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Theories. Conspiracies Publisher's note: The articles herewith published do not necessarily reflect or represent the opinions of the New York Monthly Herald, its employees and editorial staff. THE HIGH HISTORY OF THE HOLY GRAIL By Vincent Bridge Joseph Campbell, in his epic study The Masks of God places Wolfram's Parzival squarely on the dividing line between ancient and modern. Emma Jung, whose psychological insights are invaluable, identifies the Grail cycle as the beginning of the immanent spirituality of Christianity, in opposition to the more ancient transcendent view. Adolf Hitler considered the Hallows of the Grail to be an important component of his plan for world conquest. Sort of a psychic equivalent to a Panzer battalion. The Grail would seem to be the ultimate slippery idea. Even the word itself has a half-dozen different derivations: from gradual, gradulis in Latin, to a wide plate or dish, gradule in Old French, to the really strange meanings such as Sang Real or royal blood. A persistent whiff of Sufism lingers on, along with traces of other arcane undercurrents, such as Goddess worship, "witchcraft," and contact with such megalithic concepts as landscape zodiacs. To approach the Grail is to enter into Fairyland, the Magic Kingdom, but one such as Walt Disney could never have imagined. The Grail is, or becomes, all things to all seekers. Perhaps it is best seen as a state of mind, one in which the numinous exists in sharp and bright detail, while the mundane becomes charged with significance and meaning. If The Castle, or Temple of the Grail is the Garden, then the Angel of the Fiery Sword becomes a Grail Knight. And to enter one must simply ask: "Whom does the Grail Serve?" We are talking of nothing less than the redemption of the human condition, the true promise of Christianity, reneged on by the Church and forgotten by all but those who take up the Quest. Like all great and essentially timeless ideas, the Grail is a product of a specific time and place, a specific and exact set of enabling conditions that allowed the emergence of this seminal myth. To understand the Grail, we must look first to history. Elenor of Aquitaine was in many ways the most remarkable woman of the middle ages. Indeed, she was perhaps one of the most amazing women of all time. Outright sovereign of Aquitaine, the richest and fairest province of France, she was married very young to the King of France. The saintly Louis seems never to have known quite what to do with this powerful, beautiful and headstrong woman. Elenor started the fashion of the Court of Love, which flourished throughout Europe and reached its peak at the turn of the thirteenth century. Elenor's daughter, Marie de Champagne, inherited her mother's love of Provencal troubadours and all the other trappings of the cult of courtly love. Elenor and her court accompanied Louis the Young on his expedition to the Holy Land, known as the disastrous and ineffectual Second Crusade. Elenor returned from crusading and soon embarked on the great royal romance of the period. Henry Plantagenet, Henry II of England, swept her off her feet. He married her with the aid of large bribes and good friends in Rome. Their children included two of the most renowned and infamous characters in the long panorama of English history: Richard the Lion-Hearted and King John, the signer of the Magna Carta. With illustrious siblings as these, it is easy to lose track of a simple princess, no matter what her literary tastes.
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Marie de Champagne deserves a better niche in history if only for her encouragement of poetry. She brought to her court the greatest storyteller of the age, Chrétien de Troyes. Through Chrétien the undercurrents of the Grail mythos surfaced into literature. Not much is known about Chrétien, his origins or his early works. He was born around 1130 and by 1170, he was famous as the author of a version of Ovid's Book of Love, now lost, and a version of the Tristan story which has also disappeared. Erec is his first medieval bestseller. This poem introduces in a formal way the Matter of Britain to the cosmopolitan audience at the court of Marie de Champagne, and from there passed throughout the courts of Europe. Erec sets the basic pattern for all Arthurian Romances, but though the splendors of the Celtic world are here on display, the Grail is not yet in evidence. Chrétien followed up his success with three more Arthurian tales. Cliges is a Roman myth with an Arthurian background. It wasn't all that popular. There are only two copies extant. But it did introduce certain key elements in the Matter of Britain. Cliges contains the first mention of the Round Table and the first specific mention of Camelot. Chrétien may have picked up this name from Camulodunum, the Roman name for Colchester. The Knight of the Cart and The Knight with the Lion are perhaps Chrétien's masterpieces. Certainly Ywain or the knight with the lion with its marvels, strange adventures and courtly love, its finely drawn characters and well wrought unity is a masterpiece. The Knight of the Cart , our introduction to Lancelot, fares less well. The action is unexplained and unmotivated, requiring a broader canvas in order to give the causes and consequences of the adventure. The overall feeling is that of a piece of a larger work rather than a completed work of art in itself. We can imagine Chrétien working on just that problem of scope in the early 1180's.While Chrétien produced most of the Arthurian stage dressing that would define the very concept of Romance over the next three hundred years, the Grail has yet to appear. Chrétien's last work, left unfinished at his death, was Perceval, or the History of the Grail. With this uneven masterpiece, Chrétien plants the seed germ of the spiritual qualities that will, within only thiry years, become the driving force behind works as unique as Wolfram's Parzival and Walter de Mapp's Queste del Saint Graal. While the scope of Perceval, or the History of the Grail is broad enough to encompass the entire medieval world view, it is riddled with difficulties and inconsistencies. Chrétien himself claimed that he was merely reworking the material that he had found in an old manuscript. Perhaps the marvels and strange doings of his Celtic original simply proved too much for Chrétien's more down to earth approach. At any rate, his version ends after Gawain's adventure of the Perilous Bed. We can be sure that Chrétien began his last work, commissioned by Phillip of Flanders, with great enthusiasm. Chrétien refers to the story as the greatest ever told in any court. His opening scenes are full of color and verve. He tells of his hero's blunders and gaucheries with a keen comic sensitivity of effect. He invests the encounter with the Fisher King with just the right amount of awe and reverence mixed in with the mystery and strangeness. And Chrétien is equally successful with the startling appearance of the Loathly Damsel and her violent denunciation of Perceval, whose growth from boyish boorishness to knightly grace has been well drawn and realized. With the shift of narrative focus to Gawain, the tale begins to unravel. By the time the story returns to Perceval, it is obvious that Chrétien is deeply confused and that some important concept concerning this "graal" has been lost or misunderstood. But the clues are there, painted in broad strokes in the Grail procession scene. To understand the mystery of the Grail, it will be necessary to have the outline of Chretien's scene in the Grail Castle firmly in mind. Our first glimpse of the Grail offers many guideposts in the tangled thickets of theological and eschatological speculations to follow. Chrétien faithfully followed his original, even when he didn't understand it. |