Abstract

© Dr M D Magee and Saviour Shirlie
Contents Updated:Thursday, 12 December 2002
Thursday, 01 June 2006

The Holy Grail

Christian apologists says that the Grail legends are essentially romances set in a medieval Catholic society with little esoteric content. They are esoteric. They embody the struggle between Catharism and Catholicism, in that originally purely allegorical Cathar works were changed under the influence of the Catholics, into a mystic propaganda for the mystery of the Church’s own sacraments.

Initially, the Quest was an allegory of the search for perfection, in readiness for the spiritual rise to God that the death of a Perfect brought. It was the expectation that they were going directly to God that allowed the Cathar Parfaits to laugh at their tormentors, just as the Essenes had to the Romans a millennium before, and for the same reason—the utter conviction that by living a perfectly saintly life they had already been saved before they suffered death. All that remained was to die like the angels they already were.

The Grail cycles were a Cathar Pilgrim’s Progress, set in Britain, because Catharism had something in common with Celtic Christianity. When the Catholic Church set out to crush the Cathars, they also set out to bowdlerize the Cathar literature of the troubadours.

One might have thought the Church would favour a legend so apparently Christian. It did not. Christian writers do not comment on the Grail. The core of the Church ignored it completely. The Church could not approve of stories that were originally based in profane if not diabolic sources, not in canonical scripture. The legend gave the Church in Britain an independent origin as illustrious as that of the Church of Rome. If the Church did not approve of these stories, why then did it sponsor, through the Cistercians, the Vulgate Cycle? It obviously had to compromise in its battle against Catharism. Just as it had to bring in new orders and rituals to compete with Cathar practices, it had to “Christianize” these extremely popular romances, or leave the field open to the heretics.

The Arthurian romances were, indeed, in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, adapted to suit Catholicism better. Arthur F J Remy writes in CE, “The Holy Grail” is the name of a legendary sacred vessel, identified with the chalice of the Eucharist or the dish of the Pascal lamb. The proper meaning of the word “grail” is that is given by the Cistercian chronicler Helinandus (d c 1230), known at the time Master Blihis first wrote the Grail Romance as a historian and as a troubadour at the court of Philip Augustus, and, when he later became a monk at Froid Mont, as an ardent preacher of the Albigensian Crusade! In his chronicle, for about the year 720 (the author was guessing at a suitable date), he mentions a hermit’s vision of of the dish used at the last supper. The hermit then wrote a Latin book about it called Gradale:

At this time a certain marvellous vision was revealed by an angel to a certain hermit in Britain concerning S Joseph, the decurion who deposed from the cross the Body of Our Lord, as well as concerning the paten or dish in the which Our Lord supped with His disciples, whereof the history was written out by the said hermit and is called Of the Graal (De Gradali). Now, a platter (scutella), broad and somewhat deep, is called in French “gradalis” or “gradale”, wherein costly viands with their sauce are wont to be set before rich folk by degrees (“gradatim”) one morsel after another in divers rows, and in the vulgar speech it is called “graalz”, for that it is grateful and acceptable (grata) to him that eateth therein, as well for that which containeth the victual, for that haply it is of silver or other precious material, as for the contents thereof, to wit, the manifold courses of costly meats. I have not been able to find this history written in Latin, but it is in the possession of certain noblemen written in French only, nor, as they say, can it easily be found complete. This, however, I have not hitherto been able to obtain from any person so as to read it with attention. As soon as I can do so, I will translate into Latin such passages as are more useful and more likely to be true.

The medieval Latin word gradale becomes in Old French “graal,” whence the English “grail”. So, it is a dish or charger, not a cup. In The Quest for the Holy Grail, the Grail visited Camelot and fed everyone with the food they desired, a material illustration of the supposed effect of the eucharistic chalice, but matching this interpretation of Graal in early French as a platter not a cup, and Jesus Christ explained to Galahad that the Grail was the platter from which Jesus and the disciples ate the Pascal lamb at the Last Supper.

Moreover, Chrestien described the Grail as a large platter such as might have served a salmon or a lamprey. S Bernard, however, in a sermon, used the metaphor of the “sweet savour of the divine presence, pleasing the soul’s palate”. The Grail in The Quest for the Holy Grail is associated clearly with the presence of God or Christ or the Trinity, so mutatis mutandis it has the same meaning as that of the Cathars—unity with God. The adaption of “san greal” to “sang real” (royal blood) is much later, and initially seems to have been a simple error.

Those who maintain the theory of a purely Catholic Christian origin regard the religious element in the story as fundamental and trace the leading motifs to Christian ideas and conceptions, derived from the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, which had a vogue in the twelfth century, paricularly in Britain. The food producing properties of the vessel refer really to the Eucharist, which gives spiritual nourishment to the faithful. The purely Christian legend which had arisen was brought into contact with the traditional evangelization of Britain, and then developed on British soil, in Wales, and thus the Celtic stamp, which it undeniably bears, is accounted for, though in a manner never clearly explained.

The Grail saga is the most difficult to interpret, and to account for historically, of all the Arthurian romances. Just as the ideals of courtly chivalry shape and colour the story of Lancelot, so do the ascetic proclivities of a monastic cult assert themselves in the gradual unfolding of the legend of the Holy Grail.

Glastonbury and the Grail

Professor R F Treharne of the University of Wales at Aberystwyth has explained (in Myth or Legend?, Ed Glyn E Daniel) how the literary accounts of the legendary conversion of Britain are connected with the Abbey of Glastonbury, which was associated with the legend of Arthur when Glastonbury was identified with the mythic Avalon in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account. The British name for the island that stood in the Somerset wetlands and is now called Glastonbury was not Avalon. It was “Ynys Vitrin” meaning “Woad Island”. Someone with a knowledge of Latin but not of British, presumably the monks, thought this meant the Latin Vitrum, glass, and called the place Glasstown, from which we have now Glastonbury.

William of Malmesbury, the monastic chronicler, visited Glastonbury in 1125 AD and wrote a book, On the Antiquity of the Church of Glastonbury. Over the next 120 years the book was continuously revised by the monks copying it, but William in 1140 included his original work as part of his longer book, The Deeds of the Kings of Britian. Comparison of the original with the revisions shows the growth of the myths of Glastonbury.

William was to a degree skeptical of what the monks originally told him, refusing to believe that the little wattle church which he saw before him at Glastonbury had been built by the apostle Philip in 63 AD, the monks’ favoured story, but accepting another story that the church had been built by emissaries of the pope invited by king Lucius of Britain in 166 AD. Britain never had a king Lucius, and at that time it was ruled by the Romans. William says that S Patrick organised the hermits who lived about the church into a monastery in 432 AD, and then spent 30 years as their abbot.

S Bridget of Ireland, S Gildas the historian, and S David of Wales all supposedly spent time at the abbey, though Bridget is the ancient Irish goddess Christianized as a saint, and so is mythical. What William leaves out, in view of the myths he includes, is revealing—no mentions for Joseph of Arimathea or for king Arthur. Yet William knew of Arthur, commenting elsewhere on the popularity of stories about him.

On 25 May 1186, Glastonbury abbey and the wattle church were burnt down. Under the patronage of the king, the abbot launched a national appeal for funds to rebuild the abbey. In two years, enough money had been raised to build the Lady Chapel on the site of the wattle church. The trouble was that the funds began drying up, with the abbey church barely begun. The monks of Glastonbury came up with the scam of linking the riotously popular Arthur with the abbey. In 1191 AD, they declared they had found the grave of king Arthur and Queen Guinevere. They knew exactly who they were because a crude lead cross was also allegedly found inscribed:

Here lies buried the renowned king Arthur with Guinevere his second wife, in the Isles of Avalon.

Historians are ready to accept that a real “Arthur” was a fifth century Romano British hero who led the resistance of the British to the Saxon invasion, but nothing links him with Glastonbury. Gerald of Wales saw the skeletons, believed and positively identified Avalon with Glastonbury in 1194 AD. Arthur and Joseph of Arimathea—then recently linked in the Grail myth—were grafted to the stock of the Glastonbury tradition.

The connexion of Arthur with Glastonbury came in Historia Regnum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain), published in 1135 by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Bishop of S Asaph. Geoffrey was Welsh not Norman, his non-Normanized name being Gruffydd ap Arthur, and he claimed he translated it from Welsh into Latin. Geoffrey says that Walter Map (or Mapes), who died as Archdeacon of Oxford in 1210, and to whom is ascribed the authorship of a Grail Lancelot cycle, brought the original book of the kings of Briton from Brittany. Written in British, it required a Welshman to translate it. The implication is that Geoffrey transcribed the Breton first into Welsh, then into Latin, not that he had a Welsh original. But the dates do not gel. Walter Map, as a young man was in Paris about the time Geoffrey died in 1154. So, the edition published around 1135 could not have had any input from Map, who was then a child. Maybe the later edition we now have, from 1147, did.

The link between Arthur and Glastonbury was invented later on a false premise. He described Arthur as having been mortally wounded at the battle of the river Camlan, and carried thence to Insula Avallonis for the healing of his wounds. Insula Avallonis is the Latinization of the British Ynys Afalon, Apple Island. The false premise was that it was Glastonbury. The context cited suggests it was not. How can the wounds of a mortally wounded man heal? They cannot, except in the sense that dead men hope to rise again healed and able in heaven! Afalon is the Realm of the Dead. It was the Underworld, but that was heaven to the Celtic British. It was imagined as a magic island of healing and plenty in the western ocean where the sun set, below the horizon and therefore in the Underworld. It is the Celtic version of the Greek Isles of the Hesperides and the Roman Elysian Fields.

As for the Grail, the monks of Glastonbury never said they had it. Geoffrey had nothing to say about Joseph of Arimathea or the Holy Grail. The mythical history of the Grail is connected with Joseph of Arimathea. The monks said Joseph had brought two glass cruets containing the blood and the sweat of Christ, not a grail, and these had been buried with Joseph. A late medieval window in Langport Church nearby shows the cruets clearly, but the story of Joseph is a late tradition, looks invented, and no one thinks it at all probable. Indeed, Treharne seems to think the story about the apostle S Philip, rejected by William of Malmesbury to be more likely. The Glastonbury Thorn is simply a sport of common hawthorn, unusual but not unknown elsewhere. It was never alluded to until a fourteenth century seal of the Abbey.

The story of Joseph of Arimathea bringing the Grail to Britain was the last one in the cycle written, though it is where modern writers, following the internal chronology of the cycle, usually begin. It was not told until Robert de Borron told it at the end of the twelfth century as the first of the Christianized Grail romances (The Romance of Joseph of Arimathea). Other Grail stories precede it.

The best Perceval MSS refer to a book written at “Ficamp” as source for certain Perceval adventures. The book is lost but as certain Fécamp relics, like silver knives, appear in the Grail procession of the Parzival, it was perhaps a Grail story. The story with Nicodemus (“Victory of the People”) as the hero, not Joseph, is told of the Saint Sang relic at Fécamp, and a similar origin is ascribed to the Volto Santo at Lucca, the legend of which professes to date from the eighth century. Both were popular places of pilgrimage. The monks of Glastonbury wanted to be in on it.

The first true Grail romance was probably written in Latin and became the basis for the work of de Borron, who was an English knight under King Henry II, and a contemporary of Chrestien and of Map. The fully developed Grail legend was, later on, still further connected with other legends, as in Wolfram’s poem with that of Lohengrin, the swan knight, and also with that of Prestor John, the fabled Christian monarch of the East. Here also the story of Klinschor, the magician, was added. After the Renaissance the Grail legend, together with most medieval legends, fell into oblivion, from which it was rescued when the Romantic movement set in at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The Joseph myth was that, when Joseph was cast into prison by the Jews, Christ appeared to him and gave him the Grail, with which he was miraculously sustained for forty two years, until set free by Vespasian. Here Joseph of Arimathea was confused with the Jewish historian, Josephus, whose liberation by Titus is narrated by Suetonius. The Grail was then brought to the West, to Britain, either by Joseph and Josephes, his son (Grand S Graal), or by Alain, one of his kin (Robert de Borron).

In Didot, it was given by Joseph to his brother in law, Bron or Brons, whose grandson, Perceval, was destined to be the final winner and guardian of the relic. Bron is Bran the Blessed of Welsh literature. Bron, sailing from Palestine, floated across on a shirt taken from Joseph's Son, a version of the “wafting” of Bran to Ireland. Bran, or rather his mystical head, which in his legend takes the place of the Grail, provides banquet and mirth for eight years to his funeral bearers. In a later Grail romance it is a salver containing a head, and another Grail romance even says Bron lived “in these isles of Ireland”. Rhys says it is not a case of similarity but one of identity.

The notion of spiritual bread and cups comes from the obvious truth that food and drink equate with life. Cauldrons or platters of cooked food were plainly the source of life in the ancient extended family or clan, and present in every house. Cauldrons in primitive communal houses might have had food constantly added to them, so they seemed inexhaustible, or did to children, and primitive people had a childish mentality. Using a cauldron in ritual was a natural extension of it.

As fertility sprang from the earth, the vessel used for cooking its fruits became associated with the Underworld, and Celtic myths arose that Cuchulainn, Arthur, and so on, had stolen the cauldron from the Underworld to save mankind, just as fire was stolen from heaven to save humanity in the myth of Prometheus. For people secure in civilized societies, with full enough bellies to let them worry about their inevitable natural death, fertility rituals transmuted into rituals promising life after death rather than just life. Celtic heaven was beneath the earth, as stories of fairy hills full of good and magical things testify. People, like Rip Van Winkle, fell asleep before awaking inside the fairy hill. Sleep is the common euphemism for death, even in Christian holy writings.

Thus, in Taliesin's The Spoils of Annwn, concerning Pwyll and Pryderi, the cauldron is found at a place called Caer Sidi. The recovered cauldron spoke prophecies and would not cook the food of a coward. In Norman Grail romances, the Grail is kept by Pelles or Peleur in the Castle of Carbonek, and the Grail supplies whatever food everyone worthy desires, and restored them to health when sick or wounded, but anyone unworthy could not approach it without harm. Those who worship at the Grail Chapel of Peleur are forever young, and time is meaningless to them. They are dead, in fact, but with everlasting youth. The Grail has the life giving properties of the Celtic cauldron.

The Grail legends are versions of this theme, versions of ancient British myths, and rituals of initiation, Christianized because only Christianity was allowed to save! The initiate needed to know only that he was acceptable. The hierophant could tell him what to expect and its meaning, but others were to be told nothing. The presiding priest asked the questions, to elicit the adequacy of the candidate and his training. Every other enquiry, idel and unscripted, was to invite disaster. Merely to ask was to be cursed, and it appeared in the myths as a warning, like the warning in the bible that no one could change a word of it without disaster. It was a taboo meant to preserve the tradition. Peredur could ask the king of Annwn only one question, because the cult was secret.

The cauldron is the symbol of life. It contains the magical brew that confers life, spiritual as well as physical. It is the equivalent of the Christian monstrance that holds the host, or the cup of the holy blood, and appears again as the witches' cauldron, showing that witchcraft was seen by the clerics as a life giving heresy. The myth of Arthur's journey to Annwn and return with the cauldron illustrates the ascent from Annwn, through initiation into life, then eternal life.

So, the Celtic Church might have used the Grail myth to counter the ambitions of Rome to bring Britain finally under Roman religious hegemony. It was a notion that the Cathars understood and sympathised with, and took up themselves, but with their emphasis on the quest, the spiritual quest to return to God. The cauldron of life and inspiration of Welsh and Irish poems like that of Taliesin testify to the idea of a saving ritual similar to the Christian Eucharist among the Celts before Christianity, but which merged with the Christian idea giving rise to the Grail cycle. The notion of Arthur as the once and future king perhaps symbolized the hopes for a resurrection of Celtic Druidic culture when Christianity under the Norman kings was bleeding it from Wales and Ireland.

In different versions, Gawain, Perceval, and later Galahad with Bors and Perceval achieved the quest. After the death of its keeper the Grail vanished. According to the Perlesvaus, Perceval was removed, no one knows whither, by a ship with white sails on which was displayed a red cross, suggesting the Knights Templar.

So, the Grail came to be identified with the cup of the last supper, which Pilate gave to Joseph of Arimathea, and in which Joseph treasured the blood that flowed from Christ’s wounds on the Cross. The cup was brought by Joseph to Britain, and its story was thus connected with an old legend, preserved by the monks at the abbey of Glastonbury, which attributed to Joseph the conversion of Britain to Christianity. Glastonbury, associated as it was even with Avalon itself, came to have a significant connexion with Arthurian lore by the end of the twelfth century.

The glorification of Britain manifestly intended by this particular use of the Grail legend suggests, once again, the interest taken by the Angevin court in the possibilities of adroit literary manipulation of the Arthurian traditions. And if, indeed, Henry II can be proved to have had anything to do with it at all, an argument of some plausibility is established in support of the MS record that the courtier Walter Map did, “for the love of his lord, king Henry,” translate from Latin into French The Quest of the Holy Grail.

Gawain, the Solar Hero

The original hero of the Grail quest, from the earliest stage of Arthurian legend, was the Pagan sun god, Gawain, but he is displaced by the central figure of the existing versions of the story, Perceval. Perceval then is superseded by one who “exemplifies, in a yet more uncompromising, yet more inhuman, spirit, the ideal of militant asceticism,” Lancelot’s son, Galahad. The earlier versions of the legend know nothing of Galahad, nor is there any reason for assuming that the primitive forms of the story had any Christian motive.

Before Malory, it was Gawain rather than Arthur, who was the typical English hero. No knight of the primitive Arthurian fellowship enjoyed a higher renown than Arthur’s nephew, Gawain. He was the centre of a cycle of adventures independent of, and as old as, the original Arthur saga. He is the hero of more episodic romances than any other British knight, and, in all Arthurian romances, none appears so often. Under the name of Gwalchmei, Gawain figures prominently in the Welsh Triads and in the Mabinogion, while as Walgainus he is one of Arthur’s most faithful and doughty lieutenants in the wars recounted by Geoffrey. So great was the traditional fame of Gawain that William of Malmesbury thought it worth while to record the discovery of his grave in Pembrokeshire. In the Merlin proper, Gawain is a dominant personality, his feats rivalling those of Arthur, but in the later forms such as the Merlin continuations, Tristan, and the final Lancelot compilation, he is represented as cruel, cowardly and treacherous, and of indifferent sexual morality.

In the original myths, Gawain is seen by his flaming red hair and strength that waxes to the middle of the day and wanes thereafter, as a sun god—a northern version of Mithras. The light giving sword, Excalibur, belongs to Gawain, and he has a horse called Gringalet. These are often features of solar heroes or sun gods. Odin has a sword like Excalibur that he implants into an oak and Sigmund is the one able to remove it. He also has his eight legged steed, is the father of Siegfried, and in Beowulf is a dragon slayer. The German hero Siegfried—the Norse hero Sigurd, the dragon slayer—was a sun god, equivalent to Balder. Siegfried is the winner of the Nibelung’s Hoard, standing for earthly power. The sun god had defeated the dragon of night, just as Marduk defeated Tiamat, and Siegfried won the hoard which the dragon had guarded—the visible earth itself.

In Chrestien de Troyes’s Conte del Graal, and in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, Gawain is almost as important as Perceval himself. In the German poem Diu Krône, by Heinrich von dem Türlin, he, and not Perceval, achieves the Grail quest. No other knight undergoes so marked a transformation of character in his progress through the Christianization of the romances. In the Mabinogion, and the earlier stages of the legend, Gawain is the paragon of knightly courtesy—the gentleman, par excellence, of the Arthurian court. In some later romances, particularly in the more elaborate versions of the Grail legend, as in Malory and Tennyson, “A reckless and irreverent knight is he”. Before Malory’s time, Gawain is uniformly presented in English literature in a flattering light, and no Arthurian hero was more popular with English writers.

The elements of the plot in Sir Gawain and the Grene Knight are as ancient and unreasonable as mythology. In many features, Gawain is like Cuchullain, the Irish sun god and phallic hero. The chief adventure, the beheading game proposed by the Green Knight to the reluctant courtiers of King Arthur occurs often in other stories. It comes in one of the stories of Cuchullain. “You may cut off my head, if only I may have a stroke at you some other day.”

The woman whom Gawain loved was the Queen of the Other World in Irish mythology, an island of maidens which Gawain visits and returns from perpetually young. He is thereafter called the Maiden’s Knight, and later in the period of Christianization, the rewriters give him a reputation for promiscuity.

Perceval means someone who is courteous or, in this context, chivalrous. Perceval followed as the hero of Chrestien de Troyes’ Conte del Graal, and Perceval, and its three continuations by different authors. The Perceval of Robert de Borron follows and then Perlesvaus, an anonymous story, and Parzifal of Wolfram. Lancelot and Galahad appearing in Malory and later stories complete the order of introduction of the stories and the knights.

Gawain is the hero of two of the long romances and Perceval of seven, but Gawain features also on many of the earlier prose compositions such as Merlin but not in later ones like Tristan and Lancelot. Professor Rajna has found the names, of Arthur and Gawain in charters of the early twefth century. At that time, Gawain was known in Italy, appearing for example on the architrave of the north door of Modena Cathedral, a twelfth century building. Fragments of short episodic poems by Bleheris, the Welshman, glorify Arthur´s famous nephew and his brother Ghaeris, or Gareth, and his son Guinglain, and some of these are recognizable in Chrestien’s work. Among these Bleheris poems was one dealing with Gawain’s adventures at the Grail castle, where the Grail is non-Christian, and has features reminiscent of solar and seasonal mysteries. Gawain, belonging to the pre-Christian stage of spiritual edification, Christian writers found him a stumbling block in their re-rendering of Grail tradition.

It would be an interesting scholarly study, if it has not already been done, to compare the Catholic and the original versions to see what Catholic concerns about the cycle were. The most obvious ultimate difference was that Sir Galahad, an unequivocally Christian knight, replaced Sir Gawain, his solar original. The original meaning of the Grail stories must be found in the stories about Gawain, not in the more refined versions of tales about Lancelot and Galahad.

Perceval and the Grail

Somehow, Perceval became the hero of the Grail quest, instead of Gawain. Of the Perceval Grail romances, the oldest, from the point of view of manuscript preservation, is the Perceval or Conte del Graal of Chrestien de Troyes, started sometime just before 1200 AD, but harking back to earlier Welsh myths. The Welsh Perceval, Peredur, whose story is in the Mabinogian, appeared originally in The Red Book of Hergest about 1400 AD. Though later than the Grail stories, The Red Book of Hergest is datable earlier from its content, but has been contaminated by Grail material and its Christianized interpretation. Like Gawain, Perceval is a Celtic sun god, a Cuchulain or Finn, or Culhwch in the Mabinogion.

The mother of Peredur had two brothers, Peles and Peleur, Pwyll and Pryderi of the older Welsh tradition. Peredur destroyed a giant beaver living in a lake, identifying him with the Welsh God Hu, who did it in another tale. In yet another tale, in the voice of Ceridwen, goddess of the underworld and keeper of the cauldron of inspiration, the battle happened at dawn, and the goddess Arianrod paused the hostilities with a rainbow. The strife was evidently between the bright sun and the dark sun of the storm, light and dark, or order and chaos. Arianrod, the Silver Wheel, the moon goddess, also a goddess of the underworld, or the same in another tradition, intervened to prevent mutual destruction. She becomes Argante, Queen of Avalon in Arthurian legend, showing that Avalon is the land of the dead.

Now the Grail version is retroscripted into the original Welsh version. The castle visited by Peredur, adulterated to the Castle of the Grail and the Fisher King, was originally Caer Sidi or Caer Bannauc, the royal palace of Annwn where the cauldron of inspiration—now the Grail—was kept. He meets the owner of the Castle, his uncle, who is watching his men fishing in the lake. He becomes the Fisher King of the Grail cycle. He tells Peredur that whatever he saw in the castle, he must never mention. This warning strongly suggests we are reading about an initiation ceremony, the novice being bound never to tell of the mysteries of the cult.

Taliesin, in his myth, was found after birth, like Sargon, Moses, and others in a river, here by a fishing weir, owned by one Gwydno, whose brother or friend is Gwyn, son of Nudd. In the Grail romances, the Fisher King has a brother Gonumant or Goon Desert, likely foreign attempts at the Welsh name. Taliesin was a bard, and so a guardian of the Welsh mysteries of Caer Sidi or Annwn, himself. The whole Grail myth is founded on the cauldron of inspiration in Annwn, the world of the dead in Welsh mythology.

The poem of Chrestien, regarded by many as the oldest Grail romance proper, tells of Perceval’s visit to the Grail castle. Perceval begins as a boorish and callow youth who grows to become a knight, and he sets out seeking adventures. He was the son of a widow, “la dame veuve”, his father having been slain in tourney, battle or by treachery, about the time of his birth. The mother, fearful lest her son should share his father’s fate, flees to the woods, and there brings up her son in ignorance. The youth grows up strong, swift footed and of great personal beauty, but ignorant! He is a yokel and a fool. He spends his days chasing the beasts of the forest.

One day, he meets a party of knights in armour. He does not know what they are and asks naïve questions about their armour and equipment. Told that they are knights, he resolves to be one, and tells his mother. Dressed as a fool, he departs, his mother, in some versions, dying of grief. He comes at last to the court of Arthur. Here, for his gauche ways, he is mocked by Cai (Kay), but his future fame is foretold. He, and none of the regular knights, slays a foe of Arthur’s, the Red Knight, who has insulted the king. Dressing himself with difficulty in the armour of the slain knight, he sets out on his adventures which differ in the versions, and becomes a skilful and valiant knight.

This is a widespread folk tale theme, which includes such heroes as Perseus, Cyrus, Romulus and Remus, Siegfried, and Arthur himself. The most faithful representative of the original tale is the English Syr Percyvelle of Galles, where the hero is nephew to Arthur on the mother’s side, and his father, of the same name as himself, is a valiant knight of the court. In no instance, though, is the father of equal rank with his wife.

As in Peredur, he comes to the castle of the Fisher King. The castle seems to be desolate, the Fisher King being an old man alone on a couch before the central fire of a hall big enough for four hundred knights—big enough therefore for 365. He gives the visiting knight a sword, but warns that it could be trusted to be reliable except in the case of one danger that only the armourer who made it knew.

The mystery of the Grail is in the Grail procession. A squire enters with a lance dripping blood. Two squires follow with ten branched candlesticks. A beautiful damsel follows them with “a graal” so brilliantly jewelled that it dazzles even the candles of the hall. In Peredur, the grail had on it a severed head swimming with blood. Another maiden follows with a casket. The knights present show it reverence. Perceval looks on but is too polite to ask the meaning of the procession or ask the question: “Whom does the Grail Serve?” Perceval thereby incurs guilt and reproach. The next day, Perceval leaves the castle, and as soon as he does, it disappears. He turns to meet a woman with a headless body who says all would have been healed if he had asked the question about the Grail.

In Peredur, the hero has to avenge the murder of the beheaded man, so it becomes a pursuit of vengeance for a kinsman murdered. One form of the solar myth has the sun gods beheaded. A severed head would relate in Christian mythology with John the Baptist, but in Chrestien, the grail, a wide and not very deep dish, carried in the procession apparently contains the Corpus Christi in the form of the single consecrated wafer of the Catholic mass. This looks absurd, a large flat dish holding a small wafer biscuit, the host of the Catholic mass, so the dish becomes a chalice. A charger holding a severed head is more sensible.

A miraculous dish is a Celtic mythical symbol. In Bleheris, identified by Giraldus Cambrensis as an early Welsh story teller, the Grail is the “Rich” Grail, of unspecified nature, but magically serving the king and his court all their needs, especially of food for feasts, without the need for servants or seneschals. It sounds like the “gradale”.

It turns out that the Fisher King is called Bron, identifying him possibly with the Welsh Bran, who had a cauldron of plenty, and was wounded in the foot. The Fisher King was injured by a spear in the thigh. Foot and thigh are euphemisms for the genitals. In eastern legend, Bron might be Bar On—son of the Sun.

In the history versions, the Grail has the greatest sanctity. It is the dish from which Christ ate the Paschal lamb with his disciples, which passed into possession of Joseph of Arimathea, and was used by him to gather the blood of Christ, when his body was taken from the cross. It was identified with the chalice of the Eucharist, and the Grail contains a “body” taken to be the Corpus Christi, because it carried the Pascal lamb—the Lamb of God—at the last supper. This “Grail” sounds more like a bier or sarcophagus actually containing a body. When Gawain visited the Grail castle, it was the body of the dead knight. The body was carried on a bier in the Grail procession in the continuation of Crestien’s story. In the Perlesvaus, Gawain sees a chalice within the Grail!

Chrestien meant to relate the hero’s second visit to the castle, when he would have put the question and received the desired information, but did not live to finish the story. Here the Grail has no pronounced religious character, and indeed is called “a grail” not “the Grail”.

Its key is the question Perceval does not ask of the Fisher King when he sees the enactment of the mysteries at the Castle of the Quest. At an initiation ceremony, the initiate has to ask some such question as, “Am I worthy?”, whereupon the initiate will be assured he is, given various rules, then admitted to the order and thereby assured of perpetual spiritual feeding, and eternal life. The lame Fisher King and his brother are guardians of life after death, guardians of the Underworld, but are priests or hierophants in reality.

The ancient Underworld was not horrible for heroes, but only for the wicked. It was the source of life, inspiration and regeneration—in a word, fertility. Dagda, the Irish god associated with the cauldron of life was a fertility God. And the goddesses associated with the cauldron are underworld goddesses, the equivalent of Demeter-Kore-Persephone, Ceridwen, Branwen and Arianrod, via Ceridwen's story of the dual at dawn. Oeiginally, life was associated with female deities, for obvious reasons, but the patriarchal take over pushed them into the background.

The lance is explained as the one with which Longinus pierced Christ’s side, and the silver plate becomes the paten covering the chalice. But the spear is supposed to have injured the maimed king, and either bleeds continuously or exudes a few drops of blood. The ruler of Hades is often lame, and Vulcan, Weyland Smith and even the mediaeval Satan are lame.

The quest in the Christianized versions assumes a particularly sacred character, the atmosphere of chivalric adventure in Chrestien’s poem yielding to a militant asceticism, which insists not only on the purity of the quester, but, in some versions (Queste, Perlesvaus), on his virginity. In the Queste and Grand S Graal, the hero is not Perceval but the maiden knight, Galahad.

Lucifer and the Grail

Crestien’s sponsor for The Story of the Grail was Philip of Flanders, a noted crusader and persecuter of heretics! Chrestien said Philip had brought the source of the poem from the Holy land in 1177. If this is true, the source could have been the Paulicians.

In another Grail romance, Parzifal, written by Wolfram von Eshenbach, in about 1200, a conception of the Grail wholly different from that of the French romances emerges. Wolfram conceives of it as a precious stone, of special purity, possessing miraculous powers conferred upon it and sustained by a consecrated host which, on every Good Friday, a dove brings down from heaven and lays down upon it, the only concession to Catholic Christianity. The angels who remained neutral during the rebellion of Lucifer were its first guardians, then it was brought to earth and entrusted to Titurel, the first Grail king. It is guarded in the splendid castle of Munsalvaesche (mons salvationis?) by itself and nourished by its miraculous food giving power. The Grail is akin to the horn of plenty of classical myth. According to Manessier, as the Grail procession moves along the hall, the tables are magically filled with delectable food. Wolfram’s Grail does the same, though it is a magic stone. While it was there, anything desired would be at hand.

Wolfram says exactly how many ladies in waiting serve the Grail in the procession:

If I count correctly, there must now be eighteen ladies standing there. And look at this moment come another six, making altogether so far twenty four ladies.

The bearer of the Grail is the radiant Repanse de Schoye, who places the Grail before Anfortas and stands in the center with twelve maidens on either side of her. She presides over two convents of attendants.

In all these versions, the legend appears in a developed state, the preceeding phases of which can only be conjectured. An Oriental, a Celtic, and a purely Christian origin have been claimed. Where all these merge is in the Cathar heresy. The Oriental parallels are Zoroastrian dualism with the idea of paradise, and the Persian cup of Jamshid. Celtic elements undoubtedly occur in the legend. The Perceval story is probably, and the Arthurian legend certainly, of Celtic origin, and both of these legends intimately connect with the quest story. Talismans, such as magic lances and food giving vessels figure prominently in Celtic myths and folk tales. According to this theory the Mabinogion, with its simple story of vengeance by means of talismans and devoid of religious significance, would yield the version nearest to the original form of the legend. Some pre-Christian tale of a hero seeking to avenge the injury done to a kinsman was a likely precursor. The religious element would then be of secondary origin, and would have come into the legend when the old vengeance tale was fused with the legend of Joseph of Arimathea, as a legend of the conversion of Britain.

But, Wolfram said his source was Kyot (Guiot), a troubadour jongleur (one of their castes), of Provence in Cathar country. Derrick Everett cites O Rahn, E Anitchkof and J Evola as claiming that the ideas given to Wolfram by Kyot were Cathar. Some say the Cathars awaited a Messiah, who would be the son of a widow, like Parzival, although it seems contrary to Cathar theology as it is now known. One of their symbols was the dove, which according to Wolfram was the bird that brought a wafer to the Grail on each Good Friday.

But Kyot said his story had come from a Jew or a Moslem, Flegitanis, in Toledo. Spanish Sufi mystics, who had their origin in Persia, had spread with the Arabs to Spain and thence to Provence in the Middle Ages. They organized in convents of 13, and carried horse headed canes that they supposedly used to ride to heaven, an idea that might have transferred to witchcraft in France.

The Grail of Eschenbach also seems to reflect the Qabalistic Tiferet, a sacrificial death and rebirth or resurrection. The medieval Qabalistic initiation into Tiferet involved a hermit guide or wise old man, a king, a child and a sacrificed god. Later a truncated pyramid, a cube and a rosie cross were added. The emergence of the Mediaeval Qabalah was said to have been inspired by the Sepher ha Bahir, said by Qabalists to have appeared from Germany or directly from Palestine as remnants of mutilated scrolls. Gershom Scholem, the nineteenth century authority on the Qabalah, says it was a survival of a Gnostic tradition that had disappeared from Judaism in the first centuries AD, and could not account for its sudden appearance. He did note that parts of the Bahir were similar to some Cathar doctrines. The Karaites will have been the link.

Flegitanis had written of the great war in heaven between the angels. In this story, Lucifer had a large green stone made of emerald in his heavenly crown, but during the cosmic battle in which Lucifer was ejected from heaven, it fell from his crown to the earth where it became the grail. This story makes the sacred grail a possession of Satan, but he only needs to have stolen it from the true Lucifer, his brother Michael, accounting for the warfare in heaven, for the story to be restored.

Lucifer was not, when this story was circulated, a popular name for the Devil, but became so from its association with the Cathar heresy. Indeed, Lucifer is not a biblical name or title of the Devil at all, but a name used in Isaiah 14:12 for the fallen king of Babylon who had aspired to godhood. The kings of Babylon known by the authors of the biblical books would have been Persians or Greeks, and the title of this Lucifer, “son of the morning”, makes him into Mithras. The author seems to have been writing about the fall of the Persian shahs, but set it earlier. In any event, Lucifer was a noble title aspired to by kings and not a pseudonym for Satan.

Corroborating this, according to Professor M Moghdam (Tehran, 1975), the cup used for the “nushabe”, the water of immortality, in the Mithraitic divine meal, offers an origin for the Holy Grail myth. It became the holiest object in the service, figuring prominently in Persian literature, notably in mystical poems. The cup had seven measures marked on it, corresponding to the seven degrees of membership in Mithraism. The full cup is for the “Pir” or the Father, known as the “Father of the Seven Lines”. It was, in short, a graded cup, in Latin “gradalis”, a Grail!

A green glass charger was brought back from Caesarea in 1101 and has since resided in Genoa Cathedral. The legend attached to it is that it was the vessel used by Nicodemus to collect the blood of Christ when he took him from the cross. The stone which fell from Lucifer’s crown was also said to have been the philosopher’s stone which could make all things “perfect”. By this stone the Phœnix is burned to ashes, from which he is reborn. Used on humans, it immediately made them ready for the Cathar consolamentum, and therefore ready to enter heaven. Wolfram’s stone in Parzifal preserves everyone in the Grail castle in perpetual youth, identifying the castle with the spiritual heaven that all perfect Christians will enter where they live forever. Those who took it that perpetual youth could be had on Satan’s material earth, sought the stone to give them perpetual youth in physical life.

In Malory’s later version of the Morte d’Arthur, Christ addresses the knights:

My knights and my serjeants, and true children, which be come out of deadly life into spiritual life, I will now no longer hide from you…

Here is a dualism which could have been Cathar perhaps more readily than Catholic. The Grail was certainly originally a large flat dish, not a cup, and might therefore have been associated with a sacred feast and symbolic of it. Interestingly, John the Baptist was beheaded and his head presented on a charger to Herodias. In the Wild Hunt of the witches, Herodias is said to have led the nocturnal procesion. She seems a strange goddess for a Pagan ceremony. If the Cathars, though, were interested in John the Baptist, it might begin to have meaning. In Peredur, a bleeding head is presented on a charger. The Mabinogian is a later work than Parzifal, but some of the content might be earlier, and many scholars think that Parzifal and Peredur have a common source rather than Peredur being the dependent version.

The Waste Land

The earlier strands of the tradition of the Grail romances in which a king is sick or old and impotent or injured in his reproductive organs is reminiscent of the dying fertility gods like Attis, in particular, but also Tammuz and Adonis. In these old religious myths, the quest is of the mother or spouse or sister for the god who has been taken away in death in the northern winter or the burning heat of summer in the east.

The earliest Grail story, the Gawain version of Bleheris, has a castle on the sea shore, a dead body on a bier—the identity of which is never revealed, mourned over with solemn rites—a wasted country, whose desolation is mysteriously connected with the dead man, and which is restored to fruitfulness when the quester asks the meaning of the marvels he beholds—the two features of the weeping women and the wasted land being retained in versions where they have no significance—finally, the mysterious object generating food for a common feast. All of these features seem to be survivals of a solar ritual.

The Grail cycle transforms this into a spiritual quest for a cure for the malaise of the king, who Wolfram calls Amfortas, the Latin Infirmitas in disguise. He has been wounded in the genitals by a poisoned lance. Elsewhere, a sword injured the maimed king, or felled the dead knight, so causing the wasting of the land. J L Weston (1850-1928) notes eastern influences in Grail legends. She points out that the sword of the Grail romances takes various forms:

1. a broken sword, the re-welding of which is an essential condition of achieving the quest
2. a presentation sword for the hero arriving at the Grail castle, but one which has been made to break at the first blow or when it is needed to defend against some danger—only the maker knows it
3. the sword with which John the Baptist was beheaded
4. the sword of Judas Maccabeus, gifted with self acting powers

The motif of the broken sword appears in an Irish tale in which Fergus Fair hair asked the hero Cailte to repair a broken sword that the Tuatha da Danann had refused to mend. He repaired the sword and a spear and a javelin too. Each of these weapons was destined to destroy one of the enemies of the gods. After three days, Cailte and two companions left, eventually met the enemies of the gods, and killed them with the weapons.

The maimed hero appears in classical myth. Telephus, son of Heracles and Auge, was a king in Asia Minor, who married a daughter of King Priam. Telephus was wounded in the groin (bowdlerised to thigh) by the spear of Achilles who was with the Greek party raiding Troy. Telephus’s wound would not heal. The oracle of Apollo told Telephus he would be cured when the one who wounded him became his physician. The Greeks had no idea of where Troy was, so, Telephus went from Mysia to Argos, clad in rags, and begged the help of Achilles, promising to show him how to get to Troy. Achilles healed him with the rust of the spear that had caused the wound, and learnt the way to Troy. The rust, symbolizing blood, might be supposed to have been the original blood Telephus shed.

Prometheus, like Telephus, had a wound that could not heal. As punishment for helping humanity, Zeus had Prometheus crucified in the Caucasian mountains. Every day, an eagle came and ate part of Prometheus’s liver, but it grew again during the night. Aeschylus, in his Prometheus trilogy, of which only Prometheus Bound has survived, depicts Prometheus as the creator and saviour of mankind. In exchange for the gift of fire, Prometheus took from them their foresight. “I took knowledge away from Man.” In Prometheus Unbound, Zeus allowed Prometheus to be freed. Heracles shot the eagle and freed the titan from his chains.

Curiously, J L Weston assures us that the early Christian sect of the Naassenes, a name reminiscent of both Nazarenes and Essenes, had similar ideas, believing that the Logos of John’s gospel was the equal of Tammuz. They had a triple initiation which made them “alone the true Christians”. The origin of the Grail legends might be a primitive Christian cult that Weston describes as “semi Christian, semi Pagan”. These might have been the original Christians or a sister sect which eventually became the Cathar heresy. The standard of Christianity is, of course, a modern one, and by that standard, early types of the religion might well have been “semi Pagan”. Only thoughtless Christians believe their religion is like their God—unchanging. The question is whether the evolution of the religion at Rome has taken it away from its original purpose. Protestants thought that it had, but the Protestant variations is just as off target.

Weston thought the symbolic elements of the Grail tradition were used in the initiation ceremonies of a secret mystery cult. In 1932, a wall painting was found in a cave below the fortress of Montréal de Sos near Tarascon. Dated from the twelfth century, experts declared it Cathar. In it is a spear, a broken sword, a solar disk, many red crosses and a square panel with an inscribed square. The outer part of the panel, which might represent a table or altar, contains twenty crosses in various forms on a black background, the inner part contains five tear shaped drops of blood and five white crosses.

For the original hero, Gawain, the land had been wasted because a knight had died. The dead knight was lying on a scarlet cloth on a bier in the Grail castle. The Grail bearer grieved unconsolably. In the prose Lancelot, Gawain sees twelve maidens kneeling at the closed door of the Grail chamber, grieving unconsolably and praying to be delivered from their torment, even though the people of Castle Corbenic had everything they needed, and were honoured guardians of the sacred, now Christian, relic, the Holy Grail. In the first continuation to Perceval, Gawain fails to ask about the Grail, by which he would have restored the Waste Land, but by asking about the spear achieves a partial restoration. In the later German text Diu Krône (The Crown), of about 1230, the lord of the Grail castle is old and weak. After Gawain has asked the question, removing the enchantment from the Waste Land, the king and his attendants turn out to be dead, but held in semblance of life until the task was completed.

J L Weston pointed to a distinctive feature common to the otherwise differing Perceval versions—the sickness and disability of the ruler of the Waste Land, who is called the Fisher King. The element of the Waste Land declined in importance until, in Wolfram’s Parzival, the healing of the Fisher King appears to be an end in itself.

In the last of the continuations to Chrestien, about 1230, the Fisher King reveals that the bleeding spear is the lance that pierced the side of Christ and that the Grail is the cup in which Joseph of Arimathea caught the blood of Christ. Robert de Borron’s Joseph d’Arimathie, finished about 1199 has the same tales, but also that the Grail ceremony induces pain in any sinner present.

This wasting of the land is found in three Gawain Grail stories, one by Bleheris, the version of Chastel Merveilleus, and Diu Krône, and in one Perceval text, the Gerbert continuation, where Perceval, having partly succeeded, wakes to find himself alone in a flowery meadow, the Grail Castle gone. The day before, the meadow had been the waste land. Wandering in amazement, he meets at a different castle a joyful procession celebrating the land restored. When Perceval asks about the Grail, the mistress of the castle says:

All this was done by what he said,
This land whose streams no waters fed,
Its fountains dry, its fields unplowed,
His word once more with health endowed.

Revenge and healing are the twin themes of the Grail romances, pointing to two possible sources. The hero had to cure a wounded king, and avenge a slain king, both with the same name. The story is that of the old dying and rising gods, but with an emphasis on missing water. The king’s infirmity or death caused his land to be sterile and waste, despite the power of the Grail itself. The distress of the land was a result of the death of the king, or the injury or aging of the king. The king is the water God—John the Baptist, the Water Carrier, and the Fish God, Capricornus, the stormy sun of the winter rains in the ancient near east. But in Chrestien’s account, the disaster only develops after the failure of Perceval to ask the question on his first visit to the Grail castle and in the Perlesvaus, the wasting is a direct consequence of Perceval’s failure. The point is, no one realizes they are worshipping the wrong God, and neglecting the correct one! So, they cannot ask the proper question, and the situation must continue to deteriorate.

Finally, the themes of vengeance and healing, the wasting of the land, and the question fade away and what remains is a spiritual quest. As in Perlesvaus, the story is dominated by moralising and Christian allegory. The hero is now Galahad, son of Lancelot. In The Quest of the Holy Grail, two wounded kings are at the Grail castle, and the title of Fisher King is variously applied to both of them. The virgin Galahad, who was born at the Grail castle, has never failed and achieves the quest in fulfilment of his destiny.

The framework is ever the same. The castle is found by chance. The hero sees marvels he does not understand. He fails a test. He only realises his failing when the opportunity has gone. But after a long trial he does get another chance. The story of the Grail is a quest, but the essence is that the chance is lost when it appears. In every instance, the first visit fails. The quest is needed to make good the error. It is the entire purpose of Galahad, for he does not have to come to the castle by chance, but is brought up there. He presides at the solemn and symbolic feast, but has left the castle before the Quest begins. Like his predecessors, Gawain and Perceval, he goes forth from the castle to return.

Jessie Weston identified the following points of contact between the Adonis ritual and the Gawain form of the story of the Grail castle: the waste land, the slain king (or knight), the mourning, with special insistence on the part played by women, and the restoration of fertility. Another point is worth noting—the dove was sacred to Adonis and doves were sacrificed during his rites. It was a symbol of love before it came to stand for peace, and temples of fertility divinities were full of tame doves.

The Quest for the Holy Grail

The Quest for the Holy Grail is the middle book of the Lancelot cycle attributed internally to Walter Map. In the book, three knights seeking the Grail eventually get to Sarras, the heavenly city, but only Galahad is worthy. He sees the Grail and dies. The others remain alive. Galahad is, like Christ, born to his destiny. It utterly defeats the object of the quest, if it is, as conjectured here, an allegory of the Cathar quest for mystical union with God. Cathars are human and all too imperfect in their own vision. Their point is that perfection can be achieved, indeed must be achieved for any soul to unite with God, even though the criterion is a hard one. Perfection has to be struggled for. Certainly, no magical chants and rituals help, the struggle is a personal one. That is how the other knights, the ones who fail, are depicted. Galahad does not need to struggle because he, like Christ, has already achieved perfection from birth, and simply has to avoid temptation, but that is no struggle because the Christ of the Trinity is on his side, together with a host of supernatural helpers.

Before setting off, the knights at the suggestion of king Bagdemagus (or Baudemagus) agree to swear their vows on unidentified “holy relics” brought out for the purpose by Arthur’s court clergy. One would have thought the holy book or a cross or crucifix would have been used. Is this a subtle slight of such Christian symbols, not erased by the Catholic editor to whom it did not stand out as a slight because the Catholics were keen on holy relics? Bagdemagus is itself a strange name meaning “God of Magus”, “Bag” being the same word for God as the “Bog” in the word “Bogomile”, or “Friend of God”. Magus, being a Persian priest, also has implications of duality of belief.

Ladies have a prominent role in the quests, especially maidens, and are, in practice, mainly a force for good, helping the knights in their quests in various ways. Under the influence of the Catholic overwriters, however, the narrative increasingly tells against women, promoting the Catholic Christian view of women as sources of sin, and witting or unwitting allies of “The Enemy”. Arthurian literature celebrates the cult of the lady propagated by the troubadours. In courtly love, marriage had no important part. It was a necessity only for a lord to have an heir who was not a bastard, and so a nod was made to it. The lady was the power and inspiration of the chivalrous lover, and those qualities gave him the courage and virtue to practise knightly skills to the good. Love of a lady was accepted as part of life. It was normal and even noble. Women at this time had a lot of subtle power, as Eleanor of Aquitaine and her daughter, Marie de Champagne show.

Chastity was the central virtue of the Quest. Lancelot was condemned to penance for lack of it, yet Galahad was his bastard son brought up by nuns, a suggestion that the primitive Church knew that Jesus was illegitimate, and was handed over to the Essenes for safekeeping, as many were. Essene nuns seem to have been called Mary, a title not a name, meaning “Lady”! An essential teaching of the gospel Jesus is that the first would be last and the last first, a warning that any form of arrogance or smug assumption of perfection or selection would debar anyone from the kingdom of God. Modern Christians, Protestant and Catholic, seem to have forgotten this totally, and live their smug lives thinking they have already been saved. The Cathars did not assume it. They knew it was hard work, and the Catholic overwriter has spoiled the lesson by making the one to succeed in the Quest into a demi God. The first is indeed first! Jesus taught that the poor inherited the earth, and doubtless that was the point of having the callow swineherd, Perceval, as the hero of the non-bowdlerized versions. Catholicism makes the hero a chosen prince of the House of David, something Christ himself denied, and the Grail Keepers, and thereby condemns itself.

The Cathar aim in the stories of propagating the realization that pure living is what is necessary for union with God, is overwritten by the persistence of sin in the Catholic view, and the main sin is that of sex. Virginity is demanded by Cathars and Catholics alike, but, for the Cathar, an important step in the attainment of union with God is the realization that sexuality has to be eschewed. To have had sex is not an absolute bar, far from it. Nascien the wisest of hermits tells the hero knights at the outset of the Quest they must not take their ladies with them lest they bring themselves thereby to mortal sin.

No man may enter so high a service until he is cleansed of grievous sin and purged of every wickedness. For this is no search for earthly things…

The Quest for the Holy Grail, Pauline M Matarasso (Tr)

No, indeed, it was the union of the lost soul with God, and the purity needed for it meant that sex, a physical and no spiritual need, had to be abandoned. It would have been absurd for the knights to have taken their ladies with them on a spiritual quest. Even a millennium after the Essenes, the notion of having to eschew sex to become an angel was alive. But the imposed Catholic view is that any previous sexual relationship debarred the heroes from the goal, and the only one who achieves it is the ever virginal Galahad who serves as a parallel with Christ himself in being utterly good. Why then were any of the knights who had, in the Catholic view, lived in sin, even allowed to start the Quest? Counsellors with supernatural knowledge and disembodied voices advise them throughout, and Nascien could just as easily have told them not to bother wasting their time unless they were utterly pure from birth. It shows the original tale was not Catholic and has been increasingly overwritten with a Catholic theology. It has been Catholicized.

The Quest becomes almost a reversal of what it was before the Catholic editors got to work. Only the supernaturally perfect knight succeeded, so any such experience was not for the ordinary person, whereas the whole point of it for the Cathar was to suggest what was needed for anyone to become perfect. Only the perfect could unite with God, but the Cathars believed that all of us would become perfect. This Catholic Quest ends up with the message that Chivalry is wicked, and perfection is a gift of God which mainly comes through supernatural adherence to the Catholic sacraments. The ubiquity of the Catholic lifestyle is accepted in the stories—doubtless it had to be. Society is Catholic, so the mass and Catholic ritual are taken as given. But, if sacramental magic really did anything useful, then the Quest would have been unnecessary. They are depicted as obligtory habits.

The point about the Quest is that it was personal. Even as it stands The Quest for the Holy Grail repeatedly emphasises the personal responsibility of the individual for salvation. That is not Catholic. It is Cathar. In the story, king Bagdemagus was sorely wounded for an impudent deed, and a monk remarks:

We must not be too sorry for him, for we told him plainly that if he carried the shield away he would come to harm. Yet he persisted despite our enjoinders and must blame himself for his folly.

Quite contrary to the Catholic notion of magical salvation through the “holy sacraments” and “faith”, this monk teaches quite clearly that people are responsible for their own acts and decisions, and therefore for their own route to salvation. That was the Cathar belief. The two contending moralities in The Quest for the Holy Grail, that of personal responsibility, and that of responsibility subsumed in Church ritual and sacraments, suggest overwriting. So, who could have made the changes? For a great Catholic of the time, S Bernard of Clairvaux, salvation was also a personal matter, albeit within the power of the sacraments, and so he differed from the heretics merely in accepting that the sacraments had some power at all. Cathars dispensed with the sacraments altogether, except insofar as they were obliged by the Catholic state to accept them.

The Cistercian monks had a notion of salvation that seemed to be closer to that of the Cathars than the later Catholic Church, and they ended up writing the Vulgate Cycle. S Bernard had a doctrine of a mystical union with God. So too did the Cathars. Modern Catholicism was instituted largely in response to the Cathar challenge. The Cistercian order was born in 1098, as part of a sweeping movement to monasticism and reform, in eleventh century France. The objective of the Cistercians was the restoration of a stricter rule. Some Benedictine monks decided that the aims of S Benedict had been forgotten and they left the Benedictines to start a new order in which Benedict’s original rule would be restored. The abbey was built at Clairvaux (Cistercium) about twenty miles from Lake Geneva to which many heretics fled a hundred or so years later. The Cistercians were immensely successful for their first hundred years because the people of the twelfth century had much respect for their hard work and saintliness, no doubt seeming to them much like the Cathar Parfaits and quite different from the ordinary person’s experience of the Catholic clergy. By then, as an order, they were wealthy, although the monks remained remarkably devoted to their strict rules. They were associated, through S Bernard, with the Knights Templar, the real “Soldiers of Christ”.

S Bernard, whose powers of persuasion are indicted by the thirty members of his own family he took with him, was one of the first noblemen to join the new order. He was to become the genius of the twelfth century Church. Still in the Dark Ages brought on by Christianity, intellectualism still had little to stimulate it, for the Arabs had still not yet passed the writings of Aristotle they had preserved, unlike the bishops, to the west, so Plato and Ausgustine were still the intellectual basis, such as it existed, of the Church. Intellectualism was locked up by the hypocritical slogan “To know is to love”, which meant no one needed to know anything much, especially as love in the Church was thin on the ground.

The Church wanted people simply to believe in the practical value of the sacraments as the way to salvation. Any mystical union was a denial of the need for the sacraments, even if it was not a denial of them. The Cathars utterly denied the value of the sacraments, but plainly the Cistercians accepted they had some general function, akin to wearing thermal vests in the cold weather while waiting for the summer to come. The Catholic eucharist symbolized God’s freely given grace, but Bernard did not think that all those who partook of it received the same portion. He thought each soul only had the measure of God’s grace that it deserved, and so the sacrament was not a cure for aberrancy. Only those who were pure in heart and dedicated to the good could receive the salvific measure which allowed the ecstatic union with God.

As an allegorical Christ, Galahad already is perfect, so the story becomes a different statement of the gospel story. The Catholic writer who revised the story had to discard the knights who in other tales attempted and sometimes achieved the Quest, and they are introduced to show their sinful inadequacy compared with Galahad. Originally, the tales were the self revelation of the inadequacy of their lives for them to achieve the Quest, and they had to give up the sins they had become habituated to, the necessary condition for the Consolamentum and spiritual union with God. Without that realization and an appropriate response, the knights could not succeed, but with it they could. That was the original point. So, the earlier heroes in the quest had to be discarded by the Catholic overwriter’s new purpose. That is why Galahad was introduced as a latter day Jesus Christ.

The others had been drawn as human types who could aspire to achieving the Grail Quest. Percival had been a naïve, uncouth, rustic fellow with a simplicity that often overcame the guile of more worldly knights. He could abandon himself with a childish enthusiasm to any task, including the Quest, seeking God, but he is equally easily distracted and discouraged, and was often foolishly imprudent. He turns out, like all of the questing knights, to be not self critical enough, Galahad above all, because he had no need to be. Bors is much more thoughtful. He aimed to achieve success by careful work, and progresses steadily but without inspiration to reach his goal. He is cautious and prudent, and makes reasoned choices, but comes over therefore as a plodder. Launcelot does not even get to Sarras, condemned by his concupiscence—dallying with Arthur’s wife, Guinevere. He is made a penitent for his confession of his sins, but through it only glimpses the Grail. Perceval and Bors, shrove their former sins and got close to their goal, reaching Sarras. Gawain, the early hero of the tales, and himself an idealized knight, is depicted as half hearted, not willing to be bothered to take difficult advice, and makes no progress. His previous virtues are shown as obstacles making him indifferent to the task, despite a professed enthusiasm for it. Only Galahad is good enough, and allusions to him are allusions to the gospels, Acts and Paul’s writings. He is “in semblence” a second Christ, and so an impossible model for anyone.

Monks in abbeys, hermits in hermitages and anchoresses in anchorages are the real heroes in The Quest for the Holy Grail, providing hospitality, healing and shelter to the knights errant, just as the Essenes had done a thousand years earlier when Christianity was born. They were the ones who always offered advice and explained to the naïve knights what was going on. Curiously the hermits often turned out to be priests, surely a Catholicization, the hermits really being Cathar Perfects, and, as if to prove it, they are several times explicitly called “Good Men”. But always they had a handy chapel to offer the mass, and give the knights “their saviour”, thereby, one would have imagined, ending the quest instantly. One hermit is caught by two wicked knights who try to kill him with their weapons but miraculously they are blunted in hitting him as if they were hitting an anvil. So they prepare a fire to burn him. The hermit says:

Do you imagine the fire will kill me?

Assured that they indeed did, he tells them:

In truth, Sirs, if it pleases Our Lord that I should die, it pleases me as well. But, if I die, it will rather be by the will of God than by the fire…

The knights then burn the hermit to death, but his flesh is unharmed, perfect and intact. What is this but a metaphor of the burning of heretics, whose soul, destined to unite with God, they believed, would be untouched by the flames though their mortal lives ended?

Galahad came to a tomb of a “recreant Christian” where the Devil had lodged himself. The knight was fearless when an unearthly voice screeched at him, normally sufficient to take away anyone’s wits, and instead he drove “The Enemy” out. The wicked Christian’s body was then removed from the hallowed ground. A venerable man explained that the heavy tombstone Galahad had had to remove was the obduracy of the world. The dead Christian was mankind dead and blind beneath the weight of their sins. The Devil had wormed his way into mankind’s hearts and was forever whispering in their ears. thus he had made them offer Christ’s “body up to death” when God had sent him into the world. Having explained this in these general terms, the author then specifically blamed the Jews, adding that Vespasian was sent to punish them. It looks as if the general Cathar explanation has had the specific Catholic one added. The Cathars seemed not to be anti Semitic.

Where there seem to be allusions to the scriptures, they are often inexact. It is another parallel with Essene exegesis which was curiously imprecise. Indeed, some allusions seem almost contrived, if they are not simply coincidental use of words in context. The Essenes were keen to see cross references by any means, it seemed, including punning, which they were fond of. The same tradition certainly continued into early Christianity as the gospels and Acts themselves confirm, but perhaps it remained a habit of the primitive Church that remained beneath the official one. Especially in the parts concerning Perceval, the gospel allusions, such as they are, seem most often to be to John’s gospel, allegedly the one favoured by the Cathars. Strange biblical allusions that do not exist are also made in this work. Who’s bible is being used? One such is:

He who is not aflame cannot burn.

If this were a sentiment found in the Cathar gospel, it might have provided an awfully cynical Catholic rationale for burning them alive. Or is it simply a subtle and just as cynical joke of the Catholic overwriter at Cathar expense?

Perceval, abandoned mysteriously on an island, meets a beautiful woman who advises him:

There is nothing worse than people who refuse to help themselves.

It the typical self help doctrine of the original author, but this woman turns out to be a temptress who exploits Perceval’s readiness to help the oppressed. It looks as if a lesson to do with the primitive Christian tradition of helping the poor has been deliberately negated by the Catholic author.

The Devil was sent down from heaven “to the abode of darkness we call hell”. Modern Christians imagine hell to be a place full of searing heat and flames, and so hardly a dark place, but the Cathar view of it was that the world was hell, darkened by the evil presence of its Lord, Satan. Dante makes it a frozen waste land.

Lancelot is verbally flayed by a holy hermit for his former sins with Guinevere, but is told that:

If Our Lord sees you are wholehearted in asking his forgiveness, he will send you grace unstinted, and you shall be his temple and his lodging and he will take up his abode in you.

This is what the Cathars believed. They actually worshipped the Parfaits for the Christ they had within them. Everyone would attain perfection eventually, would take the Consolamentum and become perfect. Then when they died they would unite again with God. That was what the Quest was about.

A wise hermit tells Lancelot that a father bears his load of mortal sin and a son his and each is paid according to his deserts. The son does not suffer the sins of the fathers, in other words, but has the entire responsibility for his own sins. So, everyone should place their hope in God alone who would help and succour the genuine penitent. It is a plain denial of original sin, and the value of the sacraments as magical cures for error.

Another metaphor of the contrast between Cathar and Catholic with Catholic overwriting was when Lancelot came across a tournament of white liveried knights against black liveried knights. Seeing the black knights losing, Lancelot took up their side, but even he could not stop the white knights from winning, and he was driven off. A wise anchoress told him that the knights were those of earth and heaven about to join the Quest for the Grail, but all were “mortal knights”. The white liveried ones were heavenly, being righteous, and the black ones were earthly, being sinners. The sinners naturally were losing but Lancelot had entered the lists on their side out of his concern for the underdog, and so had fought on the wrong side. The Catholic message is that the underdog (the heretics) ought not to be pitied or defended, but the original message was the plain one that purity in the form of whiteness (the heretics) is supreme over wickedness in the form of blackness (the Catholics). A similar feeble overwriting is the depiction of the pure white swan as hypocritical because it was “black within”, whereas the Church was a raven, “black but beautiful”.

Nascien, the wisest of hermits, told Gawain and Hector they were “arrant sinners polluted with every filth”. Christ appeared to them as a hand grasping a candle, but Nascien saw them as so weak in faith, erring in belief and lacking in charity, abstinence and truth ever to reach the Grail. Since they had diligently taken the sacraments on every available occasion, it proves they are worthless in effecting salvation, or even goodness. The knights had to choose to be perfect to succeed. Gawain and Hector complained of their lack of adventures, a word which denotes providential happenings of any kind. Nascien explained it was because the Quest was spiritual, not just the slaying of men, and spiritual adventures were not for sinners or men sunk in guilt. Nascien told the pair that their task was useless. Why then did he not tell them that at the outset?

Bors said the Quest for the Holy grail “holds in store for him who shall see it through such honour as passes man’s imagining”. The aged monk riding on an ass whom he addressed agreed, adding that “it is no marvel for he shall be a true and more faithful servant than any of his fellows… not vile and sullied at his setting out, like the shameless sinners who have embarked on the Quest without first setting their lives to rights… None can come to his maker save by the gateway of cleanness”, which is by confession and repentance, patience and humility. While the Catholic Church would be happy to accept that the confession meant was the Catholic confession, it is plainly much more than that. It is the Cathar confession, or Consolamentum, by which they became Parfait. Without it, the Quest could not be achieved. The Catholic overwriter dramatized the mystery of the host just to make sure the reader knew what was meant, but, as noted, it is illogical, because innumerable masses do not lead these knights to their goal.

The Waste Land enters, supposedly Britain, but really standing for the material world. As the Waste Land was originally winter, when the vegetation died, the Waste Land is death contrasted with the life of heaven. The world is dead! Whose theology represented the material world as death in contrast to the spiritual life of heaven?—the Cathars for whom the world was the domain of the Devil and was therefore Hades.

The Catholic God was vicious, gratuitously wounding people like Nascien, the wise hermit, for not being worthy of him, and issuing the warning:

Take greater care not to offend thy maker!

The Cathars thought the Catholics had been fooled by the Devil, the Demiurgos, the God of the Hebrews in the Jewish scriptures, into worshipping the wrong God. King Parlan, the maimed king, was similarly wounded but by a supernatural spear striking him in his “thigh”, meaning that he had been emasculated. It turns out that Joseph of Arimathea had also been emasculated, but by a broken sword. Could a good god do all this? Nothing is made of all of this imagery.

The whole tale gets increasingly unsatisfactory as it approaches the end, getting hasty and incoherent. There is what seems to be a long digression about Adam and Eve which serves only to explain why a bed was made by Solomon’s sinning wife. The bed serves no particular purpose except to let Galahad sleep while his ship sails in a sentence all the way to Sarras. Undoubtedly something of significance has been cut out leaving this chapter virtually pointless except as a denigration of women. Sleep is the biblical metaphor for death, and so the occasion when Galahad slept is when he died and was transferred by the heavenly ship to Sarras the heavenly city.

What is significant in the preparation of the bed by Solomon’s wife is that it is spanned by a pi cross, two uprights and a cross piece, and this is allegedly a symbol of the Cathars. In the Tarot card deck, the hanged man is suspended from a pi cross. It symbolises a door or gateway, and in this story is made of wood from the Tree of Life. It has to symbolize the crossing from the material world to the spiritual, but the Catholic overwriter has emasculated the plot at this point.

Perceval’s maiden sister dies giving her life blood to a leprous woman—a precurser of the vampire tales—but promises to be at Sarras before them when they could bury her and lie with her! The tale is messed up to detract from the original allegory. Sarras undoubtedly stands for heaven, though the Catholic overwriter has it somewhere by Egypt in the Holy Land, and people are not buried in heaven. The pure virgin is to get to Sarras before them, meaning she achieves the Quest and unites with God. The three knights then will, but only Galahad does and dies in heaven(!), wile the other two, Bors and Perceval return from Sarras, Bors to Camelot, Perceval dying on the way.

The hero, at the end, sees the Grail and dies, but others had seen it in various ways and lived, and indeed the Quest began by everyone getting dinner served by it, and whatever the vision that Galahad had when he saw it is not revealed. The Catholic writer seems to want it to symbolise the Catholic mass, or what it would mean if the Catholic were truly pious. Pauline Matarasso, accepting that the whole tale was a Catholic allegory, conjectures that it is the Holy Trinity! But the real purpose of the story as a Pilgrim's Progress for Cathars is lost, and the story peters out an anti climax.

Interestingly, Jesus Christ is plainly identified with the sun:

For when the sun, for which we must read Jesus Christ, the one true light…

A Mysterious Book

A small quarto volume, in the British Museum, contains the four Middle English poems known as Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain and the Grene Knight. It has neither titles nor rubrics, but seems to date from the orthography to about 1400. No single line of these poems has been discovered in any other manuscript.

Pearl tells of a father’s grief for a lost child, an infant daughter who had lived not two years on earth. In a vision he beholds his Pearl, no longer a little child, as a queen of heaven. From the other bank of a stream which divides them she instructs him, teaches him the lessons of faith and resignation and leads him to a glimpse of the new Jerusalem. He sees his “little queen” in the long procession of maidens. Plunging into the stream to reach her he awakes, to find himself stretched on the child’s grave. The student of medieval theology may find much of interest in Pearl—many a theological problem, notably the interpretation of the parable of the vineyard, is expounded—but to read the poem as theological ignores it as a poet’s lament. The personal side of the poem is marked, though the author nowhere directly refers to his fatherhood, suggesting it as allegory. The main part of the poem is a paraphrase of the closing chapters of the Apocalypse and the parable of the vineyard. Pearl is Reason personified. The basis of Pearl is to be found in the parable of the kingdom in Matthew (Mt 13:45-46) that tells of the man “that sought the precious margarites, and, when he had found one to his liking, he sold all his goods to buy that jewel”. Here is a despair that the kingdom died in infancy, and was realised only as a dream.

The diction of the poem has been considered faulty by reason of its copiousness, but the criticism does not appear to be just. The author has drawn alike from the English, Scandinavian, and Romance elements of English speech. Scholars have noted Boccaccio’s Latin eclogue Olympia, in which his young daughter, Violante, appears transfigured, much in the same way as Pearl in the English poem. There is no evidence of direct indebtedness, but both writers have drawn from the same sources. The eclogue was written soon after the year 1358.

Cleanness relates three great subjects from scriptural history, so chosen as to enforce the lesson of purity. After a prologue, treating of the parable of the “Marriage Feast,” the author deals in characteristic manner with the Flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the fall of Belshazzar. The link that binds Cleanness to Pearl is unmistakable. The pearl is there again taken as the type of purity. The subject of the third poem is Patience. It is a masterly paraphrase of scripture, bringing the story clearly and forcibly home to English folk of the fourteenth century. Cleanness and Patience place their author among the older English epic poets. They show us more clearly than Pearl that the poet is a “backward link” to the distant days of Cynewulf.

Sir Gawain and the Grene Knight deals with a weird adventure that befell Sir Gawain, son of Loth, and nephew of king Arthur, the favourite hero of medieval romance, more especially in the literature of the west and northern parts of England. Gaston Paris, in 1888, surveyed the whole field of medieval literature relating to Gawain and considers this the jewel of English medieval literature. The story tells how on a New Year’s Day, when Arthur and his knights are feasting at Camelot, a great knight clad in green, mounted on a green horse, and carrying a Danish axe, enters the hall, and challenges one of Arthur’s knights, the conditions being that the knight must take oath that, after striking the first blow, he will seek the Green Knight twelve months hence and receive a blow in return. Gawain is allowed to accept the challenge, takes the axe and smites the Green Knight so that the head rolls from the body. The trunk takes up the head, which the hand holds out while it repeats the challenge to Gawain to meet him at the Green Chapel next New Year’s morning, submit his neck to the return stroke, and then departs.

Gawain, in due course, journeys north, and wanders through wild districts, unable to find the Green Chapel. Sir Gawain is not sent wandering in the conventional romantic scenery, but in the Wirral in winter, with its three hunting scenes—of the hart, the boar, and the fox—in contrast with the Christmas revels in the castle. On Christmas Eve, Gawain sees through the trees a fair castle which “shimmered and shone”. It represents the sun shining through the woods. He reaches it, and asks to be allowed to stay there for the night. The lord of the castle welcomed him, and tells him that the Green Chapel is near, inviting him to remain for the Christmas feast. The lord, on each of the last three days of the year, goes hunting. Gawain is to stay behind with the lady of the castle. The lord proposes a game or bargain that, on his return from hunting, each shall exchange what has been won during the day. The lady puts Gawain’s honour to a severe test during the lord’s absence—she kisses him, and in accordance with the compact, he kisses the husband on his return. There is a similar episode on the next day when two kisses are received and given by Gawain. On the third day, in addition to three kisses, Gawain receives a green girdle from the lady, which has the virtue of saving the wearer from harm. Mindful of his next day’s encounter with the Green Knight, Gawain gives the three kisses to his host, but makes no mention of the girdle.

Next morning, he rides forth and comes to the Green Chapel, a cave in a wild district. The Green Knight appears with his axe. Gawain kneels. As the axe descends, Gawain flinches, and the knight twits (reproaches, taunts) Gawain. The second time Gawain stands as still as a stone, and the Green Knight raises the axe, but pauses. The third time the knight strikes him, but, though the axe falls on Gawain’s neck, his wound is only slight. Gawain now declares that he has stood one stroke for another, and that the compact is settled between them. Then the Green Knight reveals himself to Gawain as his host at the castle. He knows all that has taken place.

That woven girdle which thou wearest mine own wife wove it. I know it well. I know too thy kisses, and thy trials, and the wooing of my wife. I wrought it myself. I sent her to tempt thee, and methinks thou art the most faultless hero that ever walked the earth. As pearls are of more price than white peas, so is Gawain of more price than other gay knights.

But for his concealing the magic girdle he would have escaped unscathed. In some versions of the story the item given is not described as a girdle, but merely as lace, as if its real nature is being hidden. The name of the Grene Knight is given as Bernlak de Hautdesert, the contriver of the test is Morgan la Fay, Arthur’s half sister, who wished to try the knights and frighten Guinevere. Gawain returns to court and tells the story, and the lords and ladies of the Round Table lovingly agree to wear a bright green girdle, in token of this adventure, and in honour of Gawain, who disparages himself as cowardly and covetous. And ever more the badge was deemed the glory of the Round Table, and he that had it was held in honour.

The action takes place on new year’s day. The Grene Knight is the god of the year, who loses his head at the year end to the new year, but makes an appointment for the deed to be repeated in one year’s time! The beautiful wife of the Grene Knight is the earth goddess seducing the new year, Gawain, but he had an old crone of a wife too, the ravaged winter landscape, identified as Morgan la Fay, who is actually called the goddess in some versions. The chivalrous point is that the knight refuses the lady’s advances, accepting only her girdle, for which mistake he is pinked with a slight cut to the neck instead of losing his head.

In some stories, the young knight rejects the blighted winter landscape in the form of an old crone, and is turned into a wizened worm. The image is a correct one—of an impotent phallus. In a frog prince type of story, the pretty spring earth maiden takes the ugly, wizened thing into her hand to carress and kiss, returning the prince to his youthful vigour as the spring sun. This is the lay told in The Ballad of Alison Gross. The crone earth of winter is often the wicked stepmother, as the feeble winter sun is often the cruel uncle. Yet the youthful hero and heroine are merely the same in their fruitful aspects. The solar myth thus expanded through the lays of the minstrels to ballads and eventually to modern fairy stories for children, where they express Freudian fears and fancies.

The author here states that the story had long been “locked in lettered lore”. The oldest form of the challenge and the beheading is an Old Irish heroic legend, Fled Bricrend (The Feast of Bricriu) of the end of the eleventh or the beginning of the twelfth century, where the story is told by Cuchulain, the giant being Uath Mac Denomain, who dwelt near the lake. The Cuchulain episode had become incorporated in Arthurian literature. The French version nearest to the Gawain story is in the first continuation by Gautier de Doulens of Chrestien’s Conte del Graal, where the story differs in many important respects from the English version. Jesse Weston thinks it the latest of the versions. Gawain is called “the falcon of the month of May”. He was the summer sun rising to its full power after the spring equinox. The whole poem may be connected with the foundation of the order of the Garter, about the year 1349. At the end of the MS, in a later hand, is the famous motto of the order: honi soit qui mal penc. A later poet has used the same story to account for the origin of the order of the Bath. The romance may be taken not to have been written before the year 1349. Gawain, the knight of chastity, is another study by the author of Cleanness. A striking passage has been noted linking the poem to Pearl, namely, the comparison of Gawain to the pearl.

On the evidence of dialect, the poet was born, somewhere in Lancashire, or a little more to the north, but not beyond the Tweed—about 1330. The descriptions of natural scenery, in Gawain, Cleanness and Patience, indicate the wild solitudes of the Cumbrian coast, near his native home. He had read The Romaunt of the Rose, the chief products of early French literature, Vergil and other Latin writers. To “Clopyngel’s clean rose” he makes direct reference. He wrote in an intensely religious spirit, and with a good knowledge of the scriptures, suggesting he was a church man. Gawain, possibly the earliest of the four, is remarkable for the writer’s minute knowledge of the higher social life of his time. He seemed to write from personal experience of the pleasures of the chase, and was accustomed to the courtly life described by him. In Patience the poet is preaching the lesson of fortitude and hope, amid misery, pain and poverty. Even the means of subsistence seem to have been denied him. An authority wrote, in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature:

Full of intense hatred towards all forms of vice, especially immorality, he would have spoken out boldly against ignoble priests and friars, and all such servants of the church who, preaching righteousness, lived unrighteously.

He seems to have broken away from minor traditional patristic views, but still seems to owe allegiance to the authority of the church, to papal supremacy and to the doctrine of Rome, though his general religious attitude was evangelical rather than ecclesiastical. It is suggested that the author was Ralph Strode of Merton College Oxford, a man who corresponded with Wycliffe and was a contemporary of him at Oxford. He was considered a leader of the Lollards, a type of heretic.

In conclusion, A E Waite, an occultist Rosicrucian around 1900, wrote in The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal:

Look assuredly to the East, in the direction of that pure catholic gnosticism which lies like a pearl of great price within the… shell of external Christianity, which is not of Marcion or Valentinus, of Cerinthus and all their cohorts…

Further Reading

• More on heretical beliefs
• More on chivalry, and sun gods as atoning saviours
• More on Mithras, and something about Zoroastrianism

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