Purification II: Chrétien, etc
The qualities of ambiguity, traumatic possession, displacement and metamorphosis denote the Wasteland, a demonic substrate of confusion and violation whose veiling and idealized representation is the goal of image-work or “the cult of aesthetics” that defines the West. Its epitome is the achieved vision and naming of the Sankgreal, the Romance of the West’s formative century .
In Chrétien de Troyes, the confusion within the story of maiming, blood and consecration extends to the characters and family of those who rely on the “host” for sustenance, for healing and who must identify it, to extract it from mystery. Percival is told by his mother that “your father was wounded…through his thighs” during a barbarian invasion. “The noble Fisher King,” a maiden later tells Perceval “was struck by a javelin through both thighs.” By this defining symbol and title, he seems identical to “the son of the king who is served from the grail” as the “holy hermit” tells him . The hermit further identifies the king, “the man served from it [the grail dish] as his brother, telling Perceval, “your mother was his sister and mine, and the rich Fisher King, I believe, is the son of the king who is served from the grail” . So the Fisher King, “maimed through his thighs” is both the nephew, “I believe” says the hermit, mystifying the mystery, and the husband of Percival’s mother; that is he is Perceval’s father and also cousin. This demonic tangle of ambiguous relationships is intrinsic to Perceval’s failure to ask about the mysterious procession for it is stressed that in being a-typically mute he was following the advice of his mentor Gornemont who taught him the skills of combat .
It also is noteworthy to the tale’s ambiguities, trauma and drive for purification — goals intrinsic to image-work — that narratives of the Grail accompany, in the formative account of Chretien, intense expressions of hatred for Jews, the formative matter or ‘host’ absorbed by Greco-Roman culture into itself to form “the West,” matter with which its metamorphic sensibility of demonic erotic trauma cannot cohere. The penitents who meet Perceval on Good Friday and send him to the hermit tell him, “the wicked Jews whom we should kill like dogs…did us great good when in their malice they raised Him on the Cross: they damned themselves and saved us.” The negation neatly states the paradoxical need of the cult of aesthetics: seekers of purity must hate Jews and “kill [them] like dogs”; this need was made into doctrine by Anselm and Bernard of Clairvaux, older contemporary of Chrétien. Adherents of the cult of aesthetics must eat the body of a dead Jew to be purified; their culture engorged and deformed the Jews and their culture in their passionate play for an imposed and magical purification. The Jew and his Promised Land is the dispossessed host who shows up as a vital accessory in the church’s play. With this twisted, over-determined logic the Jew serves the role of host-desecrator; that is, he desecrates the fiction developed from his history, writings, theology and Land.
Perceval’s mother introduced Jew hatred early in the story when she explains to him about his maimed father and tells the un-tutored, ‘natural’ boy what a church is: “a most holy and beautiful building with relics and treasures where they sacrifice the body of Jesus Christ, the Holy Prophet whom the Jews greatly defiled. He was betrayed…” Thus the Jews must be both appropriated as host or trauma site – the host itself modeled on Passover matzo (as well as symbolically subverting the Jews) but with a radically pagan import of eating god’s body — and condemned so that the new, hybrid culture can establish its identity and strive perpetually for “purity” against the host culture upon which it piggy-backed and whose adherents it seeks to scatter or slay. The confusion here gains another dimension that links the cult of aesthetics and relics to its creedal ambiguities: here the son is, as in Islam, “a Holy Prophet” before being “this Lord.”
These ambiguities are a “murderous confusion” of relationships at every level, cultural, theological-ontological and personal: two queens, the mother and grandmother of Gawain, on a quest Chretien interweaves with that of Perceval, define their savior as “the Glorious Father who made his daughter his mother” . The confusion runs from the parentage and family of Perceval, — a strong-headed, heedless naïf who refuses to answer questions but insists on his own, a fine emblem of the playful imperial thoughtlessness of the new cult and its inquisitors — to the nature of the Creator whose glory here resembles the traumatic transposition and theological and family displacements in the myth of the formation of Aphrodite and rise of Kronos. Similarly, it contains and refracts the incestuous passion of Myrhha for her father and the fruit of their union, the perfect champion of Aphrodite, Adonis , the fertility god whose wounded thigh resonates in the wounded Fisher King and the blood-dripping, ivory-tipped lance that brings new growth and purification to the Wasteland. The cult of aesthetics must fashion a glorious and healing artifice from the blood lust in its Greco-Roman substrate, a lust overt in all its Crusades, its various aesthetic-imperial projects.
The pagan parallels go further. Like Isis and Gaia, Perceval’s mother seems to have a husband who is either brother or nephew (or son) but Perceval’s sin, unlike that of the redeemer he seeks, “the white stag” in Malory’s simile, is to have killed his mother (with grief) by his quest which is necessary for healing her husband and his father, or their near kin. The paradox and ambiguities in the cultural appropriation are built into the drive for purification that the horrible ambiguities demand. The Wasteland of traumatic elemental confusion and displacement both generates and is created by the Quest. Aptly, Perceval and his family dwell in “the Waste Forest” of confusion and denial, the remnant of imperial Rome’s collapse and the ancient culture Rome took with it into a wilderness of metamorphoses and mirrors.
When Europe emerged from seven centuries of chaos, pillage and cultural fusion unleashed by Rome’s collapse it brought forth a myth of purification by magic and the combined need and hatred for Jews and Judaism it inherited as its seeds from the death of the moribund empire.
The Grail legend as told by Chrétien provides a central datum on the inter-cultural and macro-cultural levels of the traumatic ambiguities and displacements central to the topic of The Head of Orpheus. From a cultural level it is natural that Chrétien formulated the essential mythic material of Christianity and that this be done in 12th century France about the “matter of Britain.” In the decades before he wrote his romances for Marie de Champagne, the first blood libels (that Jews make matzo using the blood of murdered Christian children) were proclaimed in Norwich and Lincoln, England resulting in mass murders of Jews. A few years before Chretien died and left his Perceval myth unfinished, England expelled its Jews. Early in his lifetime and a few decades before it, the dominant voice in the Church was Anselm who focused on the unique obstinacy of the Jews. In 1095, Peter the Hermit catalyzed the First Crusade whose war on the Turks began by slaughtering Jews in northern France and the Rhineland, a pattern repeated in the 1140s by Bernard and the second crusade. The century ending with the writing of Chretien’s Romances saw Europe develop distinctive forms of architecture and literature that were not based on classical Mediterranean culture as had been Romanesque. Thus, Chrétien’s Romances were the first expression of a distinctively European culture, weaving the tangled strands of extant Celtic and Germanic legends into a barely coherent version of Ovid, but suffused with ideological thrust. Central to the formation of “Christian Europe” was its programmatic negation and genocidal vilification of Jews. This was the cultural purification the imperial rape and possession “required, as a necessity requires” to rid the “collective body” of the discordant matter within it; to heal with the magic of artifice the constructed, hybrid culture. The means and aesthetic expression of this healing is the legend of the sankgreall. The ambiguities in the relationships of the main players in this legend are congruent with its odd theology and cultural need to vilify, slander and murder Jews. Purification by artifice and magic is the method and ideology of “the West” and the legends of Perceval were woven together at the center of organized mass Jew killing and Gothic architecture. This all is part of the Romance of the West as well as its distinctive aesthetic geometry of trauma.
The Jews, the Christians, Rome and the blood libels (of which the Grail is the aesthetic – cultural axis) are the grand geometry of trauma of “the West.” The blood libels were simply the twelfth century formulation of the foundational Christian gnosis about their avatar, his robe, the cross and the “perfidy” of the Jew. In short, they were the exemplary product and sign of Europe’s identity formation as a passion play in which the Jewish savior’s death must be avenged by slaughtering, culturally or literally the rest of the Jews whose difference exposes the irrational basis of Western ‘purity’ and its need to ‘fix’ its identity with images. The blood libels were followed logically by the attack on the “impure” blood of Jewish converts made by Christian torture, terror and proselytizing; by the ghettos decreed by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215); by the “blood purity” strictures of the “Statute of Toledo” (1547); and by Luther’s assertion of the uniquely “venomous and virulent nature of the true Jew…a calamity in our land” . Similarly, soon afterward, Philip II, Hapsburg declared that “all the heresies in Germany and France, as in Spain have been sown by descendants of Jews” . The more the cult of aesthetics confronts its irrationality, the emptiness, doubt and terror of its fiction, the more its cognitive disjunction is blamed on those who do not collude in the fiction, who pollute its ‘purity’ by threatening the in any case inevitable collapse of its rapturous collective delusion. As anthropologists explain, a culture will remove the source of perceived pollution , even in this unique case in which the pollution is the source of salvation and identity. In its illogic and its imagery, the West condemns itself.
Because the cult of the West is essentially aesthetic, a shadow play of imagery, irrational passion, and rapturous negation of thought, its gist is aptly captured by a great imagist of the 20th century, perhaps the definitive postmodern poet and celebrant of figuration:
The mind
Turns to its own figurations and declares,
‘This image, this love, I compose myself
Of these. In these, I come forth outwardly,
In these I wear a vital cleanliness…
The arrogance of self-creation and abyss of solipsism in the cult of aesthetics in this poem are clearly a dramatic act, a presentation of pageantry in which “the mind” takes its own “figurations” as a host, composes itself of them and makes a declaration of faith. Many strong poems of the mid-twentieth century have similar images of the mind being engorged by its imagery. The nominally secular Stevens champions the purity or “cleanliness” of a mind formed by its own images as the West by its dominant aesthetics. These were the decades when Europe approached the pinnacle of purifying its image and completing its lie by erasing the Jews.
The last stage of this “purification” is pure paganism and the insistence that the savior of Europe is not Jewish; this was the messiah-cult or cult of the leaders of the 20th century (a form of the “super-man” or “superhuman” cult of the artifice, hailed by Yeats). The final purification is all humans in communion in a global State, “a planetary human solution” achieved by engorging its original host in a ‘peace process.’ This macro-aesthetic project is sold by the ultimate artifice, the virtual reality of digitalized media. Having purged the Jewish root whose simple, wise and rational order is vital but alien to its image-crazed and metamorphic character, the West will find itself “inanimate in an inert savoir” adoring its petrified figurations in the web of a globalized cult of aesthetics.
1. The formative century is the twelfth, or more broadly, the period from Anselm’s prime to the completion of Notre Dame de Chartres and the Fourth Lateran Council, about 1065-1215. “Sankgreall” is a contraction of “blood [sang] dish” [graal] originally a plate for a consecrated ‘host,’ later a chalice of wine-blood.
2. Chretien de Troyes, “The Story of the Grail (Perceval)” in Arthurian Romances (London 1991, translation and notes by William W. Kibler), 386, 424, 460
3. Ibid. 460
4. Ibid. 420-22
5. Ibid. 458, 388
6. This is the result of the “treacherous” message of the centaur, Nessus in the Women of Trachis by Sophocles. The “confusion” is the work of the “sickness” of Aphrodite whose power the centaur embodies. She also literally embodies perverse erotic trauma, displacement of the Father and metamorphosis.
7. “the Story of the Grail” op. cit. 482
8. Ovid, Metamorphoses Book X
9. “The Story of the Grail” 386, 417, passim
10. Book in progress by E. Narrett
11. For example, Chartres Cathedral of “Our Lady” was built c. 1145-90 during the last decades of Chretien’s life; “Our Lady of Paris,” Notre Dame de Paris was begun in 1163. The names of the sites emphasize the core of goddess worship and the continuity of the Aphrodite-Isis core of pagan antiquity. Innocent III at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) established ghettos, distinctive dress and special taxes for Jews even as Notre Dame was being completed and Talmud burning set to begin about 1240.
12. Martin Luther, “On the Jews and their Lies” (1543); the Toledo statute or “limpieza de sangre”
13. James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: the Church & the Jews (Boston 1999), 368-79 passim
14. Mary Douglas, Purity & Danger (NY 1966) explains this well and shows the rational basis of “the abominations of Leviticus,” the title of one chapter. A rare academic, she found wisdom and positive value in Judaism and empirical practices, rather than ‘spiritual’ beliefs as a grounding for the sacred.
15. Wallace Stevens, “Poem with Rhythms” 13-17; cf. “Of Modern Poetry” and “Asides on the Oboe”:
“Say that final belief must be in a fiction: it is time to choose.” See also, “the Plain Sense of Things.”
16. See for example, Theodore Roethke, “Night Crow” where the result is utter darkness, un-creation.
17. See theosophist Alice Bailey on “the Inner Source of the Outer Turmoil” 1939
18. Stevens, “the Plain Sense of Things” (1954), 4