Theodor Reuss Quotes

5 Sourced Quotes

Closing Word
Learn to eat of the tree of Knowledge, and of the tree of Life enjoy the fruit. Seek both within yourself, and so you recognize them and know their place, you are come to the highest rung of the 12 step ladder.
Through this will the Divine-Love be awoken that does not have a place in the twisted minds of men, but dwells in his heart, from which the salvational current will be born which gives us the vision of the eternal light and annihilates all falsity.
"The eternal-feminine draws us up?!"

Theodor Reuss
Gurnemanz is still not absolutely certain that Parsifal is pure and a fool, as he makes the decision to lead Parsifal to the castle of the Graal, for Gurnemanz sang after they both had walked a while: Now pay attention, and let me see, if you are a fool and if you are pure...! — The test, if he is a pure fool, shall come to Parsifal first in the Temple of the Graal! This point cannot be worked out further here.

Theodor Reuss
A Warning to all
Close minded, petty, or malicious, great and small spirits! Just as the whole plot of Parsifal of the festal play of Richard Wagner is only an allegory, a symbolical depiction with no real occurrence in the material world, so the above explanation of the Graal-secret is not to be understood as literal, personal, material, earthly, relative to vulgar events. But it is only to be understood as totally impersonal, symbolical, and relative on purely spiritual grounds.

Theodor Reuss
Now it remains only to show what the conception grace of the highest miracle, seeks in the greatest holy heater with last love-meal in sacred vessel flowing as longed for by the Knights. What in short — is the Graal!
But Parsifal does not ask in the first act: What is the Graal, Parsifal asks, Who is the Graal? — and why does Wagner not have Parsifal say: What is the Graal? — Here lies hidden a profound mystery! So Parsifal asks (with underlying intent of the author): Who is the Graal? — and Gurnemanz answers quite revealingly: That one does not say!

Theodor Reuss
Nothung, Nothung, envious sword — what is the sword Nothung, but that unbreakable legacy which Siegfried, as the only son of the father, re-tempers in the fire of youth. What else, but the symbol of the primal-sword (primal-Phallus!) The primal-father has stuck this primal-sword into the trunk of the primal-tree, and whoever pulls out this sword wins a woman with it — as bride and sister! These are no symbols of sexual-abstinence!

Theodor Reuss