4

The Historical Context of the Mystery of the Grail

When we isolate the texts that make up the Grail cycle, we find that they repeat a few essential themes, which are expressed through the symbolism of knightly figures and deeds. What we are dealing with, then, are essentially the themes of a mysterious center; of a quest and a spiritual test; of a regal succession or restoration, which sometimes assumes the character of a healing or avenging action. Percival, Gawain, Galahad, Ogier, Lancelot, and Peredur are essentially various names portraying the same human type; likewise, King Arthur, Joseph of Arimathea, Prester John, and the Fisher King are equivalent figures and variations on another theme. Also equivalent are images of various mysterious castles, islands, kingdoms, and inaccessible and adventurous lands, which in the narratives are described in a series that, on the one hand, creates a strange, surrealistic atmosphere but, on the other, often ends up becoming monotonous.

I have already mentioned that all this has or is susceptible of having the character of a “mystery” in the initiatory sense of the word. But in the specific form in which all this is expressed in the Grail cycle, we must recognize the point at which a suprahistorical reality imposed itself on history, closely associating the symbols of that mystery to the confused yet lively sensation that its effective realization required to solve the spiritual and temporal crisis of an entire epoch, namely, the medieval ecumenical-imperial age.

The Grail cycle originated from this very specific situation. The evocation of primordial and suprahistorical motifs intersected the ascent of a historical tradition at a point of equilibrium, around which a subject of varied nature and origin precipitated and was crystallized, unified by its susceptibility to the expression of a common motif. Thus we must start from the idea of a fundamental, inner unity of the various texts, and of the various figures, symbols, and adventures proper to them, and proceed to discover the latent capability of a text to integrate and continue another, until a thorough exposition of some fundamental themes is achieved. To bring back such motifs to their universal, intertraditional meaning and to an overall metaphysics of history would be a repetition of what I have tried to do in another work of mine;¹ here I must limit myself to articulating the reference points that are most crucial to our comprehension of the simultaneously historical and suprahistorical meaning of the mystery of the Grail.