I’m dressing as the Holy Grail for Halloween this year. It was a last-minute decision today based on the fact that I just finished reading The Heroine’s Journey, a female treatment of Jung’s Hero’s Journey. Jung believed that both genders have both the feminine and masculine within us, and Jungian author Maureen Murdock portrays the woman journeying through life looking for wholeness, first by abandoning the mother and venturing out into the world to seek professional success via her animus (her maleness), then when she realizes that she is like her mother, returning home to the mother and owning her anima (her femaleness). It’s when she returns home from fighting the masculine fight to make her mark in the world, and can access her nurturing principle that she is able to heal her inner masculine.
Mudock uses the 12th century French story of the wounded Fisher King to illustrate the healing process. The Fisher King was a king of Britain in the Arthurian legend who was wounded in the groin or thigh (it was assumed he had a shameful fertility problem). His body was the representation of his barren land and he was only able to be healed, and his land could only become fertile and green again when an innocent young man asked a certain question about his wound: “What ails thee?”. It was said the King spent time in a boat waiting for “the chosen one” to come along and heal him.
One day, on his way home to visit his mother, Parcifal comes upon the Fisher King in a boat. The king invites him to his castle where he sees a strange procession…:
“… in which young men and women carry magnificent objects from one chamber to another. First comes a young man carrying a bleeding lance, then two boys carrying candelabra. Then a beautiful young girl emerges bearing an elaborately decorated graal. Finally another maiden carried a silver platter. They passed before him at each course of the meal. Perceval, who had been trained by his guardian Gornemant not to talk too much, remains silent through all of this. He wakes up the next morning alone and resumes his journey home. He encounters a girl in mourning, who admonishes him for not asking about the grail, as that would have healed the wounded king.”
Wikipedia
Both Parcifal and the Fisher King were bewitched, so neither of them could see the girl carrying the Grail. And just like he couldn’t see the grail, the king represents the logical, masculine part of us that strives to succeed in the world, that pushes down into obscurity the feminine principle that we deride as weak and less important. In other words, we don’t see our own inner grail. There are different versions of this story, but the jist is that Parcifal neglects to ask the question the first time around, leaves the castle, wanders around the barren land for a number of years, then goes back to the castle and finally asks the question, allowing the king to die in peace and greenness and wetness to come back to the dry land. Once Parcifal was able to ask “What ails thee?”, a caring and nurturing question, he was able to bring the feminine principle to bear on the King’s pain, which would end the king’s pain.
“We are split off from a relationship with our creative feminine”, Murdock says. “Our rational mind devalues and ignores it as we refuse to listen to our intuition, feelings, and deep knowings of our body.” In order to integrate the masculine and feminine, we need to turn inward and ask ourselves, “What ails thee?”
“The Grail is the symbol of the sacred, creative feminine principle that is accessible to all of us. The Grail can heal the King, just as the feminine can heal our masculine nature… Like Parcifal and the king, we do not recognize the Grail within us. We must open our eyes and expand our consciousness. We need the moist, juicy, green, caring feminine to heal the wounded, dry, brittle, overextended masculine in our culture. Otherwise we inhabit a wasteland.
Murdock, The Heroine’s Journey
I’ve been asking myself a very specific “What ails thee?” question lately, and that’s to do with my career and the fact that I’m not allowing myself freer reign to learn astrology. Moreover, I’m not nurturing my spiritual side like I want to be. I recently contacted the Diamond Approach school to ask about annual fees (exhorbitant!) and signed up for a Kepler horary astrology class (Perfect!). It’s about time I allowed myself to come home to these sacred topics I’ve orbited around for so many years while pursuing more “masculine” aims.