Wagnerian Question: What Was the Holy Grail

On a newsgroup, someone brought up the question of Wagner's interpretation of Christianity, a thing that much vexes Wagnerians because ... frankly ... it seems so smarmy ... and unchristian ... and because it's hard to enjoy Parsifal, his last drama, without dealing with it. (I love the opera myself.)

The guy who brought it up asked if it was true Wagner thought Christianity was NOT derived from Judaism at all -- I knew he was part of a very large group of European Christians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who wished to believe this, but was unaware of their justifications for it. (I've seen Otter Zell's, which are quite bad enough, and have to do with Christ dying for our sins -- hardly a Jewish doctrine, now, is it?)

To this someone who knew a great deal more than I do on the matter responded by quoting letters from Wagner to Liszt that averred that Christianity was really an outgrowth of Buddhism, bypassing all Jewish connection (hard to fit the life of Jesus into that time line but ... whatever), and that the basic message of early Christianity (per Wagner) was renunciation of unnecessary experience (hard to fit that into Wagner's lifestyle ... but whatever) and ending the cycle of reincarnation. That certainly fits with Parsifal's heroine, Kundry, who besides being a figure from the medieval Parzival epic, is in the opera the Wandering Jewess, a reincarnation of Herodias, who in this version was cursed by laughing at Jesus as he carried the cross down the Via Dolorosa.

So I wondered if you had heard anything in any of your classes about the "influence" of Buddhist thought on early Christianity, through some spurious link (trade links undoubtedly existed) between the Middle East and India, and a possible visit of Jesus to India (en route from Glastonbury no doubt)?

Meanwhile, back at the Kaaba, still another mystic chimed in on the thread with word that the Holy Grail -- and I'd always heard that this was originally (paganly) a wish-granting Stone rather than an all-sustaining Chalice (outgrowth, that latter, of the Celtic mythic cauldron of the Dagda or whosever it was -- Lugh? Cerridwyn?) -- was originally a magical ithyphallic stone dropped from heaven upon the place beneath, the sort of thing (meteoric iron?) often worshipped by oriental peoples, notably the Heliogabalus stone in Aramaea and, of course, the Kaaba in Mecca (last survivor of these cults). Somehow the cultic, ethereally-derived sanctity of these stones got tied in with the Stone of Scone and the visit to Britain (with or without chalice) of Joseph of Arimathea. (Or his visit to the Priory of Sion, for that matter -- backdated.)

Is there a traceable line here, from cult A to cult B to cult C to the medieval epics (were they influenced by talk of the Kaaba? Were the Templars during their sojourn on the Mount? Were the crusaders who visited Spain and might there have been introduced to Islamic mysticism?) to Wagner's great game of symbolic musical chairs?

In Istanbul (it always re-sets to Istanbul), in a little mosque that had once been a sixth-century Byzantine church (the oldest in town), the sexton (if that is the word, and it's not) proudly showed me little squares of black stone inset in the mihrab and above the portal: cut from the Kaaba in Mecca! he said. The only mosque in Istanbul with stone from the Kaaba! Fortunately the place had other charms. But a link -- a palpable link.

Ideas?

(My opera reviews can be found at www.operatoday.com)

Istanbulletin: Pre-boarding

Got my snap shot,
Got hammams (hot!)
All I need now is the shoes …
Room set,
All my needs
met,
Got the schedule down for Byzantine ruin –
All I need now is the soles for the viewin’ –
If they’d
just arrive I’d
toss aside
all frets and blues –
And with each step I’d say
“I can wander all night where the young Turks play,”
From the Black Sea to the walls of Troy
All this sorry
boy
Needs is shoes.

In fact, my new passport has not yet arrived, but the person on the phone there (not too long a hold time either -- take notice, Met Opera!) told me it's in the final stages and should arrive by Wednesday. Departure date is October 6.

Meanwhile, every couple of days I buy new shoes and take them to a museum to test them out. (After all, streets aside, museums is where I'll be doing most of my walking. Mosques, of course, I shall walk barefoot.) So far my buying and testing has produced several days after when I could not walk at all but nothing really comfy, really winning. Worst case scenario: I unearth the hiking boots demolished two years ago and the old sneaks I last wore in Italy and get a couple of days' use out of them before they fall to the dogs of Marmara.

Before that, I tackle Eneslow, which will if necessary manufacture proper shoes for me.

Today I spent an hour at the Museum of the American Indian, which I have not visited since that notorious Steve Reich concert in the rotunda, when I danced around the ovoid room (cf. Sept. 24 New Yorker, Letters). A small exhibition of Northwest (mostly B.C.) items -- insignificant to the holdings I've seen in Vancouver and Seattle, of course, but also compared to the grand hall at AMNH -- and the floors mostly carpeted so I could not tell if the shoes worked or not (I need marble for that), but at least I wasn't blared at by fifteen talking exhibits.

Results: inconclusive.

Maybe I shall get fluffy bunny carpet slippers for the museums of Turkey. But the streets there are still in questions.