The Holy Grail

[silburnl]

There's a metric buttload of authors who mine this literary seam so a search should turn up any number of books asserting all sorts of weird and wonderful theories.

Is the Holy Grail a cup, Christ's bloodline or the secret of sacred architecture passed down from the mystery precursor civilisation of 9000 BC via the Egyptians? Maybe its all three?

Was the grail lost in the Pyrenees, buried under a church in Scotland or hidden in a bloody great hole in Newfoundland? Is the ark of the covenant there as well or is it sitting in a reliquary in an Ethiopian one-mule town? And how close did the SS archaeology unit get with their various searches for this sort of stuff? Spielberg didn't invent wacky Nazi occultists - they were busy little bees all through the 30s.

If you want a fictional entree to this sort of thing "Foucault's Pendulum" by Umberto Eco gives a comprehensive overview of the state of play as at the early 90s, but a new crop of authors and sensational revelations seems to get published every decade or so.

If its not already obvious I think they are all pretty much smoking crack - but they are a fantastic resource for roleplaying plots.

Regards
Luke

 

[Goobermunch]

Of course, if you really want to break your PCs, pick up Preacher. It's a graphic novel published under the Vertigo line. The Grail as presented there, is really an organization dedicated to protecting the bloodline of Christ (ala the Alabaster Jar). Of course, in Preacher, the Templars have been trying to "keep the blood pure" for the past 20 Centuries. The current "messiah," groomed for the day when the Grail forces armageddon, is little more than a babbling, inbred moron.

It's a good read.

--G

 

[evileeyore]

The Paper Grail by James P Blaylock has an interesting take on the Grail and where it ends up. Not really helpful for a 'Historical' Grail Hunt, but offers a really wacked interpretation. Also a thoroughly good read.

TTFN

EvilE

 

[diaglo]

i like Bullfinch's Mythology. The Age of bologna.

 

[Mirth]

And the name of this novel is... ?

-z

War In Heaven by Charles Williams. Quite a good read, actually.

Speaking as a person finishing a Master's in Lit with a focus on Arthurian Studies, I would recommend reading the following for an in-depth look at the Celtic origins of the Grail myth (the theory that I personally subscribe to):

The Grail: From Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol, by Roger Sherman Loomis

Celtic Myth and Arthurian Romance, also by Loomis

From Ritual to Romance, by Jesse L Weston

The Grail: The Celtic Origins of the Sacred Icon, by Jean Markale

and King of the Celts: Arthurian Legends and Celtic Tradition, also by Markale

That's enough to get you started. Post here if you want more

Have fun,

Mirth

 

[CrusaderX]

The article on the Grail from The New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia has some solid general info.

 

[nikolai]

No-one has yet mentioned Malory, so I thought I should. The Grail Quest kicks off in Book 13.

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/Mal2Mor.html

The archaic languague makes it hard to get into. The Once and Future King by T. H. White is a classic modern retelling. The Grail stuff is in The Ill-Made Knight. What stuck me is that the Quest was a moral one. To get the grail you had to be virtuous, but also had to have be tested (repeatedly) and make the right decision at the test. This may be hard to convert to D&D; though it would be a refreshing change of pace. I know my players are a bloodthirsty lot and would fall at the first hurdle.

This may not be a bad thing though. For example: Gawaine, Gareth and Uwaine slew seven knights at the Maidens' Castle. But even though the knights they slew were without doubt a bad lot, they sinned by handing out death too lightly and the path to the Grail was closed to them. I thought it was quite tragic that even though they had good intentions (smiting bad guys) and were doing what they thought was noble, by acting without thought they were unknowingly slamming the door in their own faces (Book 13, Chapter 16).

 

[Wombat]

During the Middle Ages the Grail (or sometimes Graal) was described variously as the Cup from the Last Supper, the Plate from the Last Supper, or the Stone beneath the Cross (onto which Jesus dropped blood). The tales of the Grail got intermixed with so many other stories (such as the Cauldron of Ceridwen) that it is often difficult to tease out a particular line in the legends.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, during a period of "neatening up" various legend cycles, the concept of the Grail as Cup from the Last Supper became pretty firmly established in the English-speaking world (I am less sure in other areas, although Wagner draws from the old German Parzifal legends which use the Stone motif). At that point suddenly all the hocum theories about bloodlines passing down and guarding the Grail for centuries cropped up (sort of like the whole "unbroken oral tradition of witchcraft"), leading to dozens of conspiracy theories. Also this was the period of the whole Celtic Revival, so there was also more on the "Celtic Origins of the Grail" with time, which again may or may not be the case, although it is a popular concept.

There are literally hundreds of the books on the subject, both fiction and "non-fiction" (the latter are often just as fictional, but don't want to admit it...). Personally I love some of the short fiction collections that appeared a few years ago, such as The Chronicles of the Holy Grail edited by Mike Ashley and Grails: Visitations of the Night/Grails:Quests of the Dawn edited by Richard Gilliam, Martin Greenberg, and Edward Kramer.

 

[Shemeska]

Just be careful about what you use as 'non-fiction' on the topic. There's been a huge crop of books lately plodding along the same course as Lincoln's 'Holy Blood, Holy Grail', and they, like his book have little basis in reality. It's historical revision and speculation at best, shoddy scholarship and outright fraud at worse.

Sadly the ideas have been parroted around so much in additional books that it's gained a shadowy air of authenticity swirling around the various laughable conspiracy theories. Names such as Roslyn Chapel, the Templars, Rennes le Chateau, various lines of French kings, etc are dropped without any real reference to support the authenticity of the claims.

Be wary even when a book purports to be non-fiction, all I can say.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

I would also point out that the grail doesn't show up as anything anybody is concerned with until fairly late in the middle ages.

Chretien de Troye, someone can get me on spelling, mentions something that might concievably be a grail like thing and thats the first mention of it.

Personally I would guess that the grail is a fairly persistent instance of misinterpretation of visual art working itself into literary truth.

There are plenty of images of cups catching the blood of Christ which makes perfect sense as a way to visualize the significance of communion if you are an early medieval artist with a pretty iconographic view of art. If you are a later medieval viewer of such art it becomes more difficult to imagine people creating non-literal images. So you create a story to go with it. Since it has little correlation it becomes a good story to build literary stories with a religious intent around.

This happened frequently with saints and is also a part of many theories on the development of some of the odder Greek myths from earlier traditions.

The misinterpretation goes on as people seek to explain the fact that this story has very little good antecedent in the Christian tradition and is totally unassociated with anything other than itself. This rarely happens with crazy saint misinterpretations since the church can compare with historical records and provide good explanations.

But since the grail isn't associated with anyone but a resurrected God, there isn't a lot that can be done. That and the stories the Grail gets wrapped up into are superfantastic.

People take two tacts on this problem:
A.) It has no association and therefore comes from someplace else, thus the Celtic origin. Which is not to say that vessels weren't big Celtic things.
B.) It has no association and therefore must be associated with something else that has been largely rejected thus the link with Christ's bloodline stories and Templars, who were only really into bad banking protocols.

It's not romantic, but, hey, it has good precedent and the best romances are all fictions.

BTW, there are theories that the cup Christ drank from at the last supper, which certainly should have been a cult object at some point, is located in a very early, and truly magnificent, reliquary that now resides in one of the major New York art museums. I'm not certain which one, it's always in storage, there were... ...controversies.

Thomas B. Costain wrote a novel based on that theory called the Silver Chalice.

They made a movie out of it starring Paul Newman. He hates his performance in it and works tirelessly to make certain it sees as little of the light of day as is possible.

If you really want to play up the conspiracy point:

1.) Indiana Jones like guy rescues grail gives it to secular US gov for protection.

2.) Government seeks to insure its protection by indulging in a too much accurate information disinformation campaign.

3.) Paul Newman, a secret agent of the Vatican, makes a movie out of the most accurate portrayal of the truth. Then squashes the theory utterly in the public eye by acting horribly and talking loudly about how horrible his acting was.

4.) The final step in the campaign is to remove everything but the initial bad, but accurate, writing from the public eye. Then enter Dan Brown, and many many others, who complete the disinformation campaign by contributing equally poorly written, but horrifically inaccurate and terribly exciting, theories to the public discourse.

5.) The public looks at the accurate theories, cannot see what they are talking about, literally, and looks at the inaccurate theories, which are way cooler and talk about things they don't like and can see in ways they do like, and makes its choice.

6.) The grail is 'safe' in fedgov hands alongside the ark of the covenant, various reincarnated messaihs, the remaining legitimate emperors of Rome and Byzantium, gasless motors, and the perpetual motion machine.

7.) Until the PCs show up... ...Hurrah!