The story of the Fisher King is a story of death and
rebirth, not only of the wounded king himself, but
of the land over which he rules. This can be seen
even by looking at the name of the myth and its
central character: The Fisher King.
The Fisher King was indeed called the Fisher King
because he fished, but why he fished is the greater
mystery. Since time immemorial bodies of water have
been potent symbols of death and the unconscious,
which were closer things once upon a time than they
are now, for in days before photographs, it was only
in dreams that we saw the dead live again.
Fish, who live in that water, are often a sign of
rebirth, reincarnation, and other means of life from
death, for they are the dynamic things that move
even in the world under the surface of death.
Pisces, of the Zodiac, is a powerful symbol of
rebirth, coming as it does at the end of the Zodiac
and the turning of winter into spring. Jesus is
often given the name
Icthus, an acronym in Greek of Jesus of Nazareth,
Son of God. Even before the dawn of Christianity,
fish were a powerful symbol of rebirth -- making
appearances in the
Judaism from which
Christianity derived as well as other religions.
Fishing is, then, the act of bringing about rebirth,
of bringing life out of death.
There are many versions of the Fisher King myth,
but common elements tend to run through them. The
most prominent is, of course, the Fisher King
himself, who is always wounded, typically in the
groin, or in the side or thigh which are both
symbolic of the groin.
The second common element is The Waste Land. The
land over which the Fisher King rules is almost
invariably infertile. This infertility is because of
the King's own infertility -- his health is the
health of the land, which is a typical theme in
early Indo-European myth and, indeed, belief. There
are many cultures that killed the king when their
land was failing in the belief that his health was
directly tied to the land, there are even some
cultures where the king's wife would tell the
priests when he was no longer able to satisfy her in
bed, as an early warning of the failing of the land
--
the king is dead, long live the king.
The third and fourth elements are the lance and
the grail, that is,
The Holy Grail. These, likewise, are symbols of
fertility and are present with the Fisher King in
some ritual that is, evidently, designed to heal the
king and thus the land. The lance is a potent symbol
of a penis and the cup unmistakably a female image
-- the merging of the two enacts human copulation,
another means of restoring fertility.
The stories become
divergent upon a third party entering into the
story. Often, the person is an innocent who knows
nothing of what is going on. Sometimes his innocence
saves the king and the land, sometimes it dooms it.
Sometimes the innocent even grows to find himself in
the same position as the Fisher King towards the end
of his life, or sometimes the once-innocent's own
King falls victim to the same malady.
Whether the innocent saves or dooms the king,
however, the tale remains a potent symbol of death
and rebirth, and an
allegory, if a thing can be called an allegory
when those who created it believed the link to be
more than
metaphorical, for the turning of the seasons and
the emerging of
Spring's new life from the ashes of
Winter.
King Arthur himself becomes a Fisher King figure
at the end of his life, asking one of his knights to
cast
Excalibur, another potent male symbol, into the
lake whence it came, the water here playing the role
of a feminine symbol as well as a symbol of death,
for afterwards
Arthur is himself borne away across the waters
to
Avalon , the isle of apples - another symbol
that recalls the feminine and death at least within
Judeo-Christian canon as well as recalling the
pomegranate of which
Persephone ate which required her to stay half
the year in the land of the dead, to return again,
reborn, when he is needed.
The innocent, or The Fool restarts the cycle
whether it does so by beginning the king's life anew
or beginning the life of an innocent out of the
ashes of experience. The Fool is a potent symbol of
new beginnings, holding as he does, the zeroth
position in the Major Arcana of the
Tarot. Indeed, he still has a day at the point
where winter becomes Spring in our current calendar
-- April Fools Day.
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