A Holy Grail That Doesn’t Exist!

The mystery of the lost city of Atlantis interested my dad. He loved hearing about such stuff. When asked if it was true, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Ah, I don’t know. But it’s a great story.”

Great story indeed. Today Atlantis, and other such mythical places, has taken a back seat to the search for the Holy Grail; the vessel Jesus supposedly used the night of the Last Supper, or the vessel housing Jesus’ blood, depending on whose version you’re reading. This mystical Grail supposedly has magical powers. Some versions of the myth, such as Richard Wagner’s Parsifal (1882), an opera loosely based on Wolfram von Eschenbach’s medieval poem about Parzival, a 13^th Arthurian knight who searched for the Holy Grail, accounts for the Grail as the vessel that Joseph of Arimathea used to catch Jesus’ blood while interring him. Although Wagner’s Parsifal places the Grail – and the lance used to pierce Jesus’ side during the fructification – at the castle of the Grail in the German forest near Montsalvat, most stories have Joseph personally taking the Grail to Britain, where he started a line of guardians to protect it for posterity. Since Joseph didn’t leave any record of what flight he took to Britain, we can only surmise that he caught an El Al red-eye flight. And, of course, we don’t know how it got from Britain to Germany. All in all we are the victims of some sloppy reporting!

Although the Indiana Jones flicks had already inflamed popular imaginations, or those who are susceptible to such medieval superstitions, Dan Brown recast the Grail myth in his novel, The Da Vinci Code. In the novel (note: it’s only a novel) Brown insists that the real Grail is not a cup but the earthly remains of Mary Magdalene (Jesus' wife), plus a set of ancient documents telling the true story of Jesus, his teachings and descendants. Brown hints that although the Grail was buried below Rosslyn Chapel, it was recently relocated to a secret chamber below the Inverted Pyramid in front of the Louvre Museum. The fact that the Louvre has never been a part of the real Grail myth hasn’t sidetracked a gullible public. The Louvre reportedly has had to rope off the location mentioned by Brown, for fear visitors would damage the facility.

King’s X, as we used to say in our childhood. Let’s stop and think about this. First, this Grail was supposedly secreted in a wild and wooly area that wasn’t even part of the civilized Roman world in the first century. Second, these Arthurian stories appeared during the middle-ages, some 1100 to 1400 years later, and had it socked away in a castle in a Germany. And now Brown has it hidden in Paris! How much sense does that make?

I suspect our search for the truth will have to wait for the next round of Hollywood installments. Among the earliest and most notable films, there was the 1922 movie entitled In The Light of Faith, followed by the Paul Newman flick of 1954 entitled The Silver Chalice. Monty Python’s debunking of the myth in his 1975 movie, The Holy Grail, should have extinguished the myth once and for all. But, like a bad penny, it keeps popping up. The Indiana Jones flicks threw high-octane fuel on the mythology, as did Babylon 5’s episode, The Grail (1994). It’s frightening when even the History Channel, one of my favorites, airs the Grail story and leaves the myth’s validity up to the viewer. Have we lost our senses?

King’s X, again. Fact: The reported final meeting of Jesus with his disciples was not interpreted as The Last Supper until decades later. Given the existing social conventions at the time, they would have eaten and drank from ordinary clay utensils just like everyone else. A silver chalice? Get real, as they say. The disciples wouldn’t have gone out and ordered a jeweled silver vessel for what was a common, everyday event. Nor would they have done so for a momentous event. Fact: That the meal turned out to be a final or Last Supper didn’t dawn on the disciples until later. The idea of a silver and jeweled vessel is a figment of middle-ages mentality and not based on historical fact.

Fact: When Jesus was executed his disciples, a rag-tag bunch of illiterates, undoubtedly loved him, but they thought he was going to be a political leader who would get rid of the Romans and restore Israel to its former glory. When he was indicted and executed they all ran off and hid. The first writings, early Gospels, didn’t appear for ten or twenty years after his death as a Jesus sect began to appear within the Jewish community.

Fact: Finally, for people in the first century a trip to far off Rome was about as good as it got. Such trips were extremely rare. And only a very few made such trips. A trip down the road five or six miles was a rare event, much less toddling off to Rome. So, trips to Britain or Paris? Gimme a break!

Why do we continue to view ancients through the rose-colored lenses of our own modernity? Its nuts! Fact is, there’s no Chalice, silver or otherwise.