The Rudolf Steiner Archive

24. The Secret of the Holy Grail in the Works of Richard Wagner

[ 1 ] Building on Richard Wagner’s work Parsifal, I would like to discuss some truths related to the occult and the spiritual sciences. There is a remarkable, profound connection between the significant artistic phenomenon of Richard Wagner and the contemporary spiritual movement known as Theosophy. The fact that Richard Wagner and his artistic work embody an immense amount of occult power is something that is now truly coming to the awareness of humanity. But something else will become clear in the future, namely, that in Richard Wagner we have a figure in whom there lived far more than he himself could have known. This is the secret of many significant and especially artistic figures: that a power lives within them of which they themselves are unaware.

[ 2 ] While we must recognize, on the one hand, that there was much more alive in Richard Wagner than he himself was aware of, we must not forget, on the other hand, that he was nevertheless unable to advance to the highest level of wisdom, and that Richard Wagner’s art therefore holds a special significance for the occultist. When considering Richard Wagner’s works of art, one must say to oneself: There is much more alive in all of this—something mysterious that lies behind it all.

[ 3 ] It is extremely fascinating to perceive the deeper currents in the background. Richard Strauss once said that one can find much more in Richard Wagner than is usually the case. He elaborated on this as follows: Those who always claim that one should not read anything into what Richard Wagner created strike me as people who do not want to read anything into a flower either. But such people will never uncover the secret of the flower. The same is true of those who cannot read anything into the work of a great artist.

[ 4 ] Richard Wagner focused particularly on subjects of great significance. In his works, one always finds names that draw on ancient sacred traditions. What he achieved in Parsifal is intimately connected with the force that had such a remarkable impact in the last third of the 19th century.

[ 5 ] We must delve into the profound mysteries of human development in order to understand its forms and motives. To this end, let us go back several millennia in history. Throughout his life, Richard Wagner conducted the most profound studies of the human condition and the mystery of the human soul. In his youth, he sought to explore the mystery of reincarnation. Evidence of his engagement with this subject can be found in a draft for a drama he worked out in 1856. This drama is titled The Victors. Wagner later abandoned the project because, for him, the problem posed by The Victors was musically insoluble. Dramatically speaking, however, it would have been entirely solvable for him. The drama had the following plot: A young man in distant India, named Ananda, from the Brahmin caste, is loved by a Chandala girl from the lowest caste, named Prakriti. Ananda becomes a disciple of the Buddha. He does not return Prakriti’s love. This plunges her into the deepest sorrow. Ananda withdraws from the world and devotes himself to the religious life. The Chandala girl is then enlightened by a Brahmin as to why she has suffered this fate. In a previous life, as a Brahmin woman, she had spurned the love of the very same young man, who at that time belonged to the Chandala caste. Deeply moved by this teaching, she, too, turns to the Buddha, and now they both become disciples of this one teacher.

[ 6 ] Wagner sketched out this material in 1856 and intended to develop it further. What he was unable to achieve at that time had already taken shape in his mind in a different form just one year later. In 1857, he conceived the grand idea for Parsifal. It is remarkable how, in a single moment, the entire mystery of Parsifal was drawn into Richard Wagner’s soul. It was on Good Friday, 1857, at Villa Wesendonk on Lake Zurich. There he looked out upon nature as it was awakening, sprouting, and blooming. And in that very moment, the connection between the burgeoning nature and the death of Christ on the cross became clear to him. This connection is the mystery of the Holy Grail. From that moment on, the thought took hold in Richard Wagner’s soul that he must send the mystery of the Holy Grail out into the world in musical form.

[ 7 ] If we wish to understand this unique experience in Richard Wagner’s soul, we must go back several thousand years in history. Richard Wagner set forth his beautiful thoughts on human evolution in his essay “Heroism and Christianity.” To this end, let us first consider the form of teaching that was imparted within Europe at all times up until the 16th or 17th century in mystery societies. Mysteries have existed throughout the ages. In the mysteries, one received knowledge that was at the same time religion, and a religion that was at the same time wisdom. Anyone who lacks a concept of a spiritual world cannot possibly grasp the true meaning of a mystery.

[ 8 ] Spread out around us in successive levels are the various kingdoms of nature: minerals, plants, animals, and human beings. We regard the human kingdom as the highest of these four kingdoms. Just as there are kingdoms surrounding human beings that are inferior to them, so too are there higher beings beyond human beings, existing in many levels. From time immemorial, the beings that transcend human beings at various levels have been called gods. Through the kind of wisdom imparted to human beings in the mysteries, people were led into a conscious relationship with the gods. Wherever mysteries existed, such a person was always referred to as an initiate. He received not merely verbal wisdom, but experienced realities within the mysteries themselves. Mysteries still exist today, though they are of a different nature than those of ancient times and the Middle Ages.

[ 9 ] At the time the Crusades began, and somewhat earlier, we find an important mystery in a region in northern Spain. The mysteries that existed at that time came to be known as the Gothic mysteries. Those who were initiated into them at that time were called the Templars or the Knights of the Holy Grail. Lohengrin was one of them. The Knights of the Grail represented, within their community, something distinct from another order of knights. This other order of knights was based in England, in Wales. Everything told in the Middle Ages about King Arthur and his Round Table is connected to this other initiatory order.

[ 10 ] In ancient times, long before the emergence of Christianity, a stream of people moved across the Earth from west to east. That was a very long time ago. Once upon a time, Atlantis was located in the region of the Atlantic Ocean, where our distant ancestors, the Atlanteans, lived. All who populated Europe and Asia, all the way to India, were descendants of the Atlanteans. These Atlanteans lived under conditions quite different from those under which people later lived. They lived in a strictly hierarchical society under the guidance of such schools of initiation. All governance and rule at that time emanated from the initiates. A famous school of initiation was located in the north of what is now Russia. The initiates there were called Trotten. Other schools of initiation existed in Western Europe, where the initiates were known as the Druids. To bring order to the masses, all social institutions originated from these initiates.

[ 11 ] We now take a look inside these most ancient schools. What kind of mystery was taught there? Only the forms of such teachings change over time. It is most remarkable that the mystery which Richard Wagner sensed was brought to its highest expression there, namely: how nature, sprouting in spring, is connected to the mystery of the cross.

[ 12 ] The point is that human beings must first realize that all creative power lying outside the animal and human kingdoms can also be observed in the plant kingdom. In spring, the divine creative power springs forth from Mother Earth. One must recognize that there is a connection between the power that emerges when the earth covers itself with a green carpet and the divine creative power. The students were told: Out there, in the opening flower calyxes, you see a power that is concentrated in the seeds. Countless seeds will emerge from the flower, which, when placed in the earth, can bring forth new life. Now one feels completely that what is happening out there in nature is nothing other than what also takes place in the human and animal kingdoms, but which, in the plant kingdom, occurs without desire, in a completely chaste manner.

[ 13 ] The infinite innocence and purity that slumber in the calyxes of plants had to flow through the souls of the students. They were further told: The sunbeam opens the blossoms. It draws the power out of the blossoms. Two meet there: the opening flower and the sunbeam. Between the plant kingdom and the divine kingdom lie other kingdoms—the animal and human kingdoms. All these realms are merely a transition from the plant kingdom to the divine kingdom. In the divine kingdom, one sees once again a realm of innocence and chastity, just as in the plant kingdom. In the animal and human kingdoms, we see a realm of desire.

[ 14 ] But then the focus shifted to the future: All lusts and desires will one day fade away. Then the chalice will open from above, just as the calyx of a flower opens, and look down upon humankind. Just as a ray of sunlight sinks into a plant, so will humankind’s own purified power unite with this divine chalice.

[ 15 ] One can mentally invert the flower’s calyx so that it tilts downward from above, from heaven, and one can invert the sunbeam so that it rises from the human being toward heaven. This inverted calyx, as it was depicted as a fact in the Mysteries, was called the Holy Grail. The actual calyx of the plant is the inverted Holy Grail. Anyone familiar with occultism recognizes what the sunbeam represents, namely in the so-called magic wand. The magic wand is the symbol—expressed in superstitious terms—of a spiritual reality. In the Mysteries, this magic wand was called the Bloody Lance. In this depiction, one sees the origin of the Grail on one side and the Bloody Lance on the other—the original magic wand of the true occultist.

[ 16 ] These are subtle hints of immense depth, meaningful truths that unfolded in the belt of land stretching across northern and western Europe. Richard Wagner sensed much of these truths, as did his friend, the profound Count Gobineau.

[ 17 ] If one were to express what underlies the mysteries mentioned so far, it would be the knowledge of what flows through the veins of animals and humans. Quite rightly, Goethe’s Faust states: “Blood is a very special fluid.” Blood is the very thing on which so much depends. We will understand what blood means when we become clear about this and grasp what a great upheaval took place within the mysteries. In the ancient times of the European people, it was known that something very special depended on how people were related to one another by blood. Therefore, in those days, further development would never have been left to chance. All these matters were governed by occult wisdom. It was known that when, within small tribal communities, the process of development was so complete that no one from outside could enter, certain higher powers were present in the people who emerged from them. In the Mysteries, people understood the consequences of the interaction of different types of blood. They also knew exactly which tribe was suited to a particular region. They knew that the shared blood contained the source of certain human powers.

[ 18 ] When the ancient blood kinship was broken, something special took place in the Mysteries. What had formerly been achieved through blood kinship was now replaced by two specific spiritual preparations in the higher Mysteries. In the lower mysteries, the outer symbols for this were present. These outer symbols were bread and wine. What existed as those two preparations were substances that spiritually brought about something similar to what blood does physically in the veins. So when the old clairvoyance was lost, it was replaced by the consumption of these preparations. In those days, once one had mastered the entire body of theosophical wisdom, one received these symbols from Ceridwen’s bowl. This was what could be given to people as purified blood from the chalice that opened from above. It is this that constitutes the actual mystery, which was then passed on to a very small group.

[ 19 ] In other parts of Europe, the mysteries have fallen into disuse and have been desecrated in a hideous, repulsive manner. There, one finds, as a symbol of sacrifice, a bowl in which a bleeding head was placed. It was believed that the sight of this head could awaken something within a person. What was being practiced there was black magic. It was the antithesis of the mystery of the Holy Grail.

[ 20 ] It was known at that time that what flows upward in the calyx lives in human blood. This had to become pure and chaste again, like the sap of the flower. In the degenerate mysteries, this was reduced to a crude, materialistic form. In the North, they used sublimated blood as a symbol in the mysteries, and in the Eleusinian mysteries, the wine of Dionysus and the bread of Demeter. We find the Grail vessel, made hideous with the bleeding head, again in the figure of Herodias with the head of John. She laughs at the desecrated mystery.

[ 21 ] The true secret of the High Mysteries has been passed on to the Knights Templar in northern Spain, the Guardians of the Grail. While the Knights of Arthur were more concerned with worldly affairs, the Knights Templar were able to prepare themselves to receive an even higher secret—namely, to understand the great mystery of Golgotha, the mystery of world history.

[ 22 ] Christianity emerged from the most diverse mix of peoples—the Galileans—those who stand completely apart, outside of any blood kinship. The Savior is the one whose kingdom is no longer based at all on the old blood ties, the one who establishes that kingdom which lies beyond all blood ties. The sublimated blood, the blood that has been purified, springs forth from the sacrificial death, the process of purification. The blood that gives rise to desires and lusts must flow out, be sacrificed, and run its course.

[ 23 ] The sacred vessel containing the purified blood was brought to Europe, to the Temple of Iron on Mount Montsalvatsch. Titurel, the progenitor, received the Grail; it had been long awaited. Now the transcendence of the blood had taken place. The purely physical aspect of the blood had been overcome by the spiritual.

[ 24 ] Only if one does not view blood merely—as the materialist does—as being composed of chemical components can one understand what took place on Golgotha. It is most remarkable that Richard Wagner was able to find the devout mood for Parsifal only because he knew: It was not merely a matter of the Savior’s death, but of the blood that had been purified—blood that was something other than ordinary blood. He himself speaks of the connection between the Savior’s blood and all of humanity: “If we previously attributed to the blood of the so-called white race the capacity for conscious suffering to a particular degree, we must now recognize in the blood of the Savior the very embodiment of consciously willed suffering itself, which, as divine compassion, flows through the entire human race as its primal source.”

[ 25 ] Richard Wagner further states: “The blood in the Savior’s veins must thus have flowed forth as the divine sublimation of the human race itself—as the result of the utmost effort of the will seeking redemption to save the human race, which was perishing even among its noblest races.”

[ 26 ] Because the Savior came from the greatest mixture of peoples, his blood was the essence of all human blood—human blood in its purified form.

[ 27 ] Richard Wagner approached the primordial mystery like almost no other. It is precisely the power with which he did so that makes him a great artist. He should not be regarded merely as an ordinary musician, but must be seen as a profound seer who sought to re-embody the deep mysteries of the Holy Grail for modern humanity. Before Richard Wagner wrote Parsifal, people in Germany knew little about the mysteries and figures that Richard Wagner subsequently introduced.

[ 28 ] In the initiation into the Mysteries, a distinction was made between three stages that a person had to pass through. The first stage was “dullness,” the second stage was “doubt,” and the third stage was “bliss.” The first stage was the one in which a person was led away from all the prejudices of the world and directed toward the power of his own soul, his own power of love, so that he could see the inner light shine. The second stage was doubt. This doubt about everything arises at the second stage of initiation, and it is transcended at a higher stage into inner bliss. This was the third stage: the conscious union with the gods.

[ 29 ] “Perceval—press on through the valley!”—that is how those destined for initiation were called in the Middle Ages. Parsifal had to experience all of this firsthand. Through a remarkable stroke of genius, Richard Wagner sensed on that Good Friday in 1857 what was to serve as the guiding thread running through the entire development of Parsifal.

[ 30 ] The “Temple Iron” were those who represented inner, true Christianity in contrast to institutional Christianity. Throughout Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, one can see how he sought to present the spirit of inner Christianity alongside institutional Christianity.

[ 31 ] In the Middle Ages, remnants of the ancient, desecrated mysteries still existed. Everything associated with them is summarized under the name Klingsor. He is the black magician, in contrast to the white magic of the Holy Grail. Richard Wagner also contrasted him with the Knights Templar.

[ 32 ] Kundry is Herodias reborn. She symbolizes the force that is nature’s creative power, which can be both chaste and unchaste, but is unguided. Chastity and impurity are based on a single underlying principle, and what matters here is “how one calls out into the forest.” The creative force that manifests itself in the calyxes of plants and ascends through the other kingdoms is the same as that in the Holy Grail. It must only undergo purification in the purest, noblest form of Christianity, as revealed in Parsifal.

[ 33 ] Kundry had to remain a black sorceress until Parsifal redeemed her. The entire juxtaposition of Parsifal and Kundry exudes the scent of the deepest wisdom. Richard Wagner, more than anyone else, ensured that people could absorb this without even realizing it. Richard Wagner was a missionary whose purpose was to convey what is truly significant to the world without humanity being aware of this truth.

[ 34 ] Wolfram von Eschenbach wrote a simple epic, Parzival. That was enough for his time. There were people back then who possessed a certain gift of clairvoyance and who understood Wolfram von Eschenbach. But making the profound meaning of that event clear to people in the drama was not possible in the 19th century. Yet there is a means of fostering understanding, even without words, without concepts, without ideas. That means is music. Wagner’s music contains all the truths found in Parsifal. Through Wagner’s unique music, listeners receive very special vibrations in their etheric body. Therein lies the secret of Wagner’s music. One does not really need to understand these things, but one receives their beneficial effects through the etheric body. The etheric body is connected to all the surges of the blood. Richard Wagner understood the secret of purified blood. His melodies contain the vibrations that must be present in the human etheric body when one purifies oneself as is necessary to receive the secret of the Holy Grail.

[ 35 ] The unique style in which Richard Wagner writes in his works can only be fully understood if one takes into account what lay behind Wagner. He was well aware that the human will receives a very special illumination from the spirit. He said that the will is, at first, the coarse, the instinctive; then it becomes increasingly refined. The intellect sheds its light on the will, and the human being becomes conscious of suffering, and through this consciousness of suffering, a purification is brought about. Echoing his friend, Count Gobineau, he says: “If, when surveying all races, the unity of the human species is impossible to overlook, and if we may, in the noblest sense, describe what constitutes this unity as the capacity for conscious suffering—and in this capacity perceive the potential for the highest moral development—then we must now ask in what the superiority of the white race can be found, if we must indeed place it far above the others. With remarkable certainty, Gobineau identifies this superiority not in an exceptional development of their moral qualities themselves, but in a greater store of fundamental characteristics from which those qualities spring. We would have to seek these in the more intense—and yet more delicate—sensitivity of the will, which manifests itself in a rich constitution, combined with the sharper intellect necessary for this; whereupon it then depends on whether the intellect, driven by the impulses of the need-driven will, elevates itself to the level of clarity that casts its own light back onto the will and, in this case, by subduing the will, becomes a moral impulse.”

[ 36 ] Richard Wagner speaks here of the actual process by which the intellect is reflected onto the will of the person who thereby becomes clairvoyant.

[ 37 ] Richard Wagner’s work represents a religious deepening of art, but ultimately a profound understanding of Christianity. He knew that Christianity could best be revealed through musical form. Through elevation to the inner mysteries of the world order, one attains knowledge on the one hand, but also true piety on the other. There is a process of human development that teaches us to recognize the significance of this aspect of Christianity.