In itself such wordplay might be provocative but hardly conclusive. Taken in conjunction with the emphasis on genealogy and lineage, however, there is not much room for doubt. And for that matter, the traditional associations—the cup that caught Jesus’ blood, for instance—would seem to reinforce this supposition. Quite clearly, the Grail would appear to pertain in some way to blood and a bloodline.
This raises, of course, certain obvious questions. Whose blood? And whose bloodline?
THE LOST KINGS AND THE GRAIL
The Grail romances were not the only poems of their kind to find a receptive audience in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. There were many others—Tristan and Isolde, for instance, and Eric and Enide—composed in some cases by Chrétien himself, in some cases by contemporaries and countrymen of Wolfram, such as Hartmann von Aue and Gottfried von Strassburg. These romances make no mention whatever of the Grail. But they are clearly set in the same mythico-historical period as the Grail romances, because they depend more or less heavily on Arthur. As far as he can be dated, Arthur seems to have lived in the late fifth and/or early sixth centuries. In other words, Arthur lived at the peak of Merovingian ascendancy in Gaul and was, in fact, closely contemporary with Clovis. If the term Ursus—"bear"—was applied to the Merovingian royal line, the name "Arthur," which also means "bear," may have been an attempt to confer a comparable dignity on a British chieftain.
For the writers at the time of the Crusades, the Merovingian era seems to have been of some crucial importance—so much so, in fact, that it provided the backdrop for romances that had nothing to do with either Arthur or the Grail. One such is the national epic of Germany, the Nibelungenlied or Song of the Nibelungen, on which, in the nineteenth century, Wagner drew so heavily for his monumental operatic sequence, The Ring. This musical opus, and the poem from which it derives, are generally dismissed as pure fantasy—as divorced from any historical basis as, say, the works of Tolkien. In fact, the Nibelungen were a real people, a tribe who lived in Merovingian times. Moreover, many of the names in the Nibelungenlied —Siegmund, for instance, Siegfrried, Sieglinde, Brünhilde and Kriemhild—are patently Merovingian names. Many episodes in the poem closely parallel, and may even refer to, specific events of Merovingian times.
Although it has nothing to do with either Arthur or the Grail, the Nibelungenlied is further evidence that the Merovingian epoch exercised a powerful hold on the imaginations of twelfth- and thirteenth-century poets—as if they knew something crucial about that epoch that later writers and historians did not. In any case, modern scholars concur that the Grail romances, like the Nibelungenlied, refer to the Merovingian age. In part, of course, this conclusion would appear self-evident, given the prominence of Arthur. But it also rests on specific indications provided by the Grail romances themselves. The Queste del Saint Graal, for example, composed between 1215 and 1230, declares explicitly that the events of the Grail story occurred precisely 454 years after the resurrection of Jesus.32 Assuming Jesus died in A.D. 33, the Grail saga would thus have enacted itself in A.D. 487—during the first flush of Merovingian power and a mere nine years before the baptism of Clovis.
There was nothing revolutionary or controversial, therefore, in connecting the Grail romances with the Merovingian age. Nonetheless we felt that something had been overlooked. Essentially it was a question of emphasis—which because of Arthur, has been placed primarily on Britain. As a result of this distinctly British emphasis, we had not automatically associated the Grail with the Merovingian dynasty. And yet Wolfram insists that Arthur’s court is at Nantes and that his poem is set in France. The same assertion is made by other Grail romances—the Queste del Saint Graal, for instance. And there are medieval traditions that maintain the Grail was not brought to Britain by Joseph of Arimathea, but to France by the Magdalen.
We now began to wonder whether the preeminence assigned to Britain by commentators on the Grail romances had not perhaps been misplaced and whether the romances in fact referred primarily to events on the continent 33—more particularly to events in France. And we began to suspect that the Grail itself, the "blood royal," actually referred to the blood royal of the Merovingian dynasty—a blood that was deemed to be sacred and invested with magical or miraculous properties.
Perhaps the Grail romances constituted, at least in part, a symbolic or allegorical account of certain events of the Merovingian epoch. And perhaps we had already encountered some of those events in the course of our investigation: a marriage with some special family, for example, which, shrouded by time, engendered the legends attending the dual paternity of Merovée; or perhaps, in the Grail family, a representation of the clandestine perpetuation of the Merovingian bloodline—les rois perdus, or "lost kings"—in the mountains and caves of the Razes; or perhaps that bloodline’s exile in England during the late ninth and early tenth centuries; and the secret but august dynastic alliances whereby the Merovingian vine, like that of the Grail family, eventually bore fruit in Godfroi de Bouillon and the house of Lorraine. Perhaps Arthur himself—the "bear"—was only incidentally related to the Celtic or Gallo-Roman chieftain. Perhaps the Arthur in the Grail romances was really "Ursus"—another name for "bear." Perhaps the legendary Arthur in the chronicles of Geoffrey of Monmouth had been appropriated by writers on the Grail and deliberately transformed into the vehicle for a quite different, and secret, tradition. If so, this would explain why the Templars—established by the Prieuré de Sion as guardians of the Merovingian bloodline—were declared to be guardians of the Grail and the Grail family. If the Grail family and the Merovingian bloodline were one and the same, the Templars would indeed have been guardians of the Grail—at the time, more or less, that the Grail romances were composed. Their presence in the Grail romances would not, therefore, have been anachronistic.
The hypothesis was intriguing, but it raised one extremely crucial question. The romances may have been set in Merovingian times, but they linked the Grail quite explicitly to the origins of Christianity— to Jesus, to Joseph of Arimathea, to the Magdalen. Some of them, in 308 fact, go even further. In Robert de Boron’s poem Galahad is said to be Joseph of Arimathea’s son—although the identity of the knight’s mother is unclear. And the Queste del Saint Graal calls Galahad, like Jesus, a scion of the house of David and identifies Galahad with Jesus himself. Indeed, the very name Galahad, according to modern scholars, derives from the name Gilead, which was deemed a mystical designation for Jesus. 34
If the Grail could be identified with the Merovingian bloodline, what was its connection with Jesus? Why should something so intimately associated with Jesus also be associated with the Merovingian epoch? How were we to reconcile the chronological discrepancy—the relation between something so pertinent to Jesus and events that occurred at least four centuries later? How could the Grail refer, on the one hand, to the Merovingian age and, on the other, to something brought by Joseph of Arimathea to England or by the Magdalen to France?
Even on a symbolic level such questions asserted themselves. The Grail, for example, pertained in some way to blood. Even without the breaking of "Sangraal" into "Sang raal," the Grail was said to have been a receptacle for Jesus’ blood. How could this be related to the Merovingians? And why should it be related to them at precisely the time it was—during the Crusades, when Merovingian heads wore the crown of the kingdom of Jerusalem, protected by the Order of the Temple and the Prieuré de Sion?
The Grail romances stress the importance of Jesus’ blood. They also stress a lineage of some kind. And given such factors as the Grail family’s culmination in Godfroi de Bouillon, they would seem to pertain to Merovingian blood.
Could there possibly be some connection between these two apparently discordant elements? Could the blood of Jesus in some way be related to the blood royal of the Merovingians? Could the lineage connected with the Grail, brought into western Europe shortly after the Crucifixion, be intertwined with the lineage of the Merovingians?
THE
NEED TO SYNTHESIZE
At this point we paused to review the evidence at our disposal. It was leading us in a startling yet unmistakable direction. But why, we wondered, had this evidence never been subpoenaed by scholars before? It had certainly been readily available, and for centuries. Why had no one, to our knowledge, ever synthesized it and drawn what would seem to be fairly obvious, if only speculative, conclusions? Granted such conclusions, a few centuries ago, would have been rigorously taboo—and, if published, severely punished. But there had been no such danger for at least the last two hundred years. Why, then, had the fragments of the puzzle not hitherto been assembled into a coherent whole?
The answers to these questions, we realized, lay in our own age and the modes or habits of thought that characterize it. Since the so-called Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, the orientation of Western culture and consciousness has been toward analysis rather than synthesis. As a result our age is one of ever-increasing specialization. In accordance with this tendency modern scholarship lays inordinate emphasis on specialization—which, as the modern university attests, implies and entails the segregation of knowledge into distinct "disciplines." In consequence the diverse spheres covered by our inquiry have traditionally been segmented into quite separate compartments. In each compartment the relevant material has been duly explored and evaluated by specialists, or "experts" in the field. But few, if any, of these experts have endeavored to establish a connection between their particular field and others that may often overlap it. Indeed, such experts tend generally to regard fields other than their own with considerable suspicion—spurious at worst, at best irrelevant. And eclectic or "interdisciplinary" research is often actively discouraged as being, among other things, too speculative.
There have been numerous treatises on the Grail romances, their origins and development, their cultural impact, their literary quality. And there have been numerous studies, valid and otherwise, of the Templars and the Crusades. But few experts on the Grail romances have been historians, while fewer still have displayed much interest in the complex, often sordid and not very romantic history behind the Templars and the Crusades. Similarly historians of the Templars and the Crusades have, like all historians, adhered closely to "factual" records and documents. The Grail romances have been dismissed as mere fiction, as nothing more than a "cultural phenomenon," a species of "by-product" generated by the "imagination of the age." To suggest to such a historian that the Grail romances might contain a kernel of historical truth would be tantamount to heresy, even though Schliemann, more than a century ago, discovered the site of Troy by dint of careful reading of Homer.
True, various occult writers, proceeding primarily on the basis of wishful thinking, have given literal credence to the legends, claiming that in some mystical way the Templars were custodians of the Grail—whatever the Grail might be. But there has been no serious historical study that tries to establish any real connection. The Templars are regarded as fact, the Grail as fiction, and no association between the two is acknowledged possible. And if the Grail romances have thus been neglected by scholars and historians of the period in which they were written, it is hardly surprising that they have been neglected by experts on earlier epochs. Quite simply, it would not occur to a specialist in the Merovingian age to suspect that the Grail romances might, in any way, shed light on the subject of his study, if, indeed, he has any knowledge whatever of the Grail romances. But is it not a serious omission that no Merovingian scholar we have encountered even makes mention of the Arthurian legends—which, chronologically speaking, refer to the very epoch in which he claims expertise?
If historians are unprepared to make such connections, biblical scholars are even less prepared to do so. During the last few decades a welter of books has appeared—according to which Jesus was a pacifist, an Essene, a mystic, a Buddhist, a sorcerer, a revolutionary, a homosexual, even a mushroom. But despite this plethora of material on Jesus and the historical context of the New Testament, not one author, to our knowledge, has touched on the question of the Grail. Why should he? Why should an expert on biblical history have any interest in, or knowledge of, a spate of fantastic romantic poems composed in western Europe more than a thousand years later? It would seem inconceivable that the Grail romances could in any way elucidate the mysteries surrounding the New Testament.
But reality, history, and knowledge cannot be segmented and compartmentalized according to the arbitrary filing system of the human intellect. And while documentary evidence may be hard to come by, it is self-evident that traditions may survive for a thousand years, then surface in a written form that does illuminate previous events. Certain Irish sagas, for instance, can reveal a great deal about the shift from matriarchal to patriarchal society in ancient Ireland. Without Homer’s work, composed long after the fact, no one would even have heard of the siege of Troy. And War and Peace—although written more than a half century later—can tell us more than most history books, more even than most official documents, about Russia during the Napoleonic era.
Any responsible researcher must, like a detective, pursue whatever clues come to hand, however seemingly improbable. One should not dismiss material a priori, out of hand, because it threatens to lead into unlikely or unfamiliar territory. The events of the Watergate scandal, for instance, were reconstructed initially from a multitude of ostensibly disparate fragments, each meaningless in itself and with no apparent connection between them. Indeed, some of the often childish "dirty tricks" must have seemed, to investigators at the time, as divorced from the broader issues as the Grail romances might seem from the New Testament. And the Watergate scandal was confined to a single country and a time span of a few short years. The subject of our investigation encompasses the whole of Western culture and a time span of two millennia.
What is necessary is an interdisciplinary approach to one’s chosen material—a mobile and flexible approach that permits one to move freely between disparate disciplines, across space and time. One must be able to link data and make connections between people, events, and phenomena widely divorced from each other. One must be able to move, as necessity dictates, from the third to the twelfth to the seventh to the eighteenth century, drawing on a varied spectrum of sources—early ecclesiastical texts, the Grail romances, Merovingian records and chronicles, the writings of Freemasonry. In short, one must synthesize—for only by such synthesis can one discern the underlying continuity, the unified and coherent fabric, which lies at the core of any historical problem. Such an approach is neither particularly revolutionary, in principle, nor particularly controversial. It is rather like taking a tenet of contemporary Church dogma—the Immaculate Conception, for instance, or the obligatory celibacy of priests—and using it to illumine early Christianity. In much the same way the Grail romances may be used to shed some significant light on the New Testament—on the career and identity of Jesus.
Finally, it is not sufficient to confine oneself exclusively to facts. One must also discern the repercussions and ramifications of facts, as those repercussions and ramifications radiate through the centuries— often in the form of myth and legend. True, the facts themselves may be distorted in the process, like an echo reverberating among cliffs. But if the voice itself cannot be located, the echo, however distorted, may yet point the way to it. Facts, in short, are like pebbles dropped into the pool of history. They disappear quickly, often without a trace. But they generate ripples that, if one’s perspective is broad enough, enable one to pinpoint where the pebble originally fell. Guided by the ripples, one may then dive or dredge or adopt whatever approach one wishes. The point is that the ripples permit one to locate what might otherwise be irrecoverable.
It was now becoming apparent to us that everything we had studied during our investigation was but a ripple that, monitored correctly, might direct us to a single stone cast into the pool of history two thousand years ago.
THE HYPOTHESIS
The Magdalen had figured prominently t
hroughout our inquiry. According to certain medieval legends the Magdalen brought the Holy Grail—or "Blood Royal"—into France. The Grail is closely associated with Jesus. And the Grail, on one level at least, relates in some way to blood—or, more specifically, to a bloodline and lineage. The Grail romances are for the most part, however, set in Merovingian times. But they were not composed until after Godfroi de Bouillon— fictional scion of the Grail family and actual scion of the Merovingians—was installed, in everything but name, as king of Jerusalem.
If we had been dealing with anyone other than Jesus—if we had been dealing with a personage such as Alexander, for example, or Julius Caesar—these fragmentary shreds of evidence alone would have led, almost ineluctably, to one glaringly self-evident conclusion. We drew that conclusion, however controversial and explosive it might be. We began to test it at least as a tentative hypothesis.
Perhaps the Magdalen—that elusive woman in the Gospels—was in fact Jesus’ wife. Perhaps their union produced offspring. After the Crucifixion perhaps the Magdalen, with at least one child, was smuggled to Gaul—where established Jewish communities already existed and where, in consequence, she might have found a refuge. Perhaps there was, in short, a hereditary bloodline descended directly from Jesus. Perhaps this bloodline, this supreme sang réal, then perpetuated itself, intact and incognito, for some four hundred years—which is not, after all, a very long time for an important lineage. Perhaps there were dynastic intermarriages not only with other Jewish families but with Romans and Visigoths as well. And perhaps in the fifth century Jesus’ lineage became allied with the royal line of the Franks, thereby engendering the Merovingian dynasty.
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