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The Editors of The Norton Anthology of English Literature say that the poem "is about spiritual dryness, about the kind of existence in which no regenerating belief gives significance and value to men's daily activities, sex brings no fruitfulness, and death heralds no resurrection" (2146).
Fertility Deities and the
Holy Grail Legends
I Fertility Deities and the Holy Grail Legends:
What is the Waste Land of Eliot's own time? Post WWI. Literally, the battlefields of France where the war was fought, the French and the British against the Germans, were a muddy wasteland, planted liberally with corpses. Figuratively, post WWI Europe is a spiritual and emotional Waste Land. Why spiritual? Many people lost their faith in Christianity after the war because they couldn't reconcile the idea of a benevolent, loving god with mass slaughter. Emotionally people were shattered because nothing in history had prepared them for the sight of so much death; the Industrial Revolution created armaments capable of killing masses in seconds.
What is the Wasteland of the past? The Wasteland encountered by the knights (from King Arthur's court) on the quest for the Holy Grail.
Eliot's own footnote credits Weston's From Ritual to Romance as his source and inspiration for his poem. The Waste Land. In her book, Weston explains that the original Wasteland was part of the legend associated with the Quest for the Holy Grail found in the Arthurian cycle of stories and legend. The stories of Arthur are very old, dating back to the time before Europe became Christian. By the time these stories were written down, Europe was Christian and the stories have taken on Christian trappings. The Grail was popularly thought to be the cup that Christ drank from at the Last Supper.Joseph of Arimithea reportedly brought the cup to England, and a descendent of his becomes the wounded king of the Wasteland in the Grail legends. Weston argues that such a cup from the Last Supper has no historical or biblical basis and that the Grail legend is a confused remnant of a procreation fertility ritual. That is to say, that within the Quest for the Holy Grail is an ancient fertility myth having to do with the Fisher King whose death, sickness, or impotence brought drought, war, and infertility of the land and among humans and animals.
Fertility religions were the first religions in many regions of the world, which makes a good bit of sense when you think that the first thing people could know about the universe was that there was a cycle of seasons that was essential to plant life.The rains come and go; summer is supplanted by winter; all of these things happen in a cycle, one season following the other, year after year. Many groups decided that there must be a god that influenced these cyclical changes on earth; if winter came and the world died, it must be because the fertility god had died or was wounded or impotent.
Examples of these gods are Adonis, Attis,Osiris. These three are mentioned in Eliot's footnote on Fraser's The Golden Bough.
Take Adonis for example: Adonis was the lover of Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual love; he was wounded in the groin by a boar, died, and taken to the underworld kingdom of the dead;Aphrodite suffered such grief that the Earth grieved along with her(winter); finally Aphrodite made a deal with the god of the underworld to release Adonis for part of the year; when Adonis and Aphrodite are reunited the earth is regenerated (spring and summer). It's not a coincidence that Aphrodite is the goddess of sexual love, because the worshippers of ancient fertility gods did not make a distinction between the fertility of the land and the fertility of animals or women. One god controlled all fertility, and the participation in one stimulated the other: in other words, the sexual was related,perhaps even gave stimulus to, the agrarian (agricultural). Though we don't know the exact connection, in people's minds, it is true that sexual symbols were associated with the worship of fertility deities.
An older god than Adonis, Tammuz of Sumerian legend is similar: in poetry written about Tammuz we find lamentations or wailings because Tammuz has disappeared from the upper earth, and a list of the disastrous effects produced upon the animal and vegetable life in his absence. Tammuz is asked by worshippers to return speedily. Scholars speculate that it is possible that the service of wailing for the dying god, the descent of the mother, and the resurrection were attended by mysterious rituals and consequently forbidden in art.
Apparently, there were similar religious beliefs in procreation in Europe. The common elements in fertility rituals are 1) a dying god or king associated with winter; 2) sexual symbols, male and female. We can see remnants of a fertility ritual in the Grail legends: the main object of the Quest for the Grail is "the restoration to health and vigor of a King suffering from infirmity caused by wounds, sickness or old age . . . whose infirmity . . . reacts disastrously upon his kingdom, either depriving it of vegetation or ravages of war" (Weston 20). The Grail knight must go to the Chapel Perilous, situated in the heart of the Wasteland, and ask certain ritual questions about the Grail (or Cup) and the Lance -- originally fertility symbols, female and male respectively. The knight must ask the right question in order to restore the king and the Wasteland to health. Significantly, in some forms of the legend, the Wasteland has been caused by War, and in some, the Grail knight, himself, causes the Wasteland by not asking the right question.
The things associated with the Grail legends are a dish or cup capable of feeding endless people, a spear, and a wounded or dying king whose lack of health is the cause of a Wasteland. Weston argues that the dish is a symbol of the female reproductive organ; the spear is a symbol of the male phallus; the wounded king is a symbolic or a dramatic stand-in for the fertility god whose temporary death is the cause of the protracted winter, the Wasteland. Weston speculates that the sight the knight on the quest for the Holy Grail has of the Wasteland of the dying king, the cup and the spear, formed the ritual enactment of the death of the fertility god and the ceremony surrounding his death and resurrection.
How did this fertility ritual take on Christian meaning?
According to Weston, the Christian church gave its own spiritual meaning to this fertility myth; the church just used the already existing ritual that people were comfortable with and merged the Deity of Vegetation, regarded as Life Principle, with the God of the Christian faith.
Eliot also refers to Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough, a book on the origin of religions in the world. Frazer discusses fertility religions in some detail.
The four suits of the Tarot pack are the cup, lance, sword, and dish -- life symbols associated with the Grail legend.
" . . . I do not find/ The Hanged Man . . ." note: "On his card in the Tarot pack he is shown hanging from one foot on a T shaped cross. He symbolizes self-sacrifice of the fertility god who is killed in order that his resurrection may bring fertility once again to land and people."
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