GRAL. — This is the name of a legendary cup, endowed with supernatural powers, in which, according to the Celtic-French saga, Jesus would have consumed the Last Supper, and which Joseph of Arimathea, after collecting in it the blood gushing from the wounds of the Crucified, would have taken with him to Britain when he went there to carry out missionary work. The very name of G. and S. G., rather than deriving from *sanguis realis*, seems to be derived from the Medieval Latin *gradalis* = dish, although the character it also assumed, of an inexhaustible dispenser of food, taken from the well-known fairy-tale motif of the magic table, led to the word being associated with *gradatim*.
The legend of the G., which perhaps arose at the beginning of the 12th century in Spain or southern France from the union of Eastern and Christian elements, soon spread widely and early on entered into famous secular legends, such as that of Parsifal and, through the introduction of the latter among the Knights of the Round Table, into that of King Arthur, as it is found precisely in the oldest surviving poem about the G., that by Chrétien de Troyes, and in the most renowned, that by Wolfram von Eschenbach.
In these poems the precious cup has taken on the character of an exceptional gem, a single emerald, kept in a splendid temple on an inaccessible mountain, the Montsalvat, and under the guard of chaste and humble Templars. On Good Friday it is raised aloft by angels who place upon it a Host consecrated by God Himself. Especially in the German poem the G. assumed a deeper mystical and ethical meaning, becoming the compendium of divine Grace and earthly happiness, at once a symbol of purification and redemption, and the object of anxious and arduous quests by knights, in whom was thus realized the perfect union of Christian and chivalric ideals.
The legend of the G., which in its origin aims to show how the Christian faith was brought directly from the East to the northern regions of Europe, was rightly called by Bertoni “a great attempt made by heresy to combat the supremacy of Rome in the history of the propagation of the Church’s doctrine, and to substitute another authority for that of St. Peter.”