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Parsifal: Wer ist der Gral? Gurnemanz: Das sagt sich nicht; doch, du selbst zu ihm erkoren, bleibt dir die Kunde unverloren.
[Parsifal, Act I]
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The Grail's secret must be concealed And never by any man revealed ...
[The Elucidation, lines 4-5.]
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remarkable
feature of the medieval Grail romances is the atmosphere of mystery
that surrounds the Grail. It is a talisman of which one may not speak,
although the knowledge of it may be revealed to those worthy of the revelation. The Grail appears in a procession, details of which differ
in various versions of the visit of Gawain, Perceval and others to the Grail castle, in
which it is accompanied by other mysterious objects.
essie Weston drew attention to the relationship between four of these
symbols and the suits of the Tarot. A Tarot pack contains four suits of cards: Cups, Wands, Swords and Dishes (or Pentangles or Pentacles).
he Grail is variously described as a cup or deep dish. In the earlier Grail romances, the word graal is not explained, perhaps because the
readers could be expected to be familiar with the word. Less than fifty years before Chrétien wrote his poem, the monk Helinand defined the similar word
gradale as meaning scutella lata et aliquantulum profunda, a wide and
slightly deep dish. Only later, in Robert de Boron's Joseph d'Arimathie, was the Grail
identified with a cup or chalice.
ne of the
characteristic properties of the Grail is the provision of food and
drink. According to Manessier's Continuation, as the Grail procession
passes through the hall, the tables are filled on every side with the most delectable
dishes. Although Wolfram's Grail is a
stone rather than a dish or cup, it too has this property: whatever one stretched one's
hand out for in the presence of the Grail, it was waiting, one found it
all ready and to hand - dishes warm, dishes cold, newfangled dishes and old favourites, the
meat of beasts both tame and wild ... Clearly the Grail is related
to the horn of plenty or ambrosial cup found in various mythologies.
.S.Loomis held that several of the strange features of the Grail romances had arisen as a result of mistranslation or the
misunderstanding of ambiguous words in various texts. He pointed out that the Old French
nominative case for both "horn" and "body" were the same: li cors; and he suggested
that this might explain the remarkable feature of a graal, or wide and deep dish, containing a
single consecrated wafer, the Corpus Christi. He suggested that originally this might have been
a magic horn. Another possibility is that this is a development from the body of the dead
knight, a feature of Gawain's visits to the Grail castle; in the First Continuation, for example, the body is carried on
a bier in the Grail procession.
he bleeding lance of the Grail castle is another
curious feature of the Grail romances. Quite early in the development
of the story, it was identified with the lance of Longinus that had pierced the side of Christ.
Thus it suggests a link between the wound of the Maimed King, if
dealt by the lance, and that of Christ. Originally, however, the bleeding lance was probably a
magic weapon. The bleeding is described either as a continuous stream of blood (as in Wolfram) or a single drop (as
in Chrétien) or as three drops.
essie Weston concluded that the cup and the lance were sexual symbols,
pointing to a relationship between the story of the Grail castle and
ancient fertility rites. She noted that, in some of the Gawain
versions of the tale, the lance appeared upright in the Grail, so that
the cup received the blood. This suggests that the Grail is somewhat larger than a normal cup; in the Perlesvaus, a later development of the story, where the blood also runs into the Grail, Gawain sees a chalice within the Grail. R.S.Loomis drew attention to certain similarities between the
lance of the Grail castle and the spear that appears in the tale of
the Irish hero Brian, from the Fate of the Children of Turenn.
he three sons
of Turenn were compelled by the god Lug to fetch for him the spear of King Pisear. When they
reached his castle, Brian demanded the spear, at which Pisear attacked him. Brian killed the
king and put his courtiers to flight. Then he and his brothers went to the room in which the
spear was kept. They found it head down in a cauldron of boiling water, from which it was taken
and delivered to Lug. Apparently there is another Irish tale in which a spear stands with its
head in a cauldron of blood; and this may be the origin of
the bleeding lance.
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[J.L.Weston, The Quest of the Holy Grail.]
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t has been
suggested by various commentators that the motif of the broken sword is derived from an Irish
tale in the Finn cycle. The hero Cailte and a companion enter an Otherworld castle where the host was Fergus Fair-hair. The host asked Cailte to repair
a broken sword that the Tuatha da Danann had refused to mend. He did
so, and also mended a spear and a javelin. Fergus revealed that each of these weapons was
destined to destroy one of the enemies of the gods. After three days, Cailte and two companions
left with the weapons. They came to a castle of woman where they
were attacked by the enemies of the gods; in the battle, each of the three weapons destroyed
one of the enemies.
n Chrétien's account of the Grail procession, it contains a
tailléor, or carving dish, of silver. In the Didot
Perceval there are two of these dishes. In Wolfram's
account, there are instead two silver knives; it has been suggested that Wolfram had some difficulty in translating the word tailléor,
although Jessie Weston noted that two knives were associated
with the relic of the Holy Blood at the Abbey of Fescamp,
and thus related to the Grail in its Christian form.
t has been
suggested that the symbols of the Grail procession might have been
originally among the treasures of the Shining Ones, the Tuatha da Danann, of Irish legend.
There is, however, no obvious relationship between the bleeding lance and the wand of the
Dagda, nor does the Grail resemble a cauldron: as noted above, in the
Grail romances it is described as a dish or cup.
Welsh
document from the early 15th century contains a list of thirteen treasures of Britain. If the
origin of this list is much older, then it might be a clue to the Celtic origins of some of the symbols of the Grail
procession. One of the treasures is the Horn of Brân, which has the property of never
being exhausted, one of the many magic vessels of Celtic myth. As
early as 1888, Alfred Nutt proposed that the Welsh god Brân was the prototype of the Fisher King, and since then many writers have identified Brân
with Robert de
Boron's Bron.
he list also
includes the dish of Rhydderch (a historic king of Strathclyde in the 6th century) which has
the interesting property that it grants whatever food is desired. There is also a cauldron,
which seems to be the same one that appears in poem The Spoils of Annwn; it has the
property that it will not boil the food of the coward. R.S.Loomis suggested that this might be the distant origin of a feature
in the Prose Lancelot, where the Grail serves food to all
except Gawain, who had been judged unworthy.
essie Weston (1850-1928) held the view that central elements of the
Grail romances had originated in eyewitness accounts of initiation ceremonies in which certain mysterious symbols played
an important part. In 1932, in a cave below the fortress of Montréal-de-Sos near Tarascon,
there was found a wall-painting which, it was suggested, was of Cathar
origin and dated from the 12th century. It shows a lance, a broken sword, a solar disk, many
red crosses and a square panel. The latter contains an inner square. The outer part of the
panel, which might represent a table or altar, contains twenty crosses in various forms on a
black background; the inner part contains five tear-shaped drops of blood and five white
crosses. If the inner part corresponds to the tailléor, then we have all four
symbols of the Grail procession.
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As students are well aware, the Sword of the 