Grail Truth
“...So not only is it important not to run down and diminish all that is here; but just because of its provisional nature, which it shares with us, these phenomena and things should be understood and transformed by us in a most fervent sense. Transformed? Yes, for it is our task to imprint this provisional, perishable earth so deeply, so patiently and passionately in ourselves that its reality shall arise in us again “invisibly.” We are the bees of the invisible. Nous butinons éperdument le miel du visible, pour l’accumuler dans la grande ruche d’or de l’lnvisible. [We desperately gather nectar - the honey of the visible - to accumulate in the great golden hive of the Invisible.]
"The Elegies show us at this work, at the work of these continual conversions of the beloved visible and tangible into the invisible vibrations and excitation of our own nature, which introduces new vibration-frequencies into the vibration-spheres of the universe. (Since different elements in the cosmos are only different vibration-exponents, we prepare for ourselves in this way not only intensities of a spiritual nature but also, who knows, new bodies, metals, nebulae and constellations.) And this activity is curiously supported and urged on by the ever more rapid fading away of so much of the visible that will no longer be replaced." --Rainer Maria Rilke (regarding his poetic work: “The Duino Elegies”), from a letter to Witold von Hulewicz, Sierre, Canton du Valais, Switzerland, Nov. 13th, 1925
"The Elegies show us at this work, at the work of these continual conversions of the beloved visible and tangible into the invisible vibrations and excitation of our own nature, which introduces new vibration-frequencies into the vibration-spheres of the universe. (Since different elements in the cosmos are only different vibration-exponents, we prepare for ourselves in this way not only intensities of a spiritual nature but also, who knows, new bodies, metals, nebulae and constellations.) And this activity is curiously supported and urged on by the ever more rapid fading away of so much of the visible that will no longer be replaced." --Rainer Maria Rilke (regarding his poetic work: “The Duino Elegies”), from a letter to Witold von Hulewicz, Sierre, Canton du Valais, Switzerland, Nov. 13th, 1925
"The adventure of the Grail--the, quest within for those creative values by which the Waste Land is redeemed--has become today for each the unavoidable task."
--Joseph Campbell, Occidental Mythology
"What is it we are questing for? It is the fulfillment of that which is potential in each of us. Questing for it is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself. There is nothing you can do that's more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way you will find, live, become a realization of your own personal myth." --Joseph Campbell
Through "creative regression," the generic form of ego death, consciousness recycles, recursively bending back upon itself. The direction is a recapitulation of, a re-experiencing of sequences from earlier life, conception and birth experience, ancestral awareness, genetic and physiological recognitions, molecular and atomic perception, and quantum consciousness. As consciousness explores and expands, ego dissolves. Pure consciousness, the fundamental luminosity, is the ground state of unborn form. The generic purpose of ego death is to liberate our embodied being, precipitating communion with and re-patterning by the Whole. When all forms finally dissolve into unconditioned consciousness, the ground state of the Nature Mind is revealed as the mystic Void, the womb of creation. --Iona Miller
--Joseph Campbell, Occidental Mythology
"What is it we are questing for? It is the fulfillment of that which is potential in each of us. Questing for it is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself. There is nothing you can do that's more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way you will find, live, become a realization of your own personal myth." --Joseph Campbell
Through "creative regression," the generic form of ego death, consciousness recycles, recursively bending back upon itself. The direction is a recapitulation of, a re-experiencing of sequences from earlier life, conception and birth experience, ancestral awareness, genetic and physiological recognitions, molecular and atomic perception, and quantum consciousness. As consciousness explores and expands, ego dissolves. Pure consciousness, the fundamental luminosity, is the ground state of unborn form. The generic purpose of ego death is to liberate our embodied being, precipitating communion with and re-patterning by the Whole. When all forms finally dissolve into unconditioned consciousness, the ground state of the Nature Mind is revealed as the mystic Void, the womb of creation. --Iona Miller
Who Do These Things Serve?
The Grail Serves Us & We Serve the Grail
The Truth of the Grail
The individual psyche is the Holy Grail, made holy by what it contains.
Sangreal is another name for the Holy Grail, a legendary sacred vessel associated with the divine bloodline of god-kings and queens. The Feminine is highly valued in these historical and mythologized lines which disappear from our sight in the mists of pre-history when we gaze backward in time to find our deepest ancestral roots. Royal descent can be found in the genealogies and genetics of many families today of both illustrious and common surnames.
Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival illustrates the metaphor of the Grail Quest which describes the essence of all seekers. The story shows the implications for the individual and the world when the conscious, rational, cultured mind overrides the instinctive bases of human existence. It hints of mysteries and transformation within and without.
The dazzling procession of the Grail gave context to the moment at which Parzival had his first opportunity to heal the grail king. The impulse was there. He thought about asking The Question — and hesitated. When his conscious thought about asking the question superseded his impulse to ask it, he failed, ignorant of the profound implications of this moment, as most of us are each time we're presented with the opportunity to ask. The lines of communication between the conscious and the unconscious zones of the human psyche have all been cut.
The return of the unconscious aspect of the psyche is evident in Parzival's seemingly naïve commitment to return to the Grail Castle in order to "right his wrong." Parcival's quest for wholeness involves the rediscovery and integration of the primary, unconscious aspect which is characterized by youth. In the Grail Romance, we seek reunion -- of the genders, of our split-off parts, of our divine essence. The timeless world of the Grail reveals the illusion of past-present-future that allows direct access to the whole spectrum of existence.
Indeed, a new myth is required to heal the modern waste land and achieve the collaboration of the two disparate aspects of the psyche. Campbell states in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, "[...] the symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche". The "solution" to the problem of the wasteland will resemble the nature of those mythological symbols in their unpredictability and spontaneity.
The ruler (divine sovereign and "measure") became a symbol of power and divine order. The "ruler" is synonymous with the universal standard of measurement -- an exemplar for humanity and one who knows the mystery of cosmic cycles and Precession.
Seeing withSangREAL Eyes is a non-stop fugue of symbolism and meaning that plunges you into the Vortex -- the flowing spontaneity of glowing consciousness.
The vortex is the meta-pattern of the universe and an elemental image. It is an archetypal symbol embodying above and below, in the Cosmos, Earth and our own microcosmic nature. Galaxies, Earth, the quantum realm, and the human energy body share this essence -- vortex energy. The field governs the particle. Earth's magnetic field protects all life on the planet. Our DNA has a helix/vortex configuration. DNA operates through holographic Light and Sound transduction with optical projection and mechano-acoustic properties (Gariaev). The nonlocal vortex field generates and regenerates matter.
Sacred geometry is the language of shape, developed from our Ancestors' original measurements of Earth and Sky over pre-historic millennia. The Dreamers are the architects of greatness navigating waves of unborn Nothingness. Our vision lies within our souls. We see beyond the mirages of Fact, and peer beyond the veils and mists of doubt to pierce the boundaries of unborn Time. This is the sense of Immortality.
Dreams express as sensory metaphor. For metaphor to elicit nuance it must be fresh, not dead; it must shock the mind into wonder by opening up a gap, an abyss, a void. Herein lies that missing information -- again, the unborn dream. Thus dreams continually amaze us with their freshness, engage us with their ability to clothe our recycling issues in story and metaphor.
Dreams also encode our evolution, our co-evolution with the entire webwork of life. Dreaming is an adaptation concerned with the survival of the species and only secondarily with the individual. Shamanic dreaming harnesses this transcultural aspect of dreamtime.
The missing, transformative information lies within the very heart of chaos, a shapeless, unborn form--an unborn dream, waiting to unfold its potential. Chaos is an infinite information source, a "hidden variable." Nuances are full of a sense of the "missing information." Dreams are full of creative nuances. So are wondering, uncertainty, and questioning; they are the very flux of creative disequilibrium.
Our new myth is The Creation of Consciousness.
The individual is a vessel for consciousness bringing to mind the symbolism of the Holy Grail. The Grail carries the divine essence extracted by the ultimate experience of the opposites. The new myth postulates that the created universe and its exquisite human flower make up a vast enterprise for the creation of consciousness; that each individual is a unique experiment in that process; and that the sum total of consciousness created by each individual in his lifetime is deposited as a permanent addition in the collective treasury of the archetypal psyche.
A viable legend might be manifested by one person, or from "group-dreaming". But it will not be produced by the rational lineal process of fictional narrative. We don't write scripture; scripture is written. Legends pre-exist realization as texts. Writers act as "treasure finders".
Oneiric and visionary texts reflect the extreme subjectivity of the "objectivity" of the "subconscious" where the archetypes or Gods reside. Rituals kindle fire in the minds of certain hearers. The link between the intentions and the actions is the text and context -- the legend and the cause it represents. The text draws out the actions from the sea of potential energy and gives them their specific shape, their "style".
For centuries an idea has existed that there once was a language, or a particular word, which perfectly expressed the nature of things. This language, called the Language of the Birds, was spoken in the Garden of Eden, but was lost. This is the alchemical language of sound and meaning for the community. We know that the names connect across cultures and continents, and welcome 'The Beloved', 'Friend', 'the Sun', bringing to the fore those ecstatic loving qualities we find in the Grail Romances and Sufi tradition with their wonderful poetry.
The unconscious lends itself to the language of chaos. The whirling, twisting motion of a molecule of water in the chaotic world of non-laminar flow through a pipe is analogous to chaos consciousness. The disorienting, dizzying surrender to the vortex, tornado, or whirlpool is a surrender to chaos, an experience of no form and total confusion and disorientation. We penetrate deeper into the psyche -- into the vortex of the internal structuring process -- through progressively de-structuring patterns of organization.
Chaos is self-organizing, self-iterating, and self-generating. It is an evolutionary force. The tendency of new forms emerging from chaos is toward a higher degree of adaptation, hence evolution. This "recycling" of consciousness leads to a self-referential vortex. Chaotic systems revolve around nexus points, known as strange attractors, because of their unpredictable quality. Rather than being "point-like," they are more like vortices within vortices. The Philosopher's Stone is like a psychic lodestone (or vortex). It acts like an inner magnet, ordering the contents of our consciousness around it (through feedback loops) in chaotic, yet meaningful fashion.
Legends are the greatest poems of our age and the Grail is the mightiest among them. Like magic incantations they sing new realities into being, as the shaman sings rain, or health, or abundant game from potentiality to actuality. These poems are meaningless without the actions they invoke. An Imaginal City or Grail Castle is a dream-space which will be manifested more and more clearly until finally the Grail is restored. It will call a world into being, even if only for a few moments, in which our desires are articulated and satisfied.
Attention to the inner workings of our psyche can help us make creativity central to our lives. It is a search for the patterns and the solutions that will solve the extraordinary number of problems and answer the complexity of our time while speaking to our own inner sourcing. We have the power of psychogenesis. But we don't have a story that's adequate to take on this kind of stewardship.
Thus, the Grail Tradition is a meta-mythology, resonating through history, woven by metaphor to give lived experience a universal purpose. A Ruler with royal ancestry is deified as King or Queen, dependent on gender. In Sumerian culture 'kingship' was identical with 'kinship' - and 'kin' means 'blood relative'.
The Grail story tells us about our strengths and inadequacies. Part of the new Grail myth is that we are all Parcival. We are all piercers of the veil that used to be the membrane that separated us from moving together to create new orders of knowledge and even new orders of society. A great myth can transpose to another society because it always speaks to eternal verities. Archetypes, myth and dream are the mirrors of change in our personal mythology. The Grail Mystery remains alive in our quest for personal and planetary renewal.
Like Parcival you learn how to fulfill your true purpose.
Consciousness, ab origine, is intuitive. Primordial Awareness is the groundstate of the human mindbody, seeing through illusion to primal reality and emptiness. Uniting Above and Below, we mirror Transcendent Consciousness. The uninterrupted narrative of self is embodied as short and longterm memory and genetic memory. The Mystery level of consciousness or abyss of consciousness includes prophetic intuition. An abyss of consciousness opens the way for intellectual freedom as liberation from the outer limits and internal biological determinism.
The Grail Serves Us & We Serve the Grail
The Truth of the Grail
The individual psyche is the Holy Grail, made holy by what it contains.
Sangreal is another name for the Holy Grail, a legendary sacred vessel associated with the divine bloodline of god-kings and queens. The Feminine is highly valued in these historical and mythologized lines which disappear from our sight in the mists of pre-history when we gaze backward in time to find our deepest ancestral roots. Royal descent can be found in the genealogies and genetics of many families today of both illustrious and common surnames.
Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival illustrates the metaphor of the Grail Quest which describes the essence of all seekers. The story shows the implications for the individual and the world when the conscious, rational, cultured mind overrides the instinctive bases of human existence. It hints of mysteries and transformation within and without.
The dazzling procession of the Grail gave context to the moment at which Parzival had his first opportunity to heal the grail king. The impulse was there. He thought about asking The Question — and hesitated. When his conscious thought about asking the question superseded his impulse to ask it, he failed, ignorant of the profound implications of this moment, as most of us are each time we're presented with the opportunity to ask. The lines of communication between the conscious and the unconscious zones of the human psyche have all been cut.
The return of the unconscious aspect of the psyche is evident in Parzival's seemingly naïve commitment to return to the Grail Castle in order to "right his wrong." Parcival's quest for wholeness involves the rediscovery and integration of the primary, unconscious aspect which is characterized by youth. In the Grail Romance, we seek reunion -- of the genders, of our split-off parts, of our divine essence. The timeless world of the Grail reveals the illusion of past-present-future that allows direct access to the whole spectrum of existence.
Indeed, a new myth is required to heal the modern waste land and achieve the collaboration of the two disparate aspects of the psyche. Campbell states in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, "[...] the symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche". The "solution" to the problem of the wasteland will resemble the nature of those mythological symbols in their unpredictability and spontaneity.
The ruler (divine sovereign and "measure") became a symbol of power and divine order. The "ruler" is synonymous with the universal standard of measurement -- an exemplar for humanity and one who knows the mystery of cosmic cycles and Precession.
Seeing withSangREAL Eyes is a non-stop fugue of symbolism and meaning that plunges you into the Vortex -- the flowing spontaneity of glowing consciousness.
The vortex is the meta-pattern of the universe and an elemental image. It is an archetypal symbol embodying above and below, in the Cosmos, Earth and our own microcosmic nature. Galaxies, Earth, the quantum realm, and the human energy body share this essence -- vortex energy. The field governs the particle. Earth's magnetic field protects all life on the planet. Our DNA has a helix/vortex configuration. DNA operates through holographic Light and Sound transduction with optical projection and mechano-acoustic properties (Gariaev). The nonlocal vortex field generates and regenerates matter.
Sacred geometry is the language of shape, developed from our Ancestors' original measurements of Earth and Sky over pre-historic millennia. The Dreamers are the architects of greatness navigating waves of unborn Nothingness. Our vision lies within our souls. We see beyond the mirages of Fact, and peer beyond the veils and mists of doubt to pierce the boundaries of unborn Time. This is the sense of Immortality.
Dreams express as sensory metaphor. For metaphor to elicit nuance it must be fresh, not dead; it must shock the mind into wonder by opening up a gap, an abyss, a void. Herein lies that missing information -- again, the unborn dream. Thus dreams continually amaze us with their freshness, engage us with their ability to clothe our recycling issues in story and metaphor.
Dreams also encode our evolution, our co-evolution with the entire webwork of life. Dreaming is an adaptation concerned with the survival of the species and only secondarily with the individual. Shamanic dreaming harnesses this transcultural aspect of dreamtime.
The missing, transformative information lies within the very heart of chaos, a shapeless, unborn form--an unborn dream, waiting to unfold its potential. Chaos is an infinite information source, a "hidden variable." Nuances are full of a sense of the "missing information." Dreams are full of creative nuances. So are wondering, uncertainty, and questioning; they are the very flux of creative disequilibrium.
Our new myth is The Creation of Consciousness.
The individual is a vessel for consciousness bringing to mind the symbolism of the Holy Grail. The Grail carries the divine essence extracted by the ultimate experience of the opposites. The new myth postulates that the created universe and its exquisite human flower make up a vast enterprise for the creation of consciousness; that each individual is a unique experiment in that process; and that the sum total of consciousness created by each individual in his lifetime is deposited as a permanent addition in the collective treasury of the archetypal psyche.
A viable legend might be manifested by one person, or from "group-dreaming". But it will not be produced by the rational lineal process of fictional narrative. We don't write scripture; scripture is written. Legends pre-exist realization as texts. Writers act as "treasure finders".
Oneiric and visionary texts reflect the extreme subjectivity of the "objectivity" of the "subconscious" where the archetypes or Gods reside. Rituals kindle fire in the minds of certain hearers. The link between the intentions and the actions is the text and context -- the legend and the cause it represents. The text draws out the actions from the sea of potential energy and gives them their specific shape, their "style".
For centuries an idea has existed that there once was a language, or a particular word, which perfectly expressed the nature of things. This language, called the Language of the Birds, was spoken in the Garden of Eden, but was lost. This is the alchemical language of sound and meaning for the community. We know that the names connect across cultures and continents, and welcome 'The Beloved', 'Friend', 'the Sun', bringing to the fore those ecstatic loving qualities we find in the Grail Romances and Sufi tradition with their wonderful poetry.
The unconscious lends itself to the language of chaos. The whirling, twisting motion of a molecule of water in the chaotic world of non-laminar flow through a pipe is analogous to chaos consciousness. The disorienting, dizzying surrender to the vortex, tornado, or whirlpool is a surrender to chaos, an experience of no form and total confusion and disorientation. We penetrate deeper into the psyche -- into the vortex of the internal structuring process -- through progressively de-structuring patterns of organization.
Chaos is self-organizing, self-iterating, and self-generating. It is an evolutionary force. The tendency of new forms emerging from chaos is toward a higher degree of adaptation, hence evolution. This "recycling" of consciousness leads to a self-referential vortex. Chaotic systems revolve around nexus points, known as strange attractors, because of their unpredictable quality. Rather than being "point-like," they are more like vortices within vortices. The Philosopher's Stone is like a psychic lodestone (or vortex). It acts like an inner magnet, ordering the contents of our consciousness around it (through feedback loops) in chaotic, yet meaningful fashion.
Legends are the greatest poems of our age and the Grail is the mightiest among them. Like magic incantations they sing new realities into being, as the shaman sings rain, or health, or abundant game from potentiality to actuality. These poems are meaningless without the actions they invoke. An Imaginal City or Grail Castle is a dream-space which will be manifested more and more clearly until finally the Grail is restored. It will call a world into being, even if only for a few moments, in which our desires are articulated and satisfied.
Attention to the inner workings of our psyche can help us make creativity central to our lives. It is a search for the patterns and the solutions that will solve the extraordinary number of problems and answer the complexity of our time while speaking to our own inner sourcing. We have the power of psychogenesis. But we don't have a story that's adequate to take on this kind of stewardship.
Thus, the Grail Tradition is a meta-mythology, resonating through history, woven by metaphor to give lived experience a universal purpose. A Ruler with royal ancestry is deified as King or Queen, dependent on gender. In Sumerian culture 'kingship' was identical with 'kinship' - and 'kin' means 'blood relative'.
The Grail story tells us about our strengths and inadequacies. Part of the new Grail myth is that we are all Parcival. We are all piercers of the veil that used to be the membrane that separated us from moving together to create new orders of knowledge and even new orders of society. A great myth can transpose to another society because it always speaks to eternal verities. Archetypes, myth and dream are the mirrors of change in our personal mythology. The Grail Mystery remains alive in our quest for personal and planetary renewal.
Like Parcival you learn how to fulfill your true purpose.
Consciousness, ab origine, is intuitive. Primordial Awareness is the groundstate of the human mindbody, seeing through illusion to primal reality and emptiness. Uniting Above and Below, we mirror Transcendent Consciousness. The uninterrupted narrative of self is embodied as short and longterm memory and genetic memory. The Mystery level of consciousness or abyss of consciousness includes prophetic intuition. An abyss of consciousness opens the way for intellectual freedom as liberation from the outer limits and internal biological determinism.
Quotes & References
This myth wasn't heard in Europe until the 12th century. The real origins of the Holy Grail were not Christian but pagan. The Grail was first Christianized in Spain from a sacred tradition of the Moors. Like the Celts' holy Cauldron of Regeneration, which it resembled, the blood-filled vessel was a womb symbol meaning rebirth in the Oriental or Gnostic sense of reincarnation, lb connotation was feminine, not masculine.
— Barbara G. Walker; The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets
The Holy Grail is a symbol both of the lower (or irrational) world and of the bodily nature of man, because both are receptacles for the living essences of the superior worlds. Such is the mystery of the redeeming blood which, descending into the condition of death, overcomes the last enemy by ensouling all substance with its own immortality. To the Christian, whose mystic faith especially emphasizes the love element, the Holy Grail typifies the heart in which continually swirls the living water of eternal life. Moreover, to the Christian, the search for the Holy Grail is the search for the real Self which, when found, is the consummation of the magnum opus.
— Manly P. Hall; The Secret Teachings of all Ages
No adequate interpretation has ever been given to the Grail Mysteries. Some believe the Knights of the Holy Grail to have been a powerful organization of Christian mystics perpetuating the Ancient Wisdom under the rituals and sacraments of the oracular Cup. The quest for the Holy Grail is the eternal search for truth, and Albert G. Mackey sees in it a variation of the Masonic legend of the Lost Word so long sought by the brethren of the Craft. There is also evidence to support the claim that the story of the Grail is an elaboration of an early pagan Nature myth which has been preserved by reason of the subtle manner in which it was grafted onto the cult of Christianity. From this particular viewpoint, the Holy Grail is undoubtedly a type of the ark or vessel in which the life of the world is preserved and therefore is significant of the body of the Great Mother--Nature. Its green color relates it to Venus and to the mystery of generation; also to the Islamic faith, whose sacred color is green and whose Sabbath is Friday, the day of Venus.
— Manly P. Hall; The Secret Teachings of all Ages
Though some controversy exists as to whether the Grail was a cup or a platter, it is generally depicted in art as a chalice of considerable size and unusual beauty. According to the legend, Joseph of Arimathea brought the Grail Cup to the place of the crucifixion and in it caught the blood pouring from the wounds of the dying Nazarene. Later Joseph, who had become custodian of the sacred relics--the Sangreal and the Spear of Longinus--carried them into a distant country. According to one version, his descendants finally placed these relics in Glastonbury Abbey in England; according to another, in a wonderful castle on Mount Salvat, Spain, built by angels in a single night. Under the name of Preston John, Parsifal, the last of the Grail Kings, carried the Holy Cup with him into India, and it disappeared forever from the Western World. Subsequent search for the Sangreal was the motif for much of the knight errantry of the Arthurian legends and the ceremonials of the Round Table. (See the Morte d'Arthur.)
— Manly P. Hall; The Secret Teachings of all Ages
Like the sapphire Schethiyâ, the Lapis Exilis, crown jewel of the Archangel Lucifer, fell from heaven. Michael, archangel of the sun and the Hidden God of Israel, at the head of the angelic hosts swooped down upon Lucifer and his legions of rebellious spirits. During the conflict, Michael with his flaming sword struck the flashing Lapis Exilis from the coronet of his adversary, and the green stone fell through all the celestial rings into the dark and immeasurable Abyss. Out of Lucifer's radiant gem was fashioned the Sangreal, or Holy Grail, from which Christ is said to have drunk at the Last Supper.
— Manly P. Hall; The Secret Teachings of all Ages
When Parsifal achieves a vision of the Holy Grail, this is a vision of the vegetable body or soul which has been so transformed by moral feeling and intellectual questioning that it is fit to carry a higher form of spirit, the Spirit of Jesus Christ.
— Mark Booth; The Secret History of the World
As we have seen, blood is the distinguishing feature of animal consciousness, and in occult physiology the animal part of our nature nestles in or is carried by - as if by a chalice - the vegetable part of our nature.
The secret of the Holy Grail, then, is not that it represents a bloodline, This, I have already suggested, would go against the esoteric doctrine of reincarnation. Rather it alludes to the role of the vegetable part of our nature as a living receptacle for our spirit or consciousness. The quest for the Grail is the quest for a purified receptacle fit to carry a higher form of spirit, and the trials in the course of the quest involve certain esoteric techniques of purification of the vegetable body. Rudolf Steiner [...] said that all serious esoteric work begins with work on the etheric, that is to say the vegetable body.
— Mark Booth; The Secret History of the World
The Holy Grail was a cup, and according to the ancient teachings, the cup was the Earth. The cup is the Earth of life, that holds all life, and the cup holds all the blood. The blood on Earth is in the Holy Grail, so whoever controls the Earth, controls the Holy Grail and controls all the holy blood. The holy blood is in the Holy Grail. Now, that goes back to this old idea about the shedding of the blood. Why are we going to shed the blood? Well, we are going to shed the blood to gain control. And, that will be our blessing. That's right, you are going to get blessed with the shedding of all this blood. The cup is the Earth and the blood is you. Now we can understand what they mean by the New World Order, and the methods that are being used to accomplish it.
— Jordan Maxwell; Matrix of Power
It [Holy Grail] was the cup that symbolized the womb and the bloodline of the most ‘pure’ of the reptilian crossbreeds which is passed on most crucially through the female
— David Icke; The Biggest Secret
The ‘Grant of Arms’ or symbol of the Dragon bloodine in Sumer was called a Gra-al, also known as the Mark of Cain. The biblical Cain was one of the early Anunnaki human royal crossbreeds who followed ‘Adam’. It is this Gra-al that became the so-called Holy Grail and this is why its equivalent in Old French means ‘blood royal’.
— David Icke; The Biggest Secret
The Grail: from myth to reality
Philip Coppens
The basic Grail account opens with a young man, Perceval, encountering knights and realising he wants to be one. Despite his mother’s objections, the boy trains for the knighthood and begins a series of travels. On one such trip, he comes across the Fisher King, who invites him to stay at his castle. While there, he witnesses a strange procession in which young men and women carry magnificent objects from one chamber to another, passing before him at each course of the meal.
The first person to write about the Grail was Chrétien de Troyes, who did not identify the nature of the Grail itself. Subsequent authors, like Robert de Boron, identified it as a Christian relic, and normally as the cup used during the Last Supper. However, the German author Wolfram von Eschenbach then wrote his Grail book, Parzival, in which he stated that previous authors had committed serious errors in their accounts, while at the same time identifying the Grail as a stone that had fallen from heaven, and which displayed supernatural qualities, bestowing apparent longevity on those who were near it, as well as attracting water.
Parcival has a unique position in the Grail literature, but is still seen as a work of fiction. Wolfram stated that the characters of those who possessed the Grail were genuine people, whose names and histories his sources had investigated in Latin documents. Furthermore, Wolfram did not write fiction, and stating that Parzival is nothing but a work of fiction therefore needs an explanation why Wolfram departed from his non-fictional writings to meddle in the fictional literature.
There are over 600 names in Parzival and its sequel Titurel combined, resulting in one of the longest identification parades ever. As most believe we are faced with a literary invention by Wolfram, any identification with historical characters seems futile.
Interestingly, most of those who have attempted this match, have tried to find correspondences with the kings and nobles of Aragon. This is interesting, for Guyot de Provins, one of the primary candidates for the role of Kyot of Provence, had strong ties with Aragon. Guyot wrote about the kings of Aragon, who were his magnanimous protectors: his patron was Alfonso the Chaste, Alfonso II, the son of Alfonso I (1104-1134), who freed Saragossa from Moorish domination in 1118.
Using this as his starting point, Swiss scholar, André de Mandach, began his research, resulting in the first publication of his work in 1992, arguing for the existence of an “UrParzival”. De Mandach felt that Wolfram’s account might not only be based on real events, he also wondered whether the legend was perhaps written in a code. The key to unlock this code, de Mandach felt, lay in the history of the Northern Spanish kingdoms, in the period of 1104 to 1137. Is it not a nice coincidence that Flegetanis, the enigmatic “first source” from which Wolfram stated he retained his information, is a family name in the Empordà, the northern Catalonian region of Spain?
The Grail Code
De Mandach realised that the key to breaking the code was the “honorary surnames”, nicknames, which was a popular tradition in Spain and specifically in Islam since the 7th century AD. Indeed, the practice became so popular that it was exported to other parts of Western Europe, with kings being labelled “the Good”, “the Seemly”, “the Just”, etc.
He argued that Anfortas, identified as a king, was thus King “something” Anfortas – “something” requiring to be substituted with a name like Alfonso, Raymond, or another popular name of the time. This approach is much more direct than most researchers’ attempts, when trying to explain that Anfortas might come from the ancient French “enferté(z)”, itself derived from the Latin “infirmitate(m)”. Such reasoning is indirect at best.
Alfonso I of Aragon
This approach enabled de Mandach to identify this person as King Alfonso I of Aragon, who was nicknamed “Anfortius”. Indeed, it is that simple: Anfortas was Anfortius. He is identified as such numerous times, including in his will, and in Flamenca, where he is known as “Anfors”. Coins minted under his reign identify him as “ANFUS REX”, some of these coins having Toletta (Toledo) on the reverse side. Just on this basis alone, it is clear that de Mandach had just cracked the code. The question is why it lasted until 1992 until someone did so. And why few have noted his contribution. Perhaps the reason can be found in the fact that de Mandach wrote for a scientific audience, who had impossible pains to accept the historical nature of the Grail account.
Though sceptics might argue that Anfortius is not totally identical with Anfortas, it should be remembered that Anfortius was his Latin nickname, with Anfortas having an Occitan appearance – as Kyot the Provencal, as an Occitan speaker himself, would do. But the key to a successful decodation is not finding the key, but whether or not all subsequent decodations are then made easy, straightforward, before all pieces fall into place. That is indeed the case…
For if Anfortas/Alfonso I is the key, then it is his cousin, Rotrou II de Perche, who confirmed that the code was broken. Rotrou II de Perche was the lord of “Val Perche”: Perche-val… hence Perceval. And like Rotrou was Alfonso’s cousin, so was Perceval Anfortas’ uncle. With Anfortas and Perceval being the nicknames of two historical figures, whose family relationship was identical to the relationship described in Wolfram’s document between the Fisher King and Perceval, de Grail code had been broken.
Anfortas, known to us as Alfonso I, the Battler, was born in 1074, the king of Aragon and Navarre, from 1104 until his death on 6 or 7 September 1134. He was a formidable fighter, known for a series of victories known as the “Reconquista”, the recovery of Spain from the Moors for the Christians. Before his death, Alfonso I made a will, leaving his kingdom to the Knights Templar, the Hospitallers and the Knights of the Sepulchre. It were of course the Knights Templar who had been identified as the protectors of the Grail by Wolfram – as was Anfortas. Therefore, in Alfonso I, we have a king – the Fisher King who owns the Grail in Wolfram’s story – passing one third of his estates to the Knights Templar – the protectors of the Grail.
That was not all. When deadly injured in battle, he ordered that he was transported to San Juan de la Peña, a voyage of two days and 115 km. He died there. San Juan de la Peña has, of all sites, one of the strongest connections with the Grail tradition. We also note that there is a tradition that those who are in the presence of the Grail, will not die during the following seven days. Was this the real purpose behind his return to San Juan de la Peña? It is impossible to prove, but an interesting suggeston.
Munsalvæsche
“For thirty miles around has been hewn neither timber nor stone to build any dwelling but one, rich in earthly splendours. If anyone sets out to find it alas he will not do so; although there are many who try. It must happen unwittingly if one should see the castle. I presume, Sir, that you know of it; Munsalvæsche it is called. This castle controls a realm named Terre de Salvæsche. It was bequeathed by old Titurel to his son, King Frimutel.”
There is every possibility that San Juan de la Peña was indeed the renowned Munsalvæsche, the residence of the Grail king and the location where the Grail was held. It is indeed, as the Catholic Church seems to accept, the site where the “Holy Chalice” was once held, before it ended up in Valencia. But whereas San Juan de la Peña is often referred to as a Monastery, it was much more special than that: it was also the residence of the Aragon kings.
In 1071, Pope Alejandro II provided special protection to the monastery, which remained under papal authority and thus outside the bailiwick of the Bishop of Jaca – a privileged position for any religious site to find itself in. It meant that San Juan de la Peña could not be interfered with by the normal church hierarchies – only by the Pope himself. This special status was reaffirmed in 1095.
Throughout this period, the Aragon kings, such as Sancho el Mayor, Ramiro I, Sancho Ramirez and Pedro I, continued to favour the monastery. The last three spent Lent there every year and chose it as the burial place for themselves and their families. San Juan de la Peña thus became a royal mausoleum. And if Anfortas was the Fisher King, then San Juan de la Peña, his capital, was Munsalvæsche.
The Fisher King, Alfonso I of Aragon, made large donations to San Juan de la Peña. He thanked his victory near Tauste to the relics of San Juan de la Peña. He, like his predecessors and successors, stayed in San Juan de la Peña, specifically during the week before Easter – the week when the Grail procession occurred. It is known that Alfonso I also stayed in San Juan de la Peña at other times, such as in May 1108, showing that it could definitely be seen as his residence, and the Grail Castle.
Anfortas was labelled “Le Roi Pescheor”, the Fisher King, a nickname that was the result of him spending his time in what according to Chrétien was a “plan d’eau”, a river, or what was known as a “see”, a lake, according to Wolfram. The river Aragon flows in the valley beneath San Juan de la Peña. But just 200 metres from the new monastery of San Juan de la Peña used to be a lake that was renowned for its many fish. This reputation lasted well into the 20th century, though the lake was dried out from the 1970s onwards (it sits close to the modern car park). As Wolfram locates the lake close to Munsalvæsche, San Juan de la Peña once again conforms perfectly to Wolfram’s narrative. Wolfram also locates Munsalvæsche in a forest and San Juan de la Peña sits in a forest.
However, Wolfram situates Munsalvæsche in “Katelangen”, Catalonia, whereas San Juan de la Peña sits in Aragon. This apparent contradiction can be smoothed out, as when Wolfram was writing his account, San Juan de la Peña was indeed part of Catalonia, after Ramiro II of Aragon had abandoned the Aragon and San Juan de la Peña to Ramon Berenguer IV, the count of Catalonia.
Furthermore, even Chrétien’s voyage of how Perceval reaches the Grail castle coincides with how one reaches San Juan de la Peña: there is a river to cross, then a journey through a forest, before you reach a tower – a “square” tower, as Chrétien states. The square tower of the Old Monastery is indeed what gives San Juan de la Peña its billboard characteristic. De Mandach has also identified other details of Chrétien’s account with those of San Juan de la Peña, as it existed in his days. It has led de Mandach to the conclusion that Munsalvæsche, the residence of the Grail king, was most definitely San Juan de la Peña, the residence of the kings of Aragon, and of Anfortas – Alfonso I.
The Grail dynasty
These initial findings led de Mandach to identify the other characters of the Grail story. The Grail dynasty is a series of three male successors: Titurel – Frimutel – Anfortas. This overlaps with Ramiro I (1035-1069), Sancho Ramirez I (1063-1094) and finally Alfonso I, all kings of Aragon.
Wolfram starts the Grail tradition with Titurel. He is the key person who brings the Grail from the East. It is Titurel, i.e. Ramiro I, who transformed San Juan de la Peña and made it his main residence. Coincidence? It is clear that Ramiro must have had a good reason for transforming the site of San Juan de la Peña; and is it not interesting to note that “a good reason” is lacking from the official accounts as to why Ramiro decided to invest so heavily in this site? But with the successful identification of Ramiro I as Titurel, the Grail accounts could actually shed light on a historical enigma. Was San Juan de la Peña transformed as it was to become the residence of the Grail?
Ramiro I
Alfonso I’s brother was Ramiro II, who in the Grail account is listed as Trevrezent, the hermit who explains the story of the Grail to Perceval. At first sight, there seems to be a major problem with this identification: Ramiro II married Agnes of Poitiers. It is Agnes of Poitiers who was also the niece of Philip of Alsace and Flanders – the noble to whom Chrétien de Troyes dedicated his story to – and who was also the man who gave Chrétien the document which he then turned into the first Grail account. The link between Aragon and Chrétien’s Grail has thus been made…
Ramiro II’s nickname was, in fact, “the Monk”, as he was one. Ramiro was bishop of Barbastro-Roda and was given papal dispensation to abdicate his monastic vows in order to secure the succession to the throne when his brother had died heirless. Indeed, once again history and the Grail account overlap and each provides further information about an auspicious situation: Anfortas, who is known to have suffered from a debilitating illness that prevented him from creating offspring, had invested in Perceval, making him his successor as Grail King, as he knew that he would die heirless. However, though Perceval would be the leader of the protectors of the Grail, and carry out its mission, on a totally mundane level, everyone knew that Rotrou II de Perche would never inherit the physical kingdom of Aragon, and hence, Alfonso I had created a will in which it would be divided between the three monastic orders, which Wolfram had identified as the protectors of the Grail.
However, as Anfortius’ will was contested, his brother Ramiro II was told to annul his marriage to God, and instead marry a woman, so that a legal heir for the kingdom of Aragon could be created. This, he did.
Crowned king, Ramiro II almost immediately had to fight off Alfonso VII of Castille, who was one of those trying to lay claim to the Aragonese crown. His kingship lasted exactly three years: he married Agnes of Poitiers in 1134, had a child with her, Peroniella or Petronila in Latin, and then gave her hand away to Ramon Berenguer IV of Barcelona, known as Kyot of Katelangen in the Grail account. His nickname was indeed “the little Guillaume” or “Guiot” or Kyot in Occitan: Kyot of Katelangen, little William of Catalonia. Ramiro II then abdicated in her favour and returned to his monastic life.
We note that the Fisher King had a serious wound on his leg, which ails him greatly. Peter L. Hays in The Limping Hero states how the wound, in Parzival, is a lance point through the testicles, a divine punishment for the king’s neglect of his sacred trust, The Holy Grail.
A lot has been written about this symbolism, identifying the Fisher King with fertility gods and arguing how his wounds were symbols of how his land had turned into a “Waste Land”. But amidst dozens of layers of symbolic interpretation, it seems no-one thought about wondering whether it might actually have been a genuine, historical account. Indeed, Alfonso I as a king did not reproduce – he was heirless. This caused the country great concern, as there was no successor to the throne – and in the end, we note that it was his brother who had to break his vow of chastity to guarantee an heir to the throne. It were definitely testing times for Aragon, the “Grail country”.
Alfonso I was a fighter, and a wound in battle that would inflict infertility would certainly have been a possibility – though whether it would have been made public knowledge, is another matter. One of a king’s primary roles is the creation of offspring. Rumours or knowledge that the king is unable to reproduce, could be perilous: the people would loose trust and other claimants to the throne may not have been able to contain their excitement, rallying troops to invade Aragon. This is exactly what happened when the king died and one claimant to the throne felt that he had more rights to the throne than the king’s brother.
Though we do not know the precise cause of Alfonso I’s impossibility to procreate, we do know that he was married to Queen Urraca in 1107; it is often said that the marriage was void of love; Alfonso I is described as a soldier, unable to give love, even depicted as beating his wife. But unless Urraca herself was adamant she did not want to have a son with this man, it is clear that the marriage was created for one specific purpose: the creation of an heir. The possibility that no heir was ever conceived – and that Alfonso was apparently not all that interested in women – might have to do with the fact that the king was indeed infertile – maimed to the extent that any sexual activity might have been painful at best, and impossible at worst. And thus we find that the Grail account and history once again walk hand in hand, one able to shed insights into the other.
The Spanish Grail
Wolfram thought that the story of the Grail had its origins in Spain, which is where he cites his sources, whether he invented them or not. Canadian Professor of history Joseph Goering has identified a number of churches in Aragon that have frescoes of the Virgin Mary holding a fiery Grail. He points out that the oddity about this depiction is twofold. First, the area in which the Virgin was depicted with a fiery Grail is very small. Second, she was depicted with the Grail fifty years before Chrétien’s tale – when the Grail was officially not yet invented as a “literary device”.
The earliest example of a fresco depicting the Virgin with a Grail dates from December 1123 and is an apse painting in the church of St. Clement in Taüll. Here, the Grail is a dish-like object, filled with a red-orange material from which rays rise, as if the plate is hot. Goering noted that the position of the Virgin holding this Grail in her left hand, the rest of her arm obscured by her blue cloak, while making a hand gesture with the right hand, is equally unique in iconography.
He concluded that “the image of the Virgin holding a sacred vessel is to be found only here, in these mountain villages, and nowhere else in Christian art before this time”, adding that “the Virgin at the head of the apostolic college is an uncommon artistic theme, and Mary holding a vessel of any sort seems to be attested nowhere else in Christian art before this time.”
These paintings were made at a time when Chrétien had not yet written about the Grail, and it would be almost a century before de Boron would link the Grail with Christian imagery. So where did this painter get his inspiration from? The answer seems as straightforward as it is simple: this type of image was local to the region, so it must have depicted a theme that was only popular in that region. And the only frame – which even Goering has to admit – was de Mandach’s conclusion, for, indeed, de Mandach’s timeframe for the Grail being in Aragon is precisely in agreement with the facts revealed by these wall frescoes.
The question, of course, is why the Virgin Mary became upgraded amongst the group of apostles and why she became the Grail bearer. For this, Goering has no clear answer. Is it possible that these wall paintings were the first attempt, performed within the heartland of the Grail (i.e. Aragon), to see whether a new image could be introduced in religious iconography, namely that of the Virgin holding the Grail? Why the Virgin Mary? Because she was said to be a virgin… and of course, in the Grail tradition, the Grail Bearer had to be a virgin. Hence, the Virgin Mary masqueraded as the Grail Bearer.
So, in at least eight Pyrenean churches, all located within a small area, stretching from the old boundary between Aragon and Catalonia in the west to the principality of Andorra in the east, all dating from the same period (ca. 1100-1170), a unique type of religious icon was introduced. In the end, it was never exported, and was abandoned before Chrétien commenced his Grail book – and the story of the Grail would take off for good.
In his analysis of these paintings, Goering goes further, noting that these churches were decorated at a time when the bishop was one Raymund, of French origins, but in 1101 invited to the court of King Pedro I of Aragon and elected as bishop of Roda – apparently to everyone’s surprise. Pedro’s son Alfonso I remained intimately involved with Bishop Raymund, from 1114 until his death from wounds received while accompanying Alfonso on a daring incursion into Andalusia in 1126. Goering’s historical analysis revealed that Raymund and Rotrou II de Perche – Perceval – not only fought together, but also appeared together frequently in royal charters, “so frequently that one might suppose a real friendship had developed between the two” and adding that “Rotrou may have even been with Raymond on his deathbed”.
The identification of a specific family – the Aragon kings – and specific locations in Northern Spain – San Juan de la Peña – show that the territory of the Grail was the kingdom of Aragon, south of the Pyrenees.
Excerpted from the introduction of “Servants of the Grail”
GAWAIN
I. Here the story is silent of Messire Gawain and beginneth to speak of Lancelot, that entereth into a forest and rideth with right great ado and meeteth a knight in the midst of the forest that was coming full speed and was armed of all arms.
"Sir," saith Lancelot, "Whence come you?"
"Sir," saith Lancelot, "I come from the neighbourhood of King Arthur's Court."
"Ha, Sir, can you tell me tidings of a knight that beareth a green shield such as I bear? If so, he is my brother."
"What name hath he?" saith Lancelot.
"Sir," saith he, "His name is Gladoens, and he is a good knight and a hardy, and he hath a white horse right strong and swift."
"Be there other knights in your country that bear such arms as your shield and his besides you and he?"
"Certes, Sir, none."
"And wherefore do you ask?" saith Lancelot.
"For this, that a certain man hath reft him of one of his castles for that he was not there. Howbeit, I know well that he will have it again through his good knighthood."
"Is he so good knight?" saith Lancelot.
"Certes, Sir, yea! He is the best of the Isles of the Moors."
"Sir, of your mercy, lower your coif."
He quickly thereon lowereth his coif, and Lancelot looketh at him in the face. "Certes, Sir Knight," saith he, "you very much resemble him."
"Ha, Sir," saith the knight, "Know you then any tidings of him?"
"Certes, Sir," saith he, "Yea! and true tidings may I well say, for he rode at my side five leagues Welsh, nor never saw I one man so like another as are you to him."
"Good right hath he to resemble me," saith the knight, "for we are twins, but he was born first and hath more sense and knighthood than I; nor in all the Isles of the Moors is there damsel that hath so much worth and beauty as she of whom he is loved of right true love, and more she desireth to see him than aught else that liveth, for she hath not seen him of more than a year, wherefore hath she gone seek her prize, my brother, by all the forests of the world. Sir," saith the knight, "Let me go seek my brother, and tell me where I may find him."
"Certes," saith Lancelot, "I will tell you though it grieve me sore."
"Wherefore?" saith the knight, "Hath he done you any mis-deed?"
"In no wise," saith Lancelot, "Rather hath he done so much for me that I love you thereof and offer you my service."
"Sir," saith the knight, "I am going my way, but for God's sake tell me where I shall find my brother."
"Sir," saith Lancelot, "I will tell you. This morning did I bid his body farewell and help to bury him."
"Ha, Sir," saith the knight, "Do you tell me true?"
"Certes," saith Lancelot, "True it is that I tell you."
"Is he slain then, my brother?" saith the knight.
"Yea, and of succouring me," saith Lancelot.
"Ha, sir," saith the knight, "For God's sake tell me nought that is not right."
"By God, Sir," saith he, "Sore grieved am I to tell it you, for never loved I knight so much in so brief a time as I loved him. He helped to save me from death, and therefore will I do for you according to that he did for me."
"Sir," saith the knight, "If he be dead, a great grief is it to myself, for I have lost my comfort and my life and my land without recovery."
"Sir," saith Lancelot, "He helped me to save my life, and yours will I help to save henceforth for ever and so be that I shall know of your jeopardy."
The knight heareth that his brother is dead and well believeth Lancelot, and beginneth to make dole thereof the greatest that was ever heard. And Lancelot saith to him, "Sir Knight, let be this dole, for none recovery is there; but my body do I offer you and my knighthood in any place you please, where I may save your honour."
"Sir," saith the knight, "With good will receive I your help and your love, sith that you deign to offer me the same, and now have I sorer need of them than ever. Sir," saith the knight, "Sith that my brother is dead, I will return back and bear with my wrong, though well would he have amended it had he been on live."
"By my head," saith Lancelot, "I will go with you, that so may I reward you of that he hath done for me. He delivered his body to the death for me, and in like manner freely would I fain set mine own in jeopardy for love of you and of him."
II. "Sir," saith the knight, "Right good will do I owe you of this that you say to me, so your deeds be but the same herein."
"Yea, so help me God," saith Lancelot, "The same shall they be, if God lend me the power."
With that, they go on their way together, and the knight comforteth him much of that which Lancelot hath said to him, but of the death of his brother was he right sorrowful. And they ride until they come to the land of the Moors; then espy they a castle upon a rock, and below was a broad meadow-land.
"Sir," saith the Knight of the Green Shield to Lancelot, "This castle was my brother's and is now mine, and much it misliketh me that it hath fallen to me on this wise. And the knight that reft it of my brother is of so great hardihood that he feareth no knight on live, and you will presently see him issue forth of this castle so soon as he shall perceive you."
Lancelot and the knight ride until they draw nigh the castle. And the knight looketh in the way before him, and seeth a squire coming on a hackney, that was carrying before him a wild boar dead. The Knight of the Green Shield asketh him whose man he is, and the squire maketh answer: "I am man of the Lord of the Rock Gladoens, that cometh there behind, and my lord cometh all armed, he and others, for the brother of Gladoens hath defied him on behalf of his brother, but right little recketh my lord of his defiance."
III. Lancelot heareth how he that is coming is the enemy of him to whom had he been alive, his love most was due. The Knight of the Green Shield pointed him out so soon as he saw him.
"Sir," saith he to Lancelot, "Behold him by whom I am disherited, and yet worse would he do to me and he knew that my brother were dead."
Lancelot, without saving more, so soon as he had espied the Knight of the Rock, smiteth his horse with his spurs and cometh toward him. The Lord of the Rock, that was proud and hardy, seeth Lancelot coming and smiteth with his spurs the horse whereon he sitteth. They come with so swift an onset either upon other that they break their spears upon their shields, and hurtle together so sore that the Knight of the Rock Gladoens falleth over the croup of his horse. Lancelot draweth his sword and cometh above him, and he crieth him mercy and asketh him wherefore he wisheth to slay him? Lancelot saith for the sake of Gladoens from whom he hath reft his land and his castle. "And what is that to you?" saith the knight. "Behoveth his brother challenge me thereof."
"As much it behoveth me as his brother," saith Lancelot.
"Wherefore you?"
"For this," saith Lancelot, "That as much as he did for me will I do to you."
He cutteth off his head and giveth it incontinent to the Knight of the Green Shield.
"Now tell me," saith Lancelot, "Sith that he is dead, is he purged of that whereof you appeached him?"
"Sir," saith the knight, "I hold him rightly quit thereof, for, sith that he is dead, all claim on behalf of his kindred is abated by his death."
"And I pledge you my faith loyally," saith Lancelot, "as I am a knight, that never shall you be in peril nor in jeopardy of aught wherein I may help you, so I be in place and free, but my help shall you have for evermore, for that your brother staked his life to help me."
IV. Lancelot and the knight lay the night at the Rock Gladoens, and the Knight of the Green Shield had his land at his pleasure, and all were obedient to him. And the upright and loyal were right glad, albeit when they heard the tidings of Gladoens' death they were right sorrowful thereof. Lancelot departed from the castle on the morrow, and the knight remained therein, sorrowful for his brother that he had lost, and glad for the land that he had gotten again. Lancelot goeth back right amidst the forest and rideth the day long, and meeteth a knight that was coming, groaning sore. And he was stooping over the fore saddle-bow for the pain that he had. He meeteth Lancelot and saith to him: "Sir, for God's sake, turn back, for you will find there the most cruel pass in the world there where I have been wounded through the body. Wherefore I beseech you not go thither."
"What pass is it then?" saith Lancelot.
"Sir," saith he, "It is the pass of the Castle of Beards, and it hath the name of this, that every knight that passeth thereby must either leave his beard there or challenge the same, and in such sort have I challenged my beard that meseemeth I shall die thereof."
"By my head," saith Lancelot, "I hold not this of cowardize, sith that you were hardy to set your life in jeopardy to challenge your beard, but now would you argue me of cowardize when you would have me turn back. Rather would I be smitten through the body with honour, so and I had not my death thereof, than lose with shame a single hair of my beard."
"Sir," saith the knight, "May God preserve you, for the castle is far more cruel than you think, and God guide the knight that may destroy the evil custom of the castle, for right shameful is the custom to strange knights that pass thereby."
V. Lancelot departeth from the knight and cometh toward the castle. Just as he had passed over a great bridge, he looketh about and seeth two knights come all armed to the entrance of the castle, and they made hold their horses before them, and their shields and spears are before them leaning against the wall. Lancelot looketh at the gateway of the castle and seeth the great door all covered with beards fastened thereon, and heads of knights in great plenty hung thereby. So, as he was about to enter the gate, two knights issue therefrom over against him.
"Sir," saith the one, "Abide and pay your toll!"
"Do knights, then, pay toll here?" saith Lancelot.
"Yea!" say the knights, "All they that have beards, and they that have none are quit. Sir, now pay us yours, for a right great beard it is, and thereof have we sore need."
"For what?" saith Lancelot.
"I will tell you," saith the knight. "There be hermits in this forest that make hair-shirts thereof."
"By my head," saith Lancelot, "Never shall they have hair-shirt of mine, so I may help it."
"That shall they," say the knights, "Of yours as of the other, or dearly shall you pay therefor!"
VI. Right wroth waxeth Sir Lancelot, and cometh to the knight, and smiteth him with his spear amidst the breast with such a thrust that it passeth half an ell beyond, and overthroweth him and his horse together. The other knight seeth his fellow wounded to the death, and cometh towards him with a great sweep and breaketh his spear upon his shield. Howbeit, Lancelot beareth him to the ground right over his horse-croup and maketh him fall so heavily that he breaketh one of his legs. The tidings are come to the Lady of the Castle that a knight hath come to the pass that hath slain one of her knights and wounded the other. The Lady is come thither, and bringeth two of her damsels with her. She seeth Lancelot that is fain to slay the knight that lieth wounded on the ground.
"Sir," saith the Lady to Lancelot, "Withdraw yourself back and slay him not, but alight and speak to me in safety."
"Lady," saith one of the maidens, "I know him well. This is Lancelot of the Lake, the most courteous knight that is in the court of King Arthur."
He alighteth and cometh before the Lady. "Lady," saith he, "what is your pleasure?"
"I desire," saith she, "that you come to my hostel to harbour, and that you make me amends of the shame you have done me."
VII. "Lady," saith Lancelot, "Shame have I never done you nor shall do, but the knights took in hand too shameful a business when they were minded to take the beards of stranger knights by force."
"Sir," saith she, "I will forego mine ill-will on condition that you harbour herewithin to-night."
"Lady," saith Lancelot, "I desire not your ill-will, wherefore will I gladly do your pleasure."
He setteth him within the castle and maketh his horse be led in after him, and the Lady hath the dead knight brought into the chapel and buried. The other she biddeth be disarmed and clothed and commandeth that his wounds be searched. Then maketh she Lancelot be disarmed and clad right richly in a good robe, and telleth him that she knoweth well who he is.
"Lady," saith Lancelot, "It is well for me."
Thereupon they sit to eat, and the first course is brought in by knights in chains that had their noses cut off; the second by knights in chains that had their eyes put out; wherefore they were led in by squires. The third course was brought in by knights that had but one hand and were in chains. After that, came other knights that had each but one foot and brought in the fourth course. At the fifth course came knights right fair and tall, and each brought a naked sword in his hand and presented their heads to the Lady.
VIII. Lancelot beheld the martyrdom of these knights, and sore misliking had he of the services of such folk. They are risen from meat and the lady goeth to her chamber and sitteth on a couch.
"Lancelot," saith the Lady, "you have seen the justice and the lordship of my castle. All these knights have been conquered at the passing of my door."
"Lady," saith Lancelot, "foul mischance hath befallen them."
"The like mischance would have befallen you had you not been knight so good. And greatly have I desired to see you this long time past. And I will make you lord of this castle and myself."
"Lady," saith he, "the lordship of this castle hold I of yourself without mesne, and to you have I neither wish nor right to refuse it. Rather am I willing to be at your service."
"Then," saith she, "you will abide with me in this castle, for more do I love you than any other knight that liveth."
"Lady," saith Lancelot, "Gramercy, but in no castle may I abide more than one night until I have been thither whither behoveth me to go."
"Whither are you bound?" saith she.
"Lady, saith he, "to the Castle of Souls."
"Well know I the castle," saith she. "The King hath the name Fisherman, and lieth in languishment on account of two knights that have been at his castle and made not good demand. Would you fain go thither?" saith the Lady.
"Yea," saith Lancelot.
"Then pledge me your faith that you will return by me to speak to me, so the Graal shall appear to you and you ask whereof it serveth."
"Yea, truly, saith Lancelot, "were you beyond sea!"
"Sir," saith one of the damsels, "So much may you well promise, for the Graal appeareth not to no knight so wanton as be ye. For you love the Queen Guenievre, the wife of your lord, King Arthur, nor so long as this love lieth at your heart may you never behold the Graal."
IX. Lancelot heard the damsel and blushed of despite.
"Ha, Lancelot," saith the Lady, "Love you other than me?"
"Lady," saith he, "the damsel may say her pleasure."
Lancelot lay the night at the castle, and right wroth was he of the damsel that calleth the love of him and the Queen disloyal. And the morrow when he had heard mass, he took leave of the Lady of the Castle, and she besought him over and over to keep his covenant, and he said that so would he do without fail. Therewithal he issueth forth of the castle and entereth into a tall and ancient forest, and rideth the day long until he cometh to the outskirt of the forest, and seeth a tall cross at the entrance of a burying-ground enclosed all round about with a hedge of thorns. And the way lay through the burying ground. Lancelot entered therein and the night was come. He seeth the graveyard full of tombs and sepulchres. He looketh behind and seeth a chapel wherein were candles burning. Thitherward goeth he, and passeth beyond without saying aught more by the side of a dwarf that was digging a grave in the ground.
"Lancelot," saith the dwarf, "you are right not to salute me, for you are the man of all the world that most I hate; and God grant me vengeance of your body. So will He what time you are stricken down here within!"
Lancelot heard the dwarf, but deigned not to answer him of nought. He is come to the chapel, and alighteth and maketh fast the bridle of his horse to a tree, and leaneth his shield and spear without. After that he entereth into the chapel, and findeth a damsel laying out a knight in his winding-sheen. As soon as Lancelot was entered therewithin the wounds of the knight were swollen up and began to bleed afresh.
"Ha, Sir Knight, now see I plainly that you slew him that I am wrapping in his windingsheet!"
X. Thereupon, behold you, two knights that are carrying other two knights dead. They alight and then set them in the chapel. And the dwarf crieth out to them: "Now shall it be seen how you avenge your friends of the enemy that fell upon you!"
The knight that had fled from the forest when Messire Gawain came thither where the three lay dead, was come therewithin and knew Lancelot, whereupon saith he: "Our mortal enemy are you, for by you were these three knights slain."
"Well had they deserved it," saith Lancelot, "and in this chapel am I in no peril of you, wherefore as at this time will I depart not hence, for I know not the ways of the forest."
He was in the chapel until the day broke, when he issued forth thereof, and sore it weighed upon him that his horse was still fasting. He taketh his arms and is mounted. The dwarf crieth out aloud: "What aileth you?" saith he to the two knights, "Will you let your mortal enemy go thus?"
With that the two knights mount their horses and go to the two issues of the grave-yard, thinking that Lancelot is fain to flee therefrom; but no desire hath he thereof, wherefore he cometh to the knight that was guarding the entrance whereby he had to issue out, and smiteth him so stiffly that he thrusteth the point of his spear right through his body. The other knight that was guarding the other entrance, that had fled out of the forest before, had no mind to avenge his fellow, and fled incontinent so fast as he might. And Lancelot taketh the horse of the knight he had slain and driveth him before him, for he thinketh that some knight may haply have need thereof. He rideth on until he cometh to a hermitage in the forest where he alighteth and hath his horses stabled, and the Hermit giveth them of the best he hath. And Lancelot heard mass, and afterward are a little and fell on sleep. Thereafter, behold you, a knight that cometh to the Hermit and seeth Lancelot that was about to mount.
"Sir," saith he, "Whither go you?"
"Sir Knight," saith Lancelot, "thither shall I go where God may please; but you, whitherward are you bound to go?"
"Sir, I go to see one of my brethren and my two sisters, for I have been told that he hath fallen on such mishap as that he is called the Poor Knight, whereof am I sore sorrowful."
"Certes," saith Lancelot, "poor he is, the more the pity! Howbeit, will you do him a message from me?"
"Sir," saith the knight, "Right willingly!"
"Will you present him with this horse on my behalf, and tell him how Lancelot that harboured with him hath sent it?"
"Sir," saith the knight, "Right great thanks, and blessed may you be, for he that doth a kindness to a worshipful man loseth it not."
"Salute the two damsels for me," saith Lancelot.
"Sir, right willingly!"
The knight delivereth the horse to his squire, and taketh leave of Lancelot.
XI. Thereupon, Lancelot departeth from the hermitage and rideth on until he cometh forth of the forest, and findeth a waste land, a country broad and long wherein wonned neither beast nor bird, for the land was so poor and parched that no victual was to be found therein. Lancelot looketh before him and seeth a city appear far away. Thither rideth he full speed and seeth that the city is so great that it seemeth him to encompass a whole country. He seeth the walls that are falling all around, and the gates ruined with age. He entereth within and findeth the city all void of folk, and seeth the great palaces fallen down and waste, and the great grave-yards full of sepulchres, and the tall churches all lying waste, and the markets and exchanges all empty. He rideth amidst the streets, and findeth a great palace that seemeth him to be better and more ancient than all the others. He bideth awhile before it and heareth within how knights and ladies are making great dole. And they say to a knight: "Ha, God, sore grief and pity is this of you, that you must needs die in such manner, and that your death may not be respited! Sore hatred ought we to bear toward him that hath adjudged you such a death."
The knights and ladies swoon over him as he departeth. Lancelot hath heard all this and much marvelleth he thereof, but nought thereof may he see.
XII. Thereupon, lo you, the knight that cometh down into the midst of the hall, clad in a short red jerkin; and he was girt with a rich girdle of gold, and had a rich clasp at his neck wherein were many rich stones, and on his head had he a great cap of gold, and he held great axe. The knight was of great comeliness and young of age. Lancelot seeth him coming, and looketh upon him right fainly when he seeth him appear. And the knight saith to him, "Sir, alight!"
"Certes," saith Lancelot, "Willingly."
He alighteth and maketh his horse fast to a ring of silver that was on the mounting-stage, and putteth his shield from his neck and his spear from his hand.
"Sir," saith he to the knight, "What is your pleasure?"
"Sir, needs must you cut me off my head with this axe, for of this weapon hath my death been adjudged, but and you will not, I will cut off your own therewith."
"Hold, Sir," saith Lancelot, "What is this you tell me?"
"Sir," saith the knight, "you must needs do even as I say, sith that you are come into this city."
"Sir," saith Lancelot, "Right foolish were he that in such a jeopardy should not do the best for himself, but blamed shall I be thereof and I shall slay you when you have done me no wrong."
"Certes," saith the Knight, "In no otherwise may you go hence."
"Fair Sir," saith Lancelot, "So gentle are you and so well nurtured, how cometh it that you take your death so graciously? You know well that I shall kill you before you shall kill me, sith that so it is."
"This know I well for true," saith the Knight, "But you will promise me before I die, that you will return into this city within a year from this, and that you will set your head in the same jeopardy without challenge, as I have set mine."
"By my head," saith Lancelot, "Needeth no argument that I shall choose respite of death to dying here on the spot. But I marvel me of this that you are so fairly apparelled to receive your death."
XIII. "Sir," saith the Knight, "He that would go before the Saviour of the World ought of right to apparel him as fairly as he may. I am by confession purged of all wickedness and of all the misdeeds that ever I have committed, and do repent me truly thereof, wherefore at this moment am I fain to die."
Therewithal he holdeth forth the axe, and Lancelot taketh it and seeth that it is right keen and well whetted.
"Sir," saith the Knight, "Hold up your hand toward the minster that you see yonder."
"Sir," saith Lancelot, "Willingly."
"Thus, then, will you swear to me upon the holy relics that are within this minster, that on this day year at the hour that you shall have slain me, or before, you yourself will come back here and place your head in the very same peril as I shall have placed mine, without default?"
"Thus," saith Lancelot, "do I swear and give you thereto my pledge."
With that, the Knight kneeleth and stretcheth his neck as much as he may, and Lancelot taketh the axe in his hands, and then saith to him, "Sir Knight, for God's sake, have mercy on yourself!"
"Let cut off my head!" saith the Knight, "For otherwise may I not have mercy upon you!"
"In God's name," saith Lancelot, "fain would I deny you!"
With that, he swingeth the axe and cutteth off the head with such a sweep that he maketh it fly seven foot high from the body. The Knight fell to the ground when his head was cut off, and Lancelot flung down the axe, and thinketh that he will make but an ill stay there for himself. He cometh to his horse, and taketh his arms and mounteth and looketh behind him, but seeth neither the body of the Knight nor the head, neither knoweth he what hath become of them all, save only that he heard much dole and a great cry far off in the city of knights and ladies, saying that he shall be avenged, please God, at the term set, or before. Lancelot hath heard and understood all that the knights say and the ladies, and issueth forth of the city.
Outremer, French (outre-mer) for "overseas", was a general name given to the Crusader states established after the First Crusade: the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli and especially the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The name was often equated to the Levant of Renaissance.
The term was, in general, used to refer to any land "overseas"; for example, Louis IV of France was called "Louis d'Outremer" as he was raised in England.
This myth wasn't heard in Europe until the 12th century. The real origins of the Holy Grail were not Christian but pagan. The Grail was first Christianized in Spain from a sacred tradition of the Moors. Like the Celts' holy Cauldron of Regeneration, which it resembled, the blood-filled vessel was a womb symbol meaning rebirth in the Oriental or Gnostic sense of reincarnation, lb connotation was feminine, not masculine.
— Barbara G. Walker; The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets
The Holy Grail is a symbol both of the lower (or irrational) world and of the bodily nature of man, because both are receptacles for the living essences of the superior worlds. Such is the mystery of the redeeming blood which, descending into the condition of death, overcomes the last enemy by ensouling all substance with its own immortality. To the Christian, whose mystic faith especially emphasizes the love element, the Holy Grail typifies the heart in which continually swirls the living water of eternal life. Moreover, to the Christian, the search for the Holy Grail is the search for the real Self which, when found, is the consummation of the magnum opus.
— Manly P. Hall; The Secret Teachings of all Ages
No adequate interpretation has ever been given to the Grail Mysteries. Some believe the Knights of the Holy Grail to have been a powerful organization of Christian mystics perpetuating the Ancient Wisdom under the rituals and sacraments of the oracular Cup. The quest for the Holy Grail is the eternal search for truth, and Albert G. Mackey sees in it a variation of the Masonic legend of the Lost Word so long sought by the brethren of the Craft. There is also evidence to support the claim that the story of the Grail is an elaboration of an early pagan Nature myth which has been preserved by reason of the subtle manner in which it was grafted onto the cult of Christianity. From this particular viewpoint, the Holy Grail is undoubtedly a type of the ark or vessel in which the life of the world is preserved and therefore is significant of the body of the Great Mother--Nature. Its green color relates it to Venus and to the mystery of generation; also to the Islamic faith, whose sacred color is green and whose Sabbath is Friday, the day of Venus.
— Manly P. Hall; The Secret Teachings of all Ages
Though some controversy exists as to whether the Grail was a cup or a platter, it is generally depicted in art as a chalice of considerable size and unusual beauty. According to the legend, Joseph of Arimathea brought the Grail Cup to the place of the crucifixion and in it caught the blood pouring from the wounds of the dying Nazarene. Later Joseph, who had become custodian of the sacred relics--the Sangreal and the Spear of Longinus--carried them into a distant country. According to one version, his descendants finally placed these relics in Glastonbury Abbey in England; according to another, in a wonderful castle on Mount Salvat, Spain, built by angels in a single night. Under the name of Preston John, Parsifal, the last of the Grail Kings, carried the Holy Cup with him into India, and it disappeared forever from the Western World. Subsequent search for the Sangreal was the motif for much of the knight errantry of the Arthurian legends and the ceremonials of the Round Table. (See the Morte d'Arthur.)
— Manly P. Hall; The Secret Teachings of all Ages
Like the sapphire Schethiyâ, the Lapis Exilis, crown jewel of the Archangel Lucifer, fell from heaven. Michael, archangel of the sun and the Hidden God of Israel, at the head of the angelic hosts swooped down upon Lucifer and his legions of rebellious spirits. During the conflict, Michael with his flaming sword struck the flashing Lapis Exilis from the coronet of his adversary, and the green stone fell through all the celestial rings into the dark and immeasurable Abyss. Out of Lucifer's radiant gem was fashioned the Sangreal, or Holy Grail, from which Christ is said to have drunk at the Last Supper.
— Manly P. Hall; The Secret Teachings of all Ages
When Parsifal achieves a vision of the Holy Grail, this is a vision of the vegetable body or soul which has been so transformed by moral feeling and intellectual questioning that it is fit to carry a higher form of spirit, the Spirit of Jesus Christ.
— Mark Booth; The Secret History of the World
As we have seen, blood is the distinguishing feature of animal consciousness, and in occult physiology the animal part of our nature nestles in or is carried by - as if by a chalice - the vegetable part of our nature.
The secret of the Holy Grail, then, is not that it represents a bloodline, This, I have already suggested, would go against the esoteric doctrine of reincarnation. Rather it alludes to the role of the vegetable part of our nature as a living receptacle for our spirit or consciousness. The quest for the Grail is the quest for a purified receptacle fit to carry a higher form of spirit, and the trials in the course of the quest involve certain esoteric techniques of purification of the vegetable body. Rudolf Steiner [...] said that all serious esoteric work begins with work on the etheric, that is to say the vegetable body.
— Mark Booth; The Secret History of the World
The Holy Grail was a cup, and according to the ancient teachings, the cup was the Earth. The cup is the Earth of life, that holds all life, and the cup holds all the blood. The blood on Earth is in the Holy Grail, so whoever controls the Earth, controls the Holy Grail and controls all the holy blood. The holy blood is in the Holy Grail. Now, that goes back to this old idea about the shedding of the blood. Why are we going to shed the blood? Well, we are going to shed the blood to gain control. And, that will be our blessing. That's right, you are going to get blessed with the shedding of all this blood. The cup is the Earth and the blood is you. Now we can understand what they mean by the New World Order, and the methods that are being used to accomplish it.
— Jordan Maxwell; Matrix of Power
It [Holy Grail] was the cup that symbolized the womb and the bloodline of the most ‘pure’ of the reptilian crossbreeds which is passed on most crucially through the female
— David Icke; The Biggest Secret
The ‘Grant of Arms’ or symbol of the Dragon bloodine in Sumer was called a Gra-al, also known as the Mark of Cain. The biblical Cain was one of the early Anunnaki human royal crossbreeds who followed ‘Adam’. It is this Gra-al that became the so-called Holy Grail and this is why its equivalent in Old French means ‘blood royal’.
— David Icke; The Biggest Secret
The Grail: from myth to reality
Philip Coppens
The basic Grail account opens with a young man, Perceval, encountering knights and realising he wants to be one. Despite his mother’s objections, the boy trains for the knighthood and begins a series of travels. On one such trip, he comes across the Fisher King, who invites him to stay at his castle. While there, he witnesses a strange procession in which young men and women carry magnificent objects from one chamber to another, passing before him at each course of the meal.
The first person to write about the Grail was Chrétien de Troyes, who did not identify the nature of the Grail itself. Subsequent authors, like Robert de Boron, identified it as a Christian relic, and normally as the cup used during the Last Supper. However, the German author Wolfram von Eschenbach then wrote his Grail book, Parzival, in which he stated that previous authors had committed serious errors in their accounts, while at the same time identifying the Grail as a stone that had fallen from heaven, and which displayed supernatural qualities, bestowing apparent longevity on those who were near it, as well as attracting water.
Parcival has a unique position in the Grail literature, but is still seen as a work of fiction. Wolfram stated that the characters of those who possessed the Grail were genuine people, whose names and histories his sources had investigated in Latin documents. Furthermore, Wolfram did not write fiction, and stating that Parzival is nothing but a work of fiction therefore needs an explanation why Wolfram departed from his non-fictional writings to meddle in the fictional literature.
There are over 600 names in Parzival and its sequel Titurel combined, resulting in one of the longest identification parades ever. As most believe we are faced with a literary invention by Wolfram, any identification with historical characters seems futile.
Interestingly, most of those who have attempted this match, have tried to find correspondences with the kings and nobles of Aragon. This is interesting, for Guyot de Provins, one of the primary candidates for the role of Kyot of Provence, had strong ties with Aragon. Guyot wrote about the kings of Aragon, who were his magnanimous protectors: his patron was Alfonso the Chaste, Alfonso II, the son of Alfonso I (1104-1134), who freed Saragossa from Moorish domination in 1118.
Using this as his starting point, Swiss scholar, André de Mandach, began his research, resulting in the first publication of his work in 1992, arguing for the existence of an “UrParzival”. De Mandach felt that Wolfram’s account might not only be based on real events, he also wondered whether the legend was perhaps written in a code. The key to unlock this code, de Mandach felt, lay in the history of the Northern Spanish kingdoms, in the period of 1104 to 1137. Is it not a nice coincidence that Flegetanis, the enigmatic “first source” from which Wolfram stated he retained his information, is a family name in the Empordà, the northern Catalonian region of Spain?
The Grail Code
De Mandach realised that the key to breaking the code was the “honorary surnames”, nicknames, which was a popular tradition in Spain and specifically in Islam since the 7th century AD. Indeed, the practice became so popular that it was exported to other parts of Western Europe, with kings being labelled “the Good”, “the Seemly”, “the Just”, etc.
He argued that Anfortas, identified as a king, was thus King “something” Anfortas – “something” requiring to be substituted with a name like Alfonso, Raymond, or another popular name of the time. This approach is much more direct than most researchers’ attempts, when trying to explain that Anfortas might come from the ancient French “enferté(z)”, itself derived from the Latin “infirmitate(m)”. Such reasoning is indirect at best.
Alfonso I of Aragon
This approach enabled de Mandach to identify this person as King Alfonso I of Aragon, who was nicknamed “Anfortius”. Indeed, it is that simple: Anfortas was Anfortius. He is identified as such numerous times, including in his will, and in Flamenca, where he is known as “Anfors”. Coins minted under his reign identify him as “ANFUS REX”, some of these coins having Toletta (Toledo) on the reverse side. Just on this basis alone, it is clear that de Mandach had just cracked the code. The question is why it lasted until 1992 until someone did so. And why few have noted his contribution. Perhaps the reason can be found in the fact that de Mandach wrote for a scientific audience, who had impossible pains to accept the historical nature of the Grail account.
Though sceptics might argue that Anfortius is not totally identical with Anfortas, it should be remembered that Anfortius was his Latin nickname, with Anfortas having an Occitan appearance – as Kyot the Provencal, as an Occitan speaker himself, would do. But the key to a successful decodation is not finding the key, but whether or not all subsequent decodations are then made easy, straightforward, before all pieces fall into place. That is indeed the case…
For if Anfortas/Alfonso I is the key, then it is his cousin, Rotrou II de Perche, who confirmed that the code was broken. Rotrou II de Perche was the lord of “Val Perche”: Perche-val… hence Perceval. And like Rotrou was Alfonso’s cousin, so was Perceval Anfortas’ uncle. With Anfortas and Perceval being the nicknames of two historical figures, whose family relationship was identical to the relationship described in Wolfram’s document between the Fisher King and Perceval, de Grail code had been broken.
Anfortas, known to us as Alfonso I, the Battler, was born in 1074, the king of Aragon and Navarre, from 1104 until his death on 6 or 7 September 1134. He was a formidable fighter, known for a series of victories known as the “Reconquista”, the recovery of Spain from the Moors for the Christians. Before his death, Alfonso I made a will, leaving his kingdom to the Knights Templar, the Hospitallers and the Knights of the Sepulchre. It were of course the Knights Templar who had been identified as the protectors of the Grail by Wolfram – as was Anfortas. Therefore, in Alfonso I, we have a king – the Fisher King who owns the Grail in Wolfram’s story – passing one third of his estates to the Knights Templar – the protectors of the Grail.
That was not all. When deadly injured in battle, he ordered that he was transported to San Juan de la Peña, a voyage of two days and 115 km. He died there. San Juan de la Peña has, of all sites, one of the strongest connections with the Grail tradition. We also note that there is a tradition that those who are in the presence of the Grail, will not die during the following seven days. Was this the real purpose behind his return to San Juan de la Peña? It is impossible to prove, but an interesting suggeston.
Munsalvæsche
“For thirty miles around has been hewn neither timber nor stone to build any dwelling but one, rich in earthly splendours. If anyone sets out to find it alas he will not do so; although there are many who try. It must happen unwittingly if one should see the castle. I presume, Sir, that you know of it; Munsalvæsche it is called. This castle controls a realm named Terre de Salvæsche. It was bequeathed by old Titurel to his son, King Frimutel.”
There is every possibility that San Juan de la Peña was indeed the renowned Munsalvæsche, the residence of the Grail king and the location where the Grail was held. It is indeed, as the Catholic Church seems to accept, the site where the “Holy Chalice” was once held, before it ended up in Valencia. But whereas San Juan de la Peña is often referred to as a Monastery, it was much more special than that: it was also the residence of the Aragon kings.
In 1071, Pope Alejandro II provided special protection to the monastery, which remained under papal authority and thus outside the bailiwick of the Bishop of Jaca – a privileged position for any religious site to find itself in. It meant that San Juan de la Peña could not be interfered with by the normal church hierarchies – only by the Pope himself. This special status was reaffirmed in 1095.
Throughout this period, the Aragon kings, such as Sancho el Mayor, Ramiro I, Sancho Ramirez and Pedro I, continued to favour the monastery. The last three spent Lent there every year and chose it as the burial place for themselves and their families. San Juan de la Peña thus became a royal mausoleum. And if Anfortas was the Fisher King, then San Juan de la Peña, his capital, was Munsalvæsche.
The Fisher King, Alfonso I of Aragon, made large donations to San Juan de la Peña. He thanked his victory near Tauste to the relics of San Juan de la Peña. He, like his predecessors and successors, stayed in San Juan de la Peña, specifically during the week before Easter – the week when the Grail procession occurred. It is known that Alfonso I also stayed in San Juan de la Peña at other times, such as in May 1108, showing that it could definitely be seen as his residence, and the Grail Castle.
Anfortas was labelled “Le Roi Pescheor”, the Fisher King, a nickname that was the result of him spending his time in what according to Chrétien was a “plan d’eau”, a river, or what was known as a “see”, a lake, according to Wolfram. The river Aragon flows in the valley beneath San Juan de la Peña. But just 200 metres from the new monastery of San Juan de la Peña used to be a lake that was renowned for its many fish. This reputation lasted well into the 20th century, though the lake was dried out from the 1970s onwards (it sits close to the modern car park). As Wolfram locates the lake close to Munsalvæsche, San Juan de la Peña once again conforms perfectly to Wolfram’s narrative. Wolfram also locates Munsalvæsche in a forest and San Juan de la Peña sits in a forest.
However, Wolfram situates Munsalvæsche in “Katelangen”, Catalonia, whereas San Juan de la Peña sits in Aragon. This apparent contradiction can be smoothed out, as when Wolfram was writing his account, San Juan de la Peña was indeed part of Catalonia, after Ramiro II of Aragon had abandoned the Aragon and San Juan de la Peña to Ramon Berenguer IV, the count of Catalonia.
Furthermore, even Chrétien’s voyage of how Perceval reaches the Grail castle coincides with how one reaches San Juan de la Peña: there is a river to cross, then a journey through a forest, before you reach a tower – a “square” tower, as Chrétien states. The square tower of the Old Monastery is indeed what gives San Juan de la Peña its billboard characteristic. De Mandach has also identified other details of Chrétien’s account with those of San Juan de la Peña, as it existed in his days. It has led de Mandach to the conclusion that Munsalvæsche, the residence of the Grail king, was most definitely San Juan de la Peña, the residence of the kings of Aragon, and of Anfortas – Alfonso I.
The Grail dynasty
These initial findings led de Mandach to identify the other characters of the Grail story. The Grail dynasty is a series of three male successors: Titurel – Frimutel – Anfortas. This overlaps with Ramiro I (1035-1069), Sancho Ramirez I (1063-1094) and finally Alfonso I, all kings of Aragon.
Wolfram starts the Grail tradition with Titurel. He is the key person who brings the Grail from the East. It is Titurel, i.e. Ramiro I, who transformed San Juan de la Peña and made it his main residence. Coincidence? It is clear that Ramiro must have had a good reason for transforming the site of San Juan de la Peña; and is it not interesting to note that “a good reason” is lacking from the official accounts as to why Ramiro decided to invest so heavily in this site? But with the successful identification of Ramiro I as Titurel, the Grail accounts could actually shed light on a historical enigma. Was San Juan de la Peña transformed as it was to become the residence of the Grail?
Ramiro I
Alfonso I’s brother was Ramiro II, who in the Grail account is listed as Trevrezent, the hermit who explains the story of the Grail to Perceval. At first sight, there seems to be a major problem with this identification: Ramiro II married Agnes of Poitiers. It is Agnes of Poitiers who was also the niece of Philip of Alsace and Flanders – the noble to whom Chrétien de Troyes dedicated his story to – and who was also the man who gave Chrétien the document which he then turned into the first Grail account. The link between Aragon and Chrétien’s Grail has thus been made…
Ramiro II’s nickname was, in fact, “the Monk”, as he was one. Ramiro was bishop of Barbastro-Roda and was given papal dispensation to abdicate his monastic vows in order to secure the succession to the throne when his brother had died heirless. Indeed, once again history and the Grail account overlap and each provides further information about an auspicious situation: Anfortas, who is known to have suffered from a debilitating illness that prevented him from creating offspring, had invested in Perceval, making him his successor as Grail King, as he knew that he would die heirless. However, though Perceval would be the leader of the protectors of the Grail, and carry out its mission, on a totally mundane level, everyone knew that Rotrou II de Perche would never inherit the physical kingdom of Aragon, and hence, Alfonso I had created a will in which it would be divided between the three monastic orders, which Wolfram had identified as the protectors of the Grail.
However, as Anfortius’ will was contested, his brother Ramiro II was told to annul his marriage to God, and instead marry a woman, so that a legal heir for the kingdom of Aragon could be created. This, he did.
Crowned king, Ramiro II almost immediately had to fight off Alfonso VII of Castille, who was one of those trying to lay claim to the Aragonese crown. His kingship lasted exactly three years: he married Agnes of Poitiers in 1134, had a child with her, Peroniella or Petronila in Latin, and then gave her hand away to Ramon Berenguer IV of Barcelona, known as Kyot of Katelangen in the Grail account. His nickname was indeed “the little Guillaume” or “Guiot” or Kyot in Occitan: Kyot of Katelangen, little William of Catalonia. Ramiro II then abdicated in her favour and returned to his monastic life.
We note that the Fisher King had a serious wound on his leg, which ails him greatly. Peter L. Hays in The Limping Hero states how the wound, in Parzival, is a lance point through the testicles, a divine punishment for the king’s neglect of his sacred trust, The Holy Grail.
A lot has been written about this symbolism, identifying the Fisher King with fertility gods and arguing how his wounds were symbols of how his land had turned into a “Waste Land”. But amidst dozens of layers of symbolic interpretation, it seems no-one thought about wondering whether it might actually have been a genuine, historical account. Indeed, Alfonso I as a king did not reproduce – he was heirless. This caused the country great concern, as there was no successor to the throne – and in the end, we note that it was his brother who had to break his vow of chastity to guarantee an heir to the throne. It were definitely testing times for Aragon, the “Grail country”.
Alfonso I was a fighter, and a wound in battle that would inflict infertility would certainly have been a possibility – though whether it would have been made public knowledge, is another matter. One of a king’s primary roles is the creation of offspring. Rumours or knowledge that the king is unable to reproduce, could be perilous: the people would loose trust and other claimants to the throne may not have been able to contain their excitement, rallying troops to invade Aragon. This is exactly what happened when the king died and one claimant to the throne felt that he had more rights to the throne than the king’s brother.
Though we do not know the precise cause of Alfonso I’s impossibility to procreate, we do know that he was married to Queen Urraca in 1107; it is often said that the marriage was void of love; Alfonso I is described as a soldier, unable to give love, even depicted as beating his wife. But unless Urraca herself was adamant she did not want to have a son with this man, it is clear that the marriage was created for one specific purpose: the creation of an heir. The possibility that no heir was ever conceived – and that Alfonso was apparently not all that interested in women – might have to do with the fact that the king was indeed infertile – maimed to the extent that any sexual activity might have been painful at best, and impossible at worst. And thus we find that the Grail account and history once again walk hand in hand, one able to shed insights into the other.
The Spanish Grail
Wolfram thought that the story of the Grail had its origins in Spain, which is where he cites his sources, whether he invented them or not. Canadian Professor of history Joseph Goering has identified a number of churches in Aragon that have frescoes of the Virgin Mary holding a fiery Grail. He points out that the oddity about this depiction is twofold. First, the area in which the Virgin was depicted with a fiery Grail is very small. Second, she was depicted with the Grail fifty years before Chrétien’s tale – when the Grail was officially not yet invented as a “literary device”.
The earliest example of a fresco depicting the Virgin with a Grail dates from December 1123 and is an apse painting in the church of St. Clement in Taüll. Here, the Grail is a dish-like object, filled with a red-orange material from which rays rise, as if the plate is hot. Goering noted that the position of the Virgin holding this Grail in her left hand, the rest of her arm obscured by her blue cloak, while making a hand gesture with the right hand, is equally unique in iconography.
He concluded that “the image of the Virgin holding a sacred vessel is to be found only here, in these mountain villages, and nowhere else in Christian art before this time”, adding that “the Virgin at the head of the apostolic college is an uncommon artistic theme, and Mary holding a vessel of any sort seems to be attested nowhere else in Christian art before this time.”
These paintings were made at a time when Chrétien had not yet written about the Grail, and it would be almost a century before de Boron would link the Grail with Christian imagery. So where did this painter get his inspiration from? The answer seems as straightforward as it is simple: this type of image was local to the region, so it must have depicted a theme that was only popular in that region. And the only frame – which even Goering has to admit – was de Mandach’s conclusion, for, indeed, de Mandach’s timeframe for the Grail being in Aragon is precisely in agreement with the facts revealed by these wall frescoes.
The question, of course, is why the Virgin Mary became upgraded amongst the group of apostles and why she became the Grail bearer. For this, Goering has no clear answer. Is it possible that these wall paintings were the first attempt, performed within the heartland of the Grail (i.e. Aragon), to see whether a new image could be introduced in religious iconography, namely that of the Virgin holding the Grail? Why the Virgin Mary? Because she was said to be a virgin… and of course, in the Grail tradition, the Grail Bearer had to be a virgin. Hence, the Virgin Mary masqueraded as the Grail Bearer.
So, in at least eight Pyrenean churches, all located within a small area, stretching from the old boundary between Aragon and Catalonia in the west to the principality of Andorra in the east, all dating from the same period (ca. 1100-1170), a unique type of religious icon was introduced. In the end, it was never exported, and was abandoned before Chrétien commenced his Grail book – and the story of the Grail would take off for good.
In his analysis of these paintings, Goering goes further, noting that these churches were decorated at a time when the bishop was one Raymund, of French origins, but in 1101 invited to the court of King Pedro I of Aragon and elected as bishop of Roda – apparently to everyone’s surprise. Pedro’s son Alfonso I remained intimately involved with Bishop Raymund, from 1114 until his death from wounds received while accompanying Alfonso on a daring incursion into Andalusia in 1126. Goering’s historical analysis revealed that Raymund and Rotrou II de Perche – Perceval – not only fought together, but also appeared together frequently in royal charters, “so frequently that one might suppose a real friendship had developed between the two” and adding that “Rotrou may have even been with Raymond on his deathbed”.
The identification of a specific family – the Aragon kings – and specific locations in Northern Spain – San Juan de la Peña – show that the territory of the Grail was the kingdom of Aragon, south of the Pyrenees.
Excerpted from the introduction of “Servants of the Grail”
GAWAIN
I. Here the story is silent of Messire Gawain and beginneth to speak of Lancelot, that entereth into a forest and rideth with right great ado and meeteth a knight in the midst of the forest that was coming full speed and was armed of all arms.
"Sir," saith Lancelot, "Whence come you?"
"Sir," saith Lancelot, "I come from the neighbourhood of King Arthur's Court."
"Ha, Sir, can you tell me tidings of a knight that beareth a green shield such as I bear? If so, he is my brother."
"What name hath he?" saith Lancelot.
"Sir," saith he, "His name is Gladoens, and he is a good knight and a hardy, and he hath a white horse right strong and swift."
"Be there other knights in your country that bear such arms as your shield and his besides you and he?"
"Certes, Sir, none."
"And wherefore do you ask?" saith Lancelot.
"For this, that a certain man hath reft him of one of his castles for that he was not there. Howbeit, I know well that he will have it again through his good knighthood."
"Is he so good knight?" saith Lancelot.
"Certes, Sir, yea! He is the best of the Isles of the Moors."
"Sir, of your mercy, lower your coif."
He quickly thereon lowereth his coif, and Lancelot looketh at him in the face. "Certes, Sir Knight," saith he, "you very much resemble him."
"Ha, Sir," saith the knight, "Know you then any tidings of him?"
"Certes, Sir," saith he, "Yea! and true tidings may I well say, for he rode at my side five leagues Welsh, nor never saw I one man so like another as are you to him."
"Good right hath he to resemble me," saith the knight, "for we are twins, but he was born first and hath more sense and knighthood than I; nor in all the Isles of the Moors is there damsel that hath so much worth and beauty as she of whom he is loved of right true love, and more she desireth to see him than aught else that liveth, for she hath not seen him of more than a year, wherefore hath she gone seek her prize, my brother, by all the forests of the world. Sir," saith the knight, "Let me go seek my brother, and tell me where I may find him."
"Certes," saith Lancelot, "I will tell you though it grieve me sore."
"Wherefore?" saith the knight, "Hath he done you any mis-deed?"
"In no wise," saith Lancelot, "Rather hath he done so much for me that I love you thereof and offer you my service."
"Sir," saith the knight, "I am going my way, but for God's sake tell me where I shall find my brother."
"Sir," saith Lancelot, "I will tell you. This morning did I bid his body farewell and help to bury him."
"Ha, Sir," saith the knight, "Do you tell me true?"
"Certes," saith Lancelot, "True it is that I tell you."
"Is he slain then, my brother?" saith the knight.
"Yea, and of succouring me," saith Lancelot.
"Ha, sir," saith the knight, "For God's sake tell me nought that is not right."
"By God, Sir," saith he, "Sore grieved am I to tell it you, for never loved I knight so much in so brief a time as I loved him. He helped to save me from death, and therefore will I do for you according to that he did for me."
"Sir," saith the knight, "If he be dead, a great grief is it to myself, for I have lost my comfort and my life and my land without recovery."
"Sir," saith Lancelot, "He helped me to save my life, and yours will I help to save henceforth for ever and so be that I shall know of your jeopardy."
The knight heareth that his brother is dead and well believeth Lancelot, and beginneth to make dole thereof the greatest that was ever heard. And Lancelot saith to him, "Sir Knight, let be this dole, for none recovery is there; but my body do I offer you and my knighthood in any place you please, where I may save your honour."
"Sir," saith the knight, "With good will receive I your help and your love, sith that you deign to offer me the same, and now have I sorer need of them than ever. Sir," saith the knight, "Sith that my brother is dead, I will return back and bear with my wrong, though well would he have amended it had he been on live."
"By my head," saith Lancelot, "I will go with you, that so may I reward you of that he hath done for me. He delivered his body to the death for me, and in like manner freely would I fain set mine own in jeopardy for love of you and of him."
II. "Sir," saith the knight, "Right good will do I owe you of this that you say to me, so your deeds be but the same herein."
"Yea, so help me God," saith Lancelot, "The same shall they be, if God lend me the power."
With that, they go on their way together, and the knight comforteth him much of that which Lancelot hath said to him, but of the death of his brother was he right sorrowful. And they ride until they come to the land of the Moors; then espy they a castle upon a rock, and below was a broad meadow-land.
"Sir," saith the Knight of the Green Shield to Lancelot, "This castle was my brother's and is now mine, and much it misliketh me that it hath fallen to me on this wise. And the knight that reft it of my brother is of so great hardihood that he feareth no knight on live, and you will presently see him issue forth of this castle so soon as he shall perceive you."
Lancelot and the knight ride until they draw nigh the castle. And the knight looketh in the way before him, and seeth a squire coming on a hackney, that was carrying before him a wild boar dead. The Knight of the Green Shield asketh him whose man he is, and the squire maketh answer: "I am man of the Lord of the Rock Gladoens, that cometh there behind, and my lord cometh all armed, he and others, for the brother of Gladoens hath defied him on behalf of his brother, but right little recketh my lord of his defiance."
III. Lancelot heareth how he that is coming is the enemy of him to whom had he been alive, his love most was due. The Knight of the Green Shield pointed him out so soon as he saw him.
"Sir," saith he to Lancelot, "Behold him by whom I am disherited, and yet worse would he do to me and he knew that my brother were dead."
Lancelot, without saving more, so soon as he had espied the Knight of the Rock, smiteth his horse with his spurs and cometh toward him. The Lord of the Rock, that was proud and hardy, seeth Lancelot coming and smiteth with his spurs the horse whereon he sitteth. They come with so swift an onset either upon other that they break their spears upon their shields, and hurtle together so sore that the Knight of the Rock Gladoens falleth over the croup of his horse. Lancelot draweth his sword and cometh above him, and he crieth him mercy and asketh him wherefore he wisheth to slay him? Lancelot saith for the sake of Gladoens from whom he hath reft his land and his castle. "And what is that to you?" saith the knight. "Behoveth his brother challenge me thereof."
"As much it behoveth me as his brother," saith Lancelot.
"Wherefore you?"
"For this," saith Lancelot, "That as much as he did for me will I do to you."
He cutteth off his head and giveth it incontinent to the Knight of the Green Shield.
"Now tell me," saith Lancelot, "Sith that he is dead, is he purged of that whereof you appeached him?"
"Sir," saith the knight, "I hold him rightly quit thereof, for, sith that he is dead, all claim on behalf of his kindred is abated by his death."
"And I pledge you my faith loyally," saith Lancelot, "as I am a knight, that never shall you be in peril nor in jeopardy of aught wherein I may help you, so I be in place and free, but my help shall you have for evermore, for that your brother staked his life to help me."
IV. Lancelot and the knight lay the night at the Rock Gladoens, and the Knight of the Green Shield had his land at his pleasure, and all were obedient to him. And the upright and loyal were right glad, albeit when they heard the tidings of Gladoens' death they were right sorrowful thereof. Lancelot departed from the castle on the morrow, and the knight remained therein, sorrowful for his brother that he had lost, and glad for the land that he had gotten again. Lancelot goeth back right amidst the forest and rideth the day long, and meeteth a knight that was coming, groaning sore. And he was stooping over the fore saddle-bow for the pain that he had. He meeteth Lancelot and saith to him: "Sir, for God's sake, turn back, for you will find there the most cruel pass in the world there where I have been wounded through the body. Wherefore I beseech you not go thither."
"What pass is it then?" saith Lancelot.
"Sir," saith he, "It is the pass of the Castle of Beards, and it hath the name of this, that every knight that passeth thereby must either leave his beard there or challenge the same, and in such sort have I challenged my beard that meseemeth I shall die thereof."
"By my head," saith Lancelot, "I hold not this of cowardize, sith that you were hardy to set your life in jeopardy to challenge your beard, but now would you argue me of cowardize when you would have me turn back. Rather would I be smitten through the body with honour, so and I had not my death thereof, than lose with shame a single hair of my beard."
"Sir," saith the knight, "May God preserve you, for the castle is far more cruel than you think, and God guide the knight that may destroy the evil custom of the castle, for right shameful is the custom to strange knights that pass thereby."
V. Lancelot departeth from the knight and cometh toward the castle. Just as he had passed over a great bridge, he looketh about and seeth two knights come all armed to the entrance of the castle, and they made hold their horses before them, and their shields and spears are before them leaning against the wall. Lancelot looketh at the gateway of the castle and seeth the great door all covered with beards fastened thereon, and heads of knights in great plenty hung thereby. So, as he was about to enter the gate, two knights issue therefrom over against him.
"Sir," saith the one, "Abide and pay your toll!"
"Do knights, then, pay toll here?" saith Lancelot.
"Yea!" say the knights, "All they that have beards, and they that have none are quit. Sir, now pay us yours, for a right great beard it is, and thereof have we sore need."
"For what?" saith Lancelot.
"I will tell you," saith the knight. "There be hermits in this forest that make hair-shirts thereof."
"By my head," saith Lancelot, "Never shall they have hair-shirt of mine, so I may help it."
"That shall they," say the knights, "Of yours as of the other, or dearly shall you pay therefor!"
VI. Right wroth waxeth Sir Lancelot, and cometh to the knight, and smiteth him with his spear amidst the breast with such a thrust that it passeth half an ell beyond, and overthroweth him and his horse together. The other knight seeth his fellow wounded to the death, and cometh towards him with a great sweep and breaketh his spear upon his shield. Howbeit, Lancelot beareth him to the ground right over his horse-croup and maketh him fall so heavily that he breaketh one of his legs. The tidings are come to the Lady of the Castle that a knight hath come to the pass that hath slain one of her knights and wounded the other. The Lady is come thither, and bringeth two of her damsels with her. She seeth Lancelot that is fain to slay the knight that lieth wounded on the ground.
"Sir," saith the Lady to Lancelot, "Withdraw yourself back and slay him not, but alight and speak to me in safety."
"Lady," saith one of the maidens, "I know him well. This is Lancelot of the Lake, the most courteous knight that is in the court of King Arthur."
He alighteth and cometh before the Lady. "Lady," saith he, "what is your pleasure?"
"I desire," saith she, "that you come to my hostel to harbour, and that you make me amends of the shame you have done me."
VII. "Lady," saith Lancelot, "Shame have I never done you nor shall do, but the knights took in hand too shameful a business when they were minded to take the beards of stranger knights by force."
"Sir," saith she, "I will forego mine ill-will on condition that you harbour herewithin to-night."
"Lady," saith Lancelot, "I desire not your ill-will, wherefore will I gladly do your pleasure."
He setteth him within the castle and maketh his horse be led in after him, and the Lady hath the dead knight brought into the chapel and buried. The other she biddeth be disarmed and clothed and commandeth that his wounds be searched. Then maketh she Lancelot be disarmed and clad right richly in a good robe, and telleth him that she knoweth well who he is.
"Lady," saith Lancelot, "It is well for me."
Thereupon they sit to eat, and the first course is brought in by knights in chains that had their noses cut off; the second by knights in chains that had their eyes put out; wherefore they were led in by squires. The third course was brought in by knights that had but one hand and were in chains. After that, came other knights that had each but one foot and brought in the fourth course. At the fifth course came knights right fair and tall, and each brought a naked sword in his hand and presented their heads to the Lady.
VIII. Lancelot beheld the martyrdom of these knights, and sore misliking had he of the services of such folk. They are risen from meat and the lady goeth to her chamber and sitteth on a couch.
"Lancelot," saith the Lady, "you have seen the justice and the lordship of my castle. All these knights have been conquered at the passing of my door."
"Lady," saith Lancelot, "foul mischance hath befallen them."
"The like mischance would have befallen you had you not been knight so good. And greatly have I desired to see you this long time past. And I will make you lord of this castle and myself."
"Lady," saith he, "the lordship of this castle hold I of yourself without mesne, and to you have I neither wish nor right to refuse it. Rather am I willing to be at your service."
"Then," saith she, "you will abide with me in this castle, for more do I love you than any other knight that liveth."
"Lady," saith Lancelot, "Gramercy, but in no castle may I abide more than one night until I have been thither whither behoveth me to go."
"Whither are you bound?" saith she.
"Lady, saith he, "to the Castle of Souls."
"Well know I the castle," saith she. "The King hath the name Fisherman, and lieth in languishment on account of two knights that have been at his castle and made not good demand. Would you fain go thither?" saith the Lady.
"Yea," saith Lancelot.
"Then pledge me your faith that you will return by me to speak to me, so the Graal shall appear to you and you ask whereof it serveth."
"Yea, truly, saith Lancelot, "were you beyond sea!"
"Sir," saith one of the damsels, "So much may you well promise, for the Graal appeareth not to no knight so wanton as be ye. For you love the Queen Guenievre, the wife of your lord, King Arthur, nor so long as this love lieth at your heart may you never behold the Graal."
IX. Lancelot heard the damsel and blushed of despite.
"Ha, Lancelot," saith the Lady, "Love you other than me?"
"Lady," saith he, "the damsel may say her pleasure."
Lancelot lay the night at the castle, and right wroth was he of the damsel that calleth the love of him and the Queen disloyal. And the morrow when he had heard mass, he took leave of the Lady of the Castle, and she besought him over and over to keep his covenant, and he said that so would he do without fail. Therewithal he issueth forth of the castle and entereth into a tall and ancient forest, and rideth the day long until he cometh to the outskirt of the forest, and seeth a tall cross at the entrance of a burying-ground enclosed all round about with a hedge of thorns. And the way lay through the burying ground. Lancelot entered therein and the night was come. He seeth the graveyard full of tombs and sepulchres. He looketh behind and seeth a chapel wherein were candles burning. Thitherward goeth he, and passeth beyond without saying aught more by the side of a dwarf that was digging a grave in the ground.
"Lancelot," saith the dwarf, "you are right not to salute me, for you are the man of all the world that most I hate; and God grant me vengeance of your body. So will He what time you are stricken down here within!"
Lancelot heard the dwarf, but deigned not to answer him of nought. He is come to the chapel, and alighteth and maketh fast the bridle of his horse to a tree, and leaneth his shield and spear without. After that he entereth into the chapel, and findeth a damsel laying out a knight in his winding-sheen. As soon as Lancelot was entered therewithin the wounds of the knight were swollen up and began to bleed afresh.
"Ha, Sir Knight, now see I plainly that you slew him that I am wrapping in his windingsheet!"
X. Thereupon, behold you, two knights that are carrying other two knights dead. They alight and then set them in the chapel. And the dwarf crieth out to them: "Now shall it be seen how you avenge your friends of the enemy that fell upon you!"
The knight that had fled from the forest when Messire Gawain came thither where the three lay dead, was come therewithin and knew Lancelot, whereupon saith he: "Our mortal enemy are you, for by you were these three knights slain."
"Well had they deserved it," saith Lancelot, "and in this chapel am I in no peril of you, wherefore as at this time will I depart not hence, for I know not the ways of the forest."
He was in the chapel until the day broke, when he issued forth thereof, and sore it weighed upon him that his horse was still fasting. He taketh his arms and is mounted. The dwarf crieth out aloud: "What aileth you?" saith he to the two knights, "Will you let your mortal enemy go thus?"
With that the two knights mount their horses and go to the two issues of the grave-yard, thinking that Lancelot is fain to flee therefrom; but no desire hath he thereof, wherefore he cometh to the knight that was guarding the entrance whereby he had to issue out, and smiteth him so stiffly that he thrusteth the point of his spear right through his body. The other knight that was guarding the other entrance, that had fled out of the forest before, had no mind to avenge his fellow, and fled incontinent so fast as he might. And Lancelot taketh the horse of the knight he had slain and driveth him before him, for he thinketh that some knight may haply have need thereof. He rideth on until he cometh to a hermitage in the forest where he alighteth and hath his horses stabled, and the Hermit giveth them of the best he hath. And Lancelot heard mass, and afterward are a little and fell on sleep. Thereafter, behold you, a knight that cometh to the Hermit and seeth Lancelot that was about to mount.
"Sir," saith he, "Whither go you?"
"Sir Knight," saith Lancelot, "thither shall I go where God may please; but you, whitherward are you bound to go?"
"Sir, I go to see one of my brethren and my two sisters, for I have been told that he hath fallen on such mishap as that he is called the Poor Knight, whereof am I sore sorrowful."
"Certes," saith Lancelot, "poor he is, the more the pity! Howbeit, will you do him a message from me?"
"Sir," saith the knight, "Right willingly!"
"Will you present him with this horse on my behalf, and tell him how Lancelot that harboured with him hath sent it?"
"Sir," saith the knight, "Right great thanks, and blessed may you be, for he that doth a kindness to a worshipful man loseth it not."
"Salute the two damsels for me," saith Lancelot.
"Sir, right willingly!"
The knight delivereth the horse to his squire, and taketh leave of Lancelot.
XI. Thereupon, Lancelot departeth from the hermitage and rideth on until he cometh forth of the forest, and findeth a waste land, a country broad and long wherein wonned neither beast nor bird, for the land was so poor and parched that no victual was to be found therein. Lancelot looketh before him and seeth a city appear far away. Thither rideth he full speed and seeth that the city is so great that it seemeth him to encompass a whole country. He seeth the walls that are falling all around, and the gates ruined with age. He entereth within and findeth the city all void of folk, and seeth the great palaces fallen down and waste, and the great grave-yards full of sepulchres, and the tall churches all lying waste, and the markets and exchanges all empty. He rideth amidst the streets, and findeth a great palace that seemeth him to be better and more ancient than all the others. He bideth awhile before it and heareth within how knights and ladies are making great dole. And they say to a knight: "Ha, God, sore grief and pity is this of you, that you must needs die in such manner, and that your death may not be respited! Sore hatred ought we to bear toward him that hath adjudged you such a death."
The knights and ladies swoon over him as he departeth. Lancelot hath heard all this and much marvelleth he thereof, but nought thereof may he see.
XII. Thereupon, lo you, the knight that cometh down into the midst of the hall, clad in a short red jerkin; and he was girt with a rich girdle of gold, and had a rich clasp at his neck wherein were many rich stones, and on his head had he a great cap of gold, and he held great axe. The knight was of great comeliness and young of age. Lancelot seeth him coming, and looketh upon him right fainly when he seeth him appear. And the knight saith to him, "Sir, alight!"
"Certes," saith Lancelot, "Willingly."
He alighteth and maketh his horse fast to a ring of silver that was on the mounting-stage, and putteth his shield from his neck and his spear from his hand.
"Sir," saith he to the knight, "What is your pleasure?"
"Sir, needs must you cut me off my head with this axe, for of this weapon hath my death been adjudged, but and you will not, I will cut off your own therewith."
"Hold, Sir," saith Lancelot, "What is this you tell me?"
"Sir," saith the knight, "you must needs do even as I say, sith that you are come into this city."
"Sir," saith Lancelot, "Right foolish were he that in such a jeopardy should not do the best for himself, but blamed shall I be thereof and I shall slay you when you have done me no wrong."
"Certes," saith the Knight, "In no otherwise may you go hence."
"Fair Sir," saith Lancelot, "So gentle are you and so well nurtured, how cometh it that you take your death so graciously? You know well that I shall kill you before you shall kill me, sith that so it is."
"This know I well for true," saith the Knight, "But you will promise me before I die, that you will return into this city within a year from this, and that you will set your head in the same jeopardy without challenge, as I have set mine."
"By my head," saith Lancelot, "Needeth no argument that I shall choose respite of death to dying here on the spot. But I marvel me of this that you are so fairly apparelled to receive your death."
XIII. "Sir," saith the Knight, "He that would go before the Saviour of the World ought of right to apparel him as fairly as he may. I am by confession purged of all wickedness and of all the misdeeds that ever I have committed, and do repent me truly thereof, wherefore at this moment am I fain to die."
Therewithal he holdeth forth the axe, and Lancelot taketh it and seeth that it is right keen and well whetted.
"Sir," saith the Knight, "Hold up your hand toward the minster that you see yonder."
"Sir," saith Lancelot, "Willingly."
"Thus, then, will you swear to me upon the holy relics that are within this minster, that on this day year at the hour that you shall have slain me, or before, you yourself will come back here and place your head in the very same peril as I shall have placed mine, without default?"
"Thus," saith Lancelot, "do I swear and give you thereto my pledge."
With that, the Knight kneeleth and stretcheth his neck as much as he may, and Lancelot taketh the axe in his hands, and then saith to him, "Sir Knight, for God's sake, have mercy on yourself!"
"Let cut off my head!" saith the Knight, "For otherwise may I not have mercy upon you!"
"In God's name," saith Lancelot, "fain would I deny you!"
With that, he swingeth the axe and cutteth off the head with such a sweep that he maketh it fly seven foot high from the body. The Knight fell to the ground when his head was cut off, and Lancelot flung down the axe, and thinketh that he will make but an ill stay there for himself. He cometh to his horse, and taketh his arms and mounteth and looketh behind him, but seeth neither the body of the Knight nor the head, neither knoweth he what hath become of them all, save only that he heard much dole and a great cry far off in the city of knights and ladies, saying that he shall be avenged, please God, at the term set, or before. Lancelot hath heard and understood all that the knights say and the ladies, and issueth forth of the city.
Outremer, French (outre-mer) for "overseas", was a general name given to the Crusader states established after the First Crusade: the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli and especially the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The name was often equated to the Levant of Renaissance.
The term was, in general, used to refer to any land "overseas"; for example, Louis IV of France was called "Louis d'Outremer" as he was raised in England.
(c)2013; All Rights Reserved, Sangreality Trust
[email protected]
Fair Use Notice
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.