Cecil says there is absolutely no “Holy Grail”, no chalice from the last supper which is the subject of legend and myth.
I have no doubt about the myth surrounding the chalice and Cecil’s cites regarding some of the origins of this fairy tale. It also seems that he not only claimed the myth to be just that, a myth, nonsense, folklore, etc.
While doing so, he also eliminated the actual possibilty there ever was a chalice from the last supper. The cup that Joseph claimed to have been a gift from Christ. The cup that was supposedly brought to Britain to be enshrined in the first Christian Church.
Is this what Cecil means when he denies the existence of the Grail? There never was a chalise, Joseph either lied or is also a myth. Christ didn’t drink from a cup at the last supper or these are also untrue. No last supper…no Christ?
Sure, I agree there is no magic chalice. I’m not so sure about the other. It seems like if Christ did live and did have a last meal before his death, he would probably have had a glass of something with it. If so, then someone would probably have kept a souvenir.
I thought Joseph of Arimathea was also supposed to be a real person in fact. I guess I’m going to have to do a little digging on this.
There are other sources that suggest that the Holy Grail or “san grial” was a transliteration of the “sange real” or Royal Blood - that being the decendants David’s line. In other words - from the sources I have encountered the search for the Holy Grail was in fact a search for the royal line that would inherit the earthly kingdom of the Jews. From a religious standpoijnt in the middle ages this would be a seriously powerful regal claim.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The whole “sang real” story is bullshit. There is no historical record of it, there is no suggestion of it in the actual Grail literature (and I say that as someone who has read Chrétien, Malory, and the work known variously as the Arthurian Vulgate, Lancelot-Grail, or the Prose Lancelot), and it makes a complete hash of Christian doctrine (remember Christianity? – the religion people actually believed in the middle ages?).
Oh, by the way, the Old French word is “Graal”, not “Grial”, or “Grail”, for that matter.
Well, t-keela, what Cecil’s saying is that the Holy Grail “as we know it” is a literary artifact. Sure, if there was a Last Supper that, as portrayed in the Gospels, was a Seder, there probably WAS a special cup used at the ceremony. But there is no scriptural source for the Grail as a special object, just as there isn’t for the Spear of Longinus or the Veil of Veronica; what is said in scripture of Joe of Arimathea has nothing to do with Britain; and there is no record of alleged-to-be-true sightings or fabrications of the Grail between the Roman period and the late Middle Ages comparable to that of “Pieces of the True Cross”. And they did a lot of very idiosyncratic “research” on those issues: a Byzantine empress (I can’t put my finger on her name right now) on tour of the went to the Holy Land and supposedly “found” all the sites of the Nativity, last Supper, Crucifixion, Incarnation, etc.
<< a Byzantine empress (I can’t put my finger on her name right now) on tour of the went to the Holy Land and supposedly “found” all the sites of the Nativity, last Supper, Crucifixion, Incarnation, etc. >>
It’s interesting indeed, in and of itself. On my first trip to Israel, the tour guide pointed out a church that was built in (I forget the exact story, let’s say 1200s) because someone decided that was the site where Jesus was baptized (or whatever it was.) OK, historians and archaeologists all agree, this is nowhere near where Jesus was baptized, the river was different in those days, blah blah blah. No matter. The church itself, even if founded on completely false information, has been there for 800 years and is itself an historic location.
This was St. Helen, the mother of Constantine, who on her travels in the Holy Land tracked down artifacts purported to be the instruments of the Passion: the three crosses (including the True Cross), the crown of thorns (which would eventually find its way to Paris when the dwindling Byzantine coffers required a yard sale), and the nails of the Passion. Helen’s “research” to determine the authenticity of the Cross was to place a dead woman on it, and she miraculously returned to life. Uh huh.
