Introduction to the Grail
Something seems to grip the Western imagination whenever we talk of the Holy Grail. While other myths and legends have slipped into oblivion, at the core of this legend there seems to exist some magic that has sustained the mystical appeal of the Grail for the last nine hundred years. An alchemical process appears to be triggered in our collective unconscious, transforming this story into a mythical dream image of the ultimate quest for all and everything.
Few have actually read any of the original Grail romances. Even fewer are acquainted with all the various pagan and apocryphal models upon which the legend grew, and yet the concept of the Grail Quest is still instantly recognized by most westerners as the greatest of all spiritual endeavours. So it is all the more strange that our fascination with the legend, or the sources behind it, appears to be out of all proportion to our knowledge about it.
So is there any historical evidence to support the idea there really was a Grail to be achieved anyway? Or was the legend only a delightful literary device created by troubadours to entertain the courts of Europe as they gently dozed off after the stuffed aurochs and roasted boar?
Yet somewhere within the interwoven threads of this legendary medieval tapestry there is a radical and compelling message, as fresh and alive today as it was in the twelfth century.
Few have actually read any of the original Grail romances. Even fewer are acquainted with all the various pagan and apocryphal models upon which the legend grew, and yet the concept of the Grail Quest is still instantly recognized by most westerners as the greatest of all spiritual endeavours. So it is all the more strange that our fascination with the legend, or the sources behind it, appears to be out of all proportion to our knowledge about it.
So is there any historical evidence to support the idea there really was a Grail to be achieved anyway? Or was the legend only a delightful literary device created by troubadours to entertain the courts of Europe as they gently dozed off after the stuffed aurochs and roasted boar?
Yet somewhere within the interwoven threads of this legendary medieval tapestry there is a radical and compelling message, as fresh and alive today as it was in the twelfth century.
1190 ~ 1220 The Era of the Legend
The Legend of the Grail first appeared at the end of the twelfth century, leaping as if fully armed from the head of a gifted poet called Chrétien de Troyes. We know virtually nothing of Chrétien's life except through his work, yet to many scholars he was the greatest French writer of all medieval romances. Certainly his writings were largely responsible for the subsequent popularity of the Arthurian legends of the period, and without his tales the Grail story might never have been told at all.
In Chrétien's time the written romance was a completely new phenomenon, drawing upon an oral tradition that had been firmly established in the Celtic lands for centuries.
For the northern Celts, the bard had long been a tribe's most precious repository of their history. He was the authority of their lineage, he sang of their noble deeds, of their father's deeds and of their remembrance of claims to kingship and order. The bard was the maker and holder of the collective memory and the collective myth. Without a bard the tribe would lose its significance and identity.
The new troubadours who peddled their wares across the continent no longer sang to such close-knit tribal families, but rather penned the traditional tales of many tribes, creating legends with which a king, a court or cloister could identify, irrespective of tribal background. They became the new literary bards who expressed a collective dream that embraced the whole family of Europe, from the lavish courts of Aquitaine, Anjou and Lorraine to that of Henry II of England.
It is said that an individual who does not dream, who cannot transform his or her fears, tensions and aspirations into meaningful images, becomes sick. A society that has lost its ability to respond to the collective dream, or legend, is likewise unable to heal itself or to fulfil its need for a spiritual or religious life. And Europe in the twelfth century, while being on the cusp of a great change, was very sick indeed. The male-dominated Church of Rome had subsumed all local myths into its own grand scheme. But its rigid orthodoxy and weird hatred of Eve had resulted in a one-sided, stagnant and ultimately twisted vision.
So the timing of the emergence of the Grail legends is significant and hardly a coincidence. A strange wave of hysteria had swept the Christian world at the turn of the tenth century, alternately swinging between prophecies of doom and those of ecstasy. The world was supposed to end by the year 1000, bringing the long-awaited New Kingdom of Heaven. But instead of being surrounded by the promised paradise on earth, the people found themselves in a barren and hopeless wasteland. The Holy City of Jerusalem had been won but then promptly lost. The Christian armies proved no match for the "Saracen Infidels" who appeared to have a far more civilized and wondrous culture than their own, and everyone could see that the representatives of the Christian God in Rome were divided and blatantly corrupt. Even the Pope of the ea described his priests as "pigs in a sty."
Most of Europe had entered a great crisis and was passing through its dark night of the soul. Nonetheless, it was an age of tremendous turmoil, on the one hand full of experiments and on the other violent oppression. Faith and heresy walked side by side. The romances of the Grail fulfilled the thirst for a legendary story with which a Europe that was poised to take a radical leap of the spirit, could identify.
In Chrétien's time the written romance was a completely new phenomenon, drawing upon an oral tradition that had been firmly established in the Celtic lands for centuries.
For the northern Celts, the bard had long been a tribe's most precious repository of their history. He was the authority of their lineage, he sang of their noble deeds, of their father's deeds and of their remembrance of claims to kingship and order. The bard was the maker and holder of the collective memory and the collective myth. Without a bard the tribe would lose its significance and identity.
The new troubadours who peddled their wares across the continent no longer sang to such close-knit tribal families, but rather penned the traditional tales of many tribes, creating legends with which a king, a court or cloister could identify, irrespective of tribal background. They became the new literary bards who expressed a collective dream that embraced the whole family of Europe, from the lavish courts of Aquitaine, Anjou and Lorraine to that of Henry II of England.
It is said that an individual who does not dream, who cannot transform his or her fears, tensions and aspirations into meaningful images, becomes sick. A society that has lost its ability to respond to the collective dream, or legend, is likewise unable to heal itself or to fulfil its need for a spiritual or religious life. And Europe in the twelfth century, while being on the cusp of a great change, was very sick indeed. The male-dominated Church of Rome had subsumed all local myths into its own grand scheme. But its rigid orthodoxy and weird hatred of Eve had resulted in a one-sided, stagnant and ultimately twisted vision.
So the timing of the emergence of the Grail legends is significant and hardly a coincidence. A strange wave of hysteria had swept the Christian world at the turn of the tenth century, alternately swinging between prophecies of doom and those of ecstasy. The world was supposed to end by the year 1000, bringing the long-awaited New Kingdom of Heaven. But instead of being surrounded by the promised paradise on earth, the people found themselves in a barren and hopeless wasteland. The Holy City of Jerusalem had been won but then promptly lost. The Christian armies proved no match for the "Saracen Infidels" who appeared to have a far more civilized and wondrous culture than their own, and everyone could see that the representatives of the Christian God in Rome were divided and blatantly corrupt. Even the Pope of the ea described his priests as "pigs in a sty."
Most of Europe had entered a great crisis and was passing through its dark night of the soul. Nonetheless, it was an age of tremendous turmoil, on the one hand full of experiments and on the other violent oppression. Faith and heresy walked side by side. The romances of the Grail fulfilled the thirst for a legendary story with which a Europe that was poised to take a radical leap of the spirit, could identify.