My life in books

The Da Vinci Code frenzy is in full swing. Cable stations like A&E and The History Channel are airing documentaries on Mary Magdalen, the Gospel of Judas, and everything else they can think of that's vaguely related to Jesus or the Bible. Two nights ago I watched someone comparing the DNA of a long-dead Merovingian queen to samples of blood taken from a close-knit population of Middle Eastern Syriac Christians to see if they shared any significant genetic markers (they didn't). Last night, it was secret codes hidden in the Torah that, if properly manipulated, can tell you everything including the names of your ancestors – thus "proving" one rabbinical claim that "Everything is in the Torah."

As it happens, as the hysteria over the secret of the Grail supposedly exposed in Dan Brown's book and the forthcoming movie has been growing toward the orgasmic moment when the film is released, I've been reading the best antidote in the world for the nausea and disgust inevitably brought on by this explosion of pseudo-historical crap – a well-researched scholarly treatise by noted medievalist Richard Barber that explores the history of the Grail legend in the context in which it belongs – the history of literature and legend.

The book is called The Holy Grail: The History of a Legend (American edition: The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief) and in it (as the blurb on the back cover says),

"…Barber traces the stories surrounding the Grail – from its first imagining in the twelfth century by Chretien de Troyes and the bitter controversy of the Reformation to its revival in the nineteenth century by the Pre-Raphaelites and Wagner and as an icon of spiritual nirvana in new-age mysticism."

The first known reference to the Grail (as opposed to just any grail) is in Chretien de Troyes's last, unfinished work, The Story of the Grail, (Le Conte du Graal, written around 1180 AD. The unfinished story intrigued other writers of the era so profoundly that within 80 years, many different versions of the story had been written by other romance writers, making the story of the Grail an integral part of the great collection of stories connected with the Court of King Arthur and his knights. Gawain, Perceval, Lancelot, Tristan, Galahad, Bors, and many more of the Knights of Arthur's Round Table turn up in Grail romances of the period, and the Grail remains a major element of all subsequent treatments of the Arthurian legend. Such a rich and resonant image – and there is no textual evidence of it in literature before de Troyes takes up his pen to write Le Conte du Graal.

Barber begins his book with an extensive discussion of this first book of the Grail literature, which is an adventure story, or romance, about the parallel quests of two knights, Gawain and Perceval, for two mysterious objects that are first seen by Perceval in the castle of the Fisher King, the home of a grievously wounded knight. The objects are brought into the hall while Perceval, his host and the other castle inhabitants are eating, and then taken into a side chamber. Perceval fails to ask his host about what he witnesses, with unfortunate consequences for all, and as a result he must experience many adventures before he earns the chance to repair his mistake.

The astonishing sight that Perceval sees includes the first known description of the object that will become the Holy Grail of Arthurian myth and literature. Chretien de Troyes wrote:

"A girl who came in with the boys, fair and comely and beautifully adorned, was holding a grail between her hands. When she entered holding the grail, so brilliant a light appeared that the candles lost their brightness like the stars or the moon when the sun rises.... The grail, which went ahead, was made of fine, pure gold, and in it were set precious stones of many kinds, the richest and most precious in the earth or the sea."

Another part of the procession presents the object that will form Gawain's quest:

"...a boy came from a chamber clutching a white lance by the middle of the shaft.... And a drop of blood issued from the tip of the lance's head, and right down to the boy's hand this red drop ran."

Because Chretien de Troyes died before completing the romance of the Grail, we do not know for certain what he intended the lance and the grail to be. In Grail literature, this bleeding lance is often associated with the lance used to pierce Jesus' side during the crucifixion; frequently it is also the weapon that dealt the grievous wound to the Fisher King, or one of his family, which cannot be healed until Perceval asks the right questions. The explanation of the Grail given to us by de Troyes comes in the words of a holy hermit who explains to Perceval what it is that he has seen.

"The rich Fisher King is the son of the king who is served from the Grail. And don't imagine he's given pike or lamprey or salmon; he's served with a single host which is brought to him in that Grail. It comforts and sustains his life, the Grail is such a holy thing."

Thus the first image of the Holy Grail positions it as a paten which provides communion to the king with the grievous wound – thus the choice of the word graal, which was a word meaning a serving dish of some kind, sometimes with a cover. Subsequent writers of Grail literature in this period describe it in a number of different ways. It is described as a stone, as a cup, as a mystical object that can take many forms, some of them not capable of being spoken of by mere humans. Over time, it comes to be associated with a great variety of dishes and containers: the dish on which the Paschal Lamb was served at Passover; the cup of the Last Supper; the cup offered to Jesus on the cross; and a container used by Joseph of Arimathea to collect the blood of Jesus during either the deposition (removal of the body from the cross) or the preparation of the body for entombment.

And thus the Grail comes to be understood as a cup that contains, or has at some time contained, either the actual blood of Jesus, or his transubstantiated flesh or blood, or food or liquid that was served to him. Each writer has his own interpretation. But whatever de Troyes' intentions were, the originator of the Grail story makes no overt references in the portions of the story he did complete to either of the mysterious objects of the procession as relics of Jesus' death and crucifixion. The thing that is holy about the Grail is that it is a communion vessel, not that it is a relic.

Barber goes on to trace the ways that subsequent writers developed the idea of the nature of the Grail, and used it to present ideas about Christian values, spiritual goals, and images of perfection. It's a very thoughtful book about the history of an image, and if nothing else, it demonstrates beyond doubt that the story of the Grail is a complex literary image that, whatever else it may be, has nothing to do with encoded secrets from the era of the historical Jesus and the early days of the Church.

There is no Grail legend prior to ca 1180. When it is first imagined by de Troyes, the Grail is a symbol of communion, and only later is given the additional associations to the blood of Jesus through its identification with objects or events mentioned in various gospels (not all of them canonical – much of the linkages between the Grail and Joseph of Arimathea comes from the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus).

The association of the Grail with a cup or chalice is by no means universal; in fact, it's not even consistently seen as a dish of some kind, which makes it a little silly to insist that the Grail is code for Mary Magdalen's womb.

While de Troyes may well have been thinking about Christian images of communion vessels and the like when he came to invent the story of the Grail, he could also have been thinking about any one of a number of magical bowls, cups and cauldrons from Celtic legend, many of which would also have been circulating in folklore of his time. In this connection, it's interesting to note that there is a whole subsection of grail stories that focus on its ability to cause food to magically appear on the plates of all the people near it, reminiscent of the Dagda's cauldron that can feed any number that set down to eat, even to an entire army. The Grail may have as its source material Celtic and other pagan myth as well as Christian communion.

There's also the question of why an image that fits perfectly with actual Christian worship and practice of the time should be looked at as a code. The connection between the associations of the Grail and the practice and theology of communion is so apt that it’s difficult to think of this as some form of deception that is nonetheless a code for a truth that predated it by over a thousand years. Transubstantiation was a real, everyday miracle to Catholics of the 12th and 13th centuries. A paten really did carry within it the body of Jesus in the form of the host, the communion cup really did carry the blood of Jesus in the form of wine.

And as for those writers who presented the Grail as a vessel in which the real, not transubstantiated blood of Jesus was contained – that's a perfectly reasonable interpretation by the practices of the times as well. Relics were big business, and an important aspect of Christian worship. People went on pilgrimages of hundreds, even thousands of miles, to see a splinter from the True Cross, a the tooth of a martyr, or a few drops of the blood of Christ. Records of the time mention relics containing some of the blood of Jesus at abbeys and shrines all across Europe; some of them can still be found today. In this context, what reason is there for using an image of a container of Jesus' blood as anything but a literal relic with already existing connotations as an object associated with penance and salvation?

In my comments here I've only touched on a small amount of the scholarship and scope of Barber's book – there is so much more, as Barber looks at the development of the Grail in works of imagination as diverse as Tennyson's Idylls of the King to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. This book is exactly what it calls itself – a history of the Grail, one of the richest and most enduring images ever created in literature, and it should be read by anyone who finds themselves, even for a moment, thinking that Dan Brown has the Grail story all figured out.