So, following Jung's general method, Part I of this essay will be concerned with "establishing the context" of the legend in socio-historical and cultural terms. In dream work, "establishing the con­text" means asking what a particular dream has to do with the ongoing life of the dreamer and how the symbolic material may be relevant to his or her existential situation at the time of the dream.
Contextual questions are rarely asked about myths; their universal and spiritual meanings tend to be looked at first. But here I intend to read the core of this myth in such a way as to specifically illuminate the psychopathology  of the era in which it arose, because I believe it can also throw light on profoundly difficult problems with which we are still struggling today. Just as Philip Slater's very revealing work on the Greek family of classical times, The Glory of Hera, [8] demonstrates how Greek myth and drama reflects the patriarchal-matriarchal tensions within the Greek family, so I believe, it can be shown how the Arthurian legends mirror more recent crises of masculine identity and the distor­tion and alienation of the feminine part of the psyche of the West.

(Readers who prefer to skip the historical contextualization, which is certainly remote and not a little involved, may comfortably proceed directly to Part II, where the major symbolic images of the legend itself are directly dealt with.)

PART I: THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT of the GRAIL LEGEND

The Tumultuous Twelfth Century: An Open Society

The time in which Chrétien de Troyes wrote was one of the most complex and dynamic periods in medieval history; it was an era that witnessed huge political, religious, and social turmoil. Jung in Aion, saw this time very much as a spiritual watershed, coming at the midpoint of the Piscean age which corresponds to the Christian era, according to  the astrological vision of cycles of history traditionally  reflected in the  precession of the equinoxes. [9]

Although the Arabs had long been contained in Moorish Spain, the First Crusade of 1096 had briefly-re-opened Jerusalem to the West. But by the Second Crusade of 1146 Jerusalem was lost once more and the Roman Church was to remain perpetually in conflict with the various Islamic kingdoms and caliphates that opposed its newly awakened religious imperialism. Despite the lofty religious motives that inspired the early crusaders, the Crusades very soon degenerated into bloody wars of personal ambition and greed marked by atrocities and massacres of ut­most barbarity (to the Muslims the Franks were the epitome of barbarity). But like all wars of expansion against a common foe, the Crusades brought a new spirit of unity which benefited faltering Christendom and re-opened a huge avenue to the East. (Frederick Turner has aptly called this strategy “regeneration through violence”)[10]

Through this avenue came a steady stream of Arab teachers, physi­cians, alchemists, entertainers, and musicians, who were to bring elements of the lost Greek learning and the essence of Arab science back to the West and transform the face of a Christendom barely struggling out of the primitive feudalism of the Dark Ages. The teachers and physicians were to found the first universities in Spain and Italy (the black academic gown is a relic of the Arab teachers); a handful of Arab alchemists were to sow the seeds of Western science; Arab lyric love songs were to become the inspiration for an entirely new and sophisticated kind of bardic singer attached to the courts of the aristocracy, namely the troubadour, an entertainer and social satirist who was to speak for several generations of adventurous young free-thinkers intoxicated by the new learning and impatient with the hypocrisy of the Church.

The troubadours were by no means the only ones to become impatient with the oppressive, decadent and often corrupt hierarchy of the Church of Rome. Numerous religious movements spontaneously arose at what to­day we would call grass roots level—the Waldenses, the Patarenes, the Poor Men of Lyons, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Cathars (or Albigenses)—some of them inspired by charismatic young leaders like Peter Waldo or Francis of Assisi.

Europe at this time was, as historian Friedrich Heer puts it in his brilliant survey The Medieval World, [11]"an open society," in which free experimentation and enquiry into the arts, the sciences, and philosophy were all nourished by the fresh influx of Arab and oriental culture. This cultural ferment also stimulated a fresh flowering of interest in the indigenous Celtic traditions of a
Arthurian myth and legend known as the "matter of Bri­tain" mentioned earlier. Out of all this, there arose in Southern France an extraordinarily rich and many-faceted civilization loosely called Provencal [12]-Proensa or sometime Occitan. It had its own poets—the troubadours—its own epics, its own tongue—the langue d'oc;—and above all its highly colorful courts where a whole new style of aristocratic manners and codes of chivalric honor were evolved, which placed the lady, la donna, at the very heart of not just their social but their spiritual universe. From the florid and exaggerated erotic conceits of the troubadours was born courtezia, the cult of courtly love from which our characteristically Western concept of romantic love is derived.

It is rarely pointed out, as a result of the departmentalized manner in which history is written—art, social patterns, philosophy, politics, all treated in isolation—that not just the religious beliefs of the civiliza­tion of Languedoc, Provence and Poitou were heretical but their very culture challenged the entire assumptions of one thousand years of Christianity. In many ways it was a

8 Slater, P. E. The Glory of Hera. Beacon, Boston, 1968,

9  We are currently at the end of the Piscean age and about to enter the new cycle of Aquarius. For an excellent account of this astrological teaching from a Jungian perspective, see Alice O. Howell.The Heavens Declare: Astrological Ages and the Evolution of Consciousness. Quest, Illinois, 2009.

10 Frederick Turner Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness. (1992).
11 Heer, F. The Medieval World.  London, 1961.
12 “Provence” is derived form the name the Romans gave the southern part of Gaul, since it was their first province.