MYTHS AND LEGENDS
ON THE GRAIL

Most researchers agree that the Holy Grail is somehow connected to Jesus.

According to certain traditions, it was the wine glass in which Jesus and his disciples drunk during the last supper, according to others, it was the cup in which Joseph of Arimathea gathered the blood of Jesus on the cross, or both things.

The very strange thing is that such an important object for Christianity doesn't show up at all in tradition, and it does not even appear in Christian literature for more than thousand years after Christ himself. An object that virtually did not exist for ten centuries, that was never even mentioned, all of a sudden takes on an enormous importance in the crusades' peak period, with a rich production of novels linked to it.

Apparently, the novels on the Grail recall rites connected to the cycle of seasons, to the death and rebirth of the year, with some reference to more ancient rites connected to Tammuz, Attis, Adonis, Osiris. Also in the Irish mythology, as well as in the Welsh, there are repeated calls to death, to rebirth through renewal and to an analogous regenerative process of the earth: sterility and fertility.

In the Mabinogion, a compilation of Welsh legends almost contemporary to the novels on the Grail, there is a mysterious "cauldron of the rebirth": the dead warriors that are thrown into it at night, the following morning rise again.

The cauldron is often associated to a gigantic hero called Bran. Bran possessed an extraordinary dish, able to produce any desired food: this capability sometimes is attributed to the Grail. At the end of his existence, Bran was beheaded and his head was guarded in London as a talisman. There, they said, it carried out several magic functions, it assured fertility to the earth and, thanks to its hidden power, it kept the invaders out.

In the second half of the XII Century, the originally pagan basis of the Grail novels underwent a transformation whose meaning has never been clarified; the Grail became in fact associated exclusively and specifically to Christianity and it seems that it was not just a simple grafting of Christian traditions into pagan ones.

As a relic mystically connected to Jesus, the Grail gave origin to a great deal of novels or long narrative poems that, still today, light up the readers' imagination. Despite the disapproval of the Church, these novels bloomed for almost a century and they gave origin to a real cult in the period contemporary to the maximum expansion and power of the Templar Order.

With the fall of the Holy Land in the 1291 and the break-up and the persecutions to the Templar Order, from 1307 on, for more than two centuries nobody ever spoke about the Grail. The theme came about again in the novel The Death of Arthur, in 1470. Since then, in European literature, we find continuous sprout and references to it. It seem that there are even documents proving that the Nazis did some excavations in southern France in order to find the Grail...

In the novel The Death of Arthur, the Grail had already assumed the more or less clear identity that it still today preserves: the form of cup used in the last supper or by Joseph of Arimathea to gather the blood of Jesus.

Various legends tell how Joseph of Arimathea brought the cup to England; others say that it was Magdalen who carried the Grail to the South from France. Attention, however: these legends speak only about the Grail and not about a cup. The identification was subsequent and it become common place only with the above cited novel.

According to many researchers, the first real novel on the Grail dates back to 1188, year of the fall of Jerusalem and of the presumed break-up between the Templar Order and the Priory of Zion. The novel's title is The Roman of Parsifal or Le Conte du Graal, and it was composed by Chretien de Troyes under a specific request from Philip of Alsace, count of Flanders. The work constitutes the prototype and the model of the following novels on the Grail.

The protagonist is Percival, who's introduced as "The Son of the Widow," meaningful and enigmatic appellative, used for a long time by several dualists and gnostic heresies, to indicate the prophets of the heresies, or even Jesus himself.

Percival leaves his widowed mother to conquer the rank of knight. In his Journey he meets an enigmatic fisherman, the " Fisherman King", that offers him shelter for the night in his castle. That evening the Grail appears. Neither at this point, nor later, is the Grail connected to Jesus. It is carried by a damsel, it's made of gold and studded with precious gems. Percival doesn't know that he's supposed to ask a question on this mysterious object; he should ask: "Who is served, with it"?. It is an ambiguous question; being a cup, it could mean: "Who eats from it"?. Or: "Whom do you serve - in knight's sense - if you serve the Grail?

Percival, however, doesn't ask the question and the next day, when he wakes up, he discovers that the castle is empty; his omission, as he will ascertain later, causes a disastrous sterility.

Later, he finds out that he himself belongs to the "family of the Grail" and that the mysterious "Fisherman King " is his uncle. Then Percival does an eccentric confession: after his unhappy personal experience with the Grail, he declares of having stopped believing in God and loving it.

The work of Chretien de Troyes is incomplete; the last part, if ever was written, was destroyed in a "strange" fire, which coincided with the death of the poet. In the following years the theme of the Grail spreads quickly all over Europe, connecting more and more with the history of King Arthur and, little by little, to Jesus. Among the most interesting following novels, is the Roman de l' Histoire du Saint Graal, that was presumably the novel that transformed the Grail in a specific Christian symbol, defining it as the cup of Christ’s blood.

Another important novel, always written around the end of 1200, is Perlesvaus, by an anonymous author, perhaps a Templar. The novel tells the history of Percival that, in his vagabondages, arrives at a castle. The castle doesn't guard the Grail, but it hosts a group of initiates that are obviously familiar with it. Percival is received by two teachers, who clap their hands, to let other 33 men in, all dressed in white, with a red cross on their breast. One of the teachers declares of having seen the Grail. The circumstance takes place at the times of King Arthur and has different references to magic rituals. It talks about evocations and of invocations, and about alchemy, quoting "two men made of copper by means of the art of necromancy."

One of the teachers dressed in white says to Percival: "There are the heads sealed in silver and the heads sealed in lead and the bodies to which such heads belonged: I tell you that you must let the King's and the Queen's heads arrive there."

In the Perlesvaus, the Grail takes on a very meaningful dimension; in fact a priest admonishes: ." It is not allowed to discover the secret of the Saviour and the people to which it is entrusted must keep it hidden. "The Grail involves a secret, entrusted to a group of chosen ones, and there is a connection with Jesus. At the end of the novel, the Grail finally appears and presents itself like a mutable sequence of images and visions. The first is that of a crowned and crucified king. The second is a child. The third is a man with a crown of thorns and bleeding from his forehead, his feet, his hands and breast. The fourth manifestation is not specified. The fifth is a wine glass. Every time, the vision is accompanied by a fragrance and a strong light.

Judging from this description, it seems that the Grail is many things at the same time, or something that can be interpreted at many different levels. On the terrestrial one, it could be a stock, a family. Besides, evidently, the Grail is an experience, an illumination, like the exalted Cathars' one and the one of other dualistic sects of those times.

Among all the novels on the Grail, the most famous and artistically richer is Parzival, written between 1195 and 1216 by Wolfram von Eschenbach. At the beginning of his novel, the Author affirms that the history of the Grail he reports- unlike the preceding ones - is the real one, because it is based on privileged information, directly received by a researcher, the pagan Flegetanis, who "saw things with his eyes in the constellations about which he prefers not to speak, arcane mysteries. There was a thing called Grail, whose name he had read clearly in the constellations; a team of angels had left it on the earth. From that time on, baptised men have had the assignment of guarding it, and with such caste discipline that all those called to the service of the Grail are always noble."

Wolfram von Eschenbach declares openly that in the mystery of the Grail there is much more than meets the eye. And he specifies, with numerous references scattered all over the poem, that the Grail is not at all a fantastic object, but a means for hiding something of great importance. Many times he recommends of "reading between the lines" and he insists on the need of secrecy. "Because no man can conquer the Grail if he is not known in the heavens and called by name by the Grail itself."

There are hints to a Temple, that let the reader guess that the keepers of the Grail are the Templars But this also leads to the hypothesis that the Grail didn't exist only in relation to King Arthur (beginning VI Century) but also during the crusades. Therefore, the Grail was not something that belonged to the past but had a great importance also in the contemporary context.

Whoever guarded the Grail had to keep pure and repudiate any falsehood. In certain pages, it is described as cornucopia or horn of abundance." ...If anybody reached out his hand to get anything, he would find it ready in front of the Grail, hot or cold foods, new or old dishes, meat of domestic animals or game." This could be a connection with the miracle of the multiplication of the bread and of the fish, in the Gospel.

In other places, the Grail is called Lapsit Exillis, a pure stone that, when looked at, restored the beholder's health. Not only, but it kept young or rejuvenated whoever stood in its presence. Lapsit Exillis could be a corrupted form of Lapis ex caeli, i.e. "stone from the skies" or also Lapis Elixir, that is the Philosopher's Stone of the alchemists. It could also be the stone on which Jesus founded his Church or the Temple's stone, "the angle stone discarded by the builders."

Among its extraordinary attributes, it seems that the Grail possesses a "certain sentient ability." It can call the individuals to its own service, call them in an active sense. The names of the chosen persons appear on the stone, and they must be initiated to a sort of mystery. At the same time it sends its servants into the world to carry out various enterprises. As the Perlesvaus suggests, the Grail seems to be, at least partially, a kind of experience. Also von Eschenbach, speaking about its healing faculty and of the gift of conferring longevity, seems to underline something experiential and not only symbolic: a state of the mind, a state of the being. There are no doubts that, at a certain level, the Grail is an initiation experience that can be described as a transformation of conscience, a mystical experience, an illumination.

Precise connections can also be made between the Grail and the Qabbalah thought. Important Quabbalah schools existed at the time in which the novels on the Grail were written, and, without doubt, they have made their influence felt.

The Quabbalah can also be called "esoteric Judaism," a methodology of exclusively Jewish origin aiming at realising an extraordinary transformation of conscience. It can be considered the Jewish equivalent of other disciplines belonging to the hindu, buddhist, taoist tradition, of certain forms of yoga or zen. Like his Western equivalent, the Qabbalah involves a series of rites, a structured sequence of initiation experiences, that brings the individual to radical modifications in his own conscience.

One of the most important stages of the cabalistic initiation is called Tiferet. In the experience of Tiferet, they say that the individual goes from the world of the form to that of the non-form, transcending his/her own ego. It is a sacrificial death, the death of the ego, in the sense of individuality and of the isolation that individuality involves. And, obviously, it is also a rebirth or resurrection, in an other dimension, of harmony and of unity that embraces all things.

In the Christian adaptations of the Qabbalah, Tiferet was associated to Jesus. For the medieval Cabalist, the initiation to Tiferet was linked to specific symbols which included a hermit or a guide or a wise old man, a stately king, a child, a sacrificed god.

With the passing of time other symbols were also added: a truncated pyramid, a cube, a red cross. The relationship between these symbols- that are found again and again- and the novels of the Grail, is evident. This connection of the Grail with the Qabbalah conferred it a Jewish element, that would be incongruous if the Grail were really something deriving from Christianity. .. obviously it is not.

A pun: in many ancient manuscripts the Grail is called Sangraal and also Sangreal. It is likely that the word was later broke up in a wrong way. Sangreal must perhaps be divided into Sang Real - royal blood - and not St. Greal. Real blood. Why real blood? Whose? Blood as vital essence, life?