rose of hell!
Herodias thou wast and what more?
Gundryggia there, Kundry here!"

It is the feminine Ahasrer, present in all ages and spheres, in our
time revealing its tangible form in the ruling spirit of Judaism. As
her sinful nature at last is overcome by Parsifal's purity, and she
humbly approaches him to receive the baptism that is awarded to every
one who believes and acts in the spirit of pure humanity, he
proclaims, when he has withstood her temptation and thereby has
regained from Klingsor the holy lance of the Grail, the impending
catastrophe by tracing with the lance the sign of the cross and
saying:

"With this sign thy spell I banish!
Even as it heals the wound
Which with it thou hast dealt--
So may thy delusive splendor in grief and ruin fall."

When in the last century, Roman Catholicism had become sensual and
worldly through Jesuitism, and Protestantism had put on either the
straight-jacket of orthodoxy or had been diluted with rationalism,
there came to the surface, outside of the religious sects, secret
societies, such as the Freemasons. In their well-meant but flat
humanitarian idealism, those strangers to our race and religion, the
hitherto despised Jews, also took active part and what "delusive
splendor" have they not since then provided for themselves in
literature and art and general ways of life? A single actual
resurrection of that sign in which we Germans alone have attained
world-culture and world-importance has "in grief and ruin destroyed"
all this, and we hope in truth that we are now approaching a new epoch
of our spiritual as well as moral existence. Just as, out of the first
awakening of a pure human feeling such as Christianity brought us,
there rose in contrast to priesthood a work like the "Magic Flute,"
child-like, artless but devoutly pure and full of feeling, so now
there resounds like the mighty watchword of this full national
resurrection, Wagner's "Parsifal."

Let us see how the poem itself has done this and what it signifies.

According to the legend of the Holy Grail, already artistically
resurrected by the master in "Lohengrin," the chalice from which
Christ had drank with His disciples at the last supper, and in which
His blood had been received at the cross, had been brought into the
western world by a host of angels at a time of most serious danger to
the pure gospel of Christianity. King Titurel had erected for it the
templ