Encyclopedia
In Christian mythology, the
Holy Grail was the dish, plate, or cup used by
Jesus at the
Last Supper, said to possess miraculous powers. The connection of
Joseph of Arimathea with the Grail legend dates from Robert de Boron's
Joseph d'Arimathie in which Joseph receives the Grail from an apparition of Jesus and sends it with his followers to
Great Britain; building upon this theme, later writers recounted how Joseph used the Grail to catch Christ's blood while interring him and that in Britain he founded a line of guardians to keep it safe. The quest for the Holy Grail makes up an important segment of the
Arthurian cycle, appearing first in works by Chrétien de Troyes. The legend may combine Christian lore with a
Celtic myth of a
cauldron endowed with special powers.
The development of the Grail legend has been traced in detail by cultural historians: It is a legend which first came together in the form of written romances, deriving perhaps from some pre-Christian folklore hints, in the later
12th and early
13th centuries. The early Grail romances centered on
Percival and were woven into the more general Arthurian fabric. The Grail romances started in
France and were translated into other European vernaculars; only a handful of non-French romances added any essential new elements.
Some of the Grail legend is interwoven with legends of the Holy Chalice.
Origins of the Grail
The Grail
The Grail plays a different role everywhere it appears, but in most versions of the legend the hero must prove himself worthy to be in its presence. In the early tales,
Percival's immaturity prevents him from fulfilling his destiny when he first encounters the Grail, and he must grow spiritually and mentally before he can locate it again. In later tellings the Grail is a symbol of God's grace, available to all but only fully realized by those who prepare themselves spiritually, like the saintly
Galahad.
Early forms of the Grail
There are two schools of thought concerning the Grail's origin. The first, championed by Roger Sherman Loomis, Alfred Nutt, and Jessie Weston, holds that it derived from early
Celtic myth and folklore. Loomis traced a number of parallels between Medieval Welsh literature and
Irish material and the Grail romances, including similarities between the
Mabinogions Bran the Blessed and the Arthurian Fisher King, and between Bran's life-restoring cauldron and the Grail. Other legends featured magical platters or dishes that symbolize otherworldly power or test the hero's worth. Sometimes the items generate a never-ending supply of food, sometimes they can raise the dead. Sometimes they decide who the next king should be, as only the true sovereign could hold them.
On the other hand, some scholars believe the Grail began as a purely Christian symbol. For example, Joseph Goering of the
University of Toronto has identified sources for Grail imagery in 12th-century wall paintings from churches in the
Catalan Pyrenees , which present unique iconic images of the
Virgin Mary holding a bowl that radiates tongues of fire, images that predate the first literary account by Chrétien de Troyes. Goering argues that they were the original inspiration for the Grail legend.
Another recent theory holds that the earliest stories that cast the Grail in a Christian light were meant to promote the
Roman Catholic sacrament of the
Holy Communion. Although the practice of Holy Communion was first alluded to in the Christian
Bible and defined by
theologians in the first centuries A.D., it was around the time of the appearance of the first Christianized Grail literature that the Roman church was beginning to add more ceremony and
mysticism around this particular sacrament. Thus, the first Grail stories may have been celebrations of a renewal in this traditional sacrament This theory has some backing by the fact that Grail legends are almost entirely a phenomenon of the Western church .
Most scholars today accept that both Christian and Celtic traditions contributed to the legend's development, though many of the early Celtic-based arguments are largely discredited . The general view is that the central theme of the Grail is Christian, even when not explicitly religious, but that much of the setting and imagery of the early romances is drawn from Celtic material.
Etymology of graal
The word
graal, as it is earliest spelled, appears to be an
Old French adaptation of the
Latin gradalis, meaning a dish brought to the table in different stages of a meal. According to the
Catholic Encyclopedia, after the cycle of Grail romances was well established, late
medieval writers came up with a false etymology for
sangreal an alternate name for "Holy Grail". In
Old French,
san graal or
san greal means "Holy Grail" and
sang real means "royal blood"; later writers played on this pun. Since then, "Sangreal" is sometimes employed to lend a medievalizing air in referring to the Holy Grail. This connection with royal blood bore fruit in a modern best-seller linking many historical conspiracies .
The beginnings of the Grail in literature
Chrétien de Troyes
The Grail is first featured in
Perceval, le Conte du Graal by Chrétien de Troyes, who claims he was working from a source book given to him by his patron, Count Philip of Flanders. In this incomplete poem, dated sometime between 1180 and 1191, the object has not yet acquired the implications of holiness it would have in later works. While dining in the magical abode of the Fisher King, Perceval witnesses a wondrous procession in which youths carry magnificent objects from one chamber to another, passing before him at each course of the meal. First comes a young man carrying a bleeding lance, then two boys carrying candelabras. Finally, a beautiful young girl emerges bearing an elaborately decorated
graal, or "grail".
Chrétien refers to his object not as "The Grail" but as
un graal, showing the word was used, in its earliest literary context, as a common noun. For Chrétien the grail was a wide, somewhat deep dish or bowl, interesting because it contained not a pike, salmon or lamprey, as the audience may have expected for such a container, but a single Mass wafer which provided sustenance for the Fisher King’s crippled father. Perceval, who had been warned against talking too much, remains silent through all of this, and wakes up the next morning alone. He later learns that if he had asked the appropriate questions about what he saw, he would have healed his maimed host, much to his honor. The story of the Wounded King's mystical fasting is not unique; several saints were said to have lived without food besides communion, Saint Catherine of Genoa is one example. This may imply that Chrétien intended the mass wafer to be the significant part of the ritual, and the Grail to be a mere prop.
Robert de Boron
Though Chrétien’s account is the earliest and most influential of all Grail texts, it was in the work of Robert de Boron that the Grail truly became the "Holy Grail" and assumed the form most familiar to modern readers. In his verse romance
Joseph d’Arimathie, composed between 1191 and 1202, Robert tells the story of
Joseph of Arimathea acquiring the chalice of the Last Supper to collect Christ’s blood upon His removal from the cross. Joseph is thrown in prison where Christ visits him and explains the mysteries of the blessed cup. Upon his release Joseph gathers his in-laws and other followers and travels to the west, and founds a dynasty of Grail keepers that eventually includes Perceval.
The Grail in other early literature
After this point, Grail literature divides into two classes. The first concerns King Arthur’s knights visiting the Grail castle or questing after the object; the second concerns the Grail’s history in the time of Joseph of Arimathea.
The nine most important works from the first group are:
- The Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes.
- Four continuations of Chrétien’s poem, by authors of differing vision and talent, designed to bring the story to a close.
- The German Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach, which adapted at least the holiness of Robert’s Grail into the framework of Chrétien’s story.
- The Didot Perceval, named after the manuscript’s former owner, and purportedly a prosification of Robert de Boron’s sequel to Joseph d’Arimathie.
- The Welsh romance Peredur, generally included in the Mabinogion is a collection of prose [i] stories from medieval [i] Welsh [i] ...
, likely at least indirectly founded on Chrétien's poem but including very striking differences from it, preserving as it does elements of pre-Christian traditions such as the Celtic cult of the head. - Perlesvaus, called the "least canonical" Grail romance because of its very different character.
- The German Diu Crône , in which Gawain, rather than Perceval, achieves the Grail.
- The Lancelot section of the vast Vulgate Cycle, which introduces the new Grail hero, Galahad.
- The Queste del Saint Graal, another part of the Vulgate Cycle, concerning the adventures of Galahad and his achievement of the Grail.
Of the second class there are:
- Robert de Boron’s Joseph d’Arimathie,
- The Estoire del Saint Graal, the first part of the Vulgate Cycle , based on Robert’s tale but expanding it greatly with many new details.
Though all these works have their roots in Chrétien, several contain pieces of tradition not found in Chrétien which are possibly derived from earlier sources.
Ideas of the Grail
As stated above, the Grail was considered a bowl or dish when first described by Chrétien de Troyes. Other authors had their own ideas; Robert de Boron portrayed it as the vessel of the Last Supper, and
Peredur had no Grail per se, presenting the hero instead with a platter containing his kinsman's bloody, severed head. In
Parzival, Wolfram von Eschenbach, citing the authority of a certain Kyot the Provençal, claimed the Grail was a stone that fell from Heaven, and had been the sanctuary of the Neutral Angels who took neither side during
Lucifer's rebellion. The authors of the Vulgate Cycle used the Grail as a symbol of
divine grace. Galahad, bastard son of
Lancelot and Elaine, the world's greatest knight and the Grail Bearer at the castle of Corbenic, is destined to achieve the Grail, his spiritual purity making him a greater warrior than even his illustrious father. Galahad and the interpretation of the Grail involving him were picked up in the
15th century by Sir Thomas Malory in
Le Morte d'Arthur is Sir Thomas Malory [i]'s compilation of some French and English [i]...
, and remain popular today.
Various notions of the Holy Grail are currently widespread in Western society , popularized through numerous medieval and modern works and linked with the predominantly Anglo-French cycle of stories about King Arthur and his knights. Because of this wide distribution, Americans and West Europeans sometimes assume that the Grail idea is universally well known. The stories of the Grail, however, are totally absent from the folklore of those countries that were and are
Eastern Orthodox . This is true of all Arthurian myths, which were not well known east of Germany until the present-day Hollywood retellings. Nor has the Grail been as popular a subject in some predominantly Catholic areas, such as
Spain and
Latin America, as it has been elsewhere. The notions of the Grail, its importance, and prominence, are a set of ideas that are essentially local and particular, being linked with Catholic or formerly Catholic locales, Celtic mythology and Anglo-French medieval storytelling. The contemporary wide distribution of these ideas is due to the huge influence of the pop culture of countries where the Grail Myth was prominent in the Middle Ages.
The later legend
Belief in the Grail and interest in its potential whereabouts has never ceased. Ownership has been attributed to various groups . There are cups claimed to be the Grail in several churches, for instance the Valencia cathedral, which contains an artifact supposedly taken by
Saint Peter to
Rome in the first century, and then to Valencia by Emperor Valerian in the 3rd century. Archaeologists say the artifact is a 1st century Middle-Eastern stone vessel, possibly from
Antioch,
Syria ; its history can be traced to the 11th century, and it presently rests atop an ornate stem and base, made in the Medieval era of alabaster, gold, and gemstones. It was the official papal chalice for many popes, and has been used by many others, most recently by
Pope Benedict XVI, on July 9, 2006. The emerald chalice at
Genoa, which was obtained during the
Crusades at
Caesarea Palaestina at great cost, has been less championed as the Holy Grail since an accident on the road while it was being returned from Paris after the fall of
Napoleon revealed that the emerald was green glass.
In Wolfram von Eschenbach's telling, the Grail was kept safe at the castle of Munsalvaesche , entrusted to Titurel, the first Grail King. Some, not least the monks of Montserrat, have identified the castle with the real sanctuary of
Montserrat in
Catalonia,
Spain. Other stories claim that the Grail is buried beneath
Rosslyn Chapel or lies deep in the spring at
Glastonbury Tor. Still other stories claim that a secret line of hereditary protectors keep the Grail, or that it was hidden by the Templars in
Oak Island,
Nova Scotia's famous "
Money Pit", while local folklore in
Accokeek, Maryland says that it was brought to the town by a closeted priest aboard Captain
John Smith's ship.
Modern interpretations
Casual metaphor
The legend of the Holy Grail is the basis of the use of the term
holy grail in modern-day culture. This or that "holy grail" is seen as the distant, all-but-unobtainable ultimate goal for a person, organization, or field to achieve. For instance,
cold fusion or
anti-gravity devices are sometimes characterized as the "holy grail" of applied physics .
Modern retellings
The story of the Grail and of the quest to find it became increasingly popular in the nineteenth century, referred to in literature such as
Alfred Tennyson's Arthurian cycle the
Idylls of the King. The combination of hushed reverence, chromatic harmonies and sexualised imagery in
Richard Wagner's late opera
Parsifal is an opera [i] in three acts by Richard Wagner [i]. ...
gave new significance to the grail theme, for the first time associating the – now periodically blood-producing – grail directly with female sexual fertility. The high seriousness of the subject was also epitomized in
Dante Gabriel Rossetti's painting , in which a woman modelled by
Jane Morris holds the Grail with one hand, while adopting a with the other. Other artists, including
George Frederic Watts and
William Dyce also portrayed grail subjects.
The Grail later turned up in movies; it debuted in a silent
Parsifal. In
The Light of Faith ,
Lon Chaney attempted to steal it, for the finest of reasons.
The Silver Chalice is a 1952 [i] historical novel [i] by Thomas B. Costain [i]. ...
, a
novel about the Grail by
Thomas B. Costain was made into a 1954 movie , that is considered notably bad by several critics, including Newman himself.
Lancelot du Lac is Robert Bresson's gritty retelling. In vivid contrast,
Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a comedy [i] film released in 1975 [i]....
deflated it and all pseudo-Arthurian posturings.
Excalibur attempted to restore a more traditional heroic representation of an Arthurian tale, in which the Grail is revealed as a mystical means to revitalise Arthur himself, and of the barren land to which his depressive sickness is connected.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is a 1989 film [i] directed by Steven Spielberg [i] and starring ...
and
The Fisher King place the quest in modern settings, one as a modern-day treasure hunt, the other robustly self-parodying.
The Grail has been used as a theme in fantasy and science fiction;
Michael Moorcock's fantasy novel
The War Hound and the World's Pain depicts a supernatural Grail quest set in the era of the
Thirty Years' War, and science fiction has taken the Quest into interstellar space, figuratively in
Samuel R. Delany's 1968 novel
Nova, and literally on the television shows
Babylon 5 is an epic science fiction television series [i] created, pr ...
and
Stargate SG-1 is an American [i] television series [i] based upon the 1994 [i] science fiction [i] ...
. The grail features heavily in the novels of
Peter David's
Knight trilogy, which depict King Arthur reappearing in modern-day New York City, in particular the second and third novels,
One Knight Only and
Fall of Knight.
Understandably the Grail has figured into much modern Arthurian literature, such as the works of poet Charles Williams and feminist author Rosalind Miles , but it has also been treated in works of non-fiction, generally of dubious scholarship, which tend to separate it from the Arthurian mythos. In
The Sign and the Seal,
Graham Hancock asserts that the Grail story is a coded description of the stone tablets stored in the
Ark of the Covenant. For the authors of
Holy Blood, Holy Grail is a [[List of controversial non-fiction books|controversial book]...
, who assert that their research ultimately reveals that Jesus may not have died on the cross, but lived to wed
Mary Magdalene and father children whose Merovingian bloodline continues today, the Grail is a mere sideshow. In their book
Swords at Sunset, Canadian authors Michael Bradley and Joelle Lauriol connect the Grail to the pseudohistorical legend that Henry Sinclair came to the Americas 100 years before
Columbus; this theory has been greeted with considerable skepticism. In an argument drawing more closely on earlier "pro-Celtic" research, English author John Grigsby attempts to connect themes of the Grail to other Indo-European myths, including Osiris,
Adonis and the Greek
Dionysos in his book
Warriors of the Wasteland. He departs from his forbearers such as Nutt and Weston by discussing modern archaeological discoveries, such as Lindow Man, an Iron Age victim of a sacrificial rite that Grigsby believes underlies the wounding of the Fisher King.
The Da Vinci Code
Like
Holy Blood, Holy Grail,
Dan Brown's bestselling novel
The Da Vinci Code is a mystery [i]/detective [i] novel [i] by American [i] ...
is based on the idea that the real Grail is not a cup but the earthly remains of Mary Magdalene , plus a set of ancient documents telling the "true" story of Jesus, his teachings and descendants. In Brown's novel, it is hinted that Jesus was merely a mortal man with strong ideals, and that the Grail was long buried beneath Rosslyn Chapel, but that in recent decades its guardians had it relocated to a secret chamber embedded in the floor beneath the
Inverted Pyramid near the
Louvre Museum. The latter location, like
Rosslyn Chapel, has never been mentioned in real Grail lore. Yet such was the public interest in this fictionalized Grail that for a while, the museum roped off the exact location mentioned by Brown, lest visitors inflict any damage in an attempt to access the supposed hidden chamber.
See also
- Cornucopia and sampo are other mythical vessels with magical powers.
- Relics attributed to Jesus
References
External links
- at the Catholic Encyclopedia
