Your post is very interesting, certainly. I think the problem I have is that Parsifal was written by Wagner, not Carl Jung. Carl Jung's psychiatric work was based primarily around interviews with patients having poorly integrated egos, hence his philosophy is framed around finding the cure via the individuation process. Wagner's life seems instead to be that of a man troubled by metaphysical and spiritual matters. In particular, Schopenhauer's concept of the Will, the early life of Christ, Buddhism, the Upanishads, and Islamic mysticism were all researched and their essence funneled into Parsifal.
If Wagner had a secular, psychological goal about explaining the healthy integration of the ego, I daresay it simply could have been a essay. That is academic knowledge, not experiential. Instead he chose to craft the experience of Parsifal, which is a very peculiar choice if his goal is to stabilize the ego, because Parsifal seems specifically designed to *destabilize* the ego: The way he built Bayreuth in a simple stadium-style to take the audience out of the auditorium, out of daily life itself, and immerse them into the scene. The way the music rises unseen from the depths and engulfs the listener. The way Parsifal is paced to distort and cause us to lose our sense of time. The result is ego-death. When it ends, and the lights come back on, and we a thrust back into our bodies, and we are shaken. We cannot put words to what we have just experienced, to even attempt to describe it in words would bring it diminishment. These indicate the intentions and effects of a mystic experience, and it is my full belief that triggering such an otherworldly experience in the audience was Wagner's primary intention. Certainly he produced a work which has caused many to change the trajectory of their lives. His purpose was not to distill religion into psychology, but a demonstration in the power of the spiritual, and how the mantle in expressing its fundamental truths can be passed from organized religion to art.
I have to say that I'm loving this conversation! I appreciate your description of the effect
Parsifal has on you; I can identify with it. When I first heard the complete opera - I think I was about 16, it was a radio broadcast of the 1951 Bayreuth recording, the only one then available - I was left in a sort of trance state from which I only gradually returned to everyday reality. When I subsequently acquired the 1962 Bayreuth recording I couldn't get enough of it, much as you report being addicted to
Tristan. I found the work both exalting and disturbing, but it's the latter effect that most intrigues me. The beautiful spirituality of the work's "religious" music, and the extraordinary blending of ecstasy and pain that's virtually unique to this work, were always easy for me to identify with (my churchy upbringing probably had much to do with it), but the strange, chromatic, insinuating music with which Kundry seduces Parsifal - music subtler and stranger than anything in
Tristan - felt somehow threatening, even corrupting, to me as a young person. As I grew older, I came to understand that this sense of existential threat is just what Parsifal feels as Kundry draws him into a dangerous vortex of helplessness, a dark place that psychoanalysis would describe as an infantile state in which sexual desire merges with a return to the mother's breast, and a place where mature manhood is impossible to achieve. As a young person poised precariously on that fence that separates boyhood from manhood, I think I experienced in Wagner's uncanny music something of what Parsifal himself experiences, but I had then no way to conceptualize those very disturbing feelings.
I know that Wagner was writing in the era before Freud and Jung, and that he didn't use their vocabulary or think in precisely their terms. I'm not trying to depict him as a psychoanalyst in any precise sense. But just as the concepts they developed are attempts to describe the dynamic processes of man's subjective life, so the concepts of religion represent earlier attempts to do the same thing. Jung, less hostile to religion than Freud, tried to represent the experience of transformation and spiritual maturation in psychological terms, and when I look at Wagner, an avowed atheist, I see him doing much the same thing, but in the concrete, sensuous form of musical drama rather than explanatory prose. He couldn't have had what you call a "secular, psychological goal about explaining the healthy integration of the ego," but he most certainly had a secular artistic goal of presenting the transformation of a naive, self-centered boy into a mature, responsible man. If I describe the process by which Parsifal attains that maturity in Jungian terms, it's because I find them useful, but not necessarily exclusive of other ways of conceptualizing what the opera is telling us. I don't intend to dismiss the Christian and Buddhist elements in the opera, but I don't think that in drawing from these traditions Wagner was shedding his modernity and adopting wholesale the metaphysical views of ancient religions. At a fundamental level I don't think
Parsifal is any more - or less - "religious" a work than the
Ring. It merely uses a different mythical vocabulary, one drawn from Christian and Buddhist legend, to convey what Wagner considered truths about human existence. That he may never have entirely settled in his own mind what those truths were probably served only to make
Parsifal more ambiguous, suggestive and fascinating.
As a modern man and a nonbeliever in gods and devils, heavens and hells, I find religion interesting, I've done a fair amount of reading in it, and I've sought to apply to my own life ideas from religious traditions, Buddhism in particular. But, like Feuerbach and Wagner, I see religious metaphysics and cosmologies as projections of man's inner life. When Gurnemanz sings about creation giving thanks for having been redeemed at last, I don't take any part of that literally. The "creation" or universe about which Wagner writes is not the universe in which we live - that unfathomable infinity of burning suns and colliding atoms - but rather the universe that lives within us. Wagner's mythical worlds, whatever their implications for human life in the social and natural realms, are above all embodiments of the internal drama played out by the forces that make up the human personality. This is increasingly the case as his work matures, and
Parsifal epitomizes the genre of mythic psychodrama unique to him, with its strange characters who make no sense as individual people but profound sense as interdependent elements of a single, evolving human consciousness.