Grail

GRAIL. - It is the name of a legendary chalice, endowed with supernatural powers, in which, according to the Celtic-French saga, Jesus would have partaken of the Last Supper, and which Joseph of Arimathea, after collecting in it the blood spurting from the wounds of the Crucified, would have carried with him to Great Britain when he went there to carry out missionary work. The very name of the G. and S. G., better than from sanguis realis, seems to have to be derived from medieval Latin gradalis = dish, although the character, which it also had, of an inexhaustible dispenser of foods, taken from the well-known fairy-tale motif of the magic table, has caused the word to be connected with gradatim.

The legend of the G., which perhaps arose at the beginning of the 12th century in Spain or in southern France from the union of Eastern and Christian elements, quickly spread widely and early penetrated 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 indeed it is found in the oldest poem that has survived concerning the G., that of Chrétien de Troyes, and in the most distinguished one, that of Wolfram von Eschenbach.

In these poems the precious chalice has taken on the character of an exceptional gem, a single-piece emerald, kept in a splendid temple on an inaccessible mountain, Monsalvat, and under the guard of the chaste and humble Templars. On Good Friday it is raised on high by the 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, and became the compendium of divine Grace and earthly happiness, a symbol at once of purification and of redemption, and the goal of the anxious and arduous quests of knights, in whom the perfect union of Christian and chivalric ideals was thus accomplished.

The legend of the G., which tends, in its origin, 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 doctrine of the Church, and to substitute another authority for that of St. Peter."

Bruno Vignola