Percival: The Grail and the Wound

When Percival, as a young knight, embarks on an adventure, he happens upon a castle. The lord of the castle is the Fisher King. The knight is given a royal welcome and sees the spear and the Grail ritually presented during dinner. But when asked who the Grail serves, he has no answer. In fact, he says nothing, for he has been taught that it is better to remain silent than to speak and speculate, especially among noble company. But as he leaves the castle, with the unanswered question lingering behind, he also leaves behind an unhealed Fisher King, who remains tormented by his wound.

When this realization later dawns on him, he bitterly swears that he will not rest until he provides the right answer to redeem the king. But he cannot find his way back to the castle. Years pass, and Percival becomes a greater warrior with more and more knightly deeds behind him. Yet, he cannot find the castle again. One day, twenty years after leaving the castle, he meets a wise hermit during his travels, with whom he stays and learns.

Then he mounts his horse and rides on, but he releases the reins, allowing the horse to guide him wherever it leads. And then, he sees the Fisher King sitting in a boat on a lake with a fishing rod in his hands. The Fisher King is only free from pain when he fishes. Just like twenty years before, the king invites him to his castle, to a banquet, and the ritual with the spear and the Grail is repeated. “Whom serves the Grail?” Now, as an older and wiser man, Percival can provide the correct answer and heal the king.

At least this is one way to understand the story, which has been retold in many versions. The following is a personal reflection on this story from a Jungian perspective.

The ailing old king is an archetypal image that sometimes symbolizes the wounded, stagnated ego. The king, as such, expresses the collective conscious – our shared values, ideals, agreements, and what is prevailing. Our true personality becomes wounded and retreats during our upbringing, while we adopt the collective as personal for the sake of survival and success. In a sense, we adopt the king’s – or, in other words, culture’s – identity. In this way, we may achieve what we strive for in the world, regarding education, careers, friends, family, housing, and status.

But there comes a day when the truth within us can no longer be suppressed. We don’t recognize it as something positive; on the contrary, we perceive it as something we’d rather avoid, something disturbing – what Jung would call “neurotic symptoms.” The Self, our innermost core, has a different plan for us, just as the acorn has a “plan” to become an oak. The conflict between our true inner nature and our ego’s identity tends to become most apparent during the period in our lives when we are more or less done with our outer, collective project. Many can ignore this signal, while for others it becomes harder to do so. The Fisher King, for his part, is intensely aware that something is wrong. He is in pain, weak, paralyzed, and capable of nothing but waiting for redemption.

His identity and attitude were successful during the first half of his life – after all, he is a king with a prosperous castle. But now the wounds of his childhood have caught up with him, and the identity and attitudes that helped him achieve his goals have lost their energy; they no longer hold any value. He is now a rigid, aged senex (old man) who has lost contact with his inner puer (young boy). One could say that he sacrificed the child for the sake of his external success. He didn’t do wrong; he did it out of necessity. He once followed his individual path, came to a crossroads, chose the left path, but was gravely wounded and chose to go right instead, eventually leading to the castle. But when he turned around, he left the boy within him behind – a painful sacrifice that now catches up with him. Everything now seems meaningless, the castle brings no joy anymore.

When we first meet Percival, he is an innocent, impulsive, curious young man with grandiose fantasies. That is, he is a puer. (I am using “senex” and “puer” in James Hillman’s understanding of the terms.) He is exactly what the Fisher King needs to bring back to his life. In order to heal, the senex needs his inner fool; he must return to the time of the wound, unreservedly, like a child – just as Jung, when he found himself at a dead end in midlife, began playing with stones and models, as he had as a child, to regain puer energy and break the senex attitude that had made him successful in the world.

But what does the question ”Whom does the Grail serve?” mean in this context, and why must the fool be able to answer it in order for the king to be healed? In Visions Jung talks briefly about the Fisher King (p. 766) and then there is an interesting footnote. I don’t know who wrote the footnote, whether Jung himself added it or if it was an editor, but in this context it is very interesting. It reads:

”[The Grail King’s] wound could be healed only by the young hero asking about its history, purpose, and meaning.”

Here, the Grail is equated with the wound. This aligns with Robert A. Johnson's view that the Fisher King can only be healed through the inner fool (He); it is only he who can touch and tend to the wound; or more concretely, through the unreservedness and honesty that characterize the child, approach the unanswered question that torments and understand its meaning. The Grail is a symbol of the story of the wound, the bloody lance, and the fool. What purpose does this inner dynamic serve – what is the underlying meaning of the myth that constitutes our life, and the pains and defeats that inevitably come with it?

According to Jung, the encounter with the Self is always a defeat for the ego. It may manifest in different ways, but what we experience as a wound, a bitter experience, can be the Self's impulse toward development. Since we are unaware of this inner core and its plan, its impulses are experienced as literal defeats, and we are hurt. Only when we foolishly approach the experience as a symbol and understand its meaning does healing occur. In other words, the wound and the healing (or the Grail) are the same thing, but while we lament the former, the fool within us nurtures the latter. In order for us to see this, however, we must understand the meaning of the symbol. ”Whom does it serve?” What is the purpose of this experience?

In speculations regarding whom the Grail serves, the common answers are the Fisher King, King Arthur, God, or, in Jungian contexts, the Self. It is noteworthy that all of these point toward something greater than the ego. This suggests that what drives is not the conscious ego, but something larger, underlying, of which the ego is merely playing a part. It is no longer about "me"; it is rather about the soul, for lack of a better term. This insight is the goal of the quest.

According to Edward Edinger, the archetypal image of "the treasure that is hard to find," which appears in so many contexts, is in fact the human soul. Jason Smith suggests that one cannot find the treasure by searching for it. ("The Symbol of the Grail.") It is pointless to look for it. Percival searches for twenty years without finding the castle again. He only finds it when he stops searching, when he lets go of the reins and allows the horse to lead him. One could say that he gives up his heoric ego ambitions and opens himself to his inner world of instincts.

In a similar way, the Fisher King has "given up," resigned himself to his fate. He has humbled himself. A king would never engage in something as plebeian as fishing; that was something only poor people did. Yet here he sits in his boat with his fishing rod. He reflects on the unconscious, contemplatively and without reservation, engaging with his inner world. Both have given up their respective heroic attitudes, opening themselves to the inner, true self. It is in this respective state that they find each other again, with the conditions necessary for healing and renewal.

As an older person, it is not so much about searching for the treasure as it is about letting it come in into our lives, the toad that has ”the dragon stone in its head.” The footnote presents a similar union of opposites. Just as we are both the Fisher King (senex) and Parcifal (puer), and the union of these is a prerequisite, the wound and the Grail are the same. Only by accepting and understanding the wound, by (to speak with Johnson) facing it unconditionally and naively, does the healing power of the Grail emerge. The question the footnote implies is not so much ”Whom does the Grail serve?” as ”What purpose does the wound serve?” At this point one can perhaps unravel what Jung calls one’s personal myth – the story one lives but is yet unaware of.

Percival, the inner impulse or the transcendent function, comes when the Fisher King has humbled himself, but importantly also while he is fishing. To fish means to sit in a boat on the lake and paying attention to what is happening; that is, quiet contemplation of the contents of the unconscious. Only in his boat with his fishing rod was the Fisher King free from pain. The castle may symbolize his egocentric ambitions and his conscious structure, his entire senex attitude. But in solitary contemplation, defeated and without purpose, Percival appears as the unexpected. In his boat, the Fisher King is open to this impulse; and the impulse, in turn, is guided by its instinct. So the Fisher King story is largely about daring to give up one’s attitude and to be led by the inner self. In middle age our own ego has become our prison. To escape it, we must, so to speak, open it and let the child from the past come in.

Jung writes in ”A Psychological Approach to the Trinity” (par. 273):

”Spiritual transformation does not mean that one should remain a child, but that the adult should summon up enough honest self-criticism admixed with humility to see where, and in relation to what, he must behave as a child - irrationally, and with unreflecting receptivity.”

In the legend, both parties represent ”unreflecting receptivity,” in contrast to searching, penetrating, acting; they are humble and receptive. Both have given up in a sense, but are attentive and honest. In this way, we allow the question of whom the Grail serves to receive an answer, and healing to become a part of our lives.