On the Islamic side, there are some Arabic documents, written in Cairo at the time of the later Crusades, which suggest that the Holy Grail was taken to the city of Leon, in Spain, in the 11th century.
PREVIOUS SEARCHES IN FACT AND FICTION
The most famous search for this legendary vessel was the great Grail Quest of the Knights of the Round Table. This is a set of myths and romances written in the 12th and 13th centuries, harkening back to the post-Roman era, in which Arthur’s greatest defining action is his commissioning of the quest for the Grail.
The first story to feature the Grail is Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval: Conte del Graal, or Percival: Story of the Grail, around 1180. Percival, raised by his widowed mother, is desperate to be a knight, and goes to Arthur’s Court, where he variously gets bullied, trained and married, in more or less that order. On his way home, he encounters the lame Fisher King, who invites him back to the castle for a party.
There, he sees the procession of various holy objects between courses, including the Holy Lance, and ‘a grail’ – a rather unspecified serving dish. The next morning he finds himself alone, and returns home to find his mother has died. Back at Camelot, a ‘loathly lady’ reveals that had he asked whom the Grail served and why the Lance bled, the Fisher King would be healed, and the lands around the castle returned to a bountiful state. We also later hear that the Grail contained the single sacramental wafer which could sustain life indefinitely.
The Knights of the Round Table were then tasked with various quests, including to find the Grail, and de Troyes’ story is on the receiving end of what today we would call fanfic continuations, with several writers adding to the hunt for the Holy Grail. The first of these focuses on Sir Gawain, who, annoyed at his sister’s forthcoming marriage, rides off and finds himself in a totally different Grail castle, in which he learns of a broken sword that can only be mended by the sufficiently full of Grace hero who will find the Grail, and heal both the Fisher King and his lands. (Tolkien fans may be more familiar with this one – not only is the broken sword Aragorn’s, but Gawain’s brother takes a trip in a swan-shaped boat too.)
Wolfram von Eschenbach’s 13th century Parzifal and Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th century Le Morte d’Arthur really became the big hits of the Middle Ages, which codified all the previous variants and poems into the story as we know it today.
Oddly, however, the Grail romances were then largely forgotten, partly because the Renaissance encouraged storytellers and their audiences to rediscover the classical tales of Greece and Rome, and to develop their own politically-charged fictions.
The story of the Grail then returned to popularity in the 19th century, thanks to Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Wagner’s operatic adaptation of Parsifal (which saw the ‘z’ in Parzival exchanged for an ‘s’. Parsifal was also the first Grail movie, in 1922.
Parzifal is also responsible for a lot of the real-life searches for the Grail over the past century. Even before the war, Parzifal was German archaeologist Otto Rahn’s favourite Grail story. It has the Grail be a dark stone in a reliquary, and says that whoever owned it or was near it would have eternal life. Rahn was Germany’s leading expert on Arthurian myth, and was sure that Eschenbach’s Parzival tale was true, and that the Grail castle of Munsalvaesche really existed.
Rahn thought that the medieval dualist Cathar sect – who were wiped out at Montségur in France during the Albigensian Crusade in the 13th century – had the Grail, and that they’d smuggled it out and hidden it in caves and tunnels under and around the Montségur area. After all, the troubadours sang about it, the name is similar enough to Munsalvaesche…
He took over the lease of a local hotel and began exploring the caves, which are the largest limestone cave system in Europe. In one cave, called the Bethlehem Cave, he found skeletons he believed were Cathar, and a pentacle-shaped alcove in the wall large enough for a person to stand in. He thought Cathars stood there as a part of an initiation ceremony. He then ran out of money and went back home to write a book about his experience.
Enter Gestapo and SS supremo Heinrich Himmler, who offered Rahn 1,000 marks a month to find the Grail, and to write a book about his search. Himmler was a folklore fan, who wanted to bring back his version of pagan rituals from which to create his own SS religion, and who thought he was a reincarnation of King Heinrich I, or Henry the Fowler (who in fact was one of the nicer guys, as Dark Age kings go). Himmler was trying fantasy world-building for real. Contrary to popular belief and Hollywood movies, Himmler, not Hitler, was the one obsessed with the occult. He was obsessed with Arthurian Grail quests, and named rooms at his castle in Wewelsburg after elements from Arthurian myth.
Himmler’s grand-a-month offer had one condition, which was somewhat awkward, given that Rahn was gay and half-Jewish: he would have to join the SS, and wear the uniform. Rahn did so, being appointed to the Ahnenerbe, as an Unterscharfuhrer (roughly halfway between a corporal and a sergeant). The Ahnenerbe was a unit of academics set up by the Nazis to ‘prove’ Himmler’s theory of Germanic superiority and Aryan history. Said theories, of course, being all total bollocks, they then had to try to find proof of stuff that wasn’t true. Himmler even wanted to prove that Jesus couldn’t have been Jewish, and take Jews out of the Aryan Bible. This was nonsense that would later be used as holocaust justification.
But the money was good, so Rahn kept his trap shut, wrote another book, and continued searching for the Grail around most of Europe’s pagan sites, from the Externsteine in Germany to Iceland. He even didn’t rock the boat when he found that Himmler had inserted anti-Semitic propaganda into the 5,000 leather-bound copies of his book, to be given out to Nazi officers.
After two-and-a-half years of travelling on expeditions, Rahn finally noticed that something was very wrong with the SS; that they were really into brutality, oppression and mass murder, and that they were almost a culture unto themselves. He also therefore noticed that his own days were numbered if he didn’t turn up a Grail soon.
In 1937 Himmler stripped him of his rank and sent him to be a guard at Dachau. Freaked out by what he saw there, he quickly became an alcoholic and repeatedly sought to leave Germany and live in France, but this was denied.
SS members were supposed to prove their Aryan racial purity four generations back – he’d been able to delay it while off grailhunting, but once he was back in Germany the jig was up. In 1939 it came out that he was a gay Jewish SS officer, which was basically suicidal. He had hoped they’d let it slide if he found the Grail, but his searches had been fruitless. On 16 March 1939, on the anniversary of the execution of Montségur’s Cathars, he went to the below-freezing Alps on the Austrian border with a bottle of scotch and some sleeping pills, and froze himself to death.
The Nazis reported this as ‘the tragic death of an outstanding SS officer and scientist’, with a posthumous promotion to Obersturmfuhrer, equivalent to 1st Lieutenant. Despite the death of their expert, the Nazis still kept looking for the Grail, and in 1940 Himmler and Hitler went to Barcelona to try to persuade General Franco – whom they had helped out in the Spanish Civil War a few years earlier – to come into the war on the Axis side. They also, however, wanted to check out a new lead to the Holy Grail.
They went to Montserrat Abbey in the Pyrenees, built on the foundations of a previous castle. SS researchers had found an old Catalonian song about a ‘mystical font of life’ at the castle, and Himmler now thought that Munsalvaesche might be Montserrat rather than Montségur. Himmler found a German-speaking monk at the abbey, Andrew Ripple Nobel, to help him with the quest, but the monk refused to tell him anything.
According to the writings of the American Howard Buchner, that didn’t stop Himmler, and that he now thought the Grail was in the French Pyrenees, near Montségur, and sent Otto Skorzeny to look for it in March 1944. Nobody had been able to figure out how the Cathars could have got stuff out of Montségur, until Skorzeny figured they must have abseiled down the sheer cliff side, taki
ng the least likely route.
On 16 March, locals marked the anniversary with a ceremony, and a German plane made a cross in the sky above them – which Buchner took to mean the Nazis were showing that Skorzeny had found the Grail, or so says the story.
Unfortunately, it’s not true. Skorzeny is known to have been in Yugoslavia in March 1944, and the fact that Buchner has the Grail eventually taken by U-boat to a secret Nazi base on Antarctica takes it well into the realms of fiction.
As the 20th century went on, the Grail became ever more popular in fiction. The Silver Chalice, by Thomas B. Costain, was one of the earliest populist novels on the subject and was filmed in 1954.
Bernard Cornwell, creator of Sharpe, has written a series called The Grail Quest, set during The Hundred Years’ War, while Michael Moorcock’s The War Hound and the World’s Pain has a spiritual Grail quest in the Thirty Years’ War.
Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon uses the Grail as a symbol for the element of water, while Peter David brings the Arthurian Grail quest to modern New York in One Knight Only and Fall of Knight. On a more literary note, the Grail is a major element in Umberto Eco’s Baudolino.
King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table have been the subject of many movies, especially through the 1950s and 1960s, but most simply dealt with the adventure side – the rivalry with Lancelot over Guinevere, and the battle against Mordred – rather than with the quest for the Grail. That had to wait until the French film Lancelot du Lac in 1974, which was closer to the Troyes version of the story.
The first really successful Grail story for movie audiences was a rather different beast: Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in which the surreal comedy troupe took a tour through Dark Age and Arthurian Myth to great effect. Such great effect, in fact, that it was rebooted as the stage musical Spamalot. Both of those are fairly thick with medieval grime. John Boorman provided a definitive Arthurian Grail quest in 1981’s Excalibur. This reintroduced the idea of the Grail as a spiritual concept by which the king and the land are connected.
Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King also revisits this idea, in a surrealist modern context, but, let’s be honest, most of us are going to be thinking of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when we think of movies about searching for the Holy Grail. And why not?
TV has covered the legend, both in many documentaries, and in settings as diverse as Stargate SG-1 and Babylon 5. The Grail has, obviously, been studied in plenty of non-fiction books as well, whether giving a psychological or spiritual interpretation to the Grail Quest (as Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell did), or, as has become more popular in recent years, in terms of historical conspiracy theories. For example, in The Sign and the Seal, Graham Hancock suggests that the Grail is actually a fictionalized Ark of the Covenant, while The Holy Blood, and the Holy Grail, famously goes with the idea that the Grail is the bloodline of Jesus Christ’s descendants (and thus inspired The Da Vinci Code).
THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE
Why would the Grail Romance writers, or later believers such as Himmler, have got the idea that the Grail should have such power of eternal life? Not from the Bible, certainly; there’s nothing in there that would lead to such a speculation.
There is, however, precedent in earlier European pagan lore; specifically there’s the mythology of the Celts of Ireland. In Irish Celtic mythology there was a king called Bran the Blessed, who had a cauldron imbued with many magical powers.
Among other things, the Cauldron of Bran could supply enough food to feed a whole army from whatever little ingredients were put into it. More impressive still, it could revive any corpse that had been placed inside it – even one which had been chopped to pieces. The slain so placed in the cauldron would be revived whole and healthy.
That this element of the Grail myth was borrowed from the Celtic myths is no secret, though it was largely forgotten by post-medieval writers and Grail fans. That the tale is borrowed is acknowledged right there in Chretien de Troyes’ original texts, in the form of the Fisher King.
The Fisher King – named Bron in this version, to really rub it in – is the king who at some point in the past was charged with looking after the Grail, in his castle in the wastelands. He had at some point been wounded in the legs (this is also why Sir Percival is the one to find the Grail – the name derives from per cheval, meaning pierced thigh, which means he has the same traits as the Grail’s guardian), and can’t move on his own. He doesn’t exist in myth or literature until Chretien de Troyes pretty much invents the Grail Quest in Perceval, le Conte du Graal, in the second half of the 12th century.
Is there even such a thing as an actual Holy Grail? Well, that depends on how you define the term ‘Holy Grail’. Let’s take the different elements separately:
The Cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper: Logically there must have been some form of drinking vessels at any meal in Biblical times. So, that would mean you’d be asking on whether the story of Jesus is true, for him to have used whatever crockery was around, and that’s a whole different debate.
That said, this actually wasn’t originally referred to as the Holy Grail, but the Holy Chalice, while the Grail was originally written to be a flat dish or stone. In the last few centuries, however, the two have become conflated.
There are several alleged Holy Chalices around, including one in St Peter’s in Rome, which is used in papal masses – though nowadays more than one chalice used by the Pope has become tagged as being the ‘official’ one.
The vessel used by Joseph of Arimathea to catch Christ’s blood: Never existed. In the Bible, and other related religious texts from the era, Joseph is one who takes custody of Jesus’s body after the crucifixion, and prepares it for burial – which would involve washing all the blood, sweat and dirt off the body. Nobody mentions him having any sort of vessel to carry it in until the 12th century, when Robert de Boron introduced him into the Arthurian cycle as bringing the Grail to Britain. (At other times, his son, Josephus, is tagged with that duty.)
A cup or goblet granting healing and/or immortality: Outside of Indiana Jones … These powers derive from the Cauldron of Bran, in Welsh mythology.
Interestingly, the Nazis did try making their own new Nazi Grail, which was more the size and shape of a soup tureen, and had figures around the rim, in the style of the Celtic depictions of warriors that harken back to the tales of Bran’s cauldron.
The bloodline of Jesus through the Merovingian Kings: No. Just, no. Aside from the Sangraal/sang real mistranslation, the simple fact is lineage spreads as it descends. Even if we assume a surviving Jesus, who has kids, you’ve got 80 generations (usually said to be 25 years), with an average of 2.4 kids – multiplied exponentially. That’s 2.4 to the power of 80. It’s a lot of descendants, not just one secret family leading to a French girl who needs protection.
The object sought by Arthurian knights in the Grail Quest: Hold on, folks, because this is where things get a little strange.
Strange in the sense that although we’re talking about fictional characters, some of whom may be loosely based on figures from centuries earlier, on a spiritual quest for a magical object in a set of acknowledged fairy tales … This is still the one that absolutely, yes, does exist.
Sort of.
There are four main medieval Grail Quest stories: those by Chretien de Troyes, Robert de Boron, Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzifal, which, as the title implies, is somewhat of a knockoff of de Troyes’s earlier Perceval. Eschenbach produces the most refined and, dare we say, efficient version of the story. He also gives us much more straightforward detail about where the quest leads to and what it is.
Best of all, he bases his story’s Grail on a real object in a real place. And that object actually still exists.
To save you poring through either a lot of Latin, medieval German, or potentially bad English translations, Eschenbach has the Grail found at the castle of Munsalvaesche, an invisible castle. At first the idea of a
n invisible castle sounds like a mad idea: castles are enormous stone fortresses dominating the countryside, with towers visible for miles, and all that. How could it be invisible? The obvious conclusion is that Eschenbach is using a bit of magic in his tale, with sorcery or supernatural powers making things difficult for the questing knights.
In fact, however, that isn’t really what he meant. What he actually meant is that there was a well-defended fortress which didn’t loom over the countryside, and which people didn’t really perceive as a castle at all.
WHERE IS IT NOW?
Wolfram von Eschenbach’s actual, genuine Holy Grail is viewable behind a panel of bullet-proof glass in the Iglesia Catedral-Basílica Metropolitana de la Asunción de Nuestra Señora de Valencia, alternatively known as Saint Mary’s Cathedral or just Valencia Cathedral. The address is Plaza Almoina, s/n, 46003 Valencia, Spain. It’s really not a secret; it’s just that nobody really notices it. Probably this is because it doesn’t glow, and none of the people who occasionally get to touch it in the religious duties have become noticeably immortal or returned from the dead. That sort of thing would get news coverage, probably.
That said, this is the Grail that Eschenbach wrote into Parzival, and which was subsequently appropriated by various other medieval writers. Until the turn of the 20th century, this Grail was held at the monastery of San Juan de la Peña, located at the south-west of Jaca, in the province of Huesca. It has also been occasionally used by the Pope as the Holy Chalice as well – most recently by Benedict XVI in 2006.
This, of course, is also the Grail that Himmler was after during World War II, but which, thankfully, was never allowed to fall into his hands.
If you know your Eschenbach, you should also know that, of the relatively few people who know of this Grail as the Holy Grail at all, most of them focus on the wrong bit. The golden chalice is impressive, and has been used as a papal chalice as recently as 2006, but the part that Eschenbach cast as his Holy Grail is, in fact, the upturned chalcedony bowl that serves as a base, and not the golden and agate goblet. The base is thought to date from around the 4th–1st century BC, while the upper cup dates from no later than AD 262 (it’s mentioned in a Roman inventory from that year).
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