A faint, affirmative nod.
‘Tomorrow evening’, I continued, ‘is the beginning of Timkat. Will the true Ark be brought out then, for the procession to the Mai Shum, or will a replica be used?’
As Hagos translated my words into Tigrigna the guardian listened, his face impassive. Finally he replied: ‘I have already said enough. Timkat is a public ceremony. You may attend it and see for yourself. If you have studied as you have claimed, even though it may only have been for two years, I think that you will be able to know the answer to your question.’
And with that he turned away and slipped into the shadows and was gone.
The secret behind the signs
The object that was carried to the Mai Shum reservoir when the Timkat ceremonies began late in the afternoon of Friday 18 January 1991 was a bulky rectangular chest over which was draped a thick blue cloth embroidered with an emblem of a dove. And I remembered that in Wolfram’s Parzival the dove, too, had been the emblem of the Grail.6 Yet I knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that what I was looking at was neither Grail nor Ark. Rather it was in itself an emblem and a symbol, a token and a sign.
As the Falasha priest Raphael Hadane had warned me months before, the sacred relic kept in the sanctuary chapel remained there – jealously guarded in the Holy of Holies. What was brought out in public procession was therefore merely a replica of it – a replica, however, that was quite different in form from the familiar flat tabotat that I had seen paraded during the previous year’s celebrations at Gondar, and that did indeed accord with the shape and dimensions of the biblical Ark.
How, then, can I be so sure that it was a replica? The answer is simple. Not for a single moment during the whole of the two-day ceremony did Gebra Mikail, the guardian monk, leave the sanctuary chapel. Late in the afternoon of the 18th, as the procession carrying the cloth-wrapped chest moved away in the direction of the Mai Shum, I saw him sitting there behind the iron bars, leaning against the grey granite wall of the squat building, seemingly lost in contemplation. He did not even look up as the priests departed, and it was plain that the object which they bore aloft held no special importance for him.
Then, when they were gone, he disappeared inside the chapel. Moments later I heard his slow arrhythmic chant. And had I been permitted to move closer I knew that I would have recognized the sweet savour of frankincense.
For what was Gebra Mikail doing, there in the thick darkness, if not offering up a fragrance pleasing to the Lord before the Holy Ark of His Covenant? And why else should he, who had been selected from amongst all his brethren to fulfil a precious trust, have stayed closed within the sanctuary until morning, if the sacred and inviolable relic that he had forfeited his own freedom to guard had not remained there with him?
In this way I believe at last that I did glimpse the secret behind the symbol, the glorious enigma proclaimed in so many wondrous signs – proclaimed and yet not revealed. For the Ethiopians know that if you want to hide a tree you must place it in a forest. And what else are the replicas that they venerate in twenty thousand churches if not a veritable forest of signs?
At the heart of that forest lies the Ark itself, the golden Ark that was built at the foot of Mount Sinai, that was carried through the wilderness and across the river Jordan, that brought victory to the Israelites in their struggle to win the Promised Land, that was taken up to Jerusalem by King David, and that – around 955 BC – was deposited by Solomon in the Holy of Holies of the First Temple.
From there, some three hundred years later, it was removed by faithful priests who sought to preserve it from pollution at the hands of the sinner Manasseh and who bore it away to safety on the far-off Egyptian island of Elephantine. There a new temple was built to house it, a temple in which it remained for two further centuries.
When the temple was destroyed, however, its restless wanderings resumed again and it was carried southward into Ethiopia, into the land shadowing with wings, into the land criss-crossed by rivers. Having come from one island it was taken to another – to green and verdant Tana Kirkos – where it was installed in a simple tabernacle and worshipped by simple folk. For the eight hundred years that followed it stood at the centre of a large and idiosyncratic Judaic cult, a cult whose members were the ancestors of all Ethiopian Jews today.
Then the Christians came, preaching a new religion, and – after converting the king – they were able to seize the Ark for themselves. They took it to Axum and placed it in the great church that they had built there, a church dedicated to Saint Mary the Mother of Christ.
Many more years then went by and – as the weary centuries passed – the memory of how the Ark had really come to Ethiopia grew blurred. Legends began to circulate to account for the now mysterious and inexplicable fact that a small city in the remote highlands of Tigray appeared to have been selected – presumably by God Himself – as the last resting place of the most precious and prestigious relic of Old Testament times. These legends were eventually codified and set down in writing in the form of the Kebra Nagast – a document containing so many errors, anachronisms and inconsistencies that later generations of scholars were never able to see their way through to the single ancient and recondite truth concealed beneath the layers of myth and magic.
That truth, however, was recognized by the Knights Templar, who understood its earth-shaking power and who came to Ethiopia in pursuit of it. It was, moreover, expressed by Wolfram von Eschenbach in his story of Parzival, where the Holy Grail – ‘the consummation of heart’s desire’ – served as an occult cryptogram for the Holy Ark of the Covenant.
In Wolfram’s text the heathen Flegetanis was said to have penetrated the hidden mysteries of the constellations and to have declared in a reverential voice that there was indeed ‘a thing called the Gral’. He declared also that this perfect thing, this spiritual thing, was guarded by a Christian progeny bred to a pure life. And he concluded his soothsaying with these words: ‘Those humans who are summoned to the Gral are ever worthy.’7
So too those humans who are summoned to the Ark – for Ark and Grail are one and the same. I, for my part, however, was never worthy enough. I knew it even as I traversed the waste land. I knew it as I approached the sanctuary chapel. I know it still. And yet … And yet … ‘my heart is glad, and my very soul rejoices, and my flesh also shall rest in hope.’
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
References
Chapter 1 Initiation
1 For example, see Julian Morgenstern, ‘The Book of the Covenant’, Hebrew Union College Annual, vol. V, 1928, reprinted by KTAV Publishing House Inc., New York, 1968, p. 118: ‘the Ark itself came in popular thought and speech to be identified with the deity; the Ark itself was to all extents and purposes the deity.’ The direct identification of the Ark with God is well illustrated in the following passage from Numbers 10:35: ‘And it came to pass, when the Ark set forward, that Moses said, Rise up, Lord, and let thine enemies be scattered and let them that hate thee flee before thee’ (King James Authorized Version). The Jerusalem Bible translation of the same verse, which makes use of Yahweh, the name of God, reads: ‘And as the Ark set out, Moses would say, Arise, Yahweh, may your enemies be scattered and those who hate you run for their lives before you.’ The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible comments: ‘The Ark is not only seen as the leader of Israel’s host, but is directly addressed as Yahweh. There is virtually an identification of Yahweh and the Ark … there is no doubt that the Ark was interpreted as the extension or embodiment of the presence of Yahweh’ (The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible: An Illustrated Encyclopaedia, Abingdon Press, Nashville, 1962, pp. 222–3.
2 See Exodus 37:1, which gives the dimensions of the Ark as follows: ‘two cubits and a half was the length of it, and a cubit and a half the breadth of it, and a cubit and a half the height of it.’ The measurements in feet and inches are extrapolated from the ancient cubit, which was eighteen inches. See Dr J. H. H
ertz (ed.), The Pentateuch and the Haftorahs, Soncino Press, London, 1978, p. 327. The Jerusalem Bible, footnote (b), p. 87, concurs (Jerusalem Bible, Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1968).
3 Exodus 37:7–9.
4 1 Chronicles 28:2.
5 Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?, Jonathan Cape, London, 1988, p. 156.
6 The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, op. cit., p. 222.
7 The phrase is taken from J. Theodore Bent’s nineteenth-century book on Axum, The Sacred City of the Ethiopians: Travel and Research in Abyssinia in 1893, Longmans, Green, London, New York and Bombay, 1896.
8 Eritrea was in fact decolonized in 1952. For the next ten years it was federated with Ethiopia but kept its own separate identity. In 1962, after what was widely believed to be a rigged referendum, the federal relationship was dissolved and Ethiopia took over full control of the territory, which thenceforward was governed directly from Addis Ababa. Haile Selassie argued that apart from the brief colonial interlude Eritrea had always been an integral part of Ethiopia and should remain so. Many Eritreans, however, felt differently.
9 G. W. B Huntingford (ed.), The Periplus of the Eritrean Sea, Hakluyt Society, London, 1980.
10 Reported in A. H. M. Jones and Elizabeth Monroe, A History of Ethiopia, Oxford University Press, 1955, pp. 32–3.
11 J. W. McCrindle (trans, and ed.), The Christian Topography of Cosmos, an Egyptian Monk, Hakluyt Society, London, 1898.
12 The Rufinius history of the conversion of Ethiopia to Christianity is reported at length in A. H. M Jones and Elizabeth Monroe, A History of Ethiopia, op. cit., pp. 26–7. See also Graham Hancock, Richard Pankhurst, Duncan Willetts, Under Ethiopian Skies, Editions HL, London and Nairobi, 1983, pp. 34–5.
13 Reported by Richard Pankhurst, writing in Hancock, Pankhurst and Willetts, Under Ethiopian Skies, op. cit.
14 For a full account of the findings of this dig see S.C. Munro-Hay, Excavations at Axum: An Account of Research at the Ancient Ethiopian Capital directed in 1972–74 by the Late Dr Neville Chittick, Royal Geographical Society, London, 1989.
15 Another tradition says that the coffers are in fact coffins and that they once contained the bodies of Kaleb and Gebre-Maskal.
16 C. F. Beckingham and G. W. B Huntingford (eds), The Prester John of the Indies: A True Relation of the Lands of Prester John, being the Narrative of the Portuguese Embassy to Ethiopia in 1520 written by Father Francisco Alvarez, Cambridge, published for the Hakluyt Society at the University Press, 1961, vol. I, pp. 151–3.
17 Ibid., footnote 2, p. 151.
18 Ibid., pp. 145–8.
Chapter 2 Disenchantment
1 From Article II of the 1955 (revised) Constitution.
2 Aymro Wondemagegnehu and Joachim Motovu, The Ethiopian Orthodox Church, The Ethiopian Orthodox Mission, Addis Ababa, 1970, p. 48.
3 Ibid., p. 46.
4 Ibid., p. 152.
Chapter 3 The Grail Cipher
1 The book was published in 1990. Carol Beckwith, Angela Fisher, Graham Hancock, African Ark: Peoples of the Horn, Collins Harvill, London, 1990.
2 William Anderson, The Rise of the Gothic, Hutchinson, London, 1985, p. 34. And see in general pp. 33–7.
3 For a chronology see Chartres: Guide of the Cathedral, Editions Houvet-la-Crypte, Chartres, pp. 12–13.
4 John James, Medieval France: A Guide to the Sacred Architecture of Medieval France, Harrap Columbus, London, 1987, p. 71.
5 Malcolm Miller, Chartres: The Cathedral and the Old Town, Pitkin Pictorials, Norwich, UK, pp. 13 and 18. See also Chartres: Guide of the Cathedral, op. cit., Foreword written by Etienne Houvet, custodian of the cathedral, p. 3.
6 Chartres: Guide of the Cathedral, op. cit., p. 53.
7 Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, The Queen of Sheba and her Only Son Menelik: bang the ‘Book of the Glory of Kings’ (Kebra Nagast), Oxford University Press, 1932, p. 29. In a conversation with Solomon the Queen of Sheba is quoted as saying: ‘From this moment I will not worship the sun, but will worship the creator of the sun, the God of Israel … because of this I have found favour with thee, and before the God of Israel, my Creator.’
8 1 Kings 10:1–13; 1 Chronicles 9:1–12.
9 For a good résumé of the scholarly conventional wisdom see H. St John Philby, The Queen of Sheba, Quartet Books, London, 1981.
10 Malcolm Miller, Chartres Cathedral: Illustrating the Medieval Stained Glass and Sculpture, Pitkin Pictorials, Norwich, UK, p. 14. See also Chartres: Guide of the Cathedral, op. cit., pp. 37–47.
11 Genesis 14:18; Psalm 110:4.
12 Malcolm Miller, Chartres Cathedral: Illustrating the Medieval Stained Glass and Sculpture, op. cit., p. 20.
13 Chartres: Guide of the Cathedral, op. cit., p. 42.
14 See Exodus 37:1 and Chapter 1, note 2 above.
15 Chartres: Guide of the Cathedral, op. cit., p. 40.
16 Louis Charpentier, The Mysteries of Chartres Cathedral, RILKO, London, 1983 (originally published by Robert Laffont, Paris, 1966), p. 70.
17 Chartres: Guide of the Cathedral, op. cit., p. 37.
18 Louis Charpentier, The Mysteries of Chartres Cathedral, op. cit., p. 68, photographic section between pp. 32 and 33, and p. 113.
19 See, for example, Robert Graves, The White Goddess, Faber & Faber, London and Boston, 1988 edn, p. 161.
20 Hebrews 7.
21 Louis Charpentier, The Mysteries of Chartres Cathedral, op. cit., p. 113.
22 See D. D. R. Owen (trans.), Chrétien de Troyes: Arthurian Romances, J. M. Dent, London, 1988, Introduction, p. x.
23 Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’arthur, Penguin Classics, London, 1988 – see half-tide page.
24 See Edwin H. Zeydel (trans. and ed.), The Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1951, p. 14. See also Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, Penguin Classics, London, 1980, Introduction, p. 8.
25 Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’arthur, op. cit., pp. 190 and 213.
26 Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, op. cit., p. 239.
27 Lady Flavia Anderson, The Ancient Secret: Fire from the Sun, RILKO, London, 1987, p. 15.
28 Ibid.
29 Chrétien de Troyts, Arthurian Romances, op. cit., p. 417.
30 Ibid., pp. 417–18.
31 Ibid., p. 459.
32 Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz, The Grail Legend, Coventure, London, 1986, pp. 29 and 116. (Originally published by Walter Verlag, Olten, 1980, and in the USA by Sigo Press, Boston, 1970.) See also A. M. Hatto’s Foreword to Wolfram’s Parzival, op. cit., p. 7. Old Catalan grazal and Provençal grasal both also meant ‘vessel, cup or bowl of wood, earthenware or metal’.
33 The word ‘holy’ appears in no less than thirty books of the Old Testament.
34 John Matthews, The Grail: Quest for the Eternal, Thames & Hudson, London, 1987, p. 12.
35 See F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds), The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 162.
36 William Anderson, The Rise of the Gothic, op. cit., p. 65.
37 For a discussion see M. Kilian Hufgard, ‘Saint Bernard of Clairvaux’, Medieval Studies, vol. II, Edwin Mellen Press, 1989, p. 143: ‘It would be impossible to calculate the full extent of Bernard’s influence on the iconography of the early Gothic cathedrals.’
38 See John Matthews, The Grail: Quest for the Eternal, op. cit., p. 12.
39 For a discussion see Bodo Mergell, Der Graal in Wolframs Parsifal, Halle, 1952. See also Encyclopaedia Britannica, Micropaedia, 15th edn, 1991, vol. V, pp. 408–9, which states that the Queste del Saint Graal ‘was clearly influenced by the mystical teachings of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux’.
40 An excellent discussion of this symbolism is contained in John Matthews, The Grail: Quest for the Eternal, op. cit., pp. 14–17.
41 F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds), The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, op. cit., p. 827.
42 John Matthews, The Grail: Quest for the Eternal
, op. cit., p. 15.
43 Ibid., p. 15.
44 M. Kilian Hufgard, ‘Saint Bernard of Clairvaux’, op. cit., p. 141.
45 F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds), The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, op. cit., pp. 42–3 and 87–8.
46 Helen Adolf, ‘New Light on Oriental Sources for Wolfram’s Parzival and other Grail Romances’, Publications of the Modern Languages Association of America, vol. 62, March 1947, pp. 306–24.
47 Ibid., p. 306. ‘I am indebted’, wrote Adolf, ‘to the pioneers in this field, to Veselovskij and Singer, founders of the Ethiopian theory.’ A. N. Veselovskij had written several works on the origin of the Grail legend which had been published in Russia between 1886 and 1904; S. Singer had been a German academic writing at about the same time. Details of their works are to be found in Adolf’s Bibliography, p. 324.
48 Ibid., p. 306.
49 See, for example, Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances, op. cit., Introduction by D. D. R. Owen, p. ix–xviii. See also Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance, Cambridge University Press, 1920, particularly Chapter 6 where she specifically rejects the cauldrons of Celtic mythology as being the prototypes for the Grail, adding ‘these special objects belong to another line of tradition altogether’ (pp. 69–70). She also rejects the other common derivation in the Cup of the Last Supper and the Lance of Longinus (p. 68). It was Jessie Weston’s scholarly book that largely inspired T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. See T. S. Eliot, Selected Poems, Faber & Faber, London, 1961, p. 68.
50 Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, op. cit., p. 410.
51 Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, op. cit. See in particular Foreword, pp. 7–8. A typical example of the close correspondences between the two texts is to be found in the near-identical descriptions of the Grail procession and of the subsequent disappearance of the Grail castle (Wolfram, pp. 123–31; Chrétien, pp. 415–22). The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th (1910) edn, confirms that Parzival was ‘beyond all doubt’ a rendering of a ‘French original’ (entry under ‘Wolfram von Eschenbach’, p. 775). See also Margaret Fitzgerald Richey, The Story of Parzival and the Grail, As Related by Wolfram von Eschenbach, Basil Blackwell & Mott, Oxford, 1935, pp. 10–11: ‘the external resemblances [between Wolfram’s account and Chrétien’s] are so close, not only in the ordering of the episodes but also in points of detail, that many scholars regard Chrétien’s poem as the one specific basis of Wolfram’s.’
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