centuries she has lived, she has borne many names. She has
but recently been the temptress of Amfortas, and at the reassumption
of the higher half of her dual nature, has, as the servant and
messenger of the Grail, striven to make amends, as far as she might,
for the mischief done by her in her other state. The curse under
which she lives has peculiar laws of its own, of which we just
vaguely feel the moral basis. In her character of temptress, while
desiring with intensity, in her Herodias part, the surrender of
the man to whose seduction she applies herself, yet with the other
side of her, the side of the penitent, which never quite slumbers,
she even more ardently and fundamentally desires his victory over
her arts, for, with her own frustration, she would be delivered from
her curse, she could die; from the enormous fatigue of centuries
of tormented earthly existence, find rest. Which is to say, perhaps,
that if once more she could meet and look into the eyes of complete
strength and purity, see an adequate approach to the Christ-spirit
shining out of whatsoever eyes, her redemption, so painfully worked
toward through centuries of alternate effort and relapse, would
be consummated; at that encounter, renewing, or confirming, faith
in the existence of perfect goodness, the evil within her, so long
vainly fought, would die, and her long trial be at end. So she
approaches every new adventure with, under her determined wiles,
the hope of failure; and when her subject is still and ever found
weak in her hands, experiences despair. And when a hero such as
Amfortas, undertaken with the undercurrent sense that he perhaps is
the unconquerable, whose resistance shall make him her deliverer,
vulgarly falls in her arms, the triumph of one side of her nature,
and the despair of the other, express themselves in terrible laughter.
The fruit of her experience with man is, as it affects the two
sides of her, a mixture of sinister cynicism and ineffable pity.
"Woe! Woe!" she laments, at Klingsor's mocking mention of Amfortas.
"Weak, he too! Weak--all of them! Through me, to my curse, all
lost as I am lost! Oh, eternal sleep, only balm, how, how shall
I win you?"

One can suppose in this Kundry, setting aside all details of personal
history, an intended personification of the
abstraction--(_Namenlose_,--Nameless One,) Eternal Feminine, with,
set in the high light, two of her broad traits, the best perhaps and
the worst: the passion