1
Just to be in the presence of the Grail
no man could age or die …
…
Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzifal
It is hardly surprising that the idea of a home for the Grail should come to the fore in the vast body of literature and myth that grew up around the sacred vessel during the Middle Ages. The mysterious relic—which could be at one and the same time a chalice, a book, a stone, or a person—was seen as existing both on the earth and at a remove from it. In the poem The Later Titurel,6 which we shall be examining later in detail, it hovers above the world, untouched by human hands and supported by angels. In the Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes7 and the Parzifal of Wolfram von Eschenbach,8 it is kept in a secret chamber within a great castle. In Sone von Nausay,9 a neglected thirteenth-century text that we shall explore later, it is kept on a fortified island in the sea. Elsewhere it is kept in an earthly paradise ruled over by a priestly king named John.
The idea of creating buildings that acted as initiatic chambers, opening up a process that enabled those who visited them to experience vision and relegation, had already been around for a long while before the Middle Ages. The Romans—especially the emperor Augustus—created a building program that included the restoration of temples to the gods laid out in such a way as to make them stages on the initiatic journey of boy into manhood.10 So, too, the Christian churches and cathedrals—many of them under construction during the period when the Grail romances were being written—were intended to show those who entered them how to live life according to God’s wishes. And so, as we shall hope to show, the temples and castles of the Grail were designed to have the same effect, whether they were rendered in words or stone.
All of these ideas come together in the idea of a Grail Temple, a permanent home where the sacred vessel awaited those who went in search of it. Virtually every surviving text on this subject composed between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries includes a version of this, and though they vary in detail, all point towards a single idea: that the buildings described as the home of the Grail are as important as the relic itself. That they may also be based on more than one actual building is something we hope to demonstrate in this book.
To understand how the nature of the Grail Temple evolved, we need to look first at a poem by Chrétien de Troyes (1130–1191), left unfinished at the time of his death and added to by no less than four “continuators,” who extended the original 9,000 lines of the poem to 54,000.
Argument still rages as to sources on which Chrétien drew, with some insisting that he was the first writer to connect the enigmatic Grail with the Arthurian world, while others maintain that he drew upon much older sources, in all likelihood of Jewish origin, which can be traced back to within a hundred years of Christ’s ministry (see chapter 6). Whatever the truth, it is Chrétien’s undoubted genius that gave us the first recognizable Grail story, one which contains most of the elements later expanded in works such as those of his near contemporary Robert de Boron and the immense collection of texts gathered into the sequence known as the Lancelot-Grail.11
Chrétien’s poem Perceval, ou le Conte du Graal (the Story of the Grail) was composed somewhere between 1188 and 1191. It literally breaks off in the middle of a sentence, supposedly with the death of its author. The story it tells can be summarized as follows:
Perceval is brought up by his mother in the forest, in ignorance of the ways of the world. There he happily hunts game with roughly made throwing spears. Then one day he meets three knights in the wood. Thinking them angels because of the brilliance of their armour, he questions them concerning their origin. Learning from them of Arthur’s court and the institution of knighthood, he vows to go there in search of adventure, and ignoring his mother’s anguished request that he should remain with her, he rides off on an ancient mount to find his way in the world of chivalry. Before he departs his mother gives him last-minute advice, but without a context for Perceval to fully comprehend it: always to give help to any women in distress, but take no more from them by way of reward than a kiss—though if one should also wish to give him a ring, let him take that also.
Armed with this advice, the first person whom Perceval encounters is a beautiful woman in a scarlet pavilion, whose ring he takes and whom he kisses, but against her will. He then proceeds to Arthur’s court, where he enters in time to witness the arrival of a red knight who spills wine in the queen’s lap and carries off her golden cup. Still mindful of his mother’s instructions, Perceval pursues the knight, kills him, and returns the cup to the queen.
From the court he then sets out on further adventures, meeting with a nobleman who gives him training in chivalry and counsels him not to be talkative. Perceval arrives at the castle of the mysterious Fisher King, whom he finds presiding over a hall in which a noble man lies upon a couch. The king presents Perceval with a sword, which he accepts unthinkingly. A procession then passes through the hall, led by a squire carrying a spear from which blood drips upon the ground, followed by two squires, each carrying a ten-branched candlestick. After this comes a damsel carrying a “grail” which blazes with a light so bright that it puts out the light of the candles and of the stars. Following her is another maiden carrying a talleors (variously translated as a dish, a bowl, a casket, or a tabernacle).
Perceval watches all this but fails to ask its meaning. He retires for the night and on waking finds the castle deserted. Thinking the company have gone hunting, he no sooner crosses the moat than the drawbridge descends. Perceval then encounters a damsel cradling the body of a knight in her arms and lamenting bitterly. She is his cousin and tells him that the Fisher King has long since received a wound in the thighs, which has never healed, though it might well have done so had Perceval asked the meaning of “the procession of the grail.” She also informs him that the sword he was given at the castle will break if he is not careful, but that in such a case he can restore it by dipping it in a lake near which its maker, the smith Trebuchet, dwells.
Returning to Arthur’s court, Perceval is upbraided by a hideous damsel who appears from nowhere to mock him for so foolishly failing to ask the question that would have healed the king and made his country prosperous again. Determined to right this wrong and to learn more of the mysterious Grail, Perceval sets forth again and after many adventures meets with a band of pilgrims, who reproach him for bearing arms on Good Friday. Five years have passed since he left Arthur’s court, and in his eagerness to discover more about the Grail, he has forgotten God. Perceval confesses his sins to a forest hermit and learns from him that his mother died of grief after he left her. He also learns that the Fisher King is the son of an older king who served by a single host from the Grail that keeps him alive.
Perceval feels great remorse but has still not rediscovered the Castle of the Grail. Here the story changes course to deal with the adventures of Gawain, which have nothing to do with the Grail, and the poem ends before Chrétien has brought the story back to Perceval.
The First Temple
This eminently mysterious story, which almost certainly drew upon legends then circulating, perhaps orally, throughout Europe, seems at first glance somewhat removed from the later, overtly Christianised retellings. Chrétien gives the word Grail a lowercase g, and only towards the end of Perceval’s adventures (in a section believed by some commentators to have been added later) does he call it “holy.”
However, it is Chrétien’s description of the castle of the Fisher King and the inner sanctum where the Grail is housed that concern us here. There is a substantial amount of evidence to suggest that it was based upon a much older structure—nothing less than the First Temple of Solomon, built according to biblical and Jewish historical sources on the Temple Mount of Jerusalem to house the Ark of the Covenant. Destroyed in circa 587 BC by King Nebuchadnezzar, the temple was subsequently rebuilt circa 832 BC and destroyed again in circa 422 BC, though these dates vary according to rabbinical or secular estimates.
Buildings following instruction dating from even more ancient texts such as the Tanakh (also known as the Hebrew Bible and upon which the Old Testament of the Christian Bible is based) existed well into the period when Chrétien lived, and descriptions provided by travellers were accessible—if not generally then almost certainly in the rabbinical school founded in Chrétien’s native city of Troyes, to which he could well have had access.
According to the Tanakh, Solomon’s Temple was built following a Phoenician design, though since people who were neither architects nor engineers compiled the descriptions given, it is difficult to arrive at an exact idea of what the temple looked like. However, it is the symbolic references that are of greatest interest here, in particular as these relate to the inner sanctum, or Holy of Holies, where the Ark of the Covenant was kept. The more we look at the avowed meaning of the temple, the more we can see how well it fits with the idea of the Grail.
Also known as the “Inner House” (Heb. 9:3), it measured 20 cubits in length, breadth, and height. (Another measure that describes it as 30 cubits high is believed to be an indication that the floor was raised. A cubit could be anything between 18 and 21 inches, based on the length of an arm from elbow to fist.) The floor and wainscots were clad in cederwood, and both walls and floor were overlaid with gold weighing roughly 20 tons. Two statues of cherubim, made of olive wood and 10 cubits high and with a wingspan of 10 cubits, stood side by side, their wings touching the walls. Between these stood the Ark of the Covenant, containing the tablets of Moses, inscribed with the Ten Commandments issued by the Hebrew God to his prophet.
However, the most important aspect of the Holy of Holies was that it housed the Presence of God (also known as the Shekinah, or Wisdom). The Solomonic temple was thus a concretization of an idea that began with the revelation of Moses, who created the first tabernacle to contain the ark and later extended it into the image of the temple itself. From within his holy house, God spoke “from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim that are upon the Ark of the Covenant.”12 But the tabernacle was never intended as a permanent home, and it was left to Solomon to complete the fashioning of a final resting place for the ark in Jerusalem.
Solomon himself was given the plan of the temple by God, who commanded the creation of a sanctuary on the earth modeled upon the ark itself “after the pattern of the Tabernacle.”13 So to, the creator of the Grail Temple, Titurel, received his instructions from angels and was given a ground plan on which to build.14
According to oral tradition, as recorded in Jewish texts, some dating from as early as the second century BC, those who carried the Ark of the Covenant were miraculously carried as if in a vehicle that seemed to float and in which they “soared … like angels.”15 The ark itself, while it was still in transit, was seen as God’s throne, but when it came to rest, it became the heart of the temple. According to the Jewish Talmud,16 the temple became a symbolic representation of “the foundation stone” upon which the earth was created; while in Kabbalistic lore Jerusalem is seen as the centre of the world, the temple the center of Jerusalem, and the ark the centre of the temple.17
This is very much how the great temple of the Grail in the thirteenth-century romance The Later Titurel, which we shall be examining later, is described. The walls of that temple surround an inner shrine wherein is a miniature replica of the building made to house the Grail.
Just as the mysteries of the Grail combined aspects of mind, heart, and spirit, in Jerusalem, worshippers entering the outer court of the Temple were said to have reached Eden; beyond this, in the Holy of Holies, the dwelling place of God within the Ark—or the Chapel of the Grail—are the mysteries of the heavenly world, where the concerns of mind and body are left behind. It is as though, looking out of a window, the eye was lead beyond a glimpse of the immediate world, to gaze up into the heavens, and on looking there was suddenly able to see beyond, through all the dark gulfs of space to the Throne of God itself, there to be lost in light.
Of the several non-biblical accounts of the Solomonic temple which exist, that of the Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun is one of the most interesting, for in it he states that the vaults below the temple, which have been mistakenly believed to be the stables for Solomon’s horses, were built to form a vacuum between the earth and the building itself, so that malign influences might not enter it from below.18 As we shall see, there is another site known as the Stable of Solomon, which possesses a powerful connection to the Grail mysteries and may be the origin of the much-discussed story of the Templars’ search for the treasure below the Temple Mound.
By medieval times, when the original site of the Solomonic temple had become a Muslim shrine, the chamber mentioned by Ibn Khaldun had become known as a place of entrance and exit for the spirits of the dead, while of the original structure nothing now remained above ground. The Crusaders, however, continued to refer to the building as the Templum Dominum (Temple of God), and it became sacred to the three major religions of the time. For the Jews it was the site of Solomon’s Altar of the Holocausts, while to the Muslims it was the place from which the Prophet had begun his night journey to heaven. For a time it rivaled Mecca in importance and was attributed with the property of “hovering” above the earth. Thus the geographer Idrisi referred to it in 1154 as “the stone which rose and fell” (lapis lapsus exilians), which recalls Wolfram von Eschenbach’s description, in his thirteenth-century poem Parzival, of the Grail itself as lapis exilis, sometimes interpreted as “the stone which fell from heaven.” In the poem of The Later Titurel, which we shall examine later, the Grail itself hovers above the earth, held by angels.
It seems that here we have a paradigm for the entire history of the Grail and of the temple built to house it. According to Wolfram, the Grail is a stone, an emerald, which fell from the crown of Lucifer and entered the sphere of the earth; thus it can also be said to have “fallen.” Another account, which we shall explore shortly, says that Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve, brought the Grail into the world from Paradise. In the Middle Ages, according to the writings of Robert de Boron and others it has become the vessel used by Christ to perform the first Eucharist. Thus it is hallowed and the world, like the lost Eden, is redeemed, so that it too “rises,” while the stones used in the building of the temple and the design for its construction are also said to “fall from heaven” in The Later Titurel.
The Hebrew Grail
Most of the information regarding the Solomonic temple was available to Chrétien in either Hebrew or Christian documents of the time. There is a very strong possibility, advanced by several scholars,19 that Chrétien himself may have been a converso, a convert from Judaism to Christianity. His description of the Grail chapel and the hall where Perceval witnesses the procession of the Grail can be shown to derive from the description of the Holy of Holies.20 Professor Urban Tigner Holmes summarized these parallels in his 1947 paper “A New Interpretation of Chrétien’s Conte del Graal”21 commenting on Chrétien’s description:
Then he [Perceval] saw before him in the valley
The top of a tower which appeared.
Had you gone as far as Beirut
No finer could you have found.
Square it was, of stone also,
With smaller towers on either side.
The hall was before the tower
And the loges before the hall …22
A few lines further on, we find:
The valet remained in the logia
Until he escorted him to the Lord,
Which two more pages soon advised
And with them he was led
Into the hall, which was square
As long as it was wide.
In the centre of the hall, lying in a bed,
A fine nobleman he saw
Who had grizzled hair…
Before him was a built-up fire
Of seasoned logs, fiercely burning
Within a hearth of four pillars.
Space enough there as for 400 men
To sit about that fire—
For each a comfortable place.
The pillars were strong enough
To support a chimney made of bronze.23
This is followed by the famous Grail procession, the bleeding lance, some golden candlesticks bearing ten candles each, and finally a girl carrying “a grail.” The meal that follows is laid on a table of ivory.
Professor Holmes sums this up succinctly:
The loges through which Perceval enters before he finds himself in the hall are porticoes before the front of the Temple: “porticum vero ante frontem” (Chronicles 3.4). Other correspondences are: the copper or brass pillars (3 Kings 7.15–16); the square-shaped hall (2 Paralip. 3.8)24; Chrétien’s table of ivory set upon trestles of ebony which corresponds to the shewbread table with trestles of setim wood (Exodus 25.28). Concerning the Temple one Bible text says: “And he made ten candlesticks of gold according to their form and set them in the Temple, five on the right hand and five on the left” (02 Paralip. 4.7). These candelabra (aurea decem) surely did not mean the ten-branched candelabra in the Temple of Solomon, but a medieval reader might be pardoned for interpreting in that way. 25
It is more than likely that Chrétien knew of the continuing traditions that associated Joseph of Arimathea with relics of the Passion of Jesus and understood by the word grail (in its many forms as greal, graal, gradalis) something specific and far from the somewhat “vague” assumptions usually attributed to him.26 He would also have encountered travellers’ descriptions of Jerusalem and of the remains of the Solomonic temple and had access to several popular and widely disseminated guidebooks. The City of Jerusalem, written circa 1187 by the great Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela, drew upon many of these and provided details that easily could have added to Chrétien’s image of the temple.
There he could have read:
The other building is called the Temple of Solomon; it is the palace built by Solomon, King of Israel … a very substantial structure, composed of large stones, and the like of which is not to be seen anywhere in the world.27
Benjamin also makes an intriguing reference to the Hebrew prophet Daniel, which may well have given Chrétien further material for his work (see chapter 6).
In Perceval, of course, there is no Ark of the Covenant, but this is replaced by a relic every bit as sacred to the medieval Christian world as the Ark was to the Jews: the Holy Grail. In connecting the two, Chrétien seems to have understood the importance not only of the object itself but also of the building in which it was kept.
The Tabut
The links with Solomon and his temple to the greater glory of God do not end here. Two important facts remain to be considered. The first concerns the Ark of the Covenant, which may be seen as the Grail of its age. A well-founded tradition of the Ethiopian Church maintains that the Ark was removed from Jerusalem before the destruction of the temple by Menelik, a child of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The supposed original Ark is still kept in the cathedral at Aksum in modern-day Ethiopia and has remained a central part of sacred practice within the Ethiopian Church. Known as the Tabut (from the Arabic tabut ‘al ‘ahdi, Ark of the Covenant), it is carried in procession at the festival of Epiphany to the accompaniment of singing, dancing, and feasting, which recalls the time when “David and all the house of Israel brought up the Ark of the Lord with shouting and with the sound of the trumpet.”28
Replicas of the Tabut are kept in every church in Ethiopia, and where these are large enough to possess a Holy of Holies, this representation of the Ark is kept within, as it was in the Temple of Solomon at Jerusalem. Every priest must posses one of these copies in order to celebrate the mysteries.
It is possible that we have here one of the contributing factors of the Grail story. It has been pointed out 29 that stories concerning a quest for a sacred object, undertaken by the fatherless son of a queen (i.e., Menelik), may well have reached the West, where they became the basis for another story of a fatherless child (Perceval) who goes upon such a quest. Add to this the nature of the Ark itself, along with the fact that apart from the Kebra Nagast,30 in which this story is told in full, the only other known source is Arabic, which suggests that the frequently noted oriental influences in the twelfth-century poem of Parzifal by Wolfram von Eschenbach may be traced to this legend.
Wolfram speaks of the Grail being brought to earth by a troop of angels where “a Christian progeny bred to a pure life had the duty of keeping it.”31 Here we enter the world of Robert de Boron’s mysterious Grail family (see chapter 6), while the Kebra Nagast tells how Menelik brings the Ark out of Israel to reside in a specially protected temenos in Ethiopia.
We have heard how Lancelot fared when he entered the chapel of the Grail to help the “man dressed like a priest” who was serving at the Mass. Even though his intention is good, he is not permitted to touch or look upon the mystery. So, too, in the story of the Ark’s journey from Gebaa, described in the biblical book of Kings, when it had reached the threshing floor of Nachon, the oxen pulling the cart on which the Ark rode began to kick and struggle and “tilted the Ark to one side; whereupon Oza put out his hand and caught hold of it. Rash deed of his, that provoked the divine anger; the Lord smote him, and he died there beside the Ark.” 32
It is clear from this that those who care for a sacred relic must maintain a respectful distance from it—though in Robert de Boron’s poem of Joseph, in which he tells the story of Joseph of Arimathea and his acquiring of the Grail from the hands of Jesus himself, we also find the story of Sarracynte, wife of Evelake of Sarras, whose mother had for a time shared the guardianship of the Grail in the shape of a host and kept it in a box that is specifically described as “an ark.” 33 She at least was allowed to touch it without harm, though such instances are rare in the mythos. Generally the mystery is too great to be looked upon or touched by one who is unprepared. A visit to the temple of the Grail must come first and its tests overcome before the revelation of the mystery can take place.
A New Temple
While Chrétien may well have considered the original Solomonic temple as a serious model for the hall of the Grail castle, he could also have visited a building inspired or copied from the actual Holy of Holies. This remarkable edifice was created at the command of a knight named Arnoul the Elder in circa 1117 and is described by Lambert d’Ardres in his Historia Comitum Ghisnensium, written between 1194–98.34 Although this work focused primarily on the lives and deeds of Lambert’s master, Count Baudouin II, Count d’Ardres, and his eldest son, Arnoul de Guines, it also references the previous Arnoul (the Elder) who commanded the building of a castle at Ardres (now part of the Pas-de-Calais Department of Northern France), which included
steps and winding stairs from one area to another, from the house to the kitchen, from one room to another, then from the house itself to the “logium,” which took its name appropriately and for the following reason: for they used to sit there in pleasure to talk, it was derived from logos; then from the logium to the oratory or chapel made in a similar way to the tabernacle of Solomon in its design of canopy and pictures.35
This is interesting for a number of reasons. The Greek word logion actually means “saying” or “word” or even “oracle.”36 Lambert is correct in noting that it derives from logos, but the word carried a weightier meaning: the Word of God, as it appears in the opening of St. John’s Gospel.37 The word logion is also used for the breastplate traditionally worn by the high priest of the Solomonic temple, suggesting that Arnoul the Elder was drawing upon earlier Hebrew traditions, as well as acknowledging the Christian Gospels.38 As we shall see later, the appearance of the name Arnoul, in this context, is of great significance (see chapter 2 and chapter 3).
Later, somewhere around 1169, Arnoul’s ancestor, Baudouin II, created a curious circular tower at Guines (also within the Pas-de-Calais area) that included
rooms, dwellings and lodgings and curved paths, such as that of a labyrinth … he built a chapel of Solomonian glory with wondrous flooring of stones and timber … [not far from] the gates of the building. 39
It became common practice among the Crusader knights to chip off fragments of the rock upon which the Temple of Solomon had once stood. These they would take home as talismans of their visit to the Holy Land. Arnoul the Elder is thus said to have brought back one such piece to his home at Ardres in 1177, along with a fragment of the Spear of Antioch and some of the Manna of Heaven (though how he obtained the latter is not related). According to Lambert, Arnoul then proceeded to have built a castle to house these holy relics, a castle of curious design indeed. It was here that Arnoul laid to rest the objects he had brought with him, and it is interesting to note that these objects coincide with the Hallows of the Grail. The spear had long been identified with that which had pierced the side of Christ, and as such had become one of the features of the Grail myth. Manna, the holy food of heaven, can be seen as the substance that the Grail provides, either physically or in spiritual form. The stone from Jerusalem was part of the “stone which rose and fell” and thus recalled the Grail stone described by Wolfram. So here we have, assembled in a temple or castle constructed to resemble the Solomonic temple, all the elements of the Grail Hallows originating from the Holy Land.
Troyes, home to Chrétien and a centre of Jewish learning, was close enough to Ardres for the poet to have visited there, and Chrétien’s patron, Philip d’Alcase, who gave him the métier and sens of his work, was a close friend of Baudouin’s. Even if Chrétien had never set foot in the curiously wrought building, he would have heard of it and almost certainly had it described by his patron. Both Philip and Baudouin would have visited the city of Jerusalem and seen the site of the original temple during the Crusades. Certainly Philip d’Alsace was in the Holy Land from 1177–8 and could very easily have brought back a description (either in writing or from personal observance), which he included in his commission of a poem from Chrétien. Philip’s own father, Thierry, had himself brought back a phial of the Holy Blood, which he gifted to the church of the Holy Sepulcher in Bruges.
The Grail Chapel of Karlstein
The castle of Guines is not the only such site to be based on the idea of the Grail and the Temple of Solomon. Karlstein, which lies twelve miles outside Prague in the Czech Republic on a wooded hill near the Beroun River,40 was built between 1348 and 1365, soon after the first flowering of Grail literature, by the German king and Bohemian emperor Charles IV. A natural mystic, Charles seems to have possessed a profound understanding of the Grail. Karlstein was consciously built to reflect this, as the following description demonstrates:
The adornment of the walls in the various chapels to be found in the castle, with their quantities of semi-precious stones and gold, the way in which the light is disused through these semi precious stones which—set in gilded lead—take the place of window glass, lead one to conclude that Charles IV knew about the [esoteric] powers of precious stones and gold. The small chapel of St. Catherine, for example, is a veritable gem; the entire walls, up to the ceiling, are inlaid with semi-precious stones such as amethyst, jasper, cornelian and agate, while the cross vaulting above has a blue background, adorned with roses … According to tradition it was here that Charles IV withdrew every year from Good Friday to Easter Sunday in order to meditate in undisturbed privacy …41
As we shall see, there are aspects of this which are very close indeed to a vastly extended description of the Grail Temple found in The Later Titurel, which we shall explore fully in chapter 4. Charles’s choice of the Easter period to withdraw to his private Grail chapel is striking. This period, of course, is not only associated with the Passion of Christ, but also with the Grail mysteries, which were said to take place at the same time. This is reflected in the design of the castle, and throughout the building are murals that follow the narrative of the Grail.
These images guide the seeker towards the great tower of the castle that is approached across a narrow bridge, echoing the Sword Bridge of the Grail story told by Chrétien. Within the tower is the Chapel of the Holy Cross, decorated in semi-precious stones, beneath a roof representing the sun, moon, and stars, interspersed with the motif of roses. The windows are formed of pure topaz, amethyst, and almandine, through which the light enters in bands of glorious colour.
The overall symbolism of the building is clear: it shows the path of the initiate learning, forgetting, relearning, following the path of spiritual alchemy until he is able to cross the perilous bridge and enter the chamber of the mysteries. The parallels need hardly be spelled out. This is indeed a representation of the chapel of the Grail.
The Christian Grail
If we are correct in describing Chrétien’s work as of Jewish origin, it was left to another writer, his near-contemporary Robert de Boron, to connect the imagery of the temple and the mysterious Grail with the mystery of the Eucharist and the story of the Last Supper. Little is known about Robert’s life, though internal evidence within his work places him in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. He was the author of at least two surviving poems, all set within the world of the Arthurian legends. His Merlin exists only in fragments and a later prose rendition, but his greatest achievement is the Joseph d’Arimathie, which was probably written either at roughly the same time as Chrétien’s Conte du Graal or shortly after. It is also possible that a third work, now known as the Didot Perceval after its nineteenth-century discoverer, may be a prose version of a now-lost original in which Robert told the story of Perceval from his own point of view.
Robert wrote his first poem for a lord named Gautier de Montbéliard, who is possibly indefinable with a lord of Montfaucon who left for the Holy Land in 1202 and died there in 1212. If this is a correct identification,42 stories brought back by Gautier could be seen as a source for Robert’s later work and to have enabled him access to accounts of an actual building located in the East (see chapter 7). Robert himself must have been in service to Gautier over a lengthy period of time, as he took the name “de Boron” from a village near his patron’s home. In Joseph he calls himself meister (clerk); later he uses the title messire (knight), so that it is sometimes assumed that he was both a poet and a knight.
Whether he was following Chrétien or had an independent source remains uncertain, though his reference to his fellow author tells us that Robert certainly knew Chrétien’s work. Pierre le Gentil, who made the connection between Robert and the Lord of Montfaucon, suggests that his mention of Avalon means that Robert wrote his Joseph d’Arimathie after 1191, when the monks at Glastonbury claimed to have discovered the coffins of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, thus linking the site with the Arthurian and Grail legends. If this is correct, it places Robert as a follower of Chrétien rather than a contemporary.
In any case, Robert changed the direction of the Grail story forever. By making Perceval the great-nephew of Joseph of Arimathea, he ensured that we could never look at the youthful hero with the same eyes again: during the course of his adventures, he changes from a hopeless young knight into a fully fledged Grail guardian.
Through his writing, Robert joined the story of the previously Hebrew or pagan vessel to the central myth of Christianity. In doing so, he followed, either deliberately or by accident, the lineage of temple mysteries that brought the presence of the Divine into direct contact with humanity. Where before the temple itself had been the means by which humankind spoke with its creator, now the sacred vessel (represented upon every altar in Christendom) became the way that offered access to God.
The Earthly Paradise
All of the foregoing leads to the idea of an earthly paradise, a perfect state of being in a realm as close to the idea of heaven as it is possible to get, and a perfect home for the Grail. The myth has been around for a long time.43 Some of the oldest written references we have refer to gardens of delight, walled enclosures filled with exotic creatures and plants … an overflowing of creation and fullness … a mirror of heaven. And of course we have, in the West, the idea of Eden, the garden where humankind first awoke and where they dwelled in a place of perfect harmony and delight until one of them sought to access greater wisdom. In the process of becoming even more human, they transgressed against the laws ascribed by their god and were expelled. The very name Eden became synonymous with the idea of loss and exile, and—along with the equally evocative myth of the fall—it became a central tenet of belief from the earliest days within Judaism and Christianity.
From this ancient myth grew the idea of a place within the realm of earth that could be reached by seekers after perfection. Amongst the earliest maps in existence, we find references to this, with the earthly paradise marked with confidence—if towards the edges of the map—as a real place. Heroes of all kinds, from the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh and the Greek Alexander the Great to the knights of Arthur, went in search of paradise. Most did not find it, and those who got as far as its walls were often turned away. Only the best of the best, the perfected ones whose belief was unshakable and whose faith absolute, could enter. This became, not surprisingly, part of the Grail myth.
Both Wolfram and Albrecht refer to the area around the temple as Salvaterre (Sacred Earth), while the Mountain of Muntsalvasche (Mountain of Salvation) becomes a beacon of hope and sacredness. A recent commentator has wisely noted that the Grail country is the expression of a perfect realm, in the centre of which is the temple, and in the centre of this the Grail itself.44 Descriptions of the area surrounding the castles and temples where the Grail resided—sometimes within walls, sometimes outside them—were clearly attempts to evoke a paradisal state. And what more appropriate place to find the most famous relic of all, the Holy Grail? As we shall see in the following chapters, much of the imagery, especially that relating to the semi-mythical figure of Prester John, who becomes a guardian of the Grail in The Later Titurel, derives entirely from the idea of a perfect place in which everything was as it should be, where peace reigned, love abounded, and God smiled on his creation.
But just as the Grail was hard to find and could only be reached after a long search, often accompanied by great hardship and loss, so too the way to the earthly paradise was fraught with danger and rejection. Thus in what is usually considered the third continuation to Chrétien’s Conte del Graal, ascribed to Gerbert de Montreuil (mid-thirteenth century), we find Perceval, shortly after his visit to the Grail castle, reaching the gates of paradise. Following the road away from the Fisher King’s castle, Perceval finds himself outside a wall that is coloured one half red and the other white. Puzzled by this, he follows the wall until he reaches a gate, upon which he hammers. The gate remains firmly shut, but within he can hear sounds of merriment and music so sweet that he forgets every trouble he had ever had “since the moment he was born.” Desperate for an answer, Perceval draws his sword (which had been recently given to him by the Fisher King himself) and hammers on the door with its pommel. At once thunder rolls and lightning flashes and the sword breaks in two. Perceval is horrified to see this, but as he stands frozen with distress, the gate opens a crack and a white-haired man looks out at him:
“What do you want, young man, yelling and bawling, battering at our gate?…Now your blade needs mending—it’s broken in half, I see! You’ve added seven whole years and a half to the toil you’ll endure before you see the bleeding lance! And you can be sure of this: you’ll not learn the secrets of the grail until you’ve done enough to earn forgiveness for all your sins and misdeeds …”
“Ah, good sir,” said Perceval. “Open your wicket gate wide! I can see a shining light inside—a radiant light; it looks a glorious place to be: everyone’s laughing with joy!”
There was no anger now in the worthy man’s reply, as he said: “You’ll see no more till you return, young sir. But if you can find your way back here you may well witness all our joy, and know for sure the perfect truth about the grail and why the lance bleeds—those secrets that have caused you so much toil.” 45
Here Perceval, whose search for the Grail is to continue for a great deal longer, glimpses what is clearly the entrance to the earthly paradise. Though not allowed in, he is given a promise that if he can find his own way back, he may be permitted more than a glimpse of the mysteries within. As we shall see again and again throughout this book, the home of the Grail, if not actually within the garden of paradise, is close at hand.
Dwelling Places of God
The symbolism of the temple within the earthly paradisal realm takes us back thousands of years before Chrétien and Robert composed their enigmatic works, to a time when human beings first began to create buildings that were seen as both a dwelling place for their gods and a means of inviting deity into a space between worlds. Thus, when the high priest of the Temple of Solomon entered the Holy of Holies, he was seen to be communicating directly with God—just as, centuries later, those who stood before the Grail in a building that recalled the Solomonic temple were able to look into the vessel itself and perceive there “the secrets of the saviour.” 46
The earliest traditions relating to temple building depict them as liminal spaces, where the creators, invited to enter their house, could choose to communicate with their creation (humanity). The earth upon which the temple stood was itself sacred, either through its being placed at that spot or by a hallowing touch of the Divine that designated the building as a marker for those in search of the sacred. Thus it became a temenos, a place set apart, where an invisible border showed that here was sacred space, a reflection of heaven on earth. A key statement in the Lancelot-Grail relates that
those who possessed the Grail thereafter … were by this very fact able to establish a Spiritual center destined to replace the lost Paradise, and to serve as an image of it. 47
It is this image that is represented by the temple of the Grail, as described in Chrétien, the work of Albrecht in The Later Titurel, Sone de Nansay, and the Cistercian compilers of the Lancelot-Grail. All of these writers described a place where God and his creation could meet and converse as they once had in paradise.
It is as though the temple builders, by inviting God to descend into the temenos, were asking not only to be guided along the path towards unity and perfection, but also were anticipating that God would actually evolve through contact with them. Since God is spirit and humanity is matter, and since the two states of being cannot evolve separately, they are linked like two interlocking circles, which are only complete when superimposed precisely one upon the other—at which moment they become one. All the temples we will examine here were intended as physical glyphs to be read by mankind and their gods, mirrors reflecting images of the temporal and Divine upon each other.
To quote the third-century Greek philosopher Plotinus:
… those ancient sages who sought to secure the presence of divine beings by the erection of shrines … showed insight into the nature of the All [perceiving that] though the Soul is everywhere, its presence will be secured all the more readily when an appropriate receptacle is elaborated, serving like a mirror to catch an image of it.48
In its most complete and complex form, this cosmic mirror for the reflection of God becomes also an initiator into the divine mystery of creation, the most perfect object of the quest.
The imagery of the Grail Temple is notably consistent. It is usually situated at the top of a mountain, which is in turn surrounded either by impenetrable forest or deep water. Access, if any, is by way of a perilously narrow, sharply edged bridge, which became known as the Sword Bridge. To make entrance even harder, the whole temple, or the castle that contained it, would often revolve, making it almost impossible to gain entry by normal means. Once within, more perils awaited, and for those few who succeeded in reaching the center, where lay the Chapel of the Grail, the experience could, as in Lancelot’s case, be both chastening and parlous. Nor was the castle without its human guardians; at an early stage in the mythos, a family of kings, supported by a specially chosen body of knights, appeared to serve and protect the sacred vessel.
The most completely developed description of the medieval Grail Temple is to be found in the two thirteenth-century romances we shall be exploring in this book, especially in the Middle High German poem Der Jüngerer Titurel (“The Later Titurel”)49 attributed to Albrecht von Scharffenberg. Here the lineage of the Grail Kings, first mentioned by Robert de Boron, is traced back to Solomon, and the temple of the Grail founded upon structures dating from more ancient times.
Let us look, now, at the first of these works.
6. Wolf, Albrecht von Scharfenberg Jüngerer Titurel.
7. De Troyes, Perceval: The Story of the Grail.
8. Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival.
9. Goldschmidt, Sone von Nausay.
10. See Vukovic, “Initiation in the Mysteries of Augustus: The Liberalia and Forum Augustum.”
11. The Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation, edited by Norris Lacy. [Previously known as the Vulgate cycle.]
12. Exodus 25:22. See plate 1 for a ground plan of Solomon’s Temple showing the position of the Holy of Holies.
13. Exodus 25:8–9.
15. Schayer, “The Meaning of the Temple,” 360.
16. Yoma 54b in: Polarno, The Talmud.
17. Schayer, “The Meaning of the Temple.”
18. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah.
19. See in particular Gaster, Studies & Texts, vol. II, 898, 895; Weinraub, Chrétien’s Jewish Grail; Holmes and Klenke, Chrétien, Troyes and the Grail; Holmes, Chrétien de Troyes; Adolf, Visio Pacis, Holy City and Grail.
20. See Elkington, The Quest for the Face of God (forthcoming) for a detailed analysis of this aspect. Also Adolf, Visio Pacis, Holy City and Grail.
21. Holmes, “A New Interpretation of Chrétien’s Conte del Graal.”
22. De Troyes, Conte du Graal (Perceval), 3075–3080. Trans. Caitlín Matthews.
23. De Troyes, Conte du Graal (Perceval), 3069–3077, 3083–3090. Trans. Caitlín Matthews.
24. Paralip. = Paralipomenon, an alternate name for the two books of Chronicles, Kings and Ezra—the history-oriented books of the Old Testament.
25. Holmes, “A New Interpretation of Chrétien’s Conte del Graal.”
26. See particularly Neitze, Perceval and the Holy Grail, and Bruce, The Evolution of Arthurian Romance.
27. Signer, Adler, and Asher, The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela.
28. 2 Samuel 6:15.
29. Adolf, “Oriental Sources for Grail Romances,” 306–23.
30. Budge, The Kebra Negast.
31. Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, 232.
32. 2 Kings 6–8.
33. De Boron, Joseph d’Arimathea.
34. Loomis, Arthurian Legends in Medieval Art; Holmes, “The Arthurian Tradition in Lambert d’Ardres”; Holmes and Klenke, Chrétien, Troyes and the Grail.
35. Holmes, “The Arthurian Tradition in Lambert d’Ardres,” Latin translation by Kresimir Vukovic.
36. Thayer’s Greek Lexicon, http://biblehub.com/greek/3051.htm.
37. John 1: 1–2.
38. We are grateful to Dr. Kresimir Vukovic for drawing our attention to this. See also http://biblehub.com/interlinear/apostolic/exodus/28.htm.
39. Ibid., translation by Dr. Kresimir Vukovic.
40. Matthews, The Grail: Quest for Eternal Life.
41. Allen, A Christian Rosecreutz Anthology.
42. le Gentil, “The Work of Robert de Boron and the Didot Perceval.”
43. The word itself entered the English language from the French paradis, which in turn received it from a long line of languages—Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Persian, etc.—most of which meant a walled garden or a sacred enclosure.
44. Wilson, “The Grail Utopia in Southern Germany.”
45. Bryant, The Complete Story of the Grail, 340.
46. Matarasso, The Quest of the Holy Grail.
47. The Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation, our italics.
48. Plotinus, The Enneads, as quoted in Crichlow, Soul as Sphere and Androgine, 23.
49. See footnote 101 on page 107.