by the peculiar
magic of the place, found the path to it obliterated. He had come
forth with the exalted but undefined sense of a great task to perform.
But, even as the road to the Castle of the Grail was difficult to
find, the road to Klingsor's castle was easy and overeasy; it would
seem that for the feet of a votary of the Grail all roads led to
it. Parsifal had seen it shining afar, and with childish shouts of
delight is drawing near. Klingsor, divining in him an enemy more
than usual dangerous, resorts, to make his ruin altogether sure,
to what are his supreme methods. He calls to his assistance once more
the ally by whose help the great Amfortas had been vanquished. With
mysterious passes and burning of gums, he summons that Formidable
Feminine: "Nameless one!... Most ancient of Devils!... Rose of
Hell!... Herodias!..." and amid the blue smoke-wreathes, uttering
the wail of a slave haled to the market-place, rises the form of
Kundry. She appears like one but half roused from the torpour of
sleep, and struggling with a terrible dream, or resisting some
terrible reality. All the answer she can give to his first words of
ironical congratulation, is in broken exclamations: "Oh! Oh! Deep
night.... Madness... Oh, wrath! Oh, misery!... Sleep! Sleep! Deep
sleep!... Death!..." and, in a subsequent outburst: "The curse!...
Oh, yearning!... Yearning!..."

Her history and hints of her extraordinarily complex personality
are to be gathered from the scene following and the scene later,
with Parsifal. The mysterious messenger of the Grail was anciently
Herodias, and meeting with the Man of Sorrows, she laughed. "Then,"
she herself relates, "He turned His eyes upon me...." Under the
curse involved in her action and the remorse generated by that
divine look, she cannot die, but goes, as she describes it, seeking
Him from world to world, to meet His eyes again. She tries in every
manner to expiate her sin, by service to others, by subjugation of
self, but the old nature is still not well out of her, the nature
of Herodias, and, at intervals, an infinite weariness of welldoing
overtakes her, a revival of the passions of her old life, and with
the cessation of struggle against them she falls into a death-like
sleep. In this condition, as if it represented a laying-off of the
armour of righteousness, her spirit is at the mercy of the powers
of evil. The necromancer Klingsor can conjure it up and force it
to his own uses.

In the