The Sacred Heart & the Legend of the Holy Grail
In his article [1] Louis Charbonneau-Lassay very rightly points out that the legend of the Holy Grail, written down in the twelfth century though originating much earlier-since in reality it is a Christian adaptation of some very ancient Celtic traditions-is something belonging to what might be called the 'prehistory of the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus'. The idea of this comparison had already occurred to us when reading an earlier, and from our standpoint extremely interesting, article entitled 'Le Coeur humain et la notion du Coeur de Dieu dans la religion de l'ancienne Égypte', [2] from which we cite the following passage: 'In hieroglyphics, a sacred writing wherein the image of the thing itself often represents the very word that designates it, the heart was represented only by an emblem, the vase. Is not the heart of man indeed the vase in which his life is continually maintained by means of his blood?' It is this vase, taken as a symbol of the heart and substituting for it in Egyptian ideography, that at once called to mind the Holy Grail, all the more in that we also see here, beside its general symbolic meaning (considered, moreover, under both its human and its divine aspects), a special and much more direct relationship with the very heart of Christ.
Indeed, the Holy Grail is the cup that contains the precious blood of Christ, and which even contains it twice, since it was used first at the Last Supper and then by Joseph of Arimathea to collect the blood and water that flowed from the wound opened in the Redeemer's side by the centurion's lance. This cup is thus a kind of substitute for the heart of Christ as a receptacle of his blood; it takes its place so to speak, and becomes its symbolic equivalent; and in this connection is it not still more remarkable that the vase should already in ancient times have been an emblem of the heart? Moreover, the cup in one form or another, just as the heart itself, plays an important part in many of the traditions of antiquity, particularly so among the Celts no doubt, since the whole fabric of the legend of the Holy Grail, or at least its guiding thread, came from them. It is regrettable that we cannot know with any precision what form this tradition took prior to Christianity, and so it is for everything concerning the Celtic doctrines, for which oral teaching was the sole means of transmission; but there are enough concordances for us at least to establish the meanings of the principal symbols that figured in them, this after all being what is most essential.
But let us return to the legend in the form in which it has come down to us, since what it has to say of the Grail's origin is particularly worthy of our attention: the cup was fashioned by angels from an emerald that fell from Lucifer's brow at the time of his fall. This emerald is strikingly reminiscent of the urnā, the frontal pearl that in Hindu iconography often takes the place of the third eye of Shiva, representing what might be called the 'sense of eternity'. This comparison seems better suited than any other to clarify exactly the symbolism of the Grail; and it illustrates yet another relationship with the heart, which, for the Hindu tradition, as for many othersthough perhaps in Hinduism more clearly so-is the center of the integral being, to which consequently this 'sense of eternity' must be directly attached.
It is then said that the Grail was entrusted to Adam in the Terrestrial Paradise, but that at the time of his fall Adam lost it in his turn, for he could not take it with him when he was cast out of Eden; and this also becomes very clear in light of what we have just indicated: man, separated from his original center through his own fault,
found himself henceforth confined to the temporal sphere; he could no longer regain the unique point from which all things are contemplated under the aspect of eternity. The Terrestrial Paradise was in fact the true 'Center of the World', which is everywhere symbolically assimilated to the divine Heart; and can it not be said that as long as he lived in Eden Adam truly lived in the Heart of God?
What follows next is more enigmatic: Seth was able to return to the Terrestrial Paradise and was thus able to recover the precious vase. Now Seth is one of the figures of the Redeemer, the more so as his very name expresses the ideas of foundation and stability, and he announces in a way the restoration of the primordial order destroyed by the fall of man. From this point there was at least a partial restoration in the sense that Seth and those who possessed the Grail after him were able thereby to establish, somewhere on earth, a spiritual center that was like an image of the Lost Paradise. The legend does not say where or by whom the Grail was preserved up to the time of Christ, or how its transmission was assured; but its manifestly Celtic origin suggests that the Druids probably played a part here, and that they must be numbered among the regular guardians of the primordial tradition. In any case, the existence of such a spiritual center, or even of several centers, simultaneously or successively, does not seem to be in doubt, wherever we may suppose them to have been located. What should be noted is that, among other designations, 'Heart of the World' was always and everywhere applied to these centers, and that in all traditions the descriptions of these centers are based upon an identical symbolism which can be traced to the precise details. Is this not sufficient to show that the Grail, or what is represented as such, had, already prior to Christianity, and even for all time, a very close link with the divine Heart and with Emmanuel, that is to say with the manifestation, virtual or real according to the epoch concerned, but always present, of the Eternal Word at the heart of terrestrial humanity? [3]
According to the legend, after the death of Christ the Holy Grail was transported to Britain by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus; the story of the Knights of the Round Table and their exploits, which we do not intend to take up here, then begins to unfold. The Round
Table was destined to receive the Grail upon one of its knights having succeeded in winning it and bringing it from Great Britain to Brittany; and this table is also probably a very ancient symbol, one of those associated with the idea of the spiritual centers to which we have just alluded. Moreover, the circular form of the table is related to the 'zodiacal circle' (another symbol that merits a special study) through the presence around it of twelve chief personages, a feature that is also to be found in the constitution of all the centers in question. This being so, may one not see in the number of the twelve apostles one sign among a multitude of others of the perfect conformity of Christianity with the primordial tradition, to which the designation 'pre-Christian' so precisely fits? And we have also noticed in connection with the Round Table a strange concordance in the symbolic revelations made to Marie des Vallées [4] in which there is mention of a 'round table of jasper that represents the Heart of Our Lord', while there is at the same time mention of 'a garden that is the Holy Sacrament of the altar,' which, with its 'four fountains of living water,' is mysteriously identified with the Terrestrial Paradise. Again, is this not a rather astonishing and unexpected confirmation of the relationships we have pointed out?
Naturally, we cannot pretend that these cursory observations constitute a thorough study of a subject so little known as this; for the moment we must confine ourselves to giving mere indications, fully realizing that at first sight these are likely to be something of a surprise to those unfamiliar with the ancient traditions and their customary modes of symbolic expression. But we intend to develop and justify them more amply later through articles in which we may be able to touch on many other points no less worthy of interest. [5]
Returning meanwhile to the legend of the Holy Grail, let us mention a singular complication that we have not yet taken into account. Through one of those verbal assimilations that often play a far from negligible part in symbolism, and that may moreover have deeper
reasons than we may imagine at first sight, the Grail is simultaneously a vase or cup (grasale) and a book (gradale or graduale). In some variants of the legend the two meanings are very closely linked, for the book becomes an inscription engraved by Christ or by an angel upon the cup itself. We do not intend to draw any conclusion from this at the moment, although parallels may easily be found with the 'Book of Life' and certain elements in Apocalyptic symbolism.
Let us also add that the legend associates the Grail with other objects, notably a lance, which, in the Christian adaptation, is none other than the lance of the centurion Longinus; but what is curious is that this lance, or one of its equivalents, already existed as a sort of complementary symbol for the cup in ancient traditions. Among the Greeks the spear of Achilles was credited with the power to cure the wounds it had caused; and medieval legend attributes precisely the same power to the lance of the Passion, recalling another similarity of the same kind: in the myth of Adonis (whose name, moreover, signifies 'the Lord'), when the hero is mortally gored by the tusk of a wild boar (which here replaces the lance), his blood, flowing to the earth, gives rise to a flower. [6] Now, Charbonneau-Lassay has pointed to 'a twelfth-century press-mould for altar bread on which the blood from the wounds of the Crucified can be seen falling in droplets that are transformed into roses, and a thirteenthcentury stained glass window of the cathedral of Angers, in which the divine blood, flowing in rivulets, also blossoms into the shapes of roses. [7] We shall return later to the topic of floral symbolism, viewed under a somewhat different aspect; but whatever may be the multiplicity of meanings presented by nearly all the symbols, they fit together in perfect harmony, and this very multiplicity, far from constituting a disadvantage or shortcoming, is on the contrary, for anyone who can understand it, one of the chief advantages of a language far less narrowly limited than the ordinary.
By way of concluding these notes let us mention several symbols that sometimes take the place of the cup in various traditions and that are in fact identical with it. This is not to depart from our subject, for the Grail itself, as may easily be realized from everything we have just said, originally had no other significance than that generally attributed to the sacred vase or vessel, wherever it is encountered, notably the significance attributed in the East to the sacrificial cup containing the Vedic Soma (or the Mazdean Haoma), that extraordinary eucharistic 'prefiguration' to which we shall perhaps return on another occasion. [8] What the Soma properly represents is the 'draught of immortality' (the Amrita of the Hindus and the Ambrosia of the Greeks, two etymologically related words), which confers on or restores to those who receive it with the requisite disposition that 'sense of eternity' to which we have already referred.
One of the symbols that we wish to mention is the downwardpointing triangle, which is a kind of schematic representation of the sacrificial cup and is encountered as such in certain yantras, or geometrical symbols, in India. But what is also very remarkable from our point of view is that the same figure is also a symbol of the heart, the shape of which it reproduces in a simplified way, the 'triangle of the heart' being an expression current in all Eastern traditions. This leads to the interesting observation that the figure of a heart inscribed in a triangle thus oriented is in itself altogether legitimate, whether it be a question of the human heart or of the divine Heart, and that this is very significant when it is related to the emblems used by certain Christian Hermeticists of the Middle Ages, whose intentions were always fully orthodox. If in modern times some have sought to attach a blasphemous meaning to this figure, [9] it is because, consciously or not, they have altered its primary sense to the point of reversing its normal value. This is a phenomenon for which many examples could be cited and which moreover finds its explanation in the fact that certain symbols are indeed susceptible of a twofold interpretation and have, as it were, two opposing faces. For example, do not the serpent and the lion both signify, according
to context, Christ and Satan? We cannot set forth here a general theory on this subject, for this would lead us too far afield, but it goes without saying that in all this there is something that makes the handling of symbols a very delicate business and that also calls for quite special care when it comes to discovering the real meaning of certain emblems and of correctly interpreting them.
Another symbolism that is frequently equivalent to the cup is that of flowers: does not the form of a flower indeed evoke the idea of a 'receptacle', and do we not speak of the 'calyx' of a flower? [10] In the East, the symbolic flower par excellence is the lotus; in the West, the rose most often plays the same role. We do not of course mean to imply that this is the only significance proper to the rose, or to the lotus; quite the contrary, for we have ourselves just pointed out another, but we willingly see this significance in the design embroidered on the altar canon at the abbey of Fontevrault, [11] where the rose is placed at the foot of a lance along which flow drops of blood. There this rose appears in association with the lance exactly as does the cup elsewhere, and it does seem to be collecting the drops of blood rather than developing from a transformation of one of them. Even so, the two meanings complement far more than they oppose each other, for in falling on the rose these drops of blood vivify it and make it bloom. They are the 'celestial dew', according to the expression so often used in reference to the idea of the Redemption or to the associated ideas of regeneration and resurrection; but that again would call for lengthy explanations even if we were to limit ourselves to bringing out the concordance of the various traditions in the case of this one other symbol.
On another front, since the Rose-Cross has been mentioned in connection with the seal of Luther, [12] we will say that this Hermetic emblem was at first specifically Christian, whatever may be the false and more or less 'naturalistic' interpretations given it from the seventeenth century onward, and is it not remarkable that in this figure the rose occupies the center of the cross, the very place of the Sacred
Heart? Apart from those representations where the five wounds of the Crucified are figured as so many roses, the central rose, when it stands alone, can very well be identified with the Heart itself, with the vase that contains the blood, which is the center of life and also the center of the entire being.
There is still at least one other symbolic equivalent of the cup, the lunar crescent; but to explain this adequately would demand further elaborations quite outside the scope of the present study. We only mention it therefore in order not to neglect entirely any aspect of the question.
From all the comparisons brought forward above we can already draw one conclusion which we hope to be able to further clarify in the future: when one finds such concordances everywhere, is this not more than a mere indication of the existence of a primordial tradition? And how is it to be explained that even those who feel obliged in principle to admit that this primordial tradition exists think no more about it more often than not, and in fact go on reasoning as if it had never existed, or at least as if nothing of it had been preserved over the centuries? Some reflection on how abnormal such an attitude is will perhaps render one less disposed to wonder at certain considerations which, in truth, only seem strange by virtue of the mental habits of our time. Besides, only a little unprejudiced research is required to discover on all sides the signs of this essential doctrinal unity, a consciousness of which may sometimes have been obscured among mankind but has never entirely disappeared. And in proportion as one advances in this research, the more the points of comparison seem to multiply of their own accord and new proofs to appear at every turn: to be sure, the Quaerite et invenietis [Seek and ye shall find] of the Gospel is no vain saying.