![]() ![]() ![]() His kingdom is sick and stagnating, and nothing can help him. He sits in his castle, rich but maimed with this festering sore. Here he finds the wounded Grail King (sometimes known as the Fisher King) whose wound will not heal. Perceval is the young man who is returning from his adventures with King Arthur to find his mother, and lands up at the Grail Castle – understood by Emma Jung and von Franz as the motherly realm of the unconscious. It is also often seen as the chalice that was used at the Last Supper. The Holy Grail, was the mythological chalice that was held up to catch his blood, and because of its shape, it symbolizes the feminine principle. As they point out, from time immemorial, blood was seen as embodying the life principle and was considered the seat of the soul. In this book, they emphasize, “ it is not so much the crucifixion of Christ which is looked upon as the redeeming factor but rather the blood flowing from his side after his death”. Eventually after her death, renowned Jungian analyst, Marie Louise von Franz completed the book entitled The Grail Legend, which Emma had been working on for so long. Despite the modern face of our civilization we still make blood sacrifices through our endless warring with each other, although these sacrifices often seem meaningless and devoid of any higher purpose than the lust for power, domination and control.Įmma Jung, a Jungian analyst in her own right, spent her life devoted to the study of the legend of the Holy Grail. On waking, I wondered if the blood was drained away and used in some way, and I was reminded of the blood sacrifices that were an inherent demand of man’s earliest religious experiences. Horrified but transfixed, I wondered, what were these corpses doing there? What was the purpose? What is our purpose? Whether we end up on a peg or end up in the ground or as burnt ashes, what purpose does our life serve? In The Grail Legend, the question was “Whom does the Grail serve? Each head was placed neatly beside its corpse. I could see three levels from where I stood – each one the same. In my dream I was shown a place where many human corpses (supposedly criminals) had been beheaded and hung upside down so the blood would drain away. But this is not about vegetarianism either.Ībout a month later I had this dream, which has also stayed with me, and which has brought me back to the age-old question made famous in The Grail Legend. There is a terrible poignancy about looking into the face of an animal and looking into its eyes, especially when you don’t stand on the moral high ground of being a vegetarian (which I am not). I loved the Slovenian people’s connection and closeness to nature and the way they have kept their old customs. It is an annual ritual in which the local people celebrate and honour the cows as they bring them down from the high mountain pastures to the valleys below each fall. The image of this beautiful cow at the Cow’s Ball in Bohinj, Slovenia has stayed with me since attending this wonderful local annual festival in Bohinj last September. ![]()
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