Another thought about Parsifal's relationship to his mother Herzeleide which just now occurs to me is that Wagner's presentation of the boy's abandonment of her and his feelings of guilt are part of the trick of inversion the composer plays upon our moral perspective. Parsifal's desertion of his mother is presented as an example of his mindlessness and callousness, as is his shooting of the innocent swan in the precincts of the Grail, as if the guilt he is made to feel were deserved. When he first appears in Act 1 with bow in hand he is chastised by the outraged Grail knights, who are presented as images of righteousness. But Wagner is playing sleight of hand with our conventional sense of right and wrong. Subsequent events lead us to realize that Titurel's apparently holy order is perverted by a basic error - while Parsifal, the apparent fool, must reaffirm in the arms of Kundry the wisdom of leaving his clinging mother behind. Yet an even more startling realization is that even the shooting of the swan, however mindless an act, and however peripheral it might seem to the story, is the right and necessary thing for Parsifal to do. The swan, snow-white in its purity, dwelling in the unruffled waters of a lake - symbol of the unconscious - represents innocent nature, as Gurnemanz tries to impress on Parsifal. But at the very center of this whole allegory of the soul's quest is the crucial necessity of leaving innocent unconsciousness behind: the "innocent fool" must lose his innocence, and innocence cannot be lost except foolishly. Killing the swan is thus akin to abandoning the mother, who would keep Parsifal an unknowing child, in another form; both acts represent the sin that must be committed, the felix culpa, the discovery of the knowledge of good and evil, the defiant "no" which falls from the lips of the child who has heretofore lived in the state of ignorance and innocence and looked to the mother for everything. Leaving his mother is no more than what every child must do, and killing the swan is a further step in the series of steps toward autonomy the growing soul must take. Guilt is a part of the price of autonomy, but it is a price that must be paid and will be worth paying when it is dispelled by the adult's consciousness of its necessity and its ultimate unimportance on the journey to maturity.
"Good" knights, confident in their wisdom and piety? "Bad" boy Parsifal, breaking his bow out of guilt? Look again! Titurel's garden of Eden turns into Klingsor's poisoned flowers right before our eyes; Parsifal - resisting the serpent in the garden and, in another Wagnerian inversion, refusing the fruit which is offered him - sets out across the desert to found a new Eden free from Adam's illusion of bliss.
Nietzsche, condemning Wagner for apparently prostrating his former extroverted heroism "at the foot of the cross," never comprehended Wagner's own final "transvaluation of values," and his discovery of the hero within.
