The Holy Grail: Medieval Literature and Modern Interpretations

that stone: even its beauty would never be corrupted! Whether it be a female or a male, one must admit that whoever has seen the stone, in appearance, remains always the same as when their best age began, even if they had been looking at it for two hundred years: only the hair becomes gray! The stone gives man such a virtue that flesh and bones rejuvenate constantly. This stone is also called Grail. Today a sign of command descends upon it, in which its supreme virtue resides. Today is Good Friday and truly one will be able to see a dove that descends from heaven to bring a small white host onto the stone: it places it on the stone, the dove of shining whiteness, and returns to heaven. Every Good Friday, as I have told you, the dove brings to the stone what allows it to bestow whatever, among drinks and foods, spreads on earth the best fragrance, everything one could desire even in Paradise - I refer to the products of the earth. In addition, the stone offers any living game under the vault of air, that flies, runs or swims. To the confraternity of those knights it is the virtue of the Grail that gives the prebend! But hear how one understands who is destined for the Grail: at the edge of the stone an epigraph of arcane letters tells the name and lineage of whoever must undertake the path of grace, whether maiden or boy. There is no need to scrape it away, because, as soon as the name has been read, the writing dissolves before their eyes. The angels who, when Lucifer and the Trinity began the war, did not want to align themselves with either side, all those noble and worthy creatures, behold, are forced to descend to earth, to the stone that always remains immaculate. I do not know whether God has forgiven them or damned them eternally: if the matter was just for Him, He will have taken them back to Himself. Subsequently, the stone has always been tended by people whom God had designated for this purpose, sending His angel to them. Thus stands the matter regarding the Grail, sir.

CONCLUSIONS ON LITERARY ANALYSES: We have thus quickly reviewed the four main "Grail Romances." We chose these four not only because they are the most representative from a certain point of view, but also because the elements presented in these texts have a direct analogy with some subsequent exegetical lines relating to the symbolic meaning of the Grail. At the conclusion of reading these texts we can say something of a general character. First, we can say that we are not facing the reading of some arbitrary fantasy coming from some medieval author. As Cardini notes, "no medieval novelist has ever written a line based on his pure and simple fantasy and it would be anachronistic to imagine it." In the same way, however, this movement cannot be thought of as a unitary corpus, especially in the forms of symbolism. Another more or less evident element is that more or less directly all the movement can be traced back to the doctrine and theology of holy war originating from the celestial militia of Saint Bernard instituted for the Order of Templars in his De Laude. Being theology and mysticism a fundamental propeller for this type of literature, an analysis of the symbols of the Grail that does not aim centrally at deepening the Grail as a theological and mystical fact is a necessarily incomplete and partial analysis. As H. Corbin says in his famous and much-quoted work on the Temple of the Grail: "Unfortunately the method of literary historicism is inadequate to the task that interests us here. One should wish that, like the Bible, the cycle of Grail poems as a whole would be read by believers not as a literary corpus, but as the Bible of the Holy Grail, and in the same way that a Philo, an Origen, a Swedenborg have read the Bible."

REVIVAL AND CONTEMPORARY INTERPRETATIONS: From about 1230 the impulse of the Grail novelists seems to slowly fade until it disappears completely in the 14th century and remains dormant for more than half a millennium. This event should in itself make us reflect, but even more should make us reflect on the fortune that the same movement has had after more than half a millennium of history. Even in 2003 we have worldwide media phenomena involving the Legend of the Holy Grail. The simple fact that more than half a millennium later, symbols, stories and narrative threads can involve hundreds and hundreds of millions of individuals of different race, creed and social class, makes us understand how these stories capture a universal aspect of Man and (evidently) of Man in his relationship with the Sacred. We will see the explanation that Palamidessi provides in this sense, however before arriving at this exposition let us see what have been the main interpretative lines of the mystical, esoteric exegetes of the 20th century and what themes they highlighted in order to better contextualize Palamidessi's text and also understand its innovative scope. At the origin of the modern rediscovery of the Grail is Wagner's work. It must be said that Wagner's Parsifal (fruit of a forty-year maturation) is a very original work in which the themes of the Grail are reviewed in a very personal reinterpretation that we do not have time to re-examine on this occasion. Indeed in Wagner's Parsifal, Amfortas is the wounded King for his own fault and will be redeemed by Parsifal who identifies with Christ and redeems Amfortas's sin. It must however be said that in Wagner's perspective, art had the task of providing new vital sap to religion that is extinguished and therefore his Parsifal with his own words had to constitute itself as a "solemn scenic action of initiation." The Themes of