From ritual to romance

A story which started with my turning the pages of my father’s 1932 copy of some poems by T.S. Eliot, in particular ‘The Wasteland’. To find at its end notes to the poem provided by the author – which struck me as odd: authors of poems do not usually provide their own notes, leaving that to literary critical types at universities. Anyway, the first note was about his debt to Miss. Weston and her study of the Grail story at reference 2. Which was duly procured, and turned up as a brand new print on demand book. A short book of just about 100 pages, with page numbers, but that apart, without any of the packaging one usually gets with a printed book. We don’t even get a contents page or a page throw at the start of each chapter. Nevertheless, what we do seem to have is a paper which was once part of a collection of studies about the King Arthur stories.

A paper which claims that the 12th century Grail story is a literary relic of ancient rites and rituals, once to be found all over the Aryan world and elsewhere. A finding which reflects the almost universal importance once attached to keeping in with the gods that look after the fruit and vegetables – with reference 3 being a well known catalogue of relevant rites and rituals from around the world. Rites and rituals which were apt to involve the annual sacrifice of the old king in favour of a new king, to involve a strong sexual element, to involve mystery and likely to involve some kind of sacred feast – of which the Christian Eucharist is a rather rarefied relic. With the most likely meaning of the word ‘Grail’ being some kind of sacred cup, very much the Christian chalice. With the wasteland being what happened when one had an impotent, old or otherwise sick king.

Weston’s major concern appears to be to prove that the main elements of the Grail story predate Christianity by a thousand years or more.

Weston reads like an autodidact, learned but undisciplined. Keen to assert her learned credentials by including lots of references to other scholars, lots of slabs of both poetry and prose in foreign languages – mostly old French and modern German – without translation. 

In the end I gave up at around the two thirds mark. Tracing the origins of all the elements of the Grail story did not seem that important any more. A battle to assert the primacy and power of ancient rites and rituals over those of the Christian church which no longer seems important – although I can see that it was to those of the early twentieth century, trying to bear down on the then considerable pretensions of that church. A church which had just presided over the horrors of the First World War.

Along the way we had lots of ‘theriomorphic’. A word mostly applied to gods and demons taking visible form as an animal. According to OED a word derived from the Greek, invented in the late nineteenth century. Perhaps by folklorists and collectors of tales. What Elizabethans would have called an ‘inkhorn’ word.

I was reminded that Yeats was another poet, of about the same time, keen on folklore. In his case, particularly the Irish variety – while Weston favoured the Welsh.

There was talk of ancient soma feasts, a word picked up by Huxley a few years later for the all-important recreational drug in his brave new world of reference 6.

There was also a lot of talk of fisher kings, from where I (quite irrelevantly) associated to the fisher, a weasel like animal mainly found in Canada. According to Wikipedia: ‘The fisher (Pekania pennanti) is a small, carnivorous mammal native to North America, a forest-dwelling creature whose range covers much of the boreal forest in Canada to the northern United States. It is a member of the mustelid family (commonly referred to as the weasel family), and is in the monospecific genus Pekania. It is sometimes misleadingly referred to as a fisher cat, although it is not a cat’. It does not eat fish and the name derives from ‘fitch’ or ‘fitchew’, old words for the polecat. Use recorded from the early 17th century, maybe from old Dutch.

With which snippet, I think I can put Weston to bed.

PS 1: coincidentally, I happened to be reading a book about religion by one Pascal Boyer at the same time as this one. He does not seem to be a fan of fertility rites or catalogues and brackets Frazer of reference 3 with George Eliot’s Dr. Casaubon. A bracketing I found irritatingly dismissive.

PS 2: turning the pages of ‘The Wasteland’ again, I find I don’t understand very much of it, still less see the links to the Grail story. Maybe that will come. Not for the first time, I wonder what on earth I could of made of it when I went no less than two times to Fiona Shaw’s peripatetic, bare footed rendition. See reference 9 for what little there is on this. 

References

Reference 1: The Waste Land – T. S. Eliot's – 1922.

Reference 2: From ritual to romance – Jessie Laidlay Weston – 1919.

Reference 3: The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion - Sir James George Frazer - 1890-1910.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Grail. 

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsifal. Wagner’s opera was another Grail spin-off.

Reference 6: Brave New World – Aldous Huxley – 1932.

Reference 7: Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age - Modris Ekstein – 1989. A more recent evocation of the story.

Reference 8: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/01/modris-eksteins.html. All good things come to an end.

Reference 9: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/01/greenshaw.html. A recent mention of ‘The Wasteland’. The only one I could find.

Reference 10: https://thefurbearers.com/blog/meet-the-fisher-ontario/. The source of the snap above.