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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 remarkable 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 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.
 
n 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. 
he 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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