"Blood Is Such Peculiar Juice": Creative Mythology's Grail

Samhuin 2005

Recently a member of the Joseph Campbell Mythology Group posted an interesting assay on blood which got my own scarlet juices flowing, so to speak.

That dialogue I provide here as a fair transfusion of what Joseph Campbell called “creative mythology,” the alchemy of mythological tradition inside the individuated psyche. Although rudiments, of the old traditions remain, the creative tradition demands that the individual make their own path through the trackless forest wherein the Grail is found -- not in eternity nor the future nor the dissembled past, but in what we make of all those things inside our own hearts.

I’m coming to accept that that work -- to articulate what has been excavated and grounded and grown inside me -- has eclipsed to large degree any other ambition I formerly held as a poet vying for attention from the academy or presses, or as a scholar seeking credence for his excavations. All that careerist stuff is so old-school: Let’s sing the gods forward! Let’s bathe in their blood, and rejoice in their wild quintessence! If this is mystery religion, let’s bibble the sibyl til her riddles dribble from our kibibbles!

OK -- My uncoagulate enthusiasm is leaking here—let me re-frame the door into my theme with the following from Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God: Creative Mythology (Penguin Arkana, 1991):

“Just as in the past each civilization was the vehicle of its own mythology, developing in character as its myth became progressively interpreted, analyzed, and elucidated by its leading minds, so in this modern world—where the application of science to the fields of practical life has not dissolved all cultural horizons, so that no separate civilization can ever develop again —each individual is the center of a mythology of his own, of which his own intelligible character is the Incarnate God, so to say, whom his empirically questing consciousness is to find. The aphorism of Delphi, ‘Know thyself,’ is the motto. And not Rome, not Mecca, not Jerusalem, Sinai, or Benares, but each and every “thou” on earth is the center of the world, in the sense of that formula just quoted from the twelfth-century Book of the Twenty-four Philosophers, of God as ‘an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere.’” (35)

I not so much awaken to this work as am roused to it: every word I’ve set to paper from my creative centers have ached for it; the dark velds I’ve probed and named and shored and welled have grown identified with it, much as the Guardians of Iona once told my father, “Your work is our work and our work is your work.” And while I today call this numen a creative mythology, that may only be the spectrometer which allows me to better see a greater shape in the dark. In his essay “Circles,” Emerson wrote, “Our life is an apprentiship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.”

***

Discussion had been touching on themes from the Grail Cycle— the Fisher King and his wounds, the melding sexuality of the story, and how both women and men both hook deeply into the tale, as if the story spoke to something beneath gender.

Here is the post from a member who uses the screen name of Isabel del Tierra. I reprint it here with her permission.

***

The Mythos of Blood
Isabel del Tierra
JCMG discussion group
post dated 10/21/2005

The recent discussions of the grail and its lore sparked, for me, a round of musings on the elixir for which the grail is the vessel. Or maybe it is the nearness of the Celtic celebration of samhain and All Hallows Eve that turned my thinking toward the mythos of blood, that precious water that is life.

Kings and queens, rulers and peers, all reckon their descendency from the divine by right of the blood flowing through them. When two people agree to wed, in essence there is an agreement to the mingling of their respective heritages, the blending of two long lines of fortuitous meetings, matings, and marryings, joined in a third that takes life as children or as a commitment lasting until there is no life left for either (ostensibly). We measure ancestry by blood quantum, how near or far we are from the fullest measure of identification with a particular land or people. We are full-blooded when our ancestors’ parentage is known or recorded for posterity and history or when we move through our days impassioned by the fiery blush of living that emboldens our acts. Our closest genetic relations are our blood relatives; blood is reckoned to be thicker than water when we number those we count as family. To adopt deep ties to someone who falls outside the charmed circle of intimate bonded connection, the flesh is rent, blood is drawn and mixed, to serve as the pigment of a sacred tattoo that creates blood brothers or sisters.

When speaking of the ultimate sacrifice warriors make for their tribes or nations, the act is reckoned in willingness to shed selfless hero blood for kith and kin, nation and neighbor, or spill the enemy’s blood, fertilizing the acres of the battlefields with the very fluid that fuels the limbs of combat.

Women, in accord with their own lunar dominated cycles, shed blood each month. In ancient societies, the shedding of what was intended as the nourishing field for life to come prompted women to be segregated from the community, to live apart, refrain from cooking meals, or participating in rituals or rites until this unused power fled the body. We are born in a wash of red and the vibrancy of our beings is measured in the vitality of the rubied river running through us. In the mystery mythology of the dead and rising divinity, the cleansing, purifying sacrifice of the one is by symbolistic alchemy transformed into the meal of the bread and blood symbolizing earth’s fecund field and flood, that yields the life vivifying sustenance to feed hearts and minds.

In modern times, it is possible to anonymously mingle our essence with those we will never meet without promise, pledge, or claim of kin through offering up the primal fluid of us for transfusion into someone else’s body. We may pass elements of ourselves slumbering in the marrow of a stranger on the street, who knows? In the lore of the vampire, Nosferatu sidles through the sloughs of ever existing twilight by taking from living beings the wine of the body’s cup.

That we are all, every one, gifted with this potion that surges through us, carrying breath to bone and bowel, each day, in a circle of nourishing tides, that lift, crash, and abate in our inner oceans, marks us as mirrors of what we see without in the form of our parent planet where great landmasses mark their ends on shores confining seas. To be this universe in body is to be a unique vessel. Aren’t we, each, the grail? ...




“Blood is such peculiar juice”
JCMG discussion group
Brendan MacOdrum
October 23, 2005

Thanks for the early All-Hallows celebration with your reverie. Odd that it occurs here, in the bloodless rooks of cyberspace, where there is no blood connection, no living presence, not even a drop of actual world in the words: And yet your post washes rich and deep and vivid with that brightest, stickiest, most vital substance of all, enriching and elivening this reader’s imagination.

Blood begets blood, thus my bloody reply. From the jugular you locate, this gout ... Apologies for the length, but much blood must flow before circulating this Theme through its round.

That such life can be abundant even only in the words tells me that nature and our nature are not lost between the lines but are richest there, capable of infusing and nourishing and washing clean the daily round, pumping adrenaline when necessary, blissing with dopamines, coagulating old wounds, and at last soothing the fret with a narcoleptic softness, blurring every border and surface til we drift down to sleep where the dark battens on us.

Pairing imagination with blood locates mind in the heart, a conceit that James Hillman writes at length in his essay “The Thought of the Heart.” It’s an oddly right grounding (or recentering), bringing mind down from the haven of its heaven to root it in the immortally desiring and loving heart. If you think of the Grail as a round vessel on a square pedestal, such uniting is weirdly logical, a wholeness arrived at through the assay of its extremes.

“Our hearts cannot apprehend that they are imaginatively thinking hearts,” he writes, “because we have so long been told that the mind thinks and the heart feels and the imagination leads us astray from both. Even when the heart is allowed its reasons, they are those of faith or of feeling, for we have forgotten that philosophy itself -- the most complex and profound demonstration of thought -- is not ‘wisdom’ or ‘truth’ in any abstract sense of ‘sophic.’ Rather, philosophy begins in a “philos” arising in the heart of our blood, together with the lion, the wound, and the rose. If we would recover the imaginal we must first recover its organ, the heart, and its kind of philosophy.”

And in the following paragraph I think he locates a Grail-spot, deep in the thinking heart:

“Philosophy enunciates the world in the images of words. It must arise in the heart in order to mediate the world truly, since, as {Henry} Corbin says, it is that subtle organ which perceives the correspondences between the subtleties of consciousness and the levels of being. This intelligence takes place by means of images which are a third possibility between mind and world. Each image coordinates within itself qualities of consciousness and qualities of world, speaking in one and the same image of the interpenetration of consciousness and world, but always and only as image which is primary to what it coordinates. This imaginal intelligence resides in the heart: ‘intelligence of the heart’ connotes a simultaneous knowing and loving by means of imagining.”

So also your post was a Grail assay, rounded and grounded in all the ways you run with the image of blood as that mysterium which flows from the Grail through us all. And like those writers of the Romances long ago, one tale begets another, accreting toward the fully-fledged myth, devling back that chalice which can only be drunk from when the right question has finally been asked, discovering its true name and source.

***

Your question is surely a good one —what that wonderfully hidden and revealed vessel holds. IMO the Grail mixes of two great traditions in its magic draught, the Celtic and the Christian. It is the cauldron of rebirth which Manannan possesses, capable of regenerating dead heroes overnight in its depths; it is the cup which Jesus drank from the at the Last Supper, which He said was filled with his own blood; all who drank from that cup would be saved from death by his immortal life-blood.

As Manannan's cauldron, is only revealed, like the spiral castle of Caer Sidi, at special times of the year, on that day outside of time—All Hallows, the eve of the Celtic New Year, which we celebrate as Halloween. On that night time is suspended and the veil thins to gossamer between living and dead; the spirits issue from their passage graves and the collective tongues of ancestry whisper and moan in the air. You don’t know who walks with you down those lonely country lanes home, what corpse you carry on your shoulders. The dead live on in our blood, they depend upon it, our living ferries a great past forward.

Have you ever sensed that primal antiquity breathing hoarsely behind you? It freezes the blood. There is a terror in that collective, totem presence. The Fisher King in the old tradition is Bran, lord of the Island of the Everliving; he is also Nodens, a sea-god of Celtic Britain that means “fisher,” as when sea fishes the surface for men; so there is a sense that the dead are reaching up for us, desperate for our blood. Jessie Weston notes that there are not one but two kings in the Grail Castle, the Maimed King in the foreground, and another king, much older, in an unseen room, into which the Grail is carried and from which it again returns. Old and older gods reside down the cauldron grail of Manannan.

But when the Grail is imaged from the new dispensation as Christ’s seeping heart, a new heaven and earth becomes possible through an individual relation independent of history. I don’t doubt that the Christ appeared when ties to the older faith (less necessary than before as consciousness evolved) had become sterile and oppressive. Each penitent receives the heavenly host on the tongue and washes it down with a transubstantiate earthly blood. History is erased through salvation, the debt of Eden finally paid off. Individual sacrifice of ego repeats the sacrifice of Jesus, atoning for the sin of difference which every ego commits. The blood of sacrifice is spiritualized, God’s covenant renewed. We begin again as if reborn: the past is cancelled; white light annihilates the dread connection we once had with night. All Hallows becomes All Saints, the victory of St. Michael and St. Francis and St. Brigid over the Manannans and Cernunnoses and Bridgids of old blood. They are cast down the abyss, but only Christian rhetoric can keep them there.

Certainly the hitching of diverse traditions in the Grail creates an uneasy marriage. Primal and future god aren’t sure what to do with each other. As a midpoint between matriarchal consciousness (dominated by the unconscious) and patriarchal consciousness (dominated by the solar ego), Sol and Luna embrace in quicksilver, their numens and qualities shifting rapidly, emitting weird harmonics. Opposition and sympathy play out at once. The one is never quite sure what to do with the other. At times they’re more like brothers feuding for the soul They wear each others faces, sometimes demonic, sometimes angelic. Sometimes the vessel shines with possibility, other times it has the gleam of everything forever lost.

As you all probably know, one of my favorite tales has to do with the sacrifice of St. Oran in the footers of St. Columba’s abbey to appease the water-lord who had been disturbed by the cutting of the sward at Iona. His feast day is Oct. 27. In one version of the tale, he travels three nights into the underworld of the old Celtic tradition, seeking Manannan, the sea god he was sacrificed to. On Oct. 31, curious to hear the news from his buried friend, Columba has Oran’s head interred. Oran’s eyes fling open and the mouth speaks the ghastly words: “There is no wonder in death, and hell is not as it is reported. In fact, the way you think it is is not the way it is at all.” Horrified, the saint had Oran buried again at all haste, yet goes on to appoint Oran the tutelary guardian of the abbey’s graveyard, saying, “No man may access the angels of Iona but through Oran.” It’s a good Halloween story.

Anyhow, Columba's curiosity about the past he buries in Oran is weirdly echoed in a tale in which a chalice used by the Iona abbey is broken. It is taken by one of the monks to the sea-god Manannan, who magically restores the chalice by blowing on it. He sends it back to Columba with a question: would he achieve Christian immortality? "Alas," says the ungrateful saint, "there is no forgiveness for a man who does such works as this!" The message is returned to Manannan, who breaks out into an indignant lament. "Woe is me, Mannan-mac Lir! For years I’ve helped the Catholics of Ireland, but I’ll do it no more, till they’re weak as water. I’ll go to the gray waves in the Highlands of Scotland."

And Manannan skedaddles, making way for the new Christian church. But rather than fade entirely, Manannan - and all the gods of the lost dispensation—live on in the borderland, on the far islands and to the north, at the bottom of the great sea of Lir.

The grail somehow holds together those two traditions, enervated and ruddy with glow of two bloods. What pours from the grail is a wild wine indeed.

***

Do I digress? Blood has its own circuit to assay, and its tides wax and ebb in plural conceivings. So to move on:

If a royal blood flows through our veins, like Perceval we have to quest a long time to discover the true nature of that heritage and lineage. All manner of untruth has to be unlearned along the way, both fictions of ignoble parentage (whispered in our ears by “false” parents) and ruinous fantasies of knighthood. We have to grow up a long way to get to the Hermit in the wood who tells us who we really are; have to be frustrated in the quest and bitter with God for the task; its very arduousness tasks the ardor of our hearts, the longing and ache which sent us forward in the first place.

Such lineage is especially odd in mongrel America. Who isn’t 1/16th this and a 32d that and a seven-64th whatever, fractious fractions which add up to us, bastards of all culture? Whatever actual royal blood has long been spilled on westward tracks. Yet the fantasy of such lineage grips Americans, carefully writing down family histories, trying to get to the sources of genealogy. Both of my parents have royal stories, my mother of a family of Scots warlords who lost their family name in a border dispute, my father’s distant fathers royal entertainers in Ireland with a king or two thrown into the savagery. That imagined history somehow survives all of the moves and divorces and greenwood marriages, the actual blood of history. Royal blood is imagined, and it seems to flow through us all. It is not valved by actual history but from our imagined ones, from courtly romances, from the Mabinogion, from the ghostly choir assembled in our skull.

Tribal blood runs thin indeed, replaced by larger and louder affinities -- nation (perhaps), certainly our pop-cultural cherry-Coke wash, all sugar and no gules. Few these days aren’t in the congregation basked by cathode rays, drinking from that chalice that is television. Yet what the Lord giveth that way, He taketh away in the other; so many elders rot in nursing homes, and suburb and ghetto both are darkly fatherless, deprived of manly blood. Desire and selfishness have brutalized so many children, bloodying them with our digressions and errancies.

So many shadowy quests attend this questing thirst for what pours from the Grail. The devil’s hooch, like fools’ gold, brims from every too-shining glass. We try stealing the sacred blood from others (with a vampyre’s tooth), we brew our own bastard fabulations of it (the Frankenstein grimacing behind every creator’s desire to create life), we try to use its power against others (like those Nazi snakes in Indiana Jones #3, or those fundamentalist fascists wielding Bibles like axes). As a lack, it will drive you insane for more. I think here of those crystal meth addicts in San Francisco who are whirling swastikas of death, insatiable knights of AIDS spiking infection rates in their sleepless quests for release. And there is our gross taste for Murder Most Foulle, the bloodstained daggers which harrow the imagination of Macbeth, making his estate Hell Castle and the knocking at the gate the very sound of doom:

Whence is that knocking?
How is’t with me, when every noise appals me?
What hands are here? ha! they pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

Such blood-spattered poetry —“the very painting of fear”—is infectuous; we dare not look but cannot stop staring. Macbeth imagines but Lady Macbeth becomes mad, her senses “sightless,” walking in her sleep, compulsively washing blood from her hands that isn’t there. The spilled blood of Duncan drives her from the ramparts; glutted on his bloody tale, Macbeth becomes insensate to his fate:

I have supp’d full well with horrors;
Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,
Cannot once start me.

The tragedy of blood transfixes us, affixes us to the sacrificial spot, arousing horror and harrowing the sense. Tragedy’s roots are soaked in blood, the primal drama arises from the death and dismemberment of the god. Elemire Zolla wrote in his essay “The Vision of the Rose” in an old issue (XII) of Parabola,

“When revelers tore the goat to pieces and fed on its flesh, Dionysos was eating himself, sacrificing himself out of love, out of cosmic completeness. The song (‘oide’) that sang of this sacrifice was tragedy, the divine goat’s song: Through the frenzy, the horror and the pity of tragedy, Dionysos became Apollo once more.”

And thus Jesus is sacrificed on the cross, anointed on his own throne of blood. He is torn from this life back to the other, mortal no more. I think here of those dayglo images of Crucifixion from the Catholic Church, his wounds gory, the entire tableau of Golgotha splattered with blood. The goat song hung on a cross: the ancient tragedy carried forward.

That new story was updated with Anfortas, the Fisher King, lying on his bier of pain, his sexual wound bleeding and bleeding, nothing on earth to coagulate the flow, no physic for the pain. What a bloody bed that must have been ... And the Four Hallows of the Grail -- bleeding lance, broken sword, serving dish (which in some versions bore a severed head), the Grail filled with the Saviour’s gules -- all are bloody symbols.

Blood everywhere there and little of it here. How drained of that red we have grown! Our wars are far, our meat comes to us washed clean of its butchery and is arrayed on white sytrofoam, our communion wine (in the Protestant blanch) is filtered of Bacchus, leaving somewhat sour grape juice. So much of this horrifying and vital substance has been bandaged from view. Can we understand sacrifice without the raw fact the blood it must spill so wantonly and tragically? Only on Halloween do we revel in it, screaming hilariously through cardboard mazes of faux-living dead with their absent appendages and Technocolor gore.

(The vitality of our literature—if it is to survive -- must somehow find a way back into blood. I would offer Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) as evidence that such work is still possible. For an examination of that book, see the post “Bloody Business”)

But its a dead god we’re trickertreating over, a lost divinity, egressed, perhaps through those fakey wounds, out through the weariness of bloodless prose. What can postmodernism offer to the questor lost in the forest? — “There’s no way out, there’s no way in, there’s no way, there’s no out or in, just barge on, it makes for a story anyway.” For many, the Christian Church is dead, and is added to the loam of dead gods, heaped upon Manannan and Dionysos and Bromios the bull-god and so many others whose names have slipped from human tongues. The underground castle where all of these divinities are found is the Grail Castle, the keep of all that wounding and dying. Do old gods fall, or do they just fade away?

Neither: they live one, darkly; that dark blood still roars in the jugular! Marie Louise von-Franz writes in CG Jung: His Myth in Our Time,

“When the god ‘dies’ (turning dark and negative in the upper world) he goes down to the secret underworld, where he is transformed. On resurrection his first appearance is in the form of a phallos ... The strange connection between the Christ-image and the subterranean nature-spirit which on the one hand seems identitical with Christ but on the other seems a hidden adversary of Christ engaged Jung’s attention all his life.”

(Very interesting then if sexuality is the pulse of that old outrageous god, defiant of transcendence, of the white havens above, greedy and rude, irrupting every civilized tea party with a tumescent roar.)

The Grail is a paradox, a circle housed on a square, filled with the blood of life from a dying god; it is a cup, chalice, or deep dish; it serves up a meal, it is meant to be drained; it is the goal of every quest which can never be found; it is housed in a place which is and is not. It is an alchemical quintessence, a marriage of elements, the elixir which makes one young. The Hermit explains to Parceval in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s version of the tale,

“The knights which defend the Graal are nourished by) a stone most precious: its name is ‘lapsit exillis’; By the power of that stone the phoenix, lighting upon it, is burnt to ashes; but the ashes then quicken it back to life. When with bright new wings, it springs from the pyre revived and beautified. There was never a man so ill, but on whatever day he beheld the stone, for the space of the whole week following he cannot die. Nor shall his colour fade. Be it maid or man, whoso beholds that stone shall keep the freshness of life’s prime. If one looked at that stone for two hundred years, but for the hair grown grey, no other sign of age would appear. Such power comes from the stone that flesh and bones are made young by it. Its other name is the Graal.

One derivation of the word “grail” comes from the Latin gradis + al, a “gradual” or “gradient,” as when a series of bowls are placed one above or behind the other. We enter numerous cauldrons of renewal as we quest room to room through the dream: sometimes a cup, sometimes a skull, sometime a womb, sometimes a grave. Our quest names these numens in succession. Maybe we complete one work to approach the next; having named one god we move on to name the next. Or it’s a via negativa, rejecting each next vessel as not it either, travelling with Oran shore to shore in search of Mannnan, learning all the way (as Rilke put it, being pinned, like Jacob, by successively greater angels).

Seeking to tap that font of everlivin’ blood, we enter our life’s fray. The Grail castle is out there somewhere, our blood tells us, somewhere deep in the forest, holding the key to our own transcendent perfection. But the error of the errant knight is that we pay too literal attention to blood’s song, foraying out in so many fruitless ways, chasing the Grail’s gold in projection, shining on external faces, the fascia of curve and curl, the dapplement and delirium of artificial pearls and real swine. A lot of folks never emerge from that forest; it is said that those who find the Grail but aren’t ready yet to receive it are transmogrified by it.

At some midpoint, exhausted by that fruitless quest, halfway through our life’s forest, when all seems hopeless and futile—perhaps when we give up on our certainty of knowing what we’re about— the numens begin to change and invert. We begin to realize that that the shining castle isn’t to be found in any literal place, between any literal thighs, not in any book that can be read or any lucre that can be spent. What we begin to sense is that the forest is in our imagined hearts. The goal we seek is not the end of so many contests and battles but comes from achieving a noble heart. In the end, clout has bend a knee to humility.

The treasure hardest to attain is our own individuation, wholeness, integration, enlightenment, call it what you will. It is a long and suffering process of slowly repealing all of the old declarations and gospels. We remove the capital letters which used to give mom and dad such power over us —Mary Queen of Heaven and Zeus no more. We painfully separate cupidity from eros, Venus from Psyche, the immortal goddess from the human woman, the faulty human flautist Marsyas from shining Apollo. We spiritualize sexuality and sexualize spirituality, healing back those far dominions toward a shared porous center.

Jung wrote, “Individuation is an expression of that biological process -- simple or complicated as the case may be -- by which everything becomes what it was destined to be in the beginning.” “The goal of individuation,” sez Marie Louse von Franz, “... represents a kind of mid-point or center in which the supreme value and greatest life-intensity are concentrated. It cannot be distinguished from the images of the supreme value of the various religions.”

Thus we find our Grail, the rounded center of the self. von Franz again: “It appears as: the ‘inner castle’ (Teresa of Avila), a four-square city or garden, the scintilla animae (Hans Hoy), the imago Dei in the soul, the ‘circle whose periphery is nowhere and whose center is everywhere,’ a crystal, a stone, a tree, a vessel or a cosmic order, or (Eastern) a ‘void’ filled with meaning.”

Those images arrive when, “instead of being a fragmented person who has to cling to collective supports, (the individual) now becomes a self-reliant whole human being who no longer needs to live like a parasite off his collective environment, but who enriches and strengthens it with his presence.”

Your closing rondo on blood’s cycle in the womb of the world is apt for my coming full circle here, at the beginning and end of rebirth. Blood got us here, blood will take us out; the tidal circulation of embrace and release which brings every human into existence washes us through the cycles of a life, innocent and then not, errant then wizened, taking life out of life and then sowing it back. “Blood is quite peculiar juice,” sez Goethe’s Mephistopheles, demanding that Faust seal his pact with the devil by signing his name in blood. The gods are fascinated with our blood and don’t quite seem to know what to do with it. They demand sacrifice, whether it is the goat torn in the horror and ecstasy of Dionysos, or the passion of God’s son on the cross, or casting Oran into the maw of Manannan. Our blood keeps Them alive and vital; when their names die from our tongues They die too. When we have quested long and bitterly enough in the forest of fictions and thrall —when we are wounded enough to lose those adolescent dreams of perfect achievement— blood cries for a reverse physic.

In Malory’s version of the Grail Quest, when Galahad and a company of knights are at last revealed the Hallows of the Grail, they then turn to the shining vessel, which is seated on a silver square table:

“Then looked they and saw a man come out of the holy vessel, that had all the signs of the passion of Jesu Christ, bleeding all openly, and said, ‘My knights and my servants and my true children, which be come out of deadly life into spiritual life, I will now no longer hide me from you, but ye shall see now a part of my secrets and of my hidden things; now hold and receive the high meat which ye have desired.’”

After receiving communion, Galahad is instructed to take the Grail and the rest of the Hallows with him across the sea to the Fisher King, where he is to anoint the entire body of that maimed lord with the lance that has not stopped bleeding since it pierced the side of Jesus. The very instruments by which we wounded ourselves so terribly and with ourselves, the world—ego, libido, ferally sharp and merciless—become, in the ministrations of the Grail elixir, the very physic of wounds. As Jung put it, “the power ‘which always wishes evil’ thus creates a spiritual life.”

You write: “That we are all, every one, gifted with this potion that surges through us, carrying breath to bone and bowel, each day, in a circle of nourishing tides, that lift, crash, and abate in our inner oceans, makes us a mirrors of what we see without in the form of our parent planet where great landmasses mark their ends on shores confining seas. To be this universe in body is to be a unique vessel. Aren’t we, each, the grail?”

Indeed we are! How good it is to quest through personal parentage and the accidents of birth and scarred history, turning all the wounds of life back into wombs, and rebirthing, like the sun, from the reddened sea of dawn—and to look with fresh eyes upon this magnificent world in which we live, as the eyes by which the world sees itself, as the heart which is fed to the fire of gods, as this old tale of totems and taboos, ten thousand mothers and fathers a-choir in our blood, in what we birth in the most furious uterus of all—this tort and alembic and umbilicus of words, enriched with the imagination of blood in its dark and scarlet joy. We hunt for its deepest sources, seeking to plunge our sense into it like Ahab’s fiery harpoon. Getting to the thick of it, the raw feast of the goat-song, staining our chops to the ears. This is the meat, the host, the ritual meal which is raised to the lips of god, us partaking of Him (or Her) as He (She) from us. Blood is thick but the veil is thin where it has been poured; therefore it is good to vigil a night in the cemetery where the gods are all buried, deep, oh so deep in the heart. Thus we still and ever commune with gods.