From Tablet Magazine, April 4:
The much sought after ancient relic that has fascinated everyone from Indiana Jones to Monty Python doesn’t appear in the Christian Bible. So where did this legend begin?
“I was raised without much in the way of religion,” filmmaker Jeff Reichert wrote in a post about Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade for Reverse Shot, the magazine for the Museum of the Moving Image. “For the longest time, a simple cup that I saw in a movie fixed for me an entire vision of the Christian religion.” Reichert probably isn’t the only person for whom this was (and is) the case. He goes on to marvel that the Holy Grail became “an idea so potent in that culturally dominant collection of tales we call Christianity that it has, over time, achieved the status of widely employed secular metaphor (X item is the Holy Grail of Y field/search/ambition, etc.),” even though it doesn’t appear in the Christian Bible at all. Moreover, despite being the Western folklore tradition’s ultimate MacGuffin, there was never a genuine cult around the cup used at the Last Supper, the way, for example, many Christians even today venerate relics believed to have belonged to or been touched by holy people. Nevertheless, the Grail has its champions, who insist that it had at least great symbolic meaning, somewhere in ancient times. Like Arthur himself, the once and future king, the Grail speaks to the preoccupations of the present by reaching back to a remote past.
It’s Holy Week, which means Christians all over the world are meditating on the Last Supper ahead of Easter. It’s an image that comes to many of us by way of Leonardo da Vinci: Jesus and his disciples gathered for a final meal, just before he is apprehended by Roman authorities, tried, and ultimately crucified. Popularly associated with this iconic mise-en-scène is the Holy Grail, the cup out of which Jesus and his followers drank (or the one that collected some of his blood at the Crucifixion, depending on the version). If you don’t think about it too much, it seems like the kind of thing devout believers would get excited about it. But the fact of the matter is, while you can find religious people in 2023 who believe the crown of thorns is at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, or that the Emperor Constantine’s mother discovered the true cross in Jerusalem, you’re almost wholly unlikely to find anyone with a passionate devotion to the Holy Grail, or a popular pilgrimage site claiming to be associated with it. Although the Grail is often elusive—Indy and his dad have to leave it in a collapsed desert temple along with a few Nazi corpses, and Arthur and his knights are all arrested by modern day police at the end of Monty Python and the Holy Grail before they can obtain it—the Grail is nevertheless easily found in the collective psyche of the West. Despite their differences in tone and genre, both films employ centuries-old Grail lore and its theme of the quest. The evident outcome has been decades of cultural relevance as one of the periodic revivals of interest in the Grail and its associated stories through the centuries. But if this continued hold on the popular imagination is not rooted in any genuine Christian doctrine or tradition, where does it come from? The answer is weird, and not wholly satisfactory for anyone wanting a simple, straightforward explanation.
In his essay, Reichert does a solid job of quickly explaining where Grail stories originate: namely, medieval France and England, with some pre-Christian Celtic mythological motifs sprinkled throughout. Twelfth- and 13th-century French tales called romances first start to talk about a Grail, and to introduce the figure of Joseph of Arimathea as a key figure, Reichert writes. Joseph of Arimathea is a bit player in the Christian Gospels as the man who takes Jesus’ body after his death and secures a burial site for it. But according to Reichert, 12th-century poet Robert de Boron’s Joseph d’Arimathie seems to be among the first installments in the Grail extended universe, building out Joseph’s character, and positing that through him the chalice traveled West and ultimately settled in Britain. Python fans will be familiar with Joseph of Arimathea as the figure who may or may not have been dictating his last words on the wall of a cave, promising “he who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Grail in the Castle of Aaargh.”....
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