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Cornell University Library 
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 ParsHaka study oJ„WM^j;S|iBilillBlM 
 
 3 1924 022 297 950 
 
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 tlie Cornell University Library. 
 
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PARSIFAL 
 
 A Study of Wagner s Music Drama 
 By W. L. WILMSHURST 
 
 LONDON 
 PERCY LUND, HUMPHRIES & CO., LTD., 
 3, Amen Corner, E.C.4. 
 MCMXXII. 
 
NOTE. 
 
 This interpretative study of Parsifal was 
 published as a magazine article in 19 14, on the 
 opera being first produced in England at Covent 
 Garden. Now that the work is being reintroduced 
 by the British National Opera Company to large 
 audiences throughout the country who hitherto 
 have had no chance of becoming acquainted with 
 it, it has been suggested in several quarters that the 
 article might usefiiUy be reprinted for the possible 
 assistance of those who wish for some guidance as 
 to Wagner's ideas and intentions in the great 
 symbolic music-drama in which his long and 
 laborious life-work culminated. 
 
 Written originally for a special and limited 
 circle of readers habituated to the study of mystical 
 religion and philosophy, the article may perhaps 
 prove difficult to, or outside the usual lines of thought 
 of, some of the public whose interests lie in other 
 directions. But as there may be many to whom 
 Parsifal may mean something more than an opera, 
 to whom it will mean something vital and deep, 
 something that the ordinary review or press-notice 
 of dramatic productions does not convey or 
 interpret, I gladly place this study of it at public 
 disposal, there to take its chance of finding sym- 
 pathetic readers and helping whom it may towards 
 that attainment of which Parsifal treats. 
 
 W. L. WiLMSHURST. 
 
 Gledholt, 
 
 Huddersfield, 
 
 March, 1922. 
 
" PARSIFAL." 
 
 CONSIDERED AS AN EXPOSITION OF PRACTICAL 
 MYSTICISM. 
 
 THE quiet eye of - the nature-mystic 
 reaps its rich harvest amid external 
 scenes and discerns " good (or God) 
 in everything." The quiet thought of the 
 philosophical mystic attains intellectual as- 
 surance of a nameless Unity manifesting in 
 conflicting diversities, and at last realizes that 
 he himself is That. The quiet feeling of the 
 lover of love and beauty learns that things 
 lovely and beautiful are but the shattered 
 multi-coloured rays of an ultra-natural white 
 brilliance that integrates them all. To each 
 of these comes his reward, for God seeks men 
 out by many ways and draws them through 
 different faculties ; and since there are neither 
 greater nor less in the Kingdom into which 
 He gathers them, it would be presumption to 
 ascribe preference or inferiority to any special 
 path by which individuals are called to travel 
 to their goal. 
 
 Nevertheless there remains another path 
 to the Centre — a path not a little obscured and 
 distrusted in these critical and controversial 
 days — ^which, temporarily shutting off every 
 other object of contemplation, asks for com- 
 plete concentration of eye and thought and 
 feeling upon — nothing general, like Nature ; 
 
nothing abstract, like an idea ; nothing diffused, 
 like beauty ; but upon a single human figure ; 
 a simple, but synthetic Personality that 
 embraces and transcends all other ways and 
 says " I am the Way ;" as though, after all, the 
 simplest, most effectual object of contem- 
 plation for assisting those anxious to reach into 
 the heart of things was one of their own kind, 
 a perfected example of their own class, a 
 divinized Man. 
 
 And, doubtless, because ideas concerning 
 this particular " Way " have in these days 
 become obscured, that way is being restated 
 and re-presented in unexpected and unprece- 
 dented forms, so that, by what method it 
 matters not, means of publicly proclaiming 
 that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand and in 
 our midst shall not fail. If one form of 
 evidence or revelation ceases to be effectual, 
 alternatives are continually forthcoming, God 
 fulfilling Himself in many ways lest one good 
 custom should corrupt the world. Was it not 
 so beforetime when the Great Exemplar was 
 to be found less in the august precincts of the 
 synagogue, the doctors of which had made 
 His doctrine of no effect by their traditions, 
 than in the streets, the countryside, the bjrways, 
 and the profane haunts of publicans and 
 sinners ? And to-day if you do not always 
 chance to find evidences of him in the places 
 of orthodoxy, it is possible to do so elsewhere, 
 
and certainly so within the secular walls of 
 Covent Garden Theatre if you happen to 
 attend a performance of the " stage-conse- 
 crating festival," as its author called it, of 
 Parsifal^ the production of which has just 
 become possible for the first time in this 
 country, and of which as a notable modern 
 example of Christian Mysticism it is proposed 
 to record something in these pages. 
 
 Despite all attempts to localize them or to 
 restrict their enjoyment to a select few, the 
 great inspirations that have visited the minds 
 of men capable of bodying them forth into 
 suitable form for the general good find a way, 
 sooner or later, of eluding those restraints and 
 of becoming the heritage of the multitude. 
 The Myths and Mystery-systems of the past, 
 the sacred waitings of all faiths, even the 
 Hebrew Scriptures and Christian Gospels, 
 have all been subject to this experience,— in 
 the first instance and for a while the exclusive 
 property of a few, and later on becoming 
 disseminated for the benefit of the many. 
 And so too when Richard Wagner sought to 
 restrict to Bayreuth for all time the perfor- 
 mance of his supreme achievement and special 
 message, he made no allowance for the opera- 
 tion of a principle that eventually would have 
 defeated his purpose, apart altogether from 
 regulations of copyright. For in the work in 
 question it was given him to express in 
 
dramatized fonn the substance of that which 
 all the Mystery-schools, Churches and religious 
 systems of the world have subsisted to declare. 
 It fell to him to proclaim, through the medium 
 of stage-spectacle and music, the cosmic facts 
 of the fallen and derelict state of humanity 
 and of the presence in the world of a Christ- 
 power redeeming and restoring from that 
 state, and to give a visible presentation of the 
 actual method and processes to be experienced 
 by the individual in the course of that restora- 
 tion. Parsifal, in a word, is a stage-spectacle 
 of the Christing of man. Its purpose is to 
 exhibit to the eye, what oral or written doc- 
 trine conveys only, and perhaps less efficiently, 
 to the understanding, the processes of the 
 inward way of reintegration, the engrafting of 
 a new self upon the old, the unifying the 
 personal with the universal divine Will, and 
 the taking or transformation of one's natural 
 manhood into God. Save by implication it 
 inculcates no theological principles or dogmas ; 
 it merely gives a practical, personal application 
 of all that those principles and dogmas imply. 
 Where they teach how and why the Divine 
 once became man, Parsifal demonstrates the 
 complementary process ; it shows how man — 
 any man — may become reintegrated into the 
 Divine image. 
 
 Of the legendary origins and literary 
 ancestry of Parsifal nothing need be said here 
 
beyond the fact that Wagner drew his idea 
 and most of the episodes of his music-drama 
 chiefly from the 12th-century German poem 
 Parzival, by Wolfram von Eschenbach, a 
 Bavarian Minnesinger, who gave expression 
 to some profound mystical perceptions in 
 the terms of romance and chivalry. He, 
 in turn, admits having derived the essential 
 elements alike of his story and his 
 esotericism from an earlier French source, 
 Kiot (Guyot, or Guy,) of Provence, who 
 originally derived them from Arabic manu- 
 scripts deposited in a library at Toledo in 
 Spain. These, it would seem, must have been 
 treatises of an alchemical character and account 
 for the direct alchemical allusions in Wol- 
 fram's jpoem and for the fact that Wagner's 
 work is, for those acquainted with the literature 
 of spiritual alchemy, a spectacular presentation 
 of the processes with which that cryptic 
 science deals. It is intended here, however, 
 to deal with the mystical content oiF the work 
 and to regard it not as a legend of the past, 
 not as an idealistic fantasy or dream-fabric, 
 having neither time nor place, of the artistic 
 imagination, but as an instruction and vivid 
 object-lesson in the actual processes of the 
 inward life. For this purpose the external 
 framework and story of the drama exist only 
 as a veil clothing Wagner's deeper purpose. 
 In his personal religious quest he had steeped 
 
himself in the literature of that remarkable 
 mediseval religious movement which expressed 
 itself in terms of spiritual chivalry and the 
 quest of the Holy Grail. He knew those 
 records dealt with no mere invention of poetic 
 fancy, but contained the tradition of an actual 
 college or association of men and women who 
 had withdrawn from the chaos of the world's 
 ordinary activities and become constituted, 
 in secrecy and sanctity, into a divinely and 
 scientifically ordered community or hierarchy 
 dedicated to advancing the regeneration of 
 those who aspired to that goal and labouring 
 to keep open, for the benefit of a benighted 
 and careless humanity, the almost closed 
 channels of grace and influx of Divine Life 
 and sustenance from planes beyond this outer 
 world of fallen Nature. He knew that these 
 one-time wardens of the sacred science of 
 regeneration had, along with the science itself, 
 long become lost to the knowledge and the 
 interest of society and become regarded as 
 but the fable of an antique unenlightened 
 age ; and, realizing that the world was but 
 the worse and the more benighted for the 
 disappearance, he set himself to revive at least 
 the memory of it, to proclaim what the great 
 quest of the Grail once really meant and 
 actually was, to show that it was no 
 imaginative fantasy, but a definite science 
 and work of sanctity attended with practical 
 
transformative results to those submitting 
 themselves to its discipline and capable of 
 imparting ulterior spiritual benefit to the 
 world beyond its withdrawn and sacred 
 circle. How, Wagner may be imagined as 
 saying (and virtually did say in his private 
 writings), how might not this troubled 
 de-spiritualized world of to-day profit by the 
 presence in its midst of such a sanctified 
 Order of spiritual knights forming a duly 
 constituted nucleus, focus-point or Grail- 
 chalice into which Super-natural Sustenance 
 could freely flow and, from that nucleus, 
 be radiated and mediated into the whole 
 social fabric, blessing, redeeming and gradually 
 transmuting it from human animals into gods? 
 Wagner knew that popular religion in any 
 age falls far short of the full scope and intention 
 of religion itself, that its exoteric teachings 
 and elementary principles of conduct may 
 produce " good " men as the world's standard 
 goes, but not divinized men, and are quite 
 inadequate in themselves to effect a radical 
 regeneration of either individuals or society. 
 He knew that towards advancing this greater 
 end there has always existed an esoteric 
 doctrine and practice, adapted only to the 
 keen spiritual adventurer and calling for far 
 more strenuous efforts of mind and will than 
 the average man deems sufficient to ensure 
 personal reintegration and social salvation. 
 
And he knew, what is now well recognised by 
 students of the extensive body of mediaeval 
 Grail literature, that behind all its romance 
 and idealism are enshrined the memorials of a 
 secret Christian Order or Fraternity of mystical 
 chivalry devoted to this advanced conception 
 of religion, dedicated to the ardent quest for 
 personal and collective union with God, and 
 conferring upon suitable aspirants thereto 
 certain high rites of Initiation conducing to 
 that supreme attainment. It is glimpses of 
 these rites and of their effect upon a properly 
 prepared candidate for them that Wagner 
 gives us in Parsifal. Its opening Act deals 
 with the first awakening of that candidate's 
 consciousness to the vistas of his soul's destiny 
 and the hitherto unsuspected possibilities of 
 his being ; it shows us the moment of his 
 restoration to that light in which for the first 
 time a man sees God and realizes his own 
 potentiality for union with Him, and the 
 agony which all creation suffers and must 
 needs suffer until' that union is effected. The 
 second Act portrays a subjective episode 
 representative of certain psychological expe- 
 riences which are in fact encountered upon 
 the path to that union and in the course of 
 the regenerative process. The third Act shows 
 that process completed ; the attainment of 
 that high degree of Mastership in which, after 
 long labours and ordeals, the individual 
 
 lO 
 
becomes perfected, reintegrated in and identi- 
 fied with the Divine Substantiality and capable 
 of mediating and ministering that basal Food 
 of life to his less advanced fellow-men. In a 
 word Parsifal exhibits the human soul's 
 evolution carried to that divine event and 
 term of which another great German mystic 
 (Angelus Silesius) speaks in the lines : 
 
 Soli ich mein letztes End und ersten Anfang finden, 
 So muss ich mich in Gott und Gott in mir ergriinden, 
 Und werden dass, was Er ; ich muss ein Schein im Schein, 
 Ich muss ein Wort im Wort, ein Gott in Gotte sein. 
 
 To enter, even imaginatively, into these 
 ideas makes unusual demands upon minds 
 habitually living upon the low levels of every- 
 day thought, even of conventional religious 
 thought; demands which Wagner notifies to 
 us in the initial episode of his drama. For as, 
 when the curtain rises to dawn-break in the 
 uplands of the Grail-kingdom and the keen 
 atmosphere of Mont Salvatch, Gurnemanz 
 rouses the sleeping young esquires, who sud- 
 denly catch the distant strains of a celestial 
 music, and bids them render thanks to God 
 that they can hear it, so it is as though the 
 audience itself is bidden to bestir itself, to 
 awake out of its sleep in the cellarage of the 
 House of Life, and listen, if haply they have 
 ears of hearing, to supernal harmonies audible 
 only to those whose minds can ascend into its 
 higher storeys. Of not all of us, perhaps, 
 
 II 
 
can it yet be said that the eyes of the blind 
 have been opened or the ears of the deaf 
 unstopped, and even if we have earned a right 
 of entry into the Grail dominion and, as 
 esquires, neophytes and disciples therein, hear 
 its music faintly and from afar, it has still its 
 distances to be traversed ere can be penetrated 
 that central sanctuary to which only the 
 knighthood of spiritual adeptship is admitted 
 and hears at full swell that harmony which 
 "is in immortal souls." ' 
 
 From the outset of the drama are premised 
 the present fallen and exiled condition of 
 man ; the helplessness of his unaided natural 
 powers to uplift himself ; the consequent 
 necessity of a redemptive power other than 
 himself to restore him ; and the actual pre- 
 sence, about and within him, of such a power 
 waiting only to be appropriated. In Amfor- 
 tas, the King and Keeper of the Grail Castle — 
 which castle is the personal organism of man 
 considered as a temple of the Holy Ghost — 
 is represented the natural humanity of this 
 
 ^ Wagner's introduction of celestial music (the Gtail-motif) 
 into this chief and concluding work of his is closely paralleled 
 in the supreme and final work of two other great geniuses 
 dealing with the fundamentals of Ufe, viz., by Goethe in the 
 second part of Faust and by Shakespeare in The Tempest. 
 Gurnemanz's speech to the esquires about the Grail music 
 strongly recalls the lovely lines allotted to the bestial Caliban, 
 beginning 
 
 " Be not afraid ; the place is full of noises, 
 Sounds and sweet strains that give delight and hurt not." 
 
 12 
 
world ; Amfortas really typifies every-man ; 
 and the very name suggests infortune, imper- 
 fection and enfeeblement.^ He is the son of 
 Titurel — obviously, from its Hebrew termina- 
 tion, a celestial name, not of this world — ^who 
 before Amfortas' time erected the Grail Castle 
 upon the Mount of Salvation and had perfectly 
 served the office of the Holy Grail therein ; by 
 which is implied that before man descended 
 into a body of jnortality and physical condi- 
 tions he pre-existed spiritually and did the 
 perfect will of God in heaven ; as it is scrip- 
 turally recorded of the self-knowing, timeless 
 spirit of man, " Thou hast been in Eden, the 
 garden of God. Every precious stone was 
 thy covering. . . Thou art the anointed 
 cherub that covereth (i.e., that overbroods the 
 natural external man) and I have set thee so. 
 Thou hast walked up and down in the midst 
 of the stones of fire ; thou wast perfect in thy 
 ways from the day that thou wast created." 
 (Ezek. xxviii., 13-15). But in the course of the 
 spirit's life — ^why and how we need not stay 
 to enquire — ^it has passed into material 
 incarnate conditions ; Titurel, " the covering 
 cherub," has been " cast to the ground " (as 
 the above quotation goes on to say) and exists 
 
 • The allegorical nature of the names is dealt with in the 
 appendices and notes to Miss Weston's translation of Wolfram's 
 Parzival, 2 vols. (D. Nutt). Amfortas, or Anfortas, is the 
 equivalent of the Provencal French enfertez (a sick man) and 
 the Latin infortis. 
 
 13 
 
now in conjunction with a corruptible 
 organism, which is Amfortas. And it is there- 
 fore now the portion of Amfortas to serve the 
 Grail on earth as antecedently Titurel had 
 done in heaven. In interpreting, Parsifal it is 
 necessary to emphasize the essentially mystical 
 relationship, or " fatherhood," of Titurel to 
 Amfortas,* for the two characters stand really 
 for the archetypal spirit and the externalized 
 body of but a single man. Titurel is the 
 divine and higher self of man, his " covering 
 cherub," genius, or guardian angel ; that part 
 of him which is always " hid with Christ in 
 God " ; the unobserved, unexternalized nexus 
 that affiliates the Amfortas part of him with its 
 creative root ; or, viewed in another way, he is 
 Adam before the fall into physical conditions 
 (considering the fall as a continuous process 
 common to humanity rather than as an isolated 
 event occurring to a single being), whilst 
 Amfortas is Adam after it. Whence it follows 
 that Titurel, although numbered among the 
 dramatis persona and given an actual part in 
 the drama, is never visibly present. Consis- 
 tently with what he types he remains always 
 
 ' In the older versions Titurel is not the father, but the 
 grandfather, of Amfortas, the father bein|; Frimutel (from 
 Freimuth) : the triad being obviously intended to denote the 
 divine spirit, the free- willing soul, and the external body of 
 man. (See Miss Weston's notes to Wolfram's Parzival, vol. 
 i., page 294.) Wagner has simplified the symbolism, but 
 without injury to its implication, by omitting reference to 
 Frimutel. 
 
 14 
 
in abscondito : a voice and nothing more, 
 singing in the unseen and urging the lower 
 man, the sluggish mortal Amfortas part, to 
 persist for both their sakes in discharging the 
 office of the Grail so that both outward body 
 and inward soul may alike be preserved unto 
 everlasting life. 
 
 The tragedy of the drama at its opening, 
 then, is the tragedy of fallen humanity, and 
 lies in the fact that Amfortas, the natural man, 
 has failed, through the weakness of his mortal 
 nature and the seductions of adverse powers, 
 in his office of perfectly " serving the Holy 
 Grail " ; that is, of continuing to be a perfect 
 vessel for manifesting the Divine Presence. 
 As expressed in the terms of this particular 
 allegory, his failure lies in having allowed one 
 of the hallows — the sacred lance — ^to become 
 separated from the chalice — a combination 
 intended never to be severed — and used for his 
 own personal ends and desires ; the chalice 
 denoting his own receptibility as a vessel for 
 the Divine grace and wisdom ; the straight- 
 shafted lance emblematizing the Divine Life- 
 Force which is the source of his own spiritual 
 will, the most potent of his faculties, but 
 intended, in good and evil conditions alike, to 
 remain subordinate and conformed to the 
 Divine will ; never therefore to be appro- 
 priated to personal, self-willed ends, even 
 when provoked or assaulted by evil, the dis- 
 
 15 
 
guised minister of the Good employed to 
 discipline and strengthen the human will by 
 subjecting it to appropriate tests. The catas- 
 trophe to Amfortas is that, under such a 
 testing, he has lost the sacred lance to 
 Klingsor, the assaulting power of evil, acting 
 upon him through the medium of the desire- 
 nature and the spirit of this world embodied 
 in the extraordinary female character Kundry — 
 that good servant, but bad mistress, neither 
 moral nor immoral, but an unspiritualized 
 ingredient in the world's and our own personal 
 composition, and ready for the service of any 
 will, good or bad, stronger than her own.* 
 But not only has Klingsor wrested the lance 
 from Amfortas ; he has turned it against him, 
 leaving him with an unhealing wound — ^the 
 cosmic wound of all humanity. The chalice 
 still remains to Amfortas ; he can still be a 
 passive receptacle of the Divine Life ; but 
 actively to enel-gize, to control the Divine 
 Life-Force and " have dominion over " 
 all created things, as was his intended 
 destiny, is now beyond his power. Moreover 
 each Divine influx into his chalice — ^now that 
 the lance is lost and his organism is mutilated 
 — ^is an agony rather than a joy ; for when new 
 
 • Wagner himself describes Kundry as " hell's rose- 
 blossom and the primeval witch," the false Magia of nature, 
 and speaks of this as having been personified under different 
 names in various religious myths, and in the Scriptures as 
 Herodias. 
 
 i6 
 
wine is poured into an old bottle, when the 
 imperfect tries to assimilate the perfect, and 
 uncleanness seeks to contain that which is 
 all-pure and holy, obvious consequences will 
 ensue; Upon each occasion that Amfortas, 
 in the symbolic sacrament of the Eucharist, 
 serves the Grail — ^invoking thereby into his 
 own self-debilitated system the Divine Life 
 and Substance, his unhealing wound breaks 
 out and bleeds afresh ; he eats, as it were, to 
 his own condemnation. Such is his agony 
 after each service, so apparently futile his 
 suppUcations for respite and restoration, that 
 his impulse is to abandon the sacred office 
 altogether. What prevents him from so doing 
 is the persistent urge of the " covering cherub," 
 the prescient watcher in the concealed higher 
 part of him, who sees — what the lower mind 
 is powerless to discern — the advent of a 
 redeeming principle with healing in its wings, 
 which cannot fail to come to his succour, 
 provided the externalized self continues 
 faithfully to discharge its appointed service. 
 For the great redemptive change that shall 
 transmute body, soul and spirit must be 
 initiated and worked out from the physical 
 circumference, must engage the energies of 
 the outermost part of the organism. And the 
 agony of Amfortas, which no natural medicine 
 or treatment, no remedies brought by the 
 serviceable Kundry, will avail, is not in vain, 
 
 17 
 
although to the limited sense-perception it 
 appears to be. Its every throe contributes 
 to the gestation and growth within the 
 old organism of " a new creature," and pro- 
 motes the formation within of a second Adam 
 who shall supplant the first. No more won- 
 derful exposition of, or practical commentary 
 upon, the words " Ye must be born again " 
 is possible than the great spectacle which 
 concludes the first act oi Parsifal. Amfortas is 
 serving the Grail once more in the temple — of 
 his own body. There encircles him the retinue 
 of knights over whom he is lord ; the personi- 
 fied natural forces, virtues and " works " of 
 his own self, consecrated and assembled for a 
 love-feast that shall enrich them all. From 
 above — ^gathered as ever, to witness the 
 Eucharistic Mystery — come the voices of 
 angels and archangels and all the company of 
 heaven. The despairing Amfortas, dreading 
 the pain ensuing upon each influx from above, 
 hesitates ; but " the covering cherub " urges 
 him on ; for " the spirit helpeth our infirmi- 
 ties, making intercession for us with groanings 
 which cannot be uttered, . . . making in- 
 tercession for saints according to the will of 
 God " (Rom. viii., 26-7) ; and the voice of 
 that spirit is heard in the guise of Titurel, 
 singing in concealment : — 
 
 Entombed live I by the Saviour's grace 
 
 Too feeble am I now to serve Him, 
 Thou serving cans't atone thy fault, 
 18 Reveal the Grail ! 
 
The holy chalice is upraised and forthwith 
 there descends upon it a beam of the Divine 
 Light. Meanwhile, watching the great spec- 
 tacle from aside, a stranger, a newcomer to 
 that temple, is seen standing by. It is Parsifal, 
 son of Herzeleide, the mystical offspring of 
 Amfortas' heart-sorrow and contrition. He 
 is the new birth, at last becoming manifest. 
 
 The exigencies of narrative and spectacle 
 of course involve this stranger being regarded 
 as a separate, independent personality from 
 those previously mentioned, and those who 
 have eyes and ears only for the outward 
 episodes of the drama must be left to such 
 satisfaction as they may derive therefrom. 
 To deeper perception Parsifal is no separate 
 person at all, but an integral factor of Amfortas; 
 an embryonic growth out of his own being ; 
 the " holy thing " born out of his own peni- 
 tential tears. As the enfeebled Titurel per- 
 sonifies the moribund spirit of the first Adam 
 in the natural man, so Parsifal impersonates 
 the germination within the latter of the second 
 Adam, " growing up before him as a tender 
 plant and a root out of a dry ground." As 
 Titurel becomes enfeebled and decreases, so, 
 synchronously, Parsifal increases in wisdom 
 and stature. For a true understanding of this 
 mystery-drama it cannot be too much insisted 
 on that, as in many old morality-plays, all its 
 dramatis personos are but so many constituents 
 
 19 
 
of a single personality and represent but the 
 changing phases of a spiritual process working 
 out to their term within an individual soul. 
 In the light of this fact there will be noted the 
 significant action of the character of Gurne- 
 manz — the personified natural reason and 
 intelligence' — ^who, upon momentarily divining 
 Parsifal as the destined healer of Amfortas, 
 has brought him into the Grail-temple, only 
 thereafter to hurry him ungraciously out of it, 
 because the stranger seems after all to be such 
 a simpleton and so incompetent to cope with 
 an urgent situation. Of what Gurnemanz 
 betokens upon first descrying his saviour it 
 has been written for all time that that saviour 
 " hath no form or comeliness and when we 
 see him there is no beauty that we should 
 desire him." 
 
 Parsifal, then, " the pure fool " or 
 " simple folly," as the name implies — ^is the 
 inward Christ, of utter weakness and simpli- 
 city, emerging out of heart sorrow into the 
 human consciousness. And this mystical son, 
 always " to the Greeks (the natural intelli- 
 gence) foolishness," being once born, the birth 
 is imperishable. Following the laws of an 
 embryology of its own its growth proceeds 
 
 ° All the names being symbolic, the conjecture is offered that 
 Gurnemanz (or Gornemans, in some versions) is an old Ger- 
 manized form of " journeyman " ; thus consistently figuring 
 the transient temporal carnal understanding which is used 
 for workaday purposes, but miist in spiritual things give way 
 to the perttianent intuitive faculty or Nous. 
 
 20 
 
subtly, secretly, but apace and independently 
 of the formal mind of the flesh, which fluc- 
 tuates between doubt and certitude of its 
 presence and undergoes affrighting alterna- 
 tions of illumination and darkness as the 
 growth progresses. There comes a time when 
 that growth must needs be tested ; be " led 
 up of the spirit into the wilderness to be 
 tempted of the devil," as the phrasing runs in 
 the Scriptures which prototypally enunciate 
 the stages of interior development ; and the 
 second act of Parsifal is nothing other than 
 that temptation formulated in dramatic spec- 
 tacle and in a manner in all essentials true to 
 the experience of those who have known it. 
 Now the average reader or spectator, 
 unaware of the processes of interior develop- 
 ment and the phenomena of advanced spiritual 
 experience, sees in this excursion of Parsifal 
 into the magic realm of Klingsor— the satanic 
 power — nothing more than an imaginative 
 flight into romance, and supposes its events 
 as applicable to the plane of the senses and its 
 characterizations to be physical personages, or 
 at least as much within the physical order as is 
 predicable of a dream of the fancy. But the 
 average reader or spectator knows nothing of 
 planes of being to which the senses do not 
 reach, nor of events and experiences therein 
 that go to the soul's strengthening and 
 upbuilding, and that are accomplished in full 
 
 21 
 
consciousness but in entire independence of 
 the physical nature whose faculties, the while, 
 remain suspended and quiescent. He knows 
 nothing of an ultra-physical fluidic world in 
 which thought becomes quasi-objective, and 
 the material of which is capable of being 
 moulded into protean and illusive shapes with 
 incredible celerity at the command of a will 
 competent to control it ; nor does he realize 
 that every human individual is permeated by 
 this fluidic sphere, and indeed moves within 
 his own personal magnetic field of it, into 
 which are garnered and stored the projections 
 of his own habitual mentality and the exhala- 
 tions of his own passions and desires, whether 
 good or evil. But it is in this illusive realm, 
 where reason is inoperative and in abeyance, 
 and only the intuitive faculty and the energies 
 of the spiritual will remain available, that the 
 second act of Parsifal must be deemed as 
 taking place.® They are especially the domain 
 of " the prince of the power of the air " — 
 these Klingsor's magic flower-gardens, of 
 
 * " The consciousness enters the fire- world and the dark 
 descent, through the thickening darkness of the nether air 
 verging to the chaos of matter flowing out from the perpetual 
 motion of the first Ufe ; the Black Saturn of the Adepts ; and 
 that appearing corruption that precedes mystical death and 
 regeneration. Here are earthquakes and strong convulsions 
 of nature. Apply not your mind to anything ; trust no lights, 
 no voices here ; they are but the passions of the soul mas- 
 querading, having no substance and nature." {A Suggestive 
 Enquiry into the Hermetic Mystery, p. 197.) Virgil also describes 
 the subject in the sixth Mneid in similar terms. 
 
 22 
 
which Wagner himself has written' that they 
 are intended to suggest sensuous extravagance 
 and " floral majesty unknown to physical 
 experience." Here it is that Parsifal is first 
 detained by the naive plausible appeals of the 
 " flower-maidens " — the rriental projections, 
 mala mentis gaudia as Virgil spe^s of them, 
 here become as it were material and mas- 
 querading in attractive guise, of the Amfortas 
 personality he is destined to redeem, — and is 
 assaulted by the more potent and insidious 
 seductions of the desire-nature made concrete 
 here in the personality of Kundry. It is here, 
 in brief, that the growing Christ of the inward 
 man is led into and tempted in the " wilder- 
 ness " — ^in the waste places of thought and 
 desire created by the outward man ; where 
 the consciousness is confronted by the dwellers 
 upon its own threshold ; discerns the falsity 
 of imaginings of its own making, to which it 
 has trusted and with which it has long 
 " walked in the house of God as friends " ; 
 and where it must subdue its own spectral 
 exhalations and cleanse the inside of its own 
 cup and platter. This is no imaginary expe- 
 rience, but a definite psychological event, 
 though only those know it who have expe- 
 rienced it. It is the peculiar trial in the course 
 of interior growth receiving special mention 
 in that clause of the Lord's Prayer which asks 
 
 ' Rd. Wagner's Prose Works (Ellis), vol. 6, p. 309. 
 
 23 
 
that we be not led into temptation without 
 being delivered from our own inherent evil ; 
 since to succumb to the evil there encountered 
 means that our second state will be worse 
 than our first. 
 
 It is here, then, that Parsifal by asserting 
 a sufficiency of insight and energy to escape 
 enthralment from the phantoms of the mind 
 and the desires of the carnal Amfortas-nature, 
 demonstrates himself as in possession of the 
 all-potent spiritual will ; in other words, he 
 recaptures the sacred lance of which Amfortas 
 had suffered himself to be despoiled ; and 
 with the recovered weapon makes the sign of 
 the Cross which shatters and dispels for ever 
 the illusions to which the senses and reasoning 
 mind are normally in bondage. Thus does 
 " the seed of the woman," — ^the Christ-spirit 
 germinating within the soul — " bruise the 
 serpent's head " whose poison infects the 
 lower man, and casts under foot the envelope 
 of carnal affections. 
 
 Only after some such trial of the soul and 
 conquest of the desire-nature as is inculcated 
 here does that regeneration become possible 
 which is exhibited in the third and concluding 
 act of Parsifal, a spectacle which advances 
 amid a wealth of sjnnbolic episode, of in- 
 creasing intensity and pathos, until the strands 
 of symbolic characterization are all brought 
 together to be synthesized in the supreme 
 24 -, I 
 
climax reached at the end of all. The allegory 
 here, dealing with the higher altitudes of the 
 soul's achievements, becomes extremely sub- 
 tle, so that, although its inwardness is obvious 
 to a single glance, to write of it in detail is not 
 a little difficult. 
 
 It is Good Friday morning, in the vicinity 
 of the Grail Castle. The season has its 
 significance in betokening the completed pas- 
 sion and crucifixion of the old Adam ; and we 
 know that now Titurel, the animating spirit of 
 the unregenerate nature, lies at last in mystical 
 death, and that his externalized expression, 
 Amfortas, is agonizing in extremity. But it 
 betokens also spring-tide, the rebirth of nature 
 from wintry bonds, and the general accession, 
 in every plane of life and department of being, 
 of the Resurrection and the Life. Along a 
 path— truly the mystic " way " — traversing a 
 wild nbw studded with spring-flowers, ap- 
 proaches a travel-wearied knight in black 
 armour ; it is Parsifal bearing the recovered 
 lance. Planting it erect in the earth, and 
 kneeling before that symbol of the spiritual 
 will, his prayer is surely that that will may 
 now and henceforward be done in the personal 
 " earth " — in his Amfortas part — ^which is 
 already being done in his own unsullied, 
 higher, heaven-nature. Attracted by this 
 action there gather to him, from the one hand, 
 the Gurnemanz by whom he was originally 
 
 25 
 
despised and rejected, for the purified intelli- 
 gence at length has come to recognise its 
 redeemer ; * and, from the other, Kundry, 
 the now all but perished astral time-spirit, 
 formerly his would-be seductress, now a 
 Magdalen thankful, ere entering into her 
 longed-for rest, to wash his feet and expend 
 upon him the stored spikenard of the world. 
 These twain it is who disrobe the knight of his 
 black habiliments, to find him all beautiful 
 within and wearing the white seamless robe and 
 the features of the Man of Sorrows . The trans- 
 muting of the interior elements that go to the 
 making of the natural man thus proceeding 
 apace, there remains now only to see effected 
 his complete transfiguration. The inward 
 Christ has yet to enter still more fully into His 
 own, flooding the entire being and conscious- 
 ness of Amfortas and metamorphosing the 
 whole outward man ; the glory of the Lord 
 must be revealed so that all his flesh may see it. 
 I suppose that no spectacle more impres- 
 sive or more instructive in the matters of 
 divine science has ever been presented to 
 public contemplation than this concluding 
 scene of Parsifal, in which all the discrete 
 parts, the corruptible and incorruptible ele- 
 ments, of human personality are at last 
 
 'The impulsiveness of Gurnemanz, his alternating 
 
 rejection and ultimate penitent recognition of Parsifal, are 
 
 strongly suggestive of the personality of Peter in the Gospels 
 
 and of the natural human understanding his character types. 
 
 26 
 
assembled to receive the magic baptism of 
 fire which shall transmute and weld them all 
 into a regenerate unity. The understanding 
 spectator will find in tiiiis wonderful demons- 
 tration of the synthesizing and reintegrating 
 of the divers elements that go to the making of 
 perfect man, all that the Mystery-systems of 
 the past were instituted to inculcate ; all that 
 the greater doctors of theology have striven 
 in their thousand treatises to express ; all that 
 the mediaeval spiritual alchemists laboured to 
 achieve ; all that the lore of the mystics of 
 East and West, of whatever church or secret 
 school, have openly proclaimed or cryptically 
 taught. 
 
 It is still Good Friday and the occasion 
 of the last Agape in the Grail Temple, — the 
 last, because, from the human and natural side 
 of things, the purpose for which that temple 
 stands is at an end, its ideals in ruins. Titurel, 
 its founder, is dead, and before the altar, in 
 final sacrifice, rests his bier. Amfortas, his 
 sore-smitten successor, is at the point of death 
 from the unhealing wound and powerless to 
 serve the Grail further. Around him is 
 assembled his company of knights, impotent 
 in themselves, because dependent for existence 
 upon their chief and upon the heavenly 
 sustenance that through him alone can reach 
 and nourish them ; as has been said, they 
 impersonate the collective faculties, attributes 
 
 27 
 
and works of a single man marshalled and 
 dedicated to the regenerative process, and, as 
 such, are inseparable therefore from their 
 governing centre now lying in extremis. In- 
 woven with these is the astral body of desire, in 
 the person of Kundry, now purged of all virus 
 and retaining only sufficient energy to aspire to 
 partake in the general redemption ; gathered 
 also into the symbolic circular chantry is the 
 purified, enlightened understanding, in Gurne- 
 manz, desiring too to depart in peace now that 
 his eyes have truly seen their salvation in 
 Parsifal. There needs but that these several 
 elements should be combined and effect a 
 higher unity, and that the old Adam, im- 
 penetrated by the quickening spirit of the new, 
 should undergo a transfiguring metamorphosis 
 and become " a new creature." It is as though 
 it had been written, " as in Titurel and Am- 
 fortas all the original elements of man die, so 
 in Parsifal shall they all be made alive." 
 
 Parsifal now heals the cosmic wound by 
 touching Amfortas' bleeding side with the 
 point of the recovered lance, so re-incorporat- 
 ing into the corrupted organism that Divine 
 Life-Force the perversion and loss of which has 
 been the cause of all human woe. This symbolic 
 action, it will be noticed, is the reverse and 
 complement of that which occurred when, 
 upon the Cross, the spear was plunged into 
 the side of the Lord. The humanity which 
 28 
 
wounded Him in wrath is in turn itself 
 wounded by Him in love ; whilst the life-flow 
 that issued from His side poured only that 
 thereafter it might be infused with saving 
 efficacy into the body of man. Thus is to be 
 understood the healing at long last of Amfortas 
 and the reinstatement, upon the altar of the 
 heart, of the sacred lance in unison with its 
 companion hallow, the chalice, making possible 
 once more the perfect service of the Grail by 
 a redeemed and perfect servitor. 
 
 At this instant the natural light forthwith 
 becomes extinguished, everything made mani- 
 fest by it disappears now at the coming of the 
 Divine darkness ; a darkness only because of 
 its sheer excess of light. And then from the 
 depths of that darkness shines a glimmer and 
 a hope, straightway shaping itself into the 
 luminous figure of the Risen One irradiating 
 the clouds and darkness round about Him. 
 In His ministering hand is the chalice of 
 Eternal Life glowing now to redness ; des- 
 cending upon Him is the Holy Dove, to testify 
 of this apotheosis of man : — " This is My 
 beloved son in whom I am well pleased." 
 The divers elements going to the making of the 
 natural man — all his now purified parts, attri- 
 butes and works — are indrawn into the dark- 
 ness, thence to be shown forth again trans- 
 formed into that mystic " city, which is at 
 unity in itself," and of which it is mystically 
 
 29 
 
written " thither the tribes go up, even the 
 tribes of the Lord, to testify unto Israel, to 
 give thanks unto the name of the Lord." 
 
 In complete and awed silence some two 
 thousand people, I suppose, who have watched 
 the consummation of this spectacle, disperse 
 from the great auditorium and melt into the 
 London streets. What came they forth to 
 see ? Perhaps only a new production at 
 Covent Garden ; Wagner transported at last 
 from Bayreuth ; an imaginative effort of the 
 mediaeval religious mind seized upon by a 
 modern musical genius and adapted to the 
 stage of the day. It is not for one to judge. But 
 doubtless some at least of those who crept 
 away thus silently from this mystery-spectacle 
 of human re-integration into the image of 
 God realized in the performance something 
 of what its author deposed to experiencing at 
 its initial production — " a blessed sense of 
 world-escape," and even discerned in it inti- 
 mations deeper than perhaps he himself was 
 fully conscious of. To continue Wagner's 
 own words f " Even the influence of our 
 surrounding optic and acoustic atmosphere 
 bore our souls away from the wonted world ; 
 and the consciousness of this was evident at 
 the thought of going back into the world. 
 Parsifal itself owed its origin and evolution to 
 
 * Wagner's Prose Works (Ellis), vol. 6, p. 312. 
 30 
 
escape therefrom. Who can look, his lifetime 
 long, with open eyes and unpent heart upon 
 this world of robbery and murder, organized 
 and legalized by lying, deceit and hypocrisy, 
 without being forced to flee from it at times 
 with shuddering disgust ? Whither turns his 
 gaze ? Too often to the pit of death. But him 
 whose calling and whose fate have fenced from 
 that, to him the truest likeness of the world 
 may well appear the herald of redemption 
 sent us by its inmost soul. To be able to 
 forget the actual world of fraud in this true- 
 dream image will seem to him the guerdon of 
 the sorrowful sincerity with which he recog- 
 nised its wretchedness." 
 
 As was said at the outset of this paper 
 there come, there are breathed, into the world 
 periodic heraldings from the Heart of things 
 announcing to our distracted minds that there 
 is a kingdom which is within, which is near at 
 hand, into which we may enter if we so 
 will, and into which we are assured the 
 kingdoms of this world shall all eventually 
 be assumed. Regnum Dei prope ! a voice is 
 always crying in this world's wilderness, but 
 the voice assumes many guises and unexpected 
 forms, and refuses to be confined by methods 
 which are conventional or traditions which 
 are established. It matters not how its appeal 
 be made, but it fails not to proclaim the 
 
 31 
 
Mystery of Faith in one or another way for the 
 sake of those who are seeking the inward 
 kingdom with watchful eyes and understanding 
 hearts. Vigilate ergo ! it cries also ; " Watch 
 ye therefore ; for ye know not when the Master 
 of the house cometh, at even or at midnight, 
 at cockcrow or in the morning." He can come 
 in the opera-house as effectually as in the 
 church ; in the poet's dramatic conception 
 and in- the musician's harmonies as readily as 
 by channels popularly accounted usual and 
 befitting. And wheii, to the strains of the 
 Grail-music and.that inspired ascending chord- 
 sequence which serves as a Sursum corda ! and 
 so strangely strings to the verge of ecstasy any 
 heart sensitive to its implications, pne beholds 
 that final spectacle of the radiant Christ-figure, 
 new risen phcenixwise out of human debris and 
 impotence, and proffering from the heart of 
 the darkness the chalice of immortal Life to 
 each and all, one feels that Wagner's Parsifal 
 is assuredly one among the many evidences of 
 His coming. 
 
 32 
 
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