When I was about age 13, I read a book called The King Must Die. It was a work of historical fiction by Mary Renault, and I remember being shocked and horrified at the ritual sacrifices in the book. The first was a “king horse,” sacrificed to the gods. Theseus, the young hero of the book, is told by his father, that in the old days, the king was also sacrificed along with the horse, and that one day a king might be called on again to make the ultimate sacrifice for his people. What a way to scare kids straight, right?
Later in the book, Theseus himself kills a king in an act of ritual sacrifice that makes him the new “year king.” At the end of the year, he will be sacrificed by the new new year king. He escapes and finds love with Ariadne, but they do not have a happy ending. Reaching Naxos, they are swept up by the Bacchae, and after they both participate in a bacchanalian orgy, Theseus discovers his lover the morning after, covered in blood and holding a body part of the king she helped dismember.
My 13 year old self was appalled at the barbarism, and secretly thrilled by the violence. There was an erotic charge to it, especially in Theseus’s relationship with his lover, Ariadne. Theseus is unwilling to acknowledge his part in the ecstatic rite. Disgusted, he abandons Ariadne and moves on, sailing home toward his father Aegeus, the King of Athens, who ends up sacrificing himself by throwing himself into the sea, because Theseus neglects to read an omen correctly. Disconnected from his intuition and oracular powers, he doesn’t raise the white sail that would have signaled to his father all was well. When Aegeus sees the black sail, he throws himself into the sea.
If I were to write a book report of this now it would read: A lot of kings die. Nobody seems better off at the end. Nothing changes.
I went on to discover Arthurian legends, and heard the story of the Fisher, or Grail King, who was unable to produce an heir because of a wound in his groin that wouldn’t heal. His kingdom is a wasteland.
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The Grail King appears in the French medieval tales of Perceval, by Chrétien de Troyes, and in the German Parzival, by Wolfram von Eschenbach. In both stories, the young hero, on his path to becoming a man, ends up at the Grail Castle where he meets the wounded Fisher King. At their first encounter, both heroes fail to ask what’s known as the “grail question.” Because of this failure, they are sent back to the forest for more trials. Once they pass them, they make their way back to the castle where they finally ask the question that heals.
Perceval asks, “Who does the grail serve?”
Parzival asks, “What ails you?”
Before we go into those questions, I want to explore the grail itself. In the physical realm, the Grail is a cup, specifically a chalice. In Christianity it’s said to be the cup shared between Jesus and his Disciples at the Last Supper. In Christianity, the chalice holds wine. People raised Protestant like me are told the wine represents the blood of Christ. Catholics, are told the wine is the blood itself. When they drink from the chalice in the sacrament of Communion they are literally receiving the life essence of Christ. The Grail must be quite a powerful vessel to carry salvation itself.
A vessel is also a means of traveling over water.
Seen this way, the Grail both contains a sacred liquid, and is a means of moving over it, which if you actually think about it, is more like being moved by it. We don’t so much move water, as we are moved by it.
What else happens when we are moved?
We weep. Water moves through us. Sometimes this weeping may begin with actual despair, understandable in these times, but if you can stay with the tears, let them flow through, what needs to be watered in you, will give life to something else.
This is what I see in Picasso’s painting “The Weeping Woman,” a portrait of one of his lovers, Dora Maar. It’s generally interpreted as a representation of the suffering of women, a cry of despair at being victimized, and maybe that is what Picasso was trying to represent. I have been a weeping woman just like that, but I have also wept beyond the concept of myself as a helpless victim. The hardest I ever cried, was the time I realized the betrayal that had broken my heart was something I’d summoned so I could learn how to love unconditionally. That is the kind of weeping woman we need to summon now. You have one within you, too, no matter what your gender.
And this brings me to the answers to Perceval and Parzival’s questions.
In Chrétien de Troyes’s version, the answer to “Who does the grail serve?” is “the Grail serves the Grail King.” In other words, the liquid held within it, heals the King.
This becomes clearer in Parzival, where we don’t get a verbal answer to the question, “What ails you?” young Parzival asks.
There is no answer. Just by hearing the question, the King is healed.
Notice I have capitalized those last two kings, because I am not talking about any specific king anymore. This isn’t King Arthur or King Charles we’re talking about. This is the King within each one of us, the exalted inner masculine.
How is the Grail King healed just by the asking of this question? What’s so special about it?
What’s so special, so rare in our time, is that it’s an empathetic approach. People in power, especially leaders, though really this applies to everyone in modern society, are supposed to be strong and show no signs of weakness. We are conditioned to stay strong no matter what, keep our feelings in, never show pain, and pursue material achievement as a twisted legacy at all cost.
Watching Trump and Biden debate this week, listening to peoples’ reactions after, I couldn’t help thinking what would happen if we asked both men, both former presidents (first time this has ever happened in a debate), the Grail Question. What ailed them?
Although Biden appeared weaker, Trump is just as frail. The Kings inside both of them need a drink from that chalice. And though empathy may not seem like a viable political strategy, don’t doubt that it’s a powerful act and a legitimate response that will ripple out and affect the material world. You might not see results in your lifetime. Your descendants might not even see the results of your tears, because there’s a good chance we humans will go extinct, but your compassion, your fellow feeling, will be remembered by the water, that which so generously made life on Earth possible in the first place, and if ever a time comes when someone can read those records again, it will be known that you were someone who loved, even when it was difficult; you will have refreshed the water of life.
You’ve probably heard the phrase, “We get the leaders we deserve,” meaning our leaders are a reflection of ourselves as citizens.
Patriarchy is a reliance on one person, the father, to rule us. One person, the man at the top (sometimes it’s a woman like Nancy Pelosi or Margaret Thatcher), is responsible for the fate of all the people. One person has to make all the decisions that will determine if his or her people survive.
It’s a lot.
It’s a lot for all of us, including the patriarchs of all genders, the actual kings, prime ministers, and presidents we put our faith in to govern us; and it’s a lot for the Kings inside us. Most of us have outsourced our King to the small “k” kings, Trump, Biden, et al.
No human was ever to meant to bear that kind of archetypal weight. Remember, it was the Titan, Atlas, who held the world on his shoulders. Kings without a council of wise advisers who will tell him the truth and hold him accountable, are bound to crack. Some distort into tyrants, some into befuddled old men who fumble their words and can’t organize their thoughts anymore. Some applaud the tyrants because they make them feel safe. Some mock the old men for slipping into the twilight. We all have our own fears. What I’m asking is for each one of us to look for ours, and when they arise in daily life, pause. Who hurt you so much that you still need to attack and mock others? Are they around you right now? Most likely not. Let them go. You are safe.
You’ll probably cry if you get to this point. I always do whenever I encounter my child self feeling so alone and helpless. My tears give her strength. She grows up a little every time she sees me weep.
Lost Without A Guide
On two occasions this week I witnessed an inability to internally organize in the kings and King’s subjects. Without an inner King to guide, people are unable to have authority over their own thoughts and feelings, and wander aimlessly in words, unable to locate what they want to say; too used to being a subject, not the main object of their lives, they struggled to clearly express what they did want to say, if they were able to locate it. No wonder we can’t organize to change our political, economic, and social infrastructure.
I also witnessed people falling in line one after another, when they misunderstood a question. The question was confusing, perhaps intentionally, because what became clear as people didn’t answer it, instead choosing to answer a question that wasn’t asked, because that’s what the first person did, we were able to see our own submission to vertical authority demonstrated in real time.
I get it. It’s not safe to stand out. Guess who answered the original question?
Yours truly.
I’m not bragging. I’ve failed to ask the Grail Question numerous times, and sometimes I still fail at sympathy, though rarely at empathy. Even when I’m unsympathetic, my heart is still moved by others’ pain. What I’m saying is we are all works in progress. I can shed a tear, while also being annoyed.
Both Perceval and Parzival, when they fail to ask the question on first meeting the Grail King, have to go back to the forest to face more monsters.
When are we going to proclaim, enough, I’m an adult now? I am my own authority. I don’t need anymore monsters to test me.
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In my eyes, both Trump and Biden are the kind of monsters we meet when we get sent back out to the forest, ones with terrifyingly real power in the world today. They are our tests. One could even say they are part of a collective initiation that has reached such a drastic point because we have failed, when given the opportunity over and over again, to ask the Grail King the question that heals, “What ails you?”
It’s not answered directly in Parzival. All we see are the results. The healed King.
The Grail serves the King.
What is in that grail?
The question itself. What ails you?
Empathy is the Water of Life.
I know it’s hard sometimes to feel empathy for these failing leaders, especially the tyrannical ones, but isn’t it a bit easier to feel it for a frail old man who stumbled on national TV?
I know people are scared and frustrated. Newspapers are calling for Biden to step down because they’re afraid he can’t trump Trump. Maybe, in practical terms, that is the best case scenario, since most people are clearly not ready to claim their internal authority as integrated, holistic beings. We
Perhaps Biden will abdicate, but there is a greater abdication that is needed, and that involves us, we the people, not our leaders—the abdication of patriarchy. And though those in power will most likely cling to it until they’re dead and they’ve killed all of us, their subjects, those of us who refuse that role, who are able to abdicate the patriarchy that has colonized our minds and made us believe we need one omnipotent ruler to survive, will seed a legacy of freedom for those who come after us. The true freedom of inner sovereignty.
In Hawaiian culture, the akua Kāne protects the water of life, which has miraculous healing properties.
So enchanted by the concept, I never asked until today, what is the water of life?
Today, I realized it’s our tears. When we cry, we water ourselves, our fallen brothers and sisters, and the ailing land, with our grief. Our tears say to them, “We feel your pain.”
Sometimes we have to feel our own pain first. If we can do this, if we can resist shutting down when we experience our own suffering, and if we can stay with it long enough to make a gift of it to others however we can, even by asking a simple question like “What ails you?” we will restore our inner waters, and the outer waters will run clear again, unpolluted by all our unmourned pain. We will no longer haunt ourselves to extinction. We will heal the King. We will be the healed King.
And if we do find we still need political leaders, they will not be fools or tyrants.
The Water of Kāne, a Hawaiian oli
(Listen in Hawaiian below this text)
Ask the question: Where is the water of Kāne? To the east with the sun, rising in the sky; There is the Water of Kāne. Where is the water of Kāne? There because of the mighty Sun, in the bank of cumulus clouds on the ocean horizon, in the wavy rising vapor, in the tap root of the lehua tree; There is the Water of Kāne. Where is the water of Kāne? There on the mountain, near the top, in the valley, in the river; There is the water of Kāne. Where is the Water of Kāne? Over the sea, over the open ocean, In the windy shower, in the rainbow, In the billowing mist, In the rainbow hued rain, In the buoyant and floating; There is the Water of Kāne. Where is the Water of Kāne? There above is the Water of Kāne. In the ominous dark clouds, In the nimbostratus clouds, In the cumulonimbus clouds of Kāne! There is the Water of Kāne. Where is the Water of Kāne? There under the ground, In the spring water bubbling up, In the exceptional water of Kāne and Kanaloa, A water spring, a water to drink, A water of spirit, a water of health, Sustaining Life!
—English version by Nathaniel B. Emerson
The Water of Kāne
Kō aloha lā ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light
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Resources:
Parzival: A Romance of the Middle Ages, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Vintage Classics, 1961.
Arthurian Romances, Chrétien de Troyes, Penguin Classics, 1991.
The Water of Life: A Jungian Journey through Hawaiian Myth, University of Hawaii Press, 1991.
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