Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

[Flex Mentallo]

Daniel Scavone, professor Emeritus of history at the University of Southern Indiana, puts forward a hypothesis which identifies the Shroud of Turin as the real object that inspires the romances of the Holy Grail.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Religious beliefs about the burial cloths of Jesus have existed for centuries. The Gospels state that Joseph of Arimathea wrapped the body of Jesus in a piece of linen cloth and placed it in a new tomb, and that Peter found strips of this cloth in the tomb after Christ’s body had disappeared.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Another recent theory holds that the earliest stories that cast the Grail in a Christian light were meant to promote the Roman Catholic sacrament of the Holy Communion. Although the practice of Holy Communion was first alluded to in the Christian Bible and defined by theologians in the first centuries AD, it was around the time of the appearance of the first Christianised Grail literature that the Roman church was beginning to add more ceremony and mysticism around this particular sacrament.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

In March 2014, Margarita Torres and José Ortega del Río presented in Leon a co-written book, "Los Reyes del Grial" (The Kings of the Grail) where they describe how a Spanish Arabist and Historian, Doctor Gustavo Turienzo, found two medieval Egyptian documents in al Azhar (Cairo).

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Those documents, written in Arabic, suggest that the Holy Grail was taken to the city of Leon in the 11th century. They claim the Chalice of Doña Urraca at the Basilica of San Isidoro was very early on believed to be the Holy Grail.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

There are cups claimed to be the Grail in several churches, for instance in O Cebreiro church in Galicia (Spain) or in the Saint Mary of Valencia Cathedral, which contains an artifact, the Valencia Chalice, supposedly taken by Saint Peter to Rome in the 1st century, and then to Huesca in Spain by Saint Lawrence in the 3rd century. According to legend, the monastery of San Juan de la Peña, located at the south-west of Jaca, in the province of Huesca, Spain, protected the chalice of the Last Supper from the Islamic invaders of the Iberian Peninsula.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Antonio Beltrán says the artifact is a 1st-century Middle Eastern stone vessel, possibly from Antioch, Syria (now Turkey); its history can be traced to the 11th century, and it now rests atop an ornate stem and base, made in the Medieval era of alabaster, gold, and gemstones. It was the official papal chalice for many popes, and has been used by many others, most recently by Pope Benedict XVI, on July 9, 2006.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The emerald chalice at Genoa, which was obtained during the Crusades at Caesarea Maritima at great cost, has been less championed as the Holy Grail since an accident on the road, while it was being returned from Paris after the fall of Napoleon, revealed that the emerald was green glass.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Belief in the Grail and interest in its potential whereabouts has never ceased. Ownership has been attributed to various groups (including the Knights Templar, probably because they were at the peak of their influence around the time that Grail stories started circulating in the 12th and 13th centuries).

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The Grail has been used as a theme in fantasy, historical fiction and science fiction; a quest for the Grail appears in Bernard Cornwell's series of books The Grail Quest, set during The Hundred Years War.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Michael Moorcock's fantasy novel The War Hound and the World's Pain depicts a supernatural Grail quest set in the era of the Thirty Years' War.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Science fiction has taken the Quest into interstellar space, figuratively in Samuel R. Delany's 1968 novel Nova -

 

[Flex Mentallo]

- and literally on the television shows Babylon 5...

 

[Flex Mentallo]

...and Stargate SG-1.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon has the grail as one of four objects symbolizing the four Elements: the Grail itself (water), the sword Excalibur (fire), a dish (earth), and a spear or wand (air).

 

[Flex Mentallo]

A grail, wondrous but not explicitly holy, first appears in Perceval, le Conte du Graal by Chrétien de Troyes, an unfinished romance dated sometime between 1180 and 1191.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

While dining in the magical abode of the Fisher King, Perceval witnesses a procession in which youths carry magnificent objects from one chamber to another, passing before him at each course of the meal. First comes a young man carrying a bleeding lance, then two boys carrying candelabras. Finally, a beautiful young girl emerges bearing an elaborately decorated graal, or "grail," which was a wide bowl, which in the story contains a single Mass wafer which provided sustenance for the Fisher King’s crippled father.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The story of the Wounded King's mystical fasting is not unique; several saints were said to have lived without food besides communion, for instance Saint Catherine of Genoa. This may imply that Chrétien intended the Mass wafer to be the significant part of the ritual, and the Grail to be a mere prop.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The Grail legend later became interwoven with legends of the Holy Chalice. Though Chrétien’s account is the earliest and most influential of all Grail texts, it was in the work of Robert de Boron that the Grail truly became the "Holy Grail" and assumed the form most familiar to modern readers. In his verse romance Joseph d’Arimathie, composed between 1191 and 1202, Robert tells the story of Joseph of Arimathea acquiring the chalice of the Last Supper to collect Christ’s blood upon his removal from the cross.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Joseph is thrown in prison, where Christ visits him and explains the mysteries of the blessed cup. Upon his release Joseph gathers his in-laws and other followers and travels to the west, and founds a dynasty of Grail keepers that eventually includes Perceval.