Symbols of the Grail Procession
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Parsifal: Wer ist der Gral?
Gurnemanz: Das sagt sich nicht;
doch, du selbst zu ihm erkoren,
bleibt dir die Kunde unverloren.
[Parsifal, Act I]
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The Grail's secret must be concealed
And never by any man revealed ...
[The Elucidation, lines 4-5.]
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characteristic feature of the medieval Grail romances is the
atmosphere of mystery that surrounds the Grail. It is a
talisman of which one may not speak, although the knowledge of it may be revealed to
those worthy of the revelation. The Grail appears in a
procession, details of which differ in various versions of
the visit of Gawain, Perceval and others to the Grail
castle, in which it is accompanied by other mysterious objects.
essie Weston drew attention to the relationship
between four of these symbols (sometimes called the Grail Hallows), and the suits of
the Tarot. A Tarot pack contains four suits of cards: Cups,
Wands, Swords and Dishes (or Pentangles or Pentacles).
 he
Grail is variously described as a cup or deep dish. In the
earlier Grail romances, the word graal is not
explained, perhaps because the readers could be expected to be familiar with the
word. Less than fifty years before Chrétien wrote his
poem, the monk Helinand defined the similar word gradale as meaning
scutella lata et aliquantulum profunda, a wide and slightly deep dish. Only
later, in Robert de Boron's Joseph d'Arimathie, was
the Grail identified with a cup or chalice.
 ne
of the characteristic properties of the Grail is the
provision of food and drink. According to Manessier's Continuation, as the Grail procession passes through the hall, the tables are filled
on every side with the most delectable dishes. Although Wolfram's Grail is a stone rather than a
dish or cup, it too has this property: whatever one stretched one's hand out for
in the presence of the Grail, it was waiting, one found it
all ready and to hand - dishes warm, dishes cold, newfangled dishes and old
favourites, the meat of beasts both tame and wild ... Clearly the Grail is related to the horn of plenty or ambrosial cup found in
various mythologies.
The procession seen by Gawain at the Grail Castle, with the grail (depicted as a
ciborium), the bleeding lance and a sword (on the bier).
.S.Loomis held that several of the strange features
of the Grail romances had arisen as a result of
mistranslation or the misunderstanding of ambiguous words in various texts. He
pointed out that the Old French nominative case for both "horn" and "body" were the
same: li cors; and he suggested that this might explain the remarkable
feature of a graal, or wide and deep dish, containing a single consecrated wafer, the
Corpus Christi. He suggested that originally this might have been a magic horn.
Another possibility is that this is a development from the body of the dead knight, a
feature of Gawain's visits to the Grail castle; in the First Continuation, for example, the body is
carried on a bier in the Grail procession.
he
bleeding lance of the Grail
castle is another curious feature of the Grail romances.
Quite early in the development of the story, it was identified with the lance of
Longinus that had pierced the side of Christ. Thus it suggests a link between the
wound of the Maimed King, if dealt by the lance, and
that of Christ. Originally, however, the bleeding lance was probably a magic weapon.
The bleeding is described either as a continuous stream of blood (as in Wolfram) or a
single drop (as in Chrétien) or as three drops.
essie Weston concluded that the cup and the lance
were sexual symbols, pointing to a relationship between the story of the Grail castle and ancient fertility rites. She noted that, in some
of the Gawain versions of the tale, the lance appeared
upright in the Grail, so that the cup received the blood. This suggests that the Grail is somewhat larger than a normal cup; in the Perlesvaus, a later development of the story, where
the blood also runs into the Grail, Gawain sees a chalice within
the Grail. R.S.Loomis drew
attention to certain similarities between the lance of the Grail castle and the spear that appears in the tale of the Irish
hero Brian, from the Fate of the Children of Turenn.
he
three sons of Turenn were compelled by the god Lug to fetch for him the spear of King
Pisear. When they reached his castle, Brian demanded the spear, at which Pisear
attacked him. Brian killed the king and put his courtiers to flight. Then he and his
brothers went to the room in which the spear was kept. They found it head down in a
cauldron of boiling water, from which it was taken and delivered to Lug. Apparently
there is another Irish tale in which a spear stands with its head in a cauldron of
blood; and this may be the origin of the bleeding
lance.
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nother magic weapon is the sword that appears in most of the accounts of
the Grail procession. In some versions, it seems to
have been the sword, rather than the lance, that injured the Maimed King, or felled the dead knight, so causing the
wasting of the land. The task of the Quester, whether Gawain or Perceval, may
be to ask a significant Question, or it may be to
mend a broken sword.
 As students are well aware, the
Sword of the Grail romances is a very elusive and
perplexing feature. It takes upon itself various forms; it may be a broken
sword, the re-welding of which is an essential condition of achieving the
quest; it may be a 'presentation' sword, given to the hero on his arrival at
the Grail castle, but a gift of dubious value, as
it will break, either after the first blow, or in an unspecified peril,
foreseen, however, by its original maker. Or it may be the sword with which
John the Baptist was beheaded; or the sword of Judas Maccabeus, gifted with
self-acting powers; or a mysterious sword as estranges
ranges, which may be identified with the the preceding weapon.
[J.L.Weston, The Quest of the Holy Grail.]
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  t
has been suggested by various commentators that the motif of the broken sword is
derived from an Irish tale in the Finn cycle. The hero Cailte and a companion enter
an Otherworld castle where the host was Fergus Fair-hair.
The host asked Cailte to repair a broken sword that the Tuatha
da Danann had refused to mend. He did so, and also mended a spear and a javelin.
Fergus revealed that each of these weapons was destined to destroy one of the enemies
of the gods. After three days, Cailte and two companions left with the weapons. They
came to a castle of woman where they were attacked by the
enemies of the gods; in the battle, each of the three weapons destroyed one of the
enemies.
 
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Chrétien's account of the Grail procession, it
contains a tailléor, or carving dish, of silver. In the Didot Perceval there are two of these dishes. In Wolfram's account, there are instead two silver knives; it has been
suggested that Wolfram had some difficulty in translating
the word tailléor, although Jessie Weston
noted that two knives were associated with the relic of the Holy Blood at the Abbey of Fescamp, and thus related to
the Grail in its Christian form.
The Four Treasures of the Tuatha da Danann
t
has been suggested that the symbols of the Grail procession
might have been originally among the treasures of the Shining Ones, the Tuatha da
Danann, of Irish legend. There is, however, no obvious relationship between the
bleeding lance and the wand of the Dagda, nor does the Grail
resemble a cauldron: as noted above, in the Grail romances
it is described as a dish or cup.
The Thirteen Treasures of Britain
Welsh document from the early 15th century contains a list of thirteen treasures of
Britain. If the origin of this list is much older, then it might be a clue to the
Celtic origins of some of the symbols of the Grail procession. One of the treasures is the Horn of Brân, which has
the property of never being exhausted, one of the many magic vessels of Celtic myth. As early as 1888, Alfred Nutt proposed that the Welsh
god Brân was the prototype of the Fisher King, and
since then many writers have identified Brân with Robert de Boron's
Bron. 
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list also includes the dish of Rhydderch (a historic king of Strathclyde in the 6th
century) which has the interesting property that it grants whatever food is desired.
There is also a cauldron, which seems to be the same one that appears in poem The
Spoils of Annwn; it has the property that it will not boil the food of the
coward. R.S.Loomis suggested that this might be the
distant origin of a feature in the Prose Lancelot, where the Grail serves food to all except Gawain, who had been judged unworthy.
The Cathar Initiation Rite
essie Weston (1850-1928) held the view that central
elements of the Grail romances had originated in eyewitness accounts of initiation ceremonies in which certain mysterious
symbols played an important part. In 1932, in a cave below the fortress of
Montréal-de-Sos near Tarascon, there was found a wall-painting which, it was
suggested, was of Cathar origin and dated from the 12th
century. It shows a lance, a broken sword, a solar disk, many red crosses and a
square panel. The latter contains an inner square. The outer part of the panel, which
might represent a table or altar, contains twenty crosses in various forms on a black
background; the inner part contains five tear-shaped drops of blood and five white
crosses. If the inner part corresponds to the tailléor, then we have all
four symbols of the Grail procession.
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