Notes on Act 3
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- Pure Blood and Holy Blood
Right: Wagner sketched by Paul Joukowsky while reading
on 12 February 1883. He was reading Fouqué's Undine.
 n
Wagner's Gobineau-influenced essay, Herodom and Christendom, he considers how the degeneration
of the human species might be attributed to two causes: the eating of animals (as suggested by Gleizès) and the mixing of
races (as suggested by Gobineau). Wagner's remedy for
this degeneration was the blood of Christ, which had for him a mystical
significance:
 Thus, if we found the faculty of conscious suffering
peculiarly developed in the so-called white race, in the Saviour's blood we must
now recognise the quintessence of free-willed suffering itself, that godlike
compassion which streams through all the human
species, its fount and origin. 
[Heldenthum und Christenthum, September 1881]
 agner's mention of the so-called white race is a reference to the ideas of
Count Gobineau, ideas which he considered in the 1881
article. Gobineau suggested that the human species could
be divided into three "races": respectively white, black and yellow. This was by no
means new; it can be traced back to the biblical account of the sons of Noah.
Gobineau further suggested that the so-called white race
was superior to the black and yellow races. This idea was consistent with the
colonialist mentality of the period. It should be noted that these ideas were put
forward by Gobineau and only reported by Wagner.
nsofar as "pure blood" is a subtext in Parsifal, it must be understood
in the context of this essay, i.e. in relation to Mitleid. In the same work,
we can also follow two elements from Herodom and
Christendom: firstly, the Buddhist-like reverence of the Grail community for birds and
animals (hence their abstention from meat even when the
divine food provided by the Grail is denied to them) and
secondly, the ritual cleansing of Kundry in baptism (allowing her release from the eternal cycle of rebirth) which Barry Millington (in his
biography of Richard Wagner) sees as an expression of a Schopenhauerian pacification of the will (obliteration of the whole being, of
all earthly desire , he told Cosima).
 here is more to Parsifal than meets the eye; in his letters and in
confidences to Cosima, Wagner hinted that there were hidden secrets in the work.
Those secrets are not necessarily, however, as dark as some would have us believe.
Some commentators (including Millington) take the view that the drama is infused with
the ideas of Wagner's last decade: a heady mix of Schopenhauerian pessimism, antivivisection
and vegetarianism, and strange theories about race and blood. Also, not least,
Wagner's theories of art and religion, and his hopes for the future of mankind, as
expressed in the somewhat incoherent essays of his last years.
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