Our lady has
been placed under a magical spell by Sir Grommer to live her life as a gruesome
hag. It is also Sir Grommer who meets the young King Arthur, defenseless,
in the forest and threatens to take his life if he fails to agree to return to
the forest, unarmed, in one year's time with the answer to a perplexing riddle:
"What do women really want above all else?" Failing miserably
in his quest for the answer to the riddle, he reluctantly returns to the forest
to meet his fate when he encounters the Hag, who offers to save the King, by
answering the riddle, but only in exchange for her marriage to one of King
Arthur's knights. The King, facing certain death, reluctantly agrees to her
proposal, and the Hag provides him with the answer. The answer, of course, is
correct and important, but all the elements of the myth are equally crucial. ”Woman”
here refers to the Yin principle of receptivity, intuition and connection to
spirit, which is critical in the creative
process. The masculine principle, the Yang, is the initiatory principle and
both of them can be positive for wholeness and health or negative for
destruction.
Why and by
whom a spell is cast is extremely significant in these legends which provides a
map to the human psyche. It is said in the story that she was put under the
spell because a powerful knight took a dislike to her ‘quick will.’ It seems she
knew exactly what she wanted and because of that Sir Grommer changed her from a
lovely young woman in her prime into an aging, warty, stooped, foul smelling
old woman who drooled through her rotting teeth. We have to assume that ‘quick
will’ in terms of creative process is different for the Yin and the Yang. Quick
willed for the Yang in the artist may be knowing the art market, having a
finger on the pulse of public response, and so on. Quick willedness of the
feminine, which can aggravate the patriarch, is a different way of knowing, and
does not always yield a viable product that the masculine can utilize.
Lady Ragnell
in the form of the Hag is the Yin principle tied and bound from her vital
impulses, her source; all those things that protect, nurture and allow the
natural energy of her ‘quick will’ to flow. She knows the answer to the riddle
that can save the King and the Kingdom because she is living it. She bargains
her answer to marry Sir Gawain, the knight in the Kingdom with the highest
integrity, because this is her only hope of breaking the spell. She is
delivered to the marriage altar and then to his bedchamber because she supplies
the solution to the riddle that no other woman in the Kingdom can furnish. The
one thing that women (artist) want above all else is . . .sovereignty.
As we well
know from the dramatic illustration in Communist Russia and China, the artist
cannot be a mouth piece of the state, or anything or anyone else. The artist
must have his or her autonomy, just as the masculine principle within the
artist must trust and respect the feminine principle. Lady Ragnell, as the Hag,
is the dark shadow of the artist who is constrained by the need to please, as
well as rebel against outside influences, either way she loses her own
authentic impulses. She needs to enlist her own
masculine self to protect, trust and value what she knows to be right.
Lady Ragnell’s
spell has two parts. The first is the easiest broken in all of us — but it is
what causes us to live a dual life. When Sir Gawain kisses her on their wedding
night she becomes her beautiful, powerful self, but, like us, she cannot easily
maintain this shape without slipping back into her disempowered self. She asks
him whether he wants her fair by night in the bedchamber or fair by day in
court. This is a hard question for the masculine, particularly in societies
where an external feminine symbol reflects back their own
masculine power through beauty. Sir Gawain, understands the dilemma, and
finally concludes that she must decide, and that he will respect whichever
decision she makes. With this declaration the second part of the spell is finally
broken.
What do you
want as a woman or as the feminine in the artist? If you could only have one
thing, do you want success in your inner life or in your outer life? Artists
are acknowledged for riding the roller coaster between public and private life.
Even as Sir Gawain's answer breaks the second spell for Lady Ragnell, we well
know that the twisted, decaying Hag form who restricts the vital energy flow
will be constantly lurk in the shadows. If public and private life exists
separately from each other, there will always be fragmentation. The artist in
us all wants to flourish and needs to be seen, above
all, by our own selves for who we are.
It is easy to identify with our appearance or, for an artist,
with how our work is received in the world. Women, in particular, are trained
to perceive self as a projected image, rather than being the embodiment of
creative forces. Healing of the first part of the curse is liberating, but it
leads to the second kind of fragmentation. Buddhism speaks of the flash of
insight that comes when you see how both
the Maiden and the Hag are illusions. This awareness is initiated and supported
by the masculine principle that enables the unification. We cannot integrate
the fragmentation through the will or by techniques, only through love and
conscious awareness of unconditional acceptance, like Sir Gawain in his value
for the higher cause of the Kingdom. He resists relating to the Hag through a
vision of perfection, a vision that would be crippling to them both, instead he
creates a more encompassing vessel. This kind of vision and dedication is what
artists need to claim personal sovereignty.
Majio
