt a risk worth taking for the healing it might propagate? If we never try, we’ll never know, and that ambiguity exacts its own price in pain. I suspect it’s as we’ve known for ages: The Wasteland only recedes when we set aside our vanity and embrace our humanity.
The Religious Impulse, lecture 1.5.5, The Grail Quest, ℗ 2012 Joseph Campbell Foundation Publications
Mythic Living, lecture 1.4.2, The Grail Quest and the Wasteland, ℗ 2011 Joseph Campbell Foundation Publications
Mythic Living, lecture 1.4.2, The Grail Quest and the Wasteland, ℗ 2011 Joseph Campbell Foundation Publications
Excellent piece! Thanks.