Savage Gardens, Original Sins: An Anarcho-Primitivist Reading of Wagner’s Parsifal

Imaginings of a lost Eden often feature humanity in harmony with the natural world, but should that natural world be a garden ? tame, gentle, harmless ? or untouched wilderness? For anarchoprimitivists, the answer is clear. Popularized by contemporary writers such as Jared Diamond, Daniel Quinn, and John Zerzan, the anarcho-primitivist movement holds that humankind’s decision to cultivate the earth many millennia ago ultimately led to the host of modern societal ills it faces today, including socio-economic inequality, hierarchical power structures, plague and communicable disease, and environmental degradation. Though it has grabbed headlines in recent years, anarcho-primitivism can in fact trace its history to ancient Greek and Indian thought and the Judeo-Christian Book of Genesis, via Rousseau’s noble savage and a variety of nineteenth century environmental, intellectual, and health reform movements. Entwined with these last three we find Richard Wagner’s final opera, Parsifal (1883), known for its lush music and cryptic message, and frequently associated with the composer’s exploration of contemporary political and social ideas in western Europe, including racial theory, theosophy, and vegetarianism. The opera’s fundamental contrast, in music and text, lies between the villainous Klingsor, the cultivator of an enchanted garden of flower maidens, and the virtuous Grail knights, who leave their land as pristine wilderness and depend for sustenance on what is provided by the Holy Spirit. This paper examines the musical and textual portrayal of nature in Parsifal in the context of the larger anarchoprimitivist movement in Western culture, which itself broadly encompasses many of the ideologies that so captivated its composer.