The Secret of the Grail
In or around the year 1190, a man named Chrétien de Troyes dipped a quill pen in an inkwell and began to write:
He who sows sparingly, reaps sparingly, but he who wishes to reap plentifully casts his seed on ground that will bear him fruit a hundredfold.81
It was an auspicious line—more auspicious, in fact, than the author had any way of knowing. This is the opening sentence of Le Conte del Graal, the first known story of the quest for the Holy Grail, and the seed Chrétien sowed with those words would bear fruit a hundredfold and more over the decades and centuries to come.
Le Conte del Graal was Chrétien’s last work, and he died before completing it. His earlier work includes four other tales—Erec et Enide, Cligés, Lancelot, and Yvain—which invented Arthurian romance as we know it. Geoffrey of Monmouth had launched Arthur and his knights into lasting fame in 1136 with his History of the Kings of Britain, and Breton and Welsh storytellers had retold and reshaped their own traditional tales of Arthur for newly appreciative audiences across Europe thereafter. It was Chrétien, though, who set the old stories in a world compounded partly of contemporary chivalry and partly of timeless wonder and created the atmosphere that defined the Arthurian legends ever after.
Chrétien’s story of the Grail is cut from the same cloth as his other Arthurian tales.82 It tells of a young man of noble birth, Perceval, who has been raised in the forest by his widowed mother, isolated from the world of war and chivalry. A chance encounter with knights on a forest road sends him on his way from home, and the rest of the tale recounts his education in the ways of knighthood, love, and the world. In the course of his travels, he finds his way to a mysterious castle where lives the wounded Fisher King, and he is received hospitably. Just before dinner is served, a strange ceremony takes place.
First, a page enters the room carrying a spear that bleeds drops of red blood from its point. After him come two more pages with candlesticks, and following them, a maiden bearing the Grail in her hands. The Grail is made of pure gold and set with many precious stones and shines so radiantly that the candles in the candlesticks lose their brightness. After her comes another maiden carrying a silver platter. All these file past and go into another room. Perceval wonders about the ceremony, but he has been taught by another character earlier in the story not to ask too many questions, and so he says nothing.
The meal is served, the Fisher King departs, and Perceval is taken to a chamber and sleeps through the night. The next morning the castle is deserted, and when he rides out over the drawbridge, it suddenly closes behind him, shutting him out. Later the same day, he learns from a weeping maiden in the forest that if he had asked about the meaning of the ceremony, the Fisher King would have been healed. Since he remained silent, however, much suffering will befall Perceval and many others. Hearing this, Perceval vows to find his way back to the castle of the Fisher King. More adventures follow; Gawain, Arthur’s nephew and one of his most valiant knights, ends up on a quest for the spear Perceval saw in the Fisher King’s castle; as he rides in search of it, he encounters still more adventures, and then …
The story ends in the middle of a sentence. We never learn how Perceval found his way back to the Fisher King’s castle and the Grail.
It was common enough at that time for a good rousing story to be picked up and retold by other writers, but what happened to the story of the Grail was very nearly unprecedented.83 Over the next four decades, four different authors wrote lengthy continuations to Chrétien’s story, and two more wrote prologues. By 1210, Robert de Boron had penned a trilogy—Joseph of Arimathea, Merlin, and The History of the Grail—that claimed to give the real story behind Chrétien’s romance, and another anonymous author had produced a completely different retelling, The High Book of the Grail, in which the protagonist’s name was changed to Perlesvaus and the whole affair was transported to the countryside around the great shrine of Glastonbury in Britain. In the following decades, other Grail romances appeared: Wolfram von Eschenbach’s great German version, Parzival, by 1220; the sprawling Vulgate Cycle in French, and Heinrich von dem Türlin’s The Crown by 1240; the awkwardly labeled Post-Vulgate Cycle by 1250.
These further developments of the story enrich Chrétien’s original tale considerably. Perceval is joined in his quest, or replaced entirely, by other knights: Bors, Gawain, Lancelot, and Galahad take part in the search for the Grail and achieve or fail to achieve the quest in their own distinctive ways. New adventures and new marvels are added to the original; the Grail changes shape and takes on new meanings freighted with Christian theology; the tale stretches back to the life of Christ, the court of King Solomon, or the Garden of Eden. In the Vulgate Cycle, the longest of the Grail legends, the parade of wonders reaches its peak; the solitary journeys of the questing knights culminate in a sea voyage by Bors, Percival, and Galahad aboard the Ship of Solomon, which was launched onto the seas by King Solomon himself and bears the knights to the mysterious city of Sarras, where the Grail knights finally meet their strange and splendid destinies.
Then, suddenly, the torrent of Grail romances stopped. After 1250, the next significant Grail narratives to be written were Ulrich Fütrer’s Lanzelet and Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, both of which appeared in the late fifteenth century. No one knows why.
The Secrets of the Grail
We can start finding our own way through the wilderness that surrounds the Grail castle with an examination of the word itself. It was originally spelled gradal and was a medieval French word for an expensive serving dish, the sort of thing on which a large fish might be served at a banquet.84 It was never a common word, but it occurs now and then in surviving medieval documents from centuries before Chrétien’s time. Once he used it in Le Conte del Graal, it quickly dropped out of use in most other contexts, though variants of it are still used in some regional dialects of French for serving dishes and the like.85
Among the many mysteries surrounding the Grail legend is the speed with which this straightforward meaning was shaken off by the writers of Grail romances and replaced by others. To Robert de Boron, the Grail was still a serving dish, but it was the very dish from which Jesus and the apostles ate at the Last Supper and in which Joseph of Arimathea collected the blood that flowed from Jesus’s wounds when his body was cleaned for burial. The High Book of the Grail describes it instead as a chalice of the sort used for the celebration of the Mass but says mysteriously that this is only the last of five forms, the other four of which may not be named. The Vulgate Cycle, which drew its raw material from several earlier sources, wavers between dish and cup in its description.
The most original description in the first great wave of Grail romances was Wolfram von Eschenbach’s. In Parzival the Grail is a magical stone, “the perfection of paradise … which surpasses all earthly perfection.”86 It miraculously feeds the company of Grail knights at the castle of Muntsalväsche, heals wounds, gives the legendary phoenix its power of rejuvenating itself through fire, and displays in mysterious writing the names of those who are summoned to its service. It also has a secret name, lapsit exillis.
While an amazing range of interpretations have been offered for it, this phrase is relatively straightforward Latin. Lapsit is the normal poetic contraction of lapsavit, “he, she, or it fell,” very slightly misspelled. (The correct spelling would be lapsat;87 minor garblings of this kind are so common in medieval manuscripts that it’s rare to find a text without them.) The second half of the phrase, exillis, is actually two words, ex illis, “from among them.” As every first-year Latin student learns, ille and its declensions imply “famous, well-known,” and the like;88 “it (or he, or she) fell from among them” catches something of the flavor of the phrase.
Wolfram’s curious name for the Grail is far from the only secret associated with the legend. From Chrétien’s version onward, in fact, the Grail is surrounded by mysteries.89 In the Conte du Graal itself, Perceval is counseled by a holy hermit, who teaches him a prayer full of secret names of Christ that should never be uttered aloud except in the greatest peril. In the continuations of Chrétien’s Conte, there are constant references to the secrets of the Grail, “which no man can hear without shivering and trembling, changing color and going pale with fear.”90 Robert de Boron refers to the secrets of the Grail repeatedly. Here is a typical passage from Joseph of Arimathea:
Then Jesus spoke some other words to Joseph which I dare not tell you—nor could I, even if I wanted to, if I did not have the high book in which they were written: and that is the creed of the great mystery of the Grail.91
Similar passages appear in the Vulgate Cycle and elsewhere among the legends. In all the original Grail romances, in fact, the Grail is said to embody a tremendous and terrifying secret, which can be communicated to the questing knight only under very specific conditions.
The role of secret knowledge in the original Grail romances and the extent to which many of those romances amount to the story of how a given knight of Arthur’s court was prepared for contact with the Grail suggests that one of the things that may be tangled up in these strange and haunting stories is some form of initiatory ceremony. This was the theory proposed in the early twentieth century by Jessie Weston, who was among the most thoughtful and interesting of all modern students of Grail lore. Weston argued that behind the Grail romances as we have them is a garbled account of a ritual of initiation related to the initiations of the ancient Mysteries and to certain traditions in that complex and generally misunderstood movement called Gnosticism.92
Perceval’s first visit to the Fisher King’s castle, Weston proposed, represents a failed initiation in which his unwillingness to ask a question at the right time marked his unfitness to proceed. (Masonic rituals to this day likewise require the candidate to answer certain questions correctly at certain points of the ceremony, on pain of being removed from the lodge and barred from membership; the details are different but the principle is much the same.) On his second visit to the castle, Perceval makes good his error and successfully passes through the initiation process. It’s an intriguing hypothesis and one that has much to offer to this book’s project, as a later chapter will show.
That said, there was more involved in the successful completion of the Grail quest than the personal initiation of the questing knight, and this further dimension was also central to Weston’s thesis. If the question was not asked, according to most of the original Grail stories, and the Fisher King not healed, a terrible misfortune would come upon the land. Chrétien is vague about what that misfortune might be, but his successors are not. The Fisher King has been struck through the genitals (or, euphemistically, through the thighs) with a spear, and while he remains unhealed, the countryside around his castle is barren, unfruitful, and uninhabited. Only if the right question is asked and the Fisher King healed of his wound will the curse that lies upon the Waste Land be lifted.
The Waste Land
The theme of fertility—the common thread this book has traced through temples and churches across much of the world—is also close to the heart of the Grail legend and becomes steadily more important to the original Grail romances as these develop the themes that Chrétien de Troyes first sketched out. In all its forms, the Grail is a source of food. Chrétien does not introduce this theme—the Grail is simply carried past the Fisher King and the baffled young knight Perceval as dinner is served—but it appears in full flower shortly thereafter. In Wolfram’s Parzival, the Vulgate Cycle, and most of the later texts, one of the distinctive miracles of the Grail is that it provides every knight with the food he loves best:
As the maiden passed in front of the dining table, each knight knelt before the holy vessel and the tables were at once replenished with all the delightful foods that one could describe; and the palace was filled with delicious odors as if all the spices in the world had been scattered there.93
This miraculous provision of food is only one of the Grail’s wonders, though, and a more important factor is the Grail’s relation to the Waste Land. From Chrétien on, the unhealed wound of the Fisher King and the unasked question are linked to the devastation of the lands surrounding the Grail castle, and as the legend develops, the nature of that devastation comes more and more to relate to a failure of crop and livestock fertility. The Grail has many aspects, but one of its essential roles is as a talisman of fertility. Thus in Robert de Boron’s Joseph of Arimathea, the first table of the Grail is established to end a famine,94 and in Heinrich von dem Türlin’s The Crown, Gawain’s success in asking the Grail question restores the Waste Land to fertility and breaks the spell that holds the Fisher King in an enchanted semblance of life.
What caused the desolation of the Waste Land is less clear in most of the original texts. In Chrétien, Perceval’s failure to ask the question is at fault. In the later tradition, from the Vulgate Cycle onward, the Dolorous Blow that originally caused the Fisher King’s wound is at fault. In between, though, a strangely detailed account appears in a text usually called The Elucidation, which is found in a handful of manuscript copies of other Grail narratives from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.95 As the title suggests, The Elucidation purports to be an explanation of the Grail stories, though it’s at least as puzzling as any of the texts it claims to explain. The story it recounts, though, points straight to the concealed meaning of the Grail legend—though following that track requires careful attention to a number of factors not usually included in scholarly studies of the Grail, among them the points already raised in this book.
Long ago, The Elucidation tells, the land of Logres was green and fertile, full of the wealth of all the world, and blessed with a special magic, for there were wells throughout the land and maidens who dwelt in them. If any traveler desired food or drink, he could stop by one of these wells, and a maiden would come out of the well with a golden cup in her hand and served him whatever food he most desired. One time, though, the wicked king Amangon raped one of the maidens and took her golden cup from her, and his vassals followed his example and did the same to the other maidens. Thereafter, the maidens no longer appeared, and the land was laid waste, so that there were no longer leaves on the trees or water in the rivers, and the fields and flowers withered. From then on, no one could find the court of the Fisher King, from which abundant wealth once came.
A long and bitter age later, Arthur became king of Logres and called every good knight to his fellowship of the Round Table. They were the best champions of the world, and they swore to restore the wells, guard the maidens, and destroy the lineage of those who had harmed them. The knights rode forth on this quest and found maidens wandering in the wild lands, each guarded by a knight, who would do battle with any who approached. It was Gawain who first vanquished one of the knights and sent him, in the manner of the time, to King Arthur’s court.
That knight was named Blihos Bleheris, and he explained to Arthur and his court that the wandering maidens and knights were descended from the maidens of the wells whom Amangon and his vassals had raped. They must wander and the land would remain blighted until the court of the Fisher King could once again be found. That, in turn, was what began the great quest for the Holy Grail, in which seven champions in all found the Fisher King’s court.
Gawain was the first to accomplish the quest, and when he did so, the waters flowed again, fields and woods became green, and the land of Logres was repopulated. Once this happened, however, an unknown evil folk came forth from the wells and established their own rule over the land, making war on King Arthur. After many battles, quests, and wonders, they were finally vanquished by the knights of the Round Table, and the court of the Fisher King was found and freed from its enchantment.
Near the end of The Elucidation, the anonymous author includes these riddling words, hinting yet again at a profound secret hidden in the stories of the Grail:
And the one who made the book
(So I tell you, one by one)
Wishes to show to each of you
Why the Grail served.
For the service which it performed
Will be revealed by the good master.
And it was not known, but hidden,
The good which it served;
For he will freely teach it to all people.96
Scholars who have wrestled with The Elucidation have offered varied theories to explain it; some have considered it an important key to the mysteries of the Grail, while others have dismissed it as an irrelevant oddity. For reasons that may already be clear to my readers, I consider it to be crucial if it’s understood correctly, but its meaning—like the meaning of the Grail tradition as a whole, and the broader secret with which this book is concerned—has to be put in its proper context.
Solving the Grail Riddle
The nature of that context was traced out by an American philologist, Urban T. Holmes, in his 1948 study A New Interpretation of Chrétien’s Conte du Graal. Scholarly studies of the Grail legend prior to that time centered on one of two theories: one tracing the legend to archaic Celtic roots, the other deriving it from the theology of the Mass in the medieval Christian church. Both theories had their strengths and weaknesses; each could explain certain things about the Grail texts but failed to explain other things. As we’ll see, both of them account for part of the broader explanation to be attempted here.
Holmes, though, chose a different path in his quest for the Fisher King’s court. He noted that a great many details of the Grail Castle in Chrétien’s Conte del Graal came from an easily identified source: passages in the Bible and the Talmud that relate to the Temple of Solomon and the priestly ordinances surrounding it. Thus the Fisher King wears a garment with a purple fringe, as required for priestly use in Numbers 15:38, and his lameness parallels that of the patriarch Jacob; the Grail’s capacity to strike down the sinful closely parallels the similar power of the Ark of the Covenant; furthermore, Holmes pointed out, the Waste Land of the Grail romances is prefigured in such biblical passages as Isaiah 6:11 and Jeremiah 44:22, which prophesy that Israel would become a waste land.
On this basis, Holmes argued that Chrétien was probably a converted Jew who had studied the Cabala in the famous Jewish school at Troyes, headed by Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac, who is traditionally known as Rashi. While this is possible, it goes considerably beyond what the evidence requires. Rashi and his school received patronage from the influential Christian nobleman Hugues I, Count of Champagne, whose court was at Troyes, and the presence of Rashi and his students in that town helped spark a general flowering of Hebrew and Aramaic studies in the region, among Christians as well as Jews.97 As we’ve already seen, Jewish traditions surrounding the Temple of Solomon were adopted into Christianity as early as the third century CE. By the twelfth century, the traditions Holmes traced in Chrétien’s work were the common property of Jewish and Christian traditions alike.
Nonetheless, Holmes was right to point out that references to the Temple of Solomon can be found in the Grail legends. What lies behind those references could have been discovered in another way had enough attention been paid to the differences between medieval and modern thought. People in the Middle Ages made extensive use of a mode of thinking—typological thinking—that has fallen entirely out of use in recent centuries, and the riddle of the Grail can be solved surprisingly easily once its typological role is understood.
What is typological thinking? In simple terms, it’s the habit of thinking in terms of concrete metaphors rather than abstract concepts. Consider the traditional titles of the Virgin Mary in medieval religious writings. There are scores of them: “sealed fountain,” “seat of wisdom,” “tower of ivory,” “mystical rose,” “star of the sea,” “tabernacle of the Lord,” “walled garden,” and so on. Each of these is a precise metaphor communicating some part of the role that the Virgin Mary plays in the Gospel story and in Catholic theology and legend. Such metaphors, or as they were called by medieval thinkers, types, played an important and familiar role in every kind of thinking in the Middle Ages, filling many of the roles that abstract concepts and categories have in our thinking today.
If the central images of the Grail mystery are understood as types, their meaning is not hard to find. Imagine those images, for example, as a medieval riddle: “It is a spear borne before a vessel; it is a chalice glowing with light; it is a dish that will not serve the sinful, but gives the virtuous the food they love best; it is a ship that Solomon set sailing on the seas of time; it is the Temple of Solomon itself. What is it?”
The answer, of course, is a church of the high Middle Ages. The tall central steeple rising from the body of the church west of the sanctuary is the spear standing upright before the chalice of the Mass; stained-glass windows and myriads of lamps make it a container glowing with light; the Masses celebrated in it are forbidden to those who are guilty of mortal sins but provide the virtuous with spiritual food; the nave of a church, as already mentioned, gets its name from the typological metaphor of a ship, and the equation of the church with the Temple of Solomon has already been discussed at length.
The essential powers of the Grail, in turn, are the same powers that we’ve seen associated with temples across much of the world and include as a central theme the power to bring fertility to an otherwise barren land. There’s a crucial difference, though, between the way that power is manifested in the Grail narratives and the way the same powers appear in the older temple cults. In the temples of old and the lore that surrounds them, the gifts of agricultural fertility and inner transformation are envisioned as established realities, subject only to the proper maintenance of certain customs and rites. In the Grail legend, by contrast, the same powers are in eclipse and the land lies waste, waiting for a specific and unusual form of deliverance.
In his book on the Grail legend, Richard A. Barber comments on the startling originality of the theme of the Grail question. “There are many stories in folklore and literature which revolve around the finding of an answer to a question, but stories where the crux is the asking of the question in the first place are rare in the extreme.”98 Not any question will do, though; it has to be the right question, asked of the right person, at the right time.
What has to be asked varies slightly from one source to another. In Chrétien, the questions Perceval fails to ask are why the lance bled, where the Grail procession was going, and who was to be fed from the Grail. The authors of the Continuations ring various changes on these themes, and in most of the other narratives, the question is simply, “Whom does the Grail serve?” The central theme of the question is not simply what the Grail is, but what it does. Only when that question has been asked can the Fisher King be healed and the Waste Land made green.
The same question might well be asked concerning all the material covered up to this point: the puzzling symbolism of Freemasonry, the traditional lore of the Temple of Solomon, the vast geographical spread of parallel temple traditions, the curious borrowings of Pagan practice by the medieval Christian church, the legends of the Grail, and the thread that connects all these—a thread that connects sacred buildings and agricultural abundance in a manner that baffles the modern mind, though it seems to have been something close to common sense not that many centuries ago. Like the strange and luminous objects carried past the knights in the Grail Castle, these things are meaningless marvels until the right question is asked.
It’s far from coincidental that the question is also the same that had to be asked about the Grail: “What do these things mean?” In the pages ahead, I will propose a tentative answer.
81 Chrétien de Troyes 1991, 381.
82 A good English translation is Chrétien de Troyes, 1991, 381–494.
83 Barber 2004, 27.
84 Carey 2007, 11–13.
85 Barber 2004, 95–96.
86 von Eschenbach 1961, 129.
87 Greenough et al. 1992, 91.
88 Ibid., 178.
89 References to secrets of the Grail are helpfully summarized in Barber 2004, 161–66; ironically, Barber then attempts to explain these references away, without much success.
90 Barber 2004, 163.
91 Cited in Barber 2004, 42.
92 Weston 1983 is the best introduction to her ideas.
93 Cited in Barber 2004, 54.
94 Barber 2004, 42.
95 Carey 2007, 181–88.
96 Carey 2007, 187; the translation is Carey’s.
97 Ralls 2003, 38.
98 Barber 2004, 109.