The Holy Grail

Arthur Edward Waite has published a work on the legends of the Holy Grail [1] that is imposing in its size and in its extent of research. Anyone interested in the subject of the Grail will find herein a very complete and methodical exposition of the contents of the many texts it mentions, as well as diverse theories that have been proposed to explain the origins and significance of these legends, which are complex and at times even contradictory in certain of their elements. It must be added that Waite's intention was not merely to publish a work of erudition, and for this too he should be commended; we are entirely in agreement with him on the minimal value of all labors that do not exceed this point of view and of which the interest, in short, can only be 'documentary'. His aim was to bring out the real and 'inner' significance of the symbolism of the Holy Grail and of the 'quest'. We are obliged to say, however, that this aspect of his work is unfortunately the one that seems least satisfactory and that the conclusions he arrives at are even rather disappointing, all the more so when one thinks of all the work expended to reach them; and it is on this aspect that we should like to formulate some observations that will, quite naturally, relate to questions we have already treated on other occasions. We do not believe we do Waite an injustice to say that his work is somewhat one-sided; [2] in French one might say 'partial', though this would not be strictly exact, and in any case we do not mean to suggest that he intended that it be so. Rather, it has more to do with that failing so common among those who have 'specialized' in a particular order of studies to incline toward reducing everything to it and to neglect whatever cannot be made to fit it. That the legend is Christian is incontestable, and Waite is right to say so; but does that necessarily preclude its being something else at the same time? Those who are conscious of the fundamental unity of all traditions will see no incompatibility here, but for his part, Waite is unwilling to see anything but what is specifically Christian, confining himself to a particular traditional form of which the connection with other forms, precisely through its 'inner' aspect, seems thereby to escape him. Not that he denies the existence of elements from another source, probably anterior to Christianity, for this would go against the evidence; but he accords these only a minor importance and seems to consider them somehow 'accidental', as though they had become attached to the legend 'from outside' simply in consequence of the environment in which it was elaborated. Hence he views these elements as deriving from what is commonly called 'folklore', not always to belittle them, as the name itself might suggest, but more to satisfy a certain contemporary 'fashion' and not always taking account of the intentions implied therein, and on which it may be of some interest to dwell a bit further. The very concept of 'folklore' as it is commonly understood rests on the radically false idea that there exist 'popular creations', spontaneous products of the masses; and one can immediately see the close relationship between this way of looking at things and 'democratic' prejudices. As has been quite rightly said, 'the profound interest of all so-called popular traditions lies above all in the fact that they are not popular in origin'; [3] and we would add that if, as is almost always the case, we are dealing with elements that are traditional in the true sense of the word, however deformed, diminished, or fragmentary they may sometimes be, and with things of real symbolic value, then their origin, far from being popular, is not even human. What may be popular is uniquely the fact of 'survival' when these elements come from traditional forms that have disappeared; and in this respect the term 'folklore' takes on a meaning very near to that of 'paganism', taking the latter in its etymological sense and with no polemical or abusive intent. The people thus preserve, without understanding them, the debris of ancient traditions sometimes even reaching back to a past too remote to be determined and which is therefore consigned to the obscure domain of 'prehistory'; and in so doing they function as a more or less 'subconscious' collective memory, of which the content has manifestly come from somewhere else. [4] What may seem most astonishing is that, when we go to the root of the matter, the things so conserved are found to contain in a more or less veiled form a considerable body of esoteric data, that is, what is least 'popular' in essence, and this fact of itself suggests an explanation that we will lay out in a few words. When a traditional form is on the verge of extinction, its last representatives may very well deliberately entrust to this collective memory of which we have just spoken what would otherwise be irrevocably lost. This, in short, is the only way to save what can, at least in some measure, be saved; and, at the same time, the natural incomprehension of the masses is a sufficient guarantee that whatever possesses an esoteric character will not be despoiled in the process but will remain as a sort of witness to the past for those in later times who may be capable of understanding it. Having said this, we see no reason without closer examination to attribute to 'folklore' everything that pertains to traditions other than Christianity, as though the latter alone were an exception; such seems to be Waite's intention however when he accepts this attribution for all the 'pre-Christian'-and especially the Celtic-elements in the Grail legends. From the perspective of the explanation just given there is no traditional form that is privileged; the only distinction to be made is between forms that have disappeared and those still living. The issue then comes down to knowing whether or not the Celtic tradition was really no longer living when the legends in question were being elaborated, and this is at least debatable: on the one hand, this tradition may have endured longer than is commonly believed, with a more or less hidden organization; on the other, the legends themselves may be far older than the 'critics' imagine; not that there need have been texts now lost (we do not believe this any more than Waite does), but there may have been an oral transmission that lasted several centuries, which would not be at all exceptional. For our part, we see here the sign of a 'conjuncture' between two traditional forms, one ancient and the other then still new, the Celtic and the Christian, a conjuncture through which what was to be conserved of the first was, as it were, incorporated into the second, no doubt being modified in its outward form to some extent by adaptation and assimilation, but not by transposition to another plane as Waite would have it, for there are equivalences between all regular traditions. The issue therefore is quite other than a simple question of 'sources' as understood by the erudite. It would perhaps be difficult to specify exactly when and where this conjuncture occurred, but this has only a secondary and primarily historical interest; it is, moreover, easy to imagine that such events are unlikely to leave traces in written 'documents'. Perhaps the 'Celtic' or 'Culdean' church merits more attention in this regard than Waite seems disposed to grant it; its very name might lead one to think so, and there is nothing improbable in the suggestion that behind this church there may have been something of a different order, no longer religious, but initiatic, for, like all that pertains to links between different traditions, what is here in question necessarily derives from the initiatic or esoteric domain. Exoterism, whether religious or not, never goes beyond the limits of the traditional form to which it properly belongs; whatever goes beyond these limits cannot belong to a 'church' as such, which can only be its external 'support', a point we shall have occasion to return to later. Another observation concerning symbolism more particularly here imposes itself: there are symbols that are common to the most diverse and widespread traditional forms, not as a result of 'borrowings', which would in many cases be quite impossible, but because they really belong to the primordial tradition whence, directly or indirectly, all these forms have issued. This is precisely the case with the vase or cup. Why should what relates thereto be merely 'folklore' when present in 'pre-Christian' traditions, whereas in Christianity alone it is an essentially 'eucharistic' symbol? The assimilations envisaged by Bournouf [5] and others like him are not to be rejected here, but rather the 'naturalistic' interpretations some have wished to impose on Christianity as on everything else, interpretations that are in fact nowhere valid. What needs to be done, then, runs exactly contrary to the procedure of Waite, who, confining himself to external and superficial explanations, which he takes on faith so long as they do not concern Christianity, sees radically different and unrelated meanings where there are only more or less multiple aspects of the same symbol or of its various applications. It would no doubt have been otherwise had he not been hampered by his preconceived notion of a sort of difference in kind between Christianity and other traditions. Likewise, though Waite quite rightly rejects any application to the Grail legend of theories that make appeal to so-called 'gods of vegetation', it is regrettable that he should be much less clear about the ancient mysteries, which never had anything in common with this quite recently invented 'naturalism'; 'gods of vegetation' and other such fictions have never existed save in the imagination of Fraser [6] and others of his ilk whose antitraditional intentions are not in doubt. It seems that Waite has been more or less influenced by a certain 'evolutionism', a tendency that clearly betrays itself when he declares that the origin of the legend is much less important than the form it eventually attained; and he seems to believe that there must have been, from the one to the other, a sort of progressive improvement. In reality, where something truly traditional is concerned, everything must on the contrary be present from the beginning, and subsequent developments serve only to render it more explicit without the adjunction of new and external elements. Waite seems to admit a sort of 'spiritualization' whereby a higher meaning might be grafted on to something that did not originally possess it-whereas it is in fact usually the other way round-in this way recalling a bit too closely the profane outlook of the 'historians of religion'. We find a striking example of this sort of reversal in connection with alchemy, for Waite thinks that material alchemy preceded spiritual alchemy, and that this latter made its appearance only with Khunrath and Jacob Boehme. If he had been familiar with certain Arabic treatises extant well before these writers he would have been obliged to modify his opinion simply on the basis of written documents; moreover, since he recognizes that the language employed is the same in both cases, we might ask him how he can be sure in any given text that the operations described are material only. The truth is that it was not always felt necessary to declare explicitly that it was really a question of something else, something that had to be veiled precisely by the symbolism then in use; and if subsequently there were some who did declare this, it was largely because of degenerations traceable to an ignorance of the value of the symbols which led men to take everything literally and in an exclusively material way, as did the 'puffers' who were the precursors of modern chemistry. To think that a new meaning can be given to a symbol that does not possess it intrinsically is almost to deny symbolism, for it makes of the latter something artificial if not entirely arbitrary, and in any case something purely human. In this order of ideas, Waite goes so far as to say that everyone finds in a symbol what he himself puts into it, so that its meaning would change with the mentality of each epoch; here we recognize the 'psychological' theories so dear to many of our contemporaries. Were we not right, then, to speak of 'evolutionism'? We have said it often but cannot repeat it often enough: every true symbol bears its multiple meanings within itself, and this from its very origin, because it is not constituted as such by any human convention but in virtue of the 'law of correspondence' that links all worlds together; if some see these meanings while others do not, or see them only in part, they are no less truly contained in the symbol, for it is the 'intellectual horizon' of each person that makes all the difference, symbolism being an exact science and not a reverie in which individual fantasies are given free rein. In matters of this order, then, we do not believe in the 'poetic inventions' of which Waite seems disposed to make so much; far from transmitting the essential, these inventions merely hide it, intentionally or not, by wrapping it in a 'fiction' of misleading appearances that sometimes conceal it only too well, for when they encroach overmuch it finally becomes nearly impossible to discover the deep and original meaning. Is this not how symbolism among the Greeks degenerated into 'mythology'? This danger is most to be feared when the poet himself is unaware of the real value of symbols, for it is evident that such cases do occur (the fable of the 'ass bearing relics' applies here as well as to many other situations), the poet then playing a part analogous to that of the common people when they conserve and unwittingly transmit initiatic teaching, as we have just said above. A question arises here most particularly: were the authors of the Grail romances poets of this latter kind, or were they on the contrary conscious to some degree of the profound meaning they were expressing? It is, of course, not easy to answer this with any certainty, for here again appearances can be deceiving. Faced with a mixture of insignificant and incoherent elements, one is tempted to think that the author did not know what he was speaking about; yet this need not necessarily be so, for it often happens that the obscurities and even the contradictions are quite intentional, and that pointless details are expressly included to lead the profane astray in the same way that a symbol may be deliberately concealed within a more or less complicated ornamental pattern; in the Middle Ages, especially, examples of this kind abound; one need only look at Dante and the Fedeli d'Amore. The fact that the higher meaning is less transparent in the work of Chrétien de Troyes, for example, than in that of Robert de Boron, does not necessarily prove that the first was less conscious of it than the second; still less should we conclude that this meaning is absent from his writings, which would be an error comparable to attributing to the ancient alchemists preoccupations of a merely material order for the sole reason that they did not deem it opportune to spell out in so many words that their science was in reality of a spiritual nature. [7] Furthermore, the question of the 'initiation' of the authors of the romances is perhaps less important than we might first think, for it makes no difference in any case to the external forms under which the subject is presented; once we are dealing with an 'exteriorization', but not in any way a 'vulgarization', of esoteric teaching, it is easy to understand that the form must be as it is. We would go further and say that even a profane person may serve as 'spokesman' [porte-parole] of an initiatic organization engaged in such an 'exteriorization', in which case he will have been chosen simply for his qualities as a poet or writer, or for some other contingent reason. Dante wrote in full knowledge of what he was doing; Chrétien de Troyes, Robert de Boron, and many others were probably less conscious of what they were expressing, and some among them probably understood nothing at all; but ultimately this is of no importance, for if there was an initiatic organization behind them, whatever it may have been, the danger of a deformation due to their incomprehension was thereby averted since this organization was able to guide them continually without their even suspecting it, either through the intermediary of certain of its members who furnished them with the elements to be put into their work, or through suggestions or influences of another kind, more subtle and less 'tangible' but no less real for all that, nor less effective. It will easily be seen that this has nothing to do with so-called poetic 'inspiration' as the moderns understand the term and which is only imagination pure and simple, or with 'literature' in the profane sense of the word; neither, for that matter, let us hasten to add, is it a question of 'mysticism', but this last point bears directly on other questions to be considered in the second part of this study. It seems beyond doubt that the origins of the Grail legend must be linked to the transmission from Druidism to Christianity of traditional elements of an initiatic order. Once this transmission had been effected in a regular manner, whatever the modalities of that transmission may have been, these elements thereby became an integral part of Christian esoterism. We are in agreement with Waite on this second point, but must say that the first seems to have escaped him. There can be no doubt of the existence of Christian esoterism in the Middle Ages; proofs of all kinds are ready to hand, and denials of it due to modern incomprehension, whether from the side of partisans or of adversaries of Christianity, are impotent in face of this fact, a point we have made often enough and which we need not insist upon again here. But even among those who do admit the existence of this esoterism there are many who have a more or less inexact conception of it; such seems to be the case with Waite, judging from his conclusions, for here again we find confusions and misunderstandings that must be dispelled. We say quite deliberately 'Christian esoterism', and not 'esoteric Christianity', for we are not in fact dealing with a special form of Christianity but with the 'inner' aspect of the Christian tradition; and it should be clear that this is more than a simple nuance of language. Besides, when there is reason to distinguish in this way two aspects of a traditional form, one esoteric and the other exoteric, it must be understood that they do not refer to the same domain, so much so that there can be no conflict or opposition of any sort between them. In particular, when the exoterism has a specifically religious character, as is the case here, the corresponding esoterism, while taking its base and support from the religious form, has nothing to do with the religious domain in and of itself, being situated in fact in an altogether different order. It follows immediately that esoterism can under no circumstances be represented by 'churches' or 'sects' of any kind, for these are always religious by definition, and therefore exoteric-yet another point we have dealt with elsewhere, and need only recall in passing. Certain 'sects' may indeed have been born of a confusion between the two domains, and from an erroneous 'exteriorization' of poorly understood and wrongly applied esoteric teaching; but true initiatic organizations, strictly keeping to their own proper domain, necessarily remain foreign to such deviations, and their very 'regularity' obliges them to recognize only what has the character of orthodoxy, even if this is only in the exoteric order. One may therefore be assured that those who persist in ascribing to 'sects' what concerns esoterism or initiation are on the wrong track and can only go astray. There is no need to make a fuller examination in order to rule out all hypotheses of this kind; and if one finds in some 'sects' elements that seem to be esoteric in nature, the conclusion to be drawn is not that these elements originated with these sects, but that, on the contrary, it was precisely with the sects that they were diverted from their true meaning. Having established this point, certain apparent difficulties are at once resolved, or, more accurately, become non-existent; and thus there is no cause to wonder what the position of orthodox Christianity, understood in the ordinary sense, might be in respect to a line of transmission outside of the 'apostolic succession', such as is suggested in several versions of the Grail legend. If here it is a question of an initiatic hierarchy, then the religious hierarchy could not in any way be affected by its existence, which, moreover, it need not even acknowledge 'officially' so to speak since it exercises a legitimate jurisdiction only in the exoteric domain. Similarly, when there is question of a secret formula in relation to certain rites, we will say quite frankly that there is a singular naiveté in asking whether the loss or the omission of this formula may not prevent the celebration of the Mass from being regarded as valid. The Mass, as it exists, is a religious rite, and the other is an initiatic rite; each is valid in its own domain, and even if they share a 'eucharistic' character this does nothing to change the essential distinction, any more than the fact that one and the same symbol may be interpreted according to the esoteric and the exoteric points of view prevents these latter from being completely distinct and related to entirely different domains. Whatever may be the external resemblances, which, moreover, are due to correspondences between them, the import and aim of initiatic rites is altogether different from those of religious rites. With all the greater reason, then, there can be no point in trying to establish whether or not the mysterious formula in question might not be identified with a formula used in some church that possesses a more or less special ritual: firstly, as far as churches with a claim to orthodoxy are concerned, the variants of the ritual are completely secondary and have no bearing whatsoever on anything essential; secondly, these variant rituals can never be other than religious, and as such they are all perfectly equivalent, and consideration of one or another of them brings us no closer to the initiatic point of view. How much futile research and discussion could be avoided if one were clear from the outset on the principles involved! Now, even if the writings on the Grail legend emanated directly or indirectly from an initiatic organization, this by no means implies that they constitute an initiatic ritual, as some have assumed rather bizarrely; and it is curious that, at least to our knowledge, no such hypothesis has ever been put forward with regard to works that describe an esoteric process quite openly, such as the Divine Comedy or the Romance of the Rose. It is in any case obvious enough that not all writings that present an esoteric character are for that reason rituals. Waite, who rejects this supposition with good reason, brings into clear relief some of the improbabilities it involves, notably that the supposed candidate for initiation would have to ask a question, rather than answer questions put by the initiator, as is generally the case; and we might add that the divergences among the different versions of the legend are incompatible with the character of a ritual, which necessarily has a fixed and definite form. But what in all this prevents the legend from being attached in some other respect to what Waite calls 'Instituted Mysteries', and which we would simply call initiatic organizations? Waite's objection derives from the fact that his notion of such organizations is far too narrow and inexact in more than one respect. On the one hand, he seems to conceive of them as something almost exclusively 'ceremonial' (a rather typically Anglo-Saxon way of seeing things, be it said in passing); on the other hand, falling victim to a very widespread error to which we have often called attention, he imagines them more or less as 'societies', whereas if some of them may have assumed this form it can only have been the result of an altogether modern degeneration. He has no doubt been personally acquainted with a good number of these pseudo-initiatic associations which are now rife throughout the West; and though they seem to have left him somewhat disaffected, he has nonetheless remained to some extent influenced by them, by which we mean that, failing to perceive clearly the difference between authentic initiation and pseudo-initiation, he wrongly attributes to genuinely initiatic organizations features comparable to those found in the counterfeit bodies with which he happened to come in contact; and this mistake entails still other consequences, which, as we shall see, bear directly on the positive conclusions of his book. It should be obvious enough that nothing in the initiatic order could be confined in so narrow a framework as that of modern 'societies'; but it is precisely in failing to find anything remotely resembling his 'societies' that Waite finds himself at a loss and ends up endorsing the fantastic supposition that an initiation could exist outside of any organization or regular transmission. We can do no better here than to refer the reader to articles we have previously devoted to this question. [8] Outside these so-called 'societies' Waite apparently sees no other possibility than that of some vague and indefinite thing that he calls the 'secret church' or the 'interior church', following terminology, borrowed from such mystics as Eckarthausen and Lopukhin, [9] in which the very word 'church' indicates that one finds oneself reduced purely and simply to the religious point of view, even though it may be one of those more or less aberrant varieties in which mysticism tends to develop spontaneously as soon as it escapes the control of a rigorous orthodoxy. Waite in fact remains one of those-unfortunately so numerous today-who for various reasons confuse mysticism and initiation, and he goes so far as to speak indiscriminately of these two things, incompatible as they are, as though they were almost synonymous. For him, initiation ultimately resolves into nothing more than 'mystical experience'; and we even wonder whether fundamentally he does not conceive of this 'experience' as something 'psychological', which would again bring us back to a level inferior to that of mysticism properly understood, because true mystical states elude the domain of psychology entirely, despite all the modern theories of the sort of which William James is the best-known representative. As for the inner states, of which the realization pertains to the initiatic domain, they are neither psychological nor even mystical; they are something much more profound, and are not something of which one can neither say exactly what they are nor whence they come, since they imply on the contrary an exact knowledge and a precise technique, sentimentality and imagination no longer playing the least part here. To transpose truths of the religious order into the initiatic order is by no means to dissolve them into some hazy sort of 'ideal'; on the contrary, it is at once to penetrate both their deepest and their most 'concrete' [positif] meaning, dispelling the clouds that impede and limit the intellectual horizon of ordinary humanity. In truth, such a conception as Waite's no longer entails transposition, but at the very most a sort of prolongation, as it were, or an extension in the 'horizontal' sense, since whatever pertains to mysticism remains in the religious domain and does not extend beyond it; to go further requires more than adherence to a 'church' qualified as 'interior', primarily because such a 'church' is merely 'ideal', which, put more plainly, comes down to saying that it is in fact only an imaginary organization. The 'secret of the Holy Grail' could not really be anything like this, nor could any other truly initiatic secret; if we would discover where this secret is found we must refer to the perfectly 'concrete' constitution of spiritual centers, something we have indicated quite explicitly in our study The King of the World. Here we shall confine ourselves to observing that Waite sometimes touches on matters of which the full significance seems to escape him: thus he speaks on various occasions of 'substitutes', which can be spoken words or symbolic objects; now this may refer either to the various secondary centers insofar as they are the images or reflections of the supreme center, or to successive phases of the 'obscuration' that gradually occurs in the external manifestations of these same centers in conformity with cyclical laws. Moreover, the first of these two cases is included in a way in the latter because the very formation of the secondary centers that correspond to particular traditional forms, whatever these may be, already marks the first degree of obscuration vis-à-vis the primordial tradition; in fact, from this point on the supreme center is no longer in direct contact with the outside world, and the link is only maintained through the intermediary of the secondary centers. On the other hand, if one of these should disappear, it can be said that it has in some way been resorbed into the supreme center, of which it was only an emanation. Here again there are degrees to be observed; it may happen that such a center only becomes more hidden and closed, and this is represented by the same symbolism as its complete disappearance, since any move away from the exterior is at the same time and in equal measure a return toward the Principle. We are alluding here to the symbolism of the final disappearance of the Grail: whether raised up to heaven, as in certain versions, or transported to the 'Kingdom of Prester John', as in certain others, exactly the same thing is signified, a point which Waite scarcely seems to suspect. [10] What is involved is this same withdrawal from the exterior toward the interior by reason of the state of the world at a certain time, or, to be more precise, the state of that portion of the world connected with the traditional form under consideration. This withdrawal, moreover, applies here only to the esoteric aspect of the tradition, the exoteric aspect having apparently remained unchanged in the case of Christianity; but it is precisely through the esoteric aspect that effective and conscious links with the supreme center are established and maintained. It must necessarily be the case, however, that something from it subsists, even if invisibly, as long as this traditional form remains living; for it to be otherwise would amount to saying that the 'spirit' had entirely withdrawn, leaving only a dead body behind. It is said that the Grail was no longer seen as it was formerly, but it is not said that it can no longer be seen; accordingly it is always present, at least in principle, for those who are 'qualified', but in fact these have become more and more rare, to the point where they now constitute only a tiny exception; and since the time when the Rosicrucians are said to have withdrawn into Asia, whether this be understood literally or symbolically, what possibilities for an effective initiation could such qualified individuals still find open to them in the West?