The Waste Land

Modern masculinity, the Grail Legend, and social conditioning under patriarchy

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The Arthurian legends of the Middle Ages interested Carl Jung and the mythologist Joseph Campbell profoundly. Campbell lectured about them countless times and wrote about them, too. Jung less so, but only because his wife, Emma Jung, had been working on an archetypal exploration of The Grail Legend for many years and he didn’t want to invade her intellectual domain.¹

Though I’m still only dipping my toes in the waters of this story, trying to make sense of its numerous variations over the centuries, I have the same feeling as Campbell and the Jungs, that the themes of the Grail Legend hold keys to understanding, and possibly healing, the suffering of our current era.

For background, here’s Emma Jung’s introduction to her book, The Grail Legend:

A mysterious, life-preserving and sustenance-dispensing object or vessel is guarded by a King in a castle that is difficult to find. The King is either lame or sick and the surrounding country is devestated. The King can only be restored to health if a knight of conspicious excellence finds the castle and at the first sight of what he sees there asks a certain question.²

If the knight fails to ask the right question, nothing will change and he will be banished from the castle, losing his opportunity to heal the land.

Originating around the 12th century, this story offers clues to the widespread wounds of patriarchal culture and, thus, to a primary wound in all of us. The country is devastated because the King is wounded. The Waste Land can only be redeemed if the King can be healed.

It is no wonder that so many people are drawn to this legend. The very name—Waste Land—evokes a feeling of the past mirroring the endless grief of our current times.

Nothing is new under the sun.

Or are we merely caught in the same recurring dream, unable to wake up to the lesson we need to learn? What is the right question to ask? What do we need to do to heal this perpetual suffering?

The knight of the Arthurian legends is named Parzival (also Perceval or Parsifal). Campbell explains what happens after Parzival is welcomed into the castle and sees the wounded king.

Parzival remarks upon… the anguish of his host, and is moved by compassion to ask about the king’s sorrow. If he were to ask that question, the land would be healed, the king would be healed, and joy would abound.³

But Parzival does not ask this question. He does not express empathy or concern.

For the first time in his life Parzival suppressed the impulse of his heart in deference to an alien social ideal: his public image as a proper knight.

…His nature prompted him many times to ask the question, but he thought of his knightly honor. He thought of his reputation instead of his true nature. The social ideal interfered with his nature, and the result is desolation.⁴

Campbell further explains that Parzival was cut off from his instincts by the very “principle responsible for the wasting of the Waste Land itself.”

The quest failed. The king was not healed, and the country's well-being was not restored.

The story of the Grail Legend makes me think of psychologist Carol Gilligan’s pioneering work on the social conditioning of patriarchy. Gilligan has spent decades studying how, under patriarchy, girls are steadily conditioned to cut off awareness of their true voices, while boys are cut off from their emotions and, thereby, their ability to connect with others, express concern, and care. What far too many people think is biology or “nature” is merely a long-standing part of a culture that severs people from their true selves and, correspondingly, from the vibrancy of life.

In Why Does Patriarchy Persist?, Gilligan and her co-author Naomi Snider write:

Patriarchy is an age-old structure that… harms both men and women by forcing men to act as if they don’t have or need relationships and women to act as if they don’t have or need a self.⁵

In this brilliant book, Gilligan and Snider name something that is absolutely core to the rampant suffering of men today and is Parzival’s exact struggle in front of the king.

[T]he iniation into patriarchal manhood… subverts the ability to repair ruptures in relationship by enjoining a man to separate his mind from his emotions (and thus not to think about what is he is feeling).

…[P]atriarchy persists in part by forcing a loss of relationship and then rendering the loss irreparable.

Not only is Parzival unable to express concern for the king and ask about his suffering, but when he fails to follow that relational instinct, he loses the ability to try again. The next morning, he is sent away, and the castle disappears. His lack of connection to his own emotions cuts him off from connection with others.

Gilligan recently spoke with

Elise Loehnen

for her podcast, Pulling the Thread. The whole conversation is really so profound; it took me several listens to finish it because I kept hitting “pause” to digest something they’d said.

Here’s Gilligan:

We all start out having a voice and [being] in relationship, and then when these gender norms start to be introduced and you take human capacities and say that reason is masculine and emotion is feminine, as if boys don't feel and as if girls don't think, it's so ludicrous. It's amazing that anyone ever repeats this. But then boys feel that if they want to be one of the boys or a real boy, they have to distance themselves or at least not show those parts of themselves, their tenderness, their empathy that would make them look soft or weak or girly or “gay.” And so they start to split.

Gilligan spoke to the “giant collective neurosis” that we’re all experiencing and the fact that patriarchy is “ultimately self-defeating. We can see it's ruining the planet, it's going to make this planet uninhabitable,” yet we keep doing the same things over and over again. The news of school shootings and escalations of wars, increased devastation to the environment, and increasingly oppressive laws drive this feeling home again day after day. All of these issues are connected, and the solution is not to do the same thing repeatedly.

Jungian Analyst Robert Johnson put a fine point on this same sentiment of a “giant collective neurosis” in his own analysis of the Grail story and what he calls the wounded feeling function:

probably the most common and painful wound which occurs in our Western world. It is very dangerous when a wound is so common in a culture that hardly anyone knows that there is a problem. There is general discontent with our way of life but almost no one knows specifically where to look for its origin.⁶

We are living in the Waste Land but think it is normal, natural life.

Men are cut off from themselves, and so they are cut off from empathy, and so they choose violence, guns, weapons, and war on repeat. Over and over and over.

But in the Grail Legend, the knight’s quest has nothing to do with a battle. The Waste Land can’t be saved through toughness or war.

Parzival does, ultimately, complete his mission: He heals the king and restores the land. But he does not accomplish this through classic knightly tasks. Ultimately, redemption comes through curiosity, relationality, empathy, and care. It comes through love.

That is the quest.

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The search for the holy grail, according to Substack AI

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I’m Satya Doyle Byock, psychotherapist, author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood, director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies, and co-host of a podcast on Carl Jung’s Red Book. My work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Oprah Daily, NPR, The BBC, Literary Hub, The Tamron Hall Show, and on podcasts such as Apple News in Conversation and The Joseph Campbell Foundation Podcast. Find links here.

1. “Had it not been for my unwillingness to intrude upon my wife’s field, I would unquestionably have had to include the Grail legend in my studies of alchemy.” Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

2. The Grail Legend, Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz, p. 9

3. Romance of the Grail, Joseph Campbell, p. 51

4. Romance of the Grail, Joseph Campbell, p. 52

5. Why Does Patriarchy Persist?, Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider, p. 6

6. The Fisher King & the Handless Maiden, Robert Johnson, p. 3