What is the Grail?
A relic that combines universal symbolism has been at the center of the speculations of writers and esotericists for a millennium. But what is the true meaning of the Cup of the Eucharist?
Any Christian knows the significance of the Chalice of the Eucharist: it can be said without fear of being contradicted by any theologian that the Eucharist is the culminating moment of the Mass and the absolute center of the doctrine propagated by the followers of Jesus Christ. According to what Christianity in its original form, preserved in Catholic rites, says, Jesus, during the Last Supper on the night before his crucifixion, broke the bread, poured the wine for the disciples, and told them that what they were eating and drinking was his body, his flesh, and his blood. The gospels, originally about twenty in number, meticulously explained these details, but were later analyzed and purged by Saint Paul through a process which we partly explained in our previous article on Mithraism, thus losing many valuable details essential for understanding that gesture.
Essentially, Jesus, aware of his imminent end, distributed to the first Christians, namely the apostles and followers, the instruments that would guarantee their union with the divine and thus the salvation of their souls: the communion, that is, the union of man with the divine through the consumption of his body. If many religions, Islam foremost among them, are horrified by this cannibalistic aspect (the Church has repeatedly emphasized how the host and wine of communion are TRULY the blood and flesh of Christ), this union with the divine is only possible through direct contact, almost an assimilation of the body of the deity that is close to disintegration.
One can be struck by the profound spirituality arising from the suffering of what the Dead Sea Scrolls refer to as Yoshua ben Yosef, or one can dismiss it all as a macabre exercise in masochism. Points of view vary, and everyone is free to believe what they want. We would never dream of questioning the legitimacy of these choices, which belong to the most important core of human rights present in each individual. What we want to clarify is how Christianity has relied almost entirely for many centuries, and still does, on the cult of the Passion and its related relics, which, like the cult of the saints, have somehow met the needs of the faithful eager to physically touch aspects of the divine.
Thus, among hands, hearts, heads, locks of hair, and holy foreskins of Jesus himself as well as saints and apostles (such as fragments of the true cross or the nails of the crucifixion used, for example, in the Iron Crown kept in Monza), the most important relic of all assumed a primary role in the Early Middle Ages. It was precisely the original Chalice of the Eucharist, the very cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper and the next day used by his uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, to collect the blood of the god-man that flowed from the wound in his side caused by the centurion Longinus' spear. A blood mixed with water, a blood in the process of purification, as well recounted in the Gospel of Nicodemus. That same cup would later take on miraculous, divine powers, capable of granting eternal life (and salvation) to anyone who drank from it.
Soon the original cup assumed a specific name, becoming famous in the cycle of chivalric novels linked to King Arthur, the celebrated Matter of Britain. It was called the Graal, Holy Grail: its etymology is obscure, perhaps from the Latin "gradalis" - meaning a vessel for holding "garum" sauce in Roman times, or perhaps from the medieval religious term "graduale" (which was the liturgical reading during Mass), or maybe from the Old French word "gré" meaning grateful or pleasing. For others, Graal is a Breton term, "graal" or "graauz", and for yet others, it originally referred to the communal drinking bowl still used today at festivals in Valle d'Aosta, called the "grolla".
But we are a millennium after the death of Christ—could it be possible that the etymological and legendary elements were solely those of proto-Christian origin? No, absolutely not. The key concept of the salvific cup was intertwined with pre-existing myths, such as the Greek cornucopia or Celtic cauldron, the "Stone of Exile" of Jewish Kabbalists, which designates the Shekinah, the manifestation of Yahweh in the material world, and still, in India, the urn set in Shiva's forehead symbolizing the Third Eye that allows inner vision.
There was also the Amonga cup, the magical cup of the Sarmatians who lived in the steppes beyond the Caucasus, said to be direct descendants of the Amazons; then there was the myth of the gifts of the Tuatha Dé Danann people, invaders (extraterrestrials) of Ireland who brought four gifts to men: the Sword of Nuada, king of the Fomorians, the Spear of Lugh, god of the Sun, the Stone of Fal of knowledge, and finally the Cup of the Dagda, the king of the gods. These later became the seeds of playing cards and tarot cards: Christian religious syncretism completed the transformation. The sword became the Durendal of the very Christian paladin Roland, fighting alongside Charlemagne against the Saracens; the spear was associated with that of the centurion Longinus (and is still kept today in Vienna under the name of the Holy Lance), the stone became the philosopher's stone that transforms iron into gold, and the cup was precisely associated with the Eucharistic chalice.
The first to speak of the Graal, or more precisely "graal" in lowercase, was the Provencal writer Chrétien de Troyes in his famous work "Perceval le Gallois ou la Conte du Graal". In this chivalric romance, both the cup as the container of Christ's blood and the concept that the cup itself can bring salvation to the world appear. The story Chrétien wrote in the mid-12th century tells of planet Earth devastated by a terrifying famine, the wasteland, which only King Arthur can remedy by drinking, symbolizing the human king in contact with the divine, from the cup of the king of kings. A nobility of spirit and blood that draws its strength and ability to protect from a "right of blood" to govern and heal the wounds caused in the world by the dangers stemming from Evil.
It would be too complex to discuss the symbolic meaning of the Matter of Britain, a metaphorical language behind which lies the history of humanity itself. We limit ourselves to saying that the Graal, Jesus's cup, becomes the container of wisdom and salvation, the instrument through which the enlightened man can seek God's intervention. However, things are not so simple. If it is clear from Chrétien de Troyes's works that the cup is accessible only after countless initiatory tests and a path of soul evolution, it already assumes very different meanings among his contemporaries. In his "Parzival", Wolfram von Eschenbach, whom we have already extensively mentioned in our Dossier in the article on the sanctuary of Montserrat in Catalonia, clearly argues that it is not a cup, but a stone. The Graal is a "Lapsit Exillis", which could mean both "fragile stone" and "stone from the sky" (exilis = ex coelis), and this detail is very indicative. In Wolfram's theology, it refers to the rebellion of the angels led by Lucifer and their fall from heaven: the Graal is an emerald, Satan's third eye that, falling to Earth, lost its ability for higher vision of reality. The Graal was subsequently faceted by the archangels and took on the appearance of a cup or a hexagonal basin.
In Genoa, the Holy Grail is kept, a basin of green glass formerly believed to be emerald, which to the Genoese represents the Graal described by Wolfram von Eschenbach. The point, however, is that if it is a stone fallen from the sky, very similar therefore to the black stone kept in the Kaaba in Mecca, the characteristics of the Graal change decisively. Like the Stone of Fal, the Graal becomes not a tool of immortality but a means to transmute base matter into divine matter: iron into gold, the human soul into divine essence. The cup-stone thus assumes a Christian role, it is Jesus himself: indeed, it is the instrument missing for Satan to conquer the world, and its possession is capable of deciding the fate of the world and the universe.
The subsequent novels of the Grail cycle, such as "Lancelot" by Rober de Boron or "Peredur" and "Perlesvaus", accentuate this aspect. We return to the concept of a magical object, capable of determining the fate of the world, and this is the meaning that the musician Richard Wagner gave to the Eucharistic cup in his opera "Parsifal", which had such an influence on the Nazis a century later. In fact, Wagnerian music led to the frantic Indiana Jones-style searches for the Grail by Himmler's SS, including dreamt-up reports presented to the "poor" Adolf Hitler, who was left without his ultimate weapon for conquering the Earth.
But perhaps the keystone of the Graal is precisely the Nazis' ultimate interpretation; it is not a reference to the cup of the Last Supper, but something older and truly explosive capable of changing the course of a war. The constant and continuous reference of Gothic cathedrals linking the cup to the Templar Knights suggests the Graal is something connected to Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem: the Ark of the Covenant, which we must not forget was capable of destroying entire cities or striking down anyone who touched it without protection! Is this the true aspect of the Graal, a technological object that according to some heterodox scholars was kept in the time of the Pharaohs in the Great Pyramid of Giza and which Moses stole during the Jews' escape from Egypt?
In truth, there is another theory, supported by the global bestseller "The Da Vinci Code" but actually revealed to the world in 1982 by the book "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" by Henry Lincoln, Michael Baigent, and Richard Leight: the Grail itself does not exist, but would be a bloodline, specifically the lineage of Jesus, who, married to Mary Magdalene, would have fathered at least four children whose descendants gave rise to the Merovingian dynasty and other noble families existing even today. "Graal" would mean, according to this theory, "royal blood": in fact, the word is usually never written without the epithet "Holy", "Holy Grail": in medieval Latin, "San Graal" or "Sang Raal", "Royal Blood". The blood of kings is that of King David of Israel, the Davidic lineage, the true descendant from the first man Adam. The evidence supporting this theory is numerous and surprising, starting with the never clarified episode of the wedding at Cana mentioned in the Gospels. If Jesus did not die on the cross, if he married and fathered children, it is understandable how the secret of the Holy Grail becomes the most explosive and powerful tool to disintegrate the world as we know it today. Telling over a billion Christians that they have been fooled for two thousand years would be truly a devastating weapon, much more than a nuclear bomb...
But it is a hidden secret, because speculating intellectually on these theories, as we allow ourselves to do without ulterior motives other than clarifying mysteries, is one thing, and having concrete evidence that no one is currently able to show is another. Neither the trio Lincoln-Baigent-Leight nor their followers nor the celebrated Dan Brown, who had the merit of fictionalizing a story as hallucinatory as can be, has this. Is this the meaning of the Grail?
A cup, or rather a womb, that of Mary Magdalene who bore the children of Christ? We like to think instead that there exists a mysterious object, perhaps truly given as a gift to humans by the gods, that holds wisdom and knowledge.
A fragile, delicate stone, perhaps an early form of computer containing knowledge from other worlds, an object difficult to understand for simple minds like those of medieval serfs but today even for ordinary citizens could assume a complete meaning. And who knows, perhaps it could also be a small object, like the box that Berengere Saunière, the priest of Rennes-le-Château, handed over to Antoni Gaudí in 1896 to be walled into the crypt of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona...
