Holy Blood, Holy Grail (44 page)

Grail.”

According to Wolfram, then, the Grail is a stone of some kind. But such a definition of the Grail is far more provocative than satisfying. Scholars have a number of interpretations of the phrase lap sit exillis’, all of which are more or less plausible. “Lapsit exillis’ might be a corruption of “lapis ex caelis’ - “stone from the heavens’. It might also be a corruption of lap sit ex caelis’ - “it fell from the heavens’, or of “lapis lapsus ex caelus’ - “a stone fallen from heaven’, or, finally, of “lapis elixir’ the fabulous Philosopher’s Stone of alchemy.2

Certainly the passage quoted, like the whole of Wolfram’s poem for that matter, is laden with alchemical symbolism. The phoenix, for example is established alchemical shorthand for resurrection or rebirth and also, in medieval iconography, is an emblem of the dying and resurrected Jesus.

If the phoenix is indeed somehow representative of Jesus, Wolfram is implicitly associating him with a stone. Such an association is, of course, hardly unique. There is Peter (Pierre or “stone’ in French) the “stone’ or ‘rock’ on which Jesus establishes his church. And as we had discovered,

Jesus, in the New Testament, explicitly equates himself with “the keystone neglected by the builders’ the keystone of the Temple; the Rock of Sion.

Because it was “founded’ on this rock, there was supposedly a royal tradition descended from Godfroi de Bouillon which was equal to the reigning dynasties of Votrppe.

Wolfram links that immedately following the one quoted, and, through the symlioraecifically with the Crucifixion -This very day, there comes with the

Magdalene: wherein lies its greatest power the Grail] a message and they await there a dove, jay is Good Friday,

Heaven. It brings a small white the stone. Then, shining white, the

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~# , down it on Heaven again. Always on Good Friday it ~&r? up to the stone what I have just told you, and from that the stone derives whatever good fragrances of drink and food there are on earth, like to the perfection of Paradise. I mean all things the earth may bear. And further the stone provides whatever game lives beneath the heavens, whether it flies or runs or swims. Thus, to the knightly brotherhood, does the power of the Grail give sustenance.z’

In addition to its other extraordinary attributes the Grail, in Wolfram’s poem, would almost seem to possess a certain sentience. It has the capacity to call individuals into its service to call them, that is, in an active sense:

Hear now how those called to the Grail are made known. On the stone, around the edge, appear letters inscribed, giving the name and lineage of each one, maid or boy, who is to take this blessed journey. No one needs to rub out the inscription, for once he had read the name, it fades away before his eyes. All those now grown to maturity came there as children. Blessed is the mother who bore a child destined to do service there. Poor and rich alike rejoice if their child is summoned to join the company. They are brought there from many lands. From sinful shame they are more protected than others, and receive good reward in heaven. When life dies for them here they are given perfection there.”

If the Grail’s guardians are Templars, its actual custodians would appear to be members of a specific family. This family seems to possess numerous collateral branches, some of which their identity often unknown even to themselves are scattered about the world. But other members of the family inhabit the Grail of

Munsalvaesche fairly obviously linked with the legendary Cathar castle of The writer has identified tsalvat, which at least one salvaesche dwell a nu, as ontsegur. Within Munthe Grail’s actual ?~-tuber of enigmatic figures. There is (“Reponse de C’-,eeper and bearer, Repanse de Schoye course, A ~.” =loix or “Chosen Response’). And there is, of castle .ntortas, the Fisher King and lord of the Grail cro ;, who is wounded in the genitals and unable to pro. ate or, alternatively, to

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die. As in Chretien’s Grail 312 romance, Anfortas, for Wolfram, is Parzival’s uncle. And when, at the end of the poem, the curse is lifted and Anfortas can at last die, Parzival becomes heir to the Grail castle.

The Grail, or the Grail family, calls certain individuals into its service from the outside world individuals who must be initiated into some sort of mystery. At the same time it sends its trained servitors out into the world to perform actions on its behalf and sometimes to occupy a throne.

For the Grail, apparently, possesses the power to create kings: Maidens are appointed to care for the Grail .. . That was God’s decree, and these maidens performed their service before it. The Grail selects only noble company. Knights, devout and good, are chosen to guard it. The coming of the high stars brings this people great sorrow, young and old alike.

God’s anger at them has lasted all too long. When shall they ever say yes to joy? .. . I will tell you something more, whose truth you may well believe. A twofold chance is often theirs; they both give and receive profit. They receive young children there, of noble lineage and beautiful.

And if anywhere a land loses its lord, if the people there acknowledge the

Hand of God, and seek a new lord, they are granted one from the company of the Grail. They must treat him with courtesy, for the blessing of God protects him.z’

From the above passage, it would seem that at some point in the past the

Grail family somehow incurred God’s wrath. The allusion to “God’s anger at them’ echoes numerous medieval statements about the Jews. It also echoes-the title of a mysterious book associated with Nicolas Flamel The

Sacred Book of Abraham the Jew, Prince, Priest, Levite, Astrologer and

Philosopher to that Tribe of Jews who by the Wrath of God were Dispersed amongst the Gauls. And Flegetanis, who Wolfram says wrote the original account of the Grail, is said to be descended from Solomon. Could the Grail family possibly be of Judaic origin?

Whatever the curse formerly visited upon the Grail family, it has unquestionably come, by Parzival’s time, to enjoy divine favour and a great deal of power as well.

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And yet it is rigorously enjoined, at least in certain respects to secrecy about its identity.

The men [of the Grail family] God sends forth secretly; the maidens leave openly .. . Thus the maids are sent out openly from the Grail, and the men in secret, that they may have children who will in turn one day enter the service of the Grail, and serving, enhance its company.

God can teach them how to do this .25

Women of the Grail family, then, when they intermarry with the outside world, may disclose their pedigree and identity. The men, however, must keep this information scrupulously concealed so much so, in fact, that they may not even allow questions about their origins. The point, apparently, is a crucial one, for Wolfram returns to it most emphatically at the very end of the poem.

Upon the Grail it was now found written that any templar whom God’s hand appointed master over foreign people should forbid the asking of his name or race, and that he should help them to their rights. If the question is asked of him they shall have his help no longer .26

From this, of course, derives the dilemma of Lohengrin, Parzival’s son, who when queried on his origin, must abandon his wife and children and retire into the seclusion from whence he came. But why should such stringent secrecy be required? What “skeleton in the closet’, so to speak, might conceivably dictate it? If the Grail family were, in fact, of Judaic origin, that for the age in which Wolfram was writing might constitute a possible explanation. And such an explanation gains at least some credence from the Lohengrin story. For there are many variants of the Lohengrin story, and Lohengrin is not always identified by the same name. In some versions, he is called Helios implying the sun. In other versions, he is called Elie or Eli 17 an unmistakably Judaic name.

In Robert de Boron’s romance and in the Perlesvaus, Perceval is of Judaic lineage the ‘holy lineage’ of Joseph of Arimathea. In Wolfram’s poem this status, so far as Parzival is concerned, would seem to be incidental. True,

Parzival is the nephew of the wounded Fisher King and thus related by

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blood to the Grail family. And though he does not marry into the Grail family he is, in fact, already married he still inherits the Grail castle and becomes its new lord. But for Wolfram the protagonist’s pedigree would seem to be less important than the means whereby he proves himself worthy of it. He must, in short, conform to certain criteria dictated by the blood he carries in his veins. And this emphasis would clearly seem to indicate the importance Wolfram ascribes to that blood.

There is no question that Wolfram does ascribe immense significance to a particular bloodline. If there is a single dominant theme pervading not only Parzival, but his other works as well, it is not so much the Grail as the Grail family. Indeed the Grail family seems to dominate Wolfram’s mind to an almost obsessive degree, and he devotes far more attention to them and their genealogy than to the mysterious object of which they are custodians.

The genealogy of the Grail family can be reconstructed from a close reading of Parzival. Parzival himself is a nephew of Anfortas, the maimed Fisher

King and lord of the Grail castle. Anfortas, in turn, is the son of one

Frimutel, and Frimutel the son of Titurel. At this point the lineage becomes more entangled. Eventually, however, it leads back to a certain

Laziliez which may be a derivation of Lazarus, the brother, in the New

Testament, of Mary and Martha. And Laziliez’s parents, the original progenitors of the Grail family, are named Mazadan and Terdelaschoye.

The latter is obviously a Germanic version of a French phrase, “Terre de la

Choix’ - “Chosen Land’. Mazadan is rather more obscure. It might conceivably derive from the Zoroastrian Ahura Mazda, the dualist principle of Light. At the same time, it also, if only phonetically perhaps, suggests

Masada - a major bastion during the Judaic revolt against Roman occupation in A.D. 68.

The names Wolfram ascribes to members of the Grail family are thus often provocative and suggestive. At the same time, however, they told us nothing that was historically useful. If we hoped to find an actual historical prototype for the Grail family, we would have to look elsewhere. The clues were meagre enough. We knew, for example, that the Grail family supposedly culminated in Godfroi de Bouillon; but that did not cast much light on

Godfroi’s mythical antecedents except, of course, that (like his real

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antecedents) they kept their identity scrupulously secret. But according to Wolfram, Kyot found an account of the

Grail story in the annals of the house of Anjou, and Parzival himself is said to be of Angevin blood. At the least this was extremely interesting for the house of Anjou was closely associated with both the Templars and the

Holy Land. Indeed Fulques, Count of Anjou, himself became, so to speak, an “honorary’ or part time Templar. In 1131, moreover, he married Godfroi de

Bouillon’s niece, the legendary Melusine, and became king of Jerusalem.

According to the “Prieure documents’, the lords of Anjou the Plantagenet family were thus allied to the Merovingian bloodline. And the name of

Plantagenet may even have been intended to echo “Plant-Ard’ or Plantard.

Such connections were patchy and tenuous. But additional clues were provided for us by the geographical setting of Wolfram’s poem. For the most part this setting is France. In contrast to later Grail chroniclers Wolfram even maintains that Arthur’s court, Camelot, is situated in France quite specifically at Nantes. Nantes, now in Brittany, was the westernmost boundary of the old Merovingian realm at the apex of its power.2e

In a manuscript of Chretien’s version of the Grail story, Perceval declares he was born in “Scaudone’ or “Sinadon’, or some such place that appears in a number of orthographic variants and the region is described as mountainous. According to Wolfram, Parzival comes from

“Waleis’. Most scholars have taken Waleis to be Wales and Sinadon, in it various spellings, as Snowdon or Snowdonia. If this is so, however, certain insurmountable problems arise, and, as one modern commentator remarks, “maps fail us’. For characters move constantly between Waleis and Arthur’s court at Nantes, as well as other French locations, without crossing any water! They move overland, in short, and through regions whose inhabitants speak French. Was Wolfram’s geography simply sloppy? Can it possibly have been that careless? Or might Waleis not be Wales after all? Two scholars have suggested that it might be Valois, the region of France to the north-east of Paris but there are no mountains in Valois, nor does the rest of the landscape conform in any way to Wolfram’s description. At the same time, however, there is

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another possible location for Waleis - a location that is mountainous, that does conform precisely to Wolfram’s other topographical descriptions and whose inhabitants do speak French. This location is the Valais in Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Leman to the east of Geneva. It would seem, in short, that Parzival’s homeland is neither Wales nor Valois, but Valais. And his actual birthplace of Sinadon would not be Snowdon or Snowdonia, but Sidonensis, the capital of the Valais, And the modern name of Sidonensis, capital of the Valais, is Sion.

According to Wolfram, then, Arthur’s court is in Brittany. Parzival would seem to have been born in Switzerland. And the Grail family itself? The

Grail castle? Wolfram provides an answer in his most ambitious work, left unfinished at his death and entitled Der Junge Titurel. In this evocative fragment Wolfram addressed himself to the life of Titurel, father of

Anfortas, and the original builder of the Grail castle. Der ]unge Titurel is very specific not only about genealogical detail, but also about the dimensions, the components, the materials, the configuration of the Grail castle its circular chapel, for example, like those of the Templars. And the castle itself is situated in the Pyrenees.