"Here lies in peace 'Wahnfried's' faithful watcher and friend—the good and beautiful Mark" (der gute, schöne Mark)!
I returned, too, to Wagner's tomb, plucked a branch of the fir-tree that waved above it, and went back to my room to prepare myself by reading and meditation for the great religious drama which I was to witness at four o'clock in the afternoon—Wagner's latest and highest inspiration—the story of the sacred brotherhood, the knights of San Graal—Parsifal!
PARSIFAL
The blood of God!—mystic symbol of divine life—"for the blood is the life thereof." That is the key-note of Parsifal, the Knight of the Sangrail. Wine is the ready symbolical vehicle—the material link between the divine and the human life. In the old religions, that heightened consciousness, that intensity of feeling produced by stimulant, was thought to be the very entering in of the "god"—the union of the divine and human spirit; and in the Eleusinian mysteries, the "sesame," the bread of Demeter, the earth mother, and the "kykeon," or wine of Dionysos, the vine god, were thus sacramental.
The passionate desire to approach and mingle with Deity is the one mystic bond common to all religions in all lands. It is the "cry of the human;" it traverses the ages, it exhausts many symbols and transcends all forms.
To the Christian it is summed up in the "Lord's Supper."
The medieval legend of the Sangrail (real or royal blood) is the most poetic and pathetic form of transubstantiation; in it the gross materialism of the Roman Mass almost ceases to be repulsive; it possesses the true legendary power of attraction and assimilation.
As the Knights of the Table Round, with their holy vows, provided medieval Chivalry with a center, so did the Lord's table, with its Sangrail, provide medieval Religion with its central attractive point. And as all marvelous tales of knightly heroism circled round King Arthur's table, so did the great legends embodying the Christian conceptions of sin, punishment, and redemption circle round the Sangrail and the sacrifice of the "Mass."
In the legends of Parsifal and Lohengrin the knightly and religious elements are welded together. This is enough. We need approach Parsifal with no deep knowledge of the various Sagas made use of by Wagner in his drama. His disciples, while most eager to trace its various elements to their sources, are most emphatic in declaring that the Parsifal drama, so intimately true to the spirit of Roman Catholicism, is nevertheless a new creation.