The Holy Grail: Healing the Sexual Wound in the Western Psyche (1983/2010)

Roger J. Woolger

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
and it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self,
and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance
long difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.
D. H.  Lawrence. Healing

In the self-same point where the soul is made sensual,
in the self-same point is the city of God ordained from without beginning.
Dame Julian of Norwich. Revelations of Divine Love

The Wounded Fisher King

Introduction

The legend of the quest for the Holy Grail first finds literary expression in the writings of the poet Chrétien de Troyes towards the end of the twelfth century where it appears under the title Perceval or the Story of the Grail. [1- see footnote] It was one of the last of a number of courtly romances that he wove around the ancient "matière de Bretagne," that is to say, the Celtic "matter of Britain," an extensive oral tradition relating the exploits of King Arthur and his knights of the Order of the Round Table in the mythic kingdom of Avalon. No one knows how old this oral tradition is.

The appearance and popularity of the Grail legend and the Arthurian romances at this particular juncture of history coincides with a period of intense crisis in the Christian west of Europe.  Society as it had evolved by the twelfth century was universally feudal, which meant that everyone belonged within a patriarchal pyramid of lord, knight and vassal. The Christian Church had early learned in Roman times to imitate such a power structure, applying an essentially imperial model with a hierarchy of supreme Pontiff, archbishops, bishops, priests, monks and, nuns. With rare dynastic exceptions such as medieval Provence (where women could inherit titles to land), women, like nuns, were the lowest in the social and ecclesiastical scale.  In feudal society women were widely regarded as little more than chattel. And since the upper echelons of the Church were mostly ruled by men who were officially, at least, celibate, a climate of purtitanism and sexual repression prevailed from the so-called Dark Ages on. [2] One inevitable outcome of such repression was the widespread but concealed practice of homosexuality within the Church [3] and an array of collective hysterias that ultimately culminated in the later witch-craze. Gordon Rattray Taylor's scholarly Sex in Society sums it up by saying: "It is hardly too much to say that medieval Europe came to resemble a vast insane asylum.” [4]

Where a whole society becomes unbalanced and psychically one-sided and strong collective repression prevails, a compensatory reaction may be predicted from the collective unconscious. Whether this leads to political revolt or even revolution in either the social, aesthetic or religious spheres (e.g. the later Reformation) depends, of course, on the degree of repression. In the decidedly masculine repressive culture of the Middle Ages the reaction came in two major forms: the romance tradition of “courtly love” to which belong the celebrated songs of troubadours and in popular spiritual movements of which Catharism is the best known. Both deeply emphasized the feminine and radically elevated the spiritual value of women to produce both secular and spiritual alternatives to the orthodoxy of the day. Their eruption into a puritanical culture long dominated by men produced a crisis in the consciousness of the times comparable to the mid-life crisis of neurotically one-sided individuals, as described by Jung in Aion, [5] his work on the split in the western Christian psyche  From this perspective it is clear that  11th- 12th century medieval society as a whole teetered psychologically on the edge of a total collective breakdown, complete with neurotic symptoms, visionary dreams and violent attempts to regain control with further repression.

In the following essay I shall attempt to how we can read the myths and legends of the 11th & 12th centuries as the collec­tive dreams of the mid-term crisis of the Christian era. In doing so, I will apply C. G. Jung's illuminating method of dream interpretation to Chrétien de Troyes' version of the Grail legend.  Much of this draws on the important work of Jung's wife Emma Jung in collaboration with Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Grail Legend, [6] and on the perspective on romantic love established by Denis de Rougemont in his seminal Love and the Western World  [7] as well as on Rattray Taylor’s Sex in Society already cited.

1 Loomis, R & Loomis, L. (Eds.) Medieval Legends. Basic Books, New York, 1981.
2 Cf:  Woolger, “The Return of Mary Magdalene” on www.magdalenetours.com
3 Boswell. J. Christianity. Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, Chicago U.P. 1980
4 Rattray Taylor, G. Sex in History.  Harper, New York, 1973, p. 19
5 Jung. C. G. Collected Works, Vol 9ii. Aion. Princeton, U. P, 1959.
6 Jung. E., & Von Franz, M.L. The Grail Legend. Putnam, New York, 1971
7 De Rougemont. D. Love in the Western World. Princeton U.P. 1956, 1983.