The Holy Grail

What might we have been overlooking? Or, alternatively, what might we have been seeking in the wrong place? Was there perhaps some fragment that had been before our eyes all along which, for one reason or another, we had failed to notice? As far as we could determine, we had overlooked no item, no data of accepted historical scholarship. But might there be something else—something that lay “beyond the pale” of documented history, the concrete facts to which we had endeavoured to confine ourselves?

Certainly there was one motif, admittedly fabulous, which had threaded itself through our investigation, recurring repeatedly, with insistent and intriguing consistency. This was the mysterious object known as the Holy Grail. By their contemporaries, for example, the Cathars were believed to have been in possession of the Grail. The Templars, too, were often regarded as the Grail’s custodians; and the Grail romances had originally issued from the court of the count of Champagne, who was intimately associated with the foundation of the Knights Templar. When the Templars were suppressed, moreover, the bizarre heads they supposedly worshipped enjoyed, according to the official Inquisition reports, many of the attributes traditionally ascribed to the Grail—providing sustenance, for example, and imbuing the land with fertility.

In the course of our investigation we had run across the Grail in numerous other contexts as well. Some had been relatively recent, such as the occult circles of Josephin Peladan and Claude Debussy at the end of the nineteenth century. Others were considerably older. Godfroi de Bouillon, for instance, was descended according to medieval legend and folklore from Lohengrin, the Knight of the Swan; and Lohengrin, in the romances, was the son of Perceval or Parzival, protagonist of all the early Grail stories. Guillem de Gellone, moreover, ruler of the medieval principality in southern France during the reign of Charlemagne, was the hero of a poem by Wolfram von Eschenbach, most important of the Grail chroniclers. Indeed, the Guillem in Wolfram’s poem was said to have been associated in some way with the mysterious “Grail family”.

Were these intrusions of the Grail into our inquiry, and others like them, merely random and coincidental? Or was there a continuity underlying and connecting them—a continuity which, in some unimaginable way, did link our inquiry to the Grail, whatever the Grail might really be? At this point, we were confronted by a staggering question. Could the Grail be something more than pure fantasy? Could it actually have existed in some sense? Could there really have been such a thing as the Holy Grail? Or something concrete, at any rate, for which the Holy Grail was employed as a symbol?

The question was certainly exciting and provocative—to say the least. At the same time it threatened to take us too far afield, into spheres of spurious speculation. It did, however, serve to direct our attention to the Grail romances themselves. And in themselves the Grail romances posed a number of perplexing and distinctly relevant conundrums.

It is generally assumed that the Holy Grail relates in some way to Jesus. According to some traditions, it was the cup from which Jesus and his disciples drank at the Last Supper. According to other traditions, it was the cup in which Joseph of Arimathea caught Jesus’s blood as he hung on the cross. According to other traditions still, the Grail was both of these. But if the Grail was so intimately associated with Jesus, or if it did indeed exist, why was there no reference to it whatever for more than a thousand years? Where was it during all that time? Why did it not figure in earlier literature, folklore or tradition? Why should something of such intense relevance and immediacy to Christendom remain buried for as long as it apparently did?

More provocatively still, why should the Grail finally surface precisely when it did—at the very peak of the Crusades? Was it coincidence that this enigmatic object, ostensibly non-existent for ten centuries, should assume the status it did at the very time it did—when the Frankish kingdom of Jerusalem was in its full glory, when the Templars were at the apex of their power, when the Cathar heresy was gaining a momentum which actually threatened to displace the creed of Rome? Was this convergence of circumstances truly coincidental? Or was there some link between them?

Inundated and somewhat daunted by questions of this kind, we turned our attention to the Grail romances. Only by examining these “fantasies” closely could we hope to determine whether their recurrence in our inquiry was indeed coincidental, or the manifestation of a pattern—a pattern which might, in some way, prove significant.

The Legend of the Holy Grail

Most twentieth-century scholarship concurs in the belief that the Grail romances rest ultimately on a pagan foundation—a ritual connected with the cycle of the seasons, the death and rebirth of the year. In its most primordial origins it would appear to involve a vegetation cult, closely related in form to, if not directly derived from those of Tammuz, Attis, Adonis and Osiris in the Middle East. Thus, in both Irish and Welsh mythology, there are repeated references to death, rebirth and renewal, as well as to a similar regenerative process in the land—sterility and fertility. The theme is central to the anonymous fourteenth-century English poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. And in the Mabinogion, a compilation of Welsh legends roughly contemporary with the Grail romances though obviously drawing on much earlier material, there is a mysterious “cauldron of rebirth” in which dead warriors, thrown at nightfall, are resurrected the following morning. This cauldron is often associated with a giant hero named Bran. Bran also possessed a platter and ‘whatever food one wished thereon was instantly obtained’—a property also sometimes ascribed to the Grail. At the end of his life, moreover, Bran was supposedly decapitated and his head placed, as a sort of talisman, in London. Here it was said to perform a number of magical functions—not only ensuring fertility of the land but also, by some occult power, repelling invaders.

Many of these motifs were subsequently incorporated into the Grail romances. There is no question that Bran, with his cauldron and platter, contributed something to later conceptions of the Grail. And Bran’s head shares attributes not only with the Grail, but also with the heads allegedly worshipped by the Knights Templar.

The pagan foundation for the Grail romances has been exhaustively explored by scholars, from Sir James Frazer in The Golden Bough up to the present. But during the mid to late twelfth century the originally pagan foundation for the Grail romances underwent a curious and extremely important transformation. In some obscure way that has eluded the investigation of researchers, the Grail became very uniquely and specifically associated with Christianity—and with a rather unorthodox form of Christianity at that. On the basis of some elusive amalgamation, the Grail became inextricably linked with Jesus. And there seems to have been something more involved than a facile grafting of pagan and Christian traditions.

As a relic linked mystically with Jesus, the Grail engendered a voluminous quantity of romances, or lengthy narrative poems, which, even today, tease the imagination. Despite clerical disapprobation, these romances flourished for nearly a century, becoming a fully fledged cult of their own—a cult whose lifespan, interestingly enough, closely paralleled that of the Order of the Temple after its separation from the Prieure de Sion in 1188. With the fall of the Holy Land in 1291, and the dissolution of the Templars between 1307 and 1314, the Grail romances also vanished from the stage of history, for another two centuries or so, at any rate. Then, in 1470, the theme was taken up again by Sir Thomas Malory in his famous Le Morte d’Arthur; and it has remained more or less prominent in Western culture ever since. Nor has its context always been wholly literary. There seems to be abundant documentary evidence that certain members of the National Socialist hierarchy in Germany actually believed in the Grail’s physical existence, and excavations for it were actually undertaken during the war in the south of France.

By Malory’s time the mysterious object known as the Grail had assumed the more or less distinct identity ascribed to it today. It was alleged to be the cup of the Last Supper, in which Joseph of Arimathea later caught Jesus’s blood. According to certain accounts, the Grail was brought by Joseph of Arimathea to England—more specifically, to Glastonbury. According to other accounts, it was brought by the Magdalene to France. As early as the fourth century legends describe the Magdalene fleeing the Holy Land and being set ashore near Marseilles where, for that matter, her purported relics are still venerated. According to medieval legends, she carried with her to Marseilles the Holy Grail. By the fifteenth century this tradition had clearly assumed immense importance for such individuals as King Rene d’Anjou, who collected “Grail cups”.

But the early legends say that the Magdalene brought the Grail into France, not a cup. In other words, the simple association of Grail and cup was a relatively late development. Malory perpetuated this facile association, and it has been a truism ever since. But Malory, in fact, took considerable liberties with his original sources. In these original sources, the Grail is something much more than a cup. And the mystical aspects of the Grail are far more important than the chivalric, which Malory extols.

In the opinion of most scholars the first genuine Grail romance dates from the late twelfth century, from around 1188—that crucial year which witnessed the fall of Jerusalem and the alleged rupture between the Order of the Temple and the Prieure de Sion. The romance in question is entitled Le Roman de Perceval or Le Conte del Graal. It was composed by one Chretien de Troyes, who seems to have been attached, in some indeterminate capacity, to the court of the count of Champagne.

Little is known of Chretien’s biography. His association with the court of Champagne is apparent from numerous works composed before his Grail romance—works dedicated to Marie, Countess of Champagne. Through this corpus of courtly romances—including one dealing with Lancelot, which makes no mention of anything resembling a Grail—Chretien by the 1180s had established an imposing reputation for himself. And, given his earlier work, one might have expected him to continue in a similar vein. Towards the end of his life, however, Chretien turned his attention to a new, hitherto unarticulated theme; and the Holy Grail, as it has come down to us today, made its official debut in Western culture and consciousness.

Chretien’s Grail romance was dedicated not to Marie de Champagne, but to Philippe d’Alsace, Count of Flanders. At the beginning of his poem Chretien declares that his work has been composed specifically at Philippe’s request, and that it was from Philippe that he heard the story in the first place. The work itself furnishes a general pattern, and constitutes a prototype, for subsequent Grail narratives. Its protagonist is named Perceval, who is described as the Son of the Widow Lady. This appellation is, in itself, both significant and intriguing. It had long been employed by certain of the dualist and Gnostic heresies—sometimes for their own prophets, sometimes for Jesus himself. Subsequently it became a cherished designation in Freemasonry.

Leaving his widowed mother, Perceval sallies forth to win his knighthood. During his travels, he comes upon an enigmatic fisherman—the famous “Fisher King”—in whose castle he is offered refuge for the night. That evening the Grail appears. Neither at this point nor at any other in the poem is it linked in any way whatever with Jesus. In fact the reader learns very little about it. He is not even told what it is. But whatever it is, it is carried by a damsel, is golden and studded with gems. Perceval does not know that he is expected to ask a question of this mysterious object—he is expected to ask “whom one serves with it”. The question is obviously ambiguous. If the Grail is a vessel or a dish of some kind, the question may mean “who is intended to eat from it”. Alternatively the question might be rephrased: “Whom does one serve (in a chivalric sense) by virtue of serving the Grail?” Whatever the meaning of the question, Perceval neglects to ask it; and the next morning when he wakes, the castle is empty. His omission, he learns subsequently, causes a disastrous blight on the land. Later still he learns that he himself is of the “Grail family”, and that the mysterious “Fisher King”, who was “sustained” by the Grail, was in fact his own uncle. At this point Perceval makes a curious confession. Since his unhappy experience with the Grail, he declares, he has ceased to love or believe in God.

Chretien’s poem is rendered all the more perplexing by the fact that it is unfinished. Chretien himself died around 1188, quite possibly before he could complete the work; and even if he did complete it no copy has survived. If such a copy ever existed, it may well have been destroyed in a fire at Troyes in 1188. The point need not be laboured, but certain scholars have found this fire, coinciding as it did with the poet’s death, vaguely suspicious.

In any case Chretien’s version of the Grail story is less important in itself than in its role as precursor. During the next half century the motif he had introduced at the court of Troyes was to spread through Western Europe like a brush-fire. At the same time, however, modern experts on the subject agree that the later Grail romances do not seem to have derived wholly from Chretien, but seem to have drawn on at least one other source as well—a source which, in all probability, pre-dated Chretien. And during its proliferation the Grail story became much more closely linked with King Arthur—who was only a peripheral figure in Chretien’s version. And it also became linked with Jesus.

Of the numerous Grail romances which followed Chretien’s version, there were three that proved of special interest and relevance to us. One of these, the Roman de l’Estoire dou Saint Graal, was composed by Robert de Boron, sometime between 1190 and 1199. Justifiably or no, Robert is often credited with making the Grail a specifically Christian symbol. Robert himself states that he is drawing on an earlier source and one quite different from Chretien. In speaking of his poem, and particularly of the Grail’s Christian character, he alludes to a “great book”, the secrets of which have been revealed to him.

It is thus uncertain whether Robert himself Christianised the Grail, or whether someone else did so before him. Most authorities today incline towards the second of these possibilities. However, there is no question that Robert de Boron’s account is the first to furnish a history of the Grail. The Grail, he explains, was the cup of the Last Supper. It then passed into the hands of Joseph of Arimathea, who, when Jesus was removed from the cross, filled it with the Saviour’s blood—and it is this sacred blood which confers on the Grail a magical quality. After the Crucifixion, Robert continues, Joseph’s family became the keepers of the Grail. And for Robert the Grail romances involve the adventures and vicissitudes of this particular family. Thus Galahad is said to be Joseph of Arimathea’s son. And the Grail itself passes to Joseph’s brother-in-law, Brons, who carries it to England and becomes the Fisher King. As in Chretien’s poem, Perceval is the “Son of the Widow Lady”, but he is also the grandson of the Fisher King.

Robert’s version of the Grail story thus deviates in a number of important respects from Chretien’s. In both versions Perceval is a “Son of the Widow Lady”, but in Robert’s version he is the grandson, not the nephew, of the Fisher King and thus even more directly related to the Grail family. And while Chretien’s narrative is vague in its chronology, set sometime during the Arthurian age, Robert’s is quite precise. For Robert, the Grail story is set in England, and is not contemporary with Arthur but with Joseph of Arimathea.

There is another Grail romance which has much in common with Robert’s. Indeed it would seem to draw upon the same sources, but its utilisation of these sources is very different and decidedly more interesting. The romance in question is known as the Perlesvaus. It was composed around the same time as Robert’s poem, between 1190 and 1212, by an author who, contrary to the conventions of the time, chose to remain anonymous. It is odd that he should have done so, given the exalted status accorded poets, unless he was involved in some calling—a monastic or military order, for example—which would have rendered composition of such romances unseemly or inappropriate. And, in fact, the weight of textual evidence concerning the Perlesvaus suggests this to be the case. According to at least one modern expert, the Perlesvaus may actually have been written by a Templar. And there is certainly evidence to support such a conjecture.

It is known, for instance, that the Teutonic Knights encouraged and sponsored anonymous poets in their ranks, and such a precedent could well have been established by the Templars. What is more, the author of the Perlesvaus reveals, in the course of the poem, an almost extraordinarily detailed knowledge of the realities of fighting—of armour and equipment, strategy and tactics, and weaponry and its effects on human flesh. The graphic description of wounds, for example, would seem to attest to a first-hand experience of the battlefield—a realistic, unromanticised experience uncharacteristic of any other Grail romance.

If the Perlesvaus was not actually composed by a Templar, it nevertheless provides a solid basis for linking the Templars with the Grail. Although the Order is not mentioned by name, its appearance in the poem would seem to be unmistakable. Thus Perceval, in his wanderings, happens upon a castle. This castle does not house the Grail, but it does house a conclave of “initiates” who are obviously familiar with the Grail. Perceval is received here by two “masters” who clap their hands and are joined by thirty-three other men. “They were clad in white garments, and not one of them but had a red cross in the midst of his breast, and they seemed to be all of an age.” One of these mysterious “masters” states that he has personally seen the Grail—an experience vouchsafed only to an elect few. And he also states that he is familiar with Perceval’s lineage.

Like Chretien’s and Robert’s poems, the Perlesvaus lays an enormous stress on lineage. At numerous points Perceval’s is described as “most holy”. Elsewhere it is stated explicitly that Perceval “was of the lineage of Joseph of Arimathea”, and that “this Joseph was his [Perceval’s] mother’s uncle, that had been a soldier of Pilate seven years.”

Nevertheless the Perlesvaus is not set in Joseph’s lifetime. On the contrary it takes place, like Chretien’s version, during the age of Arthur. Chronology is further scrambled by the fact that the Holy Land is already in the hands of the “infidel”—which it wasn’t until nearly two centuries after Arthur. And by the fact that the Holy Land is apparently to be identified with Camelot.

To a greater degree than either Chretien’s or Robert’s poems, the Perlesvaus is magical in nature. In addition to his knowledge of the battlefield, the anonymous author displays a knowledge, quite surprising for the time, of conjuration and invocation. There are also numerous alchemical references—to two men, for instance, “made of copper by art of nigromancy”. And some of the magical and alchemical references resonate with echoes of the mystery surrounding the Templars. Thus, one of the “masters” of the white-clad Templar-like company says to Perceval, “There are the heads sealed in silver, and the heads sealed in lead, and the bodies whereunto these heads belonged; I tell you that you must make come thither the head both of the King and of the Queen.”

If the Perlesvaus abounds in magical allusions, it also abounds in other allusions that are both heretical and/or pagan. Again Perceval is designated by the dualist appellation, “Son of the Widow Lady”. There are references to a sanctioned ritual of king-sacrifice, most incongruous in a purportedly Christian poem. There are references to the roasting and devouring of children—a crime of which the Templars were popularly accused. And at one point there is a singular rite, which again evokes memories of the Templar trials. At a red cross erected in a forest, a beautiful white beast of indeterminate nature is torn apart by hounds. While Perceval watches, a knight and a damsel appear with golden vessels, collect the fragments of mutilated flesh and, having kissed the cross, disappear into the trees. Perceval himself then kneels before the cross and kisses it:

and there came to him a smell so sweet of the cross and of the place, such as no sweetness can be compared therewith. He looketh and seeth coming from the forest two priests all afoot; and the first shouteth to him: “Sir Knight, withdraw yourself away from the cross, for no right have you to come nigh it”: Perceval draweth him back, and the priest kneeleth before the cross and adoreth it and boweth down and kisseth it more than a score times, and manifesteth the most joy in the world. And the other priest cometh after, and bringeth a great rod, and setteth the first priest aside by force, and beateth the cross with the rod in every part, and weepeth right passing sore. Perceval beholdeth him with right great wonderment and saith unto him, “Sir, herein seem you to be no priest! wherefore do you so great shame?” “Sir,” with the priest, “It nought concerneth you of whatsoever we may do, nor nought shall you know thereof for us!” Had he not been a priest, Perceval would have been right wroth with him, but he had no will to do him any hurt.

Such abuse of the cross evokes distinct echoes of the accusations levelled against the Templars. But not of the Templars alone. It might also reflect a skein of dualist or Gnostic thought—the thought of the Cathars, for instance, who also repudiated the cross.

In the Perlesvaus this skein of dualist or Gnostic thought extends, in some sense, to the Grail itself. For Chretien the Grail was something unspecified, made of gold and encrusted with gems. For Robert de Boron it was identified as the cup used at the Last Supper and subsequently to collect Jesus’s blood. In the Perlesvaus, however, the Grail assumes a most curious and significant dimension. At one point, Sir Gawain is warned by a priest, “for behoveth not discover the secrets of the Saviour, and them also to whom they are committed behoveth keep them covertly.” The Grail, then, involves a secret in some way related to Jesus; and the nature of this secret is entrusted to a select company.

When Gawain eventually does see the Grail, it “seemeth him that in the midst of the Graal he seeth the figure of a child… he looketh up and it seemeth him to be the Graal all in flesh, and he seeth above, as he thinketh, a King crowned, nailed upon a rood.” And some time later, the Grail appeared “at the sacring of the mass, in five several manners that none ought not to tell, for the secret things of the sacrament ought none tell openly, but he unto whom God hath given it. King Arthur beheld all the changes, the last whereof was the change into a chalice.”

In short the Grail, in the Perlesvaus, consists of a changing sequence of images or visions. The first of these is a crowned king, crucified. The second is a child. The third is a man wearing a crown of thorns, bleeding from his forehead, his feet, his palms and his side. The fourth manifestation is not specified. The fifth is a chalice. On each occasion the manifestation is attended by a fragrance and a great light.

From this account the Grail, in the Perlesvaus, would seem to be several things simultaneously—or something that can be interpreted on several different levels. On the mundane level, it might well be an object of some kind—like a cup, bowl or chalice. It would also, in some metaphorical sense, appear to be a lineage or perhaps certain individuals who comprise this lineage. And quite obviously the Grail would also seem to be an experience of some sort—quite likely a Gnostic illumination such as that extolled by the Cathars and other dualist sects of the period.

The Story of Wolfram von Eschenbach

Of all the Grail romances the most famous, and the most artistically significant, is Parzival, composed sometime between 1195 and 1216. Its author was Wolfram von Eschenbach, a knight of Bavarian origin. At first we thought that this might distance him from his subject, rendering his account less reliable than various others. Before long, however, we concluded that if anyone could speak authoritatively of the Grail, it was Wolfram.

At the beginning of Parzival, Wolfram boldly asserts that Chretien’s version of the Grail story is wrong, while his own is accurate because based on privileged information. This information, he later explains, he obtained from one Kyot de Provence who received it in turn supposedly from one Flegetanis. It is worth quoting Wolfram’s words in full:

Anyone who asked me before about the Grail and took me to task for not telling him was very much in the wrong. Kyot asked me not to reveal this, for Adventure commanded him to give it no thought until she herself, Adventure, should invite the telling, and then one must speak of it, of course.

Kyot, the well-known master, found in Toledo, discarded, set down in heathen writing, the first source of this adventure. He first had to learn the abc’s, but without the art of black magic…

A heathen, Flegetanis, had achieved high renown for his learning. This scholar of nature was descended from Solomon and born of a family which had long been Israelite until baptism became our shield against the fire of Hell. He wrote the adventure of the Grail. On his father’s side, Flegetanis was a heathen, who worshipped a calf… The heathen Flegetanis could tell us how all the stars set and rise again… To the circling course of the stars man’s affairs and destiny aye linked. Flegetanis the heathen saw with his own eyes in the constellations things he was shy to talk about, hidden mysteries. He said there was a thing called the Grail, whose name he had read clearly in the constellations. A host of angels left it on the earth.

Since then, baptised men have had the task of guarding it, and with such chaste discipline that those who are called to the service of the Grail are always noble men. Thus wrote Flegetanis of these things.

Kyot, the wise master, set about to trace this tale in Latin books, to see where there ever had been a people, dedicated to purity and worthy of caring for the Grail. He read the chronicles of the lands, in Britain and elsewhere, in France and in Ireland, and in Anjou he found the tale. There he read the true story of Mazadan, and the exact record of all his family was written there.

Of the numerous items that beg for comment in this passage, it is important to note at least four. One is that the Grail story apparently involves the family of an individual named Mazadan. A second is that the house of Anjou is in some way of paramount consequence. A third is that the original version of the story seems to have filtered into Western Europe over the Pyrenees, from Muslim Spain—a perfectly plausible assertion, given the status Toledo enjoyed as a centre for esoteric studies, both Judaic and Muslim. But the most striking element in the passage quoted is that the Grail story, as Wolfram explains its derivation, would seem ultimately to be of Judaic origin. If the Grail is so awesome a Christian mystery, why should its secret be transmitted by Judaic initiates? For that matter, why should Judaic writers have had access to specifically Christian material of which Christendom itself was unaware?

Scholars have wasted considerable time and energy debating whether Kyot and Flegetanis are real or fictitious. In fact the identity of Kyot, as we had learned from our study of the Templars, can be fairly solidly established. Kyot de Provence would seem, almost certainly, to have been Guiot de Provins—a troubadour, monk and spokesman for the Templars who did live in Provence and who wrote love songs, attacks on the Church, paeans in praise of the Temple and satirical verses.

Guiot is known to have visited Mayence, in Germany, in 1184. The occasion was the chivalric festival of Pentecost, at which the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, conferred knighthood on his sons. As a matter of course the ceremony was attended by poets and troubadours from all over Christendom. As a knight of the Holy Roman Empire, Wolfram would almost certainly have been present; and it is certainly reasonable to suppose that he and Guiot met. Learned men were not so very common at the time. Inevitably they would have clustered together, sought each other out, made each other’s acquaintance; and Guiot may well have found in Wolfram a kindred spirit to whom he perhaps confided certain information, even if only in symbolic form. And if Guiot permits Kyot to be accepted as genuine, it is at least plausible to assume that Flegetanis was genuine as well. If he was not, Wolfram and/or Guiot must have had some special purpose in creating him. And in giving him the distinctive background and pedigree he is said to have had.

In addition to the Grail story, Wolfram may have obtained from Guiot a consuming interest in the Templars. In any case it is known that Wolfram possessed such an interest. Like Guiot he even made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where he could observe the Templars in action, at first hand. And in Parzival he emphasises that the guardians of the Grail and the Grail family are Templars. This might, of course, be the sloppy chronology and cavalier anachronism of poetic licence—such as can be discerned in some of the other Grail romances. But Wolfram is much more careful about such things than other writers of his time. Moreover there are the patent allusions to the Temple in the Perlesvaus. Would both Wolfram and the author of the Perlesvaus be guilty of the same glaring anachronism? Possibly. But it is also possible that something is being implied by these ostentatious connections of the Templars with the Grail. For if the Templars are indeed guardians of the Grail, there is one flagrant implication—that the Grail existed not only in Arthurian times, but also during the Crusades, when the romances about it were composed. By introducing the Templars, both Wolfram and the author of the Perlesvaus may be suggesting that the Grail was not just something of the past, but also something which, for them, possessed contemporary relevance.

The background to Wolfram’s poem is thus as important, in some obscure way, as the text of the poem itself. Indeed the role of the Templars, like the identity of both Kyot and Flegetanis, would seem to be crucial; and these factors may well hold a key to the whole mystery surrounding the Grail. Unfortunately, the text of Parzival does little to resolve these questions, while posing a good many others.

In the first place Wolfram not only maintains that his version of the Grail story, in contrast to Chretien’s, is the correct one. He also maintains that Chretien’s account is merely fantastic fable, whereas his is in fact a species of “initiation document”. In other words, as Wolfram states quite unequivocally, there is more to the Grail mystery than meets the eye. And he makes it clear, with numerous references throughout his poem, that the Grail is not merely an object of gratuitous mystification and fantasy, but a means of concealing something of immense consequence. Again and again, he hints to his audience to read between the lines, dropping here and there suggestive hints. At the same time, he constantly reiterates the urgency of secrecy, “For no man can ever win the Grail unless he is known in Heaven and he be called by name to the Grail.” And ’the Grail is unknown save to those who have been called by name… to the Grail’s company.’

Wolfram is both precise and elusive in identifying the Grail. When it first appears, on Parzival’s sojourn in the Fisher King’s castle, there is no real indication of what it is. It would seem, however, to have something in common with Chretien’s vague description of it:

She [the Queen of the Grail family] was clothed in a dress of Arabian silk. Upon a deep green achmardi she bore the Perfection of Paradise, both root and branch. That was a thing called the Grail, which surpasses all earthly perfection. Repanse de Schoye was the name of her whom the Grail permitted to be its bearer. Such was the nature of the Grail that she who watched over it had to preserve her purity and renounce all falsity.

Among other things, the Grail, at this point, would seem to be a kind of magical cornucopia or horn of plenty:

A hundred squires, so ordered, reverently took bread in white napkins from before the Grail, stepped back in a group and, separating, passed the bread to all the tables. I was told, and I tell you too, but on your oath, not mine—hence if I deceive you, we are liars all of us—that whatsoever one reached out his hand for, he found it ready, in front of the Grail, food warm or food cold, dishes new or old, meat tame or game. “There never was anything like that,” many will say. But they will be wrong in their angry protest, for the Grail was the fruit of blessedness, such abundance of the sweetness of the world that its delights were very like what we are told of the kingdom of heaven.

All of this is rather mundane in its way, even pedestrian, and the Grail would appear to be an innocuous enough affair. But later, when Parzival’s hermit-uncle expounds on the Grail, it becomes decidedly more powerful. After a lengthy disquisition, which includes strands of flagrantly Gnostic thought, the hermit describes the Grail thus:

Well I know that many brave knights dwell with the Grail at Munsalvaesche. Always when they ride out, as they often do, it is to seek adventure. They do so for their sins, these templars, whether their reward be defeat or victory. A valiant host lives there, and I will tell you how they are sustained. They live from a stone of purest kind. If you do not know it, it shall here be named to you. It is called lapsit exillis. By the power of that stone the phoenix burns to ashes, but the ashes give him life again. Thus does the phoenix molt and change its plumage, which afterwards is bright and shining and as lovely as before. There never was a human so ill but that, if he one day sees that stone, he cannot die within the week that follows. And in looks he will not fade. His appearance will stay the same, be it maid or man, as on the day he saw the stone, the same as when the best years of his life began, and though he should see the stone for two hundred years, it will never change, save that his hair might perhaps turn grey. Such power does the stone give a man that flesh and bones are at once made young again. The stone is also called the Grail.

According to Wolfram, then, the Grail is a stone of some kind. But such a definition of the Grail is far more provocative than satisfying. Scholars have a number of interpretations of the phrase ’lapsit exillis’, all of which are more or less plausible. “Lapsit exillis” might be a corruption of “lapis ex caelis”—“stone from the heavens”. It might also be a corruption of “lap sit ex caelis”—“it fell from the heavens”, or of “lapis lapsus ex caelus”—“a stone fallen from heaven”, or, finally, of “lapis elixir”—the fabulous Philosopher’s Stone of alchemy. Certainly the passage quoted, like the whole of Wolfram’s poem for that matter, is laden with alchemical symbolism. The phoenix, for example, is established alchemical shorthand for resurrection or rebirth—and also, in medieval iconography, is an emblem of the dying and resurrected Jesus.

If the phoenix is indeed somehow representative of Jesus, Wolfram is implicitly associating him with a stone. Such an association is, of course, hardly unique. There is Peter (Pierre or “stone” in French)—the “stone” or ‘rock’ on which Jesus establishes his church. And as we had discovered, Jesus, in the New Testament, explicitly equates himself with “the keystone neglected by the builders”—the keystone of the Temple; the Rock of Sion.

Because it was “founded” on this rock, there was supposedly a royal tradition descended from Godfroi de Bouillon which was equal to the reigning dynasties of Europe. Wolfram links that immediately following the one quoted, and, through the symlicoraecifically with the Crucifixion—This very day, there comes with the Magdalene: wherein lies its greatest power the Grail] a message and they await there a dove, jay is Good Friday, Heaven. It brings a small white the stone. Then, shining white, the down it on Heaven again. Always on Good Friday it up to the stone what I have just told you, and from that the stone derives whatever good fragrances of drink and food there are on earth, like to the perfection of Paradise. I mean all things the earth may bear. And further the stone provides whatever game lives beneath the heavens, whether it flies or runs or swims. Thus, to the knightly brotherhood, does the power of the Grail give sustenance.

In addition to its other extraordinary attributes the Grail, in Wolfram’s poem, would almost seem to possess a certain sentience. It has the capacity to call individuals into its service—to call them, that is, in an active sense:

Hear now how those called to the Grail are made known. On the stone, around the edge, appear letters inscribed, giving the name and lineage of each one, maid or boy, who is to take this blessed journey. No one needs to rub out the inscription, for once he had read the name, it fades away before his eyes. All those now grown to maturity came there as children. Blessed is the mother who bore a child destined to do service there. Poor and rich alike rejoice if their child is summoned to join the company. They are brought there from many lands. From sinful shame they are more protected than others, and receive good reward in heaven. When life dies for them here they are given perfection there.

If the Grail’s guardians are Templars, its actual custodians would appear to be members of a specific family. This family seems to possess numerous collateral branches, some of which—their identity often unknown even to themselves—are scattered about the world. But other members of the family inhabit the Grail of Munsalvaesche—fairly obviously linked with the legendary Cathar castle of The writer has identified tsalvat, which at least one salvaesche dwell a nu, as Montsegur. Within Munthe Grail’s actual number of enigmatic figures. There is (“Reponse de C’-,eeper and bearer, Repanse de Schoye course, A.” =loix or “Chosen Response”). And there is, of castle .ntortas, the Fisher King and lord of the Grail cro ;, who is wounded in the genitals and unable to procreate or, alternatively, to die. As in Chretien’s Grail romance, Anfortas, for Wolfram, is Parzival’s uncle. And when, at the end of the poem, the curse is lifted and Anfortas can at last die, Parzival becomes heir to the Grail castle.

The Grail, or the Grail family, calls certain individuals into its service from the outside world—individuals who must be initiated into some sort of mystery. At the same time it sends its trained servitors out into the world to perform actions on its behalf and sometimes to occupy a throne. For the Grail, apparently, possesses the power to create kings:

Maidens are appointed to care for the Grail… That was God’s decree, and these maidens performed their service before it. The Grail selects only noble company. Knights, devout and good, are chosen to guard it. The coming of the high stars brings this people great sorrow, young and old alike. God’s anger at them has lasted all too long. When shall they ever say yes to joy?… I will tell you something more, whose truth you may well believe. A twofold chance is often theirs; they both give and receive profit. They receive young children there, of noble lineage and beautiful. And if anywhere a land loses its lord, if the people there acknowledge the Hand of God, and seek a new lord, they are granted one from the company of the Grail. They must treat him with courtesy, for the blessing of God protects him.

From the above passage, it would seem that at some point in the past the Grail family somehow incurred God’s wrath. The allusion to “God’s anger at them” echoes numerous medieval statements about the Jews. It also echoes the title of a mysterious book associated with Nicolas Flamel—The Sacred Book of Abraham the Jew, Prince, Priest, Levite, Astrologer and Philosopher to that Tribe of Jews who by the Wrath of God were Dispersed amongst the Gauls. And Flegetanis, who Wolfram says wrote the original account of the Grail, is said to be descended from Solomon. Could the Grail family possibly be of Judaic origin?

Whatever the curse formerly visited upon the Grail family, it has unquestionably come, by Parzival’s time, to enjoy divine favour and a great deal of power as well. And yet it is rigorously enjoined, at least in certain respects, to secrecy about its identity.

The men [of the Grail family] God sends forth secretly; the maidens leave openly… Thus the maids are sent out openly from the Grail, and the men in secret, that they may have children who will in turn one day enter the service of the Grail, and serving, enhance its company. God can teach them how to do this.

Women of the Grail family, then, when they intermarry with the outside world, may disclose their pedigree and identity. The men, however, must keep this information scrupulously concealed—so much so, in fact, that they may not even allow questions about their origins. The point, apparently, is a crucial one, for Wolfram returns to it most emphatically at the very end of the poem.

Upon the Grail it was now found written that any templar whom God’s hand appointed master over foreign people should forbid the asking of his name or race, and that he should help them to their rights. If the question is asked of him they shall have his help no longer.

From this, of course, derives the dilemma of Lohengrin, Parzival’s son, who when queried on his origin, must abandon his wife and children and retire into the seclusion from whence he came. But why should such stringent secrecy be required? What “skeleton in the closet”, so to speak, might conceivably dictate it? If the Grail family were, in fact, of Judaic origin, that for the age in which Wolfram was writing might constitute a possible explanation. And such an explanation gains at least some credence from the Lohengrin story. For there are many variants of the Lohengrin story, and Lohengrin is not always identified by the same name. In some versions, he is called Helios implying the sun. In other versions, he is called Elie or Eli—an unmistakably Judaic name.

In Robert de Boron’s romance and in the Perlesvaus, Perceval is of Judaic lineage—the ‘holy lineage’ of Joseph of Arimathea. In Wolfram’s poem this status, so far as Parzival is concerned, would seem to be incidental. True, Parzival is the nephew of the wounded Fisher King and thus related by blood to the Grail family. And though he does not marry into the Grail family—he is, in fact, already married—he still inherits the Grail castle and becomes its new lord. But for Wolfram the protagonist’s pedigree would seem to be less important than the means whereby he proves himself worthy of it. He must, in short, conform to certain criteria dictated by the blood he carries in his veins. And this emphasis would clearly seem to indicate the importance Wolfram ascribes to that blood.

There is no question that Wolfram does ascribe immense significance to a particular bloodline. If there is a single dominant theme pervading not only Parzival, but his other works as well, it is not so much the Grail as the Grail family. Indeed the Grail family seems to dominate Wolfram’s mind to an almost obsessive degree, and he devotes far more attention to them and their genealogy than to the mysterious object of which they are custodians.

The genealogy of the Grail family can be reconstructed from a close reading of Parzival. Parzival himself is a nephew of Anfortas, the maimed Fisher King and lord of the Grail castle. Anfortas, in turn, is the son of one Frimutel, and Frimutel the son of Titurel. At this point the lineage becomes more entangled. Eventually, however, it leads back to a certain Laziliez—which may be a derivation of Lazarus, the brother, in the New Testament, of Mary and Martha. And Laziliez’s parents, the original progenitors of the Grail family, are named Mazadan and Terdelaschoye. The latter is obviously a Germanic version of a French phrase, “Terre de la Choix”—“Chosen Land”. Mazadan is rather more obscure. It might conceivably derive from the Zoroastrian Ahura Mazda, the dualist principle of Light. At the same time, it also, if only phonetically perhaps, suggests Masada—a major bastion during the Judaic revolt against Roman occupation in A.D. 68.

The names Wolfram ascribes to members of the Grail family are thus often provocative and suggestive. At the same time, however, they told us nothing that was historically useful. If we hoped to find an actual historical prototype for the Grail family, we would have to look elsewhere. The clues were meagre enough. We knew, for example, that the Grail family supposedly culminated in Godfroi de Bouillon; but that did not cast much light on Godfroi’s mythical antecedents—except, of course, that (like his real antecedents) they kept their identity scrupulously secret. But according to Wolfram, Kyot found an account of the Grail story in the annals of the house of Anjou, and Parzival himself is said to be of Angevin blood. At the least this was extremely interesting—for the house of Anjou was closely associated with both the Templars and the Holy Land. Indeed Fulques, Count of Anjou, himself became, so to speak, an “honorary” or part-time Templar. In 1131, moreover, he married Godfroi de Bouillon’s niece, the legendary Melusine, and became king of Jerusalem. According to the “Prieure documents”, the lords of Anjou—the Plantagenet family—were thus allied to the Merovingian bloodline. And the name of Plantagenet may even have been intended to echo “Plant-Ard” or Plantard.

Such connections were patchy and tenuous. But additional clues were provided for us by the geographical setting of Wolfram’s poem. For the most part this setting is France. In contrast to later Grail chroniclers Wolfram even maintains that Arthur’s court, Camelot, is situated in France—quite specifically at Nantes. Nantes, now in Brittany, was the westernmost boundary of the old Merovingian realm at the apex of its power.

In a manuscript of Chretien’s version of the Grail story, Perceval declares he was born in “Scaudone” or “Sinadon”, or some such place that appears in a number of orthographic variants—and the region is described as mountainous. According to Wolfram, Parzival comes from “Waleis”. Most scholars have taken Waleis to be Wales and Sinadon, in its various spellings, as Snowdon or Snowdonia. If this is so, however, certain insurmountable problems arise, and, as one modern commentator remarks, “maps fail us”. For characters move constantly between Waleis and Arthur’s court at Nantes, as well as other French locations, without crossing any water! They move overland, in short, and through regions whose inhabitants speak French. Was Wolfram’s geography simply sloppy? Can it possibly have been that careless? Or might Waleis not be Wales after all? Two scholars have suggested that it might be Valois, the region of France to the north-east of Paris—but there are no mountains in Valois, nor does the rest of the landscape conform in any way to Wolfram’s description. At the same time, however, there is another possible location for Waleis—a location that is mountainous, that does conform precisely to Wolfram’s other topographical descriptions and whose inhabitants do speak French. This location is the Valais in Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Leman to the east of Geneva. It would seem, in short, that Parzival’s homeland is neither Wales nor Valois, but Valais. And his actual birthplace of Sinadon would not be Snowdon or Snowdonia, but Sidonensis, the capital of the Valais. And the modern name of Sidonensis, capital of the Valais, is Sion.

According to Wolfram, then, Arthur’s court is in Brittany. Parzival would seem to have been born in Switzerland. And the Grail family itself? The Grail castle? Wolfram provides an answer in his most ambitious work, left unfinished at his death and entitled Der Junge Titurel. In this evocative fragment Wolfram addressed himself to the life of Titurel, father of Anfortas, and the original builder of the Grail castle. Der Junge Titurel is very specific not only about genealogical detail, but also about the dimensions, the components, the materials, the configuration of the Grail castle—its circular chapel, for example, like those of the Templars. And the castle itself is situated in the Pyrenees.

In addition to Der Junge Titurel, Wolfram left another work unfinished at his death—the poem known as Willehalm, whose protagonist is Guillem de Gellone, Merovingian ruler of the ninth-century principality straddling the Pyrenees. Guillem is said to be associated with the Grail family. He would thus seem to be the only figure in Wolfram’s works whose historical identity can actually be determined. Yet even in his treatment of the unidentifiable figures, Wolfram’s meticulous precision is astonishing. The more one studies him, the more likely it seems that he is referring to an actual group of people—not a mythic or fictionalised family, but one that did exist historically, and may well have included Guillem de Gellone. This conclusion becomes all the more plausible when Wolfram admits he is hiding something—that Parzival and his other works are not merely romances, but also initiation documents, depositories of secrets.

The Grail and Cabalism

As the Perlesvaus suggests, the Grail, at least in part, would seem to be an experience of some kind. In his excursus on the Grail’s curative properties and its power to ensure longevity, Wolfram would also seem to be implying something experiential as well as symbolic—a state of mind or a state of being. There seems little question that on one level the Grail is an initiatory experience which in modern terminology would be described as a ’transformation’ or “altered state of consciousness”. Alternatively it might be described as a “Gnostic experience”, a ‘mystical experience’, ‘illumination’ or “union with God”. It is possible to be even more precise and place the experiential aspect of the Grail in a very specific context.

That context is the Cabala and Cabalistic thought. Certainly such thought was much ‘in the air’ at the time the Grail romances were composed. There was a famous Cabalistic school at Toledo, for instance, where Kyot is said to have learned of the Grail. There were other schools at Gerona, Montpellier and elsewhere in the south of France. And it would hardly seem coincidental that there was also such a school at Troyes. It dated from 1070—Godfroi de Bouillon’s time—and was conducted by one Rashi, perhaps the most famous of medieval Cabalists.

It is impossible here, of course, to do justice to the Cabala or Cabalistic thought. Nevertheless certain points must be made in order to establish the connection between Cabalism and the Grail romances. Very briefly then, Cabalism might be described as “esoteric Judaism”—a practical psychological methodology of uniquely Judaic origin designed to induce a dramatic transformation of consciousness. In this respect it may be viewed as a Judaic equivalent of similar methodologies or disciplines in Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist tradition—certain forms of yoga for example, or of Zen.

Like its Eastern equivalents, Cabalistic training entails a series of rituals—a structured sequence of successive initiatory experiences leading the practitioner to ever more radical modifications of consciousness and cognition. And though the meaning and significance of such modifications is subject to interpretation, their reality, as psychological phenomena, is beyond dispute. Of the “stages” of Cabalistic initiation, one of the most important is the stage known as Tiferet. In the Tiferet experience the individual is said to pass beyond the world of form into the formless or, in contemporary terms, to ’transcend his ego’. Symbolically speaking this consists of a kind of sacrificial “death”—the “death” of the ego, of one’s sense of individuality and the isolation such individuality entails; and, of course, a rebirth, or resurrection, into another dimension, of all-encompassing unity and harmony. In Christian adaptations of Cabalism Tiferet was therefore associated with Jesus.

For medieval Cabalists the initiation into Tiferet was associated with certain specific symbols. These included a hermit or guide or wise old man, a majestic king, a child, a sacrificed god. In time other symbols were added as well—a truncated pyramid, for example, a cube and a rose cross. The relation of these symbols to the Grail romances is sufficiently apparent. In every Grail narrative there is a wise old hermit—Perceval’s or Parzival’s uncle frequently—who acts as a spiritual guide. In Wolfram’s poem the Grail as “stone” may possibly correspond to the cube. And in the Perlesvaus the various manifestations of the Grail correspond almost precisely to the symbols of Tiferet. Indeed, the Perlesvaus in itself establishes a crucial link between the Tiferet experience and the Grail.

The Play on Words

We could thus identify the experiential aspect of the Grail and connect it quite precisely with Cabalism. This imparted another seemingly incongruous Judaic element to the Grail’s supposedly Christian character. But whatever the Grail’s experiential aspects, there were other aspects as well—aspects which we could not ignore and which were of paramount importance to our story. These aspects were historical and genealogical.

Again and again, the Grail romances had confronted us with a pattern of a distinctly mundane and unmystical nature. Again and again, there was a callow knight who, by dint of certain tests that proved him ‘worthy’, was initiated into some monumental secret. Again and again, this secret was closely guarded by an order of some sort, apparently chivalric in composition. Again and again, the secret was in some way associated with a specific family. Again and again, the protagonist by intermarriage with this family, by his own lineage or by both became lord of the Grail and everything connected with it. On this level, at least, we seemed to be dealing with something of a concrete historical character. One can become lord of a castle or a group of people. One can become heir to certain lands or even a certain heritage. But one cannot become lord or heir to an experience.

Was it relevant, we wondered, that the Grail romances, when subjected to close scrutiny, rested so crucially on matters of lineage and genealogy, pedigree, heritage and inheritance? Was it relevant that the lineage and genealogy in question should overlap at certain key points those which had figured so saliently in our inquiry—the house of Anjou, for instance, Guillem de Gellone and Godfroi de Bouillon? Could the mystery attached to Rennes-le-Chateau and the Prieure de Sion relate, in some as yet obscure way, to that mysterious object called the Holy Grail? Had we, in fact, been following in Parzival’s footsteps and conducting our own modern Grail quest?

The evidence suggested that this was a very real possibility. And indeed there was one more crucial piece of evidence which tilted the balance decisively in favour of such a conclusion. In many of the earlier manuscripts, the Grail is called the “Sangraal”; and even in the later version by Malory, it is called the “Sangreal”. It is likely that some such form—“Sangraal” or “Sangreal”—was in fact the original one. It is also likely that that one word was subsequently broken in the wrong place. In other words “Sangraal” or “Sangreal” may not have been intended to divide into “San Graal” or “San Greal” but into “Sang Raal” or “Sang Real”. Or, to employ the modern spelling, Sang Royal. Royal blood.

In itself, such wordplay might be provocative but hardly conclusive. Taken in conjunction with the emphasis on genealogy and lineage, however, there is not much room for doubt. And, for that matter, the traditional associations—the cup which caught Jesus’s blood, for instance—would seem to reinforce this supposition. Quite clearly, the Grail would appear to pertain in some way to blood and a bloodline. This raises, of course, certain obvious questions. Whose blood? And whose bloodline?

The Lost Kings and the Grail

The Grail romances were not the only poems of their kind to find a receptive audience in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. There were many others—Tristan and Isolde, for instance, and Eric and Enide—composed in some cases by Chretien himself, in some cases by contemporaries and countrymen of Wolfram, such as Hartmann von Aue and Gottfried von Strassburg. These romances make no mention whatever of the Grail. But they are clearly set in the same mythico-historical period as the Grail romances, because they depend more or less heavily on Arthur. As far as he can be dated, Arthur seems to have lived in the late fifth and/or early sixth centuries. In other words, Arthur lived at the peak of Merovingian ascendancy in Gaul, and was, in fact, closely contemporary with Clovis. If the term “Ursus”—bear—was applied to the Merovingian royal line, the name “Arthur”, which also means ‘bear’, may have been an attempt to confer a comparable dignity on a British chieftain.

For the writers at the time of the Crusades, the Merovingian era seems to have been of some crucial importance—so much so, in fact, that it provided the backdrop for romances which had nothing to do with either Arthur or the Grail. One such is the national epic of Germany, the Nibelungenlied or Song of the Nibelungen, on which, in the nineteenth century, Wagner drew so heavily for his monumental operatic sequence, The Ring. This musical opus, and the poem from which it derives, are generally dismissed as pure fantasy. Yet the Nibelungs were a real people, a Germanic tribe who lived in late Merovingian times. Moreover, many of the names in the Nibelungenlied—Siegmund, for instance, Siegfried, Sieglinde, Brunhilde and Kriemhild—are patently Merovingian names. Many episodes in the poem closely parallel, and may even refer to, specific events of Merovingian times.

Although it has nothing to do with either Arthur or the Grail, the Nibelungenlied is further evidence that the Merovingian epoch exercised a powerful hold on the imaginations of twelfth- and thirteenth-century poets—as if they knew something crucial about that epoch which later writers and historians did not. In any case, modern scholars concur that the Grail romances, like the Nibelungenlied, refer to the Merovingian age. In part, of course, this conclusion would appear self-evident, given the prominence of Arthur. But it also rests on specific indications provided by the Grail romances themselves. The Queste del Saint Graal, for example, composed between 1215 and 1230, declares explicitly that the events of the Grail story occurred precisely 454 years after the resurrection of Jesus. Assuming Jesus died in A.D. 33, the Grail saga would thus have enacted itself in A.D. 487—during the first flush of Merovingian power, and a mere nine years before the baptism of Clovis.

There was nothing revolutionary or controversial, therefore, in connecting the Grail romances with the Merovingian age. None the less question of emphasis which, because of Arthur, has been placed primarily on Britain. As a result of this distinctly British emphasis, we had not automatically associated the Grail with the Merovingian dynasty. And yet Wolfram insists that Arthur’s court is at Nantes and that his poem is set in France. The same assertion is made by other Grail romances—the Queste del Saint Graal, for instance. And there are medieval traditions which maintain the Grail was not brought to Britain by Joseph of Arimathea, but to France by the Magdalene.

We now began to wonder whether the pre-eminence assigned to Britain by commentators on the Grail romances had not perhaps been misplaced, and whether the romances in fact referred primarily to events on the continent—more particularly to events in France. And we began to suspect that the Grail itself, the “blood royal”, actually referred to the blood royal of the Merovingian dynasty—a blood which was deemed to be sacred and invested with magical or miraculous properties. Perhaps the Grail romances constituted, at least in part, a symbolic or allegorical account of certain events of the Merovingian epoch. And perhaps we had already encountered some of those events in the course of our investigation. A marriage with some special family, for example, which, shrouded by time, engendered the legends attending the dual paternity of Merovee. Or perhaps, in the Grail family, a representation of the clandestine perpetuation of the Merovingian bloodline—les rois perdus or “lost kings”—in the mountains and caves of the Razes. Or perhaps that bloodline’s exile in England during the late ninth and early tenth centuries. And the secret but august dynastic alliances whereby the Merovingian vine, like that of the Grail family, eventually bore fruit in Godfroi de Bouillon and the house of Lorraine.

Perhaps Arthur himself—the “bear”—was only incidentally related to the Celtic or Gallo-Roman chieftain. Perhaps the Arthur in the Grail romances was really “Ursus”—another name for “bear”. Perhaps the legendary Arthur in the chronicles of Geoffrey of Monmouth had been appropriated by writers on the Grail and deliberately transformed into the vehicle for a quite different, and secret, tradition. If so, this would explain why the Templars—established by the Prieure de Sion as guardians of the Merovingian bloodline—were declared to be guardians of the Grail and the Grail family.

If the Grail family and the Merovingian bloodline were one and the same, the Templars would indeed have been the guardians of the Grail at the time, more or less, that the Grail romances were composed. Their presence in the Grail romances would not, therefore, have been anachronistic.

The hypothesis was intriguing, but it raised one extremely crucial question. The romances may have been set in Merovingian times, but they linked the Grail quite explicitly to the origins of Christianity—to Jesus, to Joseph of Arimathea, to the Magdalene. Some of them, in fact, go even further. In Robert de Boron’s poem, Galahad is said to be Joseph of Arimathea’s son—although the identity of the knight’s mother is unclear. And the Queste del Saint Graal calls Galahad, like Jesus, a scion of the house of David, and identifies Galahad with Jesus himself. Indeed, the very name Galahad, according to modern scholars, derives from the name Gilead, which was deemed a mystical designation for Jesus.

If the Grail could be identified with the Merovingian bloodline, what was its connection with Jesus? Why should something so intimately associated with Jesus also be associated with the Merovingian epoch? How were we to reconcile the chronological discrepancy—the relation between something so pertinent to Jesus and events that occurred at least four centuries later? How could the Grail refer, on the one hand, to the Merovingian age and, on the other, to something brought by Joseph of Arimathea to England or the Magdalene to France?

Even on a symbolic level such questions asserted themselves. The Grail, for example, pertained in some way to blood. Even without the breaking of “Sangraal” into “Sang raal”, the Grail was said to have been a receptacle for Jesus’s blood. How could this be related to the Merovingians? And why should it be related to them at precisely the time it was—during the Crusades, when Merovingian heads wore the crown of the kingdom of Jerusalem, protected by the Order of the Temple and the Prieure de Sion?

The Grail romances stress the importance of Jesus’s blood. They also stress a lineage of some kind. And, given such factors as the Grail family’s culmination in Godfroi de Bouillon, they would seem to pertain to Merovingian blood. Could there possibly be some connection between these two apparently discordant elements? Could the blood of Jesus in some way be related to the blood royal of the Merovingians? Could the lineage connected with the Grail, brought into Western Europe shortly after the Crucifixion, be intertwined with the lineage of the Merovingians?

The Need to Synthesise

At this point we paused to review the evidence at our disposal. It was leading us in a startling yet unmistakable direction. But why, we wondered, had this evidence never been subpoenaed by scholars before? It had certainly been readily available, and for centuries. Why had no one, to our knowledge, ever synthesised it and drawn what would seem to be fairly obvious, if only speculative, conclusions? Granted, such conclusions a few centuries ago would have been rigorously taboo and, if published, severely punished. But there had been no such danger for at least the last two hundred years. Why, then, had the fragments of the puzzle not hitherto been assembled into a coherent whole?

The answers to these questions, we realised, lay in our own age and the modes or habits of thought which characterise it. Since the so-called “Enlightenment” of the eighteenth century, the orientation of Western culture and consciousness had been towards analysis, rather than synthesis. As a result, our age is one of ever increasing specialisation. In accordance with this tendency, modern scholarship lays inordinate emphasis on specialisation—which, as the modern university attests, implies and entails the segregation of knowledge into distinct “disciplines”. In consequence, the diverse spheres covered by our inquiry have traditionally been segmented into quite separate compartments. In each compartment the relevant material has been duly explored and evaluated by specialists, or “experts” in the field. But few, if any, of these “experts” have endeavoured to establish a connection between their particular field and others that may overlap it. Indeed such “experts” tend generally to regard fields other than their own with considerable suspicion—spurious at worst, at best irrelevant. And eclectic or “interdisciplinary” research is often actively discouraged as being, among other things, too speculative.

There have been numerous treatises on the Grail romances, their origins and development, their cultural impact, their literary quality. And there have been numerous studies, valid and otherwise, of the Templars and the Crusades. But few experts on the Grail romances have been historians, while fewer still have displayed much interest in the complex, often sordid and not very romantic history behind the Templars and the Crusades. Similarly historians of the Templars and the Crusades have, like all historians, adhered closely to “factual” records and documents. The Grail romances have been dismissed as mere fiction, as nothing more than a “cultural phenomenon”, a species of “by-product” generated by the “imagination of the age”. To suggest to such an historian that the Grail romances might contain a kernel of historical truth would be tantamount to heresy—even though Schliemann, more than True, various occult writers, proceeding primarily on the basis of wishful thinking, have given literal credence to the legends, claiming that, in some mystical way, the Templars were custodians of the Grail—whatever the Grail might be. But there has been no serious historical study that endeavours to establish any real connection. The Templars are regarded as fact, the Grail as fiction, and no association between the two is acknowledged possible. And if the Grail romances have thus been neglected by scholars and historians of the period in which they were written, it is hardly surprising that they have been neglected by experts on earlier epochs. Quite simply, it would not occur to a specialist in the Merovingian age to suspect that the Grail romances might, in any way, shed light on the subject of his study, if, indeed, he has any knowledge whatever of the Grail romances. But is it not a serious omission that no Merovingian scholar we have encountered even makes mention of the Arthurian legends which, chronologically speaking, refer to the very epoch in which he claims expertise?

If historians are unprepared to make such connections, Biblical scholars are even less prepared to do so. During the last few decades a welter of books has appeared—according to which Jesus was a pacifist, an Essene, a mystic, a Buddhist, a sorcerer, a revolutionary, a homosexual, even a mushroom. But despite this plethora of material on Jesus and the historical context of the New Testament, not one author, to our knowledge, has touched on the question of the Grail. Why should he? Why should an expert on Biblical history have any interest in, or knowledge of, a spate of fantastic romantic poems composed in Western Europe more than a thousand years later? It would seem inconceivable that the Grail romances could in any way elucidate the mysteries surrounding the New Testament.

But reality, history and knowledge cannot be segmented and compartmentalised according to the arbitrary filing system of the human intellect. And while documentary evidence may be hard to come by, it is self-evident that traditions may survive for a thousand years, then surface in a written form that does illuminate previous events. Certain Irish sagas, for instance, can reveal a great deal about the shift from matriarchal to patriarchal society in Ancient Ireland. Without Homer’s work, composed long after the fact, no one would even have heard of the siege of Troy. And War and Peace—although written more than half a century later—can tell us more than most history books, more even than most official documents, about Russia during the Napoleonic era.

Any responsible researcher must, like a detective, pursue whatever clues come to hand, however seemingly improbable. One should not dismiss material a priori, out of hand, because it threatens to lead into unlikely or unfamiliar territory. The events of the Watergate scandal, for instance, were reconstructed initially from a multitude of ostensibly disparate fragments, each meaningless in itself, and with no apparent connection between them. Indeed, some of the often childish “dirty tricks” must have seemed, to investigators at the time, as divorced from the broader issues as the Grail romances might seem from the New Testament. And the Watergate scandal was confined to a single country and a time-span of a few short years. The subject of our investigation encompasses the whole of Western culture, and a time-span of two millennia.

What is necessary is an interdisciplinary approach to one’s chosen material—a mobile and flexible approach that permits one to move freely between disparate disciplines, across space and time. One must be able to link data and make connections between people, events and phenomena widely divorced from each other. One must be able to move, as necessity dictates, from the third to the twelfth to the seventh to the eighteenth centuries, drawing on a varied spectrum of sources—early ecclesiastical texts, the Grail romances, Merovingian records and chronicles, the writings of Freemasonry.

In short, one must synthesise—for only by such synthesis can one discern the underlying continuity, the unified and coherent fabric, which lies at the core of any historical problem. Such an approach is neither particularly revolutionary, in principle, nor particularly controversial. It is rather like taking a tenet of contemporary Church dogma—the Immaculate Conception, for instance, or the obligatory celibacy of priests—and using it to illumine early Christianity. In much the same way the Grail romances may be used to shed some significant light on the New Testament—on the career and identity of Jesus.

Finally it is not sufficient to confine oneself exclusively to facts. One must also discern the repercussions and ramifications of facts, as those repercussions and ramifications radiate through the centuries—often in the form of myth and legend. True, the facts themselves may be distorted in the process, like an echo reverberating among cliffs. But if the voice itself cannot be located, the echo, however distorted, may yet point the way to it. Facts, in short, are like pebbles dropped into the pool of history. They disappear quickly, often without a trace. But they generate ripples which, if one’s perspective is broad enough, enable one to pinpoint where the pebble originally fell. Guided by the ripples, one may then dive or dredge or adopt whatever approach one wishes. The point is that the ripples permit one to locate what might otherwise be irrecoverable.

It was now becoming apparent to us that everything we had studied during our investigation was but a ripple—which, monitored correctly, might direct us to a single stone cast into the pool of history two thousand years ago.

Our Hypothesis

The Magdalene had figured prominently throughout our inquiry. According to certain medieval legends, the Magdalene brought the Holy Grail or “Blood Royal” into France. The Grail is closely associated with Jesus. And the Grail, on one level at least, relates in some way to blood—or, more specifically, to a bloodline and lineage. The Grail romances are for the most part, however, set in Merovingian times. But they were not composed until after Godfroi de Bouillon—fictional scion of the Grail family and actual scion of the Merovingians—was installed, in everything but name, as king of Jerusalem.

If we had been dealing with anyone other than Jesus—if we had been dealing with a personage such as Alexander, for example, or Julius Caesar—these fragmentary shreds of evidence alone would have led, almost ineluctably, to one glaring self-evident conclusion. We drew that conclusion, however controversial and explosive it might be. We began to test it at least as a tentative hypothesis. Perhaps the Magdalene—that elusive woman in the Gospels—was in fact Jesus’s wife. Perhaps their union produced offspring. After the Crucifixion, perhaps the Magdalene, with at least one child, was smuggled to Gaul where established Jewish communities already existed and where, in consequence, she might have found a refuge. Perhaps there was, in short, an hereditary bloodline descended directly from Jesus. Perhaps this bloodline, this supreme sang real, then perpetuated itself, intact and incognito, for some four hundred years—which is not, after all, a very long time for an important lineage.

Perhaps there were dynastic intermarriages not only with other Jewish families, but with Romans and Visigoths as well. And perhaps in the fifth century Jesus’s lineage became allied with the royal line of the Franks, thereby engendering the Merovingian dynasty.

If this sketchy hypothesis was in any sense true, it would serve to explain a great many elements in our investigation. It would explain the extraordinary status accorded the Magdalene, and the cult significance she attained during the Crusades. It would explain the sacred status accorded the Merovingians. It would explain the legendary birth of Merovee—child of two fathers, one of them a symbolic marine creature from beyond the sea, a marine creature which, like Jesus, might be equated with the mystical fish. It would explain the pact between the Roman Church and Clovis’s bloodline—for would not a pact with Jesus’s lineal descendants be the obvious pact for a church founded in his name? It would explain the apparently incommensurate stress laid on the assassination of Dagobert II—for the Church, by being party to that murder, would have been guilty not only of regicide, but, according to its own tenets, of a form of deicide as well. It would explain the attempt to eradicate Dagobert from history. It would explain the Carolingians’ obsession to legitimise themselves, as Holy Roman Emperors, by claiming a Merovingian pedigree.

A bloodline descended from Jesus through Dagobert would also explain the Grail family in the romances—the secrecy which surrounds it, its exalted status, the impotent Fisher King unable to rule, the process whereby Parzival or Perceval became heir to the Grail castle. Finally, it would explain the mystical pedigree of Godfroi de Bouillon—son or grandson of Lohengrin, grandson or great-grandson of Parzival, scion of the Grail family. And if Godfroi were descended from Jesus, his triumphant capture of Jerusalem in 1099 would have entailed far more than simply rescuing the Holy Sepulchre from the infidel. Godfroi would have been reclaiming his own rightful heritage.

We had already guessed that the references to viticulture throughout our investigation symbolised dynastic alliances. On the basis of our hypothesis, viticulture now seemed to symbolise the process whereby Jesus—who identifies himself repeatedly with the vine—perpetuated his lineage. As if in confirmation, we discovered a carved door depicting Jesus as a cluster of grapes. This door was in Sion, Switzerland.

Our hypothetical scenario was both logically consistent and intriguing. As yet, however, it was also preposterous. Attractive though it might be, it was, as yet, much too sketchy and rested on far too flimsy a foundation. Although it explained many things, it could not yet in itself be supported. There were still too many holes in it, too many inconsistencies and anomalies, too many loose ends. Before we could seriously entertain or consider it, we would have to determine whether there was any real evidence to sustain it. In an attempt to find such evidence we began to explore the Gospels, the historical context of the New Testament and the writings of the early Church fathers.