GRAL. — This is the name of a legendary cup endowed with supernatural powers, in which, according to the Celtic-French saga, Jesus is said to have eaten the Last Supper, and which Joseph of Arimathea, after collecting in it the blood gushing from the wounds of the Crucified One, is said to have carried with him to Great Britain when he went there to carry out missionary work. The name itself of G. and S. G., rather than from sanguis realis, would seem to derive from the Middle Latin gradalis = dish, although the character it also possessed, of being an inexhaustible dispenser of food, taken from the familiar fairy-tale motif of the magic table, led the word to be 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, quickly became widespread and early penetrated illustrious profane legends, such as that of Parsifal and, through the introduction of the latter among the “knights of the Round Table,” that of King Arthur, as it is found precisely 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 cup has assumed the character of an exceptional jewel, a single-piece emerald, kept in a splendid temple on an inaccessible mountain, Monsalvato, and under the guardianship of the chaste and humble Templars. On Good Friday it is raised aloft by angels, who place in it a Host
consecrated by God Himself. Especially in the German poem, the G. assumed a deeper mystical and ethical significance, and became the summation of divine Grace and earthly happiness, at once a symbol of purification and redemption, and the goal of the anxious and arduous quests of knights, in whom the perfect union of Christian and chivalric ideals was thus achieved.
The legend of the G., which in its origin tends 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.”