To most modern men, however, the word myth is almost synonymous with falsehood or illusion. This is because of the misguided idea that myths were the childish way ancient men had of explaining natural phenomena that science explains so much better. But certain psychologists and anthropologists are now helping us see myth in another light, to understand that mythology reflects underlying psychological and spiritual processes taking place in the human psyche. Jung in particular, with his theory of the collective unconscious, has pointed out that myths are spontaneous presentations from the unconscious of psychological and spiritual truths. For Jung, myths have meaning for everyone because they represent in story fashion “archetypes,” that is, patterns of life that are universally valid.
A myth stands in relationship to mankind in general as a dream does to the individual. A dream shows the individual an important psychological truth about himself. A myth shows an important psychological truth that applies to mankind as a whole. A person who understands a dream understands himself better; a person who grasps the inner meaning of a myth is in touch with the universal spiritual questions life asks all of us.
A central idea in Jung’s psychology is his concept of individuation. Individuation is the lifelong process in which a person increasingly becomes the whole and complete person God intended him to be. It entails the gradual expansion of his or her consciousness and the increasing capacity of the conscious personality to reflect the total self. The ego may be understood as the center of consciousness, the “I” within us, that part of ourselves with which we are consciously identified. The self is the name given to the total personality, the potential person who is within us from the beginning and seeks in our lifetime to be recognized and expressed through the ego.
One difficult problem is always the matter of becoming reconciled with the shadow — the dark, unwanted, dangerous side of ourselves that conflicts with our conscious attitudes and ideals, but with which everyone must somehow come to terms if he or she is to become whole. Rejection of the shadow personality results in a division within the personality and the establishment of a state of hostility between consciousness and the unconscious. Acceptance and integration of the shadow personality are always difficult and painful but result in the establishment of a psychological balance and unity that otherwise would be quite impossible.
Even more difficult is the inclusion by a man of his unconscious feminine element and by a woman of her unconscious masculine element.
The psychology of individuation, however, shows that the goal of this process of becoming whole is not perfection, but completeness. The whole person is never blameless, guiltless, or pure but is one in whom all sides of himself have been combined inexplicably into a total person. This paradoxical unity of the self, which is like a combination of opposites (life is never this or that, but both this and that), is a secret that cannot be rationally understood and comprehended. Unity is, so to speak, a mystery known only to God. The ego can experience the unity of the self but never logically comprehend it. In Christian language, only by the grace of God can we become whole.
All men are Fisher Kings. Every boy has naively blundered into something that is too big for him, gotten halfway through, realized that he couldn’t handle it, and collapsed. Then he is wounded, he is hurt terribly, and he goes off to lick his wounds. A certain bitterness arises in the boy because he tries so hard and actually touches his salmon — his individuation — yet he cannot hold it. It only burns him. If you are to understand any young man past puberty, you must understand this about him. Virtually every boy has to have the Fisher King wound. It is what the church called the felix culpa, the happy fault, the happy woundedness.
It is painful to watch a young man become aware that the world is not just joy and happiness, to watch the disintegration of his childlike beauty, faith, and optimism. This is regrettable but necessary. If we are not cast out of the Garden of Eden, there can be no heavenly Jerusalem.
One has no right even to talk about the last stage until he has accomplished the second one. It is no good to talk about the oneness of the universe until one is aware of the separateness of the universe. We can do all kinds of mental acrobatics and talk about the unity of all things, which happens to be true, but we haven’t a chance of functioning in that manner until we have succeeded in differentiating the inner and the outer worlds. Another way of saying the same thing is that we have to get out of the Garden of Eden before we can even start for the heavenly Jerusalem, even though they are the same place.
The man’s first step out of Eden into the pain of duality gives him this Fisher King wound.
When a boy makes the first steps toward individuation, i.e., when he first touches the salmon, he begins to be somebody in his own right. But the process is only partly accomplished. That means that he is jarred out of the ordinary collective; he is no longer a sheep in the herd. His collective relationship with other people and life is destroyed but he hasn’t gone far enough, so that he is not yet an individual who can relate to life in a whole way.
How many times have women said to their men, “Look at all the good things you have; you have the best job you can ever had in your life. Our income is better than ever. We have two cars. We have two- and sometimes three-day weekends. Why can’t you be happy? The Grail is at hand; why can’t you be happy?”
The man is too inarticulate to reply, “Because I am a Fisher King and am wounded and cannot touch any of this happiness.”
It is an added hurt that happiness is close at hand but untouchable. The mere fact he has all the things that should make him happy cannot heal the Fisher King’s condition, for he suffers from the inability to touch the goodness or happiness already at hand.
We know that until the Parsifal part of a person’s nature appears, there is a feminine part of him that has never smiled, that is incapable of being happy, and that she comes to life with a glow when Parsifal appears. If one can wake the Parsifal in a man, another part of him immediately becomes happy.
Unfortunately, a boy generally gets his Red Knight armor by taking it away from someone else. That is the fierce competitiveness of adolescence and masculinity in general. Almost every boy has to win from somebody else. His winning isn’t any good unless somebody else loses, which means that he has lose sometimes, too. But somewhere he’s got to get his Red Knight armor. He’s got to win, to be top man. Boys will struggle fiercely for this; it is a matter of life and death for them.
Often it takes dozens of Red Knight experiences to get this power. If a man is not careful he will be Red Knighting throughout his life. A man often carries this competitiveness, which has a slightly adolescent tinge to it, into everything. Perhaps some of the lure of battle and war and the glamour of the military life is from the Red Knight structure.
He cannot be a man without knowing how to be aggressive, but it must be controlled aggression that is at his conscious disposal. If he is just overcome by his rage and violence, the it is no good; his masculinity is not yet formed. Psychologically, he has been defeated inwardly by his Red Knight. His ego lies prostrate, and the Red Knight in him has won, emerging as terribly bully, a violent temper, or even in vandalism or criminal ways. So every boy on his way to manhood has to learn how to master this violent side of himself and integrate that terrible masculine power for aggression into his conscious peronality.
In other words, he puts on his new masculinity over his mother complex. Of course, everything goes wrong immediately. This is par of the course for a young man. He takes his newfound strength, his swashbuckling masculinity that he has just discovered at about 15 or 16, and puts it on over his mother complex. That’s a laughable combination. Of course, it doesn’t work.
If any man is sufficiently honest with himself, he will remember the first time he got astride the Red Knight’s horse and couldn’t stop it.
You remember that her name was Heart Sorrow. Naturally Parsifal feels dreadfully guilty about this, but this also is part of his masculine development. No son ever develops into manhood without being disloyal to his mother in some way. If he remains with his mother to comfort her and console her then he never gets out of his mother complex. Often a mother will do all she can to keep her son with her. One of the most subtle ways is to encourage in him the idea of being loyal to mother, but if he gives in to her completely on this score then she often winds up with a son who has a severely injured masculinity. The son must ride off and leave his mother, even if it seems to mean disloyalty, and the mother must bear this pain. Later, the son may then come back to the mother and they may find a new relationship on a new level, but this can only be done after the son has first achieved his independence and transferred his affections to a woman of his own age. In our myth Parsifal’s mother had died when he returned. Perhaps she represents the kind of woman who can only exist as mother, who, psychologically, “dies” when this role is taken from her because she does not understand how to be an individual woman, only a mother.
This battle with the second and first in command may symbolize one of the many battles a boy has to fight to free himself from a father or brother. A boy growing up will go out and fight every member of his family to be free of them, even when he substitutes someone else as a representative of father or brother. Often if there is a sudden flare-up with somebody at work, it is one finishing up some brother things from far back in adolescence.
Much of Christianity is a set of laws for relating to, coping with, or making meaningful the inner parts of one’s being, not a set of laws for outer conduct. Few people are aware of this differentiation.
If we confuse these laws — inner and outer — we really have a difficult thing going. If a man treats a flesh-and-blood woman according to the laws that would be appropriate for his own interior femininity, his anima, there is just chaos.
It was when man began to come to sense the difficulty of the anima and her danger to him that all the witch hunts started. Instead of quelling the interior feminine, which was the dangerous one, he had to go out and burn some poor creature who was behaving a little strangely.
Emotion is a sum of energy that occurs, or is set off, in a person by a meaningful experience. Its chief characteristic is its energy. Emotion itself is morally neutral; it may be good or it may be destructive, depending on where and how it is invested. To be really excited about something can bring much emotion, and it can sustain some beautiful things in one’s life. There is also much emotion involved in depression: One is wringing one’s hands or walking circles on the rug, hunting for something to be miserable about. Emotion defined as energy is relatively easy to understand.
It is more difficult to describe feeling. This is a word that is used far too generally and imprecisely, and therefore it almost loses its usefulness. I am going to use the word feeling in a precise way to describe a specific experience. Feeling is the act of valuing. It is not necessarily hot and volatile like emotion, but it is that rational faculty which assigns value to an experience. This is then sense in which Jung uses the term in his definition of thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition.
One thinks about something, makes an intellectual appraisal of it, understands it, but by so doing there is not yet feeling about it. There is no sense of judgment nor any valuation, so one has not related to it yet. The act of thinking is quite different from the act of feeling. To feel is to assign value to an experience.
Then there is mood. This is a thorny one, for mood is a strange thing. It is like a small psychosis, or possession. A man’s mood comes from being overpowered by the feminine part of his nature. Mood is beautifully described in Hindu mythology as Maya, goddess of illusion. Mood is being overwhelmed or possessed by some interior feminine content in one’s unconscious. When seized by a mood, it is as though a man has become an inferior woman. Modern slang puts it aptly: He just becomes bitchy, that’s all.
Ultimately the man has only two alternatives: Either he rejects this feminine side and it turns against him in the form of bad moods and undermining seductions, or he accepts it and relates to the feminine side of himself and of life and it gives him warmth and strength.
If they can bring this feminine side to good development, then they can be highly creative men and no less masculine just because of their powerful inner feminine component. These are the artists, the seers, the intuitive, sensitive men who are so culturally valuable in any society. But if they cannot come to terms with that interior woman, she will run them and probably destroy them before she is done with it. Any woman who is rejected turns negative, and the inner woman of a man is no exception.
A man’s relationship to his anima shows on his face. You need only walk down the street and look at the men you pass to get an immediate sense of their relationship with the anima. A man with no relationship to his feminine side either looks hard and inflexible and bitter, or eaten away on the inside. There is a story about Lincoln, who, after an interview with somebody, said to his secretary, “I don’t like that man’s face.” The secretary said, “But he can’t help what his face is; he is not responsible for his face.” Lincoln replied, “After forty every man is responsible for his face.”
Let’s return now the difference between feeling (one’s ability to value) and mood (one’s being overtaken or possessed by an inner feminine content). If a man has a good relationship to his anima, his inner femininity, he is able to feel, to value, and thus to find meaning in his life. If a man is not related to his anima, then he can find no meaning and has no capacity for valuation.
You know what happens when a man gets in a mood: Everything is colored by the mood he is in. If he wakes up in the morning “on the wrong side of the bed,” i.e., if the mood has got him, then everything looks bad. He knows before he gets to the morning paper that the stock market is down. He doesn’t have to look out the window to tell it is raining. He is sure that all manner of things are wrong, and if they are not wrong, he will make them wrong. He imprints an outer reality the character of this mood in which he is caught. His mood tends to be infectious, too, and pretty soon he has his wife and children upset if they are not wise to what is going on.
But, of course, it all turns out badly and usually results in a battle royal between the mans’ moody woman and the woman’s angry man. That is the worst kind of fight, between the feminine side of a man and the masculine side of a woman, because the two are totally possessed.
One of the first characteristics of a mood is that it robs us of all sense of meaning. Relatedness is necessary if we are to have a sense of meaning or fulfillment. If something is wrong with one’s ability to relate, the meaning in life is gone. So depression is another term for mood.
Gournamond told Parsifal he should neither seduce nor be seduced. Not only is one seduced by the anima, he may also try to seduce the anima. When it is said that one is not to seduce his interior fair maiden, I think it means that one must not ask for the good moods. He must not rape his feminine side. He may as for fulfillment, but he may not ask for the good moods.
He is a differentiation that most people are incapable of until they achieve some psychological understanding. That exuberant, top-of-the-world, bubbling, half-out-of-control mood which is often so highly prized among men is a dangerous thing: It too is a seduction. The man has seduced the anima. He has it by the throat and has said, “You are going to make me happy or else.” This is plain seduction. And he pays the big price for it later, for the law of compensation says a depression must come later to reestablish the balance.
This is an American sport. We think it is our God-given right to be happy, in the sense of mood happiness, and it just doesn’t work. I know two boys who planned a camping trip. Gloriously, for days ahead, they planned how great this was going to be. These fellows milked all the happiness out of that experience ahead of time.
It is highly advantageous for a man to know enough and to be wise enough so that he can refuse a mood, or at least postpone it. One simply does not have to fall prey to one of these vaporous, Maya-like emanations from the unconscious. A mood creeps up sometimes, and one doesn’t know what in the world it is. Things just begin to turn gray.
It takes a strong man to stand firm against a mood, and this means a man who is freeing himself of his childishness, i.e., his mother complex.
Now we should mention another term: enthusiasm. There is a fine but important difference between mood and enthusiasm. The word enthusiasm is a beautiful word. In Greek it means “to be filled with God.” It is one of the most sublime words in the whole English language. If one is filled with God, a great creativity will flow, and there will be a stability about it. If one is filled with the anima, one may also feel creativity, but it will probably be gone before nightfall. One must be wise enough to know the difference between God and the anima.
When a woman has to deal with a man in a mood, she generally does the wrong thing. She generally gets her animus out, that critical thing, and says, “Now, look, this is utter nonsense, stop it. We don’t need any more fishline leader.”
There is, however, a point of genius that a woman can bring forth if she is capable of it and willing to do it. If she will become more feminine than the mood attacking the man, she can dispel it for him. But this is a very, very difficult thing for a woman to do. Her automatic response is to let the sword of the animus and start hacking away. But if a woman can be patient with a man and not be critical, but represent for him a truly feminine quality, then, as soon as his sanity is back sufficiently for him to comprehend such subtleties, he will likely come out of his mood.
A woman is much more in control of her moods. She can use them. She tries them on and sees which one she is going to wear. She will even change in midstream if necessary. A man doesn’t have as much control over his moods; in fact, he has almost no control. Many women are masters of the whole feeling department as few men ever are. Much difficulty arises because a woman presumes that a man has the same kind of control over his mood that she does over hers, but he doesn’t. She must understand this and give him time, or help him a little bit.
Women who have to deal with the exotic creature called the male of the species should be easy on him when he is in a mood, because he is nearly helpless in the face of it. If there is one rule that should be understood in a marriage, it would be that when a man is falling into a mood the woman should withhold all judgment and criticism for the moment if she possibly can.
A man is in partial control if he can just say to himself, “I’m having an anima attack.” If he can also say to his wife, “I’m in a bad mood. It’s not your fault. Just leave me alone for a while,” then he will do her a big favor, and that very act will begin to free him. For the battle is half won as soon as the man recognizes that it is a mood which is possessing him.
Goethe came to the astounding observation late in his life that the province of man is to serve woman; then she will serve him. He was talking about the inner woman, the muse. She is the carrier of beauty, the inspiration, the delicacy of the whole feminine side of life. It is beautiful, each serving the other back and forth.
It is interesting that almost every time Parsifal makes a bit of an advance or when something important has happened, he is suddenly concerned with his mother. A boy must become strong before he can look at his mother, his parents, or his family situation with any kind of objectivity, even to write postcards home and be civil. If a boy divests himself a little of his mother complex, there is the beginning of a chance he might relate with his mother. But he must get a little strength first and become an independent man.
The Grail castle is the place of the most precious feminine quality, and the Grail is the epitome of all that is feminine. It is the highest feminine symbol, the holy of holies in its feminine expression. It is that for which the knight searched all his life. It gives a man everything that he asks even before he asks it. It is perfect happiness, the ecstatic experience.
The thing that is most touching about this part of the myth is that it is telling us that a youth can blunder into the Grail castle sometime in his mid-adolescence without earning it or even asking for it. Perhaps every boy in his adolescence spends at least one day in the Grail castle and experiences this perfection.
All of us at some moment have had a vision of our existence as unique, untransferable, and very precious. This transformation almost always takes place during adolescence.
Some people are wise enough, courageous enough, or honest enough to record these events. Poets speak of such morning early in life when they discover beauty, ecstasy, the golden world.
The Grail castle doesn’t exist physically. It is an inner reality, an experience of the soul. I think it is probably best described as a level of consciousness; a boy wakes up with something new in him — a power, a perception, a strength, a vision. This is his Grail castle. He can’t describe it or hang onto it, but he will never be the same again.
People often tease an adolescent out of his Grail castle experience, but one should never do this. It is a holy thing for him. Nothing will ever happen to him that is more beautiful, or more important, or more formative for him.
For when he is out of the Grail castle he is miserable. He can think of nothing else. Nothing else will do once he has seen the Grail castle. Even if he represses the memory of the Grail castle from his consciousness, his longing for it will eat away at him from the unconscious.
It sometimes destroys him. More often than not it fires him up to a wild, compulsive kind of search. It is the motivation, conscious or unconscious, for a great deal of the rest of his life, for in the Grail castle he has known perfect happiness. He has known that utter, absolute contentment, and beauty, and joy that the Grail castle can give him. Then when he loses it all, he becomes a Grail searcher, an urgent, questing beast, fairly pawing the earth to find again the beauty he viewed so briefly. His spiritual hunger forces him to climb everything that is climbable, to try this, to try that, in a restless search for the lost Grail castle. The Grail gives complete satisfaction and wholeness. If you have ever had that, how can you live an ordinary life?
A man’s mother complex does not allow him to stay in the Grail castle the first time around. After a man is out of his mother’s grip, as soon as he will ask the question in the Grail castle, then he can live in it.
It hurts so much he can’t stand it, and he tries to persuade himself he is very tough to get away from the pain.
Grail hunger accounts for all kinds of things. It’s terrifying to approach this hunger in ourselves. If a man is courageous enough, he will understand the hunger I am talking about. It is a hunger that has to be filled. He’s got to have something, he’s not sure what. It is the Saturday-evening restlessness of a youth. He has to have something or he will explode.
Much advertising plays upon this hunger in a man. I am not sure how conscious advertising people are about it, but they know how to play on this. You can sell a man almost anything if you indirectly call it the Grail.
This is also part of the reason at least for the incredible hunger of people today for drugs. That is a magical way of getting back to the Grail ecstasy. Drugs will take you to an ecstatic experience, but I think it is the wrong way. The right way doesn’t necessarily take a long time, but it is a long way. There are no shortcuts. The Grail experience is dangerous. As we said, too much of it or the experience of it at the wrong time is an invitation to a psychotic experience. The drawbridge can click shut too soon, and one is trapped and cannot get out.
It is almost a universal consensus among philosophers and poets in the Western world that life is tragic. Man in his Grail quest is the tragic man. The word tragedy has come to mean the quest for what one cannot attain or have. That is Western man, and that applies to the Grail castle. In the middle part of life, we are hungry for something that we cannot have. This is the tragic dimension of life.
Middle age is the time in between the two Grail castle visits. He is proceeding, he is doing his duty; he is getting the mortgage paid off, getting the kids through school, and keeping his job going. But he is not satisfied, for deep within himself is the hunger for the Grail castle.
One looks to see the parallel in a girl’s life. She never leaves the Grail castle. This is another thing one must understand about men. Women keep a sense of beauty, a sense of connectedness, a sense of at-homeness in the universe that a man doesn’t have. I don’t think a man is more creative than a woman. But his creativity comes in a different form. The pressure, the emergency quality of a man’s creativeness comes because a man leaves the Grail castle. A woman discovers what always is, and a man goes out and makes or creates afresh — or thinks he does.
Einstein was quoted as saying, “I now bask in that solitude which was so painful to me in my youth.” The loneliness, the feeling of pressure in a man is the hurt of his Grail experience. To have seen something so beautiful and then to be without it is nearly unendurable.
The current fascination with Oriental religion is a direct Grail quest. The peoples of the East never fractured as Western man did; they never got into or out of the Grail experience so violently. Oriental philosophers regard the West and say, “What in the world is this great push and hunger in your people?”
Theoretically a man may visit the Grail castle at any time. He doesn’t necessarily come to it just twice. There are moments all along in a man’s life when he gets a little bit of the Grail quality. This keeps him going.
The drawbridge is a hint about the nature of the Grail castle. It doesn’t exist in physical reality. It is inner reality, a vision. It is poetry, a mystical experience. It is not a specific place. One must know and understand this if he is Grail questing. One of the first things that goes wrong with one’s quest is that he expects to find the happiness of the Grail experience with an outer something or in some place. This never works because the Grail isn’t a place.
How many men have made how many pilgrimages to particular spots where Grail castles burst open to them in their youth! How many men go back to the place where they grew up, thinking that the place had some thing to do with their Grail experience!
The fact that the drawbridge stuck the back feet of the horse is a small but eloquent reminder that entering and leaving the Grail castle are dangerous. Many a youth has been toppled going or coming from the Grail castle. It is not at all uncommon for a youth simply to go to pieces at such a moment. You must be very tender and gentle with a boy when he is going through a Grail experience. Don’t tease him; he can’t stand it.
The sword is redeemed when it is drawn into the crucifixion and fulfills a holy purpose. This is the case with a man’s sword-wielding masculinity. It is redeemed only by suffering. A woman has to wring her hands and keep still when she sees her man heading into a disastrous situation that will bring him into suffering. He has to do it; it is his redemption. If done intelligently, it doesn’t need to take very long or cause very much suffering. (But men are not known for intelligence at this point.) So the sword that bleeds is the sword being redeemed by suffering.
This is a boy’s normal experience. The masculinity a boy uses at first comes from his father. It breaks the first time he uses it. It goes out and tries to to something the way he dad did it, but it doesn’t work. It is only an imitation. It takes another father — a spiritual father, a godfather — to repair it. Then it is good, and it will hold up the rest of his life.
Anytime one has a Trinitarian system going there will be an adversary somewhere, for something will have been left out. What has been rejected will reappear as the devil, for whenever something of the spirit that belongs to wholeness is excluded it turns against us. Jung has made quite a bit of this and often suggests that what has been excluded from the Christian Trinity is the dark, feminine element in life. So it comes back to plague us as a kind of chthonic devil.
Then she points an accusing finger at Parsifal and says, “It is all your fault.”
This is the hideous damsel. This usually happens at the very apex of a man’s career, at the time of his greatest success. He has just been named president of the corporation, has just been elected to the academy, has just first made his first million, or whatever the apex of life is for him, and within three days the hideous damsel will walk in on him.
This is the anima gone absolutely sour and dark. There is some correlation between the amount of fame and adulation one gets in the outer world and the condition of the anima. They often have an inverse relationship to one another. When a man really succeeds, then he is often in for trouble with his anima.
It is the universal impulse to try to get out of the accusations of the hideous damsel, but this is absolutely the wrong thing to do. You must stick with her. You must just sit there and take it as long as she chooses to sit there on her mule and outline your faults. Because when she has gone through her long speech, she will then set you own your quest again. This is what she is for.
All manner of things happen. He grows more bitter, more disillusioned; het gets harder and harder. He is farther and farther from his Blanche Fleur, his feminine consciousness. He forgets why he is wielding the sword. He conquers knights right and left, but for less and less reason and with less joy within himself.
One sees that the second million or the second wife or whatever extraverted activities he pursues aren’t going to solve the problem. Then he turns to his own introverted hermit living in the woods in a little hut; that is where he gets the next bit of strength or power.
Parsifal has failed to treat his mother correctly. But he has also followed her advice too slavishly. This is an invariable characteristic of the mother complex, that it leads to too much and too little all at the same time.
The great search for most Americans is for happiness — which is to say that we ask the Grail to serve us. We ask that this great cornucopia of nature, this great feminine outpouring, all of the material of the world — the air, the sea, the animals, the oil, the forests, and all the productivity of the world — we assume that it should serve us. And the lesson that we have to learn is that this cornucopia of nature does not serve us; it serves God.
The Grail King is the image of God, the earthly representation of the divine. The myth is telling us that our task is to learn that the Grail serves the Grail King, not that the Grail serves us.
The object of life is not happiness, but to serve God or the Grail. All of the Grail involvements are to serve God. If one understands this and drops his idiotic notion that the meaning of life is personal happiness, then one will be flooded with happiness.
Here is this incredible dilemma: If you ask for the Grail to make you happy, you have precluded happiness. If you will serve the Grail and the Grail King properly, you will be flooded with happiness.